The Little Friend

Ah, yes: a week in the country. Rainbows and twinkles. Suddenly he felt bright, well-rested, on top of the situation. Danny made his bed, tight as a drum, emptied the ashtray and washed it out in the sink, threw away the Coke can and the remnants of the doughnut. On the card table was a half-worked jigsaw puzzle (pallid nature scene, winter trees and waterfall) which had been his entertainment for many a speedy night. Should he work on that for a while? Yes: the puzzle. But then his attention was arrested by the electrical-cord situation. Electrical cords were tangled around the fan, climbing up the walls, running all over the room. Clock radio, television, toaster, the whole bit. He batted a fly from around his head. Maybe he should take care of the cords—organize them a little bit. From the distant television in his grandmother’s quarters, an announcer’s voice from World Wrestling Federation cut through the fog, distinct: “Doctor Death is f-f-flying off the handle.…”

“Get off of me,” Danny found himself shouting. Before he was aware of doing it, he’d smacked two flies dead and was examining the smears across the brim of his cowboy hat. He didn’t remember picking the hat up, didn’t even remember it being in the room.

“Where did you

come from?” he said to it. Freaky. The flies—agitated now—were zinging all around his head but it was the hat that concerned Danny at the moment. Why was it inside? He’d left it in the car; he was sure of it. He tossed it on the bed—suddenly, he didn’t want the thing touching him—and there was something about its jaunty angle, lying there on the neatly turned covers all by itself, that gave him the willies.

Fuck it, thought Danny. He popped his neck, tugged on his jeans and stepped outside. He found his brother Farish reclining in an aluminum lounge chair in front of their grandmother’s mobile home, scraping the dirt from beneath his fingernails with a pocketknife. About him were strewn various cast-off distractions: a whetstone; a screwdriver and a partially disassembled transistor radio; a paperback book with a swastika on the cover. In the dirt amongst all this sat their youngest brother, Curtis, with his stumpy legs splayed out in a V in front of him, cuddling a dirty wet kitten to his cheek and humming. Danny’s mother had Curtis when she was forty-six years old and a bad drunk—but though their father (a drunk himself, also deceased) loudly bemoaned the birth, Curtis was a sweet creature, who loved cake, harmonica music, and Christmas, and apart from being clumsy and slow, had no fault in the world other than he was slightly deaf, and liked to listen to the television turned up a little too loud.

Farish, jaw clenched, nodded at Danny and did not look up. He was good and wired himself. His brown jumpsuit (a United Parcel uniform, with a hole in the chest where the label was cut off) was unzipped nearly to the waist, exposing a thatch of black chest hair. Winter or summer, Farish wore no clothing but these brown uniform jumpsuits, except if he had to go to court or to a funeral. He bought them second hand by the dozen from the Parcel Service. Years before, Farish had actually been employed by the Post Office, though not in a parcel truck but as a mail carrier. According to him, there existed no smoother racket for casing affluent neighborhoods, knowing who was out of town, who left their windows unlocked and who left the papers to pile up every weekend and who had a dog who was likely to complicate things. It was this angle which cost Farish his job as a carrier and might have sent him to Leavenworth had the district attorney been able to prove that Farish had committed any of the burglaries while on duty.

Whenever anybody at the Black Door Tavern teased Farish about his UPS attire or inquired why he wore it, Farish always replied, tersely, that he used to be with the Post Office. But this was no reason: Farish was eaten up with hatred for the Federal Government, and for the Post Office most of all. Danny suspected that the real reason Farish liked the jumpsuits was that he had got used to wearing a similar garment while in the mental hospital (another story), but this wasn’t the sort of thing about which Danny or anyone else felt comfortable speaking to Farish.

He was about to head over to the big trailer when Farish pulled the back of his lawn chair into an upright position and snapped the pocketknife shut. His knee was jiggling to beat the band. Farish had a bad eye—white and milked-over—and even after all these years it still made Danny uneasy when Farish turned it on him suddenly, as he now did.

“Gum and Eugene just had a little a set-to in there over the television,” he said. Gum was their grandmother—their father’s mother. “Eugene don’t think Gum ort to watch her people.”