The Little Friend

She’d be walking over with our coffee, he thought, rubbing his mouth, if I’d drove on to the White Kitchen, if I hadn’t turned down this road. The waitress named Tracey, the scrawny one with the dangly earrings and the little flat ass, always brought it without asking. He imagined Farish pushed back in his chair with his stomach preceding him grandly, delivering the speech he always gave about his eggs (how he didn’t like to drink ’em, tell the cook she couldn’t get ’em too hard) and Danny across the table looking at his matted old nasty head like black seaweed and thinking:

you never know how close I come.

All that vanished, and he found himself staring at a broken bottle in the weeds. He opened and shut one hand, then the other. His palms were slimy and cold. I got to get moving here, he thought, with a rush of panic.

And yet he still stood. It was like he’d blown the fuse connecting his body with his brain. Now that the car window was shattered and the dogs had shut up wailing and crying, he could hear just the faintest thread of music drifting from the radio. Did those people who sang that song (some shit about stardust in your hair) did they ever think for a minute that somebody’d be listening to it on a dirt road by an abandoned railroad track with a dead body in front of them? No: those people just swished around Los Angeles and Hollywood in their white outfits with sparkles, and their sunglasses dark at the top and clear at the bottom, drinking champagne and snorting coke off of silver trays. They never figured—standing there in the studio by their grand pianos, with their sparkly scarves and their fancy cocktails—they never figured that some poor person was going to be standing on a dirt road in Mississippi and working through some major problems while the radio played on the day that you were born the angels got together.…

People like that never had to make a tough decision, he thought, dully, staring at his blood-spattered vehicle. They never had to do shit. It was all handed to them like a set of new car keys.

He took a step towards the car, one step. His knees trembled; the crunch of his feet on the gravel terrified him. Got to move! he told himself, with a kind of high, hearty hysteria, looking wildly all around him (left, right, up in the sky) and a hand out to brace himself in case he fell. Get this show on the road! It was clear enough what he had to do; the question was how, since there was no getting around the fact that basically he would rather take a hacksaw and cut his arm off than lay a finger on his brother’s body.

On the dashboard—resting quite naturally—lay his brother’s grubby red hand, tobacco-stained fingers, the big gold pinky ring shaped like a dice. As Danny stared at it, he tried to think his way back into the situation. What he needed was a bump, to concentrate his mind and get his heart up and kicking. Upstairs in the tower there was plenty of product, product galore; and the longer he stood around, the longer the Trans Am would stand in the weeds with a dead man and two dead police dogs bleeding on the seats.

————

Harriet, gripping the rail with both fists, lay on her stomach too terrified to breathe. Because her feet were above her head, all the blood had drained down to her face so that her heartbeat crashed in her temples. The screams from the car had ceased, the sharp high animal wails that had seemed as if they would never end, but even the silence seemed stretched and torn out of shape by those unearthly cries.

There he still stood, Danny Ratliff, down on the ground, looking very small in the flat, placid distance. It was all as still as a picture. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree seemed combed and oiled and slicked into place.

Harriet’s elbows were sore. She shifted slightly, in her trying position. She was unsure what she’d seen—she was too far away—but the gunshots and the cries she’d heard plainly enough, and the afterburn of the screams still rang in her ears: high-pitched, scalding, intolerable. All movement in the car had stopped; his victims (dark forms, more than one, it seemed) were still.

Suddenly he turned; and Harriet’s heart clenched painfully. Please, God, she prayed, please, God, don’t let him come up here.…

But he was walking towards the woods. Swiftly—after a backwards glance—he stooped in the clearing. A band of custard-white skin—at odds with the dark brown tan on his arms—appeared in the crack between his T-shirt and the waistband of his jeans. He broke the gun and examined it; he stood, and scoured it clean with his shirt. Then he threw it towards the woods, and the gun’s shadow flew dark over the weedy ground.