The Little Friend (12 page)

He bumped her with his shoulder. “You know something funny? You should have wrote
ass
. Ha!” Hely was always thinking of tricks for other people to pull; he didn’t have the nerve to pull them himself. “In really tiny letters, you know, so he could barely read it.”

“The black spot is in
Treasure Island,
” said Harriet. “That’s what the pirates gave you when they were coming to kill you, just a blank piece of paper with a black spot on it.”

————

Once home, Harriet went into her bedroom and dug out a notebook she kept hidden beneath the underwear in her bureau drawer. Then she lay down on the other side of Allison’s twin bed where no one could see her from the doorway, though she was unlikely to be disturbed. Allison and her mother were at church. Harriet was supposed to have met them there—along with Edie and her aunts—but her mother would not notice or much care that she hadn’t shown up.

Harriet did not like Mr. Dial, but nonetheless the exercise in the Sunday school room had got her thinking. Put on the spot, she had been unable to think what her goals were—for the day, for the summer, for the rest of her life—and this disturbed her, because for some reason the question was merged and entangled in her mind with the recent unpleasantness of the dead cat in the toolshed.

Harriet liked to set herself difficult physical tests (once, she’d tried to see how long she could subsist on eighteen peanuts a day, the Confederate ration at the end of the war), but mostly these involved suffering to no practical point. The only real goal she was able to think of—and it was a poor one—was to win first prize in the library’s Summer Reading Contest. Harriet had entered it every year since she was six—and won it twice—but now that she was older and reading real novels, she didn’t stand a chance. Last year, the prize had gone to a tall skinny black girl who came two and three times a day to check out immense stacks of baby books like Dr. Seuss and Curious George and
Make Way for Ducklings
. Harriet had stood behind her in line, with her
Ivanhoe
and her Algernon Blackwood and her
Myths and Legends of Japan
, fuming. Even Mrs. Fawcett, the librarian, had raised an eyebrow in a way that made it perfectly plain how
she
felt about it.

Harriet opened the notebook. Hely had given it to her. It was just a plain, spiral-bound notebook with a cartoon of a dune buggy on the cover which Harriet did not much care for, but she liked it because the lined paper was bright orange. Hely had tried to use it for his geography notebook in Mrs. Criswell’s class two years before, but had been told that neither the groovy dune buggy nor the orange paper was suitable
for school. On the first page of the notebook (in felt-tip pen, also pronounced unsuitable, and confiscated by Mrs. Criswell) was half a page of sporadic notations by Hely.

These Harriet examined with affectionate contempt. Several times she had considered tearing the page out, but over time it had come to seem part of the notebook’s personality, best left undisturbed.

She turned the page, to where her own notations, in pencil, began. These were mostly lists. Lists of books she’d read, and books she wanted to read, and of poems she knew by heart; lists of presents she’d got for birthday and Christmas, and who they were from; lists of places she’d visited (nowhere very exotic) and lists of places she wanted to go (Easter Island, Antarctica, Machu Picchu, Nepal). There were lists of people she admired: Napoleon and Nathan Bedford Forrest, Genghis Khan and Lawrence of Arabia, Alexander the Great and Harry Houdini and Joan of Arc. There was a whole page of complaints about sharing a room with Allison. There were lists of vocabulary words—Latin and English—and an inept Cyrillic alphabet which she’d done her laborious best to copy from the encyclopedia one afternoon when she had nothing else to do. There were also several letters Harriet had written, and never sent, to various people she did not like. There was one to Mrs. Fountain, and another to her detested fifth-grade
teacher, Mrs. Beebe. There was also one to Mr. Dial. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, she’d written it in a labored, curlicued hand that looked like Annabel Arnold’s.

At the bottom Harriet had pasted a tiny picture of Annabel Arnold that she’d cut out of the newspaper next to an enormous, jaundiced head of Mr. Dial she’d found in the Yellow Pages—his pop-eyes goggling with enthusiasm and his head aburst in a corona of cartoon stars above which a jangle of frantic black letters screamed:

WHERE QUALITY COMES FIRST!
LOW DOWN PAYMENT!

Looking at these letters now gave Harriet the idea of actually sending Mr. Dial a threatening note, in misspelled baby printing, purporting to be from Curtis Ratliff. But this, she decided, tapping her pencil against her teeth, would be unfair to Curtis. She wished Curtis no harm, especially after his attack on Mr. Dial.

She turned the page, and on a fresh sheet of orange paper, wrote:

Goals for Summer
Harriet Cleve Dufresnes

Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to
do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.

She turned back several pages, to the list of people she admired: a preponderance of generals, soldiers, explorers, men of action all. Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called
What Shall I Be?
It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, “career,” marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was a master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of
escape
. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it?
He wasn’t afraid
. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the river-bed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret. He’d immersed himself in daily tubs of ice, swum immense distances underwater, practiced holding his breath until he could hold it for three minutes. And while the tubs of ice were impossible, the swimming and the breath-holding—this she could do.

She heard her mother and sister coming in the front door,
her sister’s plaintive voice, unintelligible. Quickly she hid the notebook and ran downstairs.

————

“Don’t say Hate, honey,” said Charlotte absent-mindedly to Allison. The three of them were sitting around the dining-room table in their Sunday dresses, eating the chicken that Ida had left for their lunch.

Allison, with her hair falling in her face, sat staring at her plate, chewing a slice of lemon from her iced tea. Though she’d sawed apart her food energetically enough, and shoved it back and forth across her plate, and piled it up in unappetizing heaps (a habit of hers that drove Edie crazy), she’d eaten very little of it.

“I don’t see why Allison can’t say Hate, Mother,” said Harriet. “Hate is a perfectly good word.”

“It’s not polite.”

“It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page.”

“Well, don’t you say it.”

“All right, then,” Allison burst out. “I
detest
Mrs. Biggs.” Mrs. Biggs was Allison’s Sunday school teacher.

Charlotte, through her tranquilized fog, was mildly surprised. Allison was usually such a timid, gentle girl. Such crazy talk about hating people was more the kind of thing you expected from Harriet.

“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”

Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”

“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”

“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”

Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”

Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”

“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have yall been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”

When neither child answered, she said: “Now, I want you to be sure and remember to go down and do that first thing Monday morning. And a tetanus shot, too. Swimming in cow ponds and running around barefoot all summer long …”

She trailed off, pleasantly, then resumed eating. Harriet and Allison were silent. Neither of them had ever swum in a cow pond in her life. Their mother was thinking of her own childhood and muddling it up with the present—something she did more and more frequently these days—and neither of the girls knew quite how to respond when this happened.

————

Still in her daisy-patterned Sunday dress, which she’d had on since the morning, Harriet padded downstairs in the dark, her white ankle socks gray-soled with dirt. It was nine-thirty at night, and both her mother and Allison had been in bed for half an hour.

Allison’s somnolence—unlike her mother’s—was natural and not narcotic. She was happiest when she was asleep, with her head beneath her pillow; she longed for her bed all day, and flung herself into it as soon as it was decently dark. But Edie, who seldom slept more than six hours a night, was annoyed by all the lounging around in bed that went on at Harriet’s house. Charlotte had been on some kind of tranquilizers since Robin died, and there was no talking to her about it, but Allison was a different matter. Hypothesizing mononucleosis or encephalitis she had several times forced Allison to go to the doctor for blood tests, which came back negative. “She’s a growing teenager,” the doctor told Edie. “Teenagers need a lot of rest.”

“But sixteen hours!” said Edie, exasperated. She was well aware that the doctor didn’t believe her. She also suspected—correctly—that he was the one prescribing whatever dope that kept Charlotte so groggy all the time.

“Don’t matter if it’s seventeen,” said Dr. Breedlove, sitting with one white-coated haunch on his littered desk and regarding Edie with a fishy, clinical stare. “That gal wants to sleep, you let her do it.”

“But how can you
stand
to stay asleep so much?” Harriet had once asked her sister curiously.

Allison shrugged.

“Isn’t it boring?”

“I only get bored when I’m awake.”

Harriet knew how that went. Her own boredoms were so numbing that sometimes she was sick and woozy with them, like she’d been chloroformed. Now, however, she was excited by the prospect of the solitary hours ahead, and in the living room made not for the gun cabinet but for her father’s desk.

There were lots of interesting things in her father’s desk drawer (gold coins, birth certificates, things she wasn’t supposed to fool with). After rummaging through some photographs and boxes of canceled checks she finally found what she was looking for: a black-plastic stopwatch—giveaway from a finance company—with a red digital display.

She sat down on the sofa, and gulped down a deep breath as she clicked the watch. Houdini had trained himself to hold his breath for minutes at a time: a trick that made many of his greatest tricks possible. Now she would see how long she could hold her own breath without passing out.

Ten. Twenty seconds. Thirty. She became conscious of the blood thumping hard and harder in her temples.

Thirty-five. Forty. Harriet’s eyes watered, her heartbeat throbbed in her eyeballs. At forty-five, a spasm fluttered in her lungs and she was forced to pinch her nose shut and clamp a hand over her mouth.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Her eyes were streaming, she couldn’t sit still, she got up and paced in a tiny frantic circle by the sofa, fanning with her free hand at the air and her eyes skittering desperately from object to object—desk, door, Sunday shoes pigeontoed on the dove-gray carpet—as the room jumped with her thunderous heartbeat and the wall of newspapers chattered as if in the pre-trembling of an earthquake.