The Little Friend

The houses in Oak Lawn Estates were mostly owned by up-and-comers: developers and politicians and real-estate agents, ambitious young marrieds fleeing sharecropper origins in the towns of the Piney Woods or the clay hills. As if in hatred for their rural origins, they had methodically paved over every available surface and ripped out every native tree.

But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained—legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring; and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.

And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes—big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared the smell of snake musk to fish guts—buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake’s nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes. Harriet had smelled snake-stink herself, plenty of times (most strongly in the Reptile House at the Memphis Zoo, and from frightened snakes imprisoned in gallon jars in the science classroom) but also wafting acrid and reasty from murky creek-banks and shallow lakes, from culverts and steaming mud-flats in August and—every now and then, in very hot weather, after a rain—in her own yard.

Harriet’s jeans and her long-sleeved shirt were soaked with sweat. Since there were scarcely any trees in the subdivision or the marsh behind, she wore a straw hat to keep from getting sunstroke, but the sun beat down white and fierce like the very wrath of God. She felt faint with heat and apprehension. All morning long, she had maintained a stoic front while Hely—who was too proud to wear a hat, and had the start of a blistering sunburn—skipped about and babbled intermittently about a James Bond movie which had to do with drug rings, and fortunetellers, and deadly tropical snakes. On the bike ride out, he’d bored her to death by gabbing about the stunt rider Evel Knievel and a Saturday-morning cartoon called Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch

.

“You should have seen it,” he was saying now, raking back with agitated repetitiveness the dripping strings of hair that fell in his face, “oh man, James Bond, he burned that snake right up

. He’s got a can of deodorant or something? So when he sees the snake in the mirror, he spins around like this, and holds his cigar up to the spray can, and pow

, that fire shoots out across the room like this, whoosh—”

He staggered backward—trilling his lips—while Harriet considered the dozing copperhead and tried hard to think how they should proceed. They had set off hunting equipped with Hely’s BB gun, two whittled, forked sticks, a field guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeastern United States, Chester’s garden gloves, a tourniquet, a pocket knife and change for a phone call in case either of them was bitten, and an old tin lunchbox of Allison’s (Campus Queen, painted with pony-tailed cheerleaders and pert beauty contestants in tiaras) into the lid of which Harriet, with difficulty, had poked a few air holes with a screwdriver. The plan was to sneak up on the snake—preferably, after it struck, before it recollected itself—and pin it behind the head with the forked stick. They would then grab it close behind the head (very close, so it couldn’t snap around and bite) and throw it in the lunchbox and buckle it shut.

But all this was easier said than done. The first snakes they’d spotted—three young copperheads, rust-red and glistening, roasting themselves all together on a concrete slab—they’d been too scared to approach. Hely tossed a chunk of brick in their midst. Two darted off, in opposite directions; the remaining one was infuriated and began to strike, low and repeatedly, at the brick, at the air, at anything that caught its attention.