The Little Friend

As soon as she stepped outside a bird sang out, practically in her ear it seemed: a sweet clear laddering phrase which burst and fell and surged up again. Though August was not yet over something dusty and cool, like fall, tingled in the morning air; the zinnias in Mrs. Fountain’s yard—firecracker reds, hot orange and gold—were starting to nod, their raggedy heads freckled and fading.

Except for the birds—which sang loud and piercingly, with a loony optimism akin to emergency—the street was solitary and still. A sprinkler whirred on an empty lawn; the street lamps, the lighted porches glowed in long, empty perspectives and even the insignificant sound of her footsteps on the pavement seemed to echo, and carry far.

Dewy grass, wet streets that rolled out black and wide like they went on forever. As she drew closer to the freight yards, the lawns got smaller, the houses shabbier and closer together. Several streets over—towards Italian Town—a solitary car roared past. Cheerleader practice would be starting soon, only a few blocks away, on the shady grounds of the Old Hospital. Harriet had heard them shouting and yelling over there the last few mornings.

Past Natchez Street, the sidewalks were buckled and cracked and very narrow, hardly a foot wide. Harriet walked past boarded-up buildings with sagging porches, yards with rusted propane tanks and grass that hadn’t been cut in weeks. A red Chow dog with matted fur hit his chain-link fence with a rattle, teeth flashing in his blue mouth: chop chop

. Mean as he was, the Chow, Harriet felt sorry for him. He looked as if he’d never been bathed in his life and in winter his owners left him outside with nothing but an aluminum pie tin of frozen water.

Past the food stamp office; past the burned-out grocery store (struck by lightning, never rebuilt), she turned off on the gravel road that led to the freight yards and the railroad water tower. She had no very clear idea what she was going to do, or what lay ahead of her—and it was best if she didn’t think about it too much. Studiously, she kept her eyes on the wet gravel, which was littered with black sticks and leafy branches blown down by the storm the night before.

Long ago, the water tower had provided the water for steam engines, but if it was used for anything now, she didn’t know. A couple of years before, Harriet and a boy named Dick Pillow had climbed up there to see how far they could see—which was pretty far, practically to the Interstate. The view had captivated her: wash fluttering on lines, peaked roofs like a field of origami arks, roofs red and green and black and silver, roofs of shingle and copper and tar and tin, spread out below them in the airy dreamy distance. It was like seeing into another country. The vista had a whimsical, toy quality which reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Orient—of China, of Japan. Beyond crawled the river, its yellow surface wrinkled and glinting, and the distances seemed so vast that it was easy to believe that a glittering clockwork Asia lay hammering and humming and clanging its million miniature bells just beyond the horizon, past the river’s muddy dragon-coils.

The view had captivated her so completely that she had paid little attention to the tank. Try as she might, she could not remember exactly what it was like up top, or how it was constructed, only that it was wooden and that a door was cut into the roof. This, in Harriet’s memory, was an outline about two feet square with hinges and a handle like a kitchen cabinet. Though her imagination was so vivid that she could never be quite sure what she actually remembered, and what her fancy had colored in to fill the blanks, the more she thought of Danny Ratliff, crouched at the top of the tower (his tense posture, the agitated way he kept looking over his shoulder), the more it seemed to her that he was hiding something or trying to hide himself. But what rose up again and again in her mind was the jangled, off-centered agitation as his gaze had brushed across her own, and flared up, like a sunbeam striking a signal mirror: it was as if he were bouncing back a code, a distress alarm, a recognition. Somehow he knew she was out here;

she was in his field of awareness; in a strange way (and it gave Harriet a chill to realize it) Danny Ratliff was the only person who’d really looked at her for a long time.

The sunlit rails gleamed like dark mercury, arteries branching out silver from the switch points; the old telegraph poles were shaggy with kudzu and Virginia creeper and, above them, rose the water tower, its surface all washed out by the sun. Harriet, cautiously, stepped towards it in the weedy clearing. Around and around it she walked, around the rusted metal legs, at a distance of about ten feet.