The Little Friend

Panting, beet-red, exhausted, they swayed like drunks. Though they both felt as if they might pass out, the ground was neither comfortable nor safe and there was no place else to sit. A tadpole large enough to have legs had splashed out of the ditch and was stranded, twitching, on the road, and its flip-flops, its slimy skin rasping against the asphalt, bumped Harriet into a fresh fit of gagging.

Mindless of their usual grammar-school etiquette—which kept them rigidly two feet apart, except to shove or punch—they clung to each other for balance: Harriet without thought of looking a coward, Hely without thought of trying to kiss her or scare her. Their jeans—clustered with burrs, sticky with beggar’s lice—were unpleasantly heavy, soaked and stinking with the ditch water. Hely, bent double, was making noises like he might vomit.

“Are you okay?” said Harriet—and retched when she saw on his sleeve a yellow-green clot of tadpole guts.

Hely—gagging, repetitively, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball—shrugged away and started back to retrieve the dropped stick and the lunch box.

Harriet caught the back of his sweat-soaked shirt. “Hang on,” she managed to say.

They sat astraddle their bicycles to rest—Hely’s Sting-Ray with the goat horn handlebars and the banana seat, Harriet’s Western Flyer, which had been Robin’s—both breathing hard and not talking. After the banging of their hearts had slowed, and they each had swallowed a grim little drink of lukewarm, plastic-tasting water from Hely’s canteen, they set out into the field again, this time armed with Hely’s BB rifle.

Hely’s stunned silence had given way to theatrics. Loudly, with dramatic gestures, he bragged about how he was going to catch the water moccasin and what he was going to do to it when he caught it: shoot it in the face, swing it in the air, snap it like a whip, chop it in two, ride over the pieces with his bicycle. His face was scarlet, his breath fast and shallow; every now and then, he fired a shot into the weeds and had to stop and pump ferociously on the air rifle—huff huff huff—to work his pressure up again.

They had shunned the ditch and were heading toward the houses under construction, where it was easier to clamber up onto the road if they were menaced. Harriet’s head ached and her hands felt cold and sticky. Hely—the BB gun swinging from the strap across his shoulder—paced back and forth, jabbering, punching at the air, oblivious to the quiet part in the thin grass not three feet from his sneaker where lay (unobtrusively, in a nearly straight line) what Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeast United States would call a “juvenile” copperhead.

“So this briefcase that shoots teargas when you open it? Well it’s got bullets too, and a knife that pops out the side—”

Harriet’s head felt swimmy. She wished that she had a dollar for every time she’d heard Hely talk about the briefcase in From Russia with Love that shot bullets and teargas.

She closed her eyes and said: “Listen, you grabbed that other snake too low. He would have bit you.”

“Shut up!” cried Hely, after a moment’s angry pause. “It’s your fault. I had him! If you hadn’t—”

“Watch out. Behind you.”

“Moccasin?” He crouched and swung the gun round. “Where? Show me the son of a bitch.”

“There,” said Harriet—and then, stepping forward in exasperation to point, again, “there.” Blindly the pointed head wove up—exposing the pale underside of its muscled jaw—then settled again with a sort of sifting movement.

“Jeez, that’s just a little one,” said Hely, disappointed, leaning forward to peer at it.

“It doesn’t matter how—Hey,” she said, skipping awkwardly to the side as the copperhead struck out at her ankle in a red streak.

A shower of boiled peanuts flew past, and then the whole plastic bag of them sailed over her shoulder and plopped to the ground. Harriet was staggering, off balance and hopping on one foot, and then the copperhead (whose whereabouts she’d momentarily lost track of) popped out at her again.

A BB pinged harmlessly against her sneaker; another stung her calf and she yelped and jumped back as they cracked in the dust around her feet. But the snake was excited now, vigorously pressing its attack even under fire; repeatedly, it struck at her feet, lashing out again and again with stringent aim.

Dizzy, half-delirious, she scrambled to the asphalt. She smeared her forearm across her face (transparent blobs pulsing merrily across her sun-dazed vision, bumping and merging, like magnified amoebas in a drop of pond water) and as her sight cleared, she became aware that the little copperhead had lifted his head and was regarding her without surprise or emotion from a distance of about four feet.

Hely, in his frenzy, had jammed the BB gun. Shouting nonsense, he dropped it and ran to get the stick.