The Little Friend (11 page)

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.

————

“Now, boys and girls,” said Mr. Dial. With one chilly, whale-gray eye, he surveyed Harriet and Hely’s Sunday School class, which—due to Mr. Dial’s enthusiasm for Camp Lake de Selby, and unwelcome advocacy of it among the parents of his pupils—was more than half empty. “I want yall to think for a minute about Moses. Why was Moses so focused on leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land?”

Silence. Mr. Dial’s appraising, salesman’s gaze roved over
the small group of uninterested faces. The church—not knowing what to do with the new school bus—had begun an outreach program, picking up underprivileged white children from out in the country and hauling them in to the prosperous cool halls of First Baptist for Sunday school. Dirty-faced, furtive, in clothing inappropriate for church, their downcast gazes strayed across the floor. Only gigantic Curtis Ratliff, who was retarded, and several years older than the rest of the children, goggled at Mr. Dial with open-mouthed appreciation.

“Or, let’s take another example,” said Mr. Dial. “What about John the Baptist? Why was he so determined to go forth in the wilderness and prepare the way for Christ’s arrival?”

There was no point attempting to reach these little Ratliffs and Scurlees and Odums, these youngsters with their rheumy eyes and pinched faces, their glue-sniffing mothers, their tattooed fornicating fathers. They were pitiful. Only the day before, Mr. Dial had been forced to send his son-in-law Ralph—whom he employed at Dial Chevrolet—down to some of the Scurlees to repossess a new Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was an old, old story: these sad dogs drove around in top-end automobiles chewing tobacco and swilling beer from the quart bottle, little caring that they were six months late on the payments. Another Scurlee and two Odums were due for a little visit from Ralph on Monday morning, though they didn’t know it.

Mr. Dial’s gaze lighted on Harriet—Miss Libby Cleve’s little niece—and her friend the Hull boy. They were Old Alexandria, from a nice neighborhood: their families belonged to the Country Club and made their car payments more or less on time.

“Hely,” said Mr. Dial.

Hely, wild-eyed, started convulsively from the Sunday school booklet he had been folding and refolding into tiny squares.

Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead—plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on—gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin. “Will you tell us why John the Baptist went forth crying in the wilderness?”

Hely writhed. “Because Jesus made him do it.”

“Not quite!”
said Mr. Dial, rubbing his hands. “Let’s all think about John’s situation for a minute. Wonder why he’s quoting the words of Isaiah the prophet in—” he ran his finger down the page—“verse 23 here?”

“He was following God’s plan?” said a little voice in the first row.

This came from Annabel Arnold, her gloved hands folded decorously over the zippered white Bible in her lap.

“
Very good!
” said Mr. Dial. Annabel came from a fine family—a fine
Christian
family, unlike such cocktail-drinking country-club families as the Hulls. Annabel, a champion baton twirler, had been instrumental in leading a little Jewish schoolmate to Christ. On Tuesday night, she was participating in a regional twirling competition on over at the high school, an event of which Dial Chevrolet was one of the main sponsors.

Mr. Dial, noticing that Harriet was about to speak, started in again hastily: “Did you hear what Annabel said, boys and girls?” he said brightly. “John the Baptist was working in accordiance with God’s Plan. And why was he doing that? Because,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head and fixing the class with his other eye, “because John the Baptist
had a goal.
”

Silence.

“Why is it so important to have goals in life, boys and girls?” As he waited for an answer, he squared and re-squared a small stack of paper on the podium, so that the jewel in his massive gold class ring caught and flashed red in the light. “Let’s think about this, shall we? Without goals, we aren’t motivated, are we? Without goals, we’re not financially prosperous! Without goals, we can’t achieve what Christ wants for us as Christians and members of the community!”

Harriet, he noticed with a bit of a start, was glaring at him rather aggressively.

“No sir!” Mr. Dial clapped his hands. “Because goals keep us focused on the things that matter! It’s important for all of us, no matter what age we are, to set goals for ourselves on a yearly and weekly and even hourly basis, or else we don’t
have the get-up-and-go to haul our bee-hinds from out in front the television and earn a living when we grow up.”

As he spoke, he began to pass out paper and colored pens. It did no harm to try to force a little work ethic down some of these little Ratliffs and Odums. They were certainly exposed to nothing of the sort at home, sitting around living off the government the way most of them did. The exercise he was about to propose to them was one Mr. Dial himself had participated in, and found extremely motivational, from a Christian Salesmanship conference he had attended in Lynchburg, Virginia, the summer before.

“Now I want us all to write down a goal we want to achieve this summer,” said Mr. Dial. He folded his hands into a church steeple and rested his forefingers upon his pursed lips. “It may be a project, a financial or a personal achievement … or it may be some way to help your family, your community, or your Lord. You don’t have to sign your name if you don’t want to—just draw a little symbol at the bottom that represents who you are.”

Several drowsy heads jerked up in panic.

“Nothing too complicated! For instance,” said Mr. Dial, screwing his hands together, “you might draw a football if you enjoy sports! Or a happy face if you enjoy making people smile!”

He sat down again; and, since the children were looking at their papers and not at him, his wide, small-toothed grin soured slightly at the edges. No, it didn’t matter how you tried with these little Ratliffs and Odums and so forth: it was useless to think you could teach them a thing. He looked out over the dull little faces, sucking listlessly on the ends of their pencils. In a few years, these little unfortunates would be keeping Mr. Dial and Ralph busy in the repossession business, just like their cousins and brothers were doing right now.

————

Hely leaned over and tried to see what Harriet had written on her paper. “Hey,” he whispered. For his personal symbol he had dutifully drawn a football, then sat staring for the better part of five minutes in dazed silence.

“No talking back there,” said Mr. Dial.

With an extravagant exhalation, he got up and collected the children’s work. “
Now
then,” he said, depositing the papers in a heap on the table. “Everybody file up and choose a paper—no,” he snapped as several children sprang up from their chairs, “not
run
, like monkeys. One at a time.”

Without enthusiasm, the children shuffled up to the table. Back at her seat, Harriet struggled to open the paper she’d chosen, which was folded to the excruciating tininess of a postage stamp.

From Hely, unexpectedly, a snort of laughter. He shoved the paper he’d chosen at Harriet. Beneath a cryptic drawing (a headless blotch on stick legs, part furniture, part insect, depicting what animal or object or even piece of machinery Harriet could not guess) the gnarled script tumbled rockily down the paper at a forty-five-degree angle.
My gol
, read Harriet, with difficulty,
is Didy tak me to Opry Land
.

“Come on now,” Mr. Dial was saying up front. “
Any
body start. It doesn’t matter who.”

Harriet managed to pick her paper open. The writing was Annabel Arnold’s: rotund and labored, with elaborate curlicues on the
g
’s and
y
’s.

my goal!
my goal is to say a little prayer every day that God
will send me a new person to help!!!!

Harriet stared at it balefully. At the bottom of the page, two capital
B
’s, back to back, formed an inane butterfly.

“Harriet?” said Mr. Dial suddenly. “Let’s start with you.”

With a flatness that she hoped would convey her contempt, Harriet read the curlicued vow aloud.

“Now, that’s an outstanding goal,” said Mr. Dial warmly. “It’s a call to prayer, but it’s a call to service, too. Here’s a young Christian who thinks about others in church and communi—Is something funny back there?”

The pallid snickerers fell silent.

Mr. Dial said, in amplified voice: “Harriet, what does this goal reveal about the person that wrote it?”

Hely tapped Harriet’s knee. To the side of his leg, he made an inconspicuous little thumbs-down gesture:
loser
.

“Is there a symbol?”

“Sir?” said Harriet.

“What symbol has this writer chosen to represent him- or herself?”

“An insect.”

“An
in
sect??”

“It’s a butterfly,” said Annabel faintly, but Mr. Dial didn’t hear.

“What kind of an insect?” he demanded of Harriet.

“I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s got a stinger.”

Hely craned over to see. “Gross,” he cried, in apparently unfeigned horror, “what
is
that?”

“Pass it up here,” said Mr. Dial sharply.

“Who would draw something like that?” Hely said, looking around the room in alarm.

“It’s a
butterfly,
” said Annabel, more audibly this time.

Mr. Dial got up to reach for the paper and then very suddenly—so suddenly that everyone jumped—Curtis Ratliff made an exhilarated gobbling noise. Pointing at something on the table, he began to bounce excitedly in his seat.

“Rat my,” he gobbled. “Rat my.”

Mr. Dial stopped short. This had always been his terror, that the generally docile Curtis would someday erupt into some kind of violence or fit.

Quickly, he abandoned the podium and hurried to the front row. “Is something wrong, Curtis?” he said, bending low, his confidential tone audible over the whole classroom. “Do you need to use the toilet?”

Curtis gobbled, face scarlet. Up and down he bounced in the squealing chair—which was too small for him—so energetically that Mr. Dial winced and stepped backwards.

Curtis stabbed at the air with his finger.
“Rat my,”
he crowed. Unexpectedly, he lunged from his chair—Mr. Dial stumbled backward, with a small, humiliating cry—and snatched a crumpled paper off the table.

Then, very gently, he smoothed it flat and handed it to Mr.
Dial. He pointed at the paper; he pointed to himself. “My,” he said, beaming.

“Oh,” said Mr. Dial. From the back of the room, he heard whispers, an impudent little snort of merriment. “That’s right, Curtis. That’s
your
paper.” Mr. Dial had set it aside, intentionally, from those of the other children. Though Curtis always demanded pencil and paper—and cried when he was denied them—he could neither read nor write.

“My,” Curtis said. He indicated his chest with his thumb.

“Yes,” said Mr. Dial, carefully. “That’s
your
goal, Curtis. That’s exactly right.”

He laid the paper back on the table. Curtis snatched the paper up again and thrust it back at him, smiling expectantly.

“Yes,
thank
you, Curtis,” said Mr. Dial, and pointed to his empty chair. “Oh, Curtis? You can sit down now. I’m just going to—”

“Wee.”

“Curtis. If you don’t sit down, I can’t—”

“Wee my!”
Curtis shrieked. To Mr. Dial’s horror, he began to jump up and down.
“Wee my! Wee my! Wee my!”

Mr. Dial—flabbergasted—glanced down at the crumpled paper which lay in his hand. There was no writing on it at all, only scribbles a baby might make.

Curtis blinked at him sweetly, and took a lumbering step closer. For a mongoloid he had very long eyelashes. “Wee,” he said.

————

“I wonder what Curtis’s goal was?” said Harriet ruminatively as she and Hely walked home together. Her patent-leather shoes clacked on the sidewalk. It had rained in the night and pungent clumps of cut grass, crushed petals blown from shrubbery, littered the damp cement.

“I mean,” said Harriet, “do you think Curtis even has a goal?”

“
My
goal was for Curtis to kick Mr. Dial’s ass.”

They turned down George Street, where the pecans and sweetgums were in full, dark leaf, and the bees buzzed heavily in crape myrtle, Confederate jasmine, pink floribunda
roses. The fusty, drunken perfume of magnolias was as drenching as the heat itself, and rich enough to make your head ache. Harriet said nothing. Along she clicked, head down, her hands behind her back, lost in thought.

Sociably, in an effort to revive the conversation, Hely threw back his head and let out his best dolphin whinny.

O, they call him
Flipper, Flipper, he sang, in a smarmy voice.
Faster than light-ning.…

Harriet let out a gratifying little snort. Because of his whickering laugh, and the porpoise-like bulge of his forehead,
Flipper
was their nickname for Mr. Dial.

“What’d you write?” Hely asked her. He’d taken off his Sunday suit jacket, which he hated, and was snapping it around in the air. “Was it you put down that black mark?”

“Yep.”

Hely glowed. It was for cryptic and unpredictable gestures like this that he adored Harriet. You couldn’t understand why she did things like this, or even why they were cool, but they
were
cool. Certainly the black mark had upset Mr. Dial, especially after the Curtis debacle. He’d blinked and looked disturbed when a kid in the back held up an empty paper, blank except for the creepy little mark in the center. “Someone’s being funny,” he snapped, after an eerie skipped beat, and went on immediately to the next kid, because the black mark
was
creepy—why? It was just a pencil mark, but still the room had gone quiet for a strange instant as the kid held it up for everyone to see. And this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.