The Little Friend

Pem hooked his hair behind his ears with a big-knuckled hand, then took the check and examined it. He was long-boned, easy in his demeanor, and much taller than Hely; his hair was the same tangled, stripey blonde, light on top and darker underneath. His features were like Hely’s, too, but more finely cut, and his teeth were slightly crooked but in a way that was somehow more pleasing than if they were straight.

“Well, you can leave it with me,” he said at last, “but I’m not sure what to do with it. Say, I didn’t know your dad was in town.”

“He’s not.”

Pemberton, cocking a sly eyebrow at her, indicated the date.

“He sent it in the mail,” said Harriet.

“Where is old Dix, anyway? I haven’t seen him around in ages.”

Harriet shrugged. Though she didn’t like her father, she knew she wasn’t supposed to gossip or complain about him, either.

“Well, when you see him, why don’t you ask him if he’ll send me a check, too. I really want these speakers.” He pushed the magazine across the counter and showed them to her.

Harriet studied them. “They all look the same.”

“No way, sweetie. These Blaupunkts are the sexiest thing around. See? All black, with black buttons on the receiver? See how little it is compared to the Pioneers?”

“Well, get that one, then.”

“I will when you get your dad to send me three hundred bucks.” He took a last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on his plate with a hiss. “Say, where’s that dingbat brother of mine?”

“I don’t know.”

Pemberton leaned forward, with a confidential shift of the shoulders. “How come you let him hang around with you?”

Harriet stared at the ruins of Pem’s lunch: cold french fries, cigarette crooked and hissing in a puddle of ketchup.

“Doesn’t he get on your nerves?” Pemberton said. “How come you make him dress up like a woman?”

Harriet looked up, startled.

“You know, in Martha’s housecoats.” Martha was Pem and Hely’s mother. “He loves it. Every time I see him he’s running out of the house with some kind of weird pillowcase or towel over his head or something. He says you make him do it.”

“No I don’t.”

“Come on, Harriet.” He pronounced her name as if he found something faintly ridiculous about it. “I drive by your house and you’ve always got about seven or eight little boys in bedsheets hanging around out in your yard. Ricky Ashmore calls yall the baby Ku Klux Klan but I think you just enjoy making them dress up like girls.”

“It’s a game,” said Harriet, stolidly. She was annoyed at his persistence; the Bible pageants were a thing of the past. “Listen. I wanted to talk to you. About my brother.”

Now it was Pemberton’s turn to be uncomfortable. He picked up the stereo magazine and began to leaf through it with studied care.

“Do you know who killed him?”

“Well,”

said Pemberton slyly. He put down the stereo magazine. “I’ll tell you something if you promise not to tell a soul. You know old Mrs. Fountain that lives next door to you?”

Harriet was looking at him with such undisguised contempt that he collapsed in laughter.

“What?” he said. “You don’t believe it about Mrs. Fountain and all them people buried up under her house?” Several years ago, Pem had scared Hely stiff by telling him somebody had found human bones poking out of Mrs. Fountain’s flowerbed, also that Mrs. Fountain had stuffed her dead husband and propped him up in a recliner to keep her company at night.

“So you don’t know who did it, then.”

“Nope,” said Pemberton, a bit curtly. He still remembered his mother coming up to his bedroom (he had been putting together a model airplane; weird, the things that stuck in your mind sometimes) and calling him out into the hall to tell him Robin was dead. It was the only time he’d ever seen her cry. Pem hadn’t cried: he was nine years old, didn’t have a clue, he’d just gone back to his room and shut the door and—under a cloud of growing unease—continued work on the Sop-with Camel; and he could still remember how the glue beaded up in the seams, it looked like shit, eventually he’d thrown it away without finishing it.

“You shouldn’t joke around about this kind of stuff,” he said to Harriet.

“I am not joking. I am in deadly earnest,” said Harriet loftily. Not for the first time, Pemberton thought how different she was from Robin, so different you could hardly believe they were related. Maybe it was partly the dark hair that made her seem so serious, but unlike Robin she had a ponderous quality about her: poker-faced and pompous, never laughing. There was a whimsical flutter of Robin’s ghost about Allison (who, now she was in high school, was starting to get a nice little walk on her; she had turned Pem’s head on the street the other day without his realizing who she was) but Harriet was not sweet or whimsical by any stretch of the imagination. Harriet was a trip.