The Little Friend

Harriet walked through to the kitchen, to the wall phone, and dialed Hely’s house. Four rings. Five. Then someone picked up. Gabble of noise in the background. “No, you look better without it,” said Hely’s mother to someone, and then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

“It’s Harriet. May I speak to Hely, please?”

“Harriet! Of course you can, Sweet Pea.…” The receiver dropped. Harriet, her eyes still unaccustomed to the light, blinked at the dining-room chair which still stood by the refrigerator. Hely’s mother’s little nicknames and endearments always caught her by surprise: sweet pea

was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.

Commotion: a scraped chair, Pemberton’s insinuating laughter. Hely’s irritated whine rose above it, piercingly.

A door slammed. “Hey!” His voice was gruff but excited. “Harriet?”

She caught the receiver between her ear and shoulder and turned to face the wall. “Hely, if we tried, do you think we could catch a poisonous snake?”

There was an awestruck silence, during which Harriet realized, with pleasure, he understood exactly what she was getting at.

————

“Copperheads? Cottonmouths? Which is more poisonous?”

It was several hours later and they were sitting on the back steps of Harriet’s house in the dark. Hely had gone nearly berserk waiting for the birthday excitement to die down so he could slip out and meet her. His mother—made suspicious by his vanished appetite—had leapt to the humiliating assumption that he was constipated and had hovered for ages querying him about his toilet intimacies, offering him laxatives. After she’d finally kissed him goodnight, reluctantly, and gone upstairs with his father, he’d lain open-eyed and stiff beneath the covers for half an hour or more, as zinged-up as if he’d drunk a gallon of Coca-Cola, as if he’d just seen the new James Bond movie, as if it was Christmas Eve.

Sneaking out of the house—tiptoeing down the hall, easing the squeaky back door open, an inch at a time—had zinged him up even more. After the purring, air-conditioned chill of his bedroom, the night air pressed heavy and very hot; his hair was stuck to the back of his neck and he couldn’t quite catch his breath. Harriet, on the step below, sat with her knees under her chin eating a cold chicken leg that he’d brought her from his house.

“What’s the difference between a cottonmouth and a copperhead?” she said. Her lips, in the moonlight, were slightly greasy from the chicken.

“I thought it was all just one damn snake,” said Hely. He felt delirious.

“Copperheads are different. It’s cottonmouths and water moccasins that are the same snake.”

“A water moccasin will attack you if it feels like it,” said Hely gladly, repeating, word for word, something Pemberton had said to him a couple of hours earlier when Hely had questioned him. Hely was deathly afraid of snakes and did not even like to look at pictures of snakes in the encyclopedia. “They’re real aggressive.”

“Do they stay in the water all the time?”

“A copperhead is about two feet long, real thin, real red,” said Hely, repeating something else that Pemberton had said since he didn’t know the answer to her question. “They don’t like the water.”

“Would he be easier to catch?”

“Oh yeah,” said Hely, though he had no idea. Whenever Hely came across a snake he knew—unerringly, regardless of size or color, from the point or roundness of its head—whether it was poisonous or not, but that was as far as his knowledge went. All his life, he had called all poisonous snakes moccasin, and any poisonous snake on land was, in his mind, simply a water moccasin that wasn’t in water at the moment.