The Little Friend

“I’m good for it. And I’m good for anotherun, too,” snapped Farish, as the balls fell from the undercarriage and he began to rack them up again. “Winner’s break.”

Odum shrugged, and squinted down the cue—nose wrinkled, upper lip baring his rabbity front teeth—then smashed in a break that not only left the cue ball still spinning where it had hit the rack of balls, but shot the eight ball in a corner pocket.

The men who worked on the shrimping boat hooted and clapped. They looked like guys who felt they were on to a good thing. Catfish lolloped over to them jauntily—knees loose, chin high—to confer over the finances.

“That’s the fastest money you ever lost!” Danny called across the room.

Hely became aware that Lasharon Odum was standing right behind him—not because she said anything but because the baby had a bad cold and breathed with wet, repellent wheezes. “Get away from me,” he muttered, edging a little to the side.

Shyly, she moved after him, obtruding into the corner of his vision. “Let me borry a quarter.”

The wheedling hopelessness of her voice revolted him even more than the baby’s snotty breathing. Pointedly, he turned his back. Farish—to the rolled eyes of the men from the shrimping boat—was reaching again in the undercarriage.

Odum grabbed his jaw between both hands, and cracked his neck to the left and then right: snick. “Still aint had enough?”

“Oh, all right now,” Catfish crooned, along to the jukebox, popping his fingers: “Baby what I say.”

“What’s all this trash on the music box?” snarled Farish, dropping the balls in an angry clatter.

Catfish, teasingly, undulated his meager hips. “Loosen up, Farish.”

“Go on,” said Hely to Lasharon, who had sidled up again, nearly touching him. “I don’t want your booger breath.”

He was so sickened by her nearness that he said this louder than he meant to; and he froze when Odum’s unfocused gaze swung vaguely in their direction. Farish looked up, too; and his good eye pinned Hely like a thrown knife.

Odum took a deep, drunken breath, and put down the pool cue. “Yall see that little old gal standing yonder?” he said melodramatically to Farish and company. “It’s against me to tell you this, but that little gal does the work of a grown woman.”

Catfish and Danny Ratliff exchanged a quick glance of alarm.

“I ask you. Where would you find a sweet little old girl like this that looks after the house, and looks after the little ones, and puts food on the table and totes and fetches and goes without so’s her poor old Diddy can have?”

I wouldn’t want any food she put on the table, thought Hely.

“Younguns today all think they have to have,” Farish said flatly. “They would do just as well to be like yourn and go without.”

“When me and my brothers and sisters were coming up, we didn’t even have us an icebox,” said Odum in a quaver. He was getting good and wound-up. “All the summer long I had to chop cotton out in the fields—”

“I’ve chopped my share of cotton, too.”

“—and my mama, I’m telling you, she worked those fields like a nigger man. Me—I couldn’t go to school! Mama and Daddy, they needed me at home! Naw, we never had a thing but if I had the money it’s nothin in the world I wouldn’t buy those little ones over there. They know old Diddy’d rather give it to them than have it himself. Hmm? Don’t yall know that?”

His unfocused eyes wavered from Lasharon and the baby to Hely himself. “I said, Don’t Yall Know That,” he repeated, in an amplified and less pleasant tone.

He was staring straight at Hely. Hely was shocked: Geez, he thought, is the old coot so drunk he don’t know I’m not his kid? He stared back with his mouth open.

“Yes, Diddy,” Lasharon whispered, just audible.

Odum’s red-rimmed eyes softened, and moved unsteadily to his daughter; and the moist, self-pitying tremor of his lip made Hely more uneasy than anything else he had seen that afternoon.

“Hear that? Hear that little old gal? Come here and hug old Diddy around the neck,” he said, dashing away a tear with his knuckle.

Lasharon hoisted the baby on her bony hip and went slowly to him. Something about the possessiveness of Odum’s embrace, and the vacant way she accepted it—like a miserable old dog, accepting the touch of its owner—disgusted Hely but scared him a bit, too.

“This little gal loves her old Diddy, don’t she?” He pressed her to his shirt front with tears in his eyes.

Hely was gratified to see, by the way they rolled their eyes at each other, that Catfish and Danny Ratliff were just as disgusted by Odum’s slop as he was.

“She knows her Diddy’s a pore man! She don’t have to have a bunch of old toys and candy and fancy clothes!”

“And why should she?” said Farish abruptly.

Odum—intoxicated by the sound of his own voice—turned foggily and puckered his brow.