The Little Friend

Eugene—wearing the strange, scholarly drugstore glasses—sat by his bed. Lighted by the occasional flash of heat lightning, he and the chair he sat in were the only stationary objects amidst a bewildering and ever-changing swirl of people. Every so often, the room seemed to empty, and Danny bolted upright, for fear he was dying, for fear that his pulse had stopped and his blood was cooling and even his ghosts were trailing away from him.…

“Set down, set,

” said Eugene. Eugene: nutty as a fruitcake, but—besides Curtis—the gentlest of the brothers. Farish had a big dose of their father’s meanness—not so much since he’d shot himself in the head. That had knocked some of the starch out of him. Ricky Lee probably had it the worst, that mean streak. It was serving him well in Angola.

But Eugene wasn’t so much like Daddy, with his tobacco-stained teeth and billy-goat eyes, but more like their poor drunk mother who’d died raving about an Angel of God standing barefoot on the chimney. She’d been plain, God bless her, and Eugene—who was plain, too, with his close-set eyes and his honest, lumpy nose—looked very much like her in the face. Something about the glasses softened the ugliness of his scar. Poof: the lightning through the window lit him up blue from behind; the burn splashed over his left eye beneath the glasses was like a red star. “Problem is,” he was saying, hands clasped between his knees, “I didn’t see that you couldn’t separate that creeping serpent out of all creation. If you do, oh man, it’s going to bite you.” Danny stared at him in wonder. The glasses gave him an alien, learned presence, a schoolmaster from a dream. Eugene had come back from prison with a habit of talking in long, disjointed paragraphs—like a man talking to four walls, nobody listening—and this too was like their mother, who rolled around on the bed and spoke out to visitors who weren’t there and called on Eleanor Roosevelt and Isaiah and Jesus.

“You see,” Eugene was saying, “that snake’s a servant of the Lord, it’s His creature, too, you see. Noah taken it on the ark with all the others. You can’t just say ‘oh, the rattlesnake is evil’ because God made it all

. It’s all good. His hand hath wrought the serpent, just as it wrought the little lamb.” And he cast his eyes over to a corner of the room where the light didn’t really shine, where Danny—horrified—stifled with his fist a scream at the breathless black creature of his old nightmare, shuddering, tugging, struggling small and frantic on the floor by Eugene’s feet … and though it was nothing to retell or speak of, a thing more piteous than horrible, still the rank old fluttering flavor of it was, to Danny, horror beyond bloodshed or description, black bird, black men and women and children scrambling for the safety of the creek bank, terror and explosions, a foul oily taste in his mouth and a trembling as if his very body was falling to pieces: spasmed muscles, snapped tendons, dissolving to black feathers and washed bone.

————

Harriet too—early the same morning, just as it was light out—started up from her bed in a panic. What had scared her, what dream, she hardly knew. It was daylight, but only just. The rain had stopped, and the room was still and shadowy. From Allison’s bed: jumbled teddy bears, a cock-eyed kangaroo, stared at her fixedly over a drift of bedclothes, nothing of Allison visible except a long wisp of hair floating and fanning across the pillow, like the hair of a drowned girl awash at water’s surface.

No clean shirts were in the bureau. Quietly, she eased Allison’s drawer open—and was delighted to find, among the tangle of dirty clothes, a pressed and neatly folded shirt: an old Girl Scout shirt. Harriet brought it up to her face for a long dreamy breath: it still smelled, just faintly, of Ida’s washing.

Harriet put on her shoes and tiptoed downstairs. All was silence except the tick of the clock; the clutter and mess was less sordid, somehow, in the morning light which glowed rich upon the banister and the dusty mahogany tabletop. In the stairwell smiled the lush schoolgirl portrait of Harriet’s mother: pink lips, white teeth, sparkling gigantic eyes with white stars that flashed, ting, in dazzled pupils. Harriet crept by it—like a burglar past a motion detector, all doubled over—and into the living room, where she stooped and retrieved the gun from under Ida’s chair.

In the hall closet, she searched for something to carry it in, and found a thick plastic drawstring bag. But the outline, she noticed, was obvious through the plastic. So she took it out again, wrapped it in several thick layers of newspaper, and slung the bundle over her shoulder like Dick Whittington in the storybook gone to seek his fortune.