The Little Friend

On hands and knees, she gathered the shells. Neatly, she re-stacked them in their box; wiped the gun clean of fingerprints and replaced it, then locked the cabinet and dropped the key back in the red leather box in her father’s desk where it belonged: along with the nail clippers, some mis-matched cufflinks and a pair of dice in a green suede pouch, and a stack of faded matchbooks from nightclubs in Memphis and Miami and New Orleans.

Upstairs, she undressed quietly without turning on the lamp. In the next bed, Allison lay face down in a dead man’s float. The moonlight shifted over the bedspread in dappled patterns which changed and played when the wind stirred through the trees. A jumble of stuffed animals were packed in the bed around her as if on a life raft—a patchwork elephant, a piebald dog with a button eye missing, a woolly black lambkin and a kangaroo of purple velveteen and a whole family of teddy bears—and their innocent shapes crowded around her head in sweet, shadowed grotesquerie, as if they were creatures in Allison’s dreams.

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“Now, boys and girls,” said Mr. Dial. With one chilly, whale-gray eye, he surveyed Harriet and Hely’s Sunday School class, which—due to Mr. Dial’s enthusiasm for Camp Lake de Selby, and unwelcome advocacy of it among the parents of his pupils—was more than half empty. “I want yall to think for a minute about Moses. Why was Moses so focused on leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land?”

Silence. Mr. Dial’s appraising, salesman’s gaze roved over the small group of uninterested faces. The church—not knowing what to do with the new school bus—had begun an outreach program, picking up underprivileged white children from out in the country and hauling them in to the prosperous cool halls of First Baptist for Sunday school. Dirty-faced, furtive, in clothing inappropriate for church, their downcast gazes strayed across the floor. Only gigantic Curtis Ratliff, who was retarded, and several years older than the rest of the children, goggled at Mr. Dial with open-mouthed appreciation.

“Or, let’s take another example,” said Mr. Dial. “What about John the Baptist? Why was he so determined to go forth in the wilderness and prepare the way for Christ’s arrival?”

There was no point attempting to reach these little Ratliffs and Scurlees and Odums, these youngsters with their rheumy eyes and pinched faces, their glue-sniffing mothers, their tattooed fornicating fathers. They were pitiful. Only the day before, Mr. Dial had been forced to send his son-in-law Ralph—whom he employed at Dial Chevrolet—down to some of the Scurlees to repossess a new Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was an old, old story: these sad dogs drove around in top-end automobiles chewing tobacco and swilling beer from the quart bottle, little caring that they were six months late on the payments. Another Scurlee and two Odums were due for a little visit from Ralph on Monday morning, though they didn’t know it.

Mr. Dial’s gaze lighted on Harriet—Miss Libby Cleve’s little niece—and her friend the Hull boy. They were Old Alexandria, from a nice neighborhood: their families belonged to the Country Club and made their car payments more or less on time.

“Hely,” said Mr. Dial.

Hely, wild-eyed, started convulsively from the Sunday school booklet he had been folding and refolding into tiny squares.

Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead—plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on—gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin. “Will you tell us why John the Baptist went forth crying in the wilderness?”

Hely writhed. “Because Jesus made him do it.”

“Not quite!” said Mr. Dial, rubbing his hands. “Let’s all think about John’s situation for a minute. Wonder why he’s quoting the words of Isaiah the prophet in—” he ran his finger down the page—“verse 23 here?”

“He was following God’s plan?” said a little voice in the first row.

This came from Annabel Arnold, her gloved hands folded decorously over the zippered white Bible in her lap.

“Very good!” said Mr. Dial. Annabel came from a fine family—a fine Christian family, unlike such cocktail-drinking country-club families as the Hulls. Annabel, a champion baton twirler, had been instrumental in leading a little Jewish schoolmate to Christ. On Tuesday night, she was participating in a regional twirling competition on over at the high school, an event of which Dial Chevrolet was one of the main sponsors.

Mr. Dial, noticing that Harriet was about to speak, started in again hastily: “Did you hear what Annabel said, boys and girls?” he said brightly. “John the Baptist was working in accordiance with God’s Plan. And why was he doing that? Because,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head and fixing the class with his other eye, “because John the Baptist had a goal.”

Silence.