The Little Friend

CHAPTER

3

——

The Pool Hall

Sometimes, before Ida went home for the evening, she set out something nice for supper: casserole, fried chicken, sometimes even a pudding or cobbler. But tonight on the counter were only some leftovers that she wanted to get rid of: ancient ham slices, pale and slimy from sitting around wrapped in plastic; also some cold mashed potatoes.

Harriet was furious. She opened the pantry and stared in at the too-tidy shelves, lined with dim jars of flour and sugar, dried peas and cornmeal, macaroni and rice. Harriet’s mother rarely ate more than a few spoonfuls of food in the evenings and many nights she was happy with a dish of ice cream or a handful of soda crackers. Sometimes Allison scrambled eggs, but Harriet was a little sick of eggs all the time.

Cobwebs of lassitude drifted over her. She snapped off a stick of spaghetti and sucked on it. The floury taste was familiar—like paste—and triggered an unexpected splutter of pictures from nursery school … green tile floors, wooden blocks painted to look like bricks, windows too high to see out of.…

Lost in thought, still chewing on the splinter of dried spaghetti—her brow knotted cumbrously in a way that brought out her resemblance to Edie and Judge Cleve—Harriet dragged a chair to the refrigerator, maneuvering carefully to avoid setting off a landslide of newspapers. Gloomily, she climbed up and stood in it as she shifted through the crunching packages in the freezer compartment. But there was nothing good in the freezer, either: only a carton of the disgusting peppermint-stick ice cream that her mother loved (many days, especially in the summertime, she ate nothing else) buried in an avalanche of foil-wrapped lumps. The concept of Convenience Foods was foreign and preposterous to Ida Rhew, who did the grocery shopping. TV dinners she thought unwholesome (though sometimes she bought them if they went on sale); between-meal snacks she dismissed as a fad derived from television. (“Snock? What you want with a snock if you eat your dinner?”)

“Tell on her,” Hely whispered when Harriet—glumly—joined him again on the back porch. “She has to do what your mother says.”

“Yeah, I know.” Hely’s mother had fired Roberta when Hely told on her for whipping him with a hairbrush; she had fired Ruby because she wouldn’t let Hely watch Bewitched.

“Do it. Do it.” Hely bumped her foot with the toe of his sneaker.

“Later.” But she said it only to save face. Harriet and Allison never complained about Ida and more than once—even when Harriet was angry at Ida, over some injustice—she’d lied and taken the blame herself rather than get Ida in trouble. The simple fact was that things worked differently at Harriet’s house than at Hely’s. Hely—as had Pemberton before him—prided himself on being so difficult that their mother was unable to hold on to any housekeeper over a year or two; he and Pem had gone through nearly a dozen. What did Hely care if it was Roberta, or Ramona, or Shirley or Ruby or Essie Lee who was watching TV when he got home from school? But Ida stood at the firm center of Harriet’s universe: beloved, grumbling, irreplaceable, with her large kind hands and her great moist prominent eyes, her smile which was like the first smile that Harriet had ever seen in the world. It tormented Harriet to see how lightly her mother treated Ida sometimes, as if Ida was only passing through their lives and not fundamentally connected with them. Harriet’s mother sometimes got hysterical, and paced around the kitchen crying, and said things she didn’t mean (though she was always sorry later), and the possibility of Ida being fired (or, more likely, getting mad and quitting, for Ida groused continually about how little Harriet’s mother paid her) was so frightening that Harriet could not allow herself to think of it.

Amongst the slippery tinfoil lumps, Harriet caught sight of a grape Popsicle. With difficulty, she extricated it, thinking enviously of the deep-freeze at Hely’s house which was crammed with Fudgsicles and frozen pizzas, chicken pot pies and every kind of TV dinner imaginable.…

With the Popsicle, she went out to the porch—without bothering to put the chair back where she’d got it—and lay on her back in the swing, reading The Jungle Book. Slowly, the color drained from the day. The rich greens of the garden faded to lavender, and as they dulled from lavender to purple-black, the crickets began to shriek and a couple of lightning bugs popped on and off, uncertainly, in the overgrown dark spot by Mrs. Fountain’s fence.

Absentmindedly, Harriet let the Popsicle stick fall to the floor from between her fingers. She had not moved for half an hour or more. The base of her skull was propped on the swing’s wooden arm at a devilishly uncomfortable angle but still she remained motionless except to draw the book closer and closer to her nose.

Soon it was too dark to see. Harriet’s scalp prickled and there was a throbbing pressure behind her eyeballs but she stayed where she was, stiff neck and all. Some parts of The Jungle Book she knew almost by heart: Mowgli’s lessons with Bagheera and Baloo; the attack, with Kaa, upon the Bandar-log. Later, less adventurous parts—in which Mowgli began to be dissatisfied with his life in the jungle—she often did not read at all. She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Somebody was cooking steaks outside on a grill. They smelled good. Harriet’s neck hurt in earnest, but even though she had to strain to see the darkening page she was strangely reluctant to get up and switch on the light. Her attention slipped from the words to drift without purpose—mindlessly brushing along the top of the hedge opposite, as if along a length of scratchy black wool—until seized by the neck and marched back forcibly to the story.

Deep in the jungle slumbered a ruined city: collapsed shrines, vine-choked tanks and terraces, decaying chambers full of gold and jewels about which no one, including Mowgli, gave a fig. Within the ruin dwelt the snakes that Kaa the python referred to, rather contemptuously, as The Poison People. And as she read on, Mowgli’s jungle began to bleed stealthily into the humid, half-tropical darkness of her own back yard, infecting it with a wild, shadowy, dangerous feel: frogs singing, birds screaming in the creeper-draped trees. Mowgli was a boy; but he was also a wolf. And she was herself—Harriet—but partly something else.

Black wings glided over her. Empty space. Harriet’s thoughts sank and trailed into silence. Suddenly, she was not sure how long she had been lying in the swing. Why wasn’t she in her bed? Was it later than she thought? A darkness slid across her mind … black wind … cold.…

She started, so hard that the swing lurched—something flapping in her face, something oily, struggling, she couldn’t get her breath.…

Frantically, she slapped and batted at the air, floundering in space and the swing creaking and not knowing which way was up or down until, somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the bang she’d just heard was her library book, fallen to the floor.

Harriet stopped struggling and lay still. The swing’s violent rocking slowed again, and quieted, the boards of the porch ceiling sweeping slower and slower overhead and at last coming to a stop. In the glassy stillness she lay there, thinking. If she hadn’t come along, the bird would have died anyway, but that didn’t change the fact that it was she who had actually killed it.

The library book lay open and face up upon the floorboards. She rolled on her stomach to reach for it. A car swung around the corner and down George Street; and as the headlights swept across the porch, an illustration of the White Cobra was illumined, like a road sign flashing up suddenly at night, with the caption beneath:

They came to take the treasure away many years ago.

I spoke to them in the dark, and they lay still.

Harriet rolled back over and lay very still for a number of minutes; she stood, creakily, and stretched her arms over her head. Then she limped inside, through the too-bright dining room, where Allison sat alone at the dining-room table eating cold mashed potatoes from a white bowl.

Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.

Harriet walked through to the kitchen, to the wall phone, and dialed Hely’s house. Four rings. Five. Then someone picked up. Gabble of noise in the background. “No, you look better without it,” said Hely’s mother to someone, and then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

“It’s Harriet. May I speak to Hely, please?”

“Harriet! Of course you can, Sweet Pea.…” The receiver dropped. Harriet, her eyes still unaccustomed to the light, blinked at the dining-room chair which still stood by the refrigerator. Hely’s mother’s little nicknames and endearments always caught her by surprise: sweet pea was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.

Commotion: a scraped chair, Pemberton’s insinuating laughter. Hely’s irritated whine rose above it, piercingly.

A door slammed. “Hey!” His voice was gruff but excited. “Harriet?”

She caught the receiver between her ear and shoulder and turned to face the wall. “Hely, if we tried, do you think we could catch a poisonous snake?”

There was an awestruck silence, during which Harriet realized, with pleasure, he understood exactly what she was getting at.

————

“Copperheads? Cottonmouths? Which is more poisonous?”

It was several hours later and they were sitting on the back steps of Harriet’s house in the dark. Hely had gone nearly berserk waiting for the birthday excitement to die down so he could slip out and meet her. His mother—made suspicious by his vanished appetite—had leapt to the humiliating assumption that he was constipated and had hovered for ages querying him about his toilet intimacies, offering him laxatives. After she’d finally kissed him goodnight, reluctantly, and gone upstairs with his father, he’d lain open-eyed and stiff beneath the covers for half an hour or more, as zinged-up as if he’d drunk a gallon of Coca-Cola, as if he’d just seen the new James Bond movie, as if it was Christmas Eve.

Sneaking out of the house—tiptoeing down the hall, easing the squeaky back door open, an inch at a time—had zinged him up even more. After the purring, air-conditioned chill of his bedroom, the night air pressed heavy and very hot; his hair was stuck to the back of his neck and he couldn’t quite catch his breath. Harriet, on the step below, sat with her knees under her chin eating a cold chicken leg that he’d brought her from his house.

“What’s the difference between a cottonmouth and a copperhead?” she said. Her lips, in the moonlight, were slightly greasy from the chicken.

“I thought it was all just one damn snake,” said Hely. He felt delirious.

“Copperheads are different. It’s cottonmouths and water moccasins that are the same snake.”

“A water moccasin will attack you if it feels like it,” said Hely gladly, repeating, word for word, something Pemberton had said to him a couple of hours earlier when Hely had questioned him. Hely was deathly afraid of snakes and did not even like to look at pictures of snakes in the encyclopedia. “They’re real aggressive.”

“Do they stay in the water all the time?”

“A copperhead is about two feet long, real thin, real red,” said Hely, repeating something else that Pemberton had said since he didn’t know the answer to her question. “They don’t like the water.”

“Would he be easier to catch?”

“Oh yeah,” said Hely, though he had no idea. Whenever Hely came across a snake he knew—unerringly, regardless of size or color, from the point or roundness of its head—whether it was poisonous or not, but that was as far as his knowledge went. All his life, he had called all poisonous snakes moccasin, and any poisonous snake on land was, in his mind, simply a water moccasin that wasn’t in water at the moment.

Harriet threw the chicken bone off the side of the steps and, after wiping her fingers on her bare shins, opened the paper towel and began to eat the slice of birthday cake Hely had brought. Neither child spoke for some moments. Even in the daytime, a dingy, shut-up vapor of neglect hung over Harriet’s back yard, which was tarnished-looking somehow, and colder than the other yards on George Street. And at night, when the sags and tangles and rat’s nests of vegetation blackened, and massed together, it practically twitched with hidden life. Mississippi was full of snakes. All their lives Hely and Harriet had heard stories of fishermen bitten by cottonmouths twining up paddles or tumbling into canoes from low, overhanging trees; of plumbers and exterminators and furnace repairmen, bitten beneath houses; of water skiers toppling into submerged nests of moccasins, floating up blotched and glassy-eyed, swollen so tight that they bobbed in the wash of the motorboat like blow-up pool toys. They both knew not to walk in the woods in the summer without boots and long pants, never to turn over big rocks or step over big logs without looking first on the other side, to stay away from tall grass and brush piles and swampy water and culverts and crawl-spaces and suspicious holes. Hely reflected, not without discomfort, on his mother’s repeated warnings to be careful of the overgrown hedges, the dank, long-abandoned goldfish pond and the rotted lumber piles in Harriet’s yard. It’s not her fault, she said, her mother doesn’t keep the place cleaned up like she should, just don’t you let me catch you running around barefoot over there.…

“There’s a nest of snakes—little red ones like you say—under the hedge. Chester says they’re poison. Last winter when the ground froze, I found a ball of them like so—” she drew a softball-sized circle in mid-air. “With ice on them.”

“Who’s scared of dead snakes?”

“They weren’t dead. Chester said they’d come to life if they thawed out.”

“Ugh!”

“He set the whole ball of them on fire.” It was a memory that had stayed with Harriet a little too vividly. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Chester, in high boots, splashing the snakes with gasoline out in the flat, wintry yard, holding the gas can from his body at arm’s length. After he threw the match, the flame was a surreal, orange ball that cast no warmth or light upon the dull greeny-black of the hedge behind. Even at that distance, the snakes had seemed to writhe, glowing suddenly into a horrible life; one in particular had separated its head from the mass and weaved back and forth blindly, like a windshield wiper on a car. As they burned, they’d made a hideous crackling noise, one of the worst noises Harriet had ever heard. All the rest of that winter and most of the spring there’d been a small pile of greasy ash and blackened vertebrae in the spot.

Absent-mindedly, she picked up the piece of birthday cake, then put it down again. “That kind of snake,” she said, “Chester told me, you can’t really get rid of them. They might go away for a little while if you really get after them, but once they get to living in a place and liking it, they’ll come back sooner or later.”

Hely was thinking of all the times that he had taken the shortcut through that hedge. Without his shoes on. Aloud, he said: “Do you know that Reptile Playland out on the old highway? Near the Petrified Forest? It’s a gas station, too. Creepy old hare-lip guy runs it.”

Harriet turned to stare at him. “You’ve been there?”

“Yep.”

“You mean your mother stopped there?”

“Gosh no,” said Hely, slightly embarrassed. “Just Pem and me. On the way back from a ball game.” Even Pemberton, even Pem, had not really seemed all that keen on stopping at the Reptile Playland. They’d been low on gas.

“I never knew anybody who actually went there.”

“The man there is scary. He’s got tattoos of snakes all up and down his arms.” And scars, too, like he’d been bitten plenty of times, Hely had noticed while he was filling up the tank. And no teeth, and no dentures, either—which had given his grin a soft, horrible, snake-like quality. Worst of all, a boa constrictor had been twined around his neck: want to pet him, son? he’d said, leaning into the car, pinning Hely with his flat, sun-dazzled eyes.

“What’s it like? The Reptile Playland?”

“Stinks. Like fish. I touched a boa constrictor,” he added. He’d been afraid not to; he’d been afraid that the snake man might throw it on him if he didn’t. “It was cold. Like a car seat in winter.”

“How many snakes does he have?”

“Oh, man. Snakes in fish tanks, this whole wall of them. Then a ton more of snakes just laying out free. Out in this fenced part called the Rattlesnake Ranch? There was another building out in the back with words and pictures and junk painted all over the sides.”

“What kept them from climbing out?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t moving around too much. They looked sort of sick.”

“I don’t want a sick snake.”

A strange thought struck Hely. What if Harriet’s brother hadn’t died when she was little? If he was alive, he might be like Pemberton: teasing her, messing with her stuff. She probably wouldn’t even like him much.

He pulled his yellow hair up in a ponytail with one hand, fanned the back of his neck with the other. “I’d rather have a slow snake than one of those fast ones that follow your ass,” he said cheerfully. “One time I saw on TV about Black Mambas? They’re about ten feet long? And what they do, is, they raise up on their first eight feet and chase after you about twenty miles an hour with their mouths wide open, and when they catch you,” he said, raising his voice over Harriet’s, “what they do is, they hit you right in the face.”

“Does he have one of those?”

“He has every snake in the world. Plus, I forgot to say, they’re so poisonous you die in ten seconds. Forget about the snakebite kit. You have had it.”

Harriet’s silence was overpowering. With her dark hair, and her arms around her knees, she looked like a little Chinese pirate.

“You know what we need?” she said presently. “A car.”

“Yeah!” said Hely, brightly, after a sharp, stunned pause, cursing himself for bragging to her that he knew how to drive.

He glanced at her, sideways, then leaned back stiff-armed on his palms and looked at the stars. Can’t or no was never what you wanted to have to say to Harriet. He had seen her jump off rooftops, attack kids twice her size, kick and bite the nurses during the five-in-one booster inoculations in kindergarten.

Not knowing what to say, he rubbed his eyes. He was sleepy, but unpleasantly so—hot, and prickly, and like he was going to have nightmares. He thought of the skinned rattlesnake he’d seen hanging from a fence post at the Reptile Playland: red, muscular, twined with blue veins.

“Harriet,” he said, aloud, “wouldn’t it be easier to call the cops?”

“It would be a lot easier,” she said without missing a beat, and he felt a wave of affection for her. Good old Harriet: you could snap your fingers and change the subject just like that, and there she was, she stayed right with you.

“I think that’s what we should do, then. We can call from that pay phone by City Hall and say we know who killed your brother. I know how to talk in a voice exactly like an old woman.”

Harriet looked at him like he was insane.

“Why should I let other people punish him?” she said.

The expression on her face made him uncomfortable. Hely glanced away. His eyes lit on the greasy paper towel on the steps, with the half-eaten cake lying on top of it. For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.

————

The copperhead was small, only a little over a foot long, and by far the smallest of the five that Hely and Harriet had spotted that morning within the space of an hour. It was lying very quietly, in a slack S shape, in some sparse weeds coming up through a layer of builder’s sand just off the cul-de-sac in Oak Lawn Estates, a housing development out past the Country Club.

All the houses in Oak Lawn were less than seven years old: mock Tudor, blocky ranch and contemporary, even a couple of fake antebellums of new, spanking-red brick, with ornamental columns tacked on to their facades. Though big, and fairly expensive, their newness gave them a raw, unfriendly feel. In the back of the subdivision, where Hely and Harriet had parked their bicycles, many of the houses were still under construction—barren, staked-off plots, stacked with tarpaper and lumber, sheetrock and insulation, bracketed with skeletons of new yellow pine through which the sky streamed a feverish blue.

Unlike shady old George Street, built before the turn of the century, there were few trees of any size and no sidewalks at all. Virtually every scrap of vegetation had toppled to the chainsaw and the bulldozer: water oaks, post oaks, some of which—according to an arborist from the state university who led a doomed attempt to save them—were standing when La Salle came down the Mississippi River in 1682. Most of the topsoil their roots had held in place had washed into the creek and down the river. The hard-pan had been bulldozed down into low-lying areas to make the land level, and little would grow in the poor, sour-smelling earth that was left. Grass sprouted sparsely, if at all; the trucked-in magnolias and dogwoods withered swiftly and died down to sticks, protruding from hopeful circles of mulch and decorative edging. The baked expanses of clay—red as Mars, littered with sand and sawdust—butted starkly against the very margin of the asphalt, which was so black and so new that it still looked sticky. Behind, to the south, lay a teeming marsh, which rose and flooded the development each spring.

The houses in Oak Lawn Estates were mostly owned by up-and-comers: developers and politicians and real-estate agents, ambitious young marrieds fleeing sharecropper origins in the towns of the Piney Woods or the clay hills. As if in hatred for their rural origins, they had methodically paved over every available surface and ripped out every native tree.

But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained—legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring; and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.

And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes—big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared the smell of snake musk to fish guts—buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake’s nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes. Harriet had smelled snake-stink herself, plenty of times (most strongly in the Reptile House at the Memphis Zoo, and from frightened snakes imprisoned in gallon jars in the science classroom) but also wafting acrid and reasty from murky creek-banks and shallow lakes, from culverts and steaming mud-flats in August and—every now and then, in very hot weather, after a rain—in her own yard.

Harriet’s jeans and her long-sleeved shirt were soaked with sweat. Since there were scarcely any trees in the subdivision or the marsh behind, she wore a straw hat to keep from getting sunstroke, but the sun beat down white and fierce like the very wrath of God. She felt faint with heat and apprehension. All morning long, she had maintained a stoic front while Hely—who was too proud to wear a hat, and had the start of a blistering sunburn—skipped about and babbled intermittently about a James Bond movie which had to do with drug rings, and fortunetellers, and deadly tropical snakes. On the bike ride out, he’d bored her to death by gabbing about the stunt rider Evel Knievel and a Saturday-morning cartoon called Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.

“You should have seen it,” he was saying now, raking back with agitated repetitiveness the dripping strings of hair that fell in his face, “oh man, James Bond, he burned that snake right up. He’s got a can of deodorant or something? So when he sees the snake in the mirror, he spins around like this, and holds his cigar up to the spray can, and pow, that fire shoots out across the room like this, whoosh—”

He staggered backward—trilling his lips—while Harriet considered the dozing copperhead and tried hard to think how they should proceed. They had set off hunting equipped with Hely’s BB gun, two whittled, forked sticks, a field guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeastern United States, Chester’s garden gloves, a tourniquet, a pocket knife and change for a phone call in case either of them was bitten, and an old tin lunchbox of Allison’s (Campus Queen, painted with pony-tailed cheerleaders and pert beauty contestants in tiaras) into the lid of which Harriet, with difficulty, had poked a few air holes with a screwdriver. The plan was to sneak up on the snake—preferably, after it struck, before it recollected itself—and pin it behind the head with the forked stick. They would then grab it close behind the head (very close, so it couldn’t snap around and bite) and throw it in the lunchbox and buckle it shut.

But all this was easier said than done. The first snakes they’d spotted—three young copperheads, rust-red and glistening, roasting themselves all together on a concrete slab—they’d been too scared to approach. Hely tossed a chunk of brick in their midst. Two darted off, in opposite directions; the remaining one was infuriated and began to strike, low and repeatedly, at the brick, at the air, at anything that caught its attention.

Both children were horrified. Circling, cagily, forked sticks at arm’s length, they darted quickly towards it and just as quickly back when the thing whipped around to strike—first on one side, then the other, fighting them off in all directions. Harriet was so frightened that she felt she might black out. Hely jabbed at it, and missed; the snake whipped back and lashed at him its full length and Harriet, with a stifled cry, pinned the back of its head with the forked stick. Immediately, with shocking violence, it began to thrash the remaining two feet of its length as if possessed by the Devil. Harriet, flabbergasted with revulsion, leapt back to keep its tail from slapping her legs; with a wriggle, the thing muscled free—toward Hely, who danced back and shrieked like he’d been impaled with an iron spike—and shot into the parched weeds.

One thing about Oak Lawn Estates: if a child—or anyone—had screamed long and high and hard like that on George Street, Mrs. Fountain, Mrs. Godfrey, Ida Rhew, and half a dozen housekeepers would have flown outside in a heartbeat (“Children! Leave that snake alone! Scat!”). And they would mean business, and not stand for any back talk, and stand watch at their kitchen windows after they went back inside just to make sure. But things were different at Oak Lawn Estates. The houses had a frightening sealed-off quality, like bunkers or mausoleums. People didn’t know each other. Out here at Oak Lawn you could scream your head off, some convict could be strangling you with a piece of barbed wire, and nobody would come outside to see what was going on. In the intense, heat-vibrant silence, manic laughter from a TV game show wafted eerily from the nearest house: a shuttered hacienda, hunched defensively in a raw plot just beyond the pine skeletons. Dark windows. A gleaming new Buick was parked in the sand-strewn car-port.

“Ann Kendall? Come on down!” Wild audience applause.

Who was in that house? thought Harriet, dazed, shading her eyes with one hand. A drunk dad who hadn’t gone to his job? Some sluggish Junior League mother, like the sloppy young mothers that Allison sometimes babysat for out here, lying in a darkened room with the TV on and the laundry undone?

“I can’t stand The Price Is Right,” said Hely, stumbling backwards with a little moan, and looking on the ground with an agitated, jerky movement as he did so. “They have money and cars on Tattletales.”

“I like Jeopardy.”

Hely wasn’t listening. Energetically, he thrashed about in the weeds with his forked stick. “From Russia with love …” he crooned; and then, again, because he couldn’t remember the words: “From Russia with LOVE.…”

They had not long to look before finding a fourth snake, a moccasin: waxy, liver-yellow, no longer in its body than the copperheads but thicker than Harriet’s arm. Hely—who, despite his apprehension, insisted upon leading the way—nearly stepped on it. Like a spring, it popped up and struck, just missing his calf; Hely, his reflexes electrified by the previous encounter, lunged back and pinned it in one stab. “Hah!” he shouted.

Harriet laughed aloud; with trembling hands, she fumbled with the catch of the Campus Queen lunchbox. This snake was slower and less nimble. Testily, it swept its thick body—an awful, corrupt yellow—back and forth across the ground. But it was much larger than the copperheads; would it fit into Campus Queen? Hely, so terrified that he was laughing too, high and hysterical, spread his fingers and bent to grab it—

“The head!” cried Harriet, dropping the lunchbox with a clatter.

Hely jumped back. The stick fell from his hand. The moccasin lay still. Then, very smoothly, it pulled its head up and regarded them with its slitted pupils for a long ice-cold moment before it opened its mouth (eerie white inside) and went for them.

They turned and ran, knocking into each other—afraid of stumbling in a ditch, and yet too afraid to look at the ground—with the undergrowth crashing beneath their sneakers and the smell of trampled bitterweed eddying up pungent all around them in the heat like the smell of fear itself.

A ditch, filled with brackish water that squiggled with tadpoles, cut them off from the asphalt. The concrete sides were slick and mossy, too wide to clear with a single leap. They skidded down (the smell they churned up, sewage and fishy rot, catapulted them both into an ecstasy of coughing), fell forward on their hands, scrambled up to the other side. When they heaved themselves up, and turned—tears streaming down their faces—to look back at the way they’d just come, they saw only the path they’d beaten through the yellow-flowered scraggle of bitterweed, and the melancholy pastels of the dropped lunchbox, farther back.

Panting, beet-red, exhausted, they swayed like drunks. Though they both felt as if they might pass out, the ground was neither comfortable nor safe and there was no place else to sit. A tadpole large enough to have legs had splashed out of the ditch and was stranded, twitching, on the road, and its flip-flops, its slimy skin rasping against the asphalt, bumped Harriet into a fresh fit of gagging.

Mindless of their usual grammar-school etiquette—which kept them rigidly two feet apart, except to shove or punch—they clung to each other for balance: Harriet without thought of looking a coward, Hely without thought of trying to kiss her or scare her. Their jeans—clustered with burrs, sticky with beggar’s lice—were unpleasantly heavy, soaked and stinking with the ditch water. Hely, bent double, was making noises like he might vomit.

“Are you okay?” said Harriet—and retched when she saw on his sleeve a yellow-green clot of tadpole guts.

Hely—gagging, repetitively, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball—shrugged away and started back to retrieve the dropped stick and the lunch box.

Harriet caught the back of his sweat-soaked shirt. “Hang on,” she managed to say.

They sat astraddle their bicycles to rest—Hely’s Sting-Ray with the goat horn handlebars and the banana seat, Harriet’s Western Flyer, which had been Robin’s—both breathing hard and not talking. After the banging of their hearts had slowed, and they each had swallowed a grim little drink of lukewarm, plastic-tasting water from Hely’s canteen, they set out into the field again, this time armed with Hely’s BB rifle.

Hely’s stunned silence had given way to theatrics. Loudly, with dramatic gestures, he bragged about how he was going to catch the water moccasin and what he was going to do to it when he caught it: shoot it in the face, swing it in the air, snap it like a whip, chop it in two, ride over the pieces with his bicycle. His face was scarlet, his breath fast and shallow; every now and then, he fired a shot into the weeds and had to stop and pump ferociously on the air rifle—huff huff huff—to work his pressure up again.

They had shunned the ditch and were heading toward the houses under construction, where it was easier to clamber up onto the road if they were menaced. Harriet’s head ached and her hands felt cold and sticky. Hely—the BB gun swinging from the strap across his shoulder—paced back and forth, jabbering, punching at the air, oblivious to the quiet part in the thin grass not three feet from his sneaker where lay (unobtrusively, in a nearly straight line) what Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeast United States would call a “juvenile” copperhead.

“So this briefcase that shoots teargas when you open it? Well it’s got bullets too, and a knife that pops out the side—”

Harriet’s head felt swimmy. She wished that she had a dollar for every time she’d heard Hely talk about the briefcase in From Russia with Love that shot bullets and teargas.

She closed her eyes and said: “Listen, you grabbed that other snake too low. He would have bit you.”

“Shut up!” cried Hely, after a moment’s angry pause. “It’s your fault. I had him! If you hadn’t—”

“Watch out. Behind you.”

“Moccasin?” He crouched and swung the gun round. “Where? Show me the son of a bitch.”

“There,” said Harriet—and then, stepping forward in exasperation to point, again, “there.” Blindly the pointed head wove up—exposing the pale underside of its muscled jaw—then settled again with a sort of sifting movement.

“Jeez, that’s just a little one,” said Hely, disappointed, leaning forward to peer at it.

“It doesn’t matter how—Hey,” she said, skipping awkwardly to the side as the copperhead struck out at her ankle in a red streak.

A shower of boiled peanuts flew past, and then the whole plastic bag of them sailed over her shoulder and plopped to the ground. Harriet was staggering, off balance and hopping on one foot, and then the copperhead (whose whereabouts she’d momentarily lost track of) popped out at her again.

A BB pinged harmlessly against her sneaker; another stung her calf and she yelped and jumped back as they cracked in the dust around her feet. But the snake was excited now, vigorously pressing its attack even under fire; repeatedly, it struck at her feet, lashing out again and again with stringent aim.

Dizzy, half-delirious, she scrambled to the asphalt. She smeared her forearm across her face (transparent blobs pulsing merrily across her sun-dazed vision, bumping and merging, like magnified amoebas in a drop of pond water) and as her sight cleared, she became aware that the little copperhead had lifted his head and was regarding her without surprise or emotion from a distance of about four feet.

Hely, in his frenzy, had jammed the BB gun. Shouting nonsense, he dropped it and ran to get the stick.

“Wait a minute.” With a tug of effort, she pulled free from the snake’s icy gaze, clear as churchbells; what’s wrong with me? she thought, weakly, stumbling back into the shimmering center of the road, heatstroke?

“Oh, jeez.” Hely’s voice, coming from she didn’t know where. “Harriet?”

“Wait.” Hardly aware what she was doing (her knees were loose and clumsy, like they belonged to a marionette she didn’t know how to work) she stepped back again, and then sat down hard on the hot asphalt.

“You okay, dude?”

“Leave me alone,” Harriet heard herself say.

The sun sizzled red through her closed eyelids. An afterburn of the snake’s eyes glowed against them, in malevolent negative: black for the iris, acid-yellow for the slashed pupil. She was breathing through her mouth, and the odor of her sewage-soaked trousers was so strong in the heat that she could taste it; suddenly she realized that she wasn’t safe on the ground; she tried to scramble to her feet but the ground slid away—

“Harriet!” Hely’s voice, a long way off. “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”

She blinked; the white light stung, like lemon juice squirted in her eyes, and it was horrible to be so hot, and so blind, and so confused in her arms and legs.…

The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back. The sky blazed a cloudless, heartless blue. Time seemed to have skipped a half-beat, as if she’d dozed and awakened with a snap of her head in the same instant. A heavy presence darkened her vision. Panic-stricken, she threw both arms over her face, but the hovering darkness only shifted, and pressed in, more insistently, from the other side.

“Come on, Harriet. It’s just water.” She heard the words, in the back of her mind, and yet did not hear them. Then—quite unexpectedly—something cold touched the corner of her mouth; and Harriet floundered away from it, screaming as loudly as she could.

————

“You two are nuts,” Pemberton said. “Riding your bikes out to this shit subdivision? It must be a hundred degrees.”

Harriet, flat on her back in the rear seat of Pem’s Cadillac, watched the sky rush past overhead through a cool lace-work of tree branches. The trees meant that they had turned out of shadeless Oak Lawn back onto good old County Line Road.

She shut her eyes. Loud rock music blared from the stereo speakers; patches of shade—sporadic, fluttering—drove and flickered against the red of her closed eyelids.

“The courts are deserted,” said Pem above the wind and the music. “Nobody in the pool, even. Everybody’s in the clubhouse watching One Life to Live.”

The dime for the phone call had come in handy after all. Hely—very heroically, because he was nearly as panicked and sun-sick as Harriet—had hopped on his bicycle and despite his faintness and the cramps in his legs had pedalled nearly half a mile to the pay phone in the parking lot of Jiffy Qwik-Mart. But Harriet, who’d had a hellish wait of it, roasting on the asphalt at the end of the snake-infested cul-de-sac all by herself for forty minutes, was too hot and woozy to feel very grateful for this.

She sat up a little, enough to see Pemberton’s hair—crinkly and frizzed from the pool chemicals—blown back and snapping like a scrappy yellow banner. Even from the back seat, she could smell his acrid and distinctly adult smell: sweat, sharp and masculine under the coconut suntan lotion, mingled with cigarettes and something like incense.

“Why were you all the way out at Oak Lawn? Do you know somebody there?”

“Naw,” said Hely, in the jaded monotone he adopted around his brother.

“What were yall doing, then?”

“Hunting for snakes to—Quit,” he snapped, his hand flying up, as Harriet yanked a handful of his hair.

“Well, if you feel like catching a snake, that’s the place to do it,” said Pemberton lazily. “Wayne that does maintenance at the Country Club told me that when they were landscaping a pool for some lady out there, the crew killed five dozen snakes. In one yard.”

“Poisonous snakes?”

“Who cares? I wouldn’t live out in that hell hole for a million dollars,” said Pemberton, with a contemptuous, princely toss of his head. “This same guy Wayne said that the exterminator found three hundred of them living under one of those shitty houses. One house. Soon as there’s a flood too big for the Corps of Engineers to sandbag you’re going to have every car-pool mommy out there bit to pieces.”

“I caught a moccasin,” said Hely primly.

“Yeah, right. What’d you do with him?”

“I went on and let him go.”

“I’ll bet you did.” Pemberton glanced at him sideways. “He come after you?”

“Naw.” Hely eased down a little in his seat.

“Well, I don’t care what anybody says about the snake being more scared of you than you are of it. Water moccasins are vicious. They’ll chase your ass. One time a big bull moccasin attacked me and Tink Pittmon in Oktobeha Lake, and I mean, we weren’t anywhere near him, he swam after us clear across the lake.” Pem made a sinuous, swishing movement with his hand. “All you could see on the water was that white mouth open. Then bam bam with his head, like a battering ram, up against the aluminum side of the canoe. People were standing on the pier watching it.”

“What’d you do?” said Harriet, who was sitting up now and leaning over the front seat.

“Well, there you are, Tiger. I thought we were going to have to carry you to the doctor.” Pem’s face, in the rear-view mirror, caught her by surprise: chalk-white lips and white sun cream down his nose, a deep sunburn that reminded her of the frost-bitten faces of Scott’s polar party.

“So you like to hunt snakes?” he said, to Harriet’s reflection.

“No,” said Harriet, at once defiant of and confused by his bemused manner. She retreated into the back seat.

“Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

Pem laughed. “You’re tough, Harriet,” he said. “You’re all right. I’ll tell you, though, you guys are nuts with that forked-stick business. What you want to do is get yourself a length of aluminum pipe and run a loop of clothesline through it. All you have to do is slip the loop over his head and pull the ends tight. Then you’ve got him. You can take him in a jar to the Science Fair and really impress everybody” (swiftly, he shot out his right arm and thumped Hely on the head) “right?”

“Shut up!” screamed Hely, rubbing angrily at his ear. Pem would never let Hely forget the butterfly cocoon he’d brought to school for his Science Fair project. He’d spent six weeks nursing it, reading books, taking notes, keeping it at the right temperature and doing everything he was supposed to; but when he finally brought the unhatched chrysalis to school on the day of the Science Fair—nestled tenderly in a jewelry box on a square of cotton—it turned out not to be a cocoon at all but a petrified cat turd.

“Maybe you just thought you caught a water moccasin,” said Pemberton, laughing, raising his voice above the hot stream of insults that Hely pelted at him. “Maybe it wasn’t a snake at all. A big fresh dog turd curled up in the grass can sure look a whole lot like—”

“—Like you,” shouted Hely, raining blows on his brother’s shoulder.

————

“I said, drop the subject, all right?” said Hely for what seemed like the tenth time.

He and Harriet were in the deep end of the pool, holding on to the side. The afternoon shadows were growing long. Five or six little kids—ignoring a fat, distracted mother who paced by the side, pleading with them to get out—yelled and splashed in the shallow end. On the side near the bar, a group of high-school girls in bikinis were stretched out on lounge chairs with towels over their shoulders, giggling and talking. Pemberton was off duty. Hely almost never swam while Pem was lifeguarding because Pem picked on him, shouting insults and unfair commands from his chair on high (like “No running by the pool!” when Hely wasn’t running, only walking fast), so he was very careful about checking Pemberton’s weekly schedule, taped to the refrigerator, before going down to the pool. And this was a pain because in the summer he wanted to swim every day.

“Stupid,” he muttered, thinking of Pem. He was still fuming about Pem mentioning the cat turd at the Science Fair.

Harriet looked at him with a blank and rather fishy expression. Her hair was plastered flat and slick against her skull; her face was criss-crossed with wavering streams of light that made her look small-eyed and ugly. Hely had been irritated with her all afternoon; without his noticing it, his embarrassment and discomfort had turned into resentment and, now, he felt a surge of anger. Harriet had laughed about the cat turd too, along with the teachers and the judges and everybody else at the science fair, and it made him boiling mad all over again just to remember it.

She was still looking at him. He made bug eyes at her. “What are you looking at?” he said.

Harriet kicked off from the side of the pool and—rather ostentatiously—did a backwards somersault. Big deal, thought Hely. Next thing you knew, she’d be wanting to have contests where they held their breath underwater, a game Hely couldn’t stand because she was good at it and he wasn’t.

When she came up again he pretended not to notice that she was annoyed. Nonchalantly, he squirted a jet of water at her—a well-aimed spurt that hit her right in the eye.

“I’m looking over my dead dog Rover,” he sang, in a sugary voice that he knew she hated:

That I overlooked before

One leg is missing

One leg is gone—

“Don’t come with me tomorrow, then. I’d rather go by myself.”

“One leg is scattered all over the lawn …” sang Hely, right over her, gazing up into the air with a rapt goody-two-shoes expression.

“I don’t care if you come or not.”

“At least I don’t fall down on the ground screaming like a big fat baby.” He fluttered his eyelashes. “ ‘Oh, Hely! Save me, save me!’ ” he cried in a high-pitched voice that made the high-school girls on the other side of the pool start laughing.

A sheet of water hit him in the face.

He squirted her with his fist, expertly, and ducked her answering squirt. “Harriet. Hey, Harriet,” he said, in a babyish voice. He felt unaccountably pleased with himself for having stirred her up. “Let’s play horsie, okay? I’ll be the front end, and you be yourself.”

Triumphantly, he kicked off—evading retaliation—and swam out to the middle of the pool, fast, with much noisy splashing. He had a blistering sunburn, and the pool chemicals burned his face like acid, but he’d drunk five Coca-Colas that afternoon (three when he got home, parched and exhausted; two more, with crushed ice and peppermint-striped straws, from the concession stand at the swimming pool) and his ears roared and the sugar trilled high and quick through his pulse. He felt exhilarated. Often, before, Harriet’s recklessness had shamed him. But though the snake hunt had stricken him, temporarily, rambling and crack-brained with terror, something in him still rejoiced over her fainting fit.

He burst exuberantly to the surface, spitting and treading water. When he blinked the sting from his eyes he realized that Harriet was no longer in the pool. Then he saw her, far away, walking rapidly towards the ladies’ locker room with her head down and a zig-zag of wet footprints on the concrete behind her.

“Harriet!” he shouted without thinking, and got a mouthful of water for his carelessness; he’d forgotten that he was in over his head.

————

The sky was dove-gray and the evening air heavy and soft. Down on the sidewalk Harriet still heard, faintly, the shouts of the little kids in the shallow end of the pool. A small breeze raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. She drew her towel closer and began to walk home, very quickly.

A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.

None of them glanced at Harriet. She stared at the sidewalk as they shot past, in a jingly rocket-trail of pop music, her cheeks burning with an angry and mysterious shame. If Hely had been walking with her, they would almost certainly have slowed down to yell something, since Lisa and Pam both had crushes on Pemberton. But they probably didn’t know who Harriet was, though they’d been in Allison’s class since nursery school. In a collage by Allison’s bed at home were pasted happy kindergarten photographs of Allison playing London Bridge with Pam McCormick and Lisa Leavitt; of Allison and Ginger Herbert—red-nosed, laughing, the best of friends—holding hands in somebody’s wintry back yard. Labored first-grade valentines, printed in pencil: “2 Hugs 2 Kisses 4 you. Love Ginger!!!” To reconcile all this affection with the current Allison, and the current Ginger (gloved, glossy-lipped in chiffon beneath an arch of fake flowers) was inconceivable. Allison was as pretty as any of them (and a lot prettier than Sissy Arnold, who had long, witchy teeth and the body of a weasel) but somehow she’d devolved from the childhood friend and fellow of these princesses into a nonentity, someone who never got called except about missed homework assignments. It was the same with their mother. Though she’d been a sorority girl, popular, voted Best Dressed in her college class, she also had a whole lot of friends who didn’t call any more. The Thorntons and the Bowmonts—who at one time had played cards with Harriet’s parents every week, and shared vacation cabins with them on the Gulf Coast—didn’t come by now even when Harriet’s father was in town. There was a forced note about their friendliness when they ran into Harriet’s mother at church, the husbands overly hearty, a sort of shrieking bright vivacity in the women’s voices, and none of them ever quite looked Harriet’s mother in the eye. Ginger and the other girls on the school bus treated Allison in a similar fashion: bright chatty voices, but eyes averted, as if Allison carried an infection they might catch.

Harriet (staring bleakly at the sidewalk) was distracted from these thoughts by a gargling noise. Poor retarded Curtis Ratliff—who roamed the streets of Alexandria ceaselessly in the summertime squirting cats and cars with his water pistol—was lumbering across the road towards her. When he saw her looking at him, a wide smile broke across his smashed face.

“Hat!” He waved at her with both arms—the whole of his body wagging with the effort—and then began to jump up and down laboriously, feet together, as if stamping out a fire. “All wight? All wight?”

“Hello Alligator,” said Harriet, to humor him. Curtis had gone through a long phase where everybody and everything he saw was alligator: his teacher, his shoes, the school bus.

“All wight? All wight, Hat?” He wasn’t going to stop until he got an answer.

“Thank you, Curtis. I’m all right.” Though Curtis wasn’t deaf, he was a little hard of hearing, and you had to remember to speak up.

Curtis’s smile stretched even wider. His roly-poly body, his dim, sweet, toddly manner were like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

“I like cake,” he said.

“Curtis, hadn’t you better get out of the road?”

Curtis froze, hand to mouth. “Uh oh!” he crowed and then again: “Uh oh!” He bunny-hopped across the street and—with both feet, as if leaping a ditch—jumped over the curb and in front of her. “Uh oh!” he said, and dissolved into a jelly of giggles, his hands over his face.

“Sorry, you’re in my way,” Harriet said.

Through his spread fingers, Curtis peeped out at her. He was beaming so hard that his tiny dark eyes were narrowed to slits.

“Snakes bite,” he said unexpectedly.

Harriet was taken aback. Partly because of his hearing problem, Curtis didn’t speak too plain. Certainly she’d misunderstood him; certainly he’d said something else: Ask why? Cake’s nice? Bye-bye?

But before she could ask him, Curtis heaved a big, businesslike sigh and stuck his water pistol in the waistband of his stiff new denims. Then he picked up her hand and doddled it in his own large limp sticky one.

“Bite!” he said cheerfully. He pointed at himself, and to the house opposite—and then he turned and loped off down the street as Harriet—rather unnerved—blinked after him and pulled her towel a bit closer around her shoulders.

————

Though Harriet was unaware of it, poisonous snakes were also a topic of discussion less than thirty feet from where she stood: in the second-story apartment of a frame house across the street, one of several rental properties in Alexandria belonging to Roy Dial.

The house was nothing special: white, two stories, with a slat staircase running up the side so the second floor had its own entrance. This had been built by Mr. Dial, who had blocked off the inside staircase so that what had once been a single home was now two rental units. Before Mr. Dial had bought it, and cut it into apartments, the house had belonged to an old Baptist lady named Annie Mary Alford who was a retired bookkeeper for the lumber mill. After she’d fallen one rainy Sunday in the parking lot of the church and broken her hip, kindly Mr. Dial (who, as a Christian businessman, took an interest in the ailing and elderly, especially those of means who had no family to advise them) made it a special little point to visit Miss Annie Mary daily, offering canned soups, country drives, inspirational reading matter, fruits in the season, and his impartial services as executor of her estate and power of attorney.

Because Mr. Dial dutifully handed over his gains to the bursting First Baptist bank accounts, he felt himself justified in his methods. After all, was not he bringing comfort and Christian fellowship to these barren lives? Sometimes “the ladies” (as he called them) left Mr. Dial their property outright, so comforted were they by his friendly presence: but Miss Annie Mary—who, after all, had worked as a bookkeeper for forty-five years—was suspicious by both training and nature, and after her death he was shocked to discover that she—quite deceitfully, in his view—had called in a Memphis lawyer without his knowledge and made a will which entirely negated the informal little written agreement which Mr. Dial had suggested, ever so discreetly, while patting her hand at her hospital bedside.

Possibly Mr. Dial would not have purchased Miss Annie Mary’s house after her death (for it was not especially cheap) had he not accustomed himself, during her final illness, to considering it his own. After cutting the upstairs and downstairs into two different apartments, and chopping down the pecan trees and rosebushes (for trees and shrubberies meant maintenance dollars) he rented the first floor almost immediately to a couple of Mormon missionary boys. That was nearly ten years ago, and still the Mormons had it—this despite their mission’s stark failure in all that time to convert even one citizen of Alexandria to their wife-swapping Utah Jesus.

The Mormon boys believed that everyone who wasn’t a Mormon was going to Hell (“Yall sure are going to rattle around up there!” Mr. Dial liked to chortle, whenever he went around on the first of the month to collect the rent; it was a little joke he had with them). But they were clean-cut, polite boys, and would not come right out and say the word “Hell” unless pressed. They also abstained from alcohol and all tobacco products and paid their bills on time. More problematic was the upper apartment. As Mr. Dial balked at the expense of installing a second kitchen, the place was almost impossible to get rid of short of renting to blacks. In ten years the upper story had housed a photography studio, a Girl Scout headquarters, a nursery school, a trophy showroom, and a large family of Eastern Europeans who, as soon as Mr. Dial’s back was turned, moved in all their friends and relations and nearly burnt down the whole building with a hot plate.

It was in this upper apartment that Eugene Ratliff now stood—in the front room, where the linoleum and wallpaper were still badly scorched from the incident with the hot plate. He was running a nervous hand over his hair (which he wore greased back, in the vanished hoodlum style of his teen years) and gazing out the window at his retarded baby brother, who had just left the apartment and was pestering some black-headed child out on the street. On the floor behind him were a dozen dynamite boxes filled with poisonous snakes: timber rattlers, canebrake rattlers, Eastern diamondbacks; cottonmouths and copperheads and—in a box by itself—a single king cobra, all the way from India.

Against the wall, covering a burned spot, was a hand-lettered sign which Eugene had painted himself, and which his landlord Mr. Dial had made him take out of the front yard:

With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding and Spreading the Protestant Religion and enforcement of all our Civil Laws. Mister Bootlegger, Mr. Pusher, Mr. Gambler, Mr. Communist, Mr. Homewrecker and all Law Breakers: the Lord Jesus has yr Number, there are 1 thousand Eyes upon you. You had better change your ocupation before the Grand Jury of Christ. Romans 7:4 This Ministry stands strictly for Clean Living and the Sanctity of Our Homes.

Beneath this was a decal of an American flag, and the following:

The Jews and its municipalities, which are the Antichrist, have stolen our oil and our Properties. Revelations 18:3. Rev. 18:11–15. Jesus will Unite. Rev. 19:17.

Eugene’s visitor—a wiry, staring-eyed young man of twenty-two or -three, with a loose-limbed country manner and ears that stood out from his head—joined Eugene at the window. He’d done his best to slick back his short, cowlicked hair but it still stood up in unruly tufts all over his head.

“It’s the innocents such as him for who Christ shedded His blood,” he remarked. His smile was the frozen smile of the fanatical blessed, radiating either hope or idiocy, depending on how you looked at it.

“Praise God,” said Eugene, rather mechanically. Eugene found snakes unpleasant whether they were poisonous or not, but for some reason he had assumed these on the floor behind him had been milked of venom or otherwise rendered harmless—else how did hill preachers like his visitor kiss these rattlers on the lips and stuff them down their shirt fronts and pitch them back and forth across the length of their tin-roofed churches as they were said to do? Eugene himself had never seen snakes handled during a religious service (and, indeed, snake-handling was rare enough even high in the coal mining country of Kentucky, where the visitor hailed from). He had, however, seen plenty of churchgoers babbling in tongues, knocked flat on the floor and twitching in fits. He had seen devils cast out, with a smack of the palm to the sufferer’s forehead, unclean spirits coughed up in gobs of bloody spit. He had witnessed the laying on of hands, which made the lame to walk and the blind to see; and, one evening at a riverside Pentecostal service near Pickens, Mississippi, he had seen a black preacher named Cecil Dale McAllister raise a fat woman in a green pants suit from the dead.

Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed. Certainly many of those who performed wonders in His name were fakes; legions of the shady and deceitful stood constantly on the look-out for new ways to rook their fellow man, and Jesus Himself had spoken against them—but even if only five percent of the purported miracles of Christ Eugene had witnessed were genuine, was not that five percent miracle enough? The devotion with which Eugene regarded his Maker was vocal, unwavering, and driven by terror. There was no question of Christ’s power to lift the burden of the imprisoned, the oppressed and oppressive, the drunk, the bitter, the sorry. But the loyalty He demanded was absolute, for His engines of retribution were swifter than His engines of mercy.

Eugene was a minister of the Word, though affiliated with no church in particular. He preached to all who had ears to hear him, just as the prophets and John the Baptist had done. Though Eugene was rich in faith the Lord had not seen fit to bless him with charisma or oratorical skill; and sometimes the obstacles he struggled against (even in the bosom of his family) seemed insurmountable. Being forced to preach the Word in abandoned warehouses and by the side of the highway was to labor without rest among the wicked of the earth.

The hill-preacher was not Eugene’s idea. His brothers Farish and Danny had arranged the visit (“to hep your ministry”) with enough whispering and winking and low talking in the kitchen to make Eugene suspicious. Never before had Eugene laid eyes upon the visitor. His name was Loyal Reese, and he was the baby brother of Dolphus Reese, a mean Kentucky operator who had worked as a trustee alongside Eugene in the laundry room at Parchman Penitentiary while Eugene and Farish were serving time for two counts of Grand Theft Auto in the late 1960s. Dolphus was never getting out. He was in for life plus ninety-nine on racketeering and two counts of first-degree murder, which he claimed he wasn’t guilty of and had been set up for.

Dolphus and Eugene’s brother Farish were buddies, two of a kind—still kept in touch, and Eugene got the feeling that Farish, on the outside now, aided Dolphus in some of his inside schemes. Dolphus was six foot six, could drive a car like Junior Johnson and kill a man with his bare hands (he said) in half a dozen ways. But unlike the closemouthed and sullen Farish, Dolphus was a great talker. He was the lost black sheep in a family of Holiness preachers, preachers for three generations back; and Eugene had loved to hear Dolphus tell—over the roar of the great industrial washing machines in the prison laundry—tales of his boyhood in Kentucky: singing on the street corners of mountain coal towns in Christmas snowstorms; traveling around in the rattletrap school bus from which his father operated his ministry, and which the whole family lived in, for months at a time—eating potted meat from the can, sleeping on corn shucks piled in the back, the caged rattlesnakes whispering at their feet; driving town to town, one step ahead of the law, brush arbor revivals and midnight prayer meetings lit by gasoline torches, all six children clapping and dancing to tambourines and the strumming of their mother’s Sears-Roebuck guitar as their father gulped strychnine out of a mason jar, wove rattlesnakes around his arms, his neck, around his waist in a living belt—their scaly bodies weaving upwards in time with the music, as if to climb on the air—as he preached in tongues, stamping, shaking from head to foot, chanting all the while about the might of the Living God, His signs and wonders, and the terror and joy of His awful, awful love.

The visitor—Loyal Reese—was the baby of the family, the baby Eugene had heard tell of in the prison laundry, laid to rest as a newborn amongst the rattlers. He had been handling serpents since he was twelve years old; he looked as innocent as a calf, with his big country ears and his slicked-back hair, beatitude shining glassily from his brown eyes. As far as Eugene knew, none of Dolphus’s family (apart from Dolphus) had ever been in trouble with the law for any reason other than their peculiar religious practices. But Eugene was convinced that his own sniggering and malicious brothers (involved in narcotics, both of them) had some ulterior motive in arranging this visit of Dolphus’s youngest sibling—some motive, that is, apart from Eugene’s inconvenience and distress. His brothers were lazy, and as much as they loved to annoy Eugene, calling young Reese down here with all his reptiles was too much effort for a practical joke. As for young Reese himself, with his big ears and his bad skin, he seemed wholly unsuspicious: lighted violently by hope, and his calling, and only slightly puzzled by the cautious welcome Eugene had offered him.

From the window, Eugene watched his baby brother Curtis galumphing off down the street. He had not asked for the visitor, and felt confused about how to deal with the reptiles caged and hissing around the Mission. He’d envisioned them locked in a car trunk or a barn somewhere, not residing as guests in his own quarters. Eugene had stood dumbfounded as box after tarp-draped box was dragged laboriously up the stairs.

“How come you didn’t tell me these things didn’t have the poison took out of them?” he said abruptly.

Dolphus’s little brother seemed astonished. “That’s not in accordiance with the Scripture,” he said. His hill-country twang was as sharp as Dolphus’s, but without the wryness, the gamesome cordiality. “Working with the Signs, we work with the serpent as God made him.”

Eugene said, curtly: “I could have got bit.”

“Not if you had the anointment of God, my brother!”

He turned from the window, full-face, and Eugene flinched slightly at the bright impact of his gaze.

“Read the Acts of the Prophets, my Brother! The Gospel according to Mark! It’s coming a victory against the Devil here in the last days, just like it was told in the Bible times. … And these signs shall follow them that believe: they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thang—”

“These animals are dangerous.”

“His hand hath made the serpent, Brother, just as it made the little lamb.”

Eugene did not reply. He had invited trustful Curtis to wait with him at the apartment for young Reese’s arrival. Because Curtis was such a valorous puppy—stricken, bumbling uselessly to the defense when he believed his loved ones hurt or in danger—Eugene had thought to scare him by pretending to be bitten.

But the joke had been on Eugene. Now he felt ashamed of the trick he had tried to pull, especially since Curtis had reacted with great sympathy to Eugene’s shriek of terror when the rattlesnake coiled and struck the screen, spraying poison all over Eugene’s hand: stroking Eugene’s arm; inquiring, solicitously, “Bite? Bite?”

“The mark upon your face, my brother?”

“What about it?” Eugene was well aware of the gruesome red burn scar running down his face, and felt no need for strangers to call it to his attention.

“Is it not from being took in the Signs?”

“Accident,” Eugene said curtly. The injury had resulted from a concoction of lye and Crisco shortening known, in prison parlance, as Angola cold cream. A vicious little trick-bag named Weems—from Cascilla, Mississippi, in for aggravated assault—had thrown it in Eugene’s face in a dispute over a pack of cigarettes. It was while Eugene was recovering from this burn that the Lord had appeared to Eugene in the dark of the night and informed him of his mission in the world; and Eugene had come out of the infirmary with his sight restored and all set to forgive his persecutor; but Weems was dead. Another disgruntled prisoner had cut Weems’s throat with a razor blade melted into the end of a toothbrush—an act which only strengthened Eugene’s new faith in the mighty turbines of Providence.

“We all of us who love Him,” said Loyal, “bear His mark.” And he held out his hands, pocked and hatched with scar tissue. One finger—spotted with black—was horribly bulbed at the tip and another cut short to a nub.

“Here’s the thing,” Loyal said. “We got to be willing to die for Him like He was willing to die for us. And when we take up the deadly serpent and handle it in His name, we show our love for Him just as He shown it for you and me.”

Eugene was touched. Obviously the boy was sincere—no sideshow performer, but a man who lived his beliefs, who offered up his life to Christ like the martyrs of old. But just then they were disturbed very suddenly by a knock at the door, a series of quick, jaunty little raps: tap tap tap tap.

Eugene tossed his chin at the visitor; their gazes parted. For several moments, all was stillness except their breath and the dry, whispery rattle from the dynamite crates—a hideous noise, so delicate that Eugene had not been aware of it before.

Tap tap tap tap tap. Again came the knock, prissy and self-important—Roy Dial, had to be. Eugene was paid up on the rent but Dial—a born landlord, drawn irresistibly to meddle—often came snooping around on one pretext or another.

Young Reese laid a hand on Eugene’s arm. “They’s a sheriff in Franklin County got a warrant on me,” he said in Eugene’s ear. His breath smelled like hay. “My daddy and five others was arrested down there night before last for Breach of the Peace.”

Eugene held up a palm to reassure him but then Mr. Dial gave the doorknob a ferocious rattle. “Hello? Anybody home?” Tap tap tap tap tap. A moment of silence and then, to his horror, Eugene heard a stealthy key turning in the lock.

He bolted to the back room, just in time to see the chain-lock catch the door in the act of easing open.

“Eugene?” The doorknob rattled. “Is somebody in there?”

“Um, I’m sorry Mr. Dial but now aint a very good time,” Eugene called, in the chatty, polite voice he used with bill collectors and law-enforcement officials.

“Eugene! Hello there, bud! Listen, I understand what you’re saying but I’d appreciate it if we could have a word.” The nose of a black wing-tip shoe slid into the door crack. “Okey-doke? Half a second.”

Eugene crept up, stood with one ear inclined to the door. “Uh, what can I do for you?”

“Eugene.” The doorknob rattled again. “Half a second and I’ll be out of your hair!”

He ort to been a preacher himself, thought Eugene sourly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hands and said aloud, in the most glib and sociable voice he could muster: “Um, I sure do hate to do you this away but you done caught me at a bad time, Mr. Dial! I’m directly in the middle of my Bible Study!”

A brief silence before Mr. Dial’s voice came back: “All right. But Eugene—you ought not to be setting all this garbage out in front of the curb before five o’clock p.m. If I receive a summons you’re going to be responsible.”

“Mr. Dial,” said Eugene, staring fixedly at the Little Igloo cooler on his kitchen floor, “I sure do hate to tell you this but I kindly think that trash out there belongs to the Mormon boys.”

“It’s not my problem whose it is. The Sanitation Department doesn’t want it out here before five.”

Eugene glanced at his wristwatch. Five minutes to five, you Baptist devil. “All right. Er, I surely will keep my eye on it.”

“Thanks! I’d really appreciate it if we could help each other out on this thing, Eugene. By the way—is Jimmy Dale Ratliff your cousin?”

After a wary pause, Eugene replied: “Second cousin.”

“I’m having trouble running down a phone number on him. Could you give it to me?”

“Jimmy Dale and them out there don’t have a phone.”

“If you see him, Eugene, will you please tell him to stop by the office? We need to have a little talk about the financing on his vehicle.”

In the silence that followed, Eugene reflected upon how Jesus had overthrown the tables of the moneychangers, and cast out them that sold and bought in the temple. Cattle and oxen had been their wares—the cars and trucks of Bible times.

“All right now?”

“I sure will do it, Mr. Dial!”

Eugene listened for Mr. Dial’s footsteps going down the stairs—slowly at first, pausing halfway before they resumed at a brisker pace. Then he crept to the window. Mr. Dial did not proceed directly to his own vehicle (a Chevy Impala with dealer’s plates) but lingered in the front yard for several minutes, out of Eugene’s line of vision—probably inspecting Loyal’s pick-up, also a Chevrolet; possibly only checking up on the poor Mormons, whom he was fond of but devilled mercilessly, baiting them with provocative passages from Scripture and interrogating them on their views of the Afterlife and so forth.

Only when the Chevy started up (with a rather lazy, reluctant sound, for so new a car) did Eugene return to his visitor, whom he found knelt down on one knee and praying intently, all atremble, thumb and forefinger pressed into his eye sockets in the manner of a Christian athlete before a football game.

Eugene was uncomfortable, reluctant either to disturb his guest or join him. Quietly, he went back to the front room and retrieved from his Little Igloo cooler a warm, sweaty wedge of hoop cheese—purchased only that morning, never far from his thoughts since he’d bought it—and cut himself a greedy chunk with his pocket knife. Without crackers, he gobbled it down, his shoulders hunched and his back to the open door of the room where his guest still knelt amongst the dynamite boxes, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to put curtains up in the Mission. Never before had it seemed necessary, since he was on the second story, and though his own yard was bare, trees in other yards occluded the view from neighboring windows. Still, a little extra privacy would be wise while the snakes were in his custody.

————

Ida Rhew poked her head through the door of Harriet’s room, her arms full of fresh towels. “You aint cutting pictures from that book, are you?” she said, eyeing a pair of scissors on the rug.

“No, maam,” said Harriet. Faintly, through the open window, drifted the whir of chainsaws: trees toppling, one by one. Expansion was all the Deacons thought about at the Baptist church: new rec rooms, new parking lot, a new youth center. Soon there would not be a tree left on the block.

“I better not catch you doing any such.”

“Yes, maam.”

“What them scissors out for, then?” Belligerently, she nodded at them. “You put them up,” she said. “This minute.”

Harriet, obediently, went to her bureau and put the scissors in the drawer and closed it. Ida sniffed, and trundled off. Harriet sat down on the foot of her bed, and waited; and as soon as Ida was out of earshot, she opened the drawer and got the scissors out again.

Harriet had seven yearbooks for Alexandria Academy, starting with first grade. Pemberton had graduated two years before. Page by page she turned through his senior yearbook, studying every photograph. There was Pemberton, all over the place: in group pictures of the tennis and golf teams; in plaid pants, slumped at a table in the study hall; in black tie, standing in front of a glittery backdrop swagged with white bunting, along with the rest of the Homecoming Court. His forehead was shiny and his face glowed a fierce, happy red; he looked drunk. Diane Leavitt—Lisa Leavitt’s big sister—had a gloved hand through his elbow, and though she was smiling she looked a little stunned that Angie Stanhope and not her had just been announced Homecoming Queen.

And then the senior portraits. Tuxedoes, pimples, pearls. Big-jawed country girls looking awkward in the photographer’s drape. Twinkly Angie Stanhope, who’d won everything that year, who’d married right out of high school, who now looked so pasty and faded and thick about the waist when Harriet saw her in the grocery store. But there was no sign of Danny Ratliff. Had he failed? Dropped out? She turned the page, to baby pictures of the graduating seniors (Diane Leavitt talking on a play plastic telephone; scowling Pem in a soggy diaper, swaggering about a toy pool), and with a shock found herself looking down at a photo of her dead brother.

Yes, Robin: there he was opposite, on a page to himself, frail and freckled and glad, wearing a huge straw hat that looked as if it might belong to Chester. He was laughing—not as if he was laughing at something funny but in a sweet way, as if he loved the person who was holding the camera. ROBIN WE MISS YOU!!! read the caption. And, underneath, his graduating classmates had all signed their names.

For a long time, she studied the picture. She would never know what Robin’s voice had sounded like, but she had loved his face all her life, and had followed its modulations tenderly throughout a fading trail of snapshots: random moments, miracles of ordinary light. What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing. To judge from his photograph, Pemberton had been a very ugly baby—broad-shouldered and bow-legged, with no neck, and no indication at all that he would grow up to be handsome.

There was no Danny Ratliff in Pem’s class for the previous year (though there was Pem again, as Jolly Junior) but running her finger down the alphabetized list of the class behind Pemberton’s, suddenly she landed on his name: Danny Ratliff.

Her eye jumped to the column opposite. Instead of a photograph there was only a spiky cartoon of a teenager with his elbows on a table, poring over a piece of paper that said “Exam Cheat Sheet.” Below the drawing, jangly beatnik capitals read: TOO BUSY—PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE.

So he’d failed at least one year. Had he dropped out of school after the tenth grade?

When she went back another year, she finally found him: a boy with thick bangs brushed low on his forehead, covering his eyebrows—handsome, but in a threatening way, like a hoodlum pop star. He looked older than a ninth-grader. His eyes were half-hidden beneath the low fringe of hair, which gave him a mean, hooded look; his lips were insolently pursed as if he was about to spit out a piece of gum or blow a raspberry.

She studied the picture for a long time. Then, carefully, she scissored it out, and tucked it in her orange notebook.

“Harriet, get down here.” Ida’s voice, at the foot of the stairs.

“Maam?” called Harriet, hastening to finish.

“Who been poking holes in this lunch bucket?”

————

Hely did not call that afternoon, or that night. The next morning—which was rainy—he didn’t come by either so Harriet decided to walk over to Edie’s house to see if she had made breakfast.

“A deacon!” said Edie. “Trying to turn a profit from a church outing of widows and retired ladies!” She was dressed—handsomely—in khaki shirt and dungarees, for she was to spend the day working at the Confederate cemetery with the Garden Club. “ ‘Well,’ he said to me,” (lips pursed, mimicking Mr. Dial’s voice) “ ‘but Greyhound would charge you eighty dollars.’ Greyhound! ‘Well!’ I said. ‘I find that not at all surprising! The last I heard, Greyhound was still running a money-making concern!’ ”

She was looking at the newspaper over the tops of her half-moon spectacles as she said this: her voice was queenly, withering. She had taken no notice of her granddaughter’s silence, which had driven Harriet (crunching quietly at her toast) into a deeper and more determined sulk. She had felt quite hard towards Edie ever since her conversation with Ida—more so, because Edie was always writing letters to congressmen and senators, getting up petitions, fighting to save this old landmark or that endangered species. Was not Ida’s welfare as important as whatever Mississippi waterfowl occupied Edie’s energies so profoundly?

“Of course, I didn’t bring it up,” said Edie, and sniffed an imperious sniff as if to say: and he’d better be glad I didn’t as she picked up her paper and gave it a rattle, “but I never will forgive Roy Dial for the way he did Daddy on that last car he bought. Daddy got mixed up about things there at the last. He might as well have knocked Daddy on the pavement and stolen the money out of his pocket.”

Harriet realized that she was staring at the back door too pointedly, and turned back to her breakfast. If Hely went to her house and she wasn’t home, he came looking for her over here, and this was sometimes uncomfortable since Edie loved nothing better than to tease Harriet about Hely, with murmured asides about sweethearts and romance, humming infuriating little love songs under her breath. Harriet bore teasing of any sort very badly, but she could not endure being teased about boys. Edie pretended not to know this, and drew back from the results of her handiwork (tears, denial) in theatrical astonishment. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” she said, gaily, in a merry, mocking tone that Harriet loathed; or, more smugly, “You must really like that little boy if it upsets you so much to talk about him.”

“I think,” said Edie—startling Harriet from these recollections—“I think they ought to give them a hot lunch at school but they ought not to give the parents a dime.” She was talking about a story in the newspaper. A little earlier she’d been talking about the Panama Canal, how crazy it was to just give the thing away.

“I guess I’ll read the obituaries,” she said. “That’s what Daddy used to say. ‘Guess I’d better go to the obituaries first and see if anybody I know has died.’ ”

She turned to the back of the paper. “I wish this rain would clear up,” she said, glancing out the window, seemingly quite oblivious to Harriet. “There’s plenty to do inside—the potting shed needs to be cleaned and those pots disinfected—but I guarantee you that people will wake up, and take one look at this weather—”

As if on cue, the telephone rang.

“Here we go,” said Edie, clapping her hands, rising from the table. “The first cancellation of the morning.”

————

Harriet walked home in the drizzle with her head down, under a gigantic borrowed umbrella of Edie’s which—when she was smaller—she had used to play Mary Poppins. Water sang in the gutters; long rows of orange day lilies, beaten down by the rain, leaned towards the sidewalk at frenetic angles as if to shout at her. She half-expected Hely to run up splashing through the puddles in his yellow slicker; she was determined to ignore him if he did, but the steamy streets were empty: no people, no cars.

Since there was no one around to prevent her from playing in the rain, she hopped ostentatiously from puddle to puddle. Were she and Hely not speaking? The longest time they had ever gone without talking was in fourth grade. They had gotten into an argument at school, during a winter recess in February, with sleet driving at the windowpanes and all the kids agitated from being kept off the playground three days in a row. The classroom was overcrowded, and stank: of mildew and chalk dust and milk gone sour, but mainly of urine. The wall-to-wall carpet reeked of it; on damp days the smell drove everyone wild, so the kids pinched their noses shut, or pretended to gag; and even the teacher, Mrs. Miley, roamed the back part of the classroom with a can of Glade Floral Bouquet air freshener, which she sprayed in steady, relentless sweeps—even while she explained long division or gave dictation—so that a gentle deodorizing mist was perpetually settling about the heads of the children, and they went home smelling like commodes in a ladies’ rest room.

Mrs. Miley was not supposed to leave her class unsupervised: but she didn’t enjoy the pee smell any more than the children and often plodded across the hall to gossip with the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rideout. She always picked a child to be in charge while she was gone and on this occasion she had picked Harriet.

Being “left in charge” was no fun. While Harriet stood by the door and watched for Mrs. Miley to come back, the other kids—who had nothing to worry about except getting to their seats in time—raced around the smelly, overheated room: laughing, whining, playing tag and throwing checkers, thumping footballs of folded notebook paper into each other’s faces. Hely and a boy named Greg DeLoach had been amusing themselves by attempting to hit Harriet in the back of the head with these thumped paper footballs as she stood watch. Both were unconcerned that she would tell. People were so afraid of Mrs. Miley that no one ever told. But Harriet was in a terrible mood because she needed to go to the bathroom and because she hated Greg DeLoach, who did things like picking his nose and eating the boogers. When Hely played with Greg, Greg’s personality infected him like a disease. Together, they threw spitballs and shouted insults at Harriet, and shrieked if she went anywhere near them.

So when Mrs. Miley returned, Harriet told on Greg and Hely, too, and for good measure she added that Greg had called her a whore. In the past, Greg had indeed called Harriet a whore (once he had even called her some mysterious name that sounded like “whore-hupper”) but on this particular occasion he hadn’t called her anything worse than Gross. Hely was made to memorize fifty extra vocabulary words, but Greg got the vocabulary words and nine licks with the paddle (one for each letter in the words “Damn” and “Whore”) from tough old yellow-toothed Mrs. Kennedy, who was as big as a man, and did all the paddling at the elementary school.

The main reason Hely was mad at Harriet for so long over this was because it took him three weeks to memorize the vocabulary words sufficiently to pass a written test. Harriet had reconciled herself stolidly and without much pain to life without Hely, which was life the way it always was, only lonelier; but two days after the test, there he was at Harriet’s back door asking her to ride bikes. Generally, after quarrels, it was Hely who struck up relations again, whether he was the one at fault or not—because he had the shorter memory, and because he was the first to panic when he found himself with an hour on his hands and no one to play with.

Harriet shook the umbrella, left it on the back porch, and went through the kitchen to the hall. Ida Rhew stepped out of the living room and in front of her before she could go up the stairs to her room.

“Listen here!” she said. “You and me aint finished with that lunch bucket. I know it was you gone and poke holes in that thing.”

Harriet shook her head. Though she felt compelled to stick by her previous denial, she did not have the energy for a more vigorous lie.

“Reckon you want me to think somebody broke in the house and done it?”

“It’s Allison’s lunchbox.”

“You know yo’ sister aint poke holes in that thing,” Ida called up the stairs after her. “You aint fool me for one second.”

————

We’re gonna turn it on …

We’re gonna bring you the power …

Hely, blankly, sat crosslegged on the floor in front of the television with a half-eaten bowl of Giggle Pops in his lap and his Rock’em Sock’em Robots—one robot unsprung, elbow dangling—shoved to the side. Beside them, face down, lay a GI Joe who’d been serving as referee.

The Electric Company was an educational program but at least it wasn’t as dumb as Mister Rogers. He ate another listless spoonful of the Giggle Pops—they were soggy now, and the dye had turned the milk green, but the mini marshmallows were still like aquarium gravel. His mother, a few minutes before, had run downstairs and popped her head into the family room to ask if he felt like helping her make some cookies; and he was angry when he remembered how little his scornful refusal had troubled her. Okay, she’d replied, in all good cheer, suit yourself.

No: he would not give her the satisfaction of appearing interested. Cooking was for girls. If his mother really loved him, she would drive him to the bowling alley.

He ate another spoonful of the Giggle Pops. All the sugar had soaked off them and they didn’t taste so good any more.

————

At Harriet’s, the day dragged on. Nobody seemed to notice that Hely hadn’t been around—except, oddly, Harriet’s mother, who could not be expected with absolute certainty to notice if a hurricane rose up and tore the roof off the house. “Where’s little Price?” she called out to Harriet from the sun-porch that afternoon. She called Hely little Price because Price was his mother’s maiden name.

“Don’t know,” said Harriet curtly, and went upstairs. But soon she was bored—drifting fretfully between bed and window seat, watching the rain slash against the windowpanes—and soon she wandered downstairs again.

After loitering aimlessly for some time, and being chased from the kitchen, she finally sat down in a neglected spot on the hall floor where the boards were particularly smooth, to play a game of jacks. As she played, she counted out loud in a dull singsong which alternated numbingly with the thump of the ball, and with Ida’s monotonous song in the kitchen:

Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain

Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain

Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain …

The jacks ball was a hard miracle plastic that bounced higher than rubber. If it struck a particular raised nail head it zinged off at a crazy angle. And this particular raised nail head—black, slanted to one side at an angle that suggested a Chinaman’s tiny sampan hat—even this nail head was an innocent, well-meaning little object that Harriet could fasten her attention to, a welcome still point in the chaos of time. How many times had Harriet stepped on this raised nail head with her bare foot? It was bent over at the neck by the force of the hammer, not sharp enough to cut, though once when she was about four years old, and sliding on her rear end down the hall floor, this nail had snagged and torn the seat of her underpants: blue underpants, part of a matched set from the Kiddie Korner, embroidered in pink script with the days of the week.

Three, six, nine, one to grow on. The nail head was steadfast; it hadn’t changed since she was a baby. No: it had stayed where it was, residing quietly in its dark tidal pool behind the hall door while the rest of the world ran haywire. Even the Kiddie Korner—where, until recently, all Harriet’s clothes had been bought—was now closed. Tiny, pink-powdered Mrs. Rice—a changeless fixture of Harriet’s early life, with her big black eyeglasses and big gold charm bracelet—had sold it and gone into a nursing home. Harriet did not like walking past the vacant shop, though she always put her hand to her forehead and stopped to peer through the dusty plate-glass window whenever she did. Somebody had torn the curtains off their rings, and the display cases were empty. The floor was littered with sheets of newspaper, and spooky little child-sized mannequins—tanned, naked, with molded pageboy haircuts—stood staring this way and that in the vacant dim.

Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

Tearing down the kingdom of this world.

Foursies. Fivesies. She was the jacks champion of America. She was the jacks champion of the world. With an enthusiasm only slightly forced, she shouted out scores, cheered for herself, rocked back on her heels in amazement at her own performance. For a while, her agitation even felt like fun. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t quite forget that nobody cared if she was having fun or not.

————

Danny Ratliff woke from his nap with a bad start. He’d got by on very little sleep in recent weeks, since his oldest brother, Farish, had set up a methamphetamine laboratory in the taxidermy shed behind their grandmother’s trailer. Farish was no chemist, but the amphetamine was good enough and the scheme itself was pure profit. Between the drugs, his disability checks, and the deer heads he stuffed for local hunters, Farish earned five times what he’d made in the old days: burgling houses, stealing batteries out of cars. He wouldn’t go anywhere near that business now. Ever since he’d got out of the mental hospital, Farish refused to use his considerable talents in any but an advisory capacity. Though he himself had taught his brothers everything they knew, he no longer joined them in their errands; he refused to listen to details of specific jobs, refused even to ride along in the car. Though he was vastly more gifted than his brothers in lock-picking, hot-wiring, tactical reconnaissance, getaway, and nearly every aspect of the trade, this new hands-off policy was wiser for all in the end; for Farish was a master, and he was of more use at home than behind bars.

The genius of the methamphetamine lab was that the taxidermy business (which Farish had run, quite legitimately, on and off for twenty years) gave him access to chemicals otherwise tricky to obtain; moreover, the stink from the taxidermy operation went a long, long way towards masking the distinctive cat-piss smell of the meth manufacture. The Ratliffs lived in the woods, a good distance from the road, but even so the smell was a dead tip-off; and many a laboratory (said Farish) had been brought down by nosy neighbors or winds that blew the wrong direction, right into the window of a passing police car.

The rain had stopped; the sun shone through the curtains. Danny closed his eyes against it and then rolled over with a shriek of bedsprings and turned his face into his pillow. His trailer—one of two units behind the larger mobile home where his grandmother lived—was fifty yards from the methamphetamine lab but between the meth and the heat and the taxidermy, the stink traveled; and Danny was sick of it nearly to vomiting. Part cat piss, part formaldehyde, part rot and death, it had penetrated nearly everything: clothes and furniture, water and air, his grandmother’s plastic cups and dishes. His brother smelled so strongly of it you could hardly stand within six feet of him and, once or twice, Danny had been horrified to detect a whiff of it in his own sweat.

He lay stiff, heart pounding. For several weeks, he’d been cranked up pretty much non-stop, no sleep except a jerky catnap now and then. Blue sky, fast music on the radio, long speedy nights that skimmed on and on towards some imaginary vanishing point while he kept his foot hard to the gas and sped right through them, one after the other, dark after light after dark again, like skimming through summer rainstorms on a long flat stretch of highway. It wasn’t about going anyplace, just about going fast. Some people (not Danny) ran so fast and far and ragged that one too many black mornings grinding their teeth and listening to the birdies tweet before sunup and snap: bye-bye. Permanently ripped, wild-eyed and flapping and twisting every which way: convinced that maggots were eating their bone marrow, that their girlfriends were cheating on them and the government was watching them through the television set and the dogs were barking out messages in Morse code. Danny had seen one emaciated freak (K. C. Rockingham, now deceased) jabbing at himself with a sewing needle until his arms looked as if they’d been plunged to the elbow in a deep fryer. Miniature hookworms were burrowing into his skin, he said. Over two long weeks, in a state close to triumph, he’d sat in front of the television twenty-four hours a day and pried the flesh off his forearms, shouting “Gotcha” and “Hah!” at the imaginary vermin. Farish had come close to that shrieking frequency a time or two (one bad incident in particular, swinging a poker and screaming about John F. Kennedy) and it wasn’t anywhere that Danny was ever going to be.

No: he was fine, just dandy, only sweating like a tiger, too hot and a little edgy. A tic fluttered in his eyelid. Noises, even tiny ones, were starting to jerk on his nerves but mostly he was hammered down from having the same nightmare on and off for a week now. It seemed to hover for him, waiting for him to drop off; as he lay on his bed, sliding uneasily into sleep, it pounced and grabbed him by the ankles and towed him down with sickening speed.

He rolled on his back and stared up at the swimsuit poster taped to the ceiling. Like a nasty hang-over, the vapors of the dream still pressed in on him low and poisonous. Terrible as it was, he could never quite remember the details when he woke up, no people or situations (although there was always at least one other person) but only the astonishment of being sucked into a blind, breathless emptiness: struggles, dark wingbeats, terror. It wouldn’t sound so bad to tell about, but if he’d ever had a worse dream he couldn’t remember what it was.

Black flies were clustered on the half-eaten doughnut—his lunch—that lay on the card table beside his bed. They rose in a hum when Danny stood and darted crazily for several moments before they settled on the doughnut again.

Now that his brothers Mike and Ricky Lee were in jail for the time being, Danny had the trailer to himself. But it was old, and had low ceilings, and—though Danny kept it scrupulously clean, windows washed, never a dirty dish—still it was shabby and cramped. Back and forth droned the electric fan, stirring the flimsy curtains as it passed. From the breast pocket of his denim shirt, slung over a chair, he retrieved a snuff tin which contained not snuff but an ounce of powdered methamphetamine.

He did a good-sized bump off the back of his hand. The burn felt so sweet, hitting the back of his throat just so, that his eyes misted. Almost instantly, the taint lifted: colors clearer, nerves stronger, life not so bad again. Quickly, with trembling hands, he tapped himself out another bump before the jump-start from the first kicked in all the way.

Ah, yes: a week in the country. Rainbows and twinkles. Suddenly he felt bright, well-rested, on top of the situation. Danny made his bed, tight as a drum, emptied the ashtray and washed it out in the sink, threw away the Coke can and the remnants of the doughnut. On the card table was a half-worked jigsaw puzzle (pallid nature scene, winter trees and waterfall) which had been his entertainment for many a speedy night. Should he work on that for a while? Yes: the puzzle. But then his attention was arrested by the electrical-cord situation. Electrical cords were tangled around the fan, climbing up the walls, running all over the room. Clock radio, television, toaster, the whole bit. He batted a fly from around his head. Maybe he should take care of the cords—organize them a little bit. From the distant television in his grandmother’s quarters, an announcer’s voice from World Wrestling Federation cut through the fog, distinct: “Doctor Death is f-f-flying off the handle.…”

“Get off of me,” Danny found himself shouting. Before he was aware of doing it, he’d smacked two flies dead and was examining the smears across the brim of his cowboy hat. He didn’t remember picking the hat up, didn’t even remember it being in the room.

“Where did you come from?” he said to it. Freaky. The flies—agitated now—were zinging all around his head but it was the hat that concerned Danny at the moment. Why was it inside? He’d left it in the car; he was sure of it. He tossed it on the bed—suddenly, he didn’t want the thing touching him—and there was something about its jaunty angle, lying there on the neatly turned covers all by itself, that gave him the willies.

Fuck it, thought Danny. He popped his neck, tugged on his jeans and stepped outside. He found his brother Farish reclining in an aluminum lounge chair in front of their grandmother’s mobile home, scraping the dirt from beneath his fingernails with a pocketknife. About him were strewn various cast-off distractions: a whetstone; a screwdriver and a partially disassembled transistor radio; a paperback book with a swastika on the cover. In the dirt amongst all this sat their youngest brother, Curtis, with his stumpy legs splayed out in a V in front of him, cuddling a dirty wet kitten to his cheek and humming. Danny’s mother had Curtis when she was forty-six years old and a bad drunk—but though their father (a drunk himself, also deceased) loudly bemoaned the birth, Curtis was a sweet creature, who loved cake, harmonica music, and Christmas, and apart from being clumsy and slow, had no fault in the world other than he was slightly deaf, and liked to listen to the television turned up a little too loud.

Farish, jaw clenched, nodded at Danny and did not look up. He was good and wired himself. His brown jumpsuit (a United Parcel uniform, with a hole in the chest where the label was cut off) was unzipped nearly to the waist, exposing a thatch of black chest hair. Winter or summer, Farish wore no clothing but these brown uniform jumpsuits, except if he had to go to court or to a funeral. He bought them second hand by the dozen from the Parcel Service. Years before, Farish had actually been employed by the Post Office, though not in a parcel truck but as a mail carrier. According to him, there existed no smoother racket for casing affluent neighborhoods, knowing who was out of town, who left their windows unlocked and who left the papers to pile up every weekend and who had a dog who was likely to complicate things. It was this angle which cost Farish his job as a carrier and might have sent him to Leavenworth had the district attorney been able to prove that Farish had committed any of the burglaries while on duty.

Whenever anybody at the Black Door Tavern teased Farish about his UPS attire or inquired why he wore it, Farish always replied, tersely, that he used to be with the Post Office. But this was no reason: Farish was eaten up with hatred for the Federal Government, and for the Post Office most of all. Danny suspected that the real reason Farish liked the jumpsuits was that he had got used to wearing a similar garment while in the mental hospital (another story), but this wasn’t the sort of thing about which Danny or anyone else felt comfortable speaking to Farish.

He was about to head over to the big trailer when Farish pulled the back of his lawn chair into an upright position and snapped the pocketknife shut. His knee was jiggling to beat the band. Farish had a bad eye—white and milked-over—and even after all these years it still made Danny uneasy when Farish turned it on him suddenly, as he now did.

“Gum and Eugene just had a little a set-to in there over the television,” he said. Gum was their grandmother—their father’s mother. “Eugene don’t think Gum ort to watch her people.”

As he spoke, the two brothers stared off across the clearing and into the dense, silent woods without looking at each other—Farish slouched massively in his chair, Danny standing beside him, like passengers on a crowded train. My people was what their grandmother called her soap opera. Tall grass grew around a dead car; in the high weeds, a broken wheelbarrow wallowed belly-up.

“Eugene says it aint Christian. Hah!” Farish said, and he slapped his knee with a whack that made Danny jump. “Wrestling he don’t think it’s anything wrong with. Or football. What’s so Christian about wrestling?”

Except for Curtis—who loved everything in the world, even bees and wasps and the leaves that fell from the trees—all the Ratliffs had an uneasy relationship with Eugene. He was the second brother; he’d been Farish’s field marshal in the family business (which was larceny) after their father died. In this he was dutiful, if not particularly energetic or inspired, but then—while in Parchman Penitentiary for Grand Theft Auto in the late 1960s—he had received a vision instructing him to go forth and exalt Jesus. Relations between Eugene and the rest of the family had been somewhat strained ever since. He refused to dirty his hands any longer with what he called the Devil’s work, though—as Gum often pointed out, shrilly enough—he was happy enough to eat the food and live under the roof which the Devil and his works provided.

Eugene didn’t care. He quoted scripture at them, bickered ceaselessly with his grandmother, and generally got on everybody’s nerves. He had inherited their father’s humorlessness (though not—thankfully—his violent temper); even in the old days, back when Eugene had been stealing cars and staying out drunk all night, he’d never been much fun to be around, and though he didn’t hold a grudge or nurse an insult, and was fundamentally a decent guy, his proselytizing bored them all to death.

“What’s Eugene doing here, anyway?” said Danny. “I thought he’d be down at the Mission with Snake Boy.”

Farish laughed—a startling, high-pitched giggle. “I expect Eugene’s going to leave it to Loyal while them snakes are in there.” Eugene was correct in suspecting motives other than revival and Christian fellowship in the visit of Loyal Reese, for the visit had been engineered by Loyal’s brother, Dolphus, from his prison cell. No shipments of amphetamine had gone out from Farish’s lab since Dolphus’s old courier got picked up on an outstanding warrant back in February. Danny had offered to drive the drugs up to Kentucky himself—but Dolphus didn’t want anybody moving in on his distribution territory (a genuine worry for a man behind bars) and besides, why hire a courier when he had a kid brother named Loyal who would drive it up for free? Loyal, of course, was in the dark here—because Loyal was devout, and would not cooperate knowingly with any such plans as Dolphus had hatched in prison. He had a church “homecoming” to attend in East Tennessee; he was driving down to Alexandria as a favor to Dolphus, whose old friend Farish had a brother (Eugene) who needed help getting started in the revival business. That was all Loyal knew. But when—in all innocence—Loyal drove back home to Kentucky, he would be carrying unawares along with his reptiles a number of securely wrapped bundles which Farish had concealed in the engine of his truck.

“What I don’t understand,” said Danny, gazing off into the pine woods that pressed dark around their dusty little clearing, “is why do they handle the things in the first place? Don’t they get bit?”

“All the damn time.” Farish jerked his head belligerently. “Go on in and ask Eugene. He’ll sure tell you more than you wanted to know about it.” His motorcycle boot was jittering away. “If you mess with the snake and it don’t bite you, that’s a miracle. If you mess with it and it does bite you, that’s a miracle too.”

“Getting bit by a snake is no miracle.”

“It is if you don’t go to the doctor, just roll around on the floor calling out to Jesus. And you live.”

“Well what if you die?”

“Another miracle. Lifted up to Heaven through getting took in the Signs.”

Danny snorted. “Well, hell,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “If it’s miracles everywhere, what’s the point?” The sky was bright blue above the pine trees, reflecting blue in the puddles on the ground, and he felt high, fine, and twenty-one. Maybe he would hop in his car and drive over to the Black Door, maybe take a spin down to the reservoir.

“They’ll find themselves a big old nest of miracles if they walk out in that brush and turn over a rock or two,” said Farish sourly.

Danny laughed and said: “Tell you what’ll be the miracle, is if Eugene handles a snake.” There wasn’t much to Eugene’s preaching, which for all Eugene’s religious fervor was strangely flat and wooden. Apart from Curtis—who galumphed up front to get saved every time he went—he hadn’t converted a soul as far as Danny knew.

“You aint never going to see Eugene handle a snake if you ast me. Eugene won’t put a worm on a fish-hook. Say brother—” Farish, his gaze fixed upon the scrub pines across the clearing, nodded briskly as if to switch the subject—“what you think of that big white rattlesnake done crawled up here yesterday?”

He meant the meth, the batch he’d just finished. Or, at least, Danny thought that’s what he meant. Often it was hard to figure out what Farish was talking about, especially when he was wired or drunk.

“Say what?” Farish glanced up at Danny, rather jerkily, and winked—a twitch of the eyelid, nearly imperceptible.

“Not bad,” Danny said warily, lifting his head in a way that felt easy and turning to look in the opposite direction, really smooth. Farish was apt to explode if anyone dared misunderstand him, even though most people had no idea what he was talking about half the time.

“Not bad.” Farish’s look could go either way, but then he shook his head. “Pure powder. It’ll thow you through the damn window. I like to lost my mind doctoring on that iodine-smelling product last week. Ran it through mineral spirits, ringworm medicine, what-have-you, stuff’s still so sticky I can hardly pound it up my damn nose. Tell you one thing for damn sure,” he chortled, falling back into his chair, clutching the arms as if readying for take-off, “a batch like this, don’t matter how you cut it—” Suddenly he bolted upright and shouted: “I said get that thing off me!”

A slap, a strangled cry; Danny jumped, and from the corner of his eye saw the kitten go flying. Curtis, his lumpy features scrunched together in a rictus of grief and fear, ground a fist into his eye and stumbled after it. It was the last of the litter; Farish’s German shepherds had taken care of the rest.

“I told him,” said Farish, rising dangerously to his feet, “I told him and told him never to let that cat near me.”

“Right,” said Danny, looking away.

————

Nights were always too quiet at Harriet’s house. The clocks ticked too loud; beyond the low corona of light from the table lamps, the rooms grew gloomy and cavernous, and the high ceilings receded into what seemed endless shadow. In autumn and winter, when the sun went down at five, it was worse; but being up and having no one but Allison for company was in some ways worse than being alone. She lay at the other end of the couch, her face ash-blue in the glow of the television, her bare feet resting in Harriet’s lap.

Idly, Harriet stared down at Allison’s feet—which were damp and ham-pink, oddly clean considering that Allison walked around barefoot all the time. No wonder Allison and Weenie had got on so well with each other. Weenie had been more human than cat, but Allison was more cat than human, padding around on her own and ignoring everybody most of the time, yet perfectly comfortable to curl up by Harriet if she felt like it and stick her feet in Harriet’s lap without asking.

Allison’s feet were very heavy. Suddenly—violently—they twitched. Harriet glanced up and saw Allison’s eyelids fluttering. She was dreaming. Quickly, Harriet seized her little toe and wrenched it backward, and Allison yelped and yanked her foot up to her body like a stork.

“What are you dreaming about?” demanded Harriet.

Allison—red waffle-patterns from the sofa stamped upon her cheek—turned her sleep-dulled eyes as if she didn’t recognize her … no, not quite, thought Harriet, observing her sister’s confusion with keen, clinical detachment. It’s like she sees me and something else.

Allison cupped both hands over her eyes. She lay there like that for a moment, very still, and then she stood. Her cheeks were puffy, her eyelids heavy and inscrutable.

“You were dreaming,” said Harriet, watching her closely.

Allison yawned. Then—rubbing her eyes—she trudged towards the stairs, swaying sleepily as she walked.

“Wait!” cried Harriet. “What were you dreaming? Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t? You mean you won’t.”

Allison turned and looked at her—strangely, Harriet thought.

“I don’t want it to come true,” she said, starting upstairs.

“Don’t want what to come true?”

“What I just dreamed.”

“What was it? Was it about Robin?”

Allison stopped on the bottom step and looked back. “No,” she said, “it was about you.”

————

“That was only fifty-nine seconds,” said Harriet, coldly, over Pemberton’s coughs and splutters.

Pem grasped the side of the pool and wiped his eyes with his forearm. “Bullshit,” he said, between gasps. He was maroon in the face, practically the color of Harriet’s penny loafers. “You were counting too slow.”

Harriet, with a long, angry whoosh, blew out all the air in her lungs. She breathed deep and hard, a dozen times, until her head began to whirl, and at the top of the last breath she dove and kicked off.

The way across was easy. On the return trip, through the chill blue tiger-stripes of light, everything thickened and ground down to slow motion—some kid’s arm floating past, dreamy and corpse-white; some kid’s leg, tiny white bubbles clinging to the leg hairs standing on end and rolling away with a slow, foamy kick as her blood crashed hard in her temples, and washed back, and crashed hard and washed back and crashed again, like ocean waves pounding on the beach. Up above—hard to imagine it—life clattered on in brilliant color, at high temperature and speed. Kids shouting, feet slapping on hot pavement, kids huddled with soggy towels around their shoulders and slurping on blue Popsicles the color of pool water. Bomb Pops, they were called. Bomb Pops. They were the fad, the favorite treat that year. Shivering penguins on the cold case at the concession stand. Blue lips … blue tongues … shivers and shivers and chattering teeth, cold …

She burst through the surface with a deafening crack, as if through a pane of glass; the water was shallow but not quite shallow enough for her to stand in and she hopped about on tiptoe, gasping, as Pemberton—who’d been observing with interest—hit the water smoothly and glided out to her.

Before she knew what was happening, he scooped her expertly off her feet and all of a sudden her ear was against his chest and she was looking up at the nicotine-yellow undersides of his teeth. His tawny smell—adult, foreign, and, to Harriet, not wholly pleasant—was sharp even over the pool chemicals.

Harriet rolled out of his arms and they fell away from each other—Pemberton on his back, with a solid thwack that threw up a sheet of water as Harriet splashed to the side and clambered up, rather ostentatiously, in her yellow-and-black-striped bathing suit that (Libby said) made her look like a bumblebee.

“What? Don’t you like to be picked up?”

His tone was lordly, affectionate, as if she was a kitten who’d scratched him. Harriet scowled and kicked a spray of water into his face.

Pem ducked. “What’s the matter?” he said teasingly. He knew very well—irritatingly well—how handsome he was, with his superior smile and his marigold-colored hair streaming out behind him in the blue water, like the laughing merman in Edie’s illustrated Tennyson:

Who would be

A merman bold

Sitting alone

Singing alone

Under the sea

With a crown of gold?

“Hmmn?” Pemberton let go her ankle and splashed her, lightly, then shook his head so that the drops flew. “Where’s my money?”

“What money?” said Harriet, startled.

“I taught you how to hyperventilate, didn’t I? Just like they tell scuba divers to do in those expensive courses.”

“Yes, but that’s all you told me. I practice holding my breath every day.”

Pem drew back, looking pained. “I thought we had a deal, Harriet.”

“No we don’t!” said Harriet, who couldn’t bear to be teased.

Pem laughed. “Forget it. I ought to be paying you for lessons. Listen—” he dipped his head in the water, then bobbed up again—“is your sister still bummed out about that cat?”

“I guess. Why?” said Harriet, rather suspiciously. Pem’s interest in Allison made no sense to her.

“She ought to get a dog. Dogs can learn tricks but you can’t teach a cat to do anything. They don’t give a shit.”

“Neither does she.”

Pemberton laughed. “Well then, I think a puppy is just what she needs,” he said. “There’s a notice in the clubhouse about some chow-chow puppies for sale.”

“She’d rather have a cat.”

“Has she ever had a dog?”

“No.”

“Well, then. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Cats look like they know what’s going on, but all they do is sit around and stare.”

“Not Weenie. He was a genius.”

“Sure he was.”

“No, really. He understood every word we said. And he tried to talk to us. Allison worked with him all the time. He did the best he could but his mouth was just too different and the sounds didn’t come out right.”

“I bet they didn’t,” said Pemberton, rolling over to float on his back. His eyes were the same bright blue as the pool water.

“He did learn a few words.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like ‘nose.’ ”

“Nose? That’s a weird word to teach him,” said Pemberton idly, looking up at the sky, his yellow hair spread out like a fan on the surface of the water.

“She wanted to start with names of things, things she could point to. Like Miss Sullivan with Helen Keller. She’d touch Weenie’s nose, and say: ‘Nose! That’s your nose! You’ve got a nose!’ Then she’d touch her own nose. Then his again. Back and forth.”

“She must not have had much to do.”

“Well, she didn’t really. They’d sit there all afternoon. And after a while all Allison had to do was touch her nose and Weenie would reach up like this with his paw and touch his own nose and—I’m not kidding,” she said, over Pemberton’s loud derision—“no, really, he would make a weird little meow like he was trying to say ‘nose.’ ”

Pemberton rolled over on his stomach and resurfaced with a splash. “Come on.”

“It’s true. Ask Allison.”

Pem looked bored. “Just because he made a noise …”

“Yes, but it wasn’t any old noise.” She cleared her throat and tried to imitate the sound.

“You don’t expect me to believe that.”

“She has it on tape! Allison recorded a bunch of tapes of him! Most of it just sounds like plain old meows but if you listen hard you can really hear him saying a couple of words in there.”

“Harriet, you crack me up.”

“It’s the truth. Ask Ida Rhew. And he could tell time, too. Every afternoon at two-forty-five on the dot he scratched on the back door for Ida to let him out so he could meet Allison’s bus.”

Pemberton bobbed under the water to slick his hair back, then pinched his nostrils shut and blew, noisily, to clear his ears. “How come Ida Rhew doesn’t like me?” he said cheerfully.

“I don’t know.”

“She never has liked me. She was always mean to me when I came over to play with Robin, even when I was in kindergarten. She would pick a switch off one of those bushes you have out back there and chase my little ass all over the yard.”

“She doesn’t like Hely, either.”

Pemberton sneezed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “What’s going on with you and Hely, anyway? Is he not your boyfriend any more?”

Harriet was horrified. “He never was my boyfriend.”

“That’s not what he says.”

Harriet kept her mouth shut. Hely got provoked and shouted out things he didn’t mean when Pemberton pulled this trick, but she wasn’t going to fall for it.

————

Hely’s mother, Martha Price Hull—who had gone to high school with Harriet’s mother—was notorious for spoiling her sons rotten. She adored them frantically, and allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, never mind what their father had to say; and though it was too soon to tell with Hely, this indulgence was thought to be the reason why Pemberton had turned out so disappointingly. Her fond child-rearing methods were legend. Grandmothers and mothers-in-law always pulled out Martha Price and her boys as a cautionary example to doting young mothers, of the heavy grievance someday to fall if (for instance) one allowed one’s child for three whole years to refuse all food but chocolate pie, as Pemberton had been famously permitted to do. From the ages of four to seven, Pemberton had eaten no food but chocolate pie: moreover (it was stressed, grimly) a special kind of chocolate pie, which called for condensed milk and all sorts of costly ingredients, and which doting Martha Price had been forced to rise at six a.m. daily in order to bake. The aunts still talked about an occasion when Pem—a guest of Robin’s—had refused lunch at Libby’s house, beating on the table with his fists (“like King Henry the Eighth”) demanding chocolate pie. (“Can you imagine? ‘Mama gives me chocolate pie.’ ” “I would have given him a good whipping.”) That Pemberton had grown to adulthood enjoying a full head of teeth was a miracle; but his lack of industry and gainful employment were fully explainable, all felt, by this early catastrophe.

It was often speculated what a bitter embarrassment Pem’s father must find his eldest son, since he was the headmaster of Alexandria Academy and disciplining young people was his job. Mr. Hull was not the shouting, red-faced ex-athlete customary at private academies like Alexandria; he was not even a coach: he taught science to junior-high-school students, and spent the rest of his time in his office with the door shut, reading books on aeronautical engineering. But though Mr. Hull held the school under tight control, and students were terrified by his silences, his wife undercut his authority at home and he had a tough time keeping order with his own boys—Pemberton in particular, who was always joking and smirking and making rabbit ears behind his father’s head when the group photographs were taken. Parents sympathized with Mr. Hull; it was clear to everyone that nothing short of knocking the boy unconscious was going to shut him up; and though the withering way he barked at Pemberton on public occasions made everyone in the room nervous, Pem himself seemed not bothered by it in the slightest, and kept right up with the easy wisecracks and smart remarks.

But though Martha Hull did not mind if her sons ran all over town, grew their hair past their shoulders, drank wine with dinner or ate dessert for breakfast, a few rules in the Hull household were inviolable. Pemberton, though twenty, was not allowed to smoke in his mother’s presence; and Hely, of course, not at all. Loud rock-and-roll music on the hi-fi was forbidden (though when his parents were out, Pemberton and his friends blasted the Who and the Rolling Stones across the entire neighborhood—to Charlotte’s befuddlement, Mrs. Fountain’s complaints, and Edie’s volcanic rage). And while neither parent could now stop Pemberton from going anywhere he pleased, Hely was forbidden at all times Pine Hill (a bad section of town, with pawn shops and juke joints) and the Pool Hall.

It was the Pool Hall where Hely—still in his sulk over Harriet—now found himself. He had parked his bicycle down the street, in the alley by the City Hall, in case his mother or father happened to drive by. Now he stood morosely crunching barbecued potato chips—which were sold along with cigarettes and gum at the dusty counter—and browsing through the comic books at the rack by the door.

Though the Pool Hall was only a block or two from the town square, and had no liquor license, it was nonetheless the roughest place in Alexandria, worse even than the Black Door or the Esquire Lounge over in Pine Hill. Dope was said to be sold at the Pool Hall; gambling was rampant; it was the site of numerous shootings and slashings and mysterious fires. Poorly lit, with cinder-block walls painted prison green, and fluorescent tubes flickering on the foam-panelled ceiling, it was on this afternoon fairly empty. Of the six tables, only two were in use, and a couple of country boys with slicked hair and snap-front denim shirts played a subdued game of pinball in the back.

Though the Pool Hall’s mildewy, depraved atmosphere appealed to Hely’s sense of desperation, he did not know how to play pool, and he was scared to loiter near the tables and watch. But he felt invigorated just to stand by the door, unnoticed, munching his barbecued potato chips and breathing the same perilous ozone of corruption.

What drew Hely to the Pool Hall were the comic books. Their selection was the best in town. The drugstore carried Richie Rich, and Betty and Veronica; the Big Star grocery had all these and Superman, too (on a rack situated uncomfortably, by the rotisserie chicken, so that Hely couldn’t browse too long without thoroughly roasting his ass); but the Pool Hall had Sergeant Rock and Weird War Tales and G.I. Combat (real soldiers killing real gooks); they had Rima the Jungle Girl in her panther-fur bathing suit; best of all, they had a rich selection of horror comics (werewolves, premature burials, drooling carrions shuffling forth from the graveyard), all of which were, to Hely, of unbelievably riveting interest: Weird Mystery Tales and House of Secrets, The Witching Hour and The Specter’s Notebook and Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion.… He had not been aware that such galvanizing reading matter existed—much less that it was available for him, Hely, to purchase in his own town—until one afternoon, when he had been forced to stay after school, he had discovered in an empty desk a copy of Secrets of Sinister House. On its cover was a picture of a crippled girl in a creepy old house, screaming and frantically trying to roll her wheelchair away from a giant cobra. Inside, the crippled girl perished in a froth of convulsions. And there was more—vampires, gouged eyes, fratricides. Hely was enthralled. He read it five or six times from cover to cover, and then took it home and read it some more until he knew it backwards and forward by heart, every single story—“Satan’s Roommate,” “Come Share My Coffin,” “Transylvania Travel Agency.” It was without question the greatest comic book he had ever seen; he believed it to be one of a kind, some marvelous fluke of nature, unobtainable, and he was beside himself when some weeks later he saw a kid at school named Benny Landreth reading one quite similar, this one called Black Magic with a picture of a mummy strangling an archaeologist on the cover. He pleaded with Benny—who was a grade older, and mean—to sell the comic to him; and then, when that didn’t work, he offered to pay Benny two dollars and then three if Benny would only let him look at the comic for a minute, just one minute.

“Go down to the Pool Hall and buy your own,” Benny had said, rolling up the comic book and slapping Hely across the side of the head.

That was two years ago. Now, horror comic books were all that got Hely through certain difficult stretches of life: chicken pox, boring car trips, Camp Lake de Selby. Because of his limited funds and the strict interdiction against the Pool Hall, his expeditions to purchase them were infrequent, once a month perhaps, and much anticipated. The fat man at the cash register didn’t seem to mind that Hely stood around the rack for so long; in fact, he hardly noticed Hely at all, which was just as well as Hely sometimes stood studying the comics for hours in order to make the wisest possible selection.

He had come up here to get his mind off Harriet, but he only had thirty-five cents after the potato chips, and the comic books were twenty cents each. Half-heartedly, he leafed through a story in Dark Mansions called “Demon at the Door” (“AARRRGGGHH—!!!—I—I—HAVE UNLEASHED A—A—LOATHESOME EVIL … TO HAUNT THIS LAND UNTIL SUNRISE!!!!!) but his eye kept straying to the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisement on the page opposite. “Take a good honest look at yourself. Do you have the dynamic tension that women admire? Or are you a skinny, scrawny, ninety-seven-pound half-alive weakling?”

Hely was not sure how much he weighed, but ninety-seven pounds sounded like a lot. Glumly, he studied the “Before” cartoon—a scarecrow, basically—and wondered if he should send for the information or if it was a rip-off, like the X-Ray Spex he’d ordered from an ad in Weird Mystery. The X-Ray Spex were advertised as enabling one to see through flesh and walls and women’s clothing. They had cost a dollar ninety-eight plus thirty-five cents for postage, and they had taken forever to arrive, and when they finally came they were nothing more than a pair of plastic frames with two sets of cardboard inserts: one with a cartoon drawing of a hand through which you could see the bones, the other with a cartoon of a sexy secretary in a see-through dress with a black bikini underneath.

A shadow fell over Hely. He glanced up to see two figures with their backs half to him, who had drifted from the pool tables to the comic-book rack to converse privately. Hely recognized one of them: Catfish de Bienville, who was a slumlord, something of a local celebrity; he wore his rust-red hair in a giant Afro, and drove a custom Gran Torino with tinted windows. Hely often saw him at the pool hall, also standing around talking to people outside the car wash on summer evenings. Though his features were like a black man’s, he was not actually dark in color; his eyes were blue, and his skin was freckled, and as white as Hely’s. But he was mostly recognizable around town for his clothes: silk shirts, bell-bottom pants, belt buckles the size of salad plates. People said he bought them from Lansky Brothers, in Memphis, where Elvis was said to shop. Now—as hot as it was—he wore a red corduroy smoking jacket, white flares, and red patent-leather platform loafers.

It was not Catfish who had spoken, however, but the other: underfed, tough, with bitten fingernails. He was little more than a teenager, not too tall or too clean, with sharp cheekbones and lank hippie hair parted in the middle, but there was a scruffy, mean-edged coolness about him like a rock star; and he held himself erect, like he was somebody important, though he obviously wasn’t.

“Where’d he get playing money?” Catfish was whispering to him.

“Disability, I reckon,” said the hippie-haired kid, glancing up. His eyes were a startling silvery blue, and there was something staring and rather fixed about them.

They seemed to be talking about poor Carl Odum, who was racking balls across the room and offering to take on any comers for any sum they wished to lose. Carl—widowed, with what seemed like about nine or ten squalid little children—was only about thirty but looked twice as old: face and neck ruined with sunburn, his pale eyes pink around the rims. He’d lost a few fingers in an accident down at the egg-packing plant, not long after his wife’s death. Now he was drunk, and bragging how he could whip anybody in the room, fingers or not. “Here’s my bridge,” he said, holding up his mutilated hand. “This here’s all I need.” Dirt etched the lines of his palm and the nails of the only two fingers remaining: the pointer and the thumb.

Odum was addressing these remarks to a guy beside him at the table: a gigantic, bearded guy, a bear of a guy, who wore a brown coverall with a ragged hole cut in the breast where the name tag should have been. He wasn’t paying any attention to Odum; his eyes were fixed upon the table. Long dark hair, streaked with gray, straggled down past his shoulders. He was very large, and awkward somehow about the shoulders, as if his arms did not fit comfortably into the sockets; they hung stiffly, with slightly crooked elbows and the palms falling slack, the way a bear’s arms might hang if a bear decided to rear up on its hind legs. Hely couldn’t stop staring at him. The bushy black beard and the brown jumpsuit made him look like some kind of crazy South American dictator.

“Anything pertaining to pool or the playing of pool,” Odum was saying. “It’s what I guess you’d have to call second nature.”

“Well, some of us has gifts that way,” said the big guy in the brown jumpsuit, in a deep but not unpleasant voice. As he said this he glanced up, and Hely saw with a jolt that one of his eyes was all creepy: a milky wall-eye rolled out to the side of his head.

Much closer—only a few feet from where Hely stood—the tough-looking kid tossed his hair out of his face and said tensely to Catfish: “Twenty bucks a pop. Ever time he loses.” Deftly, with the other hand, he shook a cigarette from the pack in a tricky flick like he was throwing dice—and Hely noted, with interest, that despite the practiced cool of the gesture his hands trembled like an old person’s. Then he leaned forward and whispered something in Catfish’s ear.

Catfish laughed aloud. “Lose, my yellow ass,” he said. In an easy, graceful movement, he spun and sauntered off to the pinball machines in the back.

The tough kid lit his cigarette and gazed out across the room. His eyes—burning pale and silvery out of his sunburnt face—gave Hely a little shiver as they passed over him without seeing him: wild-looking eyes, with a lot of light in them, that reminded Hely of old pictures he’d seen of Confederate soldier boys.

Across the room, over by the pool table, the bearded man in the brown jumpsuit had only the one good eye—but it shone with something of the same silvery light. Hely—studying them over the top of his comic book—noted a squeak of family resemblance between the two of them. Though they were very different at first glance (the bearded man was older, and much heavier than the kid), still they had the same long dark hair and sunburnt complexion, the same fixity of eye and stiffness of neck, a similar tight-mouthed way of talking, as if to conceal bad teeth.

“How much you plan on taking him for?” said Catfish, presently, sliding back to his pal’s side.

The kid cackled; and at the crack in his laugh, Hely nearly dropped the comic book. He’d had plenty of time to get used to that high-pitched, derisive laughter; it had rung at his back from the creek bridge for a long, long time as he stumbled through the undergrowth, the echoes of the gunshots singing off the bluffs.

It was him. Without the cowboy hat—that was why Hely hadn’t recognized him. As the blood rushed to his face, he stared down furiously at his comic book, at the gasping girl who clutched Johnny Peril’s shoulder (“Johnny! That figure of wax! It moved!”)

“Odum aint a bad player, Danny,” Catfish was saying quietly. “Fingers or no fingers.”

“Well, he might could beat Farish when he’s sober. But not when he’s drunk.”

Twin light bulbs popped on in Hely’s head. Danny? Farish? Being shot at by rednecks was exciting enough, but being shot at by the Ratliffs was something else. He could not wait to get home and tell Harriet about all this. Could this bearded Sasquatch actually be the fabled Farish Ratliff? There was only one Farish that Hely had ever heard of—in Alexandria or anywhere else.