The Little Friend Page 8

  Hely and Harriet craned to look. It was a picture of Allison, a studio portrait taken at school the autumn before, smiling up at them from the raw dirt. She had on a pink sweater with a lace collar, and pink barrettes in her hair.

  Sobbing, Allison scooped a double handful of earth and threw it in the grave, over her own smiling face. The dirt rattled as it hit the photograph. For a moment the pink of Allison’s sweater was still visible, her timid eyes still peering hopefully through a blear of soil; another black handful rattled over them and they were gone.

  “Come on,” she cried impatiently, as the two younger children stared down into the hole and then at her, bewildered. “Come on, Harriet. Help me.”

  “That’s it,” shrieked Mrs. Fountain. “I’m going back in the house. I’m going to go get right on the telephone with your mothers. Look. I’m going back inside now. You children are all going to be mighty sorry.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  ——

  The Blackbird

  A few nights later, around ten o’clock, while her mother and sister were upstairs sleeping, Harriet gently turned the key in the lock of the gun cabinet. The guns were old and in bad repair, inherited by Harriet’s father from an uncle who’d collected them. Of this mysterious Uncle Clyde, Harriet knew nothing but his profession (engineering), his temperament (“sour,” said Adelaide, making a face; she had been at high school with him) and his end (plane crash, off the Florida coast). Because he had been “lost at sea” (that was the phrase that everyone used), Harriet never thought of Uncle Clyde as dead, exactly. Whenever his name was mentioned, she had a vague impression of a bearded tatterdemalion like Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, leading a lonely existence on some bleak, salty islet, his pants in rags and his wristwatch corroded from the seawater.

  Carefully, with a palm on the glass so it wouldn’t rattle, Harriet worked the sticky old door of the gun cabinet. With a shiver, it popped open. On the top shelf was a case of antique pistols—tiny dueling sets, trimmed in silver and mother of pearl, freakish little Derringers scarcely four inches long. Below, ranked in chronological order and leaning to the left, stood the larger arms: Kentucky flintlocks; a grim, ten-pound Plains rifle; a rust-locked muzzle loader said to have been in the Civil War. Of the newer guns, the most impressive was a Winchester shotgun from World War I.

  Harriet’s father, the owner of this collection, was a remote and unpleasant figure. People whispered about the fact that he lived in Nashville, since he and Harriet’s mother were still married to each other. Though Harriet had no idea how this arrangement had come to be (except, vaguely, that it had to do with her father’s work), it was quite unremarkable to her, since he had lived away from home as long as Harriet could remember. A check arrived every month for the household expenses; he came home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and stopped by for several days in the fall on the way down to his hunting camp in the Delta. To Harriet, this arrangement seemed perfectly reasonable, suiting as it did the personalities of those involved: her mother, who had very little energy (staying in bed most of the day), and her father, who had too much energy, and the wrong kind. He ate fast, talked fast, and—unless he had a drink in his hand—was incapable of sitting still. In public, he was always kidding around, and people thought he was a hoot, but his unpredictable humors were not always so amusing in private, and his impulsive habit of saying the first thing that came into his head often hurt his family’s feelings.

  Worse: Harriet’s father was always right, even when he was wrong. Everything was a test of wills. Though he was quite inflexible in his opinions, he loved to argue; and even in good moods (settled back in his chair with a cocktail, half-watching the television) he liked to needle Harriet, and tease her, just to show her who was boss. “Smart girls aren’t popular,” he’d say. Or: “No point of educating you when you’re just going to grow up and get married.” And because Harriet was incensed by this sort of talk—which he considered the plain, good-natured truth—and refused to take it, there was trouble. Sometimes he whipped Harriet with a belt—for talking back—while Allison looked on glassy-eyed and their mother cowered in the bedroom. Other times, as punishment, he assigned Harriet tremendous, un-doable chores (mowing the yard with the push mower, cleaning the whole attic by herself) which Harriet simply planted her feet and refused to do. “Go on!” Ida Rhew would say, poking her head through the attic door with a worried look, after her father had stormed downstairs. “You better get going or he going to tear you up some more when he gets back!”

  But Harriet—glowering amidst stacks of papers and old magazines—would not budge. He could whip her all he wanted; never mind. It was the principle of the thing. And often Ida was so worried for Harriet that she would abandon her own work, and go upstairs and do the thing herself.

  Because her father was so quarrelsome and disruptive, and so dissatisfied with everything, it seemed right to Harriet that he did not live at home. Never had she been struck by the strangeness of the arrangement, or realized that people thought it odd, until one afternoon in fourth grade when her school bus broke down on a country road. Harriet was seated next to a talkative younger girl named Christy Dooley, who had big front teeth and wore a white crochet poncho to school every day. She was the daughter of a policeman, though nothing in her white-mouse appearance or twitchy manner suggested this. Between sips of leftover vegetable soup from her Thermos bottle, she chattered without encouragement, repeating various secrets (about teachers, about other people’s parents) that she had heard at home. Harriet stared bleakly out the window, waiting for somebody to come and fix the bus, until she became aware, with a jolt, that Christy was talking about her own mother and father.

  Harriet turned to stare. Oh, everybody knew, Christy whispered, huddling close under her poncho (she always wanted to sit closer than was comfortable). Didn’t Harriet wonder why her dad lived out of town?

  “He works there,” said Harriet. Never before had this explanation struck her as inadequate, but Christy gave a satisfied and very adult little sigh, and then told Harriet the real story. The gist of it was this: Harriet’s father wanted to move after Robin died—to a new town, someplace he could “start over.” Christy’s eyes widened with a confidential spookiness. “But she wouldn’t go.” It was as if Christy was talking not about Harriet’s own mother but some woman in a ghost story. “She said she was going to stay forever.”

  Harriet—who was annoyed to be sitting by Christy in the first place—slid away from her on the seat and looked out the window.

  “Are you mad?” said Christy slyly.

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “Your breath smells like soup.”

  In the years since, Harriet had heard other remarks, from both children and adults, to the effect that there was something “creepy” about her household but these struck Harriet as ridiculous. Her family’s living arrangements were practical—even ingenious. Her father’s job in Nashville paid the bills, but no one enjoyed his holiday visits; he did not love Edie and the aunts; and everybody was disturbed by the hard, infuriating way he badgered Harriet’s mother. Last year he had nagged her to go with him to some Christmas party until at last (rubbing her shoulders through the thin sleeves of her night-gown) she blinked and said Fine. But when it was time to get ready, she sat at her dressing table in her bathrobe and stared at her reflection without putting on lipstick or taking the pins out of her hair. When Allison tiptoed upstairs to check on her, she said she had a migraine. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and ran the taps until Harriet’s father (red in the face, trembling) pounded on the door with his fists. It had been a miserable Christmas Eve, Harriet and Allison sitting rigidly in the living room by the tree, as the Christmas carols (alternately sonorous and jubilant) swelled powerfully from the stereo, not quite powerful enough to cover the shouting upstairs. It was a relief when Harriet’s father clumped out to his car with his suitcase and his shopping bag of presents early on C
hristmas afternoon and drove away again, up to Tennessee, and the household settled back with a sigh into its own forgetful doze.

  Harriet’s house was a sleepy house—for everybody but Harriet, who was wakeful and alert by nature. When she was the only person awake in the dark, silent house, as she often was, the boredoms that settled over her were so dense, so glassy and confused, that sometimes she was unable to do anything but gape at a window or a wall, as if doped. Her mother stayed in her bedroom pretty much all the time; and after Allison went to bed—early, most nights, around nine—Harriet was on her own: drinking milk straight out of the carton, wandering through the house in her stocking feet, through the stacks of newspaper which were piled high in nearly every room. Harriet’s mother, since Robin’s death, had developed an odd inability to throw anything away and the junk which packed the attic and cellar had now begun to creep into the rest of the house.

  Sometimes Harriet enjoyed being up by herself. She switched on lights, turned on the television or the record player, called Dial-a-Prayer or made prank calls to the neighbors. She ate what she wanted out of the refrigerator; she clambered up on high shelves, and poked through cabinets she wasn’t supposed to open; she jumped on the sofa till the springs squealed, and pulled the cushions on the ground and built forts and life rafts on the floor. Sometimes she pulled her mother’s old college clothes out of the closet (pastel sweaters with moth holes, elbow gloves in every color, an aqua prom dress that—on Harriet—dragged a foot upon the ground). This was dangerous; Harriet’s mother was quite particular about the clothes, though she never wore them; but Harriet was careful about putting everything back the way she’d found it and if her mother ever noticed anything amiss, she never mentioned it.

  None of the guns were loaded. The only ammunition in the case was a box of twelve-gauge shells. Harriet, who had only the haziest idea of the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, shook the shells out of the box and arranged them in starburst patterns on the carpet. One of the big guns had a bayonet attachment, which was interesting, but her favorite was the Winchester with the telescopic scope. She switched off the overhead light and propped the barrel on the sill of the living-room window and looked down the scope with narrowed eyes—at parked cars, pavement sparkling under the high lamps and sprinklers hissing on lush empty lawns. The fort was under attack; she was guarding her post and all their lives depended on it.

  Wind chimes tinkled on Mrs. Fountain’s front porch. Across the overgrown lawn, along the oily barrel of the gun, she could see the tree her brother had died in. A breeze whispered in the glossy leaves, jingling the liquid shadows on the grass.

  Sometimes, when Harriet was prowling the gloomy house late at night, she felt her dead brother draw close to her side, his silence friendly, confidential. She heard his footfall in the creakings of the floorboards, sensed him in the playing of a blown curtain or the arc of a door that swung open by itself. Occasionally, he was mischievous—hiding her book or her candy bar, replacing it on the seat of her chair when she wasn’t looking. Harriet enjoyed his company. Somehow she imagined that wherever he lived it was always night, and that when she wasn’t there, he was all by himself: fidgeting, lonely, swinging his legs, in a waiting room with ticking clocks.

  Here I am, she said to herself, on guard. For she felt the glow of his presence quite warmly when she sat at the window with the gun. Twelve years had passed since her brother’s death and much had altered or fallen away but the view from the living-room window had not changed. Even the tree was still there.

  Harriet’s arms ached. Carefully, she laid the rifle down at the foot of her armchair and went into the kitchen for a Popsicle. Back in the living room, she ate it by the window, in the dark, without hurrying. Then she put the stick on top of a stack of newspaper and resumed her position with the rifle. The Popsicles were grape, her favorite. There were more in the freezer, and nobody to stop her from eating the whole box, but it was hard to eat Popsicles and keep the rifle propped up at the same time.

  She moved the gun across the dark sky, following some night bird across the moonlit clouds. A car door slammed. Quickly, she swivelled toward the sound and zeroed in on Mrs. Fountain—returning late from choir practice, tottering up her front walk in the haze of the street lamps—oblivious, entirely unaware that one sparkly earring shone dead in the center of Harriet’s crosshairs. Porch lights off, kitchen lights on. Mrs. Fountain’s slope-shouldered, goat-faced silhouette gliding past the window shade, like a puppet in a shadow play.

  “Bang,” Harriet whispered. One twitch, one squeeze of the knuckle, that’s all it took and Mrs. Fountain would be where she belonged—down with the Devil. She would fit right in—horns curling out of her permanent and an arrow-tipped tail poking from the back of her dress. Ramming that grocery cart around through Hell.

  A car was approaching. She swung from Mrs. Fountain and followed it, magnified and bouncing, in her scope—teenagers, windows down, going too fast—until the red tail-lights swept around the corner and vanished.

  On her way back to Mrs. Fountain, she saw a lighted window blur over the lens and then, to her delight, she was smack in the Godfreys’ dining room, across the road. The Godfreys were rosy and cheerful and well into their forties—childless, sociable, active in the Baptist church—and to see the two of them up and moving around was comforting. Mrs. Godfrey stood scooping yellow ice cream from a carton into a dish. Mr. Godfrey sat at the table with his back to Harriet. The two of them were alone, lace tablecloth, pink-shaded lamp burning low in the corner; everything sharp and intimate, down to the grape-leaf patterns on the Godfreys’ ice-cream dishes and the bobby pins in Mrs. Godfrey’s hair.

  The Winchester was a pair of binoculars, a camera, a way of seeing things. She laid her cheek against the stock, which was smooth and very cool.

  Robin, she was certain, watched over her on these nights much the way she watched over him. She could feel him breathing at her back: quiet, sociable, glad for her company. But the creaks and shadows of the dark house still frightened her sometimes.

  Restless, her arms aching from the gun’s weight, Harriet shifted in the armchair. Occasionally, on nights like this, she smoked her mother’s cigarettes. On the worst nights she was unable even to read, and the letters of her books—even Treasure Island, Kidnapped, books she loved and never tired of—changed into some kind of savage Chinese: illegible, vicious, an itch she couldn’t scratch. Once, out of sheer frustration, she had smashed a china figurine of a kitten belonging to her mother: then, panic-stricken (for her mother was fond of the figurine, and had had it since she was a little girl), she wrapped the fragments in a paper towel and shoved them inside an empty cereal box and put the cereal box at the very bottom of the garbage can. That had been two years ago. As far as Harriet knew, her mother still was not aware that the kitten was missing from the china cabinet. But whenever Harriet thought of this, especially when she was tempted to do something of the sort again (break a teacup, rip up a tablecloth with scissors), it gave her a heady, sick feeling. She could set the house on fire if she wanted to, and no one would be there to stop her.

  A rusty cloud had drifted halfway over the moon. She swept the rifle back to the Godfreys’ window. Now Mrs. Godfrey had some ice cream too. She was talking to her husband, between lazy spoonfuls, with a rather cool, annoyed expression on her face. Mr. Godfrey had both elbows propped on the lace tablecloth. All she could see was the back of his bald head—which was dead in the center of the crosshairs—and she couldn’t tell if he was answering Mrs. Godfrey or even if he was listening.

  Suddenly, he got up, made a stretching movement, and walked out. Mrs. Godfrey, alone now at the table, said something. As she ate the last spoonful of her ice cream, she turned her head slightly, as if listening to Mr. Godfrey’s response in the other room, and then stood and walked to the door, smoothing her skirt with the back of her hand. Then the picture went black. Theirs had been the only light on the street. Mrs. Fountain’s had gone out long
ago.

  Harriet glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was past eleven, and she had to be up at nine in the morning for Sunday school.

  There was nothing to be scared of—the lamps shone bright on the calm street—but the house was very still and Harriet was a little edgy. Even though he had come to her house in broad daylight, she was most afraid of the killer at night. When he returned in her nightmares it was always dark: a cold breeze blowing through the house, curtains fluttering, and all the windows and doors ajar as she ran to and fro slamming the sashes, fumbling with the locks, her mother sitting unconcerned on the sofa with cold-cream on her face, never moving a finger to help, and never enough time before the glass shattered and the gloved hand reached through to turn the knob. Sometimes Harriet saw the door opening but she always woke up before she saw a face.

  On hands and knees, she gathered the shells. Neatly, she re-stacked them in their box; wiped the gun clean of fingerprints and replaced it, then locked the cabinet and dropped the key back in the red leather box in her father’s desk where it belonged: along with the nail clippers, some mis-matched cufflinks and a pair of dice in a green suede pouch, and a stack of faded matchbooks from nightclubs in Memphis and Miami and New Orleans.

  Upstairs, she undressed quietly without turning on the lamp. In the next bed, Allison lay face down in a dead man’s float. The moonlight shifted over the bedspread in dappled patterns which changed and played when the wind stirred through the trees. A jumble of stuffed animals were packed in the bed around her as if on a life raft—a patchwork elephant, a piebald dog with a button eye missing, a woolly black lambkin and a kangaroo of purple velveteen and a whole family of teddy bears—and their innocent shapes crowded around her head in sweet, shadowed grotesquerie, as if they were creatures in Allison’s dreams.