The Little Friend (55 page)

“Edie,” said Harriet—watching her grandmother’s face as she spoke—“maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

“I can read just fine. Yes, maam. At one time,” said Edie, regally, “these backwoods were full of Confederate renegades. They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.”

To the left, the woods opened onto a field. At the very sight of it—the small sad bleachers, the soccer nets, the ragged grass—Harriet’s heart plunged. Some tough-looking older girls were punching a tetherball, their slaps and
oofs
ringing out hard and audible in the morning stillness. Over the scoreboard, a hand-lettered sign read:

de Selby Frosh!
there are no Limits!

Harriet’s throat constricted. Suddenly she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

“Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest was not from the wealthiest or most cultivated family in the world, but
he
was the greatest general of the war!” Edie was saying. “Yes, maam! ‘Fustest with the Mostest’! That was Forrest!”

“Edie,” said Harriet in a small fast voice, “I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go home.”

“Home?”
Edie sounded amused—not even surprised. “Nonsense! You’re going to have the time of your life.”

“No,
please
. I hate it here.”

“Then why’d you want to come?”

Harriet had no answer for this. Rounding the old familiar corner, at the bottom of the hill, a gallery of forgotten horrors opened before her. The patchy grass, the dust-dulled pines, the particular yellowy-red color of the gravel which was like uncooked chicken livers—how could she have forgotten how much she loathed this place, how miserable she’d been every single minute? Up ahead, on the left, the pass gate; beyond, the head counselor’s cabin, sunk in threatening shade. Above
the door was a homemade cloth banner with a dove on it that read, in fat, hippie letters: REJOICE!

“Edie please,” said Harriet, quickly, “I changed my mind. Let’s go.”

Edie, gripping the steering wheel, swung around and glared at her—light-colored eyes, predatory and cold, eyes that Chester called “sure-shot” because they seemed made to look down the barrel of a gun. Harriet’s eyes (“Little sure-shot,” Chester sometimes called her) were just as light, and chilling; but, for Edie, it was not pleasant to meet her own stare so fixedly and in miniature. She was unaware of any sorrow or anxiety in her grandchild’s rigid expression; which struck her only as insolence, and aggressive insolence at that.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, callously, and glanced back at the road—just in time to keep from running off into a ditch. “You’ll love it here. In a week you’ll be screaming and carrying on because you don’t want to come home.”

Harriet stared at her in amazement.

“Edie,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it here yourself. You wouldn’t stay with these people for a million dollars.”

“ ‘
Oh, Edie!
’ ” Meanly, in falsetto, Edie mimicked Harriet’s voice. “ ‘
Take me back! Take me back to camp!
’ That’s what you’ll be saying when it’s time to go.”

Harriet was so stung that she couldn’t speak. “I won’t,” she managed to say at last. “I won’t.”

“Yes you will!” sang Edie, chin high, in the smug, merry voice that Harriet detested; and “Yes you will!”—even louder, without looking at her.

Suddenly a clarinet honked, a shuddering note which was partly barnyard bray and partly country howdy: Dr. Vance, with clarinet, heralding their arrival. Dr. Vance was not a real doctor—a medical doctor—only a sort of a glorified Christian band director; he was a Yankee, with thick bushy eyebrows, and big teeth like a mule. He was a big wheel on the Baptist youth circuit, and it was Adelaide who had pointed out—correctly—that he was a dead ringer for the famous Tenniel drawing of the Mad Hatter in
Alice in Wonderland
.

“Welcome, ladies,” he crowed, leaning into Edie’s rolled-down window. “Praise the Lard!”

“Hear hear,” replied Edie, who did not care for the more evangelical tone which sometimes crept into Dr. Vance’s conversation. “Here’s our little camper. I guess we’ll get her checked in and then I’ll be going.”

Dr. Vance—tucking his chin down—leaned in the window to grin at Harriet. His face was a rough, stony red. Coldly, Harriet noted the hair in his nostrils, the stains between his large, square teeth.

Dr. Vance drew back theatrically, as if singed by Harriet’s expression. “Whew!” He raised an arm; he sniffed his armpit, then looked at Edie. “Thought maybe I forgot to put my deodorant on this morning.”

Harriet stared at her knees.
Even if I have to be here
, she told herself,
I don’t have to pretend I like it
. Dr. Vance wanted his campers to be loud, outgoing, boisterous, and those who didn’t rise naturally enough into the camp spirit he heckled and teased and tried to pry open by force.
What’s wrong, cantcha take a joke? Dontcha know how to laugh at yourself?!
If a kid was too quiet—for any reason—Dr. Vance would make sure they got doused with the water balloon, that they had to dance in front of everybody like a chicken or chase a greased pig in a mud pit or wear a funny hat.

“Harriet!” said Edie, after an awkward pause. No matter what Edie said otherwise, Dr. Vance made her uncomfortable too, and Harriet knew it.

Dr. Vance blew a sour note on the clarinet, and—when this too failed to get Harriet’s attention—put his head in at the window and stuck his tongue out at her.

I am among the enemy
, Harriet told herself. She would have to hold fast, and remember why she was here. For as much as she hated Camp de Selby it was the safest place to be at the moment.

Dr. Vance whistled: a derisive note, insulting. Harriet, grudgingly, glanced at him (there was no use resisting; he would just keep hammering at her) and he dropped his eyebrows like a sad clown and stuck out his bottom lip. “A pity party isn’t much of a party,” he said. “Know why? Hmn?
Because there’s only room for one.
”

Harriet—face aflame—sneaked a glance past him, out the
window. Gangly pines. A line of girls in swimsuits tiptoed past, gingerly, their legs and feet splashed with red mud.
The power of the highland chiefs is broken
, she told herself.
I have fled my country and gone to the heather
.

“… problems at
home?
” she heard Dr. Vance inquire, rather sanctimoniously.

“Certainly not. She’s just—Harriet is a bit big for her britches,” said Edie, in a clear and carrying voice.

A sharp ugly memory rose in Harriet’s mind: Dr. Vance pushing her onstage in the Hula Hoop contest, the camp roaring with laughter at her dismay.

“Well—” Dr. Vance chuckled—“big britches is one condition we certainly know how to cure around here!”

“Do you hear that, Harriet?
Harriet
. I don’t,” said Edie, with a little sigh, “I don’t know what’s got into her.”

“Oh, one or two skit nights, and a hot potato race or two, and we’ll get her warmed up.”

The skit nights! Confused memories rose in a clamor: stolen underpants, water poured in her bunk (
look, Harriet wets the bed!
), a girl’s voice crying:
You can’t sit here!

Look, here comes Miss Book Scholar!

“Well hay!”
This was Dr. Vance’s wife, her voice high-pitched and countrified, swaying amiably toward them in her polyester shorts set. Mrs. Vance (or “Miss Patsy” as she liked the campers to call her) was in charge of the girls’ side of the camp, and she was as bad as Dr. Vance, but in a different way: touchy-feely, intrusive, asking too many personal questions (about boyfriends, bodily functions and the like). Though Miss Patsy was her official nickname, the girls called her “The Nurse.”

“Hay, Hun!”
In through the car window she reached and pinched Harriet on the upper arm.
“How you doing, girl!”
Twist, twist.
“Lookit you!”

“Well hello, Mrs. Vance,” said Edie, “how do you do?” Edie—perversely—liked people like Mrs. Vance because they gave her the space to be especially lofty and grand.

“Well come on, yall! Let’s head up to the office!”
Everything Mrs. Vance said, she said with unnatural pep, like the women in the Miss Mississippi pageant or on
The Lawrence Welk
Show. “Gosh
, you’re all grown up, girl!” she said to Harriet. “I know you’re not going to get in any more fist-fights this time, are you?”

Dr. Vance, in turn, gave Harriet a hard look that she did not like.

————

At the hospital, Farish played and replayed the scenario of their grandmother’s accident, speculating, theorizing, all night long and into the next day, so that his brothers had grown very, very tired of listening to him. Dull, red-eyed with fatigue, they slouched around in the waiting room of Intensive Care, partly listening to him but also partly watching a cartoon program about a dog solving a mystery.

“If you move, he’s
going
to bite you,” Farish said, addressing the air, almost as if he was talking to the absent Gum. “You shouldn’t of moved. I don’t care if he’s laying in your lap.”

He had stood—running his hands through his hair—and begun to pace, disturbing their view of the television. “Farsh,” said Eugene loudly, re-crossing his legs, “Gum had to drive the car, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have to drive it off in a ditch,” said Danny.

Farish drew his eyebrows down. “You couldn’t have
knocked
me out of that driver’s seat,” he said belligerently. “I would’ve sat still as a mouse. If you move—” he made a smooth, skating motion with the flat of his palm—“you’ve threatened him. He’s going to defend himself.”

“What the hell is she going to do, Farish? A snake is coming through the roof of the damn car?”

Suddenly Curtis clapped his hands and pointed at the television. “Gum!” he exclaimed.

Farish wheeled around. After a moment, Eugene and Danny burst into horrified laughter. In the cartoon, the dog and a group of young people were trooping through a spooky old castle. A grinning skeleton hung on the wall, along with a bunch of trumpets and axes—and, strange to say, the skeleton bore a strong resemblance to Gum. Suddenly it flew off the wall and sailed after the dog, who ran yowling.

“That,” said Eugene—he was having a hard time getting
it out—“
that
’s what she looked like when the snake was after her.”

Farish, without a word, turned to look at them in weariness and despair. Curtis—aware that he’d done something wrong—stopped laughing instantly, staring at Farish with a disturbed look on his face. But just at this instant Dr. Breedlove appeared in the doorway, striking them all into silence.

“Your grandmother’s conscious,” he said. “It looks like she’s going to pull through. We’ve got her off the tubes.”

Farish put his face in his hands.

“Off the breathing tubes, anyway. She’s still got the IVs, since her heartbeat hasn’t stabilized yet. Would you like to see her?”

Solemnly, they all threaded single file behind him (all except Curtis, happy enough to stay watching
Scooby-Doo
) through a wilderness of machines and mysterious equipment, to a curtained area concealing Gum. Though she lay very still, and the stillness itself was frightening, she actually did not look much more ragged than usual except for her eyelids, which drooped half-shut from muscle paralysis.

“Well, I’ll leave you alone for a minute now,” the doctor said, energetically rubbing his hands. “But just a minute. Don’t tire her out.”

Farish made his way to the bed first. “It’s me,” he said, leaning close.

Her eyelids fluttered; slowly, she lifted a hand from the coverlet, which Farish clasped in both his own.

“Who done this to you?” he said, in a stern-sounding voice, and bent his head close to her lips to listen.

After a moment or two she said: “I don’t know.” Her voice was dry and wispy and very faint. “All I seen was some kids off in the distance.”

Farish—shaking his head—stood and smacked his closed fist into his palm. He walked to the window and stood looking out into the parking lot.

“Forget about kids,” Eugene said. “You know who I figured, when I heard this?
Porton Stiles.
” His arm was still in a
sling from his own snake bite. “Or Buddy Reebals. They always said Buddy had a hit list. That there was people he was coming after someday.”

“It wasn’t any of them people,” said Farish, glancing up with a sudden, cutting intelligence. “All this started at the Mission the other night.”

Eugene said: “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not
my
fault.”

“You think Loyal did it?” said Danny to Farish.

“How could he?” said Eugene. “He left a week ago.”

“Well, we know one thing for damn sure. It’s
his
snake. No question about that,” Farish said.

“Well, it was
you
that asked him and his snakes to come here,” said Eugene angrily, “
not me
. I mean, I’m scared to go in my own place now—”

“I said it was
his snake,
” said Farish, tapping his foot with agitation. “I didn’t say he was the one that thrown it.”

“See, Farish, this is what bothers me, though,” Danny said. “Who broke that windshield? If they were looking for product—”

Danny noticed Eugene looking at him funny; he stopped talking and shoved his hands in his pockets. There was no need to go on about the drugs in front of Gum and Eugene.

“You think it was Dolphus?” he said to Farish. “Or somebody working for Dolphus maybe?”

Farish thought about it. “No,” he said. “All these snakes and shit aint Dolphus’s style. He’d just send somebody down to cut your ass up.”

“You know what I keep wondering about?” Danny said. “That girl who come upstairs to the door that night.”

“I was thinking about her, too,” said Farish. “I didn’t get a good look at her. Where’d she come from? What was she doing hanging around outside the house?”