The Little Friend

Danny put a hand on Eugene’s shoulder. Looking quickly over at the Trans Am (the only motion he could see was the dogs, tails thumping against the window glass), he said: “Do me a favor. Stand here a minute and don’t let him in.” Quickly he slipped inside the trailer and, from its place on the shelf behind the television, grabbed Gum’s little .22 pistol, pulled up his pants leg and stuck it muzzle-first in the top of his boot. Gum liked to keep it loaded, and he prayed that it still was; no time to fool with bullets.

Outside, heavy fast footsteps. He heard Eugene say, in a high frightened voice: “Don’t you raise your hand to me.”

Danny straightened his pants leg, opened the door. He was about to blurt his excuse (“my wallet”) when Farish snatched him up by the collar. “Don’t try to run from me, son.”

He hauled Danny down the steps. Halfway to the car Curtis scuttled over and tried to throw his arms around Danny’s waist. He was crying—or, rather, he was coughing and choking for breath, the way he did when he was upset. Danny, stumbling along behind Farish, managed to reach back and pat him on the head.

“Get back, baby,” he called after Curtis. “Be good.…” Eugene was watching anxiously from the door of the trailer; poor Curtis was crying now, crying to beat the band. Danny noticed that his wrist was smeared with orange lipstick, where Curtis had pressed his mouth.

The color was garish, shocking; for a fraction of a second, it stopped Danny cold. I’m too tired to do this, he thought, too tired. Then, the next thing he knew, Farish had opened the driver’s side door of the Trans Am and slung him inside. “Drive,” he said.

————

The top of the water tank was more rickety than Harriet remembered: furred gray boards, with nails popped loose in some places and, in others, dark gaps where the wood had shrunk and split. Peppering it all were plump white fishhooks and squiggles of bird dropping.

Harriet, from the ladder, examined it at eye level. Then she stepped up, cautiously, and began to climb toward the middle—and something tore loose in her chest as a plank screeched and sank sharply under her foot, like a pressed piano key.

Carefully, carefully, she took a giant step backward. The plank sprang up with a shriek. Stiff, heart pounding, she crept to the margin of the tank, by the railing, where the boards were more stable—why was the air so strange and thin, up high? Altitude sickness, pilots and mountain climbers suffered from it, and whatever those words actually meant, they described how she felt, a queasiness in her stomach and sparkles at the corners of her eyes. Tin roofs glittered in the hazy distance. On the other side lay the dense green woods where she and Hely had played so often, fighting their all-day wars, bombing each other with clods of red mud: a jungle, lush and singing, a palmy little Vietnam to parachute into.

She circled the tank twice. The door was nowhere to be seen. She was just starting to think that there wasn’t a door at all when at last she noticed it: weather-worn, almost perfectly camouflaged in the monotone surface except for a chip or two of chrome paint that hadn’t quite peeled off the handle.

She dropped to her knees. With a wide, windshield-wiper swing of her arm, she pulled it open (squeaky hinges, like a horror movie) and dropped it with a bang which vibrated in the boards beneath her.

Inside: dark, a bad smell. A low, intimate whine of mosquitos hung in the stagnant air. From the roof, a prickle of tiny sun shafts—narrow as pencils—bristled from the holes up top, and crisscrossed in dusty beams which were powdery and pollen-heavy like goldenrod in the darkness. Below, the water was thick and inky, the color of motor oil. At the far end, she made out the dim form of a bloated animal, floating on its side.

A corroded metal ladder—rickety, rusted half-through—went down for about six feet, stopping just short of the water. As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the dim, she saw, with a thrill, that something shiny was taped to the top rung: a package of some sort, rolled up in a black plastic garbage bag.

Harriet prodded it with her toe of her shoe. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got on her stomach and reached inside and patted it. Something soft but solid was inside—not money, nothing stacked or sharp or definite, but something that gave under pressure like sand.

The package was bound around and around with heavy duct tape. Harriet picked and pulled at it, tugged with both hands, tried to work her fingernails under the edges of the tape. Finally she gave up and tore through several layers of plastic right into the heart of the package.