The Little Friend

“Wait a minute.” With a tug of effort, she pulled free from the snake’s icy gaze, clear as churchbells; what’s wrong with me? she thought, weakly, stumbling back into the shimmering center of the road, heatstroke?

“Oh, jeez.” Hely’s voice, coming from she didn’t know where. “Harriet?”

“Wait.” Hardly aware what she was doing (her knees were loose and clumsy, like they belonged to a marionette she didn’t know how to work) she stepped back again, and then sat down hard on the hot asphalt.

“You okay, dude?”

“Leave me alone,” Harriet heard herself say.

The sun sizzled red through her closed eyelids. An afterburn of the snake’s eyes glowed against them, in malevolent negative: black for the iris, acid-yellow for the slashed pupil. She was breathing through her mouth, and the odor of her sewage-soaked trousers was so strong in the heat that she could taste it; suddenly she realized that she wasn’t safe on the ground; she tried to scramble to her feet but the ground slid away—

“Harriet!” Hely’s voice, a long way off. “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”

She blinked; the white light stung, like lemon juice squirted in her eyes, and it was horrible to be so hot, and so blind, and so confused in her arms and legs.…

The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back. The sky blazed a cloudless, heartless blue. Time seemed to have skipped a half-beat, as if she’d dozed and awakened with a snap of her head in the same instant. A heavy presence darkened her vision. Panic-stricken, she threw both arms over her face, but the hovering darkness only shifted, and pressed in, more insistently, from the other side.

“Come on, Harriet. It’s just water.” She heard the words, in the back of her mind, and yet did not hear them. Then—quite unexpectedly—something cold touched the corner of her mouth; and Harriet floundered away from it, screaming as loudly as she could.

————

“You two are nuts,” Pemberton said. “Riding your bikes out to this shit subdivision? It must be a hundred degrees.”

Harriet, flat on her back in the rear seat of Pem’s Cadillac, watched the sky rush past overhead through a cool lace-work of tree branches. The trees meant that they had turned out of shadeless Oak Lawn back onto good old County Line Road.

She shut her eyes. Loud rock music blared from the stereo speakers; patches of shade—sporadic, fluttering—drove and flickered against the red of her closed eyelids.

“The courts are deserted,” said Pem above the wind and the music. “Nobody in the pool, even. Everybody’s in the clubhouse watching One Life to Live.”

The dime for the phone call had come in handy after all. Hely—very heroically, because he was nearly as panicked and sun-sick as Harriet—had hopped on his bicycle and despite his faintness and the cramps in his legs had pedalled nearly half a mile to the pay phone in the parking lot of Jiffy Qwik-Mart. But Harriet, who’d had a hellish wait of it, roasting on the asphalt at the end of the snake-infested cul-de-sac all by herself for forty minutes, was too hot and woozy to feel very grateful for this.

She sat up a little, enough to see Pemberton’s hair—crinkly and frizzed from the pool chemicals—blown back and snapping like a scrappy yellow banner. Even from the back seat, she could smell his acrid and distinctly adult smell: sweat, sharp and masculine under the coconut suntan lotion, mingled with cigarettes and something like incense.

“Why were you all the way out at Oak Lawn? Do you know somebody there?”

“Naw,” said Hely, in the jaded monotone he adopted around his brother.

“What were yall doing, then?”

“Hunting for snakes to—Quit,” he snapped, his hand flying up, as Harriet yanked a handful of his hair.

“Well, if you feel like catching a snake, that’s the place to do it,” said Pemberton lazily. “Wayne that does maintenance at the Country Club told me that when they were landscaping a pool for some lady out there, the crew killed five dozen snakes. In one yard.”

“Poisonous snakes?”

“Who cares? I wouldn’t live out in that hell hole for a million dollars,” said Pemberton, with a contemptuous, princely toss of his head. “This same guy Wayne said that the exterminator found three hundred of them living under one of those shitty houses. One house. Soon as there’s a flood too big for the Corps of Engineers to sandbag you’re going to have every car-pool mommy out there bit to pieces.”

“I caught a moccasin,” said Hely primly.

“Yeah, right. What’d you do with him?”

“I went on and let him go.”

“I’ll bet you did.” Pemberton glanced at him sideways. “He come after you?”

“Naw.” Hely eased down a little in his seat.