The Little Friend (41 page)

“Be straight with me, Farsh. You done got me into something and I know, I
know,
” he said, over Farish’s objections, “that it’s got to do with those narcotics. That’s why that boy is here from Kentucky. Don’t ask me how I know it, I just do. I wisht you’d just go on and tell me why you invited him down here to stay.”

Farish laughed. “I didn’t
invite
him. Dolphus told me he was driving over to that homecoming—”

“In East Tennessee.”

“I know, I know, but he’d never been down thisaway before. I thought you and the boy might like to hook up, since you’re just getting started and the boy’s got a big congregation of his own, and swear to God that’s all I know about it.”

Long silence on the line. Something in the way that Farish was breathing made Eugene feel the smirk on Farish’s face, as plainly as if he saw it.

“But you’re right about one thing,” said Farish, tolerantly, “no telling what that Loyal is into. And I’ll apologize to you for that. Old Dolphus sho had his hand in every fire you care to mention.”

“
Loyal’s
not the one behind this. This is something you and Danny and Dolphus have cooked up yourselves.”

“You sound awful,” said Farish. “Say you got one of them headaches?”

“I feel pretty low.”

“Listen, if I was you, I’d go lay down. Are you and him preaching tonight?”

“Why?” said Eugene suspiciously. After the close shave with Dial—it had been only luck that they’d moved the snakes down to the truck before he turned up—Loyal had apologized for all the trouble he’d caused (“I kindly didn’t understand the situation, you living here in town”) and volunteered to drive the snakes to an undisclosed location.

“We’ll come to hear you,” Farish said expansively. “Me and Danny.”

Eugene passed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t want you to.”

“When is Loyal driving back home?”

“Tomorrow. Look, I
know
you’re up to something, Farsh. I don’t want you to get this boy into trouble.”

“What you so worrit about him for?”

“I don’t know,” said Eugene, and he didn’t.

“Well, then, we’ll see you tonight,” Farish said, and he hung up before Eugene could say a word.

————

“What goes on up there, sweetie, I have no idea,” Pemberton was saying. “But I can tell you who rents the place—Danny and Curtis Ratliff’s big brother. He’s a preacher.”

At this, Hely turned to stare at Harriet with amazement.

“He’s a real nut,” said Pem. “Something wrong with his face. He stands out on the highway yelling and shaking his Bible at cars.”

“Is that the guy who walked up and knocked on the window when Daddy was stopped at the intersection?” said Hely. “The one with the weird face?”

“Maybe he’s not crazy, maybe it’s just an act,” Pem said. “Most of these hillbilly preachers that yell, and pass out, and jump up on their chairs and run up and down the aisles—they’re just showing off. It’s all a big fake, that holy-roller stuff.”

“Harriet—Harriet, you know what?” Hely said, unbearably
excited, twisting around in his seat. “I know who this guy is. He preaches on the square every Saturday. He’s got a little black box with a microphone leading to it, and—” He turned back to his brother. “Do you think he handles snakes? Harriet, tell him what you saw over there.”

Harriet pinched him.

“Hmn? Snakes? If he handles snakes,” said Pemberton, “he’s a bigger nut than I thought.”

“Maybe they’re tame,” Hely said.

“Idiot. You can’t tame a
snake.
”

————

It had been a mistake telling Farish about the car. Eugene was sorry he’d ever said anything about it. Farish had called back half an hour later, just as Eugene had managed to doze off—and then again, ten minutes after that. “Have you seen any suspicious characters in uniform in the street outside your house? Like jogging suits, or janitor outfits?”

“No.”

“Anybody been tailing you?”

“Look here, Farsh, I’m trying to get some rest.”

“This is how you tell if you’ve got a tail on you. Run a red light or drive the wrong way down a one way street and see if the person follows. Or—Tell you what. Maybe I should just come on down there myself and take a look around.”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that Eugene was able to dissuade Farish from coming down to the Mission for what he called “an inspection.” He settled down for a nap in the beanbag chair. Finally—just as he’d managed to slip into a dazed and fitful sleep—he became aware that Loyal was standing over him.

“Loyle?” he said, floundering.

“I’ve got some bad news,” said Loyal.

“Well, what is it?”

“There was a key broke off in the lock. I couldn’t get in.”

Eugene sat quietly, trying to make some sense of this. He was still half asleep; in his dream, there’d been lost keys, car keys. He’d been stranded at an ugly bar with a loud jukebox
somewhere out on a dirt road at night, with no way to get home.

Loyal said: “I’d been told I could leave them snakes over at a hunting cabin in Webster County. But there was a key broke off in the lock and I couldn’t get in.”

“Ah.” Eugene shook his head, to clear it, and looked around the room. “So that means …”

“The snakes are downstairs in my truck.”

There was a long silence.

“Loyle, I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve had a migraine headache.”

“I’ll bring em in. You don’t have to help. I can get em up here by myself.”

Eugene rubbed his temples.

“Listen, I’m in a tight spot. It’s cruel to leave em out there roasting in this heat.”

“Right,” said Eugene listlessly. But he wasn’t worried about the snakes’ welfare; he was worried about leaving them out in the open to be discovered—by Mr. Dial, by the mysterious snooper in the convertible, who knew. And suddenly it came to him that there had been a snake too in his dream, a dangerous snake crawling loose among people somewhere.

“Okay,” he said to Loyal with a sigh, “bring em in.”

“I promise they’ll be out of here by tomorrow morning. This hasn’t worked out very well for you, I know,” said Loyal. His intense blue gaze was frankly sympathetic. “Having me here.”

“It aint your fault.”

Loyal ran a hand through his hair. “I want you to know I’ve enjoyt your fellowship. If the Lord don’t call you to handle—well, He has His reasons. Sometimes He don’t call me to handle either.”

“I understand.” Eugene felt he should say something more, but he couldn’t marshal the right thoughts. And he was too ashamed to say what he felt: that his spirit was dry and empty, that he wasn’t naturally good, good in his mind and heart. That he was of a tainted blood, and a tainted lineage; that God looked down on him, and despised his gifts, as He had despised the gifts of Cain.

“Someday I’ll get called,” he said, with a brightness he did not feel. “The Lord’s just not ready for me yet.”

“There are other gifts of the Spirit,” said Loyal. “Prayer, preaching, prophecy, visions. Laying hands on the sick. Charity and works. Even amongst your own family—” he hesitated, discreetly. “There’s good to be done there.”

Wearily, Eugene looked up into the kind, candid eyes of his visitor.

“It aint about what you want,” said Loyal. “It’s about the perfect will of God.”

————

Harriet came in through the back door to find the kitchen floor wet, and the counter-tops wiped—but no Ida. The house was silent: no radio, no fan, no footsteps, only the monotone hum of the Frigidaire. Behind her, something scratched: Harriet jumped, and turned just in time to see a small gray lizard scrabbling up the screen of the open window behind her.

The smell of the pine cleaner that Ida used made her head ache in the heat. In the dining room, the massive china cabinet from Tribulation squatted amongst the hectic stacks of newspaper. Two oblong carving platters, leaning upright against the top shelf, gave it a wild-eyed expression; low and tense on its bowed legs, it slanted out from the wall on one side ever so slightly, like a musty old sabreur poised to leap out over the stacks of newspaper. Harriet ran an affectionate hand over it as she edged past; and the old cabinet seemed to pull its shoulders back and flatten itself, obligingly, against the wall to let her by.

She found Ida Rhew in the living room, sitting in her favorite chair, where she ate her lunch, or sewed buttons, or shelled peas while she watched the soap operas. The chair itself—plump, comforting, with worn tweed upholstery and lumpy stuffing—had come to resemble Ida in the way that a dog sometimes resembles its owner; and Harriet, when she couldn’t sleep at night, sometimes came downstairs and curled up in the chair with her cheek against the tweedy brown fabric, humming strange old sad songs to herself that nobody sang but Ida, songs from Harriet’s babyhood, songs as
old and mysterious as time itself, about ghosts, and broken hearts, and loved ones dead and gone forever:

At the foot of the chair, Allison lay on her stomach with her ankles crossed. She and Ida were looking out the window opposite. The sun was low and orange, and the television aerials bristled on Mrs. Fountain’s roof through a sizzle of afternoon glare.

How she loved Ida! The force of it made her dizzy. With no thought whatever of her sister, Harriet skittered over and threw her arms passionately around Ida’s neck.

Ida started. “Gracious,” she said, “where’d
you
come from?”

Harriet closed her eyes and rested with her face in the moist warmth of Ida’s neck, which smelled like cloves, and tea, and woodsmoke, and something else bitter-sweet and feathery but quite definite that was to Harriet the very aroma of love.

Ida reached around and disengaged Harriet’s arm. “You trying to strangle me?” she said. “Look there. We’s just watching that bird over on the roof.”

Without turning around, Allison said: “He comes every day.”

Harriet shaded her eyes with her hand. On the top of Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, pocketed neatly between a pair of bricks, stood a red-winged blackbird: spruce, soldierly in its bearing, with steady sharp eyes and a fierce slash of scarlet cutting like a military epaulet across each wing.

“He’s a funny one,” said Ida. “Here’s how he sound.” She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird’s call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry
tcch tchh tchh
of the cricket’s birr and up again in delirious, sobbing trills; not the clear, three-note whistle of the chickadee or even the blue jay’s rough cry, which was like a rusty gate creaking. This was an abrupt,
whirring, unfamiliar cry, a scream of warning—
congeree!—
which choked itself off on a subdued, fluting note.

Allison laughed aloud. “Look!” she said, rising up on her knees—for the bird had suddenly perked up, cocking its glossy fine head intelligently to the side. “He hears you!”

“Do it again!” said Harriet. Ida wouldn’t do bird-calls for them just any old time; you had to catch her in the right mood.

“Yes, Ida, please!”

But Ida only laughed and shook her head. “Yall remember, don’t you,” she said, “the old story how he got his red wing?”

“No,” said Harriet and Allison, at once, though they did. Now that they were older, Ida told stories less and less, and that was too bad because Ida’s stories were wild and strange and often very frightening: stories about drowned children, and ghosts in the woods, and the buzzard’s hunting party; about gold-toothed raccoons that bit babies in their cradles, and bewitched saucers of milk that turned to blood in the night.…

“Well, once upon a time, in the long-ago,” said Ida, “there was a ugly little hunchback man so mad at everything he decide to burn up the whole world. So he taken a torch in his hand, just as mad as he could be, and walked down to the big river where all the animals lived. Because back in the old days, there wasn’t a whole lot of little second-class rivers and creeks like you have now. There was only the one.”

Over on Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, the bird battered his wings—quick, businesslike—and flew away.

“Oh, look. There he goes. Aint want to hear my story.” With a heavy sigh, Ida glanced at the clock, and—to Harriet’s dismay—stretched and stood up. “And it’s time for me to be getting home.”

“Tell us anyway!”

“Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”

“Ida, don’t go!” cried Harriet as Ida Rhew broke the small, contented silence that followed by heaving a sigh and moving towards the door, slowly, as if her legs hurt her: poor Ida. “Please?”

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Ida, wryly, without turning around, hoisting her brown paper grocery bag underneath her arm, trudging heavily away. “Never you worry.”

————

“Listen, Danny,” said Farish, “Reese is leaving, so we’re going to have to go on down to the square and listen to Eugene’s—” abstractedly, he waved his hand in the air. “You know. That church bullshit.”

“Why?” said Danny, pushing back his chair, “why we got to do that?”

“The boy is leaving tomorrow.
Early
tomorrow, knowing him.”

“Well, come on, we’ll just run down to the Mission and put the stuff in his truck right now.”

“We can’t. He’s went off somewhere.”

“Damn.” Danny sat and thought for a moment. “Where you planning on hiding it? The engine?”

“I know places that the FBI could tear that truck apart and never find it.”

“How long’s it going to take you? … I said,
how long’s it going to take you,
” Danny repeated, when he saw a hostile light spark up suddenly in Farish’s eyes. “To hide the stuff.” Farish was slightly deaf in one ear, from the gunshot; and when he was drugged up and paranoid, sometimes he misunderstood things in a really twisted way, thought you’d told him to go fuck himself when really you’d asked him to shut the door or pass the salt.

“How long you say?” Farish held up five fingers.

“So, all right now. Here’s what we do. Why don’t we skip the preaching and go on over there to the Mission afterwards? I’ll keep em busy upstairs while you go out and put the package in the truck, wherever, and that’s all there is to it.”