The Little Friend (50 page)

Now that they were clear of the underbrush they moved along much faster, the wagon jolting explosively on the crossties. Hely’s teeth ached. They were making a lot of racket; and though there was nobody around to hear them, he was afraid that—between the clatter and the frogs—they would be deaf to an oncoming freight train until it was right on top of them. He kept his eyes on the tracks as he ran—half-hypnotized by the roll of the dim bars under his feet, and by the fast, repetitive rhythm of his breath—and he had just begun to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to slow down and switch on the flashlight, after all, when Harriet let out an extravagant sigh and he glanced up and drew a deep breath of relief at the sight of flickering red neon in the distance.

On the margin of the highway, in a bristle of weeds, they huddled by the wagon and peeped out at the railroad crossing, with its sign that said
STOP LOOK AND LISTEN
. A small breeze blew in their faces, fresh and cool, like rain. If they
glanced down the highway to the left—south, towards home—they could just make out the Texaco sign in the distance, the pink-and-green neon of Jumbo’s Drive-In. Here, the lights were farther apart: no shops, no traffic lights or parking lots, only weedy fields and sheds of corrugated metal.

A car whooshed past, startling them. Once they’d looked both ways to make sure no more were coming, they dashed over the tracks and across the silent highway. With the wagon bumping along between them in the dark, they cut across a cow pasture toward County Line Road. County Line was desolate this far out, past the Country Club: fenced pastureland interspersed with vast tracts of dust scraped flat by bulldozers.

A pungent stink of manure wafted up in Hely’s face. Only moments later did he feel the repulsive slipperiness on the bottom of his sneaker. He stopped.

“What is it?”

“Hang on,” he said, miserably, dragging his shoe on the grass. Though there weren’t any lights this far out the moon was bright enough for them to see exactly where they were. Parallel to County Line Road ran an isolated strip of blacktop which went for twenty yards or so, then stopped—a frontage road, whose construction had been halted when the Highway Commission had decided to route the Interstate on the opposite side of the Houma, by-passing Alexandria. Grass poked through the buckled asphalt. Ahead, the abandoned overpass arched pale over County Line.

Together, they started up again. They’d thought of hiding the snake in the woods, but the experience at Oak Lawn Estates was still vivid and they faltered at the idea of tramping into dense brush after dark—crashing through thickets, stepping blindly over rotten logs—while encumbered with a fifty-pound box. They’d thought too of hiding it in or around one of the warehouses but even the deserted ones, with plywood nailed over the windows, were posted as private property.

The concrete overpass presented none of these dangers. From Natchez Street, it was easily accessible, via shortcut; it crossed over County Line Road in plain view; yet it was closed
to traffic, and far enough from town so that there was little danger of workmen, nosy old folks, or other kids.

The overpass was not stable enough to take cars—and, even if it was, no vehicle could get to it short of a Jeep—but the red wagon slid easily enough up the ramp, with Harriet pushing from behind. On either side rose a concrete retaining wall, three feet high—easy enough to duck behind, in case of a car on the road beneath, but when Harriet raised her head to look, the road was dark both ways. Beyond, broad lowlands rolled off into darkness, with a white sparkle of lights in the direction of town.

When they reached the top, the wind was stronger: fresh, dangerous, exhilarating. Ashen dust powdered the road surface and the retaining wall. Hely brushed his chalky-white hands on his shorts, clicked on his flashlight and jumped it around, over a caked metal trough filled with crumpled waste paper; a skewed cinderblock; a pile of cement bags and a glass bottle with a sticky half-inch of orange soda still inside. Grasping the wall, Harriet stood leaning out over the dark road below as if over the railing of an ocean liner. Her hair was blown back from her face and she looked less miserable than Hely had seen her look all day.

In the distance they heard the long, eerie whistle of a train. “Gosh,” said Harriet, “it’s not eight yet, is it?”

Hely felt weak at the knees. “Nope,” he said. He could hear the breakneck rattle of the boxcars, somewhere in the singing darkness, clattering down the tracks toward the Highway 5 crossing, louder and louder and louder.…

The whistle screamed, nearer this time, and the freight train ran past in a long
whoosh
as they stood and watched it go, over the tracks where they’d been pushing the wagon not fifteen minutes before. The echo of the warning bell vibrated sternly in the distance. Over the river, in the fat clouds to the east, twitched a silent, mercury-blue vein of lightning.

“We should come up here more,” Harriet said. She was looking not at the sky but at the sticky black pour of asphalt which rushed through the tunnel beneath their feet; and even though Hely was at her back it was almost like she didn’t expect him to hear her, as if she were leaning over the spillway
of a dam, spray churning in her face, deaf to everything but the water.

The snake knocked inside his box, startling them both.

“Okay,” said Harriet, in a goofy, affectionate voice, “settle down, now—”

Together, they lifted out the box and wedged it between the retaining wall and the stacked cement bags. Harriet knelt on the ground, amongst the litter of smashed cups and cigarette filters left by the workmen, and tried to tug an empty cement bag from under the stack.

“We have to hurry,” said Hely. The heat lay on him like an itchy damp blanket and his nose tickled from the cement dust, from the hay in the fields and from the charged, staticky air.

Harriet wrenched free the empty sack, which caught and whipped up in the night air like some eerie banner from a lunar expedition. Quickly she plucked it down and dropped behind the cement barricade. Hely dropped beside her. With their heads together, they stretched it over the snake’s box, then weighted it at the edges with cement chunks so it wouldn’t blow off.

What were the grown-ups doing, wondered Hely, back in town and shut up in their houses: balancing checkbooks, watching television, brushing their cocker spaniels? The night wind was fresh, and bracing, and lonely; never had he felt so far from the known world. Shipwrecked on a desert planet … flapping flags, military funeral for the casualties … homemade crosses in the dust. Back on the horizon, the sparse lights of an alien settlement: hostile, probably, enemies of the Federation.
Stay clear of the inhabitants
, said the stern voice in his head.
To do otherwise will spell death for you and the girl.…

“He’ll be okay here,” said Harriet, standing up.

“He’ll be fine,” said Hely, in his deep, space-commander voice.

“Snakes don’t have to eat every day. I just hope he had a good drink of water before he left.”

Lightning flashed—bright this time, with a sharp crack. Almost simultaneously there was a growl of thunder.

“Let’s go back the long way,” said Hely, brushing the hair from his eyes. “By the road.”

“How come? The train from Chicago isn’t due in for a while,” she said, when he didn’t answer.

Hely was alarmed at the intensity of her gaze. “It’ll be through in half an hour.”

“We can make it.”

“Suit yourself,” said Hely, and he was glad that his voice came out sounding tougher than he felt. “I’m taking the road.”

Silence. “What do you want to do with the wagon, then?” she said.

Hely thought for a moment. “Leave it up here, I guess.”

“Out in the open?”

“Who cares?” said Hely. “I don’t play with it any more.”

“Somebody might find it.”

“Nobody’s going to come up here.”

They ran down the concrete ramp—it was fun, wind in their hair—and the momentum carried them halfway across the dark pastureland before they got breathless and slowed to a jog.

“It’s about to rain,” said Harriet.

“So what,” said Hely. He felt invincible: ranking officer, conqueror of the planet. “Hey, Harriet,” he said, pointing to a fancy illumined sign glowing gently in a moonscape of bulldozed clay scraped in the pasture opposite. It read:

Heritage Groves
Homes of the Future

“The future must suck, huh?” said Hely.

They scurried down the margin of Highway 5 (Hely mindful of the dangers; for all he knew, his mom wanted ice cream and had asked his dad to run to Jumbo’s before it closed) ducking behind lamp posts and garbage bins. As soon as they were able they turned off into the dark side streets and made their way down to the square, to the Pix Cinema.

“The feature’s half over,” said the shiny-faced girl at the ticket window, glancing at them over the top of her compact.

“That’s okay.” Hely pushed his two dollars through the glass window and stepped back—swinging his arms, legs jittering nervously. Sitting through the last half of a movie about a talking Volkswagen was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. Just as the girl snapped shut her compact and reached for her key ring so that she could come around and unlock the door for them, a steam whistle blew in the distance: the 8:47, bound for New Orleans, on her way in to the Alexandria Station.

Hely punched Harriet on the shoulder. “We ought to hop on that and ride to New Orleans sometime. Some night.”

Harriet turned away from him, folding her arms across her chest, and looked out at the street. Thunder growled in the distance. Opposite, the awning of the hardware store flapped in the wind, and bits of paper skittered and somersaulted down the sidewalk.

Hely looked at the sky, held out a palm. Just as the girl clicked the key in the lock of the glass door, a drop of rain splashed on his forehead.

————

“Gum, can you drive the Trans Am?” said Danny. He was high, high as a kite, and his grandmother looked as spiny as an old cactus in her red flowered house-dress:
flowery
, he told himself, staring up at her from the chair where he sat,
red paper flower
.

And Gum—like a cactus—stood vegetating for a moment before she gasped and responded, in her spiny voice:

“Driving’s not the problem. It’s just real low down to the ground for me. This arthuritis.”

“Well, I can’t—” Danny had to stop and reconsider, begin again—“I can drive you to Jury Duty if you want but that aint going to fix the car being low on the ground.” Everything was the wrong height for his grandmother. When the pickup was working, she complained that the cab was too high.

“Oh,” Gum said peacefully, “I don’t mind if you drive me, son. You might as well do something with that expensive truck-driving education of yours.”

Slowly, slowly, with her light little brown claw of a hand
resting on Danny’s arm, she hobbled out to the car—through the packed-dirt yard where Farish sat in his lawn chair taking apart a telephone, and it occurred to Danny (in a vivid flash, as these things sometimes did) that all his brothers, himself included, saw deep into the nature of things. Curtis saw the good in people; Eugene saw God’s presence in the world, how each thing had its own work and its own orderly place; Danny saw into people’s minds, and what made them act the way they did, and sometimes—the drugs were making him think it—sometimes he could even see a little bit into the future. And Farish—before his accident, anyway—had seen more deeply into things than any of them. Farish understood power, and hidden possibilities; he understood what made things work—whether it was engines, or the animals out in the taxidermy shed. But nowadays, if he was interested in something, he had to cut it up and strew it all over the ground to make sure nothing special was inside.

Gum didn’t like the radio, so they rode into town in silence. Danny was aware of every bit of metal in the car’s bronze body, whirring simultaneously.

“Well,” she said placidly. “I worried from the start that nothing was ever going to come from that truck-driving job.”

Danny said nothing. The truck-driving days, back before his second felony arrest, had been the happiest of his life. He’d been running around a lot, playing guitar at night, with vague hopes of starting a band, and driving a truck seemed pretty boring and ordinary in comparison with the future he’d had lined up for himself. But now, when he looked back on it—only a few years ago, though it seemed a lifetime—it was the days in the trucks and not the nights in the bars that he remembered with longing.

Gum sighed. “I guess it’s just as well,” she said, in her thin, wispy old voice. “You’d have been driving that old truck till you died.”

Better than getting stuck here at home
, thought Danny. His grandmother had always made him feel stupid for liking that job. “Danny don’t expect much from life.” That’s what she’d gone around saying after the truck outfit had hired him. “It’s good you don’t expect much, Danny, because you won’t be
disappointed.” It was the main lesson in life she had drilled into her grandsons: not to expect much from the world. The world was a mean place, dog eat dog (to quote another of her favorite sayings). If any of her boys expected too much, or rose above themselves, they would get their hopes knocked down and broken. But in Danny’s view, this wasn’t much of a lesson.

“It’s like I told Ricky Lee.” Scabs and sores and atrophied black veins on the backs of her hands, folded complacently in her lap. “When he got that basketball scholarship to Delta State, he was going to have to work nights on top of his school and his ball practice just to pay for his books. I said ‘I just hate to think about you having to work so much harder than everybody else, Ricky. Just so’s a lot of rich kids who got more than you do can stand around and make fun of you.’ ”

“Right,” said Danny, when he realized his grandmother expected him to say something. Ricky Lee hadn’t taken the scholarship; Gum and Farish, between them, had managed to make enough fun of him so he turned it down. And where was Ricky now? In jail.