The Little Friend

The rain had stopped; the sun shone through the curtains. Danny closed his eyes against it and then rolled over with a shriek of bedsprings and turned his face into his pillow. His trailer—one of two units behind the larger mobile home where his grandmother lived—was fifty yards from the methamphetamine lab but between the meth and the heat and the taxidermy, the stink traveled; and Danny was sick of it nearly to vomiting. Part cat piss, part formaldehyde, part rot and death, it had penetrated nearly everything: clothes and furniture, water and air, his grandmother’s plastic cups and dishes. His brother smelled so strongly of it you could hardly stand within six feet of him and, once or twice, Danny had been horrified to detect a whiff of it in his own sweat.

He lay stiff, heart pounding. For several weeks, he’d been cranked up pretty much non-stop, no sleep except a jerky catnap now and then. Blue sky, fast music on the radio, long speedy nights that skimmed on and on towards some imaginary vanishing point while he kept his foot hard to the gas and sped right through them, one after the other, dark after light after dark again, like skimming through summer rainstorms on a long flat stretch of highway. It wasn’t about going anyplace, just about going fast. Some people (not Danny) ran so fast and far and ragged that one too many black mornings grinding their teeth and listening to the birdies tweet before sunup and snap: bye-bye. Permanently ripped, wild-eyed and flapping and twisting every which way: convinced that maggots were eating their bone marrow, that their girlfriends were cheating on them and the government was watching them through the television set and the dogs were barking out messages in Morse code. Danny had seen one emaciated freak (K. C. Rockingham, now deceased) jabbing at himself with a sewing needle until his arms looked as if they’d been plunged to the elbow in a deep fryer. Miniature hookworms were burrowing into his skin, he said. Over two long weeks, in a state close to triumph, he’d sat in front of the television twenty-four hours a day and pried the flesh off his forearms, shouting “Gotcha” and “Hah!” at the imaginary vermin. Farish had come close to that shrieking frequency a time or two (one bad incident in particular, swinging a poker and screaming about John F. Kennedy) and it wasn’t anywhere that Danny was ever going to be.

No: he was fine, just dandy, only sweating like a tiger, too hot and a little edgy. A tic fluttered in his eyelid. Noises, even tiny ones, were starting to jerk on his nerves but mostly he was hammered down from having the same nightmare on and off for a week now. It seemed to hover for him, waiting for him to drop off; as he lay on his bed, sliding uneasily into sleep, it pounced and grabbed him by the ankles and towed him down with sickening speed.

He rolled on his back and stared up at the swimsuit poster taped to the ceiling. Like a nasty hang-over, the vapors of the dream still pressed in on him low and poisonous. Terrible as it was, he could never quite remember the details when he woke up, no people or situations (although there was always at least one other person) but only the astonishment of being sucked into a blind, breathless emptiness: struggles, dark wingbeats, terror. It wouldn’t sound so bad to tell about, but if he’d ever had a worse dream he couldn’t remember what it was.

Black flies were clustered on the half-eaten doughnut—his lunch—that lay on the card table beside his bed. They rose in a hum when Danny stood and darted crazily for several moments before they settled on the doughnut again.

Now that his brothers Mike and Ricky Lee were in jail for the time being, Danny had the trailer to himself. But it was old, and had low ceilings, and—though Danny kept it scrupulously clean, windows washed, never a dirty dish—still it was shabby and cramped. Back and forth droned the electric fan, stirring the flimsy curtains as it passed. From the breast pocket of his denim shirt, slung over a chair, he retrieved a snuff tin which contained not snuff but an ounce of powdered methamphetamine.

He did a good-sized bump off the back of his hand. The burn felt so sweet, hitting the back of his throat just so, that his eyes misted. Almost instantly, the taint lifted: colors clearer, nerves stronger, life not so bad again. Quickly, with trembling hands, he tapped himself out another bump before the jump-start from the first kicked in all the way.