The Little Friend (63 page)

He’d hidden the drugs in the old water tower behind the train tracks. Danny was fairly sure of this because—after losing Farish, in the overgrown wilderness around the switching yards—he’d caught sight of him away in the distance on the tower ladder, high in the air, climbing laboriously, his knapsack in his teeth, a portly silhouette against the preposterously rosy dawn sky.

He’d turned right around, walked back to his car and driven straight home: outwardly calm, but his mind all abuzz. That’s where it was hidden, in the tower, and there it still sat: five thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine, ten thousand when stepped on. Farish’s money, not his. He’d see a few hundred dollars—whatever Farish decided to give him—whenever it got sold. But a few hundred bucks wasn’t enough to move to Shreveport, or Baton Rouge, not enough to get himself an apartment and a girlfriend and set himself up in the long-distance truck driving business. Heavy metal on the eight-track, no more country music once he got away from this hillbilly town, not ever. Big chrome truck (smoked windows, air-conditioned cab) screaming down the Interstate, west. Away from Gum. Away from Curtis, with the sad teenage pimples that were starting to spring up on his face.
Away from the faded school picture of himself that hung over the television in Gum’s trailer: skinny, furtive-looking, with long dark bangs.

Danny parked the car, lit a cigarette, and sat. The tank itself, some forty-five feet off the ground, was a wooden barrel with a peaked cap, atop spindly metal legs. A rickety utility ladder led to the top of the tank, where a trap-door opened onto a reservoir of water.

Night and day, the image of the knapsack stayed with Danny, like a Christmas present on a high shelf he wasn’t supposed to climb up and look at. Whenever he got in his car, it tugged at him with a magnetic fascination. Twice already he’d driven alone to the tank, just to sit and look up at it and daydream. A fortune. His getaway.

If it was his, which it wasn’t. And he was more than a little worried about climbing up to get it, for fear that Farish had sawn through a rung of the ladder or rigged the trap door with a spring gun or otherwise booby-trapped the tower—Farish, who had taught Danny how to construct a pipe bomb; Farish, whose laboratory was surrounded with home-made punji traps fashioned from boards and rusty nail, and laced about with trip wires concealed in the weeds; Farish, who had recently ordered, from an advertisement in the back of
Soldier of Fortune
, a kit for constructing spring-loaded ballistic knives. “Trip this sweetheart and—whing!” he said, leaping up exhilarated from his work on the cluttered floor while Danny—appalled—read a sentence on the back of the cardboard box that said
Disables Attackers at a Range of up to Thirty Five Feet
.

Who knew how he’d rigged the tower? If it was rigged at all, it was (knowing Farish) rigged to maim not kill, but Danny did not relish losing a finger or an eye. And yet, an insistent little whisper kept reminding him that Farish might not have rigged the tower at all. Twenty minutes earlier, while driving to the post office to mail his grandmother’s light bill, an insane burst of optimism had struck Danny, a dazzling vision of the carefree life awaiting him in South Louisiana and he’d turned on Main Street and driven to the switching yards with the intention of climbing straight up the
tower, fishing out the bag, hiding it in the trunk—in the spare tire—and driving right out of town without looking back.

But now he was here, he was reluctant to get out of the car. Nervy little silver glints—like wire—glinted in the weeds at the tower’s foot. Hands trembling from the crank, Danny lit a cigarette and stared up at the water tower. Having a finger or a toe blown off would be pleasant compared to what Farish would do if he had even the slightest clue what Danny was thinking.

And you could read a whole lot into the fact that Farish had hidden the drugs in a water tank of all places: a deliberate slap in Danny’s face. Farish knew how afraid Danny was of water—ever since their father had tried to teach him to swim when he was four or five, by chunking him off a pier into a lake. But instead of swimming—as Farish and Mike and his other brothers had done, when the trick was tried on them—he sank. He remembered it all very clearly, the terror of sinking, and then the terror of choking and spitting up the gritty brown water as his father (furious at having to jump in the lake fully clothed) screamed at him; and when Danny came away from that worn-out pier it was without much desire to swim in deep water ever again.

Farish, perversely, had also ignored the practical dangers of storing crystal in such a nasty damp place. Danny had been in the lab with Farish one rainy day in March when the stuff refused to crystallize because of the humidity. No matter how they fooled with it, it stuck together and caked on the mirror under their fingertips in a sticky, solid patty—useless.

Danny—feeling defeated—had a little bump to steady his nerves, and then threw his cigarette out the window and started the car. Once he was out on the street again, he forgot his real errand (his grandmother’s bill to mail) and took another spin by the funeral home. But though Catfish was still sitting in the limo, the girl wasn’t, and there were too many people milling around on the front steps.

Maybe I’ll circle the block again
, he thought.

Alexandria: flat and desolate, a circuit of repeating street signs, a giant train set. The sense of unreality was what got you after a while. Airless streets, colorless skies. Buildings
empty, only pasteboard and sham.
And if you drive long enough
, he thought,
you always end up right back where you started
.

————

Grace Fountain, rather self-consciously, came up the front steps and in the front door of Edie’s house. She followed the voices and the festive tinkle of glass through a hallway narrowed by massive glass-front bookcases to a crowded parlor. A fan whirred. The room was packed with people: men with jackets off, ladies with pink faces. On the lace tablecloth stood a bowl of punch, and plates of beaten biscuits and ham; silver compotes of peanuts and candied almonds; a stack of red paper napkins (
tacky
, noted Mrs. Fountain) with Edie’s monogram in gold.

Mrs. Fountain, clutching her purse, stood in the doorway and waited to be acknowledged. As houses went, Edie’s house (a bungalow, really) was smaller than her own, but Mrs. Fountain came from country people—“good Christians,” as she liked to point out, but hill folk all the same—and she was intimidated by the punch bowl, by the gold silk draperies and the big plantation dining table—which, even with a leaf out, sat twelve, at least—and by the overbearing portrait of Judge Cleve’s father which dwarfed the tiny mantel. Around the perimeters of the room stood at taut attention—as if at a dancing school—twenty-four lyre-back dining chairs with petit-point seats; and, if the room was a bit small, and a bit low in the ceiling, to accommodate so much large dark furniture, Mrs. Fountain felt daunted by it all the same.

Edith—with a white cocktail apron over her black dress—spotted Mrs. Fountain, laid down her tray of biscuits and came over. “Why Grace. Thank you for stopping by.” She wore heavy black eyeglasses—men’s glasses, like those that Mrs. Fountain’s deceased husband, Porter, used to wear; not very flattering, thought Mrs. Fountain, for a lady; she was also drinking, from a kitchen tumbler wrapped at the bottom with a damp Christmas napkin, what appeared to be whiskey with ice.

Mrs. Fountain—unable to restrain herself—remarked:
“Looks like you’re celebrating, having all this big party over here after the funeral.”

“Well, you can’t just lay down and die,” snapped Edie. “Go over and get yourself some hors d’oeuvres while they’re hot, why don’t you.”

Mrs. Fountain, thrown into confusion, stood very still and allowed her gaze to wander unfocused over distant objects. At last she replied, vaguely: “Thank you,” and walked stiffly to the buffet table.

Edie put her cold glass to her temple. Before this day, Edie had been tipsy less than half a dozen times in her life—and all of those times before she was thirty, and in vastly more cheerful circumstances.

“Edith, dear, can I help you with anything?” A woman from the Baptist church—short, round in the face, a good-natured little fluster in her manner like Winnie the Pooh—and, for the life of her, Edith couldn’t recall her name.

“No, thank you!” she said, patting the lady on the back as she moved through the crowd. The pain in her ribs was breathtaking, but in a strange way she was grateful of it because it helped her concentrate—upon the guests, and the guest book, and the clean glasses; upon the hot hors d’oeuvres, and the replenishment of the cracker tray, and the regular addition of fresh ginger ale to the punch bowl; and these worries in turn distracted her from Libby’s death, which had not yet sunk in. In the past few days—a hectic grotesque blur of doctors, flowers, morticians, papers to be signed and people arriving from out of town—she had not shed a tear; she had devoted herself to the get-together after the funeral (the silver to be polished, the punch cups to be hauled down jingling from the attic, and washed) partly for the sake of the out-of-town guests, some of whom hadn’t seen one another in years. Naturally, no matter how sad the occasion, everyone wanted a chance to catch up; and Edie was grateful for a reason to keep moving, and smiling, and re-filling the compotes of candied almonds. The night before, she had tied her hair in a white rag and hurried around with dust-pan and furniture polish and carpet sweeper: fluffing cushions, cleaning mirrors, moving furniture and shaking rugs and scrubbing
floors until after midnight. She arranged the flowers; she re-arranged the plates in her china cabinet. Then she had gone into her spotless kitchen and run a big sink of soapy water and—hands trembling from fatigue—washed punch cup after dusty, delicate, punch cup: a hundred punch cups in all; and when, at three in the morning, she finally climbed into bed, she had slept the sleep of the blessed.

Libby’s little pink-nosed cat, Blossom—the newest addition to the household—had retreated in terror to Edie’s bedroom, where she was crouching under the bed. On top of bookcase and china cabinet perched Edie’s own cats, all five of them, Dot and Salambo, Rhamses and Hannibal and Slim: sitting well apart, switching their tails and glaring down at the proceedings with witchy yellow eyes. Generally, Edie enjoyed guests no more than the cats did, but this day she was grateful for the multitudes: a distraction from her own family, whose behavior was unsatisfactory, more irritant than comfort. She was tired of them all—Addie especially, swanning around with horrible old Mr. Sumner—Mr. Sumner the smooth talker, the flirt, Mr. Sumner whom their father the Judge had despised. And there she was, touching his sleeve and batting her eyes at him, as she sipped punch she had not helped to make from cups she had not helped to wash; Addie, who had not come out to sit with Libby a single afternoon while she was in the hospital because she was afraid of missing her nap. She was tired of Charlotte, too, who had not come to the hospital either, because she was too busy lying in the bed with whatever imaginary vapors plagued her; she was tired of Tatty—who had come to the hospital, plenty, but only to deliver unwelcome scenarios of how Edith might have avoided the car accident, and reacted better to Allison’s incoherent phone call; she was tired of the children, and their extravagant weeping at funeral parlor and gravesite. Out back on the porch they still sat, carrying on just as they had done over the dead cat:
no difference
, thought Edie bitterly,
no difference in the world
. Equally distasteful were the crocodile tears of Cousin Delle, who hadn’t visited Libby in years. “It’s like losing Mother again,” Tatty had said; but Libby had been both mother and sister to Edie. More than this: she was the
only person in the world, male or female, living or dead, whose opinion had ever mattered to Edie one jot.

Upon two of these lyre-back dining chairs—old friends in disaster, crowding around the walls of this little room—their mother’s casket had been laid, in Tribulation’s murky downstairs parlor more than sixty years ago. A circuit preacher—Church of God, not even Baptist—had read from the Bible: a psalm, something to do with gold and onyx, except he had read onyx as “oinks.” A family joke thereafter: “oinks.” Poor teen-aged Libby, wan and thin in an old black tea dress of their mother’s pinned at the hem and bosom; her china-pale face (naturally without color, as blonde girls were in those days before suntans and rouge) drained by sleeplessness and grief to a sick, dry chalk. What Edie remembered best was how her own hand, in Libby’s, felt moist and hot; how she’d stared the whole time at the preacher’s feet; though he’d attempted to catch Edie’s eye she was too shy to look him in the face and over half a century later she still saw the cracks in the leather of his lace-up shoes, the rusty slash of sunlight falling across the cuffs of his black trousers.

The death of her father—the Judge—had been one of those passings that everyone called A Blessing: and that funeral oddly jolly, with lots of old red-faced “compatriots” (as the Judge and his friends called one another, all his fishing pals and Bar Association cronies) standing with their backs to the fireplace in Tribulation’s downstairs parlor, drinking whiskey and swapping stories about “Old Bully” in his youth and boyhood. “Old Bully,” that was their nickname for him. And scarcely six months later, little Robin—which she could not bear to think of, even now, that tiny coffin, scarcely five feet long; how had she ever got through that day? Shot full of Compazine … a grief so strong that it hit her like nausea, like food poisoning … vomiting up black tea and boiled custard.…

She glanced up from her fog, and was badly unnerved to see a small Robin-like shape in tennis shoes and cut-off jeans creeping down her hallway: the Hull boy, she realized after a stunned moment or two, Harriet’s friend. Who in the world had let him in? Edie slipped into the hallway and stole up
behind him. When she grabbed his shoulder, he jumped and screamed—a small, wheezing, terrified scream—and cowered from her as a mouse from an owl.