The Little Friend

CHAPTER

5

——

The Red Gloves

The next morning, Harriet woke late: itchy, unbathed, in gritty sheets. The smell in the crawlspace, the colorful boxes all jewelly with nail-heads, the long shadows in the lighted doorway—all this, and more, had bled into her sleep and mixed oddly with the pen-and-ink illustrations from her dime-store edition of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”—big-eyed Teddy, the mongoose, even the snakes rendered perky and adorable. There had been some poor creature tied up and thumping at the bottom of the page, like an end plate to a storybook; it was in pain; it needed her assistance in ways she could not divine but though its very presence was a reproach, a reminder of her own laxity and injustice, she was too repulsed to help it or even look in its direction.

Ignore it Harriet! sang Edie. She and the preacher were in the corner of her bedroom by the chest of drawers, setting up a torture contraption which was like a dentist’s chair with needles prickling from the padded arms and headrest. In some distressing way they seemed like sweethearts, eyebrows lifted, full of admiring glances for each other, Edie testing the needle points here and there with a delicate finger-tip as the preacher stepped back, grinning fondly, his hands crossed over his chest and tucked beneath his armpits.…

As Harriet—fretfully—slid back into the stagnant waters of nightmare, Hely woke bolt upright in the top bunk, so fast that he knocked his head on the ceiling. Without thinking, he threw his legs over—and nearly fell, for he’d been so freaked out the night before about what might climb up after him, he’d unhitched the ladder and pushed it over on the carpet.

Self-consciously—as if he’d stumbled on the playground and people were watching—he righted himself and hopped to the floor, and was out of his dark, air-conditioned little room and halfway down the hall before it struck him how silent the house was. He crept downstairs to the kitchen (nobody around, driveway empty, his mom’s car keys gone) and poured himself a bowl of Giggle Pops and took it to the family room and switched on the television. A game show was on. He slurped up the cereal. Though the milk was cold enough, the crunchy pebbles scratched the roof of his mouth; they were strangely tasteless, not even sweet.

The silent house made Hely uncomfortable. He was reminded of the awful morning after he and his older cousin Todd had taken a bottle of rum from a paper bag in the front seat of someone’s unlocked Lincoln, at the Country Club, and drunk about half of it. While Hely and Todd’s parents stood chatting at the poolside luau, nibbling cocktail sausages on toothpicks, he and Todd borrowed a golf cart, rammed it into a pine tree, though Hely remembered very little of this: the main thing he remembered was lying on his side and rolling down a steep hill behind the golf course over and over again. Later, when his stomach started hurting, Todd told him to go to the buffet and eat as many cocktail weenies as fast as he could and that would make it stop. He’d vomited on his knees in the parking lot behind somebody’s Cadillac, while Todd laughed so hard that his mean, freckled face turned tomato-red. Though Hely didn’t remember it, somehow he’d walked home and got in his bed and gone to sleep. When he woke the next morning, the house was empty: they’d all gone to Memphis without him, to drive Todd and his parents back to the airport.

It had been the longest day of Hely’s life. He’d had to clatter around the house by himself for hours: lonesome, nothing to do, trying to piece together exactly what had happened the night before and worrying that he was in for a terrible punishment when his parents returned—which indeed he was. He’d had to hand over all his birthday money to help pay for the damage (his parents had to pay for most of it); he’d had to write a letter of apology to the owner of the golf cart. He’d lost his TV privileges for what seemed like forever. But worst was his mother wondering aloud where he had learned to be a thief. “It’s not so much the liquor”—she must have said it to his father a thousand times—“as him stealing it.” His father made no such distinctions; he acted as if Hely had robbed a bank. For ages, he had hardly spoken to Hely except to say things like Pass The Salt, wouldn’t even look at him, and life at home had never gone back to quite the same way it was before. Typically, Todd—Mr. Musical Genius, first-chair clarinet in his Illinois junior-high band—had blamed everything on Hely, which had been the way throughout their childhoods whenever they saw each other, thankfully not often.

A celebrity guest had just said a bad word on the game show (some rhyming game, the contestants had to come up with the rhyming word that completed a riddle).… The host blipped it out, the bad word, with an obnoxious noise like a dog’s squeaky toy and wagged a finger at the celebrity guest, who clapped a hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes.…

Where the hell were his parents? Why didn’t they just come on home and get it over with? Naughty, naughty! said the laughing host. The other celebrity on the panel had reared back in his chair and was clapping appreciatively.

He tried to stop thinking about the night before. The memory clouded and fouled the morning, like the after-taste of a bad dream; he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, hadn’t damaged property or hurt anyone or taken anything that didn’t belong to him. There was the snake—but they hadn’t really taken it; it was still under the house. And he’d set the other snakes loose but so what? It was Mississippi: snakes were crawling all over the place anyway; who was going to notice a few more? All he’d done was open a latch, one latch. What was the big deal about that? It wasn’t like he’d stolen a golf cart from a City Councilman and wrecked it.…

Ding went the bell: time for today’s tiebreaker! The contestants—eyes darting—stood gulping before the Big Board: what did they have to worry about? Hely thought bitterly. He hadn’t spoken to Harriet after his escape—wasn’t even sure she’d made it home, something else that was starting to worry him. As soon as he’d ducked out of the yard, he’d darted to the opposite side of the street and run home, over fences and through back yards, dogs barking at him from what seemed like all directions in the dark.

When he’d crept in the back door, red-faced and panting, he saw by the clock on the stove that it was still early, only nine. He could hear his parents watching television in the family room. Now, this morning, he wished he had stuck his head into the family room and said something to them, called out “Goodnight” from the stairs, anything; but he had not had the nerve to face them and had scurried cravenly to bed without a word to anyone.

He had no desire to see Harriet. Her very name made him think about things which he would rather not. The family room—tan rug, corduroy sofa, tennis trophies in a case behind the wet bar: all seemed alien, unsafe. Rigidly, as if some hostile observer were glowering at his back from the doorway, he stared at the carefree celebrities conferring over their riddle and tried to forget his troubles: no Harriet, no snakes, no punishment imminent from his dad. No big scary rednecks who had recognized him, he was certain of it.… What if they went to his father? Or, worse: came after him? Who could say what a nut like Farish Ratliff might do?

A car pulled up in the driveway. Hely nearly screamed. But when he looked out the window, he saw it wasn’t the Ratliffs; it was only his dad. Quickly, spasmodically, he attempted to slouch down and spread out and generally arrange himself in a more casual posture, but he could not make himself comfortable, cringing in expectation of the slammed door, his father’s footsteps clipping fast down the hallway the way they always did when he was angry, and meant business.…

Hely—trembling with the effort—tried hard not to hold himself too stiffly; but he could not contain his curiosity and he sneaked a terrified glance to see that his father, with maddening leisure, was just climbing out of the car. He seemed unconcerned—even bored, though his expression was hard to read through the gray sunshades which were clipped over his glasses.

Unable to tear his eyes away, Hely watched him as he circled to the back of the car, opened the trunk. One by one he unloaded his purchases in the empty sunlight and set them down on the concrete: a gallon of paint. Plastic buckets. A coil of green garden hose.

Hely got up very quietly and took his cereal bowl to the kitchen and rinsed it out, then went up to his room and shut the door. He lay on the bottom bunk, staring at the slats above and trying not to hyperventilate or pay too much attention to his own heartbeat. Presently he heard footsteps. Outside the door, his father said: “Hely?”

“Sir?” Why is my voice so squeaky?

“I thought I told you to turn off that television when you were finished watching it.”

“Yes sir.”

“I want you to come out and help me water your mother’s garden. I thought it was going to rain this morning but it looks like it’s blown over.”

Hely was afraid to argue. He detested his mother’s flower garden. Ruby, the maid before Essie Lee, would not go anywhere near the dense perennials his mother grew for cutting. “Snakes like flowers,” she always said.

Hely put on his tennis shoes and went outside. The sun was already high and hot. Glare in his eyes, woozy with heat, he stood seven or eight feet back on the crisped yellow grass as he swept the hose over the flower bed, holding it as far away from his body as he could.

“Where’s your bicycle?” said his father, returning from the garage.

“I—” Hely’s heart sank. His bike was right where he’d left it: on the median in front of the frame house.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t come back in this house until it’s in the garage. I’m sick and tired of telling you not to leave it out in the yard.”

————

Something was wrong when Harriet went downstairs. Her mother was dressed in one of the cotton shirt-waist dresses she wore to church, and was whisking around the kitchen. “Here,” she said, presenting Harriet with some cold toast and a glass of milk. Ida—her back to Harriet—was sweeping the floor in front of the stove.

“Are we going somewhere?” said Harriet.

“No, darling …” Though her mother’s voice was cheerful, her mouth was slightly tense and the waxy coral lipstick she wore made her face look white. “I just thought I’d get up and make your breakfast for you this morning, is that all right?”

Harriet glanced over her shoulder, at Ida, who did not turn around. The set of her shoulders was peculiar. Something’s happened to Edie, thought Harriet, stunned, Edie’s in the hospital.… Before she had time for this to sink in, Ida—without looking at Harriet—stooped with the dust-pan and Harriet saw with a shock that she’d been crying.

All the fear of the past twenty-four hours came thundering down upon her, and along with it was a fear that she could not name. Timidly, she asked: “Where’s Edie?”

Harriet’s mother looked puzzled. “At home,” she said. “Why?”

The toast was cold, but Harriet ate it anyway. Her mother sat down at the table with her and watched her, with her elbows on the table and her chin propped in her hands. “Is it good?” she said presently.

“Yes, maam.” Because she did not know what was wrong, or how to act, Harriet concentrated all her attention upon her toast. Then her mother sighed; Harriet glanced up, just in time to see her rise from the table in a rather dispirited manner and drift from the room.

“Ida?” whispered Harriet, as soon as they were alone.

Ida shook her head and said nothing. Her face was expressionless, but big glassy tears swelled at the bottom lid of her eyes. Then, pointedly, she turned away.

Harriet was stricken. She stared at Ida’s back, at the apron straps criss-crossed over her cotton dress. She could hear all sorts of tiny noises, crystal-clear and dangerous: the hum of the refrigerator, a fly buzzing over the kitchen sink.

Ida dumped the dust-pan into the pail beneath the sink, then shut the cabinet. “What for you told on me?” she said, without turning around.

“Tell on you?”

“I’m always good to you.” Ida brushed past her, returned the dust-pan to its home on the floor by the hot-water heater, next to the mop and broom. “Why you want to get me in trouble?”

“Tell on you for what? I didn’t!”

“You sure did. And you know what else?” Harriet quailed at her steady, bloodshot gaze. “Yall got that poor woman fired over at Mr. Claude Hull’s house. Yes you did,” she said, over Harriet’s stutters of astonishment. “Mr. Claude drove over there last night and you should have heard how he talk to that poor woman, like she’s a dog. I heard the whole thing and so did Charley T.”

“I didn’t! I—”

“Listen at you!” Ida hissed. “You ought to be ashamed. Telling Mr. Claude that woman try to set the house on fire. And what you do then, but priss yourself on home and tell your mama that I don’t feed you right.”

“I didn’t tell on her! It was Hely!”

“I aint talking about him. I’m talking about you.”

“But I told him not to tell! We were in his room, and she banged on the door and started yelling—”

“Yes, and what you do then but come home and tell on me your own self. You’s mad at me when I left yesterday, because I didn’t want to sit around after work telling stories. Don’t say you wasn’t.”

“Ida! You know how Mama gets mixed up! All I said was—”

“I’ll tell you why you did it. You’s mad and spiteful that I don’t sit around all night cooking fried chicken and telling stories when I gots to get home and do my own work. After cleaning up for you folks all day.”

Harriet went outside. The day was hot, sun-bleached, soundless. She felt as if she’d just had a tooth filled at the dentist’s, pain blooming plum-black in her rear molars, walking through the glass doors into the glare and withering heat of the parking lot. Harriet, is somebody waiting to pick you up? Yes, maam, Harriet always said to the receptionist, whether somebody was waiting or not.

From the kitchen, all was silence. The shutters of her mother’s room were closed. Was Ida fired? Somehow—incredibly—the question caused her no pain or anxiety, only the same dull puzzlement as when she bit hard on the inside of her cheek after a novocaine shot and it didn’t hurt.

I’ll pick her some tomatoes for lunch, said Harriet to herself, and—squinting against the glare—went to the side of the house, to Ida’s little vegetable garden: an unfenced plot, twelve feet square, badly in need of weeding. Ida didn’t have space for a garden where she lived. Though she made them tomato sandwiches every day, she took most of the other vegetables home with her. Almost daily, Ida offered Harriet a kindness of some sort in exchange for help in the garden—a game of checkers, a story—which Harriet always refused; she hated yard-work, could not bear the dust on her hands, or the beetles, or the heat, or the stinging hairs on the squash vines which made her legs itch.

Now her selfishness made her feel sick. Many painful thoughts clustered about, pricking at her ceaselessly. Ida had to work hard all the time … not just here, but at her own house. What did Harriet ever have to do?

Some tomatoes. She’ll like that. She picked some bell peppers too, and okra, and a fat black eggplant: the summer’s first. She piled the muddy vegetables in a small cardboard box and then set to work weeding, gritting her teeth with displeasure. Vegetable plants—save only for the vegetables—looked like overgrown weeds to her, with their sprawling habits and rough, ungainly leaves, so she left what she wasn’t sure about and only pulled the weeds she was certain of: clover and dandelion (easy) and long switches of Johnson grass, which Ida had a tricky way of folding so they made a shrill, unearthy whistle when she put them between her lips and blew a certain way.

But the blades were sharp; and it was not long before one of them had sliced a red seam like a paper cut across the base of her thumb. Harriet—sweating—reared back on her dusty heels. She had some red cloth gardening gloves, child-sized, which Ida Rhew had bought for her at the hardware store last summer, and it made her feel terrible even to think about them. Ida didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to spend on presents; even worse, Harriet disliked the garden so much that she had never worn the gloves, not once. Don’t you like them little gloves I gave you? Ida had asked her, rather sadly, one afternoon while they were sitting on the porch; when Harriet protested, she shook her head.

I do like them, I do. I wear them to play in.…

You don’t have to tell me a story, baby. I’m just sorry you don’t care anything about them.

Harriet’s face burned. The red gloves had cost three dollars—for poor Ida, nearly a day’s work. Now that she thought about it, she realized that the red gloves were the only present that Ida had ever given her. And she had lost them! How could she have been so careless? For a long time, in the winter, they had lain neglected in a galvanized tub in the toolshed, with the pruning shears and the hedge clippers and some other tools of Chester’s.…

She left her weeding, uprooted shoots scattered harumscarum across the dirt, and hurried to the toolshed. But the gloves weren’t in the galvanized tub. They weren’t in Chester’s tool-bench, either; they weren’t on the shelf with the flowerpots and fertilizer; they weren’t behind the caked tins of varnish and Spackle and house paint.

On the shelves she found badminton rackets, pruning shears and handsaw, numberless extension cords, a yellow plastic hard hat like construction workers wore; more garden tools, of every description: loppers, rose-snips, weed-fork and shrub rake and three different sizes of trowel; Chester’s own gloves. But not the gloves that Ida had given her. She could feel herself getting hysterical. Chester knows where they are, she told herself. I’ll ask him. Chester only worked on Mondays; on other days, he worked either for the county—pulling weeds and cutting grass, in the cemetery—or at odd jobs around town.

She was breathing hard, in the dusty, gasoline-smelling dimness, staring at the litter of tools on the oily floor and wondering where to look next—for she had to find the red gloves; I have to, she thought, her eyes darting over the mess, I’ll die if I’ve lost them—when Hely ran up and poked his head in the door. “Harriet!” he gasped, clinging to the door frame. “We’ve got to go get the bikes!”

“Bikes?” said Harriet, after a confused silence.

“They’re still there! My dad noticed my bike was gone and he’s going to whip me if I’ve lost it! Come on!”

Harriet tried to focus her attention on the bicycles, but all she could think of were the gloves. “I’ll go later,” she said at last.

“No! Now! I’m not going by myself!”

“Well, wait a little while, and I’ll—”

“No!” Hely wailed. “We have to go now!”

“Look, I’ve got to go in and wash my hands. Put all this junk back on the shelf for me, okay?”

Hely stared at the jumble on the floor. “All of it?”

“Do you remember some red gloves I used to have? They used to be in that bucket there.”

Hely looked at her with apprehension, like she was crazy.

“Garden gloves. Red cloth with elastic at the wrist.”

“Harriet, I’m serious. The bikes have been outside all night. They might not even be there any more.”

“If you find them, just tell me, all right?”

She ran back to the vegetable bed and tossed the weeds she’d pulled into a big, careless pile. Never mind, she told herself, I’ll clean it up later.… Then she snatched up the box of vegetables and ran back into the house.

Ida wasn’t in the kitchen. Quickly, without soap, Harriet rinsed the dirt off her hands at the sink. Then she carried the box into the living room, where she found Ida sitting in her tweed chair with her knees apart and her head in her hands.

“Ida?” Harriet said timidly.

Stiffly, Ida Rhew swung her head around. Her eyes were still red.

“I—I brought you something,” Harriet stammered. She set the cardboard box down on the floor by Ida’s feet.

Dully, Ida stared down at the vegetables. “What am I going to do?” she said, and shook her head. “Where will I go?”

“You can take them home if you want to,” said Harriet helpfully. She picked up the eggplant to show it to Ida.

“Your mama say I don’t do a good job. How I’m supposed to do a good job when she got newspapers and trash stacked clear up the walls?” Ida picked up the corner of her apron and wiped her eyes on it. “Alls she pays me is twenty dollars a week. And that aint right. Odean over at Miss Libby’s gets thirty-five and she aint got a mess like this nor two children to fool with, either.”

Harriet’s hands felt useless, dangling at her sides. She longed to hug Ida, to kiss her cheek, to fall in her lap and burst into tears—yet something in Ida’s voice and in the tense, unnatural way that Ida sat made her afraid to come any closer.

“Your mama say—she say yall are big now and don’t need looking after any more. You’s both in school. And after school, yall can take of yourselves.”

Their eyes met—Ida’s, red and teary; Harriet’s round and ringing with horror—and stayed together for a moment that Harriet would remember until she died. Ida looked away first.

“And she’s right,” she said, in a more resigned voice. “Allison’s in high school and you—you don’t need anybody to stay at home all day and watch out for you any more. You’s in school most of the year anyway.”

“I’ve been in school for seven years!”

“Well, that’s what she tell me.”

Harriet dashed upstairs to her mother’s room and ran in without knocking. She found her mother sitting on the side of the bed and Allison on her knees, crying with her face pressed into the bedspread. When Harriet came in, she raised her head and, with swollen eyes, gave Harriet a look so anguished that it took her aback.

“Not you, too,” said her mother. Her voice was blurred and her eyes drowsy. “Leave me alone, girls. I want to lie down for a minute.…”

“You can’t fire Ida.”

“Well, I like Ida too, girls, but she doesn’t work for free and lately it seems as if she’s dissatisfied.”

These were all things that Harriet’s father said; her voice was slow and mechanical, as if she were reciting a memorized speech.

“You can’t fire her,” repeated Harriet shrilly.

“Your father says—”

“So what? He doesn’t live here.”

“Well, girls, you’ll have to talk to her yourself. Ida agrees with me that neither of us are happy with the way things have been working out around here.”

There was a long pause.

“Why’d you tell Ida that I told on her?” Harriet said. “What’d you say?”

“We’ll talk about this later.” Charlotte swung around and lay down on the bed.

“No! Now!”

“Don’t worry, Harriet,” Charlotte said. She closed her eyes. “And don’t cry, Allison, please don’t, I can’t stand it,” she said, her voice trailing fitfully away. “It’ll all work out. I promise.…”

Screaming, spitting, scratching, biting: none of these were adequate to the rage that blazed up in Harriet. She stared down at her mother’s serene face. Peacefully her chest rose; peacefully her chest fell. Moisture glistened on her upper lip, where the coral lipstick had faded and feathered up into the tiny wrinkles; her eyelids were oily and bruised-looking, with deep hollows like thumb-prints at the inner corner.

Harriet went downstairs, leaving Allison at her mother’s bedside, smacking the banister with her hand. Ida was still in her chair and staring out the window with her cheek cupped in her palm and as Harriet stopped in the doorway and gazed at her sorrowfully Ida seemed to glow up out of her surroundings with a merciless reality. Never had she seemed quite so palpable, so fixed and robust and marvelously solid. Her chest, beneath the thin gray cotton of her faded dress, heaved powerfully with her breath. Impulsively, Harriet started over to the chair but Ida—the tears still glistening on her cheeks—turned her head and gave her a look that stopped her where she stood.

For a long time, the two of them looked at each other. The two of them had had staring contests since Harriet was small—it was a game, a test of wills, something to laugh about but this time it was no game; everything was wrong and terrible and there was no laughter when Harriet, at last, was forced to drop her eyes in shame. And in silence—for there was nothing else to do—Harriet hung her head and walked away, with the beloved sorrowful eyes burning into her back.

————

“What’s wrong?” said Hely when he saw Harriet’s dull, dazed expression. He’d been about to let her have it for taking so long, but the look on her face made him feel sure that they were both in big, big trouble: the worst trouble of their lives.

“Mother wants to fire Ida.”

“Tough,” said Hely agreeably.

Harriet looked at the ground, trying to remember how her face worked and her voice sounded when everything was okay.

“Let’s get the bikes later,” she said; and she was heartened by how casual her voice came out sounding.

“No! My dad’s going to kill me!”

“Tell him you left it over here.”

“I can’t just leave it out there. Somebody’ll steal it.… Look, you told me you would,” said Hely despairingly. “Just walk over there with me.…”

“Okay. But first you have to promise—”

“Harriet, please. I put up all this junk for you and everything.”

“Promise you’ll go back with me tonight. For the box.”

“Where you going to take it?” said Hely, brought up short. “We can’t hide it at my house.”

Harriet held up both hands: no fingers crossed.

“Fine,” said Hely, and held his hands up, too—it was their own private sign language, as binding as any spoken promise. Then he turned and broke into a fast walk, through the yard and down to the street, with Harriet right behind him.

————

Sticking close to the shrubbery and ducking behind trees, they were within forty feet or so of the frame house when Hely seized Harriet’s wrist, and pointed. On the median, a long spike of chrome glinted from beneath the unwieldy spread of the summersweet bush.

Cautiously, they advanced. The driveway was empty. Next door, at the house belonging to the dog Pancho and his mistress, was parked a white county car which Harriet recognized as Mrs. Dorrier’s. Every Tuesday, at three-forty-five, Mrs. Dorrier’s white sedan rolled slowly up to Libby’s house and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier, in her blue Health Service uniform, come to take Libby’s blood pressure: pumping the cuff tight around Libby’s little bird-boned arm, counting the seconds on her large, masculine wristwatch while Libby—who was unspeakably distressed by anything remotely to do with medicine, or illness or doctors—sat gazing at the ceiling, her eyes filling with tears behind her glasses, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth trembling.

“Let’s do it,” Hely said, glancing over his shoulder.

Harriet nodded at the sedan. “The nurse is over there,” she whispered. “Wait till she leaves.”

They waited, behind a tree. After a couple of minutes, Hely said: “What’s taking so long?”

“Dunno,” said Harriet, who was wondering the same thing herself; Mrs. Dorrier had patients all over the county and was in and out of Libby’s in a flash, never loitering to chat or have a cup of coffee.

“I’m not waiting here all day,” Hely whispered, but then across the street the screen door opened and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier in her white cap and blue uniform. Following was the sun-baked Yankee woman, in dirty scuffs and a parrot-green housedress, with Pancho hooked over her arm. “Two dallors a pill!” she squawked. “I’m takin forteen dallors of medicine a day! I said to that boy down there at the pharmacist’s—”

“Medicine is expensive,” said Mrs. Dorrier politely, and turned to go; she was tall and thin, about fifty, with a gray streak in her black hair and very correct posture.

“I said, ‘Son, I gat emphysema! I gat gallstones! I gat arthritis! I—What’s your problem, Panch,” she said to Pancho, who had stiffened in her grasp, his gigantic ears cocked straight out from the side of his head. Even though Harriet was hidden behind the tree, he still seemed to see her; his lemur-like eyes were fixed directly on her. He bared his teeth at her and then—with rabid ferocity—began to bark and struggle to get away.

The woman whacked him with the flat of her palm across the top of his head. “Shut your trap!”

Mrs. Dorrier laughed—slightly uncomfortable—and picked up her bag and started down the steps. “Next Tuesday then.”

“He’s all worked up,” called the woman, still wrestling with Pancho. “We had a winder-peeper last night. And the police come next door.”

“Great day!” Mrs. Dorrier paused, at the door of her sedan. “You don’t mean it!”

Pancho was still barking up a storm. As Mrs. Dorrier got in her car and slowly rolled away, the woman—standing on the sidewalk now—whacked Pancho again, then carried him inside and slammed the door.

Hely and Harriet waited, for a moment or two, breathless; and when they were sure that no cars were coming, they dashed across the street to the grassy median and dropped to their knees by the bicycles.

Harriet jerked her head at the driveway of the frame house. “Nobody’s home over there.” The stone in her chest had lifted somewhat and she felt lighter now, level and swift.

With a grunt, Hely wrenched his bicycle free.

“I need to get that snake from under there.”

The brusqueness of her voice made him feel sorry for her without understanding why. He stood his bike up. Harriet was astride her own bicycle, glaring at him.

“We’ll come back,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He hopped on and, together, they kicked off and glided down the street.

Harriet overtook him, and passed, aggressively, cutting him off at the corner. She was acting like she’d just had the shit beaten out of her, he thought, looking after her hunched low on the bike and pedalling furiously down the street, like Dennis Peet, or Tommy Scoggs, mean kids who beat up on smaller kids and got beaten up themselves by larger ones. Maybe it was because she was a girl—but when Harriet got in these mean daredevil moods, it excited him. The thought of the cobra excited him too; and though he didn’t feel comfortable explaining to Harriet—not yet—that he’d set half a dozen rattlesnakes loose in the apartment, it had just occurred to him that the frame house was empty, and might be for some time.

————

“How often do you think he eats?” said Harriet, who was stooped over pushing the wagon from behind as Hely tugged it ahead in front—not very fast, because it was almost too dark to see. “Maybe we should give him a frog.”

Hely heaved the wagon down from the curb and into the street. A beach towel from his house was draped over the box. “I’m not feeding this thing any frog,” he said.

He had been correct in his hunch that the Mormon house was empty. It had been only a hunch, nothing more: based on a conviction that he, personally, would rather spend the night locked in a car trunk than a house where rattlesnakes had been found crawling loose. He still had not mentioned to Harriet what he had done, but all the same he had brooded upon his actions sufficiently to justify his innocence. Little did he realize that the Mormons, in a room at the Holiday Inn, were at that very moment discussing with a real-estate lawyer in Salt Lake whether the presence of poisonous vermin in a rental property constituted a breach of contract.

Hely hoped that nobody drove by and saw them. He and Harriet were supposed to be at the movies. His father had given them money to go. She’d spent the whole afternoon at Hely’s house, which wasn’t like her (usually she got tired of him and went home early, even when he begged her to stay) and for hours they’d sat cross-legged on the floor of Hely’s bedroom playing tiddlywinks as they talked quietly about the stolen cobra and what to do with it. The box was too big to conceal on the premises of her house, or his. At length they’d settled on an abandoned overpass west of town, which spanned County Line Road at a particularly desolate stretch, outside the city limits.

Lugging the dynamite box out from under the house and loading it on Hely’s old red kiddie wagon had been easier than they’d imagined; they hadn’t seen a soul. The night was hazy and sweltering, with rumbles of thunder in the still distance. Cushions had been removed from porch furniture, sprinklers turned off and cats called indoors.

Down the sidewalk they rattled. It was only two blocks up High Street on open sidewalks to the train depot, and the farther east they got—closer to the freight yards, and the river—the fewer lights they saw. Tall weeds jingled in neglected yards, which were posted with signs which read FOR SALE and NO TRESPASSING.

Only two passenger trains a day stopped at the Alexandria station. At 7:14 in the morning, the City of New Orleans stopped in Alexandria on her way home from Chicago; at 8:47 in the evening, she stopped again on her way back, and the rest of the time, the station was more or less deserted. The rickety little ticket office, with its steeply pitched roof and its peeling paint, was dark, though the ticket master would arrive in an hour to open it up. Behind, a series of unused gravel roads connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the gin, and the lumber mill, and the river.

Together, Hely and Harriet stopped to ease the wagon off the sidewalk and down onto the gravel. Dogs were barking—big dogs, but far away. To the south of the depot were the lights of the lumberyard and, further back, the friendly streetlamps of their own neighborhood. Turning their backs upon these last glimmers of civilization, they headed off resolutely in the opposite direction—into outer darkness, and the broad, flat, uninhabited wastes stretching off to the north, past the dead freight yards with their open boxcars and empty cotton wagons, and towards a narrow gravel path vanishing into black pine woods.

Hely and Harriet had played along this isolated road—which led to the abandoned cotton warehouse—but not often. The woods were still and frightening; even in broad daylight the gloomy footpath—choked to a thread—was always dark beneath the dense, vine-strangled canopy of ailanthus, stunted sweetgum, and pine. The air was damp and unwholesome, whining with mosquitos, and the silence broken only occasionally: by the startling crash of a rabbit through the thicket, or the harsh caws of unseen birds. Several years ago, it had sheltered a team of convicts escaped from a chain gang. Never before had they seen a living soul in that wasteland—except, once, a tiny black boy in red underpants who, bent at the knee, had chunked a rock underhand at them and then tottered back, shrieking, into the underbrush. It was a lonely spot, and neither Harriet nor Hely enjoyed playing there, though neither admitted it.

The wagon tires crackled loud on the gravel. Clouds of gnats—undeterred by the fumes of the insect repellent they’d sprayed themselves with, head to foot—floated around them in the dank, airless clearing. In the shadow and dusk, they could only just see what was in front of them. Hely had brought a flashlight, but now they were here, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to shine lights all over the place.

As they went along, the path grew narrower and more choked with brush, pressing in close on either side like a pair of walls, and they had to roll along very slowly, stopping every now and then to push branches and twigs out of their faces in the dense, blue twilight. “Phew!” said Hely, up front, and as they rolled forward the buzz of the flies grew louder and Harriet was struck in the face by a moist, rotten odor.

“Gross!” she heard Hely cry.

“What?” It was getting so dark that she couldn’t see much more than the wide white bands on the back of Hely’s rugby shirt. Then gravel crunched as Hely lifted the front of the wagon and pushed it sharply to the left.

“What is it?” The stench was incredible.

“A possum.”

A dark lump—whirring with flies—lay bunched and shapeless on the footpath. Despite the twigs and branches scratching at her face, Harriet turned her head away as they edged past it.

They pushed ahead until the metallic drone of the flies had faded and the stink was well behind them, then stopped for a moment to rest. Harriet switched on the flashlight and lifted a corner of the beach towel between her thumb and forefinger. In the beam, the cobra’s small eyes glittered at her spitefully when he opened his mouth to hiss at her, and the open slit of his mouth was horribly like a smile.

“How’s he doing?” said Hely, gruffly, hands on his knees.

“Fine,” said Harriet—and jumped back (so that the circle of light swung up crazily in the treetops) as the snake struck against the screen.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Harriet. She switched off the flashlight. “He must not mind being in the box too much.” Her voice seemed very loud in the silence. “I guess he must have lived in it his whole life. They can’t exactly let him out to crawl around, can they?”

After a moment or two of silence, they started up once more, a bit reluctantly.

“I don’t guess the heat bothers him,” Harriet said. “He’s from India. That’s hotter than here.”

Hely was careful where he put his foot—as careful as he could be, in the dark. From the black pines on either side a chorus of tree frogs shrilled back and forth across the road, their song pulsing vertiginously between left ear and right in stereophonic sound.

The path opened into a clearing, where stood the cotton warehouse, washed bone-gray in the moonlight. The recesses of the loading dock—where they’d sat, many afternoons, dangling their legs and talking—were alien in the deep shadow, but on the moon-washed doors, the muddy round marks they’d made by throwing tennis balls were perfectly distinct.

Together they eased the wagon over a ditch. The worst was over now. County Line Road was forty-five minutes from Hely’s house by bicycle, but the road behind the warehouse was a shortcut. Just beyond it were the railroad tracks and then—after a minute or so—the path emerged like magic at County Line Road, just past Highway 5.

From behind the warehouse, they could just see the tracks. Telegraph poles, sagging with honeysuckle, stood out black against a lurid purple sky. Hely looked back and saw in the moonlight that Harriet was glancing around, nervously, in the sawgrass which rose past her knees.

“What’s the matter?” said Hely. “Lose something?”

“Something stung me.”

Hely wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. “The train doesn’t come through for another hour,” he said.

Together, they struggled to lift the wagon onto the train tracks. While it was true that the passenger train to Chicago wouldn’t be in for a while, they both knew that freight trains sometimes passed through unexpectedly. Local freights, ones that stopped at the depot, crept along so slowly you could practically out-run them on foot but the express freights to New Orleans screamed by so fast that—when waiting with his mother, behind the crossing gate of Highway 5—Hely could scarcely read the words on the boxcars.

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The snake knocked inside his box, startling them both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We can make it.”

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

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

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

“Out in the open?”

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

“Somebody might find it.”

“Nobody’s going to come up here.”

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

“It’s about to rain,” said Harriet.

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

Heritage Groves

Homes of the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All that. Going to school and working the night shift. Just to play ball.”

Danny vowed that Gum would be driving herself to the courthouse tomorrow.

————

Harriet woke that morning and looked at the ceiling for a little while before she remembered where she was. She sat up—she had slept in her clothes again, with dirty feet—and went downstairs.

Ida Rhew was hanging laundry out in the yard. Harriet stood watching her. She thought of going up for a bath—unasked—to please Ida, and decided not to: appearing unwashed, in yesterday’s grimy clothes, would certainly make it clear to Ida how vital it was that she stay. Humming, her mouth full of clothespins, Ida reached down into her basket. She did not seem troubled or sad, only preoccupied.

“Are you fired?” said Harriet, watching her closely.

Ida started; then took the clothespins out of her mouth. “Well, good morning, Harriet!” she said, with a hearty, impersonal cheer that made Harriet’s heart sink. “Aint you filthy? Get in there and wash up.”

“Are you fired?”

“No, I aint fired. I’ve decided,” said Ida, returning to her work, “I’ve decided to go on down to Hattiesburg and live with my daughter.”

Sparrows twittered overhead. Ida shook out a wet pillowcase, with a loud flap, and pinned it on the line. “That’s what I decided,” she said. “It’s time.”

Harriet’s mouth was dry. “How far is Hattiesburg,” she said, although she knew, without being told, that it was near the Gulf Coast—hundreds of miles away.

“All the way down there. Down where they have all those old long-needled pine! You don’t need me any more,” said Ida—casually, as if she were telling Harriet that she didn’t need any more dessert or Coca-Cola. “I’s married when I’s only a few years older than you. With a baby.”

Harriet was shocked and insulted. She hated babies—Ida knew very well how much.

“Yes maam.” Absent-mindedly, Ida pinned another shirt on the line. “Everything changes. I’s only fifteen years old when I married Charley T. Soon you’ll be married, too.”

There was no point in arguing with her. “Is Charley T. going with you?”

“ ’Cose he is.”

“Does he want to go?”

“I reckon.”

“What will you do down there?”

“What, me or Charley?”

“You.”

“I don’t know. Work for somebody else, I guess. Sit some other kids, or babies.”

To think of Ida—Ida!—abandoning her for some slobbery baby!

“When are you leaving?” she asked Ida, coldly.

“Next week.”

There was nothing else to say. Ida’s demeanor made it plain that she wasn’t interested in further conversation. Harriet stood and watched her for a moment—bending to the basket, hanging up the clothes, bending to the basket again—and then walked away, across the yard, in the empty, unreal sunshine. When she went in the house, her mother—hovering anxiously, in the Blue Fairy nightgown—pittered into the kitchen and tried to kiss her, but Harriet wrenched away and stamped out the back door.

“Harriet? What’s the matter, sweetheart?” her mother called after her piteously, out the back door. “You seem like you’re mad at me … ? Harriet?”

Ida looked at Harriet incredulously as she stormed past; she took the clothespins out of her mouth. “Answer yo mama,” she said, in the voice that usually stopped Harriet cold.

“I don’t have to mind you any more,” Harriet said, and kept walking.

————

“If your mother wants to let Ida go,” said Edie, “I can’t interfere.”

Harriet attempted, unsuccessfully, to catch Edie’s eye. “Why not?” she said at last, and—when Edie went back to her pad and pencil—“Edie, why not?”

“Because I can’t,” said Edie, who was trying to decide what to pack for her trip to Charleston. Her navy pumps were the most comfortable, but they did not look nearly so well with her pastel summer suits as the spectators. She was also a little annoyed that Charlotte had not consulted her about such an important decision as whether or not to hire or fire the maid.

Presently, Harriet said: “But why can’t you interfere?”

Edie laid down her pencil. “Harriet, it’s not my place.”

“Your place?”

“I wasn’t consulted. Don’t you worry, little girl,” said Edie, in a brighter key, rising to pour herself another cup of coffee and laying an absent-minded hand upon Harriet’s shoulder. “Everything will work out for the best! You’ll see!”

Gratified to have cleared things up so easily, Edie sat back down with her coffee and said, after what was to her a peaceful silence: “I certainly wish I had some of those nice little wash-and-wear suits to take on my trip. The ones I have are all worn down, and linen isn’t practical for travel. I could hang a garment bag in the back of the car.…” She was not looking at Harriet, but somewhere over the top of her head; and she slipped back into thought without noticing Harriet’s red face or her hostile, provocative stare.

After some moments—preoccupied ones, for Edie—steps creaked up the back porch. “Hello!” A shadowy form—hand to brow—peered in through the screen door. “Edith?”

“Well, I declare!” cried another voice, thin and cheery. “Is that Harriet you’ve got in there with you?”

Before Edie could get up from the table, Harriet hopped up and scooted to the back door—past Tat, to Libby on the porch.

“Where’s Adelaide?” said Edie to Tat, who was smiling over her shoulder at Harriet.

Tat rolled her eyes. “She wanted to stop off at the grocery store for a jar of Sanka.”

“Oh, my,” Libby was saying, out on the back porch, in a slightly muffled voice. “Harriet, my goodness! What a joyous welcome.…”

“Harriet,” called Edie sharply, “don’t hang all over Libby.”

She waited, and listened. From the porch, she heard Libby say: “Are you sure you’re all right, my angel?”

“Heavens,” said Tatty, “is the child crying?”

“Libby, how much do you pay Odean a week?”

“Goodness! What makes you ask a question like that?”

Edie got up and marched to the screen door. “That’s none of your business, Harriet,” she snapped. “Get inside.”

“Oh, Harriet’s not bothering me,” said Libby, disengaging her arm, adjusting her spectacles and peering at Harriet with innocent and unsuspicious perplexity.

“Your grandmother means—” Tat said, following Edie onto the porch—since childhood, it had been her task to rephrase, diplomatically, Edie’s sharp dictums and decrees—“what she means is, Harriet, it’s not polite to ask people about money.”

“I don’t care,” said Libby, loyally. “Harriet, I pay Odean thirty-five dollars a week.”

“Mother only pays Ida twenty. That’s not right, is it?”

“Well,” said Libby, blinking, after what was obviously a stunned pause, “I don’t know. I mean, your mother’s not wrong, but—”

Edie—who was determined not to waste the morning discussing a fired housekeeper—interrupted: “Your hair looks pretty, Lib. Doesn’t her hair look beautiful? Who did it?”

“Mrs. Ryan,” said Libby, bringing a flustered hand up to hover at her temple.

“We’ve all got so gray-headed now,” Tatty said pleasantly, “you can’t tell one from the other.”

“Don’t you like Libby’s hair?” said Edie, sternly. “Harriet?”

Harriet, on the verge of tears, looked angrily away.

“I know a little girl who could stand to get her own hair cut,” said Tat, waggishly. “Does your mother still send you down to the barber, Harriet, or do you get to go to the beauty shop?”

“I reckon Mr. Liberti can do it just as well and not charge half as much,” said Edie. “Tat, you ought to have told Adelaide not to stop at the grocery store. I told her I had a bunch of hot chocolate in those little individual envelopes that I’d already packed for her.”

“Edith, I did tell her, but she says she can’t have sugar.”

Edie drew back mischievously, in mock astonishment. “Why not? Does sugar make her wild, too?” Adelaide had recently begun to refuse coffee, citing this as the cause.

“If she wants Sanka, I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t have it.”

Edie snorted. “Nor do I. I certainly don’t want Adelaide to be wild.”

“What? What’s all this about wild?” said Libby, startled.

“Oh, didn’t you know? Adelaide can’t have coffee. Because coffee makes her wild.” Adelaide had only started saying this recently, since her silly choir friend Mrs. Pitcock had started to go around saying the same thing.

“Well, I like a cup of Sanka myself, every now and then,” Tat said. “But it’s not as if I must have it. I can get along without it just fine.”

“Well, it’s not as if we’re going to the Belgian Congo! They sell Sanka in the city of Charleston, there’s no reason for her to haul a great big jar of it in her suitcase!”

“I don’t see why not. When you’re taking the hot chocolate. For yourself.”

“You know how early Addie does get up, Edith,” interjected Libby, anxiously, “and she’s afraid that the room service won’t open until seven or eight—”

“That’s why I packed this good hot chocolate! A cup of hot chocolate won’t hurt Adelaide one bit.”

“I don’t mind what I have, hot chocolate sounds awfully good! Just think,” said Libby, clapping her hands and turning to Harriet. “This time next week we’ll be in South Carolina! I’m so excited!”

“Yes,” Tat said brightly. “And your grandmother’s mighty smart to drive us all there.”

“I don’t know about smart, but I expect I can get all of us there and back in one piece.”

“Libby, Ida Rhew quit,” said Harriet in a miserable rush, “she’s leaving town—”

“Quit?” asked Libby, who was hard of hearing; she glanced imploringly at Edith, who tended to speak more loudly and distinctly than most people. “I’m afraid you’ll have to slow down a little, Harriet.”

“She’s talking about Ida Rhew that works for them,” said Edie, folding her arms over her chest. “She’s leaving, and Harriet is upset about it. I’ve told her that things change, and that people move on, and that’s just the way the world is.”

Libby’s face fell. With candid sympathy, she gazed at Harriet.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” said Tat. “You’ll miss Ida, I know you will, sweetheart, she’s been with you a long time.”

“Ah,” said Libby, “but this child loves Ida! You love Ida, don’t you darling,” she said to Harriet, “the way that I love Odean.”

Tat and Edie rolled their eyes at each other, and Edie said: “You love Odean a little too much, Lib.” Odean’s laziness was an old, old joke among Libby’s sisters; she sat around the house, supposedly in ill-health, while Libby brought her cold drinks and did the washing-up.

“But Odean’s been with me for fifty years,” said Libby. “She’s my family. She was with me out at Tribulation, for Heaven’s sake, and she’s not in good health.”

Tat said: “She takes advantage of you, Libby.”

“Darling,” said Libby, who had grown quite pink in the face, “I mean to tell you that Odean carried me out of the house when I was so sick with pneumonia that time out in the country. Carried me! On her back! All the way from Tribulation over to Chippokes!”

Edie said, thinly: “Well, she certainly doesn’t do much now.”

Quietly, Libby turned to Harriet for a long moment, and her watery old eyes were steady and compassionate.

“It’s awful being a child,” she said, simply, “at the mercy of other people.”

“Just wait until you’re grown up,” Tatty said encouragingly, putting an arm around Harriet’s shoulder. “Then you’ll have your own house, and Ida Rhew can come live with you. How about that?”

“Nonsense,” said Edie. “She’ll get over it soon enough. Maids come, and maids go—”

“I’ll never get over it!” shrieked Harriet, startling them all.

Before any of them could say anything, she threw off Tatty’s arm and turned and ran off. Edie lifted her eyebrows, resignedly, as if to say: this is what I have put up with all morning.

“My goodness!” said Tat, at last, passing a hand over her forehead.

“To tell you the truth,” Edie said, “I think Charlotte’s making a mistake, but I’m tired of putting my foot in over there.”

“You’ve always done everything for Charlotte, Edith.”

“So I have. And it’s why she doesn’t know how to do anything for herself. I think it’s high time she started taking more responsibility.”

“But what about the girls?” said Libby. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”

“Libby, you had Tribulation to run and Daddy and the rest of us to look after when you were hardly older than she is,” said Edie, nodding in the direction in which Harriet had disappeared.

“That’s so. But these children aren’t like we were, Edith. They’re more sensitive.”

“Well, it didn’t matter if we were sensitive. We didn’t have any choice.”

“What’s wrong with that child?” said Adelaide—powdered and lipsticked, her hair freshly curled—as she started up the porch. “I met her running down the street like a thunderbolt, dirty as anything. And she wouldn’t even speak to me.”

“Let’s all go inside,” said Edie; for the morning was getting hot. “I have a pot of coffee on. For those who can drink it, that is.”

“My,” said Adelaide, stopping to admire a bank of rosy pink lilies, “these are certainly going great guns!”

“Those zephyr lilies? I brought those from out on the place. Dug them up in the dead of winter and put them in pots, and only one came up the next summer.”

“Look at them now!” Adelaide leaned down.

“Mother used to call them,” said Libby, peering over the porch railing, “Mother used to call those her pink rain lilies.”

“Zephyr is their real name.”

“Pink rain is what Mother called them. We had these at her funeral, and tuberose. It was so hot when she died—”

“I’m going to have to go on in,” said Edie, “I’m about to have the heat stroke, I’ll be inside having a cup of coffee whenever yall are ready.”

“Will it be too much trouble to heat up a kettle of water for me?” said Adelaide. “I can’t have coffee, it makes me—”

“Wild?” Edie raised an eyebrow at her. “Well, we certainly don’t want you to be wild, do we, Adelaide.”

————

Though Hely had ridden his bicycle all over the neighborhood, Harriet was nowhere to be found. At her house, the strange atmosphere (strange even for Harriet’s) was worrying. No one had come to the door. He’d just walked in and found Allison crying at the kitchen table, and Ida bustling around and mopping the floor as if she didn’t hear or see it. Neither of them had said a word. It gave him the chills.

He decided to try the library. A drift of artificially cooled air hit him as soon as he pushed open the glass door—the library was always chilly, winter and summer. Mrs. Fawcett swivelled in her chair at the check-out desk and waved to him, with a jingle of her bangle bracelets.

Hely waved back—and, before she could collar him and try to sign him up for the Summer Reading Program—he walked as fast as he politely could to the Reference Room. Harriet, with her elbows on the table, was sitting underneath a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Open in front of her was the largest book that he had ever seen.

“Hey,” he said, slipping into the chair beside her. He was so excited that he could barely keep his voice down. “Guess what. Danny Ratliff’s car is parked out in front of the courthouse.”

His eyes fell on the huge book—which, he now saw, was a book of bound newspapers—and he was startled to see on the yellowed newsprint a ghastly, grainy photograph of Harriet’s mother, with her mouth open and her hair all messed up, out in front of Harriet’s house. MOTHER’S DAY TRAGEDY, said the headline. In the front, a blurred male figure was sliding a stretcher into what looked like the back of an ambulance, but you couldn’t quite see what was on it.

“Hey,” he said—aloud, pleased with himself—“that’s your house.”

Harriet shut the book; she pointed to the sign that said No Talking.

“Come on,” whispered Hely, and gestured for her to follow him. Without a word, Harriet pushed back her chair and followed him out.

Hely and Harriet stepped out onto the sidewalk, into heat and blinding glare. “Listen, it’s Danny Ratliff’s car, I know it,” said Hely, shading his eyes with his hand. “There’s only one Trans Am like that in town. If it wasn’t parked right in front of the courthouse, what I’d do is put a piece of glass under the tire.”

Harriet thought of Ida Rhew and Allison: at home now, curtains drawn, watching their stupid soap opera with the ghosts and vampires.

“Let’s go get that snake and put it in his car,” she said.

“No way,” said Hely, sobered abruptly. “We can’t bring it all the way back down here on the wagon. Everybody’ll see.”

“What’s the point of taking it?” said Harriet bitterly. “Unless we make it bite him.”

They stood on the library steps, without talking, for some time. At length, Harriet sighed and said: “I’m going back inside.”

“Wait!”

She turned.

“Here’s what I was thinking.” He hadn’t been thinking anything, but he felt compelled to say something in order to save face. “I was thinking … That Trans Am has a T-top. A roof that opens,” he added, seeing Harriet’s blank expression. “And I bet you a million dollars he has to go down County Line Road to get home. All those hicks live out that way, over the river.”

“He does live out there,” said Harriet. “I looked it up in the phone book.”

“Well, great. Because the snake’s up at the overpass already.”

Harriet made a scornful face.

“Come on,” said Hely. “Didn’t you see that on the news the other day, about those kids in Memphis chunking rocks on cars from the overpass?”

Harriet knit her eyebrows. Nobody watched the news at her house.

“There was a whole big story. Two people died. Some man from the police came on and told you to change lanes if you saw kids looking down at you. Come on,” he said, nudging her foot hopefully with the toe of his sneaker. “You’re not doing anything. At least let’s go check on the snake. I want to see him again, don’t you? Where’s your bike?”

“I walked over.”

“That’s okay. Hop on the handlebars. I’ll ride you out there if you ride me back.”

————

Life without Ida. If Ida didn’t exist, thought Harriet—sitting cross-legged on the dusty, sun-bleached overpass—then I wouldn’t feel so bad now. All I have to do is pretend I never knew her. Simple.

For the house itself wouldn’t be different when Ida left. Traces of her presence had always been faint. There was the bottle of dark Karo syrup she kept in the pantry, to pour on her biscuits; there was the red plastic drinking glass that she filled with ice on summer mornings and carried around to drink from during the day. (Harriet’s parents didn’t like Ida to drink from the regular kitchen glasses; it made Harriet ashamed even to think about it.) There was the apron Ida kept out on the back porch; there were the snuff cans filled with tomato seedlings, and the vegetable patch by the house.

And that was all. Ida had worked in Harriet’s house for all of Harriet’s life. But when those few possessions of Ida’s were gone—the plastic glass, the snuff cans, the bottle of syrup—there would be no sign that she had ever been there at all. Realizing this made Harriet feel immeasurably worse. She imagined the vegetable patch abandoned, in weeds.

I’ll take care of it, she told herself. I’ll order some seeds from the back of a magazine. She pictured herself in straw hat and garden smock, like the brown smock that Edie wore, stepping down hard on the edge of a shovel. Edie grew flowers: how different could vegetables be? Edie could tell her how to do it, Edie would probably be glad she was taking an interest in something useful.…

The red gloves popped into her mind and, at the thought of them, fright and confusion and emptiness rose up in a strong wave and swept over her in the heat. The only present that Ida had ever given her, and she had lost them.… No, she told herself, you’ll find the gloves, don’t think about it now, think about something else.…

About what? About how famous she would someday be as a prize-winning botanist. She imagined herself like George Washington Carver, walking among rows of flowers in a white lab coat. She would be a brilliant scientist, yet humble, taking no money for her many inventions of genius.

Things looked different from the overpass in the daytime. The pastures were not green, but crisped and brown, with dusty red patches where cattle had tramped it bald. Along the barbed-wire fences flourished a lush growth of honeysuckle intertwined with poison ivy. Beyond, a trackless stretch of nothing, nothing but a skeleton barn—gray board, rusted tin—like a wrecked ship washed up on a beach.

The shade of the stacked cement bags was surprisingly deep and cool—and the cement itself was cool, against her back. All my life, she thought, I will remember this day, how I feel. Over the hill, out of sight, a farm machine droned monotonously. Above it sailed three buzzards like black paper kites. The day she lost Ida would always be about those black wings gliding through cloudless sky, about shadowless pastures and air like dry glass.

Hely—cross-legged in the white dust—sat opposite, his back against the retaining wall, reading a comic book whose cover showed a convict in a striped suit crawling through a graveyard on hands and knees. He looked half-asleep, though for a while—an hour or so—he had watched vigilantly, on his knees, hissing sssh! sssh! every time a truck passed.

With effort, she turned her thoughts back to her vegetable garden. It would be the most beautiful garden in the world, with fruit trees, and ornamental hedges, and cabbages planted in patterns: eventually it would take over the whole yard, and Mrs. Fountain’s too. People driving by would stop in their cars and ask to be taken through it. The Ida Rhew Brownlee Memorial Gardens … no, not memorial, she thought hastily, because that made it sound as if Ida were dead.

Very suddenly one of the buzzards fell; the other two dropped after it, as if reeled in by the same kite-string, down to devour whatever mangled field mouse or ground-hog the tractor had rolled over. In the distance a car was approaching, indistinct in the wavy air. Harriet shaded her eyes with both hands. After a moment she said: “Hely!”

The comic book went flapping. “Are you sure?” he said, scrambling to look. She’d already given two false alarms.

“It’s him,” she said, and dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the white dust to the opposite wall, where the box sat atop four bags of cement.

Hely squinted at the road. A car shimmered in the distance, in a ripple of gasoline fumes and dust. It didn’t look like it was coming fast enough to be the Trans Am, but just as he was about to say so the sun struck and glittered off the hood a hard, metallic bronze. Through the wavering heat-mirage burst the snarling grille: shining, shark-faced, unmistakable.

He ducked behind the wall (the Ratliffs carried pistols; somehow he hadn’t remembered until this instant) and crawled to help her. Together they tipped the box on its side with the screen facing the road. Already, on their first false alarm, they’d been paralyzed when it came to reaching blindly around the screened front to pull the bolt, scrabbling around in confusion as the car shot beneath them; now, the latch was loosened, a Popsicle stick to the ready so they could shoot the bolt without touching it.

Hely glanced back. The Trans Am was rolling towards them—disturbingly slow. He’s seen us; he must have. But the car didn’t stop. Nervously, he glanced up at the box, which was propped above the level of their heads.

Harriet, breathing like she had asthma, glanced over her shoulder. “Okay …” she said, “here we go, one, two …”

The car disappeared beneath the bridge; she shot the bolt; and the world went into slow motion as together, in a single effort, they tipped the box. As the cobra slid and shifted, flipping his tail in an attempt to right himself, several thoughts flashed through Hely’s mind at once: chief among them, how they were going to get away. Could they outrun him? For certainly he’d stop—any fool would, with a cobra falling on the roof of his car—and take out after them.…

The concrete rumbled beneath their feet just as the cobra slid free, and fell through empty air. Harriet stood up, her hands on the railing, and her face as hard and mean as any eighth-grade boy’s. “Bombs away,” she said.

They leaned over the railing to watch. Hely felt dizzy. Down the cobra writhed through space, filliping toward the asphalt below. We missed, he thought, looking down at the empty road, and just at that moment the Trans Am—with its T-top open—shot from under their feet and directly beneath the falling snake.…

Several years before, Pem had been throwing baseballs to Hely down the street from their grandmother’s house: an old house with a modern addition—mostly glass—on the Parkway in Memphis. “Put it through that window,” said Pem, “and I’ll give you a million dollars.” “All right,” said Hely, and swung without thinking, and hit the ball crack without even looking at it, hit it so far that even Pem’s jaw dropped as it flew overhead and sailed far far far, straight and undeviating on its path until it crashed, bang: right through the sun-porch window and practically into the lap of his grandmother, who was talking on the telephone—to Hely’s dad, as it turned out. It was a million-to-one shot, impossible: Hely was no good at baseball; he was always the last non-gay or -retarded kid to get picked for a team; never had he hit any ball so high and hard and sure, and the bat had clunked to the ground as he stared in wonder at its clean, pure arc, curving straight for the center panel of his grandma’s glassed-in porch.…

And the thing was, he’d known the ball was going to break his grandma’s window, known it the second he felt the ball strike solid against the bat; as he’d watched it speeding for the center pane like a guided missile he’d had no time to feel anything but the most bracing joy, and for a breathless heartbeat or two (right before it struck the glass, that impossible and distant mark) Hely and the baseball had become one; he’d felt he was guiding it with his mind, that God had for some reason this strange moment decided to grant him absolute mental control over this dumb object hurtling at top speed towards its inevitable target, splash, whackeroo, banzai.…

Despite what came later (tears, a whipping) it remained one of the most satisfying moments of his life. And it was with the same disbelief—and terror, and exhilaration, and dumbstruck goggling awe at all the invisible powers of the universe rising in concert and bearing down simultaneously upon this one impossible point—that Hely watched the five-foot cobra strike the open T-top unevenly, at a diagonal, so that his top-heavy tail slid abruptly inside the Trans Am and pulled the rest of him in after it.

Hely—unable to contain himself—jumped up, struck the air with his fist: “Yes!” Yipping and capering like a demon, he grabbed Harriet’s arm and shook it, stabbing a gleeful finger at the Trans Am, which had braked with a screech and swerved to the other side of the road. Gently, in a cloud of dust, it coasted onto the pebbly shoulder, the gravel cracking under its tires.

Then it stopped. Before either of them could move, or speak, the door opened and out tumbled not Danny Ratliff but an emaciated mummy of a creature: frail, sexless, clad in a repellent mustard-yellow pants suit. Feebly, it clawed at itself, tottered onto the highway, then halted, and wobbled a few feet in the opposite direction. Aiiiieeeeeeee, it wailed. Its cries were thin and strangely bloodless considering that the cobra was fastened to the creature’s shoulder: five feet of long black body hanging down solid and pendulous from the hood (wicked spectacle-marks clearly visible) ending in a length of narrow and frightfully active black tail that lashed up a thunderous cloud of red dust.

Harriet stood transfixed. Though she’d envisioned the moment clearly enough, somehow it was happening wrong-side-out, through the small end of the telescope—cries remote and inhuman, gestures flat, stretched thin with a spacey, ritualized horror. Impossible to quit now, put the toys up, knock down the chessboard and start again.

She turned and ran. At her back, a clatter and a rush of wind and the next instant Hely’s bike swerved past her, bounced on the ramp, and flew off and away down the highway—every man for himself now, Hely hunched like one of the Winged Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz and pedalling furiously.

Harriet ran, her heart pounding, the creature’s weak cries (aiiii … aiii …) echoing senseless in the distance. The sky blazed bright and murderous. Off the shoulder … here, on the grass now, past this fence post with the No Trespass sign and half across the pasture … What they’d aimed for, and struck, in the depthless glare off the overpass, was not so much the car itself as a point of no return: time a rear view mirror now, the past rushing backward to the vanishing point. Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.

————

Gladly, the cobra slipped into the high weeds of the cow pasture, into a heat and vegetation not unlike that of its native land, away into the fable and legend of the town. In India, it had hunted on the outskirts of villages and cultivated areas (slipping into grain bins at twilight, feeding upon rats) and it adapted with alacrity to the barns and corncribs and garbage dumps of its new home. For years to come, farmers and hunters and drunks would sight the cobra; curiosity seekers would attempt to hunt it down, and photograph or kill it; and many, many tales of mysterious death would hover about its silent, lonely path.

————

“Why wasn’t you with her?” demanded Farish in the waiting room of Intensive Care. “That’s what I want to know. I thought you was responsible for driving her home.”

“How was I to know she got out early? She should have called me at the pool hall. When I come on back to the courthouse at five she was gone.” Leaving me stranded was what Danny felt like saying, and didn’t. He’d had to walk down to the car wash and find Catfish to drive him home.

Farish was breathing very noisily, through his nose, as he always did when he was about to lose his temper. “All right then, you should of waited there with her.”

“At the courthouse? Outside in the car? All day?”

Farish swore. “I should of took her myself,” he said, turning away. “I should of known something like this’d happen.”

“Farish,” said Danny, and then stopped. It was better not to remind Farish that he couldn’t drive.

“Just why the hell didn’t you take her in the truck?” Farish snapped. “Tell me that.”

“She said the truck was too high for her to climb up in. Too high,” repeated Danny when Farish’s face darkened in suspicion.

“I heard you,” said Farish. He looked at Danny for a long, uncomfortable moment.

Gum was in Intensive Care, on two IVs and a cardiorespiratory monitor. A passing truck driver had brought her in. He had happened to drive along just in time to see the astonishing sight of an old lady staggering on the highway with a king cobra latched onto her shoulder. He’d pulled over, hopped out and swiped at the thing with a six-foot length of flexible plastic irrigation pipe from the back of his truck. When he’d knocked it off her, the snake had shot into the weeds—but no doubt about it, he told the doctor at the Emergency room when he brought Gum in, it was a cobra snake, spread hood, spectacle marks, and all. He knew how they looked, he said, from the picture on the pellet-gun box.

“It’s just like armadillos and killer bees,” offered the truck driver—a stumpy little fellow, with a broad red, cheerful face—as Dr. Breedlove searched through the Venomous Reptiles chapter in his Internal Medicine textbook. “Crawling up from Texas and going wild.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” said Dr. Breedlove, “it came from a lot farther away than Texas.”

Dr. Breedlove knew Mrs. Ratliff from his years in the Emergency room, where she was a frequent visitor. One of the younger paramedics did a passable impersonation of her: clasping her chest, wheezing out instructions to her grandsons as she staggered to the ambulance. The cobra story sounded like a lot of bosh but indeed—as incredible as it seemed—the old woman’s symptoms were consistent with cobra bite, and not at all with the bite of any native reptile. Her eyelids drooped; her blood pressure was low; she complained of chest pains and difficulty breathing. There was no spectacular swelling around the puncture, as with a rattlesnake bite. It seemed that the creature had not bitten her very deeply. The shoulder pad of her pants suit had prevented it from sinking its fangs too far into her shoulder.

Dr. Breedlove washed his large pink hands and went out to speak to the cluster of grandsons, standing moodily outside Intensive Care.

“She’s displaying neurotoxic symptoms,” he said. “Ptosis, respiratory distress, falling blood pressure, lack of localized edema. We’re monitoring her closely since she may need to be intubated and placed on a ventilator.”

The grandsons—startled—gazed at him suspiciously, while the retarded-looking child waved at Dr. Breedlove with enthusiasm. “Hi!” he said.

Farish stepped forward in a way that made it clear he was in charge.

“Where is she?” He pushed past the doctor. “Let me talk to her.”

“Sir. Sir. I’m afraid that’s impossible. Sir? I’ll have to ask you to come back out in the hall right now.”

“Where is she?” said Farish, standing confounded among tubes and machines and beeping equipment.

Dr. Breedlove stepped in front of him. “Sir, she’s resting comfortably.” Expertly, with the aid of a pair of orderlies, he herded Farish out into the hall. “She doesn’t need to be disturbed now. There’s nothing you can do for her. See, there’s a waiting area down there where you can sit. There.”

Farish shrugged his arm off. “What are yall doing for her?” he said, as if whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

Dr. Breedlove went back into his smooth speech about the cardiorespiratory monitor and the ptosis and the lack of local edema. What he did not say was that the hospital had no cobra antitoxin and no way of obtaining any. The last few minutes with the Internal Medicine textbook had offered Dr. Breedlove quite a little education in a subject which had not been covered in medical school. For cobra bites, only the specific antitox would do. But only the very largest zoos and medical centers kept it in stock, and it had to be administered within a few hours, or it was useless. So the old lady was on her own. Cobra bite, said his textbook, was anywhere from ten to fifty percent fatal. That was a big margin—especially when the figures didn’t specify if the survival percentage was based upon treated or untreated bites. Besides, she was old, and she had an awful lot wrong with her besides snakebite. The records on her were an inch thick. And if pressed for odds on whether or not the old lady would live the night—or even the next hour—Dr. Breedlove would have had absolutely no idea what to hazard.

————

Harriet hung up the telephone, walked upstairs and into her mother’s bedroom—without knocking—and presented herself at the foot of the bed. “Tomorrow I’m going to Camp Lake de Selby,” she announced.

Harriet’s mother glanced up from her copy of the Ole Miss alumni magazine. She had been half-drowsing over a profile of a former classmate, who had some complicated job on Capitol Hill that Charlotte couldn’t quite get the gist of.

“I’ve called Edie. She’s driving me.”

“What?”

“The second session already started, and they told Edie it was against the rules but they’ll take me anyway. They even gave her a discount.”

She waited, impassively. Her mother didn’t say anything; but it didn’t matter what—if anything—she had to say because the matter was now squarely in Edie’s hands. And as much as she hated Camp de Selby, it wasn’t as bad as reform school or jail.

For Harriet had called her grandmother out of sheer panic. Running down Natchez Street she’d heard sirens wailing—she didn’t know whether it was ambulance or police—before she even made it home. Panting, limping, with cramps in her legs and a burning pain in her lungs, Harriet locked herself in the downstairs bathroom, stripped out of her clothes and threw them in the hamper, and ran herself a bath. Several times—while sitting rigidly in the bathtub, staring at the narrow tropical slashes of light that fell into the dim room through the venetian blinds—she’d heard sounds like voices at the front door. What on earth would she do if it was the police?

Petrified with fear, fully expecting someone to bang on the bathroom door at any moment, Harriet sat in the tub until the water was cold. Once out of the bath, and dressed, she tiptoed down to the front hall and peeked through the lace curtains, but there was nobody in the street. Ida had gone home for the day, and the house was ominously still. It seemed as if years had passed, but in reality it was only forty-five minutes.

Tensely, Harriet stood in the front hall, watching at the window. After a while she got tired of standing there, but still she could not bring herself to go upstairs and she walked back and forth, between the hall and the living room, looking out the front window every so often. Then, again, she heard sirens; for a heart-stopping moment, she thought she heard them turning down George Street. She stood in the middle of the living room, almost too frightened to move, and in a very short time her nerves got the better of her and she dialed Edie’s number—breathless, carrying the telephone over to the lace-curtained sidelights so she could watch the street as they talked.

Edie, to give her credit, had leapt into action with gratifying speed, so swiftly that Harriet almost felt a little stir of renewed affection for her. She’d asked no questions when Harriet stammered out that she’d changed her mind about church camp, and would like to leave as soon as possible. She’d got right on the phone to Lake de Selby; and—at initial reluctance from some mealy-mouthed girl in the office—demanded to be put on directly to Dr. Vance. From there, she’d sewed up the arrangements, and when she called back—within ten minutes—it was with a packing list, a water-ski permit, an upper bunk in Chickadee Wigwam, and plans to pick Harriet up at six the next morning. She had not (as Harriet believed) forgotten about camp; she had merely grown weary of struggling with Harriet on the one hand, and on the other hand Harriet’s mother, who did not back her up in these matters. Edie was convinced that Harriet’s problem lay in not mingling sufficiently with other children, especially nice little ordinary Baptist ones; and as Harriet—with effort—kept her silence, she had talked enthusiastically over the telephone of what a grand time Harriet would have, and the wonders which a little discipline and Christian sportsmanship would work for her.

The silence in her mother’s bedroom was deafening. “Well,” said Charlotte. She laid the magazine aside. “This is all very sudden. I thought you had such a terrible time at that camp last year.”

“We’re leaving before you wake up. Edie wants to get on the road early. I thought I should let you know.”

“Why the change of heart?” said Charlotte.

Harriet shrugged, insolently.

“Well … I’m proud of you.” Charlotte couldn’t think what else to say. Harriet, she noticed, had got terribly sunburnt, and thin; who did she look like? With that straight black hair, and her chin stuck out that way?

“I wonder,” she said, aloud, “whatever happened to that book of the child Hiawatha that used to be around the house?”

Harriet glanced away—toward the window, as if she were expecting someone.

“It’s important …” Charlotte tried, gamely, to recover the thread. It’s the arms folded across the chest, she thought, and the haircut. “What I mean is, it’s good for you to be involved in … in things.”

Allison was loitering outside their mother’s bedroom door—eavesdropping, Harriet supposed. She followed Harriet down the hall and stood in the door of their room as Harriet opened her dresser drawer and took out tennis socks, underwear, her green Camp de Selby shirt from the summer before.

“What did you do?” she said.

Harriet stopped. “Nothing,” she said. “What makes you think I did something?”

“You act like you’re in trouble.”

After a long pause, Harriet—face burning—returned to her packing.

Allison said: “Ida’ll be gone when you get back.”

“I don’t care.”

“This is her last week. If you leave, you won’t see her again.”

“So what?” Harriet jammed her tennis shoes in the knapsack. “She doesn’t really love us.”

“I know.”

“Well why should I care then?” replied Harriet, smoothly, though her heart skidded and jumped a beat.

“Because we love her.”

“I don’t,” said Harriet swiftly. She zipped up the knapsack and threw it on the bed.

————

Downstairs, Harriet got a sheet of stationery from the table in the front hall and, in the fading light, sat down and wrote the following note:

Dear Hely,

I am going to camp tomorrow. I hope the rest of your summer is good. Maybe we will be in the same home room when you are in seventh grade next year.

Your friend,

Harriet C. Dufresnes

She had no sooner finished it than the telephone rang. Harriet started not to answer, but relented after three or four rings and—cautiously—picked up the receiver.

“Dude,” said Hely, his voice crackly and very faint on the football-helmet phone. “Did you hear all those sirens just now?”

“I just wrote you a letter,” said Harriet. The hall felt like winter, not August. From the vine-choked porch—through the curtained side-lights, and the spoked fanlight on top of the door—the light filtered ashy and sober and wan. “Edie’s taking me to camp tomorrow.”

“No way!” He sounded like he was talking from the bottom of the ocean. “Don’t go! You’re out of your mind!”

“I’m not staying here.”

“Let’s run away!”

“I can’t.” With her toe, Harriet drew a shiny black mark through the dust—pristine, like the dust on a black plum—that frosted the table’s curved rosewood pedestal.

“What if somebody saw us? Harriet?”

“I’m here,” Harriet said.

“What about my wagon?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet. She had been thinking about Hely’s wagon herself. It was still sitting up on the overpass, and the empty box, too.

“Should I go back and get it?”

“No. Somebody might see you. Your name’s not on it, is it?”

“Nope. I never use it. Say, Harriet, who was that person?”

“Dunno.”

“They looked real old. That person.”

A tense, grown-up silence followed—not like their usual silences, when they’d run out of things to say and sat waiting amiably for the other to speak up.

“I have to go,” said Hely at last. “My mom’s making tacos for supper.”

“Okay.”

They sat breathing, on each end of the line: Harriet in the high, musty hall, Hely in his room on the top bunk.

“What ever happened to those kids you were talking about?” said Harriet.

“What?”

“Those kids on the Memphis news. That threw rocks from the overpass.”

“Oh, them. They got caught.”

“What’d they do to them?”

“I don’t know. I guess they went to jail.”

There followed another long silence.

“I’ll write you a postcard. So you’ll have something to read at Mail Call,” said Hely. “If anything happens, I’ll tell you.”

“No, don’t. Don’t write anything down. Not about that.”

“I’m not going to tell!”

“I know you’re not going to tell,” said Harriet irritably. “Just don’t talk about any of this.”

“Well—not to just anybody.”

“Not anybody at all. Listen, you can’t go around telling people like … like … Greg DeLoach. I mean it, Hely,” she said over his objection. “Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“Greg lives way out at Hickory Circle. I never see him except at school. Besides, Greg wouldn’t tell on us, I know he wouldn’t.”

“Well don’t tell him anyway. Because if you tell even one person—”

“I wish I was going with you. I wish I was going somewhere,” said Hely miserably. “I’m scared. I think that was maybe Curtis’s grandma we threw that snake on.”

“Listen to me. I want you to promise. Don’t tell anybody. Because—”

“If it’s Curtis’s grandmother, then it’s the others’, too. Danny and Farish and the preacher.” To Harriet’s surprise, he erupted into shrill, hysterical laughter. “Those guys will murder me.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, seriously, “and that’s why you can’t tell anybody ever. If you don’t tell, and I don’t tell—”

Sensing something, she glanced up—and was badly startled to see Allison standing in the door of the living room, only a few feet away.

“It sucks that you’re leaving.” Hely’s voice sounded tinny on the other end. “Except I cannot believe you are going to that shitty damn Baptist camp.”

Harriet, turning pointedly from her sister, made an ambiguous noise, to indicate that she couldn’t talk with freedom, but Hely didn’t catch it.

“I wish I could go somewhere. We were supposed to go on a vacation to the Smoky Mountains this year but Dad said he didn’t want to put the miles on the car. Say, do you think you can leave me some quarters so I can call you if I have to?”

“I don’t have any money.” Typical of Hely: trying to weasel money out of her when he was the one who got an allowance. Allison had disappeared.

“Gosh I hope it’s not his grandmother. Please please let it not be his grandmother.”

“I have to go.” Why was the light so sad? Harriet’s heart felt as though it were breaking. In the mirror opposite, across the tarnished reflection of the wall above her head (cracked plaster, dark photographs, dead giltwood sconces) swirled a mildewy cloud of black specks.

She could still hear Hely’s ragged breath on the other end. Nothing in Hely’s house was sad—everything cheerful and new, television always going—but even his breath sounded altered, tragic, when it traveled through the telephone wires into her house.

“My mom’s requested Miss Erlichson for my home room teacher when I start seventh grade this fall,” said Hely. “So I don’t guess we’ll be seeing each other that much when school starts.”

Harriet made an indifferent noise, disguising the pain which bit her at this treachery. Edie’s old friend Mrs. Clarence Hackney (nickname: “Hatchet-head”) had taught Harriet in the seventh grade, and would teach her again in the eighth. But if Hely had chosen Miss Erlichson (who was young, and blonde, and new at the school) that meant Hely and Harriet would have different study halls, different lunchtimes, different classrooms, different everything.

“Miss Erlichson’s cool. Mom said that no way was she going to force another kid of hers through a year of Mrs. Hackney. She lets you do your book report on whatever you want and—Okay,” said Hely in response to an off-stage voice. To Harriet he said: “Suppertime. Talk to you later.”

Harriet sat holding the heavy black receiver until the dial tone came on at the other end. She replaced it on the cradle with a solid click. Hely—with his thin, cheery voice, his plans for Miss Erlichson’s room—even Hely felt like something that was lost now, or about to be lost, an impermanence like lightning bugs or summer. The light in the narrow hallway was almost completely gone. And without Hely’s voice—tinny and faint as it was—to break the gloom, her sorrow blackened and roared up like a cataract.

Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust. What did Hely—eating his tacos for supper, sailing off blithely to Miss Erlichson’s home room in the fall—what did Hely care about chill and loneliness? What did he know of her world?

Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees. What might they have talked of? She would never know. It would pain her that she’d run off, cravenly, before Ida’s last work-week was over; it would pain her that somehow, strangely, the whole misunderstanding had been her fault; it would pain her, terribly, that she hadn’t told Ida goodbye. But, most of all, it would pain her that she’d been too proud to tell Ida that she loved her. In her anger, and her pride, she had failed to realize that she would never see Ida again. A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.