The Little Friend

Both children were horrified. Circling, cagily, forked sticks at arm’s length, they darted quickly towards it and just as quickly back when the thing whipped around to strike—first on one side, then the other, fighting them off in all directions. Harriet was so frightened that she felt she might black out. Hely jabbed at it, and missed; the snake whipped back and lashed at him its full length and Harriet, with a stifled cry, pinned the back of its head with the forked stick. Immediately, with shocking violence, it began to thrash the remaining two feet of its length as if possessed by the Devil. Harriet, flabbergasted with revulsion, leapt back to keep its tail from slapping her legs; with a wriggle, the thing muscled free—toward Hely, who danced back and shrieked like he’d been impaled with an iron spike—and shot into the parched weeds.

One thing about Oak Lawn Estates: if a child—or anyone—had screamed long and high and hard like that on George Street, Mrs. Fountain, Mrs. Godfrey, Ida Rhew, and half a dozen housekeepers would have flown outside in a heartbeat (“Children! Leave that snake alone! Scat!”). And they would mean business, and not stand for any back talk, and stand watch at their kitchen windows after they went back inside just to make sure. But things were different at Oak Lawn Estates. The houses had a frightening sealed-off quality, like bunkers or mausoleums. People didn’t know each other. Out here at Oak Lawn you could scream your head off, some convict could be strangling you with a piece of barbed wire, and nobody would come outside to see what was going on. In the intense, heat-vibrant silence, manic laughter from a TV game show wafted eerily from the nearest house: a shuttered hacienda, hunched defensively in a raw plot just beyond the pine skeletons. Dark windows. A gleaming new Buick was parked in the sand-strewn car-port.

“Ann Kendall? Come on down!

” Wild audience applause.

Who was in that house? thought Harriet, dazed, shading her eyes with one hand. A drunk dad who hadn’t gone to his job? Some sluggish Junior League mother, like the sloppy young mothers that Allison sometimes babysat for out here, lying in a darkened room with the TV on and the laundry undone?

“I can’t stand The Price Is Right,” said Hely, stumbling backwards with a little moan, and looking on the ground with an agitated, jerky movement as he did so. “They have money and cars on Tattletales.

”

“I like Jeopardy.”

Hely wasn’t listening. Energetically, he thrashed about in the weeds with his forked stick. “From Russia with love …” he crooned; and then, again, because he couldn’t remember the words: “From Russia with

LOVE.…”

They had not long to look before finding a fourth snake, a moccasin: waxy, liver-yellow, no longer in its body than the copperheads but thicker than Harriet’s arm. Hely—who, despite his apprehension, insisted upon leading the way—nearly stepped on it. Like a spring, it popped up and struck, just missing his calf; Hely, his reflexes electrified by the previous encounter, lunged back and pinned it in one stab. “Hah!” he shouted.

Harriet laughed aloud; with trembling hands, she fumbled with the catch of the Campus Queen lunchbox. This snake was slower and less nimble. Testily, it swept its thick body—an awful, corrupt yellow—back and forth across the ground. But it was much larger than the copperheads; would it fit into Campus Queen? Hely, so terrified that he was laughing too, high and hysterical, spread his fingers and bent to grab it—

“The head!” cried Harriet, dropping the lunchbox with a clatter.

Hely jumped back. The stick fell from his hand. The moccasin lay still. Then, very smoothly, it pulled its head up and regarded them with its slitted pupils for a long ice-cold moment before it opened its mouth (eerie white inside) and went for them.

They turned and ran, knocking into each other—afraid of stumbling in a ditch, and yet too afraid to look at the ground—with the undergrowth crashing beneath their sneakers and the smell of trampled bitterweed eddying up pungent all around them in the heat like the smell of fear itself.

A ditch, filled with brackish water that squiggled with tadpoles, cut them off from the asphalt. The concrete sides were slick and mossy, too wide to clear with a single leap. They skidded down (the smell they churned up, sewage and fishy rot, catapulted them both into an ecstasy of coughing), fell forward on their hands, scrambled up to the other side. When they heaved themselves up, and turned—tears streaming down their faces—to look back at the way they’d just come, they saw only the path they’d beaten through the yellow-flowered scraggle of bitterweed, and the melancholy pastels of the dropped lunchbox, farther back.