The Little Friend

CHAPTER

4

——

The Mission

It was odd, thought Harriet, that she hadn’t come to hate Curtis despite what she now knew about his family. Far down the street—in the same spot she’d last run into him—he was stomping flat-footed and very purposefully along the curb. To and fro he swayed, his water pistol clenched in both fists and his roly-poly body swinging side to side.

From the ramshackle house he was guarding—low-rent apartments of some sort—a screen door banged. Two men stepped out onto the outside staircase, hefting between them a large box with a tarpaulin slung over it. The man facing Harriet was very young, and very awkward, and very shiny on the forehead; his hair stood on end and his eyes were round and shocked-looking as if he’d just stepped out of an explosion. The other, backing down first, fairly stumbled in his haste; and despite the weight of the box, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the precarious drape of the tarpaulin—which seemed liable to slide off and entangle them at any moment—they did not pause for even an instant but thumped down in an agonizing rush.

Curtis, with a mooing cry, wobbled and pointed the water pistol at them as they turned the box sideways, and edged with it to a pickup truck parked in the driveway. Another tarpaulin was draped across the truck’s bed. The older and heavier of the two men (white shirt, black trousers and open black vest) nudged it aside with his elbow, then lifted his end of the box over the side.

“Careful!” cried the young, wild-haired fellow as the crate toppled with a solid crash.

The other—his back still to Harriet—swiped his brow with a handkerchief. His gray hair was slicked back in an oily ducktail. Together, they replaced the tarpaulin and went back up the stairs again.

Harriet observed this mysterious toil without being very curious about it. Hely could entertain himself for hours by gawking at laborers on the street, and if he was really interested he went up and pestered them with questions but cargo, workmen, equipment—all this bored Harriet. What interested her was Curtis. If what Harriet had heard all her life was true, Curtis’s brothers weren’t good to him. Sometimes Curtis showed up at school with eerie red bruises on his arms and legs, bruises of a color peculiar to Curtis alone, the color of cranberry sauce. People said that he was just more delicate than he looked, and bruised easily, just like he caught cold more easily than other kids; but teachers sometimes sat him down all the same, and asked questions about the bruises—what exact questions, or Curtis’s exact answers, Harriet didn’t know; but among the children there was a vague but widespread belief that Curtis was mistreated at home. He had no parents, only the brothers and a tottery old grandmother who complained that she was too feeble to look out for him. Often he arrived at school with no jacket in winter, and no lunch money, and no lunch (or else some unwholesome lunch, like a jar of jelly, which had to be taken away from him). The grandmother’s chronic excuses about all this provoked incredulous glances among the teachers. Alexandria Academy, after all, was a private school. If Curtis’s family could afford the tuition—a thousand dollars a year—why couldn’t they afford lunch for him, and a coat?

Harriet felt sorry for Curtis—but from afar. Good-natured as he was, his broad, awkward movements made people nervous. Little kids were scared of him; girls wouldn’t sit by him on the school bus because he tried to touch their faces and clothes and hair. And though he had not yet spotted her, she dreaded to think what would happen if he did. Almost automatically, staring at the ground and feeling ashamed of herself even as she did it, she crossed to the other side of the street.

The screen door banged again and the two men came clattering back down the steps with another crate, just as a long, slick, pearl-gray Lincoln Continental swung around the corner. Mr. Dial, in profile, swept grandly past. To Harriet’s amazement, he turned into the driveway.

Having heaved the last box into the back of the truck, and pulled the tarp over it, the two men were climbing back up the stairs at a more creaky and comfortable pace. The car door opened: snick. “Eugene?” called Mr. Dial, climbing out of the car and brushing right past Curtis, apparently without seeing him. “Eugene. Half a second.”

The man with the gray ducktail had stiffened. When he turned Harriet saw—with a nightmarish jolt—the splashy red mark on his face, like a handprint in red paint.

“I sure am glad to run into you out here! You’re a tough man to get aholt of, Eugene,” said Mr. Dial, heading up the stairs after them uninvited. To the young, wiry man—whose eyes were rolling, as if he was about to bolt—he extended a hand. “Roy Dial, Dial Chevrolet.”

“This is—This is Loyal Reese,” said the older man, visibly uncomfortable, fingering the edge of the red mark on his cheek.

“Reese?” Mr. Dial surveyed the stranger pleasantly. “Not from around here, are you?”

The young man stammered something in response, and though Harriet couldn’t make out the words, his accent was clear enough: a high, hill-country voice, nasal and bright.

“Ah! Glad to have you with us, Loyal.… Just a visit, yes? Because,” Mr. Dial said, holding up a palm to forestall any protestations, “there are the terms of the lease. Single occupancy. No harm, is there, in making sure that we understand each other, Gene?” Mr. Dial folded his arms, much the way he did in Harriet’s Sunday-school class. “By the way, how have you been enjoying the new screen door I put in for you?”

Eugene managed a smile and said: “It’s nice, Mr. Dial. It works better than the otherun.” Between the scar, and the smile, he looked like a good-natured ghoul from a horror movie.

“And the water heater?” said Mr. Dial, screwing his hands together. “Now, that’s a lot faster now, I know, heating your bath water, and all. Got all the hot water you can use now, don’t you? Ha ha ha.”

“Well sir, Mr. Dial …”

“Eugene, if you don’t mind, I’ll cut to the chase here,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head cozily to the side. “It’s in your interest as well as mine to keep our lines of communication open, don’t you agree?”

Eugene looked confused.

“Now, the last two times I’ve stopped by to see you you’ve denied me access to this rental unit. Help me out here, Eugene,” he said—holding up a palm, expertly blocking Eugene’s interruption. “What’s going on here? How can we improve on this situation?”

“Mr. Dial, I kindly don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Eugene, that as your landlord, I have the right to enter the premises as I see fit. Let’s help each other out here, shall we?” He was moving up the stairs. Young Loyal Reese—looking more shocked than ever—was quietly backing up the steps to the apartment.

“I kindly don’t understand the problem, Mr. Dial! If I done something wrong—”

“Eugene, I’ll be frank about my concerns. I’ve received complaints about an odor. When I dropped by the other day, I noticed it myself.”

“If you’d like to step inside a minute, Mr. Dial?”

“I certainly would like to do that, Eugene, if you don’t mind. Because you see it’s like this. I’ve got certain responsibilities to all my tenants at a property.”

“Hat!”

Harriet jumped. Curtis was weaving from side to side and waving to her with his eyes closed.

“Blind,” he called to her.

Mr. Dial turned, halfway. “Well, hello there, Curtis! Careful, there,” he said, brightly, stepping aside with an expression of slight distaste.

At this, Curtis swung around, with a long goose-step, and began to stomp across the street towards Harriet with his arms straight out in front of him, hands dangling, like Frankenstein.

“Munster,” he gurgled. “Ooo, munstrer.”

Harriet was mortified. But Mr. Dial hadn’t seen her. He turned away and—still talking (“No, wait a second, Eugene, I really do want you to understand my position here”)—he headed up the steps in a very determined fashion as the two men retreated nervously before him.

Curtis stopped in front of Harriet. Before she could say anything, his eyes popped open. “Tie my shoes,” he demanded.

“They’re tied, Curtis.” This was a habitual exchange. Because Curtis didn’t know how to tie his shoes, he was always going up to kids on the playground and asking for help. Now, it was how he started a conversation, whether his shoes needed tying or not.

With no warning, Curtis shot out an arm and grabbed Harriet by the wrist. “Gotchoo,” he burbled happily.

The next thing she knew, he was towing her firmly across the street. “Stop,” she said crossly, and tried to yank free. “Let me go!”

But Curtis plowed on. He was very strong. Harriet stumbled along behind him. “Stop,” she cried, and kicked him in the shin as hard as she could.

Curtis stopped. He slackened his moist, meaty grip around her wrist. His expression was blank and rather frightening but then he reached over and patted her on the head: a big, flat, splay-fingered pat that didn’t quite connect, like a baby trying to pat a kitten. “You strong, Hat,” he said.

Harriet stepped away and rubbed her wrist. “Don’t do that any more,” she mumbled. “Jerking people around.”

“Me a good munster, Hat!” growled Curtis, in his grumbly monster voice. “Friendly!” He patted his stomach. “Eat only cookies!”

He had dragged her all the way across the street, up into the driveway behind the pickup truck. Paws dangling peacefully under his chin, in his Cookie Monster posture, he lumbered over to the rear and lifted the tarpaulin. “Look, Hat!”

“I don’t want to,” said Harriet, grumpily, but even as she turned away a dry, furious whir rolled up from the truck bed.

Snakes. Harriet blinked with amazement. The truck was stacked with screened boxes and in the boxes were rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, serpents large and small, twined in great mottled knots, scaly white snouts licking out from the mass this way and that, like flames, bumping the crate walls, pointed heads retreating, coiling back upon themselves and striking at the screen, and the wood, and each other, then snapping back and—emotionless, staring—sliding along with their white throats low upon the floor, pouring into a fluid S shape … tick tick tick … until they bumped the sides of the box and reared back into the mass, hissing.

“Not friendly, Hat,” she heard Curtis say, behind her, in his thick voice. “Not to touch.”

The boxes were hinged and screened at the top and fitted with handles on each end. Most were painted: white, black, the brick-red of country barns; some had writing—Bible verses—in tiny, scraggled printing, and patterns worked in brass nail-heads: crosses, skulls, stars of David, suns and moons and fishes. Others were decorated with bottle caps, buttons, bits of broken glass and even photographs: faded Polaroids of caskets, solemn families, staring country boys holding rattlesnakes aloft in a dark place where bonfires burned in the background. One photograph, washed-out and ghostly, showed a beautiful girl with her hair scraped back hard, her eyes shut tight and her sharp, lovely face tipped up to Heaven. Her fingertips were poised at her temples, over a wicked fat timber rattlesnake which lay draped across her head, its tail partially coiled around her neck. Above it, a jangle of yellowed letters—scissored from newspaper—spelled out the message:

SLEep witH JESuS

REESiE fOrd

1935–52

Behind her, Curtis crooned, an indistinct moan that sounded like “Spook.”

In the profusion of boxes—sparkly and various and awash with messages—Harriet’s eye was arrested by a startling sight. For a moment she hardly believed what she saw. In a vertical box, a king cobra swayed grandly in his solitary quarters. Below the hinge, where the screen joined the wood, red thumbtacks spelled out the words LORD JESUS. He was not white, like the cobra Mowgli had met in the Cold Lairs, but black: black like Nag and his wife Nagaina, whom the mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi had fought to the death in the gardens of the big bungalow at Segowlee Cantonment, over the boy Teddy.

Silence. The cobra’s hood was spread. Upright, calm, he gazed at Harriet, his body oscillating soundlessly to and fro, to and fro, as softly as her own breath. Look and be afraid. His tiny red eyes were the steady eyes of a god: here were jungles, cruelty, revolts and ceremonies, wisdom. On the back of his spread hood, she knew, was the spectacle mark which the great god Brahm had put on all the cobra’s people when the first cobra rose up and opened his hood to shelter Brahm as he slept.

From the house, a muffled noise—a door shutting. Harriet glanced up, and for the first time noticed that the second-floor windows glinted blank and metallic: silvered out with tin foil. As she stared up at this (for it was an eerie sight, as unsettling as the snakes in its way), Curtis bunched his fingertips together and snaked his arm out in front of Harriet’s face. Slowly, slowly, he opened his hand, in a motion which was like a mouth opening. “Munster,” he whispered, and closed his hand, twice: snap snap. “Bite.”

The door had shut upstairs. Harriet stepped back from the truck and listened, hard. A voice—muffled, but rich with disapproval—had just interrupted another speaker: Mr. Dial was still up there, behind those silvered-out windows, and for once in her life Harriet was glad to hear his voice.

All at once Curtis grabbed her arm again and began to pull her toward the stairs. For a moment Harriet was too startled to protest and then—when she saw where he was going—she struggled and kicked and tried to dig her heels in. “No, Curtis,” she cried, “I don’t want to, stop, please—”

She was on the verge of biting his arm when her eye lit on his large white tennis shoe.

“Curtis, hey Curtis, your shoe’s untied,” she said.

Curtis stopped; he clapped a hand to his mouth. “Uh-oh!” He stooped to the ground, all in a fluster—and Harriet ran, as hard as she could.

————

“They’re with the carnival,” said Hely, in his annoying way, like he knew everything there was to know about it. He and Harriet were in his room with the door shut, sitting on the lower bunk of his bed. Nearly everything in Hely’s bedroom was black or gold, in honor of the New Orleans Saints, his favorite football team.

“I don’t think so,” Harriet said, scratching with her thumbnail at the raised cord of the black bedspread. A muffled bass from the stereo thumped from Pemberton’s room, down the hall.

“If you go to the Rattlesnake Ranch, there’s pictures and stuff painted on the buildings.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, reluctantly. Though she could not put it into words, the crates she’d seen in the back of the truck—with their skulls and stars and crescent moons, their wobbly, misspelled bands of scripture—felt very different from the Rattlesnake Ranch’s florid old billboard: a winking lime-green snake wrapped around a cheesy woman in a two-piece swimsuit.

“Well, who’d they belong to?” said Hely. He was sorting through a stack of bubble-gum cards. “The Mormons, had to be. They’re the ones that rent rooms over there.”

“Hmn.” The Mormons who lived at the bottom of Mr. Dial’s apartment building were a dull pair. They seemed very isolated, just the two of them; they didn’t even have real jobs.

Hely said: “My grandpa said the Mormons believe they get their own little planet to live on when they die. Also that they think it’s okay to have more than one wife.”

“Those ones that live over at Mr. Dial’s don’t have any wife at all.” One afternoon they had knocked on Edie’s door while Harriet was visiting. Edie had let them in, accepted their literature, even offered them lemonade after they refused a Coca-Cola; she had told them they seemed like nice young men but that what they believed was a lot of nonsense.

“Hey, let’s call Mr. Dial,” said Hely unexpectedly.

“Yeah, right.”

“I mean, call him and pretend to be somebody else, ask him what’s going on over there.”

“Pretend to be who?”

“I don’t know—Do you want this?” He tossed her a Wacky Packs sticker: a green monster with bloodshot eyes on stalks, driving a dune buggy. “I’ve got two.”

“No thanks.” Between the black-and-gold curtains, and the stickers plastered thick on the windowpanes—Wacky Packs, STP, Harley-Davidson—Hely had blocked nearly all the sunlight from his room; it was depressing, like being in a basement.

“He’s their landlord,” said Hely. “Come on, call him.”

“And say what?”

“Call Edie then. If she knows so much about Mormons.”

All of a sudden, Harriet realized why he was so interested in making phone calls: it was the new telephone on the bedside table, which had a push-button earpiece housed inside a Saints football helmet.

“If they think they get to live on their own personal planets and all that,” said Hely, nodding at the phone, “who knows what else they think? Maybe the snakes are something to do with their church.”

Because Hely kept looking at the telephone, and because she had no idea what else to do, Harriet pulled the telephone over to her and punched in Edie’s number.

“Hello?” said Edie sharply, after two rings.

“Edie,” said Harriet, into the football helmet, “do the Mormons believe anything about snakes?”

“Harriet?”

“Like for example, do they keep snakes as pets, or … I don’t know, have a lot of snakes and things living up in the house with them?”

“Where on earth did you get such an idea? Harriet?”

After an uncomfortable pause, Harriet said: “From TV.”

“Television?” said Edie, incredulously. “What program?”

“National Geographic.”

“I didn’t know you liked snakes, Harriet. I thought you used to scream and holler Save me! Save me! whenever you saw a little grass snake out in the yard.”

Harriet was silent, letting this low dig pass unremarked.

“When we were girls, we used to hear stories about preachers handling snakes out in the woods. But they weren’t Mormons, just Tennessee hillbillies. By the way, Harriet, have you read A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Now, that has a lot of very good information about the Mormon faith.”

“Yes, I know,” said Harriet. Edie had brought this story up with her Mormon visitors.

“I think that old set of Sherlock Holmes is over at your aunt Tat’s house. She may even have a copy of the Book of Mormon, in that boxed set my father used to have—you know with Confucius and the Koran and religious texts of the—”

“Yes, but where can I read about these snake people?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. What’s that echo? Where are you calling from?”

“Hely’s.”

“It sounds like you’re calling from the toilet.”

“No, this phone is just a funny shape.… Listen, Edie,” she said—for Hely was waving his arms back and forth and trying to get her attention—“what about these snake-handling people? Where are they?”

“In the backwoods and mountains and the desolate places of the earth, that’s all I know,” said Edie grandly.

The instant Harriet hung up, Hely said, in a rush: “You know, there used to be a trophy showroom in the upstairs of that house. I just remembered. I think the Mormons are only downstairs.”

“Who rents it now?”

Hely—excited—stabbed his finger at the telephone but Harriet shook her head; she was not about to call Edie back.

“What about the truck? Did you get the license number?”

“Gosh,” said Harriet. “No.” She hadn’t thought about it before, but the Mormons didn’t drive.

“Did you notice if it was Alexandria County or not? Think, Harriet, think!” he said melodramatically. “You’ve got to remember!”

“Well why don’t we just ride over there and see? Because if we go now—come on, stop it,” she said, irritably turning her head as Hely began to tick an imaginary hypnotist’s watch back and forth in front of her face.

“You are growing vairy vairy sleepy,” said Hely, in a thick Transylvanian accent. “Vairy … vairy …”

Harriet shoved him away; he circled to the other side, waggling his fingers in her face. “Vairy … vairy …”

Harriet turned her head. Still he kept hovering, and finally she punched him as hard as she could. “Jesus!” screamed Hely. He clutched his arm and fell back on the bunk.

“I said stop.”

“Jeez, Harriet!” He sat up, rubbing his arm and making faces. “You hit me on the funny bone!”

“Well, quit pestering me!”

Suddenly, there was a furious flurry of fist-thumping on the closed door of Hely’s room. “Hely? Yo company in there with you? Yall open the do’ this minute.”

“Essie!” screamed Hely, falling backwards in exasperation onto his bed. “We’re not doing anything.”

“Open this do’. Open it.”

“Open it yourself!”

In burst Essie Lee, the new housekeeper, who was so new that she didn’t even know Harriet’s name—though Harriet suspected that she only pretended not to know. She was about forty-five, much younger than Ida, with chubby cheeks and artificially straightened hair which was broken and wispy at the ends.

“What yall doing in here, screaming out the Lord’s name in vain? Yalls ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she cried. “Playing in here with the do’ shut. Yall aint shutting it no more, you hear?”

“Pem keeps his door shut.”

“And he aint got no girl company in there with him, either.” Essie swung round and glared at Harriet as if she were a puddle of cat-sick on the rug. “Screaming and cussing and carrying on.”

“You better not talk to my company like that,” shrilled Hely. “You can’t do that. I’m going to tell my mother.”

“I’m gonna tell my mama,” said Essie Lee, mimicking his whine, screwing her face up. “Run on and tell her. You tells on me all the time for stuff I aint even did, like you told yo mama I was the one ate those chocolate chips when you know you eat them yourself? Yes, you know you did it.”

“Get out!”

Harriet, uneasily, studied the carpet. Never had she got used to the flagrant dramas which erupted in Hely’s household when his parents were at work: Hely and Pem against each other (locks picked, posters torn from walls, homework stolen and ripped to pieces) or, more frequently, Hely and Pem against an ever-changing housekeeper: Ruby, who ate slices of white bread folded in half, and would not let them watch anything that came on television at the same time as General Hospital; Sister Bell, the Jehovah’s Witness; Shirley, with brown lipstick and lots of rings, always on the telephone; Mrs. Doane, a gloomy old woman terrified of break-ins who sat watching by the window with a butcher knife in her lap; Ramona, who went berserk and chased Hely with a hairbrush. None of them were very friendly or nice, but it was hard to blame them since they had to put up with Hely and Pemberton all the time.

“Listen at you,” said Essie, with contempt; “ugly thing.” She gestured, vaguely, at the hideous curtains, the stickers darkening his windows. “I’d like to take and burn down this whole ugly—”

“She threatened to burn down our house!” shrieked Hely, red in the face. “You heard her, Harriet. I have a witness. She just threatened to burn down—”

“I aint say one word about yo house. You better not—”

“Yes, you did. Didn’t she, Harriet? I’m going to tell my mother,” he cried—without waiting for a reply from Harriet, who was too stunned by all this to speak, “and she’s going to call the employment office, and tell them you’re crazy, and not to send you out to anybody else’s house—”

Behind Essie, Pem’s head appeared in the doorway. He stuck his lower lip out at Hely, in a babyish, tremulous pout. “Wook who’s in twouble,” he piped, with fraudulent tenderness.

It was the wrong thing to say, at exactly the wrong moment. Essie Lee wheeled, eyes bulging. “What for you talk to me like that!” she screamed.

Pemberton—brows knit—blinked at her foggily.

“Sorry thing! Lay up in the bed all day, aint work a day in your life! I got to earn money. My child—”

“What’s eating her?” said Pemberton to Hely.

“Essie threatened to burn the house down,” said Hely, smugly. “Harriet’s my witness.”

“I aint done no such thing!” Essie’s plump cheeks quivered with emotion. “That’s a lie!”

Pemberton—in the hall, but out of view—cleared his throat. Behind Essie’s heaving shoulder, his hand popped up, then beckoned: all clear. With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated the stairs.

Without warning, Hely seized Harriet’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom which connected his room with Pemberton’s and shot the bolt behind them. “Hurry!” he yelled to Pemberton—who was on the other side, in his room, trying to get the door open—and then they dashed out into Pemberton’s room (Harriet, in the dim, tripping on a tennis racket) and scurried out behind him and down the stairs.

————

“That was nuts,” said Pemberton. It was the first thing anyone had said for a while. The three of them were sitting at the lone picnic table behind Jumbo’s Drive-In, on a concrete slab next to a forlorn pair of kiddie rides: a circus elephant and a faded yellow duck, on springs. They had driven around in the Cadillac—aimlessly, all three of them in the front seat—for about ten minutes, no air-conditioning and about to roast with the top up, before Pem finally pulled in at Jumbo’s.

“Maybe we ought to stop by the tennis courts and tell Mother,” said Hely. He and Pem were being unusually cordial to each other, though in a subdued way, united by the quarrel with Essie.

Pemberton took a last slurp of his milkshake, tossed it into the trash. “Man, you called that one.” The afternoon glare, reflected off the plate-glass window, burned white at the edges of his pool-frizzed hair. “That woman is a freak. I was scared she was going to hurt you guys or something.”

“Hey,” said Hely, sitting up straighter. “That siren.” They all listened to it for a moment, off in the distance.

“That’s probably the fire truck,” said Hely, glumly. “Driving to our house.”

“Tell me again, what happened?” Pem said. “She just went berserk?”

“Totally nuts. Hey, give me a cigarette,” he added, casually, as Pem tossed a packet of Marlboros—squashed from the pocket of his cutoff jeans—onto the table and dug in the other pocket for a light.

Pem lit his cigarette, then moved both matches and cigarettes out of Hely’s reach. The smoke smelled unusually harsh and poisonous, there on the hot concrete amidst the backwash of fumes from the highway. “I have to say, I saw it coming,” he said, shaking his head. “I told Mama. That woman is deranged. She’s probably escaped from Whitfield.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” blurted Harriet, who’d hardly said a word since they’d bolted from the house.

Both Pem and Hely turned to stare at her as if she was insane. “Huh?” said Pem.

“Whose side are you on?” said Hely, aggrieved.

“She didn’t say she was going to burn down the house.”

“Yes she did!”

“No! All she said was burn down. She didn’t say the house. She was talking about Hely’s posters and stickers and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah?” Pemberton said reasonably. “Burn Hely’s posters? I guess you think that’s all right.”

“I thought you liked me, Harriet,” said Hely sulkily.

“But she didn’t say she was going to burn the house down,” said Harriet. “All she said was … I mean,” she said, as Pemberton rolled his eyes knowingly at Hely, “it just wasn’t that big a deal.”

Hely, ostentatiously, scooted away from her on the bench seat.

“But it wasn’t,” said Harriet, who was growing by the moment more unsure of herself. “She was just … mad.”

Pem rolled his eyes and blew out a cloud of smoke. “No kidding, Harriet.”

“But … but yall are acting like she chased us with a butcher knife.”

Hely snorted. “Well, next time, she might! I’m not staying by myself with her any more,” he repeated, self-pityingly, as he stared down at the concrete. “I’m sick of getting death threats all the time.”

————

The drive through Alexandria was short, and contained no more novelty or diversion than the Pledge of Allegiance. Down the east side of Alexandria and hooking in again at the south, the Houma River coiled around two-thirds of the town. Houma meant red, in the Choctaw language, but the river was yellow: fat, sluggish, with the sheen of ochre oil paint squeezed from the tube. One crossed it from the south, on a two-lane iron bridge dating from FDR’s administration, into what visitors called the historic district. A wide, flat, inhospitable avenue—painfully still in the strong sun—gave into the town square with its disconsolate statue of the Confederate soldier slouching against his propped rifle. Once he had been shaded by oak trees, but these had all been sawn down a year or two before to make way for a confused but enthusiastic aggregate of commemorative civic structures: clock tower, gazebos, lamp-posts, bandstand, bristling over the tiny and now shadeless plot like toys jumbled together in an unseemly crowd.

On Main Street, up to First Baptist Church, the houses were mostly big and old. To the east, past Margin and High Street, were the train tracks, the abandoned cotton gin and the warehouses where Hely and Harriet played. Beyond—towards Levee Street, and the river—was desolation: junkyards, salvage lots, tin-roofed shacks with sagging porches and chickens scratching in the mud.

At its grimmest point—by the Alexandria Hotel—Main Street turned into Highway 5. The Interstate had passed Alexandria by; and now the highway suffered the same dereliction as the shops on the square: defunct grocery stores and car lots, baking in a poisonous gray heat haze; the Checkerboard Feed Store and the old Southland gas station, boarded up now (its faded sign: a saucy black kitten with white bib and stockings, batting with its paw at a cotton boll). A north turn, onto County Line Road, took them by Oak Lawn Estates and under an abandoned overpass, into cow pastures and cotton fields and tiny, dusty little sharecropper farms, laboriously cut from dry red-clay barrens. Harriet and Hely’s school—Alexandria Academy—was out here, a fifteen-minute drive from town: a low building of cinder block and corrugated metal which sprawled in the middle of a dusty field like an airplane hangar. Ten miles north, past the academy, the pines took over from the pastures entirely and pressed against either side of the road in a dark, high, claustrophobic wall which bore down relentlessly almost to the Tennessee border.

Instead of heading out into the country, however, they stopped at the red light by Jumbo’s, where the rearing circus elephant held aloft in his sun-bleached trunk a neon ball advertising:

CONES

SHAKES

BURGERS

and—past the town cemetery, rising high upon its hill like a stage backdrop (black iron fences, graceful-throated stone angels guarding the marble gateposts to north, south, east, and west)—they circled around through town again.

When Harriet was younger, the east end of Natchez Street had been all white. Now both blacks and whites lived here, harmoniously for the most part. The black families were young and prosperous, with children; most of the whites—like Allison’s piano teacher, and Libby’s friend Mrs. Newman McLemore—were old, widowed ladies without family.

“Hey, Pem, slow down in front of the Mormon house here,” said Hely.

Pem blinked at him. “What’s the matter?” he said, but he slowed down, anyway.

Curtis was gone, and so was Mr. Dial’s car. A pickup was parked in the driveway but Harriet could see that it wasn’t the same truck. The gate was down, and the bed was empty except for a metal tool chest.

“They’re in that?” said Hely, breaking off short in the midst of his complaints about Essie Lee.

“Man, what is that up there?” said Pemberton, stopping the car in the middle of the street. “Is that tin foil on the windows?”

“Harriet, tell him what you saw. She said she saw—”

“I don’t even want to know what goes on up there. Are they making dirty movies, or what? Man,” said Pemberton, throwing the car into park, peering upward with his hand shading his eyes, “what kind of a creep rolls tin foil over all their windows?”

“Oh my gosh.” Hely flounced around in the seat and stared straight ahead.

“What’s your problem?”

“Pem, come on, let’s go.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Look,” said Harriet, after several moments of fascinated silence. A triangle of black had appeared in the center window, where the tinfoil was being peeled back from within by some anonymous but artful claw.

————

As the car sped off, Eugene rolled the tin foil back over the window with trembling fingers. He was coming down with a migraine headache. Tears streamed from his eye; as he stepped from the window, in the darkness and confusion, he bumped into a crate of soda bottles, and the racket slashed in a brilliant zig-zag of pain down the left side of his face.

Migraine headaches ran in the Ratliff family. It was said of Eugene’s grandfather—“Papaw” Ratliff, long deceased—that when suffering from what he called “a sick headache,” he had beaten out a cow’s eye with a two-by-four. And Eugene’s father, similarly afflicted, had slapped Danny so hard on some long-ago Christmas Eve that he flew head-first against the freezer and cracked a permanent tooth.

This headache had descended with less warning than most. The snakes were enough to make anybody sick, not to mention the anxiety of Roy Dial rolling up unannounced; but neither cops, nor Dial, was likely to come snooping in a flashy old gunboat like the car that had stopped out front.

He went into the other room, where it was cooler, and sat down at the card table with his head in his hands. He could still taste the ham sandwich he had for lunch. He had enjoyed it very little, and the bitter, aspirin overtaste in his mouth rendered the memory even more unpleasant.

The headaches made him sensitive to noise. When he’d heard the engine idling in front, he’d gone immediately to the window, fully expecting to see the Clay County sheriff—or, at the very least, a cop car. But the incongruity of the convertible fretted at him. Now, against his better judgment, he dragged the telephone over to him and dialed Farish’s number—for, as much as he hated to call Farish, he was out of his depth in a matter like this. It was a light-colored car; between the glare and his aching head, he hadn’t been able to make out the exact model: maybe a Lincoln, maybe a Cadillac, maybe even a big Chrysler. And all he’d been able to see of its occupants was their race—white—though one of them had pointed up to the window clearly enough. What business had an old-fashioned parade car like that stopping right in front of the Mission? Farish had met a lot of gaudy characters in prison—characters worse to tangle with, in many instances, than the cops.

As Eugene (eyes shut) held the receiver so it wouldn’t touch his face, and tried to explain what had just happened, Farish ate noisily and steadily, something that sounded like a bowl of cornflakes, crunch slop crunch slop. For a long time after he had finished speaking, there was no noise on the other end except Farish’s chews and gulps.

Presently Eugene—clutching his left eye in the darkness—said: “Farsh?”

“Well, you’re right about one thing. No cop, or repo man, isn’t going to drive a car stands out like that,” said Farish. “Maybe syndicate from down on the Gulf Coast. Brother Dolphus used do a little business down that way.”

The bowl clicked against the receiver as Farish—from the sound of it—tipped his bowl up and drank down the leftover milk. Patiently, Eugene waited for him to resume the sentence, but Farish only smacked his lips, and sighed. Distant clatter of spoon on china.

“What would a Gulf Coast syndicate want with me?” he finally asked.

“Hell if I know. Something you aint being straight about?”

“Straight is the gate, brother,” Eugene replied stiffly. “I’m just running this mission and loving my Christian walk.”

“Well. Assuming that’s correct. Could be little Reese they come after. Who knows what kind of hot water he’s got himself into.”

“Be straight with me, Farsh. You done got me into something and I know, I know,” he said, over Farish’s objections, “that it’s got to do with those narcotics. That’s why that boy is here from Kentucky. Don’t ask me how I know it, I just do. I wisht you’d just go on and tell me why you invited him down here to stay.”

Farish laughed. “I didn’t invite him. Dolphus told me he was driving over to that homecoming—”

“In East Tennessee.”

“I know, I know, but he’d never been down thisaway before. I thought you and the boy might like to hook up, since you’re just getting started and the boy’s got a big congregation of his own, and swear to God that’s all I know about it.”

Long silence on the line. Something in the way that Farish was breathing made Eugene feel the smirk on Farish’s face, as plainly as if he saw it.

“But you’re right about one thing,” said Farish, tolerantly, “no telling what that Loyal is into. And I’ll apologize to you for that. Old Dolphus sho had his hand in every fire you care to mention.”

“Loyal’s not the one behind this. This is something you and Danny and Dolphus have cooked up yourselves.”

“You sound awful,” said Farish. “Say you got one of them headaches?”

“I feel pretty low.”

“Listen, if I was you, I’d go lay down. Are you and him preaching tonight?”

“Why?” said Eugene suspiciously. After the close shave with Dial—it had been only luck that they’d moved the snakes down to the truck before he turned up—Loyal had apologized for all the trouble he’d caused (“I kindly didn’t understand the situation, you living here in town”) and volunteered to drive the snakes to an undisclosed location.

“We’ll come to hear you,” Farish said expansively. “Me and Danny.”

Eugene passed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t want you to.”

“When is Loyal driving back home?”

“Tomorrow. Look, I know you’re up to something, Farsh. I don’t want you to get this boy into trouble.”

“What you so worrit about him for?”

“I don’t know,” said Eugene, and he didn’t.

“Well, then, we’ll see you tonight,” Farish said, and he hung up before Eugene could say a word.

————

“What goes on up there, sweetie, I have no idea,” Pemberton was saying. “But I can tell you who rents the place—Danny and Curtis Ratliff’s big brother. He’s a preacher.”

At this, Hely turned to stare at Harriet with amazement.

“He’s a real nut,” said Pem. “Something wrong with his face. He stands out on the highway yelling and shaking his Bible at cars.”

“Is that the guy who walked up and knocked on the window when Daddy was stopped at the intersection?” said Hely. “The one with the weird face?”

“Maybe he’s not crazy, maybe it’s just an act,” Pem said. “Most of these hillbilly preachers that yell, and pass out, and jump up on their chairs and run up and down the aisles—they’re just showing off. It’s all a big fake, that holy-roller stuff.”

“Harriet—Harriet, you know what?” Hely said, unbearably excited, twisting around in his seat. “I know who this guy is. He preaches on the square every Saturday. He’s got a little black box with a microphone leading to it, and—” He turned back to his brother. “Do you think he handles snakes? Harriet, tell him what you saw over there.”

Harriet pinched him.

“Hmn? Snakes? If he handles snakes,” said Pemberton, “he’s a bigger nut than I thought.”

“Maybe they’re tame,” Hely said.

“Idiot. You can’t tame a snake.”

————

It had been a mistake telling Farish about the car. Eugene was sorry he’d ever said anything about it. Farish had called back half an hour later, just as Eugene had managed to doze off—and then again, ten minutes after that. “Have you seen any suspicious characters in uniform in the street outside your house? Like jogging suits, or janitor outfits?”

“No.”

“Anybody been tailing you?”

“Look here, Farsh, I’m trying to get some rest.”

“This is how you tell if you’ve got a tail on you. Run a red light or drive the wrong way down a one way street and see if the person follows. Or—Tell you what. Maybe I should just come on down there myself and take a look around.”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that Eugene was able to dissuade Farish from coming down to the Mission for what he called “an inspection.” He settled down for a nap in the beanbag chair. Finally—just as he’d managed to slip into a dazed and fitful sleep—he became aware that Loyal was standing over him.

“Loyle?” he said, floundering.

“I’ve got some bad news,” said Loyal.

“Well, what is it?”

“There was a key broke off in the lock. I couldn’t get in.”

Eugene sat quietly, trying to make some sense of this. He was still half asleep; in his dream, there’d been lost keys, car keys. He’d been stranded at an ugly bar with a loud jukebox somewhere out on a dirt road at night, with no way to get home.

Loyal said: “I’d been told I could leave them snakes over at a hunting cabin in Webster County. But there was a key broke off in the lock and I couldn’t get in.”

“Ah.” Eugene shook his head, to clear it, and looked around the room. “So that means …”

“The snakes are downstairs in my truck.”

There was a long silence.

“Loyle, I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve had a migraine headache.”

“I’ll bring em in. You don’t have to help. I can get em up here by myself.”

Eugene rubbed his temples.

“Listen, I’m in a tight spot. It’s cruel to leave em out there roasting in this heat.”

“Right,” said Eugene listlessly. But he wasn’t worried about the snakes’ welfare; he was worried about leaving them out in the open to be discovered—by Mr. Dial, by the mysterious snooper in the convertible, who knew. And suddenly it came to him that there had been a snake too in his dream, a dangerous snake crawling loose among people somewhere.

“Okay,” he said to Loyal with a sigh, “bring em in.”

“I promise they’ll be out of here by tomorrow morning. This hasn’t worked out very well for you, I know,” said Loyal. His intense blue gaze was frankly sympathetic. “Having me here.”

“It aint your fault.”

Loyal ran a hand through his hair. “I want you to know I’ve enjoyt your fellowship. If the Lord don’t call you to handle—well, He has His reasons. Sometimes He don’t call me to handle either.”

“I understand.” Eugene felt he should say something more, but he couldn’t marshal the right thoughts. And he was too ashamed to say what he felt: that his spirit was dry and empty, that he wasn’t naturally good, good in his mind and heart. That he was of a tainted blood, and a tainted lineage; that God looked down on him, and despised his gifts, as He had despised the gifts of Cain.

“Someday I’ll get called,” he said, with a brightness he did not feel. “The Lord’s just not ready for me yet.”

“There are other gifts of the Spirit,” said Loyal. “Prayer, preaching, prophecy, visions. Laying hands on the sick. Charity and works. Even amongst your own family—” he hesitated, discreetly. “There’s good to be done there.”

Wearily, Eugene looked up into the kind, candid eyes of his visitor.

“It aint about what you want,” said Loyal. “It’s about the perfect will of God.”

————

Harriet came in through the back door to find the kitchen floor wet, and the counter-tops wiped—but no Ida. The house was silent: no radio, no fan, no footsteps, only the monotone hum of the Frigidaire. Behind her, something scratched: Harriet jumped, and turned just in time to see a small gray lizard scrabbling up the screen of the open window behind her.

The smell of the pine cleaner that Ida used made her head ache in the heat. In the dining room, the massive china cabinet from Tribulation squatted amongst the hectic stacks of newspaper. Two oblong carving platters, leaning upright against the top shelf, gave it a wild-eyed expression; low and tense on its bowed legs, it slanted out from the wall on one side ever so slightly, like a musty old sabreur poised to leap out over the stacks of newspaper. Harriet ran an affectionate hand over it as she edged past; and the old cabinet seemed to pull its shoulders back and flatten itself, obligingly, against the wall to let her by.

She found Ida Rhew in the living room, sitting in her favorite chair, where she ate her lunch, or sewed buttons, or shelled peas while she watched the soap operas. The chair itself—plump, comforting, with worn tweed upholstery and lumpy stuffing—had come to resemble Ida in the way that a dog sometimes resembles its owner; and Harriet, when she couldn’t sleep at night, sometimes came downstairs and curled up in the chair with her cheek against the tweedy brown fabric, humming strange old sad songs to herself that nobody sang but Ida, songs from Harriet’s babyhood, songs as old and mysterious as time itself, about ghosts, and broken hearts, and loved ones dead and gone forever:

Don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?

Don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?

The flowers are blooming for evermore,

There the sun will never go down.

At the foot of the chair, Allison lay on her stomach with her ankles crossed. She and Ida were looking out the window opposite. The sun was low and orange, and the television aerials bristled on Mrs. Fountain’s roof through a sizzle of afternoon glare.

How she loved Ida! The force of it made her dizzy. With no thought whatever of her sister, Harriet skittered over and threw her arms passionately around Ida’s neck.

Ida started. “Gracious,” she said, “where’d you come from?”

Harriet closed her eyes and rested with her face in the moist warmth of Ida’s neck, which smelled like cloves, and tea, and woodsmoke, and something else bitter-sweet and feathery but quite definite that was to Harriet the very aroma of love.

Ida reached around and disengaged Harriet’s arm. “You trying to strangle me?” she said. “Look there. We’s just watching that bird over on the roof.”

Without turning around, Allison said: “He comes every day.”

Harriet shaded her eyes with her hand. On the top of Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, pocketed neatly between a pair of bricks, stood a red-winged blackbird: spruce, soldierly in its bearing, with steady sharp eyes and a fierce slash of scarlet cutting like a military epaulet across each wing.

“He’s a funny one,” said Ida. “Here’s how he sound.” She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird’s call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry tcch tchh tchh of the cricket’s birr and up again in delirious, sobbing trills; not the clear, three-note whistle of the chickadee or even the blue jay’s rough cry, which was like a rusty gate creaking. This was an abrupt, whirring, unfamiliar cry, a scream of warning—congeree!—which choked itself off on a subdued, fluting note.

Allison laughed aloud. “Look!” she said, rising up on her knees—for the bird had suddenly perked up, cocking its glossy fine head intelligently to the side. “He hears you!”

“Do it again!” said Harriet. Ida wouldn’t do bird-calls for them just any old time; you had to catch her in the right mood.

“Yes, Ida, please!”

But Ida only laughed and shook her head. “Yall remember, don’t you,” she said, “the old story how he got his red wing?”

“No,” said Harriet and Allison, at once, though they did. Now that they were older, Ida told stories less and less, and that was too bad because Ida’s stories were wild and strange and often very frightening: stories about drowned children, and ghosts in the woods, and the buzzard’s hunting party; about gold-toothed raccoons that bit babies in their cradles, and bewitched saucers of milk that turned to blood in the night.…

“Well, once upon a time, in the long-ago,” said Ida, “there was a ugly little hunchback man so mad at everything he decide to burn up the whole world. So he taken a torch in his hand, just as mad as he could be, and walked down to the big river where all the animals lived. Because back in the old days, there wasn’t a whole lot of little second-class rivers and creeks like you have now. There was only the one.”

Over on Mrs. Fountain’s chimney, the bird battered his wings—quick, businesslike—and flew away.

“Oh, look. There he goes. Aint want to hear my story.” With a heavy sigh, Ida glanced at the clock, and—to Harriet’s dismay—stretched and stood up. “And it’s time for me to be getting home.”

“Tell us anyway!”

“Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”

“Ida, don’t go!” cried Harriet as Ida Rhew broke the small, contented silence that followed by heaving a sigh and moving towards the door, slowly, as if her legs hurt her: poor Ida. “Please?”

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Ida, wryly, without turning around, hoisting her brown paper grocery bag underneath her arm, trudging heavily away. “Never you worry.”

————

“Listen, Danny,” said Farish, “Reese is leaving, so we’re going to have to go on down to the square and listen to Eugene’s—” abstractedly, he waved his hand in the air. “You know. That church bullshit.”

“Why?” said Danny, pushing back his chair, “why we got to do that?”

“The boy is leaving tomorrow. Early tomorrow, knowing him.”

“Well, come on, we’ll just run down to the Mission and put the stuff in his truck right now.”

“We can’t. He’s went off somewhere.”

“Damn.” Danny sat and thought for a moment. “Where you planning on hiding it? The engine?”

“I know places that the FBI could tear that truck apart and never find it.”

“How long’s it going to take you? … I said, how long’s it going to take you,” Danny repeated, when he saw a hostile light spark up suddenly in Farish’s eyes. “To hide the stuff.” Farish was slightly deaf in one ear, from the gunshot; and when he was drugged up and paranoid, sometimes he misunderstood things in a really twisted way, thought you’d told him to go fuck himself when really you’d asked him to shut the door or pass the salt.

“How long you say?” Farish held up five fingers.

“So, all right now. Here’s what we do. Why don’t we skip the preaching and go on over there to the Mission afterwards? I’ll keep em busy upstairs while you go out and put the package in the truck, wherever, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Tell you what bothers me,” said Farish abruptly. He sat down at the table beside Danny and began to clean his fingernails with a pocketknife. “It was a car over there at Gene’s just now. He called me about it.”

“Car? What kind of a car?”

“Unmarked. Parked out front.” Farish heaved a bilious sigh. “Took off when they saw Gene looking out the window at em.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“What?” Farish reared back, and blinked. “Don’t be whispering at me, now. I can’t stand it when you whisper.”

“I said it’s nothing.” Danny looked at his brother intently, then shook his head. “What would anybody want with Eugene?”

“It’s not Eugene they want,” said Farish, darkly. “It’s me. I’m telling you, there’s government agencies got a file on me this thick.”

“Farish.” You didn’t want to get Farish started on the Federal Government, not when he was cranked up like this. He’d rant all night and into the next day.

“Look here,” he said, “if you’d just go on and pay that tax—”

Farish shot a quick, angry glance at him.

“There was a letter come just the other day. If you don’t pay your taxes, Farish, they’re going to come after you.”

“This isn’t about any tax,” said Farish. “The government’s been surveilling my ass for twenty years.”

————

Harriet’s mother pushed open the door to the kitchen, where Harriet—head in hands—sat slumped at the table. Hoping to be asked what was wrong, she slumped down even further; but her mother did not notice her and went directly to the freezer, where she dug out the striped gallon bucket of peppermint ice cream.

Harriet watched her as she reached up on tiptoe to get a wine glass from the top shelf, and then, laboriously, scooped a few spoonfuls of ice cream into it. The nightgown she had on was very old, with filmy ice-blue skirts and ribbons at the throat. When Harriet was small, she had been captivated by it because it looked like the Blue Fairy’s gown in her book of Pinocchio. Now, it just looked old: wilted, gone gray at the seams.

Harriet’s mother, turning to put the ice cream back in the freezer, saw Harriet slouching at the table. “What’s the matter?” she said, as the freezer door barked shut.

“To start with,” said Harriet, loudly, “I’m starving.”

Harriet’s mother wrinkled her brow—vaguely, pleasantly—and then (no, don’t let her say it, thought Harriet) asked the very question that Harriet had known she would ask. “Why don’t you have some of this ice cream?”

“I … hate … that … kind … of … ice … cream.” How many times had she said it?

“Hmn?”

“Mother, I hate peppermint ice cream.” She felt desperate all of a sudden; didn’t anybody ever listen to her? “I can’t stand it! I’ve never liked it! Nobody’s ever liked it but you!”

She was gratified to see her mother’s hurt expression. “I’m sorry … I just thought we all enjoyed a little something light and cool to eat … now that it’s so hot at night.…”

“I don’t.”

“Well, get Ida to fix you something.…”

“Ida’s gone!”

“Didn’t she leave you anything?”

“No!” Nothing Harriet wanted, anyway: only tuna fish.

“Well, what would you like, then? It’s so hot—you don’t want anything heavy,” she said doubtfully.

“Yes I do!” At Hely’s house, no matter how hot it was, they sat down and ate a real supper every night, big, hot, greasy suppers that left the kitchen sweltering: roast beef, lasagne, fried shrimp.

But her mother wasn’t listening. “Maybe some toast,” she said brightly, as she replaced the ice cream carton in the freezer.

“Toast?”

“Why, what’s wrong with that?”

“People don’t have toast for dinner! Why can’t we eat like regular people?” At school, in health class, when Harriet’s teacher had asked the children to record their diets for two weeks, Harriet had been shocked to see how bad her own diet looked when it was written down on paper, particularly on the nights that Ida didn’t cook: Popsicles, black olives, toast and butter. So she’d torn up the real list, and dutifully copied from a cookbook her mother had received as a wedding present (A Thousand Ways to Please Your Family) a prim series of balanced menus: chicken piccata, summer squash gratin, garden salad, apple compote.

“It’s Ida’s responsibility,” said her mother, with sudden sharpness, “to fix you something. That’s what I pay her for. If she’s not fulfilling her duties, then we’ll have to find somebody else.”

“Shut up!” screamed Harriet, overcome by the unfairness of this.

“Your father is after me all the time about Ida. He says she doesn’t do enough around the house. I know you like Ida but—”

“It’s not her fault!”

“—if she’s not doing what she should be, then Ida and I will have to have a little talk,” said her mother. “Tomorrow …”

She drifted out, with her glass of peppermint ice cream. Harriet—dazed and baffled by the turn their conversation had taken—put her forehead on the table.

Presently she heard someone come into the kitchen. Dully she glanced up to see Allison standing in the doorway.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” she said.

“Leave me alone!”

Just then, the telephone rang. Allison picked it up and said, “Hello?” Then her face went blank. She dropped the receiver so it swung by the cord.

“For you,” she said to Harriet, walking out.

The instant she said hello, Hely said in a rush: “Harriet? Listen to this—”

“Can I eat dinner at your house?”

“No,” said Hely, after a confused pause. Dinner at his house was over, but he’d been too excited to eat. “Listen, Essie did go berserk. She busted some glasses in the kitchen and left, and my dad drove by her house and Essie’s boyfriend came out on the porch and they got into a huge fight and Dad told him to tell Essie not to come back, she was fired. Yaaay! But that’s not why I called,” he said, rapidly; for Harriet had begun to stutter with horror at this. “Listen, Harriet. There isn’t much time. That preacher with the scar is down at the square right now. There’s two of them. I saw it with Dad, on the way home from Essie’s, but I don’t know how long they’re going to be there. They’ve got a loudspeaker. I can hear them from my house.”

Harriet put the telephone down on the counter and went to the back door. Sure enough, from the vine-tangled seclusion of the porch, she heard the tinny echo of a loudspeaker: someone shouting, indistinctly, the hiss and crackle of a bad microphone.

When she went back to the telephone Hely’s breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.

“Can you come out?” she said.

“I’ll meet you at the corner.”

It was after seven, still light outside. Harriet splashed some water on her face from the kitchen sink and went to the toolshed for her bicycle. As she flew down the driveway, the gravel popped under her tires until bump: her front wheel hit the street, and off she skimmed.

Hely, astride his bicycle, was waiting at his corner. When he saw her in the distance, he took off; pedalling furiously, she soon caught up with him. The street lamps were not yet lit; the air smelled like hedge clippings, and bug spray, and honeysuckle. Rose beds blazed magenta and carmine and Tropicana orange in the fading light. They sped past drowsy houses; hissing sprinklers; a yipping terrier who shot out after them, chased behind them for a block or two with his little short legs flying, and then fell away.

Sharply, they turned the corner of Walthall Street. The wide gables of Mr. Lilly’s shingle Victorian flew towards them at a forty-five-degree angle, like a house-boat beached at a sideways tilt upon a green embankment. Harriet let the momentum whisk her through the turn, the fragrance of his climbing roses—clouds of sweetheart pink, tumbling in great drifts from his trellised porch—blowing spicy and evanescent past her as she coasted, free, for a second or two, and then pedalled furiously rounding out upon Main: a hall of mirrors, white facades and columns in the rich light, receding in long, grand perspectives towards the square—where the flimsy white lattices and pickets of bandstand and gazebo bristled in the dim, lavender distance, against the deep blue scrim of the sky—all tranquility, like a backlit stage set at the high-school play (Our Town) except for the two men in white shirts and dark trousers pacing back and forth, waving their arms, bowing and rearing back to shout as they walked, their paths meeting in the center and criss-crossing to and fro to all four corners in an X formation. They were going at it like a pair of auctioneers, amplified and rhythmic cants that met, and clashed, and pulled apart, in two distinct lines, Eugene Ratliff’s mush-mouthed basso and the high hysterical counterpoint of the younger man, an up-country twang, the sharp-plucked i’s and e’s of the mountains:

“—your mama—”

“—your daddy—”

“—your poor little baby that’s in the ground—”

“You mean to tell me that they’re gettin up?”

“I mean to tell you that they’re gettin up.”

“You mean to tell me that they’ll rise again?”

“I mean to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

“The Book means to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

“Christ means to tell you that they’ll rise again.”

“The prophets mean to tell you that they’ll rise again.…”

As Eugene Ratliff stomped his foot, and clapped, so that a greasy hank of the gray ducktail shook loose and fell over his face, the wild-haired fellow flung his hands up and broke out in a dance. He shook all over; his white hands twitched, as if the electrical current blazing from his eyes and standing his hair on end had crackled throughout his entire body, jerking and jittering him all over the bandstand in forthright convulsions.

“—I mean to shout it like the Bible times—”

“—I mean to shout it like Elijah done.”

“—Shout it loud to make the Devil mad—”

“—Come on children make the Devil mad!”

The square was practically deserted. Across the street stood a couple of teenaged girls, giggling uneasily. Mrs. Mireille Abbott stood in the door of the jewelry store; over by the hardware store, a family sat in a parked car with the windows down, watching. On the little finger of the Ratliff preacher (held lifted out, slightly, from the pencil-thin microphone, as if from a teacup’s handle) a ruby-colored stone caught the setting sun and flashed deep red.

“—Here in these Last Days we’re living in—”

“—We’re here to preach the truth from this Bible.”

“—We’re preaching this Book like the Olden Days.”

“—We’re preaching It like the Prophets done.”

Harriet saw the truck (THIS WORLD IS NOT MY HOME!)—and saw, with disappointment, that the bed was empty, except for a little vinyl-sided amplifier that looked like a cheap briefcase.

“Oh, it’s been a long time since some of you here now—”

“—read your Bible—”

“—gone to Church—”

“—got on your knees like a little child …”

With a jolt, Harriet noticed that Eugene Ratliff was looking directly at her.

“… for to be carnally minded is DEATH—”

“—to be vengefully minded is DEATH—”

“—for the Lust of the Flush is DEATH …”

“Flesh,” said Harriet, rather mechanically.

“What?” Hely said.

“It’s flesh. Not flush.”

“—for the wages of sin is DEATH—”

“—for the lies of the Devil are HELL AND DEATH …”

They’d made a mistake, Harriet realized, by venturing up a little too close, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Hely stood staring with his mouth open. She nudged him in the ribs. “Come on,” she whispered.

“What?” said Hely, wiping a forearm across his sticky forehead.

Harriet cut her eyes to the side in a way that meant let’s go. Without a word, they turned and walked their bikes politely away until they were around the corner and out of sight.

“But where were the snakes?” said Hely, plaintively. “I thought you said they were in the truck.”

“They must have carried them back in the house after Mr. Dial left.”

“Come on,” said Hely. “Let’s ride over there. Hurry, before they finish.”

They jumped back on their bicycles and pedalled to the Mormon house, as fast as they could. The shadows were getting sharper, and more complicated. The clipped boxwood globes punctuating the median of Main Street glowed brilliantly at the sun’s edge, like a long rank of crescent moons with three-quarters of their spheres darkened, but still visible. Crickets and frogs had begun to shriek in the dark banks of privet along the street. When, at last—gasping for breath, stepping down hard on the pedals—they rode in sight of the frame house, they saw that the porch was dark and the driveway empty. Up and down the street, the only soul in sight was an ancient black man with sharp, shiny cheekbones, as taut-faced and serene as a mummy, ambling peacefully down the sidewalk with a paper bag under his arm.

Hely and Harriet concealed their bicycles beneath a sprawling summersweet bush in the median’s center. From behind it they watched, warily, until the old man tottered around the corner and out of view. Then they darted across the street and squatted amidst the low, sprawling branches of a fig tree in the yard next door—for there was no cover in the yard of the frame house, not even a shrub, nothing but a brackish tuft of monkey grass encircling a sawn tree trunk.

“How are we going to get up there?” said Harriet, eyeing the gutter which ran from first to second story.

“Hang on.” Breathless with his own daring, Hely shot from the shelter of the fig tree and ran pell-mell up the stairs and then—just as rapidly—skimmed down again. He darted across the open yard and dove back under the tree, by Harriet. “Locked,” he said, with a silly, comic-book shrug.

Together, through a tremble of leaves, they regarded the house. The side facing them was dark. On the street side, in the rich light, the windows glowed lavender in the setting sun.

“Up there,” said Harriet, and pointed. “Where the roof is flat, see?”

Above the pitched roof-ledge peaked a small gable. Within it, a tiny, frosted window was cracked an inch or two at the bottom. Hely was about to ask how she planned to get up there—it was a good fifteen feet off the ground—when she said: “If you give me a boost, I’ll climb up the gutter.”

“No way!” Hely said; for the gutter was rusted nearly in two.

It was a very small window—hardly a foot wide. “I’ll bet that’s the bathroom window,” said Harriet. She pointed to a dark window positioned halfway up. “Where’s that one go?”

“To the Mormons. I checked.”

“What’s in there?”

“Stairs. There’s a landing with a bulletin board and some posters.”

“Maybe—Got you,” said Harriet, triumphantly, as she slapped her arm, and then examined the bloody mosquito smeared on her palm.

“Maybe the upstairs and downstairs connect on the inside,” she said to Hely. “You didn’t see anybody in there, did you?”

“Look, Harriet, they’re not home. If they come back and catch us we’ll say it’s a dare but we need to hurry or else let’s forget about it. I’m not sitting out here all night.”

“Okay …” She took a deep breath, and darted into the cleared yard, Hely right behind her. Up the stairs they pattered. Hely watched the street while Harriet, hand to glass, peered inside: deserted stairwell stacked with folding chairs; sad, tan-colored walls brightened by a wavery bar of light from a window facing the street. Beyond was a water cooler, a notice board tacked with posters (DO TALK TO STRANGERS! RX FOR AT-RISK KIDS).

The window was shut, no screen. Side by side, Hely and Harriet curled their fingers under the tongue of the metal sash and tugged at it, uselessly—

“Car,” hissed Hely. They flattened themselves against the side of the house, hearts pounding, as it whooshed past.

As soon as it was gone, they stepped out of the shadows and tried again. “What’s with this?” Hely whispered, craning on tiptoe to peer at the center of the window, where the top pane and the bottom pane met, perfectly flush.

Harriet saw what he meant. There was no lock, and no space for the panes to slide over each other. She ran her fingers over the sash.

“Hey,” whispered Hely, suddenly, and motioned for her to help.

Together, they pushed the top of the pane inward; something caught and squeaked and then, with a groan, the bottom of the window swung out on a horizontal pivot. One last time, Hely checked the darkening street—thumbs up, coast clear—and a moment later they were wriggling in together, side by side.

Hanging head down, fingertips on the floor, Hely saw the gray specks on the linoleum rushing in at him, fast, as if the simulated granite was the surface of an alien planet hurtling at him a million miles an hour—smack, his head hit the floor and he tumbled inside, Harriet collapsing on the floor beside him.

They were in: on the landing of an old-fashioned staircase, only three steps up, with another long landing at the top of the stairs. Bursting with excitement, trying not to breathe too loudly, they picked themselves up and skittered to the top—where, turning the corner, they dashed almost headlong into a heavy door with a fat padlock dangling from the hasp.

There was another window, too—an old-fashioned wooden one, with a sash lock and a screen. Hely stepped over to examine it—and while Harriet stood staring at the padlock with dismay, he began gesturing frenetically all of a sudden, his teeth gritted in a rictus of excitement: for the roof ledge ran beneath this window, too, directly to the window in the gable.

By pulling hard, until their faces were red, they managed to wedge the sash up eight inches or so. Harriet wriggled out first (Hely steering her legs like a plow until unwittingly she kicked him, and he cursed and jumped back). The roofing was hot and sticky, gritty beneath her palms. Gingerly, gingerly, she eased to her feet. Eyes shut tight, holding the window frame with her left hand, she gave her right hand to Hely as he crawled out beside her.

The breeze was cooling off. Twin jet trails traced a diagonal in the sky, tiny white water-ski tracks in an enormous lake. Harriet—breathing fast, afraid to look down—smelled the wispy fragrance of some night-scented flower, far below: stocks, maybe, or sweet tobacco. She put her head back and looked up at the sky; the clouds were gigantic, glazed on their underbellies with radiant pink, like clouds in a painting of a Bible story. Very, very carefully—backs to the wall, electrified with excitement—they inched around the steep corner and found themselves looking down into the yard with their fig tree.

With their fingertips hooked beneath the aluminum siding—which held the day’s heat, and was a little too hot to touch comfortably—they sidled towards the gable inch by inch. Harriet made it first, and shuffled over to give Hely room. It was very small indeed, not much larger than a shoe-box and cracked open only about two inches at the bottom. Carefully, hand by hand, they transferred their grip from siding to sash and pulled up, together: timidly, at first, in case the thing flew up without warning and knocked them backward. It slid up four or five inches, easily, but then stuck firm, though they tugged until their arms trembled.

Harriet’s palms were wet and her heart slammed like a tennis ball in her chest. Then, down on the street, she heard a car coming.

They froze. The car whooshed past without stopping.

“Dude,” she heard Hely whisper, “don’t look down.” He was several inches away, not touching her, but a palpable corona of damp heat radiated from him head to toe, like a force field.

She turned; gamely, in the spooky lavender twilight, he gave her the thumbs up and then stuck his head and forearms through the window like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke and started through.

It was a tight squeeze. At the waist, he stuck fast. Harriet—clutching the aluminum siding with her left hand, straining up on the sash with her right—shied back as far as she could from his frantically kicking feet. The incline was shallow, and she slipped and nearly fell, catching herself only at the last moment, but before she could swallow or even catch her breath Hely’s front half fell inside the apartment, with a loud thump, so that only his sneakers stuck out. After a moment’s stunned pause, he pulled himself in the rest of the way. “Yes!” Harriet heard him say—his voice distant, jubilant, a familiar ecstasy of attic darkness, when they scrambled on their hands and knees to cardboard forts.

She stuck her head in after him. In the dim, she just made him out: curled in a heap, nursing a hurt kneecap. Clumsily—on his knees—he rose and walked forward and seized Harriet’s forearms and threw his weight backward. Harriet sucked her stomach in and did her best to wriggle through, oof, kicking in mid-air, like Pooh stuck in the rabbit hole.

Still writhing, she fell all in a tumble—partly on Hely, partly on a dank, mildewy carpet that smelled like something from the bottom of a boat. As she rolled away, her head bumped the wall with a hollow sound. They were indeed in a bathroom, a tiny one: sink and toilet, no tub, walls of particle board laminated to look like tile.

Hely, on his feet now, pulled her up. As she stood, she smelled an acerbic, fishy smell—not mildew, though intertwined with mildew, but sharp and distinct and entirely vile. Fighting the bad taste at the back of her throat, Harriet hurled all her rising panic into battling the door (flapping vinyl accordion, printed to look like woodgrain), which was stuck firmly in its tracks.

The door snapped and they fell on top of each other through it into a larger room—just as stuffy, but darker. The far wall bellied out in an overstuffed curve which was blackened with smoke damage and buckled with damp. Hely—panting with excitement, heedless as a terrier on the scent—was yanked up suddenly by a fear so sharp it rang on his tongue with a metallic taste. Partly because of Robin, and what had happened to him, Hely’s parents had warned him all his life that not all grown-ups were good; some of them—not many, but a few—stole children from their parents and tortured and even killed them. Never before had the truth of this struck him so forcefully, like a blow to the chest; but the stench and the loathsome swell of the walls made him feel seasick and all the horror stories his parents had told him (kids gagged and bound in abandoned houses, hung from ropes or locked in closets to starve) all at once came to life, turned piercing yellow eyes on him and grinned, with shark’s teeth: chop-chop.

Nobody knew where they were. Nobody—no neighbor, no passer-by—had seen them climb in; nobody would ever know what had happened to them if they didn’t come home. Following behind Harriet, who was heading confidently into the next room, he tripped over an electrical cord and nearly screamed.

“Harriet?” His voice came out strange. He stood there in the dim, waiting for her answer, staring at the only light visible—three rectangles traced in fire, outlining each of the three tinfoiled windows, floating eerily in the dark—when suddenly the floor plunged beneath him. Maybe it was a trap. How did they know nobody was home?

“Harriet!” he cried. All of a sudden he had to pee worse than he’d ever had to pee in his whole life and—fumbling with his zipper, hardly knowing what he did—he turned from the door and let rip right on the carpet: fast fast fast, mindless of Harriet, practically hopping up and down in his agony; for in warning him so vigorously about sickos, Hely’s parents had unwittingly planted in him some strange ideas, and chief among these was a panicky belief that kidnapped children were not permitted by their captors to use the toilet, but forced to soil themselves wherever they might be: tied to a dirty mattress, locked in a car trunk, buried in a coffin with a breathing tube.…

There, he thought, half-delirious with relief. Even if the rednecks tortured him (with clasp-knives, nail-guns, whatever) at least they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching him wet himself. Then, behind him, he heard something, and his heart skidded like a car on an ice slick.

But it was only Harriet—her eyes big and inky, looking very small against the door frame. He was so glad to see her he didn’t even think to wonder if she’d caught him peeing.

“Come see this,” she said, flatly.

At her calmness, his fear evaporated. He followed her into the next room. The instant he stepped in, the rotten musky stink—how could he not have recognized it?—hit him so hard that he could taste it—

“Holy Moses,” he said, clapping a hand over his nose.

“I told you,” she said primly.

The boxes—lots of them, nearly enough to cover the floor—glinted in the faint light; pearly buttons, mirror shards, nailheads and rhinestones and crushed glass all shimmering discreetly in the dimness like a cavern of pirate treasure, rough sea-chests strewn with great careless sprays of diamonds and silver and rubies.

He looked down. In the crate by his sneaker, a timber rattlesnake—inches away—was coiled and switching his tail, tch tch tch. Without thinking, he leapt back when through the screen at the corner of his vision he caught sight of another snake pouring itself quietly toward him in a mottled S-shape. When its snout butted the side of the box it snapped back, with such a hiss and such a powerful lash (impossible movement, like a film run backwards, rope rising from a puddle of spilled milk and flying upwards and back into the pitcher) that Hely jumped again, knocking into another crate, which spat with a perfect ebullition of hisses.

Harriet, he noticed, was shoving an up-ended box away from the mass and towards the latched door. She stopped and brushed the hair from her face. “I want this one,” she said. “Help me.”

Hely was overcome. Though he hadn’t realized it, up until this very instant he hadn’t believed she was telling him the truth; and an icy bubble of excitement surged up through him, tingling, deadly, delicious, like cold green sea rushing through a hole in the bottom of a boat.

Harriet—lips compressed—slid the crate through several feet of clear floor space, then tipped it sideways. “We’ll take him …” she said, and paused to rub her palms together, “we’ll take him down the stairs outside.”

“We can’t walk down the street carrying that box.”

“Just help me, okay?” With a gasp, she wrenched the crate free of the tight spot.

Hely started over. The crates were not nice to wade through; behind the screens—no more than window-screen, he noted, easy to put a foot through—he had a vague consciousness of shadowy motion: circles that broke, and melted, and doubled back on themselves, black diamonds flowing one after the other in vile, silent circuits. His head felt full of air. This isn’t real, he told himself, not real, no it’s just a dream and indeed, for many years to come—well into adulthood—his dreams would drop him back sharply into this malodorous dark, among the hissing treasure-chests of nightmare.

The strangeness of the cobra—regal, upright, solitary, swaying irritably with the jolting of his crate—did not occur to Hely; he was aware of nothing except the odd unpleasant slide of its weight from side to side, and of the need to keep his hand well back from the screen. Grimly, they pushed it up to the back door, which Harriet unlocked and opened wide. Then, together, they picked up the box and carried it lengthwise between them down the outside staircase (the cobra knocked off balance, thrashing and lashing with a dry, enraged violence) and set it on the ground.

It was dark now. The streetlamps were on and porch lights shone from across the street. Light-headed, too afraid even to look at the box, such was the hateful delirium of thumps from within, they kicked it up beneath the house.

The night breeze was chilly. Harriet’s arms prickled with sharp little goose bumps. Upstairs—around the corner, out of sight—the screen door blew open against the railing and then banged shut. “Hang on,” Hely said. He rose from his half-squatting posture and darted up the stairs again. With trembling, slack-fingered hands, he fumbled with the knob, groping for the lock. His hands were sticky with perspiration; a strange, dreamlike lightness had overtaken him and the dark, shoreless world billowed all around him, as if he were perched high in the rigging of some nightmare pirate ship, tossing and swaying, the night wind sweeping across the high seas.…

Hurry, he said to himself, hurry up and let’s get out of here but his hands weren’t working right, they slipped and slid uselessly on the doorknob like they weren’t even his.…

From below, a strangled cry from Harriet, so astonished with fright and despair that it choked off partway through.

“Harriet?” he called, into the uncertain silence that followed. His voice sounded flat and oddly casual. Then, the next instant, he heard car tires on gravel. Headlights swept grandly into the back yard. Whenever Hely thought about this night in the years to come, the picture that came to him most vividly was for some reason always this: the stiff, yellowed grass flooded in the sudden glare of car lights; scattered weed-spires—Johnson grass, beggar’s-lice—trembling and illumined harshly.…

Before he had time to think, or even breathe, high beams cut to low: pop. Pop again: and the grass went dark. Then a car door opened and what sounded like half a dozen heavy pairs of boots were tramping up the staircase.

Hely panicked. Later, he would wonder that he hadn’t thrown himself off the landing in his fright, and broken a leg or possibly his neck, but in the terror of those heavy footfalls he could think of nothing except the preacher, that scarred face coming toward him in the dark, and the only place to run was back into the apartment.

He darted inside; and in the dim, his heart sank. Card table, folding chairs, ice chest: where to hide? He ran into the back room, stubbing his toe against a dynamite crate (which responded with an angry whack and a tch tch tch of rattles), and instantly realized his terrible mistake but it was too late. The front door creaked. Did I even shut it? he thought, with a sickening crawl of fear.

Silence, the longest of Hely’s life. After what seemed like forever there was the slight click of a key turning in a lock, then twice again, rapidly.

“What’s the matter,” said a cracked male voice, “didn’t it catch?”

The light snapped on in the next room. In the flag of light from the doorway, Hely saw that he was trapped: no cover, no escape. Apart from the snakes, the room was virtually empty: newspapers, tool chest, a hand-painted signboard propped against one wall (With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding the Protestant Religion and All Civil Laws …) and, in the far corner, a vinyl beanbag chair. In an agony of haste (they could see him just by glancing through the open door) he slipped through the dynamite crates towards the beanbag.

Another click: “Yep, there it goes,” said the cracked voice, indistinctly, as Hely dropped to his knees and squirmed under the beanbag, as best as he could, pulling the bulk of it on top of him.

More talking, which he could not now hear. The bean-bag was heavy; he was facing away from the door, his legs curled tight beneath him. The carpet smashed against his right cheek smelled like sweaty socks. Then—to his horror—the overhead light came on.

What were they saying? He tried to make himself as small as he could. As he couldn’t move, he had no choice—unless he closed his eyes—except to stare at five or six snakes moving inside a gaudy, side-screened box two feet from his nose. As Hely stared at them, half-hypnotized, his muscles locked with terror, one little snake trickled away from the others and crawled halfway up the screen. The hollow of his throat was white, and his belly-scales ran in long, horizontal plates, the chalky tan of calamine lotion.

Too late—as sometimes happened when he caught himself gawking at the spaghetti-sauce guts of some animal squashed on the highway—Hely shut his eyes. Black circles on orange—the light’s afterburn, thrown into negative—drifted up from the bottom of his vision, one after another, like bubbles in a fish tank, growing fainter and fainter as they rose and vanished.…

Vibrations in the floor: footsteps. The steps paused; and then another set, heavier, and quicker, tramped in and stopped abruptly.

What if my shoe is poking out? thought Hely, with a near-uncontrollable sizzle of horror.

Everything stopped. The steps reversed themselves a pace or two. More muffled talking. It seemed to him as if one set of feet went to the window, paced fitfully, then retreated. How many different voices there were, he could not tell, but one voice rose distinct from the rest: garbled, singsong, like the game that he and Harriet sometimes played at the swimming pool where they took turns saying sentences underwater and tried to figure out what the other person was saying. At the same time he was aware of a quiet scritch scritch scritch coming from the snake box, a noise so faint that he thought he must be imagining it. He opened his eyes. In the narrow strip between beanbag and smelly carpet, he found himself staring sideways at eight pale inches of snake-belly, resting weirdly against the screen of the box opposite. Like the livery tip of some sea-creature’s tentacle, blindly it oscillated back and forth, like a windshield wiper … scratching itself, Hely realized, with horrified fascination, scritch … scritch … scritch.…

Off snapped the overhead lights, unexpectedly. The footsteps and the voices retreated.

Scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch … scritch …

Hely—rigid, his palms pressed between his knees—stared out hopelessly into the dim. The snake’s belly was still visible, just barely, through the screen. What if he had to spend the night here? Helplessly, his thoughts skittered and bumped around in such a wild confusion that he felt sick. Remember your exits, he told himself; that was what his Health workbook said to do in case of fire or emergency, but he had not been paying very good attention and the exits he did remember were of absolutely no use: back door, inaccessible … inside staircase, padlocked by the Mormons … bathroom window—yes, that was possible—though coming in had been hard enough, never mind trying to squeeze out again unheard, and in the dark.…

For the first time, he remembered Harriet. Where was she? He tried to think what he would do if their positions were reversed. Would she have the sense to run get someone? In any other circumstances Hely would sooner have her pour hot coals down his back than call his dad, but now—short of death—he saw no alternative. Balding, soft around the middle, Hely’s father was neither large nor imposing; if anything, he was slightly below the average height but his years as a high-school administrator had given him a gaze which was Authority itself, and a stony manner of stretching out his silences at which even grown men faltered.

Harriet? Tensely, he pictured the white Princess phone in his parents’ bedroom. If Hely’s dad knew what had happened, he would march straight up here unafraid and yank him up by the shoulder and tow him out—to the car, for a whipping, and a lecture on the drive home which would leave Hely’s ears sizzling—while the preacher cowered in confusion among his serpents mumbling yes sir thankee sir not knowing what had hit him.

His neck hurt. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the snake. Suddenly it occurred to him that Harriet might be dead: strangled, shot, hit by the preacher’s truck, for all he knew, turning in right on top of her.

Nobody knows where I am. His legs were cramping. Ever so slightly, he straightened them. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody.

A shower of pinpricks sparkled through his calves. He lay very still for some minutes—tensed, fully expecting the preacher to swoop down on him at any moment. At last, when nothing happened, he rolled over. Blood tingled through his pinched limbs. He wriggled his toes; he turned his head from side to side. He waited. Then, at last, when he could stand it no longer, he poked his head from beneath the beanbag.

In the darkness, the boxes sparkled. A skewed rectangle of light spilled onto the snuff-colored carpet from the doorway. Beyond—Hely inched forward, on his elbows—was framed a grimy yellow room, brilliantly lit by a ceiling bulb. A high-pitched hillbilly voice was speaking, rapid but indistinct.

A growly voice interrupted. “Jesus never done a thing for me, and the law sure aint.” Then, quite suddenly, a gigantic shadow blocked the doorway.

Hely clutched the carpet; he lay petrified, trying not to breathe. Then another voice spoke: distant, peevish. “These reptiles aint got a thing to do with the Lord. All they are is nasty.”

The shadow in the doorway let out a weird, high-pitched chuckle—and Hely froze to iron. Farish Ratliff. From the doorway, his bad eye—pale like a boiled pickerel’s—raked across the darkness like the search beam of a lighthouse.

“Tell you what you ort to do …” To Hely’s immense relief, the heavy tread retreated. From the next room, there was a squeak like a kitchen cabinet opening. When, at last, he opened his eyes, the bright doorway stood empty.

“… what you ort to do, if you’re tired of hauling them around, is to take them all in the woods and turn em aloose and shoot em. Kill the shit out of ever last one of them. Light em on fire,” he said, loudly, over the preacher’s objection, “chunk them in the river, I don’t care. Then you aint got a problem.”

A belligerent silence. “Snakes can swim,” said a different voice—male, too, white, but younger.

“They aint going to swim far in a damn box, are they?” A crunch, as if Farish had bitten into something; in a jocular, crumbly voice, he continued. “Look, Eugene, if you don’t want to fool with em, I got me a .38 down there in the glove compartment. For ten cents, I’ll go in there right now and kill ever last one of them.”

Hely’s heart plummeted. Harriet! he thought wildly. Where are you? These were the men who had killed her brother; when they found him (and they would find him, of that he was sure) they would kill him too.…

What weapon did he have? How to defend himself? A second snake had nosed up the screen alongside the first one, his snout on the underside of the other’s jaw; they looked like the twined snakes on a medical staff. The nastiness of this commonplace symbol—printed in red on his mother’s collection envelopes for the Lung Association—had never before occurred to him. His mind spun. Hardly aware what he was doing, Hely reached out with trembling hand and lifted the latch on the box of snakes in front of him.

There, that’ll slow ’em down, he thought, rolling on his back and staring at the foam-panelled ceiling. He might be able to escape in whatever confusion ensued. Even if he was bit, he might make it to the hospital.…

One of the snakes had snapped at him, fitfully, as he reached for the lock. Now he felt something sticky—poison?—on the palm of his hand. The thing had struck and sprayed him clear through the screen. Hurriedly, he scrubbed his hand on the back of his shorts, hoping he didn’t have any cuts or scratches he’d forgotten about.

It took the snakes a little while to figure out they were loose. The two leaning against the screen had tumbled free at once; for some moments they lay there, without moving, until other snakes nosed in over their backs to see what was going on. All at once—as if a signal had been given—they seemed to understand that they were free and slid out gladly, fanning in all directions.

Hely—sweating—squirmed out from under the beanbag and crawled as rapidly as he dared past the open doorway, through the light spilling in from the next room. Though he was sick with apprehension, he dared not glance in but kept his gaze rigidly down for fear that they would sense his eyes upon them.

When he was safely past the door—safe for the moment, anyway—he slumped in the shadow of the opposite wall, shaky and weak from the beating of his heart. He was all out of ideas. If somebody decided to get up again and come in and turn on the lights, they would see him instantly, huddled defenseless against the particle-board.…

Had he really set those snakes loose? From where he stood, he saw two lying in the open floor; another wriggling, energetically, towards the light. A moment ago it had seemed like a good plan but now he was fervently sorry: please, God, please don’t let it crawl over here.… The snakes had patterns on their backs like copperheads, only sharper. On the audacious snake—which was making brazenly for the next room—he now made out the two-inch stack of rattle buttons on the tail.

But it was the ones he couldn’t see that made him nervous. There had been at least five or six snakes in that box—possibly more. Where were they?

From the front windows it was a sheer drop to the street. His only hope was the bathroom. Once he got out on the roof, he could dangle from the edge before dropping the rest of the way. He’d jumped from tree limbs nearly as high.

But to his dismay, the bathroom door wasn’t where he thought it was. Down the wall he inched—too far altogether for his taste, down into the dark area where he’d turned the snakes loose—but what he’d thought was the door wasn’t the door at all but only a piece of particle-board propped against the wall.

Hely was perplexed. The bathroom door was on the left, he was sure of it; he was debating whether to move farther down or go back when with an abrupt pitch of his heart he realized that it was on the left side of the other room.

He was too stunned to move. For an instant, the room plunged away (great depths, soundless wells, pupils dilating in response) and when it rushed back again, it took him a moment to figure out where he was. He leaned his head against the wall, rolling it back and forth. How could he be so dumb? He always had trouble with directions, confusing left with right; letters and numbers switched chairs when he was looking away from the page, and grinned back at him from different places; sometimes he even sat down at the wrong chair at school without realizing it. Careless! Careless! screamed the red writing on his book reports, on his math tests and scratched-up worksheets.

————

When the lights swung into the driveway, Harriet was caught wholly off-guard. She dropped to the ground and rolled under the house—bump, right into the cobra’s box, which lashed angrily in reply. The gravel crackled and almost before she could catch her breath, tires roared by a few feet from her face, in a blast of wind and bluish light that rippled through the ragged grass.

Harriet—face down in powdery dust—smelled a strong nauseating odor of something dead. All the houses in Alexandria had crawlspaces, for fear of floods, and this one was no more than a foot high and not much less claustrophobic than a grave.

The cobra—who had not enjoyed being jostled downstairs, and tipped on his side—whacked against the box, with horrid dry slashes she could feel through the wood. But worse than the snake or the dead-rat smell was the dust, which tickled her nose unbearably. She turned her head. A reddish pan from the tail-lights slanted under the house, glowing suddenly over squiggled earthworm castings, ant hills, a dirty shard of glass.

Then everything went black. The car door slammed. “—that’s what started that car on fire,” said a growly voice, not the preacher’s. “ ‘All right,’ I said to him—they had me laying all proned out on the ground—‘I’m on be honest with you sir, and you can take me to jail right now, but this one here’s got a warrant on him long as your arm.’ Ha! Well, he took off running.”

“That was all there was to that, I reckon.”

Laughter: not nice. “You got that right.”

The feet were tramping toward her. Harriet—desperately battling a sneeze—held her breath, clamped a hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut. Over her head and up the stairs the footsteps clomped. A tentative stinger pricked her ankle. Finding no resistance, it settled and sank in deeper, as Harriet trembled head to foot with the urge to slap it.

Another sting, this one on her calf. Fire ants. Great.

“Well, when he come on back home,” said the growly voice—fainter now, receding—“they all got to seeing who could get the true story out of him.…”

Then the voice stopped. Upstairs, everything was quiet, but she hadn’t heard the door open, and she sensed they hadn’t gone inside, but were lingering on the landing, watchfully. Stiffly she lay there, straining to listen with every ounce of her attention.

Minutes passed. The fire ants—energetically and in growing numbers—stung her arms and legs. Her back was still pressed against the box and every now and again, through the wood, the cobra whacked sullenly against her spine. In the stifling quiet, she imagined she heard voices, footsteps—and yet, when she tried to make them out, the noises shimmered and dissolved away into nothingness.

Rigid with terror, she lay on her side, staring out at the pitch-dark driveway. How long would she have to lie here? If they came after her, she would have no choice but to crawl further under the house, and never mind the fire ants: wasps built their nests under houses, as did skunks, and spiders, and all manner of rodents and reptiles; sick cats and rabid possums dragged themselves there to die; a black man named Sam Bebus who repaired furnaces for people had recently got on the front page of the newspaper when he found a human skull beneath Marselles, a Greek Revival mansion on Main Street, only a few blocks away.

Suddenly the moon came out from behind a cloud, silvering the straggly grass that grew at the house’s margin. Ignoring the fire ants, she lifted her cheek from the dust and listened. Tall blades of witch-grass—white at the edges with moonlight—shivered at eye level, then blew flat against the ground for a moment before they sprang back, disheveled, all a-jitter. She waited. At last, after a long, breathless silence, she inched forward on her elbows and put her head out from under the house.

“Hely?” she whispered. The yard was deathly still. Weeds shaped like tiny green wheat-stalks pushed up through the sparkling gravel of the driveway. At the end of the driveway the truck—towering up stupendous out of all proportion—stood silent and dark with its back to her.

Harriet whistled; she waited. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she crawled out and climbed to her feet. Something that felt like a crushed bug-shell was embedded in her cheek; she wiped it away, with gritty hands, dusted the ants from her arms and legs. Wispy brown clouds like gasoline vapors blew raggedly over the moon. Then they blew free entirely, and the yard was bathed in a clear, ashen light.

Quickly Harriet stepped back into the shadows around the house. The treeless lawn was as bright as day. For the first time, it occurred to her that she hadn’t actually heard Hely come down the stairs.

Around the corner she peeped. The yard next door, leaf-shade jangling on the grass, was empty: not a soul. With growing unease, she edged along the side of the house. Through a chain-link fence, she found herself staring into the glassy stillness of the next yard over, where a kiddie pool sat lonely and abandoned on the moonlit grass.

In the shadows, her back to the wall, Harriet circled the house but there was no sign of Hely anywhere. In all likelihood he’d run home and left her. Reluctantly, she stepped out onto the lawn and craned to look at the second story. The landing was empty; the bathroom window—still partially open—was dark. Upstairs were lights: movement, voices, too vague to distinguish.

Harriet worked up her courage, and ran out into the brightly lit street—but when she got to the bush on the median where they’d left the bikes, her heart tripped and skidded and she stopped in mid-step, unable to believe what she saw. Beneath the white-flowering branches, both bicycles lay sprawled on their sides, undisturbed.

For a moment she stood frozen. Then she came to her senses and ducked behind the bush and dropped to her knees. Hely’s bicycle was expensive and new; he was particular about it to a ridiculous degree. Head in hands, she stared at it, trying not to panic, and then she parted the branches and peered across the street, at the lighted second story of the Mormon house.

The calmness of the house, with its silvered windows glinting eerie on the top floor, put her in a great fear, and all at once the weight of the situation crashed in on her. Hely was trapped up there, she was sure of it. And she needed help; but there was no time, and she was alone. For some moments, she sat back on her heels in a daze, looking about, trying to decide what to do. There was the bathroom window, still partially open—but what good did that do her? In “A Scandal in Bohemia” Sherlock Holmes had thrown a smoke bomb in the window to get Irene Adler out of the house—nice idea, but Harriet didn’t have a smoke bomb, or anything else at hand except sticks and gravel.

For a moment more, she sat thinking—and then, in the high, broad moonlight, she ran back across the street, next door, to the yard where they’d hidden under the fig tree. Under a canopy of pecan trees sprawled an untidy bed of shade plants (caladiums, gas-plant) circled by chunks of whitewashed rock.

Harriet dropped to her knees and tried to lift one of the stones, but they were cemented together. Faintly, from inside, beneath an air-conditioner roaring hot air from a side window, a dog yapped sharp and tirelessly. Like a raccoon patting for fish on a stream’s bottom, she plunged her hands into the froth of greenery and felt around blindly in the overgrown tumble until her fingers closed on a smooth chunk of concrete. With both hands, she heaved it up. The dog was still yapping. “Pancho!” shrilled an ugly Yankee voice: an old woman’s voice, rough as sandpaper. She sounded sick. “Hush yer mouth!”

Stooped with the rock’s weight, Harriet ran back into the driveway of the frame house. There were two trucks, she saw, down at the end of the driveway. One was from Mississippi—Alexandria County—but the other had Kentucky plates, and as heavy as the rock was, Harriet stopped where she was and took a moment to fix the numbers in her mind. Nobody had thought to remember any license-plate numbers back when Robin was murdered.

Quickly, she ducked behind the first truck—the Kentucky one. Then she took the chunk of concrete (which, she now noticed, was not just any old chunk of concrete but a lawn ornament in the shape of a curled-up kitten) and knocked it against the headlight.

Pop went the lights as they broke—easily, with an explosion like a flashbulb; pop pop. Then she ran back and broke out all the lights on the Ratliff truck, the headlights and the tail-lights too. Though she felt like smashing them with all her strength, she held herself back; she was afraid of rousing the neighbors, and a good hard rap—like cracking the shell of an egg—was all it took to shatter them, so that big triangles of glass fell out upon the gravel.

From the tail-lights, she gathered up the biggest and most pointed shards and wedged them into the treads of the back tires, as firmly as she could without cutting her hands. Then she circled to the front of the truck and did the same. Heart pounding, she took two or three deep breaths. Then, with both hands, and with all the strength she could muster, she stood and lifted the concrete kitten as high as she could and hurled it through the windshield.

It broke with a bright splash. A shower of glass pebbles pattered to the dashboard. Across the street, a porch light snapped on, followed by the light next door, but the moonlit driveway—sparkling with broken glass—was deserted now, for Harriet was already halfway up the stairs.

“What was that?”

Silence. All at once—to Hely’s horror—a hundred and fifty watts of white electricity poured down on him from the overhead bulb. Aghast, blinded by the dazzle, he cringed against the sleazy panel board and almost before he could blink (there had been an awful lot of snakes on the carpet) somebody cursed and the room went black again.

A bulky form stepped through the door and into the dark room. Lightly, for its size, it slipped past Hely and toward the front windows.

Hely froze: the blood drained in a rapid whoosh from his head clear down to his ankles but just as the room was starting to swing back and forth a disturbance broke out in the front room. Agitated talk, not quite audible. A chair scraped back. “No, don’t,” someone said, clearly.

Fierce whispers. In the dark, only a few feet away, Farish Ratliff stood listening in the shadows—motionless, his chin high and his stumpy legs parted, like a bear poised to attack.

In the next room, the door squeaked open. “Farsh?” said one of the men. Then, to Hely’s surprise, he heard a child’s voice: whiny, breathless, indistinct.

Horribly near, Farish snapped: “Who’s that?”

Commotion. Farish—only steps from Hely—drew a long, exasperated breath then wheeled and thundered back into the lighted room as if he meant to choke someone.

One of the men cleared his throat and said: “Farish, look here—”

“Downstars … Come see …” The new voice—the child—was countrified and whiny; a little too whiny, Hely realized, with an incredulous surge of hope.

“Farsh, she says the truck—”

“He done broke your windows out,” piped the acid, tiny voice. “If you hurry—”

There was a general scramble, cut short by a bellow loud enough to bring down the walls.

“—if you hurry, you can catch him,” said Harriet; the accent had slipped, the voice—high, pedantic—recognizably hers, but nobody seemed to notice over the ecstasy of stuttering and curses. Feet thundered down the back stairs.

“Goddamn it!” shrieked someone, from outside.

From below floated an extraordinary ruckus of curses and shouts. Hely, cautiously, edged to the door. For several moments he stood and listened, so intently that he took no notice in the weak light of a small rattlesnake, coiled to strike, only ten or twelve inches from his foot.

“Harriet?” he whispered, at last—or tried to whisper, for he had almost completely lost his voice. For the first time, he realized how horribly thirsty he was. From downstairs, in the driveway, came confused shouts, a fist pounding on metal—hollow, repetitive, like the galvanized washtub that rendered the thunder sound effects in the middle-school plays and dance recitals.

Carefully, he peered around the door. The chairs were pushed back all cock-eyed; glasses of melting ice stood, in linked rings of water, on the card table beside an ashtray and two packs of cigarettes. The door to the landing was ajar. Another small snake had crawled into the room and was lying inconspicuously beneath the column radiator, but Hely had forgotten all about the snakes. Without wasting another moment, without even looking where he put his feet, he ran through the kitchen for the back door.

————

The preacher, hugging himself, leaned out over the pavement and looked down it as if waiting for a train. The scalded side of his face was turned away from Harriet but even in profile he was unnerving, with a furtive and disconcerting habit of putting his tongue out between his lips from time to time. Harriet stood as far from him as she reasonably could, with her face turned to the side so that neither he nor the others (still cursing, back in the driveway) could get a good look at her. She wanted—badly—to break and run for it; she had drifted down to the sidewalk with the idea of doing exactly that; but the preacher had disengaged himself from the confusion and trailed along behind her and she was not sure that she could out-run him. Upstairs, she’d trembled and quailed inside as the brothers towered over her in the lighted doorway: giants all, overpowering in their bulk, sunburnt and scarred and tattooed and greasy, glaring down at her with their stony light-colored eyes. The dirtiest and most massive of them—bearded, with bushy black hair and a ghastly white fish-eye like blind Pew in Treasure Island—had slammed his fist against a door frame, cursed so foully and fluently and with such an alarming violence that Harriet backed away in shock; now, methodically, his gray-streaked mane flying, he was kicking the remnants of one of the tail-lights to splinters with his boot. He was like the Cowardly Lion, but evil, with his strongman torso and his little short legs.

“Say they wasn’t in a car?” said the preacher, turning scar and all to scrutinize her.

Harriet, dumbly, kept her eyes down and shook her head. The lady with the Chihuahua—gaunt, in sleeveless nightgown and flip-flop pool sandals, a pink plastic hospital band around her wrist—was shuffling back toward her own house. She’d come outside carrying the dog, and her cigarettes and lighter in a tooled leather case, and stood at the edge of her yard to watch what was going on. Over her shoulder, the Chihuahua dog—still yapping—was staring Harriet straight in the eye and wriggling as if he wanted nothing more in the world than to escape from his mistress’s grasp and chew Harriet to pieces.

“He was white?” said the preacher. He wore a leather vest over his short-sleeved white shirt, and his gray hair was slicked back in a high, wavy pompadour. “You sure about that?”

Harriet nodded; with a show of shyness she pulled a strand of hair over her face.

“You’re running around out here mighty late this evening. Aint I seen you down at the square earlier?”

Harriet shook her head, glanced back studiously at the house—and saw Hely, blank-faced, white as a bedsheet, skimming rapidly down the stairs. Down he flew, without seeing Harriet or anybody—and bumped smack into the one-eyed man, who was muttering into his beard and striding towards the house with his head down, very fast.

Hely staggered back, let out a ghastly, wheezing little scream. But Farish only shoved past him and clomped up the stairs. He was jerking his head, talking in a clipped, angry voice (“… better not try it, better not …”) as if to some invisible but definite creature about three feet high which was scrabbling up the steps after him. All at once his arm flew out and slapped empty air: hard, as if making contact with an actual presence, some pursuing hunchbacked evil.

Hely had vanished. Suddenly a shadow fell over Harriet. “Who you?”

Harriet—badly startled—glanced up to find Danny Ratliff standing over her.

“Just happened to see it?” he said, hands on hips, tossing the hair out of his face. “Where was you when all this window-breaking was going on? Where’d she come from?” he said to his brother.

Harriet stared up at him, flabbergasted. From the sudden surprised flare of Danny Ratliff’s nostrils she knew that her revulsion was written plain all over her face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. Up close, he was wolfishly brown and thin, dressed in jeans and a skanky-looking long-sleeved T-shirt; his eyes—hooded, under heavy brows—had a mean, off-center cast that made her nervous. “What’s the matter with you?”

The preacher, who seemed quite agitated, glancing up and down the street, crossed his arms over his shirt-front and tucked his hands into his armpits. “Don’t worry,” he said, in his high-pitched, over-friendly voice. “We aint gone bite you.”

As afraid as she was, Harriet could not help noticing the blotchy blue tattoo on his forearm, and wondering what the picture was supposed to be. What kind of a preacher had tattoos on his arms?

“What’s wrong?” the preacher said to her. “You’re afret of my face, aren’t you?” His voice was pleasant enough; but then, quite without warning, he caught Harriet by the shoulders and thrust his face in hers, in a manner suggesting that his face was something to be very afraid of indeed.

Harriet stiffened, less at the burn (glossy red, with the fibrous, bloody sheen of raw membrane) than at his hands on her shoulders. From beneath a slick, lashless eyelid, the preacher’s eye sparkled, colorfully, like a blue chip of glass. Abruptly, his cupped palm darted out, as if to slap her, but as she flinched his eyes lit up: “Uh uh uh!” he said, triumphantly. With a light, infuriating touch, he stroked her cheek with his knuckle—and, passing his hand in front of her, produced unexpectedly a bent stick of gum, which he twirled between his first and middle fingers.

“Aint got much to say now, do you?” said Danny. “You was talking pretty good up there a minute ago.”

Harriet stared diligently at his hands. Though they were bony and boyish-looking, they were heavily scarred, the bitten nails rimmed in black, and covered with big ugly rings (a silver skull; a motorcycle insignia) like a rock star might wear.

“Whoever it was done this sure run off mighty fast.”

Harriet glanced up at the side of his face. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. He was looking up and down the street, and his eyes jumped around in a quick, jittery, suspicious way, like a bully on the playground who wanted to make sure that the teacher wasn’t looking before he hauled off and punched somebody.

“Ont it?” said the preacher, dangling the stick of gum in front of her.

“No thank you,” said Harriet, and was sorry the instant it was out of her mouth.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” Danny Ratliff demanded suddenly, wheeling as if she’d insulted him. “What’s your name?”

“Mary,” whispered Harriet. Her heart pounded. No thank you, indeed. Grubby though she was (leaves in her hair, dirt on her arms and legs), who was going to believe she was a little redneck? Nobody: rednecks, least of all.

“Hoo!” Danny Ratliff’s high-pitched giggle was sharp and startling. “Can’t hear you.” He spoke fast, but without moving his lips much. “Speak up.”

“Mary.”

“Say Mary?” His boots were big and scary-looking, with lots of buckles. “Mary who? Who you belong to?”

A shivery little wind blew through the trees. Leaf-shadow trembled and shifted on the moonlit pavement.

“John—Johnson,” said Harriet, weakly. Good grief, she thought. Can’t I do better than that?

“Johnson?” the preacher said. “Which Johnson is that?”

“Funny, you look like one of Odum’s to me.” Danny’s jaw muscles worked, furtively, on the left side of his mouth, biting down on the inside of his cheek. “How come you out here all by yourself? Aint I seen you down at the pool hall?”

“Mama …” Harriet swallowed, decided to start over. “Mama, she aint …”

Danny Ratliff, she noticed, was eyeing the expensive new camp moccasins Edie had ordered for her from L. L. Bean.

“Mama aint allow me to go there,” she said, awkwardly, in a small voice.

“Who is your mama?”

“Odum’s wife is past on,” said the preacher, primly, folding his hands.

“I aint askin you, I ast her.” Danny was gnawing at the side of his thumbnail and staring at Harriet in a stony way that made her feel very uncomfortable. “Look at her eyes, Gene,” he said to his brother, with a nervous toss of his head.

Congenially, the preacher stooped to peer into her face. “Well, derned if they’re not green. Where you get them green eyes from?”

“Look at her, staring at me,” said Danny shrilly. “Staring like that. What’s the matter with you, girl?”

The Chihuahua was still barking. Harriet—off in the distance—heard something that sounded like a police siren. The men heard it, too, and stiffened: but just then, from upstairs, rang a hideous scream.

Danny and his brother glanced at each other, and then Danny bolted for the stairs. Eugene—too shocked to move, able to think of nothing but Mr. Dial (for if this caterwauling failed to bring Dial and the sheriff, nothing would)—passed a hand over his mouth. Behind, he heard the slap of feet on the sidewalk; he turned to see the girl running off.

“Girl!” he shouted after her. “You, girl!” He was about to go after her when up above, the window sailed up with a crash and out flew a snake, the white of its underbelly pale against the night sky.

Eugene jumped back. He was too startled to cry out. Though the thing was stomped flat in the middle and its head was a bloody pulp, it filliped and twitched in convulsions on the grass.

Loyal Reese was all of a sudden behind him. “This isn’t right,” he said to Eugene, looking down at the dead snake, but Farish was already pounding down the back stairs with fists clenched and murder in his eyes and before Loyal—blinking like a baby—could say another word Farish swung him around and punched him in the mouth and sent him staggering.

“Who you working for?” he bellowed.

Loyal stumbled backward and opened his mouth—which was wet and bleeding thinly—and when nothing came out of it after a moment or two, Farish glanced quickly over his shoulder and then punched him again, this time to the ground.

“Who sent you?” he screamed. Loyal’s mouth was bloody; Farish grabbed his shirtfront and jerked him up to his feet. “Whose idea was this? You and Dolphus, yall just thought you’d fuck with me, make some easy money, but yall are fucking with the wrong person—”

“Farish,” called Danny—white as chalk, running down the stairs two at a time—“you got that .38 in the truck?”

“Wait,” said Eugene, panic-stricken—guns in Mr. Dial’s rental apartment? a dead body? “Yall got it wrong,” he called, waving his hands in the air. “Everybody calm down.”

Farish pushed Loyal to the ground. “I got all night,” he said. “Motherfucker. Double-cross me and I’m on break ye teeth out and blow a hole in your chest.”

Danny caught Farish’s arm. “Leave him, Farish, come on. We need the gun upstairs.”

Loyal, on the ground, raised himself up on his elbows. “Is they out?” he said; and his voice was full of such innocent astonishment that even Farish stopped cold.

Danny staggered back in his motorcycle boots and wiped a dirty arm across his forehead. He looked shellshocked. “All over the fucking place,” he said.

————

“We’re missing one,” said Loyal, ten minutes later, wiping the blood-tinged spit from his mouth with his knuckle. His left eye was purple and swollen to a slit.

Danny said: “I smell something funny. This place smells like piss. Do you smell it, Gene?” he asked his brother.

“There he goes!” cried Farish suddenly, and lunged for a defunct heating register from which protruded six inches of snake tail.

The tail flicked, with a parting rattle, and disappeared down the register like a whiplash.

“Quit,” said Loyal to Farish, who was pounding the register with the toe of his motorcycle boot. Moving quickly to the register, he bent over it fearlessly (Eugene and Danny and even Farish, ceasing his dance, stepping well back). Pursing his lips, he emitted an eerie, cutting little whistle: eeeeeeeee, like a cross between a teakettle and a wet finger rubbed across a balloon.

Silence. Loyal puckered up again, with bloodied and swollen lips—eeeeeeee, a whistle to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Then he listened, with his ear to the ground. After a full five minutes of silence he climbed painfully to his feet and rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs.

“He’s gone,” he announced.

“Gone?” cried Eugene. “Gone where?”

Loyal wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s went down in that other apartment,” he said gloomily.

“You ort to be in the circus,” said Farish, looking at Loyal with newfound respect. “That’s some trick. Who taught you how to whistle like that?”

“Snakes mind me,” said Loyal, modestly, as they all stood staring at him.

“Ho!” Farish clapped an arm around him; the whistle had so impressed him that he’d forgotten all about being angry. “Reckon you can teach me to do that?”

Staring out the window, Danny muttered: “Something funny’s going on around here.”

“What’s that?” snapped Farish, wheeling on him. “You got something to say to me, Danny boy, you say it to my face.”

“I said something funny’s going on around here. That door was open when we come up here tonight.”

“Gene,” said Loyal, clearing his throat, “you need to call these people downstairs. I know exactly where that fellow’s gone. He’s went down that retchister, and he’s making himself comfortable in the hot water pipes.”

“Reckon why he don’t come on back?” said Farish. He pursed his lips and tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate the unearthly whistle that Loyal had employed to lure six timber rattlers, one by one, from varying parts of the room. “Aint he trained as good as the others?”

“Aint none of em trained. They don’t like all this hollering and stomping. Nope,” said Loyal, scratching his head as he looked down into the register, “he’s gone.”

“Hi you going to get him back?”

“Listen, I got to get to the doctor!” wailed Eugene, wringing his wrist. His hand was so swollen that it looked like a blown-up rubber glove.

“I be damned,” Farish said brightly. “You are bit.”

“I told you I was bit! There, there, and there!”

Loyal said, coming over to see: “He don’t always use all his venom in one strike.”

“The thing was hanging off of me!” The room was starting to turn black at the edges; Eugene’s hand burned, he felt high and not unpleasant, the way he felt in the sixties, back in prison before he was saved, when he’d got off by huffing cleaning fluid in the laundry room, when the steamy cinder-block corridors closed in around him until he was seeing everything in a narrow but queerly pleasing circle, like looking through an empty toilet-paper roll.

“I been bit worse,” said Farish; and he had, years before, while lifting a rock from a field he was bush-hogging. “Loyle, you got a whistle to fix that?”

Loyal picked up Eugene’s swollen hand. “Oh, my,” he said glumly.

“Go on!” said Farish gaily. “Pray for him, preacher! Call down the Lord for us! Do your stuff!”

“It don’t work like that. Boy, that little fellow got you good!” Loyal said to Eugene. “Right in the vein here.”

Restlessly, Danny ran a hand through his hair and turned away. He was stiff and aching from adrenaline, muscles strung like a high-tension wire; he wanted another bump; he wanted to get the hell out of the Mission; he didn’t care if Eugene’s arm fell off, and he was good and sick of Farish too. Here Farish had dragged him all the way into town—but had Farish gone out and secured the drugs in Loyal’s truck while he had the chance? No. He’d sat around for nearly half an hour, reared back luxuriantly in his chair, relishing the captive audience he had in the polite little preacher, bragging and boasting and telling stories that his brothers had heard a million times already and just generally running his mouth. Despite all the not-so-subtle hints that Danny had dropped, he still hadn’t gone out and moved the drugs from the army-surplus bag to wherever he was going to hide them. No: he was far too interested now in Loyal Reese and the rattlesnake roundup. And he’d let up on Reese too easy: way too easy. Sometimes, when Farish was high, he locked into ideas and fancies and couldn’t shake them loose; you could never tell what was going to seize his attention. Any irrelevant little thing—a joke, a cartoon on television—could distract him like a baby. Their father had been the same. He might be beating Danny or Mike or Ricky Lee half to death over some triviality, but let him overhear some irrelevant news item and he’d stop in mid-blow (leaving his son crumpled and crying on the floor) and run into the next room to turn up the radio. Cattle prices rising! Well, imagine that.

Aloud, he said: “Tell you what I want to know.” He’d never trusted Dolphus, and he didn’t trust this Loyal, either. “How’d them snakes get out of the box in the first place?”

“Oh, shit,” said Farish, and darted to the window. After several moments Danny realized that the faint staticky pop pop sparking in his ears was not his imagination, but an actual car pulling up on the gravel outside.

A hot pin-head—like a tick lit on fire—sizzled and flared in his visual field. The next thing Danny knew, Loyal had vanished into the back room and Farish, by the door, was saying: “Get over here. Tell him the ruckus—Eugene?—Tell him you was snake-bit out in the yard—”

“Tell him,” said Eugene—who was glassy-eyed, and wobbling, in the glare of the overhead bulb—“tell him to pack his damn reptiles. Tell him he’d better not be here when I wake up in the morning.”

“Sorry, mister,” said Farish—stepping to block the passage of the enraged and gibbering figure who was attempting to gain entry.

“What’s going on here? What kind of a party is this—”

“This aint a party sir, no, don’t come in,” said Farish, blocking his way with his large body, “no time to stand around and visit. We need some help here, my brother’s snake-bit—out of his head, see? Help me get him out to the car.”

“You Babdist devil,” said Eugene, to the red-faced hallucination of Roy Dial—in plaid shorts and canary-yellow golf shirt—which wavered at black tunnel’s end, in a narrowing radius of light.

————

That night—while a beringed and whorish lady wept amidst crowds and flowers, wept on the flickering black-and-white screen for the big gate, and the broad way, and the multitudes rushing down it to destruction—Eugene tossed upon his hospital cot, a smell like burned clothes in his nostrils. Back and forth he wavered, between the white curtains and the hosannas of the whorish lady and a storm on the shores of a dark and far-away river. Images whirled in and out like prophecy: soiled doves; an evil bird’s nest, fashioned from scaly bits of cast-off snakeskin; a long black snake crawling out of a hole with birds in its stomach: tiny lumps that stirred, still living, struggling to sing even in the blackness of the snake’s belly.…

Back at the Mission, Loyal—curled in his sleeping bag—slept soundly, black eye and all, untroubled by nightmares and reptiles alike. Before dawn he woke rested, said his prayers, washed his face and drank a glass of water, loaded his snakes in a hurry, came back upstairs and—sitting at the kitchen table—laboriously wrote out a thank-you note to Eugene on the back of a gas-station receipt, which he left on the table along with a fringed leatherette bookmark, a pamphlet entitled “Job’s Conversation,” and a stack of thirty-seven one-dollar bills. By sun-up, he was in the truck and on the highway, broken lights and all, heading back to his church homecoming in East Tennessee. He did not notice that the cobra (his prize snake, the only one he’d paid money for) was missing until Knoxville; when he called to tell Eugene, nobody answered the phone. And nobody was in the Mission to hear the scream of the Mormon boys—who, rising late (at eight o’clock, having returned late from Memphis the night before) were startled at their morning devotions by the sight of a timber rattlesnake, observing them from atop a basket of freshly laundered shirts.