The Little Friend

None of them glanced at Harriet. She stared at the sidewalk as they shot past, in a jingly rocket-trail of pop music, her cheeks burning with an angry and mysterious shame. If Hely had been walking with her, they would almost certainly have slowed down to yell something, since Lisa and Pam both had crushes on Pemberton. But they probably didn’t know who Harriet was, though they’d been in Allison’s class since nursery school. In a collage by Allison’s bed at home were pasted happy kindergarten photographs of Allison playing London Bridge with Pam McCormick and Lisa Leavitt; of Allison and Ginger Herbert—red-nosed, laughing, the best of friends—holding hands in somebody’s wintry back yard. Labored first-grade valentines, printed in pencil: “2 Hugs 2 Kisses 4 you. Love Ginger!!!” To reconcile all this affection with the current Allison, and the current Ginger (gloved, glossy-lipped in chiffon beneath an arch of fake flowers) was inconceivable. Allison was as pretty as any of them (and a lot prettier than Sissy Arnold, who had long, witchy teeth and the body of a weasel) but somehow she’d devolved from the childhood friend and fellow of these princesses into a nonentity, someone who never got called except about missed homework assignments. It was the same with their mother. Though she’d been a sorority girl, popular, voted Best Dressed in her college class, she also had a whole lot of friends who didn’t call any more. The Thorntons and the Bowmonts—who at one time had played cards with Harriet’s parents every week, and shared vacation cabins with them on the Gulf Coast—didn’t come by now even when Harriet’s father was in town. There was a forced note about their friendliness when they ran into Harriet’s mother at church, the husbands overly hearty, a sort of shrieking bright vivacity in the women’s voices, and none of them ever quite looked Harriet’s mother in the eye. Ginger and the other girls on the school bus treated Allison in a similar fashion: bright chatty voices, but eyes averted, as if Allison carried an infection they might catch.

Harriet (staring bleakly at the sidewalk) was distracted from these thoughts by a gargling noise. Poor retarded Curtis Ratliff—who roamed the streets of Alexandria ceaselessly in the summertime squirting cats and cars with his water pistol—was lumbering across the road towards her. When he saw her looking at him, a wide smile broke across his smashed face.

“Hat!” He waved at her with both arms—the whole of his body wagging with the effort—and then began to jump up and down laboriously, feet together, as if stamping out a fire. “All wight? All wight?”

“Hello Alligator,” said Harriet, to humor him. Curtis had gone through a long phase where everybody and everything he saw was alligator: his teacher, his shoes, the school bus.

“All wight? All wight, Hat?” He wasn’t going to stop until he got an answer.

“Thank you, Curtis. I’m all right.” Though Curtis wasn’t deaf, he was a little hard of hearing, and you had to remember to speak up.

Curtis’s smile stretched even wider. His roly-poly body, his dim, sweet, toddly manner were like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

“I like cake,” he said.

“Curtis, hadn’t you better get out of the road?”

Curtis froze, hand to mouth. “Uh oh!” he crowed and then again: “Uh oh!” He bunny-hopped across the street and—with both feet, as if leaping a ditch—jumped over the curb and in front of her. “Uh oh!” he said, and dissolved into a jelly of giggles, his hands over his face.

“Sorry, you’re in my way,” Harriet said.

Through his spread fingers, Curtis peeped out at her. He was beaming so hard that his tiny dark eyes were narrowed to slits.

“Snakes bite,” he said unexpectedly.

Harriet was taken aback. Partly because of his hearing problem, Curtis didn’t speak too plain. Certainly she’d misunderstood him; certainly he’d said something else: Ask why? Cake’s nice? Bye-bye?

But before she could ask him, Curtis heaved a big, businesslike sigh and stuck his water pistol in the waistband of his stiff new denims. Then he picked up her hand and doddled it in his own large limp sticky one.

“Bite!” he said cheerfully. He pointed at himself, and to the house opposite—and then he turned and loped off down the street as Harriet—rather unnerved—blinked after him and pulled her towel a bit closer around her shoulders.

————

Though Harriet was unaware of it, poisonous snakes were also a topic of discussion less than thirty feet from where she stood: in the second-story apartment of a frame house across the street, one of several rental properties in Alexandria belonging to Roy Dial.