The Little Friend

CHAPTER

7

——

The Tower

Time was broken. Harriet’s way of measuring it was gone. Before, Ida was the planet whose round marked the hours, and her bright old reliable course (washing on Mondays and mending on Tuesdays, sandwiches in summer and soup in winter) ruled every aspect of Harriet’s life. The weeks revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas. On Thursday mornings, Ida set up the board and ironed by the sink, steam gasping from the monolithic iron; on Thursday afternoons, winter and summer, she shook the rugs and beat them and hung them out to air, so the red Turkey carpet slung on the porch rail was a flag that always said Thursday. Endless summer Thursdays, chill Thursdays in October and distant dark Thursdays of the first-grade past, when Harriet dozed beneath hot blankets, fitful with tonsillitis: the whap of the rug beater and the hiss and burble of the steam iron were vivid sounds of the present but also links in a chain winding back through Harriet’s life until vanishing in the abstract darks of babyhood. Days ended at five, with Ida’s change of aprons on the back porch; days began with the squeak of the front door and Ida’s tread in the hall. Peacefully, the hum of the vacuum cleaner floated from distant rooms; upstairs and down, the slumbrous creak of Ida’s rubber-soled shoes, and sometimes the high dry cackle of her witchy laughter. So the days slid by. Doors opened, doors shut, shadows that sank and rose. Ida’s quick glance, as Harriet ran barefoot by an open doorway, was a sharp, delicious blessing: love in spite of itself. Ida! Her favored snacks (stick candy; molasses on cold cornbread); her “programs.” Jokes and scolding, heaped spoons of sugar sinking like snow to the bottom of the iced-tea glass. Strange old sad songs floating up from the kitchen (don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?) and birdcalls from the back yard, while the white shirts flapped on the line, whistles and trills, kit kit, kit kit, sweet jingle of polished silver, tumbling in the dish-pan, the variety and noise of life itself.

But all this was gone. Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, week-end and week-day, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.

With Ida had vanished many comforts. Among them was sleep. Night after night, in dank Chickadee Wigwam, Harriet had lain awake in gritty sheets with tears in her eyes—for no one but Ida knew how to make the bed the way she liked it, and Harriet (in motels, sometimes even at Edie’s house) lay open-eyed and miserable with homesickness late into the night, painfully aware of strange textures, unfamiliar smells (perfume, mothballs, detergents that Ida didn’t use), but more than anything else of Ida’s touch, indefinable, always reassuring when she woke up lonely or afraid, and never more lovely than when it wasn’t there.

But Harriet had returned to echoes and silence: a spellbound house, encircled with thorns. On Harriet’s side of the room (Allison’s was a mess) everything was perfect, just as Ida had left it: tidy bed, white ruffles, dust settling like frost.

And so it remained. Underneath the coverlet, the sheets were still crisp. They had been washed and smoothed by Ida’s hand; they were the last trace of Ida in the house, and—as much as Harriet longed to crawl into her bed, to bury her face in the lovely soft pillow and pull the clothes up over her head—she could not bring herself to disturb this last small Heaven left to her. At night, the reflection of the bed floated radiant and transparent in the black windowpanes, a flouncy white confection, as soft as a wedding cake. But it was a feast that Harriet could only look at, and long for: for once the bed was slept in, even the hope of sleep was lost.

So she slept on top of the covers. The nights passed fitfully. Mosquitos bit her legs and whined about her ears. The early mornings were cool, and sometimes Harriet sat up foggily to reach for phantom bedclothes; when her hands closed on air, she fell back on the coverlet, with a plump, and—twitching like a terrier in her sleep—she dreamed. She dreamed of black swamp water with ice in it, and country paths she had to run down again and again with a splinter in her foot from being barefoot; of swimming upward through dark lakes, knocking her head against a sheet of metal that sealed her underwater, away from the surface air; of hiding under the bed at Edie’s house from some creepy presence—unseen—who called out to her in a low voice: “Did you leave something, missy? Did you leave me something?” In the morning she woke late and exhausted, red patterns from the bedspread stamped deep into her cheek. And even before she opened her eyes, she was afraid to move, and lay still in the breathless consciousness that she was waking to something wrong.

And so she was. The house was frighteningly dim and still. When she got out of bed and tiptoed to the window and pushed aside the curtain, it was with a sense of being the sole survivor of a terrible disaster. Monday: clothesline empty. How could it be Monday with no sheets and shirts snapping on the line? The shadow of the empty clothesline jangled across the dry grass. Downstairs she crept, down into the murky hall—for now that Ida was gone, there was no one to open the blinds in the morning (or to make coffee, or call “Good Morning, Baby!” or do any of the comforting little things that Ida did) and the house remained sunk for most of the day in a filtered, underwater gloom.

Underlying the vapid silence—a terrible silence, as if the world had ended and most of the people in it had died—was the painful awareness of Libby’s house shut up and vacant only a few streets away. Lawn unmowed, flower beds browned and sizzling with weeds; inside, the mirrors empty pools without reflection and the sunlight and the moonlight gliding indifferently through the rooms. How well Harriet knew Libby’s house in all its hours and moods and weathers—its winter dullness, when the hall was dim and the gas fire burned low; its stormy nights and days (rain streaming down purple windowpanes, shadows streaming down the opposite wall) and its blazing autumn afternoons, when Harriet sat in Libby’s kitchen tired and disconsolate after school, taking heart in Libby’s small talk, and basking in the glow of her kindly inquiries. All the books Libby had read aloud, a chapter each day after school: Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe. Sometimes the October light that flared up suddenly in the west windows on those afternoons was clinical, terrifying in its radiance, and its brilliance and chill seemed like a promise of something unbearable, like the inhuman glow of old memories recalled on a deathbed, all dreams and lurid farewells. But always, even in the most still, desolate lights (leaden tick of mantel clock, library book face down on the sofa) Libby herself shone pale and bright as she moved through the gloomy rooms, with her white head ruffled like a peony. Sometimes she sang to herself, and her reedy voice quavered sweetly in the high shadows of the tiled kitchen, over the fat hum of the Frigidaire:

The owl and the pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat

They took some honey and plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.…

There she was, embroidering, with her tiny silver scissors hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, working the crossword or reading a biography of Madame de Pompadour, talking to her little white cat … tip tip tip, Harriet could hear her footsteps now, the particular sound of them in her size-three shoe, tip tip tip down the long hallway to answer the telephone. Libby! How glad Libby always seemed when Harriet called—even late at night—as if there were no one in the world whose voice she so wanted to hear! “Oh! It’s my darling!” she cried; “how sweet of you to call your poor old auntie …”; and the gaiety and warmth of her voice thrilled Harriet so much that (even alone, standing by the wall phone in the dark kitchen) she shut her eyes and hung her head, warmed and glowing all over, like a chimed bell. Did anyone else seem so happy to hear from Harriet? No: no one did. Now she might dial that number, dial it all she pleased, dial it every moment until the end of time and she would never hear Libby crying at the other end: My darling! my dear! No: the house was empty now, and still. Smells of cedar and vetivert in closed rooms. Soon the furniture would be gone, but for now everything was exactly as it was when Libby set out on her trip: beds made, washed teacups stacked in the dish drainer. Days sweeping through the rooms in unremarked procession. As the sun rose, the bubbled glass paperweight on Libby’s mantelpiece would glow again into life, its little gleaming life of three hours, only to sink into darkness and slumber again when the triangle of sunlight passed over it, at noon. The flower-twined carpet—vast tangled game board of Harriet’s childhood—glowed here, glowed there, with the yellow bars of light that slashed through the wooden blinds in the late afternoons. Around the walls they slid, long fingers, passing in long distorted strands across the framed photographs: Libby as a girl, thin and frightened-looking, holding Edie’s hand; stormy old Tribulation, in sepia tone, with its thundery air of vine-choked tragedy. That evening light too would fade and vanish, until there was no light at all except the cool blue half-light of the street lamps—just enough to see by—glimmering steadily until the dawn. Hatboxes; gloves neatly folded, slumbering in drawers. Clothes that would never know Libby’s touch again, hanging in dark closets. Soon they would be packed away in boxes and sent to Baptist missions in Africa and China—and soon, perhaps, some tiny Chinese lady in a painted house, under golden trees and faraway skies, would be drinking tea with the missionaries in one of Libby’s pink Sunday-school dresses. How did the world go on the way it did: people planting gardens, playing cards, going to Sunday school and sending boxes of old clothes to the China missions and speeding all the while toward a collapsed bridge gaping in the dark?

So Harriet brooded. She sat alone on the stairs, in the hall or at the kitchen table, with her head in her hands; she sat on the window seat in her bedroom and looked down at the street. Old memories scratched and pricked at her: sulks, ungratefulness, words she could never take back. Again and again she thought of the time she’d caught black beetles in the garden and stuck them into the top of a coconut cake Libby had worked all day to make. And how Libby had cried, like a little girl, cried with her face in her hands. Libby had cried, too, when Harriet got mad on her eighth birthday and told Libby she hated her present: a heart-shaped charm for her charm bracelet. “A toy! I wanted a toy!” Later, Harriet’s mother had pulled her aside and told her the charm was expensive, more than Libby could afford. Worst: the last time she’d seen Libby, the last time ever, Harriet had shrugged her hand off, run down the sidewalk without looking back. Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother’s dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

————

School started in two weeks. Hely was at something called Band Clinic, which involved going out to the football field every day and marching back and forth in the suffocating heat. When the football team came out to practice, they all filed back into the tin-roofed shanty of a gymnasium and sat around in folding chairs practicing their instruments. Afterwards the band director built a bonfire and cooked hot dogs, or got together a softball game or an impromptu “jam session” with the bigger kids. Some nights Hely came home early; but on those nights, he said, he had to practice his trombone after supper.

In a way, Harriet was glad of his absence. She was embarrassed by her sorrow, which was too huge to conceal, and by the disastrous state of the house. Harriet’s mother had grown more active after Ida’s departure, in a manner recalling certain nocturnal animals at the Memphis zoo: delicate little saucer-eyed marsupials who—deceived by the ultraviolet lamps that illumined their glass case—ate and groomed themselves and scurried gracefully about their leafy business under the illusion that they were safely hidden, beneath cover of night. Secret trails popped up overnight, and ran and crisscrossed throughout the house, trails marked by tissues, asthma inhalers, bottles of pills and hand lotion and nail varnish, glasses of melting ice which left a linkage of white rings on the table-tops. A portable easel appeared in a particularly crowded and dirty corner of the kitchen and—upon it, gradually, day by day—a picture of some watery purple pansies (though she never finished the vase they were in, beyond the pencil sketch). Even her hair took on a rich new brunette tint (“Chocolate Kiss,” said the bottle—covered with sticky black drips—that Harriet discovered in the wicker trash-can in the downstairs bathroom). Unmindful of the unswept carpets, the sticky floors, the sour-smelling towels in the bathroom, she lavished a bewildering amount of care upon trivia. One afternoon, Harriet found her pushing stacks of clutter left and right in order that she might get down on her knees and polish the brass doorknobs with special polish and a special cloth; another afternoon—heedless of the crumbs, the grease specks, the spilled sugar on the kitchen counter, of the dirty tablecloth and the tower of dishes, stacked precariously above cold gray sink-water, heedless above all of certain sweet whiffs of spoilage, emanating from everywhere and nowhere all at once—she spent a whole hour frantically buffing down an old chrome toaster until it shone like the fender of a limousine, and then spent another ten minutes standing back to admire her handiwork. “We’re managing all right, aren’t we?” she said, and: “Ida never did get things really clean, did she, not like this?” (gazing upon the toaster) and “It’s fun, isn’t it? Just the three of us?”

It wasn’t fun. Still, she was trying. One day, toward the end of August, she got out of bed, took a bubble bath, dressed and put on lipstick, seated herself on a kitchen step-ladder and leafed through The James Beard Cookbook until she found a recipe called Steak Diane, and then walked to the grocery store and bought all the ingredients. Back home, she put on a ruffled cocktail apron (a Christmas gift, never used) over her dress; lit a cigarette, and made herself a Coke on ice with a little bourbon in it, and drank it while she cooked the recipe. Then, holding the platter aloft over her head, they all squeezed single-file into the dining room. Harriet cleared a space on the table; Allison lit a pair of candles, which cast long, wavering shadows on the ceiling. The dinner was the best that Harriet had eaten in a long time—though, three days later, the dishes were still piled in the sink.

Ida’s presence had been valuable not least in this aspect, previously unforeseen: it had constricted her mother’s range of activity in respects which—only now, too late—Harriet appreciated. How often had Harriet yearned for her mother’s company, wished her up and around and out of the bedroom? Now—in a stroke—this wish was granted; and if Harriet had been lonely, and discouraged by the bedroom door, which was always shut, now she was never sure when that door might creak open and her mother drift out, to hover wistfully about Harriet’s chair, as if waiting for Harriet to speak the word that would break the silence and make everything easy and comfortable between them. Harriet would have helped her mother, gladly, if she’d had any clue what she was supposed to say—Allison knew how to reassure their mother without saying a word, just by the calm of her physical presence—but with Harriet, it was different, it seemed that she was supposed to say or do something, though she wasn’t sure what, and the pressure of that expectant gaze only left her speechless and ashamed, and sometimes—if it was too desperate, or lingered too long—frustrated and angry. Then, willfully, she fixed her gaze on her hands, on the floor, on the wall before her, anything to shut out the appeal of her mother’s eyes.

Harriet’s mother did not often talk of Libby—she could hardly pronounce Libby’s name without breaking down in tears—but her thoughts ran towards Libby most of the time, and their current was as plain as if she spoke them aloud. Libby was everywhere. Conversations turned about her, even though her name went unmentioned. Oranges? Everyone remembered the orange slices Libby liked to float in Christmas punch, the orange cake (a sad dessert, from a World War II ration cookbook) that Libby sometimes baked. Pears? Pears too were rich in associations: Libby’s gingered pear preserves; the song that Libby sang about the little pear tree; the still life, featuring pears, that Libby had painted at the state college for women at the turn of the century. And somehow—in talking wholly about objects—it was possible to talk about Libby for hours without mentioning her name. Unspoken reference to Libby haunted every conversation; every country or color, every vegetable or tree, every spoon and doorknob and candy dish was steeped and distempered with her memory—and though Harriet did not question the correctness of this devotion, still sometimes it felt uncomfortably as if Libby had been transformed from a person into a sort of sickly omnipresent gas, seeping through keyholes and under the door cracks.

This was all a very strange design of talk, and it was even stranger because their mother had made it plain in a hundred wordless ways that the girls were not to mention Ida. Even when they referred to Ida indirectly, her displeasure was evident. And she had frozen with her drink halfway to her lips when Harriet (without thinking) had mentioned Libby and Ida in the same, sad breath.

“How dare you!” she cried, as if Harriet had said something disloyal to Libby—base, unforgivable—and then, to Harriet: “Don’t look at me like that.” She seized the hand of startled Allison; she dropped it and fled from the room.

But though Harriet was forbidden to confide her own sorrow, her mother’s sorrow was a constant reproach, and Harriet felt vaguely responsible for it. Sometimes—at night, especially—it waxed palpable, like a mist, permeating the entire house; a thick haze of it hung about her mother’s bowed head, her slumped shoulders, as heavy as the whiskey smell that hung over Harriet’s father when he had been drinking. Harriet crept up to the doorway and watched silently, as her mother sat at the kitchen table in the yellowy light of the lamp with her head in her hands and a cigarette burning between her fingertips.

And yet, when her mother turned and tried to smile, or make small talk, Harriet fled. She hated the shy, girlish way her mother had begun to tiptoe around the house, peeping around corners and looking in cabinets, as if Ida were some tyrant she was glad to be rid of. Whenever she edged close—smiling timidly, in that particular, tremulous way that meant she wanted to “talk,” Harriet felt herself harden to ice. Still as a stone she held herself when her mother sat down beside her on the sofa, when her mother reached out, awkwardly, and patted her hand.

“You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” Her voice was too loud; she sounded like an actress.

Harriet was silent, staring down sullenly at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was open in her lap, at an article about the Cavy. It was a family of South American rodents which included the guinea pig.

“The thing is—” her mother laughed, a choked, dramatic little laugh—“I hope you never have to live through the kind of pain I’ve suffered.”

Harriet scrutinized a black-and-white photograph of the Capybara, the largest member of the Cavy family. It was the largest rodent alive.

“You’re young, honey. I’ve done my best to protect you. I just don’t want you to make some of the mistakes I’ve made.”

She waited. She was sitting far too close. Though Harriet felt uncomfortable, she held herself still and refused to look up. She was determined not to give her mother the slightest opening. All her mother wanted was a display of interest (not genuine interest, just a show) and Harriet knew well enough what would please her: to set the encyclopedia pointedly aside, to fold her hands in her lap and put on a sympathetic frowny face as her mother talked. Poor mother. That was enough; that would do.

And it wasn’t much. But the unfairness of it made Harriet tremble. Did her mother listen when she wanted to talk? And in the silence, looking fixedly at the encyclopedia (how hard it was to hold firm, not to answer!) she recalled stumbling into her mother’s bedroom, tear-blinded over Ida, the limp, queenly way her mother had raised a fingertip, one fingertip, just like that.…

Suddenly Harriet became aware that her mother had stood up, and was looking down at her. Her smile was thin and barbed like a fish-hook. “Please don’t let me bother you while you’re reading,” she said.

Immediately Harriet was struck by regret. “Mother, what?” She pushed the encyclopedia aside.

“Never mind.” Her mother cut her eyes away, drew the sash of her bathrobe.

“Mother?” Harriet called after her down the hallway, as the bedroom door—a little too decorously—clicked shut. “Mother, I’m sorry.…”

Why was she so hateful? Why couldn’t she behave like other people wanted her to? Harriet sat on the sofa, berating herself; and the sharp unpleasant thoughts tumbled through her mind long after she’d picked herself up and trudged up to bed. Her anxiety and guilt were not confined to her mother—or even her immediate situation—but ranged far and wide, and the most torturous of it revolved around Ida. What if Ida had a stroke? Or was struck by a car? It happened, and now Harriet knew it only too well: people died, just like that, fell right over on the ground. Would Ida’s daughter send word? Or—more likely—would she assume that no one at Harriet’s house cared?

Harriet—with a scratchy crochet afghan thrown over her—tossed, and flopped, and shouted out accusations and orders in her sleep. From time to time, August heat lightning flashed blue through the room. She would never forget how her mother had treated Ida: never forget it, never forgive it, never. Yet angry as she was, she could not harden her heart—not wholly—against the wringing of her mother’s sorrow.

And this was most excruciating of all when her mother tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She lolloped downstairs in her pyjamas, threw herself down on the sofa before her silent daughters like some sort of goofy baby-sitter, suggested “fun” activities as if they were all just a big bunch of pals sitting around together. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright; but beneath her cheer was a frantic and pitifully strained quality that made Harriet want to weep. She wanted to play card games. She wanted to make taffy—taffy! She wanted to watch television. She wanted them to go over to the Country Club for a steak—which was impossible, the dining room at the Country Club wasn’t even open on Mondays, what was she thinking? And she was full of horrifying questions. “Do you want a bra?” she asked Harriet; and “Wouldn’t you like to have a friend over?” and “Do you want to drive up and visit your father in Nashville?”

“I think you should have a party,” she said to Harriet.

“Party?” said Harriet warily.

“Oh, you know, a little Coca-Cola or ice-cream party for the girls in your class at school.”

Harriet was too aghast to speak.

“You need to … see people. Invite them over. Girls your own age.”

“Why?”

Harriet’s mother waved a hand dismissively. “You’ll be in high school soon,” she said. “Before long, it’ll be time for you to think about cotillion. And, you know, cheerleading and modeling squad.”

Modeling squad? thought Harriet in amazement.

“The best days of your life are still ahead of you. I think high school’s really going to be your time, Harriet.”

Harriet had no idea what to say to this.

“It’s your clothes, is that it, sweetie?” Her mother looked at her appealingly. “Is that why you don’t want to have your little girlfriends over?”

“No!”

“We’ll take you to Youngland in Memphis. Buy you some pretty clothes. Let your father pay for it.”

Their mother’s ups and downs were wearing even upon Allison, or so it seemed, because Allison had begun without explanation to spend afternoons and evenings away from home. The phone began to ring more often. Twice in one week, Harriet had answered when a girl identifying herself as “Trudy” had called for Allison. Who “Trudy” was Harriet didn’t ask, and didn’t care, but she watched through the window as Trudy (a shadowy figure in a brown Chrysler) stopped in front of the house for Allison who waited barefoot by the curb.

Other times, Pemberton came to pick her up in the baby-blue Cadillac, and they drove away without saying hello or inviting Harriet to come. Harriet sat in the upstairs window seat of her darkened bedroom after they rattled off down the street, staring out into the murky sky over the train tracks. Off in the distance, she saw the lights of the baseball field, the lights of Jumbo’s Drive-In. Where did they go, Pemberton and Allison, when they drove away in the dark, what did they have to say to each other? The street was still slick from the afternoon’s thunderstorm; above it, the moon shone through a ragged hole in thunderhead clouds, so that the billowy edges were washed with a livid, grandiose light. Beyond—through the rift in the sky—all was clarity: cold stars, infinite distance. It was like staring into a clear pool that seemed shallow, inches deep, but you might toss a coin in that glassy water and it would fall and fall, spiraling down forever without ever striking bottom.

————

“What’s Ida’s address?” Harriet asked Allison one morning. “I want to write and tell her about Libby.”

The house was hot and still; dirty laundry was heaped in great grimy swags on top of the washing machine. Allison looked up blankly from her bowl of cornflakes.

“No,” said Harriet, after a long moment of disbelief.

Allison glanced away. She had recently started wearing dark makeup on her eyes, and it gave her an evasive, uncommunicative look.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t get it! What’s wrong with you?”

“She didn’t give it to me.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

Silence.

“Well, didn’t you? What’s the matter with you?”

“She knows where we live,” said Allison. “If she wants to write.”

“Sweetheart?” Their mother’s voice, in the next room: helpful, infuriating. “Are you looking for something?”

After a long pause, Allison—her eyes down—resumed eating. The crunch of her cornflakes was nauseatingly loud, like the magnified crunch of some leaf-eating insect on a nature program. Harriet pushed back in her chair, cast her eyes about the room in useless panic: what town had Ida said, what town exactly, what was her daughter’s married name? And would it make any difference, even if Harriet knew? In Alexandria, Ida hadn’t had a telephone. Whenever they needed to get in touch with Ida, Edie had to get in the car and drive over to Ida’s house—which wasn’t even a house, only a lopsided brown shack in a yard of packed dirt, no grass and no sidewalk, just mud. Smoke puffing from a rusty little metal stovepipe, up top, when Edie had stopped by one winter evening with Harriet in the car, bringing fruitcake and tangerines for Ida’s Christmas. The memory of Ida appearing in the doorway—surprised, in the car headlights, wiping her hands on a dirty apron—choked Harriet with a sudden, sharp grief. Ida hadn’t let them in, but the glimpse through the open door had flooded Harriet with confusion and sadness: old coffee cans, an oilcloth-covered table, the raggedy old smoky-smelling sweater—a man’s sweater—that Ida wore in the wintertime, hanging on a peg.

Harriet unfolded her fingers of her left hand and consulted, in private, the cut she’d made in the meat of her palm with a Swiss Army knife on the day after Libby’s funeral. In the suffocating misery of the quiet house, the stab wound had made her yelp aloud with surprise. The knife clattered to the floor of the bathroom. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes, which were already hot and sore from crying. Harriet wrung her hand and squeezed her lips tight as the black coins of blood dripped on the shadowy tile; around and around she looked, in the corners of the ceiling, as if expecting some help from above. The pain was a strange relief—icy and bracing, and in its harsh way it calmed her and concentrated her thoughts. By the time this stops hurting, she’d said to herself, by the time it heals, I won’t feel so bad about Libby.

And the cut was better. It didn’t hurt much any more, except when she closed her hand a certain way. A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. “The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.

————

So August passed. At Libby’s funeral, the preacher had read from the Psalms. “I watch, and am as a sparrow alone on the house top.” Time healed all wounds, he said. But when?

Harriet thought of Hely, playing his trombone on the football field in the blazing sun, and that too reminded her of the Psalms. “Praise Him with the trumpet, with psaltery and harp.” Hely’s feelings didn’t run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright. He’d seen dozens of housekeepers come and go. Nor did he understand her grief over Libby. Hely didn’t like old people, was afraid of them; he didn’t like even his own grandparents, who lived in a different town.

But Harriet missed her grandmother and her great-aunts, and they were too busy to give her much attention. Tat was packing Libby’s things: folding her linens, polishing her silver, rolling up rugs and standing on ladders to take down curtains and trying to figure out what to do with the things in Libby’s cabinets and cedar chests and closets. “Darling, you are an angel to offer,” said Tat, when Harriet called her on the telephone and offered to help. But though Harriet ventured by, she had not been able to force herself to go up the front walk, so shocked was she by the drastically altered air of Libby’s house: the weedy flower bed, the shaggy lawn, the tragic note of neglect. The curtains were off Libby’s front windows, and their absence was shocking; inside, over the living-room mantel, there was only a big blind patch where the mirror had hung.

Harriet stood aghast on the sidewalk; she turned and ran home. That night—feeling ashamed of herself—she called Tat to apologize.

“Well,” said Tat, in a voice not quite as friendly as Harriet would have liked. “I was wondering what happened.”

“I—I—”

“Darling, I’m tired,” said Tat; and she did sound exhausted. “Can I do something for you?”

“The house looks different.”

“Yes it does. It’s hard being over there. Yesterday I sat down at her poor little table in that kitchen full of boxes and cried and cried.”

“Tatty, I—” Harriet was crying herself.

“Listen, darling. You’re precious to think of Tatty but it’ll go faster if I’m by myself. Poor angel.” Now Tat was crying too. “We’ll do something nice when I’m finished, all right?”

Even Edie—as clear and constant as the profile stamped on a coin—had changed. She’d grown thinner since Libby died; her cheeks were sunken and she seemed smaller somehow. Harriet had hardly seen her since the funeral. Nearly every day she drove down to the square in her new car to meet with bankers or attorneys or accountants. Libby’s estate was a mess, mostly because of Judge Cleve’s bankruptcy, and his muddled attempts, at the end, to divide and conceal what remained of his assets. Much of this confusion reverberated through the tiny, tied-up inheritance he’d passed down to Libby. To make matters worse: Mr. Rixey, the old man whose car she’d hit, had filed a lawsuit against Edie, claiming “distress and mental anguish.” He would not settle; it seemed sure to mean a court case. Though Edie was tight-lipped and stoical about it, she was clearly distraught.

“Well, it was your fault, darling,” said Adelaide.

She’d had headaches, said Adelaide, since the accident; she wasn’t up to “fooling with boxes” over at Libby’s; she wasn’t herself. In the afternoons, after her nap (“Nap!” said Tat, as if she wouldn’t enjoy a nap herself) she walked down to Libby’s house and vacuumed carpets and upholstery (unnecessary) and re-organized boxes that Tatty had already packed, but mainly she worried aloud about Libby’s estate; and she provoked Tatty and Edie alike by her cordial but transparent suspicion that Edie and the lawyers were cheating her, Adelaide, out of what she called her “share.” Every night she telephoned Edie to question her, in exasperating detail, about what had happened that day at the lawyers’ office (the lawyers were too expensive, she complained, she was fearful of her “share” being “eaten up” by legal fees); also to pass along Mr. Sumner’s advice about financial matters.

“Adelaide,” cried Edie for the fifth or sixth time, “I wish you wouldn’t tell that old man our business!”

“Why not? He’s a family friend.”

“He’s no friend of mine!”

Adelaide said, with a deadly cheerfulness: “I like to feel that someone has my interests at heart.”

“I suppose you don’t think I do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

This was nothing new. Adelaide and Edie had never got along—even as children—but never had the situation between them reached such an openly rancorous point. If Libby was alive, she would have made peace between them long before relations reached this crisis; would have pled with Adelaide for patience and discretion, and—with all the usual arguments—begged Edie for forbearance (“She is the baby … never had a mother … Papa spoiled Addie so …”).

But Libby was dead. And—with no one to mediate—the rift between Edie and Adelaide grew daily colder and more profound, to the point where Harriet (who was, after all, Edie’s granddaughter) had begun to feel an uncomfortable chill in Adelaide’s company. Harriet felt the unfairness of this all the more keenly because, formerly, whenever Addie and Edie quarrelled, Harriet had tended to take Addie’s side. Edie could be a bully: Harriet knew that only too well. Now, for the first time, she was starting to understand Edie’s side of the quarrel, and exactly what Edie meant by the word “petty.”

Mr. Sumner was back at home now—in South Carolina or wherever it was that he lived—but he and Adelaide had struck up a busy little correspondence that had Adelaide humming with importance. “Camellia Street,” she’d said, as she showed Harriet the return address on one of the letters he’d sent her. “Isn’t that a lovely name? Streets around here don’t have names like that. How I would love to live on a street with such an elegant name.”

She held the envelope at arm’s length and—glasses low on her nose—surveyed it fondly. “He’s got a nice handwriting for a man too, doesn’t he?” she asked Harriet. “Neat. That’s what I’d call it, wouldn’t you? Oh, Daddy thought the world and all of Mr. Sumner.”

Harriet said nothing. According to Edie, the Judge had thought Mr. Sumner “fast and loose,” whatever that meant. And Tatty—the deciding opinion here—would say nothing about Mr. Sumner at all; but her manner suggested that she had nothing nice to say.

“I’m sure that you and Mr. Sumner would have lots of things to talk about,” Adelaide was saying. She had removed the card from the envelope and was glancing it over, front and back. “He’s very cosmopolitan. He used to live in Egypt, did you know that?”

As she spoke she was gazing at the picture—a scene of Old Charleston—on the front of the card; on the back of it, Harriet made out, in Mr. Sumner’s eloquent, old-fashioned penmanship, the phrases something more to me and dear lady.

“I thought you were interested in that, Harriet,” said Adelaide, holding the card out at arm’s length and surveying it with her head to one side. “All those old mummies and cats and things.”

Harriet blurted: “Are you and Mr. Sumner going to be engaged?”

Adelaide—with a distracted air—touched an earring. “Did your grandmother tell you to ask me that?”

Does she think I’m retarded? “No, maam.”

“I hope,” said Adelaide, with a chilly laugh, “I hope I don’t seem so very old to you …” and, as she rose to walk Harriet to the door, she glanced at her reflection in the window glass in a way that made Harriet’s heart sink.

————

The days were very noisy. Heavy machinery—bulldozers, chainsaws—roared in the distance, three streets over. The Baptists were cutting down the trees and paving over the land around the church because they needed more parking, they said; the rumble in the distance was terrible, as if of tanks, an advancing army, pressing in on the quiet streets.

The library was closed; painters were working in the Children’s Room. They were painting it bright yellow, a slick shiny enamelled yellow that looked like taxicab paint. It was horrible. Harriet had loved the scholarly wood paneling, which had been there for as long as she could remember: how could they be painting over all that beautiful dark old wood? And the summer reading contest was over; and Harriet had not won it.

There was nobody to talk to, and nothing to do, and no place to go but the pool. Every day at one o’clock she put her towel under her arm and walked over. August was drawing to a close; football and cheerleading practice and even kindergarten had started, and—except for the retired people out on the golf course, and a few young housewives who lay roasting themselves on deck chairs—the Country Club was deserted. The air, for the most part, was as hot and still as glass. Every so often the sun passed under a cloud and a gust of hot wind swept through and wrinkled the surface of the pool, rattled the awning of the concession stand. Underwater, Harriet enjoyed having something heavy to fight and kick against, enjoyed the white Frankenstein arcs of electricity leaping—as from some great generator—against the walls of the pool. Suspended there—in chains and spangles of radiance, ten feet above the bellying curve of the deep end—sometimes she forgot herself for whole minutes at a time, lost in echoes and silence, ladders of blue light.

For long dreamy spells, she lay in a dead man’s float, staring down at her own shadow. Houdini had escaped fairly quickly in his underwater tricks and while the policemen glanced at their watches, and tugged at their collars, while his assistant shouted for the axe and his wife screamed and slumped in a make-believe faint, he was usually well out of his restraints and—out of view—floating quite calmly beneath the surface of the water.

Towards this, at least, Harriet had progressed over the summer. She could hold her breath comfortably for well over a minute and—if she stayed very still—she could grit it out (not so comfortably) for nearly two. Sometimes she counted the seconds but more often she forgot: what enthralled her was the process, the trance. Her shadow—ten feet below—wavered dark across the floor of the deep end, as big as the shadow of a grown man. The boat’s sunk, she told herself—imagining herself shipwrecked, adrift in blood-warm immensities. Oddly, it was a comfortable thought. No one’s coming to rescue me.

She’d been floating for ages—scarcely moving, except to breathe—when, very faintly, she heard someone calling her name. With a breaststroke and a kick, she surfaced: to heat, glare, the noisy hum of the cooling unit outside the clubhouse. Through foggy eyes, she saw Pemberton (who hadn’t been on duty when she’d arrived) wave from atop his lifeguard chair and then jump down into the water.

Harriet ducked to avoid the splash, and then—seized inexplicably by panic—somersaulted underwater and swam for the shallow end but he was too quick, and cut her off.

“Hey!” he said as she surfaced, with a grand shake of his head that sent the spray flying. “You got good while you were at camp! How long can you hold your breath? Seriously,” he said, when Harriet didn’t answer. “Let’s time you. I’ve got a stopwatch.”

Harriet felt her face growing red.

“Come on. Why don’t you want to?”

Harriet didn’t know. Down below on the blue bottom her feet—barred with pale blue breathing tiger stripes—looked very white and twice as fat as usual.

“Suit yourself.” Pem stood up for a minute, to push his hair back, and then settled back down in the water so their heads were on the same level. “Don’t you get bored, just laying there in the water? Chris gets a little pissed off.”

“Chris?” said Harriet, after a startled pause. The sound of her own voice startled her even more: it was all dry and rusty, like she hadn’t spoken for days.

“When I came to relieve him he was all like: ‘Look at that kid, laying in the water like a log.’ Those toddler moms kept bugging him about it, like he would just let some dead kid float in the pool all afternoon.” He laughed, and then, when he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he swam to the other side.

“Do you want a Coke?” he said; and there was a cheerful crack in his voice that reminded her of Hely. “Free? Chris left me the key to the cooler.”

“No thanks.”

“Say, why didn’t you tell me Allison was home when I called the other day?”

Harriet looked at him—blankly, a look that made Pemberton’s brow pucker—and then hopped along the bottom of the pool and began to swim away. It was true: she’d told him that Allison wasn’t there, and hung up, even though Allison was in the next room. Moreover: she didn’t know why she’d done it, couldn’t even invent a reason.

He hopped after her; she could hear him splashing. Why won’t he leave me alone? she thought despairingly.

“Hey,” she heard him call. “I heard Ida Rhew quit.” The next thing she knew, he had glided in front of her.

“Say,” he said—and then did a double take. “Are you crying?”

Harriet dove—kicking a healthy spray of water in his face—and darted off underwater: whoosh. The shallow end was hot, like bathtub water.

“Harriet?” she heard him call as she surfaced by the ladder. In a grim hurry, she clambered out and—head down—scurried for the dressing room with a string of black footprints winding behind her.

“Hey!” he called. “Don’t be like that. You can play dead all you want. Harriet?” he called again as she ran behind the concrete barrier and into the ladies’ locker room, her ears burning.

————

The only thing that gave Harriet a sense of purpose was the idea of Danny Ratliff. The thought of him itched at her. Again and again—perversely, as if bearing down on a rotten tooth—she tested herself by thinking of him; and again and again outrage flared with sick predictability, fireworks sputtering from a raw nerve.

In her bedroom, in the fading light, she lay on the carpet, staring at the flimsy black-and-white photograph she’d scissored from the yearbook. Its casual, off-centered quality—which had shocked her at first—had long since burned away and now what she saw when she looked at the picture was not a boy or even a person, but the frank embodiment of evil. His face had grown so poisonous to her that now she wouldn’t even touch the photograph except to pick it up by the edges. The despair of her house was the work of his hand. He deserved to die.

Throwing the snake on his grandmother had given her no relief. It was him she wanted. She’d caught a glimpse of his face outside the funeral home, and of one thing she was now confident: he recognized her. Their eyes had met, and locked—and his bloodshot gaze had flashed up so fierce and strange at the sight of her that the memory made her heart pound. Some weird clarity had flared between them, a recognition of some sort, and though Harriet wasn’t sure what it meant, she had the curious impression that she troubled Danny Ratliff’s thoughts fully as much as he troubled hers.

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”

Well: Harriet would not see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles. For years, she’d lived in terror of turning nine—Robin was nine when he died—but her ninth birthday had come and gone and now she wasn’t afraid of anything. Whatever was to be done, she would do it. She would strike now—while she still could, before her nerve broke and her spirit failed her—with nothing to sustain her but her own gigantic solitude.

She turned her attention to the problem at hand. Why would Danny Ratliff go to the freight yards? There wasn’t much to steal. Most of the warehouses were boarded up and Harriet had climbed up and looked inside the windows of the ones that weren’t: empty, for the most part, except for raggedy cotton bales and age-blacked machinery and dusty pesticide tanks wallowing belly-up in the corners. Wild possibilities ran through her mind: prisoners sealed in a boxcar. Bodies buried; burlap sacks of stolen bills. Skeletons, murder weapons, secret meetings.

The only way to find out exactly what he was doing, she decided, was to go down to the freight yards and see for herself.

————

She hadn’t talked to Hely in ages. Because he was the only seventh grader at the Band Clinic, he now thought he was too good to associate with Harriet. Never mind that he’d only been invited because the brass section was short on trombones. The last time she and Hely had spoken—by telephone, and she had called him—he’d talked of nothing but band, volunteering gossip about the big kids as if he actually knew them, referring to the drum majorette and the hot-shot brass soloists by first name. In a chatty but remote tone—as if she were a teacher, or a friend of his parents—he informed her of the many, many technical details of the half-time number they were working on: a Beatles medley, which the band would conclude by playing “Yellow Submarine” while forming a gigantic submarine (its propeller represented by a twirled baton) on the football field. Harriet listened in silence. She was silent, too, at Hely’s vague but enthusiastic interjections about how “crazy” the kids in the high-school band were. “The football players don’t have any fun. They have to get up and run laps while it’s still dark, Coach Cogwell screams at them all the time, it’s like the National Guards or something. But Chuck, and Frank, and Rusty, and the sophomores in the trumpet section … they are so much wilder than any of the guys on the football team.”

“Hmmn.”

“All they do is talk back and crack crazy jokes and they wear their sunglasses all day long. Mr. Wooburn’s cool, he doesn’t care. Like yesterday—wait, wait,” he said to Harriet, and then to some peevish voice in the background: “What?”

Conversation. Harriet waited. After a moment or two Hely returned.

“Sorry. I have to go practice,” he said virtuously. “Dad says I need to practice every day because my new trombone is worth a lot of money.”

Harriet hung up and—in the still, dingy light of the hallway—leaned with her elbows on the telephone table and thought. Had he forgot about Danny Ratliff? Or did he just not care? Her lack of concern over Hely’s distant manner took her by surprise, but she could not help being pleased by how little pain his indifference caused her.

————

The night before, it had rained; and though the ground was wet, Harriet couldn’t tell if a car had recently passed through the broad gravel expanse (a loading area for cotton wagons, not really a road) that connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the river. With her backpack and her orange notebook under her arm, in case there were clues she needed to write down, she stood on the edge of the vast, black, mechanical plain, and gazed out at the scissors and loops and starts and stops of track, the white warning crosses and the dead signal lanterns, the rust-locked freight cars in the distance and the water tower rising up tall behind them, atop spindly legs: an enormous round tank with its roof peaked like the Tin Woodman’s hat in The Wizard of Oz. In early childhood, she’d formed an obscure attachment to the water tower, perhaps because of this resemblance; it seemed a dumb, friendly guardian of some sort; and when she went to sleep, she often thought of it standing lonely and unappreciated out somewhere in the dark. Then, when Harriet was six, some bad boys had climbed up the tower on Halloween and painted a scary jack-o’-lantern face on the tank, with slit eyes and sawteeth—and for many nights after, Harriet lay awake and agitated, and could not sleep for the thought of her steadfast companion (fanged now, and hostile) scowling out over the silent rooftops.

The scary face had faded long ago. Someone else had sprayed Class of ’70 over it in gold paint, and now this too had faded, bleached by sun and washed dull by years and years of rain. Melancholy black drips of decay streaked the tank’s facade from top to bottom—but even though it wasn’t really there any more, the devil face, still it burned in Harriet’s memory, like a light’s afterburn in a recently darkened room.

The sky was white and empty. With Hely, she thought, at least there’s somebody to talk to. Had Robin wandered down here to play, had he stood astride his bicycle to look across the train tracks? She tried to imagine seeing it all through his eyes. Things wouldn’t have changed much: maybe the telegraph wires would sag a little more, maybe the creeper and the bindweed would hang a little thicker on the trees. How would it all look in a hundred years, after she was dead?

She cut through the freight yards—hopping over the tracks, humming to herself—towards the woods. Her voice was very loud in the silence; she had never ventured so far into this abandoned area by herself. What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me?

I’d go live at the library, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home—peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes—and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on.…

When she stepped on the footpath and into the shady woods (lush vegetation, crackling through the ruins of her death-stilled city, buckling up the sidewalks, snaking through the houses) the passage from warmth to cool was like swimming into a cool plume of spring water in the lake. Airy clouds of gnats swirled away from her, spinning from the sudden movement like pond creatures in green water. In the daylight, the path was narrower and more choked than she had imagined it to be in the dark; barbs of fox-tail and witch grass prickled up in tufts, and the ruts in the clay were coated in scummy green algae.

Overhead, a raucous scream that made her jump: only a crow. Trees dripping in great chains and swags of kudzu loomed high on either side of the path like rotting sea monsters. Slowly she walked—gazing up at the dark canopy—and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell, and looked down. A glittering green snake—not poisonous, for its head was not pointed, but unlike any snake she had ever seen—lay dead on the path ahead of her. It was about three feet long, stomped flat in the middle, so that its guts were smashed out in rich dark globs, but the remarkable thing was its color: a sparkly chartreuse, with iridescent scales, like the color illustration of the King of the Snakes in an old book of fairy tales that Harriet had had since she was a baby. “Very well,” had said the King of the Snakes to the honest shepherd, “I shall spit into your mouth three times, and then you shall know the language of the beasts. But take care not to let other men know your secret, or they shall grow angry and kill you.”

By the side of the path, Harriet saw the ridged print of a boot—a large boot—stamped distinctly in the mud; and at the same time she tasted the snake’s death-stink in the back of her throat and she began to run, heart pounding, as if the very devil was chasing her, ran without knowing why. The pages of the notebook flapped loudly in the silence. Drops of water, shaken loose from the vines, pittered all around her; a bewilderment of stunted ailanthus (varying heights, like stalagmites on a cave floor) rose pale and staggered from the strangle of brush on the ground, their lizard-skinned trunks luminous in the dim.

She broke through into sunlight—and, suddenly, sensed that she was not alone, and stopped. Grasshoppers whirred high and frantic in the sumac; she shaded her eyes with the notebook, scanned the bright, baked expanse—

High in the corner of her vision a silver flash jumped out at her—out of the sky, it seemed—and Harriet saw with a jolt a dark shape crawling hand over hand up the ladder of the water tower, about thirty feet high and sixty feet away. Again, the light flashed: a metal wristwatch, glinting like a signal mirror.

Heart racing, she stepped back into the woods and squinted through the dripping, interlaced leaves. It was him. Black hair. Very thin. Tight T-shirt, with writing she couldn’t read on the back. Part of her tingled with excitement but another, cooler part stood back and marveled at the smallness and flatness of the moment. There he is, she told herself (jabbing herself with the thought, trying to provoke the proper excitement), it’s him, it’s him.…

A branch was in her face; she ducked so she could see him better. Now he was climbing up the last rungs of the ladder. Once he’d hoisted himself up onto the top he stood on the narrow walkway with his head down, hands on hips, motionless against the harsh, unclouded sky. Then—with a sharp backwards glance—he stooped and put a hand on the metal railing (it was very low; he had to lean to the side a bit) and limped along it quick and light to the left and out of Harriet’s sight.

Harriet waited. After some moments, he came into view on the other side. Just then a grasshopper popped up in Harriet’s face and she stepped backwards with a little rustle. A stick cracked under her foot. Danny Ratliff (for it was him; she saw his profile plainly, even in his crouched animal posture) swung his head in her direction. Impossible that he’d heard, such a slight noise and so far away yet somehow incredibly he had heard because his gaze lingered, luminous and queer, without moving.…

Harriet stood very still. A tendril of vine hung over her face, quivering gently with her breath. His eyes—passing coldly over her, as he scanned the ground—shone with the bizarre, blind, marble-like cast that Harriet had seen in old photographs of Confederate soldiers: sunburnt boys with light-pinned eyes, staring fixedly into the heart of a great emptiness.

Then he looked away. To her horror, he started to climb down the ladder: fast, looking over his shoulder.

He was more than halfway to the bottom before Harriet came to her senses and turned and ran, as fast as she could, back down the damp, buzzing path. She dropped the notebook, flustered back to pick it up. The green snake lay fish-hooked across the path all sparkly in the dim. She jumped over it—batting with both hands the flies that rose humming in her face—and kept running.

She burst through in the clearing where stood the cotton warehouse: tin roof, windows boarded up and dead-looking. Far behind, she heard the crash of underbrush; panicked, she froze for an instant, despairing in her indecision. Inside the warehouse, she knew, were lots of good places to hide—the stacked bales, the empty wagons—but if he managed to corner her in there, she’d never get out again.

She heard him shouting in the distance. Breathing painfully, clutching the stitch in her side, Harriet ran behind the warehouse (faded tin signs: Purina Checkerboard, General Mills) and down a gravelled road: much wider, wide enough for a car to go down, with wide bare patches marbled with patterns of black and white sand swirled through the red clay and dappled with patchy shade from tall sycamores. Her blood pounded, her thoughts clattered and banged around her head like coins in a shaken piggy-bank and her legs were heavy, like running through mud or molasses in a nightmare and she couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t tell if the crash and snap of twigs (like gunshots, unnaturally loud) was only the crashing of her own feet or feet crashing down the path behind her.

The road slanted sharply down hill. Faster and faster she ran, faster and faster, afraid of falling but afraid to slow down, her feet pounding along like they weren’t even a part of her but some rough machine propelling her along until the road dipped and then rose again—abruptly—to high earthen banks: the levee.

The levee, the levee! Her pace wound down, slower and slower, and bore her halfway up the steep slope until she tipped over on the grass—gasping with fatigue—and crawled to the top on her hands and knees.

She heard the water before she saw it … and when at last she stood, on wobbly knees, the breeze blew cool in her sweaty face and she saw the yellow water swirling in the cut-banks. And up and down the river—people. People black and white, young and old, people chatting and eating sandwiches and fishing. In the distance, motorboats purred. “Well, tell you the one I liked,” said a high, country voice—a man’s voice, distinct—“the one with the Spanish name, I thought he preached a good sermon.”

“Dr. Mardi? Mardi ain’t a Spanish name.”

“Well, whatever. He was the best if you ask me.”

The air was fresh and muddy-smelling. Light-headed and trembling, Harriet stuffed the notebook in her backpack and made her way down from the levee, down to the quartet of fishermen directly below her (talking about Mardi Gras now, whether that festival was Spanish or French in origin) and—on light legs—walked down the river-bank, past a pair of warty old fishermen (brothers, from the look of them, in belted Bermuda shorts hitched high upon Humpty Dumpty waists), past a sunbathing lady in a lawn chair, like a sea turtle done up in hot pink lipstick and matching kerchief; past a family with a transistor radio and a cooler full of fish and all sorts of dirty children with scratched-up legs, scrambling and tumbling and running back and forth, daring each other to put their hands in the bait bucket, shrieking and running away again.…

On she walked. The people all seemed to stop talking, she noticed, as she approached—maybe it was her imagination. Surely he couldn’t hurt her down here—too many people—but just then her neck prickled as if somebody was staring at her. Nervously, she glanced behind her—and stopped when she saw a scruffy man in jeans with long dark hair, only a few feet away. But it wasn’t Danny Ratliff, just someone who looked like him.

The day itself—the people, the ice chests, the screams of the children—had taken on a bright menace all its own. Harriet walked a little faster. Sun flashed from the mirrored glasses of a well-upholstered man (lip puffed, repulsive with chewing tobacco) on the other side of the water. His face was perfectly expressionless; Harriet glanced away, quickly, almost as if he’d grimaced at her.

Danger: everywhere now. What if he was waiting for her somewhere up on the street? That’s what he’d do, if he was smart: retrace his steps, circle around and wait for her, jump out from behind a parked car or a tree. She had to walk home, didn’t she? She would have to keep her eyes open, stick to the main streets and not take any shortcuts through lonely places. Too bad: there were a lot of lonely places in the old part of town. And once she was up on Natchez Street, with the bulldozers going so loudly over at the Baptist church, who would hear her if she screamed? If she screamed at the wrong moment: no one. Who’d heard Robin? And he’d been with his sisters in his own front yard.

The riverbank had grown narrow and rocky now, and a little deserted. Lost in thought, climbing the stone steps (cracked, tufted with round little pincushions of grass) that wound to the street, she turned on the landing and almost stumbled over a dirty toddler with an even dirtier baby seated in his lap. Kneeling before them on a man’s old shirt, spread out beneath her like a picnic blanket, Lasharon Odum was busy re-arranging squares of a broken-up chocolate bar upon a large, fuzzy leaf. Beside her were three plastic cups of yellowy water that looked as if they had been dipped from the river. All three of the children were peppered with scabs and mosquito bites, but the main thing that Harriet noticed were the red gloves—her gloves, the gloves Ida had given her, filthy now, ruined—on Lasharon’s hands. Before Lasharon, blinking up, could say a word, Harriet slapped the leaf out of her hands so the chocolate squares went flying and jumped on top of her and knocked her on the pavement. The gloves were large, loose at the fingertip; Harriet tore off the left one without much trouble but as soon as Lasharon realized what she was after she began to fight.

“Give me that! It’s mine!” Harriet roared, and—when Lasharon closed her eyes and shook her head—she grabbed a handful of Lasharon’s hair. Lasharon screamed; her hands flew to her temples and instantly Harriet peeled off the glove and stuffed it in her pocket.

“It’s mine,” she hissed. “Thief.”

“Mine!” shrieked Lasharon, in a voice of bewildered outrage. “Her gave them to me!”

Gave? Harriet was taken aback. She started to ask who’d given her the gloves (Allison? their mother?) and then thought better of it. The toddler and the baby were staring at Harriet with large round frightened eyes.

“Her GAVE them to—”

“Shut up!” cried Harriet. She was a little embarrassed now that she’d flown into such a rage. “Don’t ever come begging at my house again!”

In the small, confused pause that followed, she turned—heart pounding wildly—and started quickly up the steps. The incident had so violently disturbed her that she’d forgotten Danny Ratliff for the moment. At least, she told herself—stepping back hastily on the curb as a station wagon shot past her on the street; she needed to pay attention where she was going—at least I have the gloves back. My gloves. They were all she had left of Ida.

Yet Harriet did not feel proud of herself, exactly, only defiant and a bit unsettled. The sun shone uncomfortably in her face. And just as she was about to step out into the street again without looking, she stopped herself, and held her hand against the glare as she glanced both ways and then darted across.

————

“Oh, what would you give in exchange for your soul,” sang Farish, as he stabbed at the base of Gum’s electric can opener with a screwdriver. He was in a fine mood. Not so Danny, jangled to the backbone with nerves, horrors, premonitions. He sat on the aluminum steps of his trailer and picked at a bloody hangnail as Farish—amidst a glittering disarray of cylinders and snap-rings and gaskets strewn in the packed dust—hummed busily at his work. Like a demented plumber in his brown coverall, he was going methodically through their grandmother’s trailer, through the carport, through the sheds, opening fuse boxes and tearing up sections of floor and prying apart (with sighs and huffs of triumph) various small appliances that caught his eye, on a relentless hunt for cut wires, misplaced parts and hidden transistor tubes, any subtle evidence of sabotage in the electronic apparatus of the household. “Directly,” he snapped, throwing an arm out behind him, “I said directly,” whenever Gum crept up as if she was about to say something, “I’ll get around to it, okay?” But he had not got around to it yet; and the front yard was so scattered with bolts and pipes and plugs and wires and switches and plates and odds and ends of metal debris that it looked as if a bomb had exploded and showered trash for thirty feet.

On the dusty ground, two tab numbers from a clock radio—double zero, white on black—stared up at Danny, like a pair of cartoon google-eyes. Farish was grappling and groping with the can opener, dickering and dackering amidst the litter as if nothing at all was on his mind and though he wasn’t exactly looking at Danny he had a very strange smile on his face. Better to ignore Farish, with all his sly hints, his sneaky speed-freak games—but all the same, Farish obviously had something on his mind and it bothered Danny that he didn’t know quite what it was. For he suspected that Farish’s elaborate counter-spy activity was a display staged for his benefit.

He stared at the side of his brother’s face. I didn’t do anything, he told himself. Just went up there to look at it. Ain’t took nothing.

But he knows I wanted to take it. And there was something else besides. Somebody had been watching him. Down in the scrub of sumac and kudzu behind the tower, something had moved. White flash, like a face. A little face. On the scummy, shady clay of the path, the footprints were those of a child, dug deep and switching every which way, and this was creepy enough but farther on—alongside a dead snake on the trail—he’d found a flimsy little black-and-white picture of himself. Of himself! A tiny school picture, back from junior high, cut from a yearbook. He picked it up and stared at it, not believing what he saw. And all sorts of old memories and fears from that long-ago time rose and mingled with the mottled shadows, the red clay mud and the stench of the dead snake … he’d nearly fainted from the indescribable weirdness of it, of seeing his younger self in a new shirt smiling up at him from the ground, like the hopeful photographs on muddy new graves in country cemeteries.

And it was real, he hadn’t imagined it, because the picture was now in his wallet and he’d taken it out to look at it maybe twenty or thirty times in sheer incredulity. Could Farish have left it there? As a warning? Or a sick joke, something to psych Danny out as he stepped on the toe-popper or walked into the fish-hook dangling invisibly at eye level?

The eeriness of it haunted him. Around and around turned his mind in the same useless groove (like the doorknob to his bedroom, which turned and turned quite easily without actually opening the door) and the only thing that kept him from taking the school picture out of his wallet and looking at it again, right now, was Farish standing in front of him.

Danny gazed off into space and (as often happened, since he’d given up sleeping) was paralyzed by a waking dream: wind blowing on a surface like snow or sand, a blurred figure in the far distance. He’d thought it was her, and walked closer and closer until he realized it wasn’t, in fact there was nothing in front of him at all, just empty space. Who was this damn girl? Only the day before, some children’s cereal had been sitting out in the middle of Gum’s kitchen table—some kind of flakes that Curtis liked, in a brightly colored box—and Danny had stopped dead on his way to the bathroom and stared, because her face was on the box. Her! Pale face, black bowl haircut, leaning over a bowl of cereal that cast a magical glow up into her downturned face. And all around her head, fairies and sparkles. He ran, snatched up the box—and was confused to see that the picture wasn’t her at all (any more) but some different child, some child he recognized from television.

In the corner of his eye, tiny explosions popped, flashbulbs firing everywhere. And all of a sudden, it occurred to him—jolted back into his body, sitting in a sweaty flash on the steps of his trailer again—that when she slipped through whatever dimension she came from and into his thoughts, the girl, she was preceded in his mind by something very like an opened door and a whirl of something bright blowing through it. Points of light, glittery dust flecks like creatures in a microscope—meth bugs, that would be your scientific explanation, because every itch, every goose bump, every microscopic speck and piece of grit that floated across your tired old eyeballs was like a living insect. Knowing the science of it didn’t make it any less real. At the end, bugs crawled on every imaginable surface, long, flowing trails that writhed along the grain in the floorboards. Bugs on your skin that you couldn’t scrub off, though you scrubbed until your skin was raw. Bugs in your food. Bugs in your lungs, your eyeballs, your very squirming heart. Lately Farish had begun placing a paper napkin (perforated by a drinking straw) over his glass of iced tea to keep away the invisible swarms he perpetually swatted from his face and head.

And Danny too had bugs—except his thank Heavens weren’t burrowing bugs, crawling bugs, maggots and termites of the soul—but fireflies. Even now, in broad daylight, they flickered at the corner of his vision. Dust flecks, experienced as electronic pops: twinkle, twinkle everywhere. The chemicals had possessed him, they had the upper hand now; it was chemicals—pure, metallic, precise—that boiled up vaporous to the surface and did the thinking and talking and even the seeing now.

That’s why I’m thinking like a chemist, he thought, and was dazed by the clarity of this simple proposition.

He was resting in the snowy fallout of sparks which showered about him at this epiphany when, with a start, he became aware that Farish was talking to him—had been talking to him, actually, for some time.

“What?” he said, with a guilty jump.

“I said, you do know what that middle D in Radar stands for,” said Farish. Though he was smiling, his face was stony red and congested with blood.

Danny—aghast at this weird challenge, at the horror which had wormed its way so deep into even the most innocuous contact with his own kind—sat up and spasmodically twisted his body away, rooting in his pocket for a cigarette he knew he did not have.

“Detection. Radio Detecting And Ranging.” Farish unscrewed a hollow part from the can opener, and held it up to the light and looked through it before he tossed it away. “Here you’ve got one of the most sophisticated surveillance tools available—standard equipment in every law-enforcement vehicle—and anybody tells you that the police use it to trap speeders is full of shit.”

Detection? thought Danny. What was he getting at?

“Radar was a wartime development, top secret, for military purposes—and now every single damn police department in the country uses it to monitor the movements of the American populace in peacetime. All that expense? All that training? You’re telling me that’s just to know who’s going five miles over the speed limit?” Farish snorted. “Bullshit.”

Was it his imagination, or was Farish giving him an extremely pointed look? He’s messing with me, thought Danny. Wants to see what I’ll say. The hell of it was: he wanted to tell Farish about the girl, but he couldn’t admit he’d been at the tower. What reason did he have to be there? He was tempted to mention the girl anyway, though he knew he shouldn’t; no matter how carefully he brought it up, Farish would get suspicious.

No: he had to keep his mouth shut. Maybe Farish knew he was planning to steal the drugs. And maybe—Danny couldn’t quite figure this one out, but just maybe—Farish had something to do with the girl being down there in the first place.

“Those little short waves echo out—” Farish fanned his fingers—“then they ripple back in to report your exact position. It’s about supplying information.”

A test, thought Danny, in a quiet fever. That was how Farish went about things. For the past few days, he’d been leaving huge piles of dope and cash unsupervised around the laboratory, which of course Danny hadn’t touched. But possibly these recent events were part of a more complicated test. Was it just a coincidence that the girl had come to the door of the Mission the very night that Farish had insisted on going over there, the night the snakes were set loose? Something fishy about it from the get-go, her showing up at the door. But Farish hadn’t actually taken very much notice of her, had he?

“My point, is,” said Farish, inhaling heavily through his nostrils as a cascade of mechanical parts from the can opener fell tinkling to the ground, “if they’re beaming all these waves at us, there has to be somebody at the other end. Right?” At the top of his mustache—which was wet—clung a rock of amphetamine the size of a pea. “All this information is worthless without somebody receiving, somebody schooled, somebody trained. Right? Am I right?”

“Right,” said Danny, after a brief pause, trying hard to hit just the right note, falling a little flat. What was Farish getting at, with all this broken-record talk about surveillance and spying, unless he was using it to conceal his true suspicions?

Except he doesn’t know a thing, thought Danny in a sudden panic. He can’t. Farish didn’t even drive.

Farish cracked his neck and said, slyly: “Hell, you know it.”

“What?” said Danny, looking around; for a moment he thought he’d spoken aloud without meaning to. But before he could jump up and protest his innocence, Farish began to pace in a tight circle with his eyes fixed on the ground.

“This isn’t generally known, by the American people, the military application of these waves,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what the fuck else. Even the fucking Pentagon don’t know what these waves really are. Oh, they can generate ’em, and track ’em—” he laughed, a short, sharp-pitched laugh—“but they don’t know what the fuck they’re made of.”

I have got to cut this shit out. All I have to do, Danny told himself—horribly aware of a fly which buzzed, repetitively, at his ear, like a tape loop in some endless fucking nightmare—all I have to do is get on the ball, clean up, sleep for a day or two. I can go grab the crank and get out of town while he’s still sitting on the ground out here gibbering about radio waves and tearing up toasters with a screwdriver.…

“Electrons damage the brain,” said Farish. As he said this, he looked keenly at Danny, as if he suspected that Danny disagreed with him on some point.

Danny felt faint. It was past time for his hourly bump. Pretty soon—without it—he’d have to crash, as his over-taxed heart fluttered, as his blood pressure sank to a thread, half-crazy with the fear it would stop altogether because sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; dammed up, irresistible, it rolled in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death.

“And what are radio waves?” said Farish.

Farish had been through this with Danny before. “Electrons.”

“Exactly, numbnuts!” Farish, with a manic, Charles Manson glitter, leaned forward and thumped his own skull with surprising violence. “Electrons! Electrons!”

The screwdriver glinted: bang, Danny saw it, on a giant movie screen, like a cold wind blowing from his future … saw himself lying on his sweaty little bed, knocked out and defenseless and too weak to move. Clock ticking, curtains stirring. Then creak went the trailer’s padded door, ever so slowly, Farish easing quietly to his bedside, butcher knife in his fist.…

“No!” he cried, and opened his eyes to see Farish’s good eye bearing down on him like a power drill.

For a long, bizarre moment, they stared at each other. Then Farish snapped: “Look at your hand. What you done to it? ”

Confused, Danny brought both hands up, trembling, before his eyes and saw that his thumb was covered in blood where he’d been picking at the hangnail.

“Better look after yourself, brother,” Farish said.

————

In the morning, Edie—dressed soberly in navy blue—came by Harriet’s house to pick up Harriet’s mother, so the two of them could go out for breakfast before Edie met the accountant at ten. She’d called to arrange the date three days earlier, and Harriet—after answering the telephone, and getting her mother to pick up—had listened to the first part of their conversation before putting down the receiver. Edie had said that there was something personal they needed to talk about, that it was important, and that she didn’t want to talk about it over the telephone. Now, in the hallway, she refused to sit down and kept glancing at her wristwatch, glancing at the top of the stairs.

“They’ll be through serving breakfast by the time we get there,” she said, and recrossed her arms with an impatient little clucking sound: tch tch tch. Her cheeks were pale with powder and her lips (sharply drawn in a cupid’s bow, in the waxy scarlet lipstick that Edie usually saved for church) were less like a lady’s lips than the thin, pursed lips of old Sieur d’Iberville in Harriet’s Mississippi history book. Her suit—nipped at the waist, with three-quarter-length sleeves—was very severe, stylish too in its old-fashioned way, the suit that (Libby said) made Edie look like Mrs. Simpson who had married the King of England.

Harriet, who was sprawled across the bottom step and glowering at the carpet, raised her head and blurted: “But WHY can’t I go?”

“For one,” said Edie—looking not at Harriet but over her head—“your mother and I have something to discuss.”

“I’ll be quiet!”

“In private. For two,” Edie said, turning her chilly bright gaze quite ferociously on Harriet, “you aren’t dressed to go anywhere. Why don’t you go upstairs and get in the bathtub?”

“If I do, will you bring me back some pancakes?”

“Oh, Mother,” said Charlotte, hurrying down the stairs in an unpressed dress with her hair still damp from the bath. “I’m so sorry. I—”

“Oh! That’s all right!” said Edie, but her voice made it plain that it wasn’t all right, not at all.

Out they went. Harriet—all in a sulk—watched them drive away, through the dusty organdy curtains.

Allison was still upstairs, asleep. She’d come in late the night before. Except for certain mechanical noises—the tick of the clock, the whir of the exhaust fan and the hum of the hot-water heater—the house was as silent as a submarine.

On the counter in the kitchen stood a tin of saltine crackers which had been purchased before Ida’s departure and Libby’s death. Harriet curled up in Ida’s chair and ate a few of them. The chair still smelled like Ida, if she closed her eyes and breathed deep, but it was an elusive scent that vanished if she tried too hard to capture it. Today was the the first day that she hadn’t waked up crying—or wanting to cry—since the morning she left for Camp de Selby but though her eyes were dry and her head was clear she felt restless; the entire house lay still, as if waiting for something to happen.

Harriet ate the rest of her crackers, dusted her hands, and then—climbing on a chair—stood on tiptoe to examine the pistols on the top shelf of the gun cabinet. From among the exotic gambler’s pistols (the pearl-handled Derringers, the rakish dueling sets) she chose the biggest and ugliest pistol of the lot—a double-action Colt revolver, which was most like the pistols she had seen policemen use on television.

She hopped down, closed the cabinet and—placing the gun carefully on the carpet, with both hands (it was heavier than it looked)—ran to the bookcase in the dining room for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Guns. See: Firearms.

She carried the F volume into the living room and used the revolver to prop it open as she sat, cross-legged on the carpet, puzzling over the diagram and text. The technical vocabulary baffled her; after half an hour or so she went back to the shelf for the dictionary but that wasn’t much help, either.

Again and again, she returned to the diagram, leaning over it on all fours. Trigger guard. Swing-out cylinder … but which way did it swing? The gun in the picture didn’t match the gun she had in front of her: crane latch, cylinder crane assembly, ejector rod.…

Suddenly something clicked; the cylinder swung out: empty. The first bullets she tried wouldn’t go in the holes, and neither would the second ones, but mixed in the same box were some different ones that seemed to slide in all right.

Scarcely had she time to begin loading the revolver when she heard the front door open, her mother stepping inside. Quickly, in one broad movement, she pushed everything under Ida’s armchair—guns, bullets, encyclopedia and all—and then stood up.

“Did you bring me some pancakes?” she called.

No answer. Harriet waited, tensely, staring at the carpet (for breakfast, she’d certainly come and gone in a hurry) and listening to her mother’s footfalls skimming up the steps—and was surprised to hear a hiccupy gasp, like her mother was choking or crying.

Harriet—brow wrinkled, hands on hips—stood where she was, listening. When she heard nothing, she went over cautiously and peeked into the hallway, just in time to hear the door of her mother’s room open, then shut.

Ages seemed to pass. Harriet eyed the corner of the encyclopedia, the outline of which protruded ever so slightly beneath the skirt of Ida’s armchair. Presently—as the hall clock ticked on, and still nothing stirred—she stooped and tugged the encyclopedia out from its hiding place and—lying on her stomach, chin propped in her hands—she read the “Firearms” article from beginning to end again.

One by one, the minutes threaded by. Harriet stretched out flat on the floor and lifted the tweed skirt of the chair and peered at the dark shape of the gun, at the pasteboard box of bullets lying quietly alongside it—and, heartened by the silence, she reached under the chair and slid them out. So absorbed was she that she did not hear her mother coming down the stairs until suddenly she said from the hallway, very close: “Sweetie?”

Harriet jumped. Some of the bullets had rolled out of the box. Harriet grabbed them up—fumbling—and stuck them by the handful into her pockets.

“Where are you?”

Harriet had barely enough time to scrape everything under the chair again, and stand up, before her mother appeared in the doorway. Her powder had worn off; her nose was red, her eyes moist; with some surprise, Harriet saw that she was carrying Robin’s little blackbird costume—how black it looked, how small, dangling limp and bedraggled from its padded satin hanger like Peter Pan’s shadow that he’d tried to stick on with soap.

Her mother seemed about to say something; but she had stopped herself, and was looking at Harriet curiously. “What are you doing?” she said.

In apprehension, Harriet stared at the tiny costume. “Why—” she said and, unable to finish, she nodded at it.

Harriet’s mother glanced at the costume, startled, almost as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. “Oh,” she said, and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a tissue. “Tom French asked Edie if his child could borrow it. The first ball game is with a team called the Ravens or something and Tom’s wife thought it would be cute if one of the children dressed up like a bird and ran out with the cheerleaders.”

“If you don’t want to lend it to them, you should tell them they can’t have it.”

Harriet’s mother looked a bit surprised. For a long strange moment, the two of them looked at each other.

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “What day do you want to drive to Memphis and buy your school clothes?” she said.

“Who’s going to fix them?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Ida always hems my school clothes.”

Harriet’s mother started to say something, then shook her head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant thought. “When are you going to get over this?”

Harriet glared at the carpet. Never, she thought.

“Sweetheart … I know you loved Ida and—maybe I didn’t know how much.…”

Silence.

“But … honey, Ida wanted to leave.”

“She’d have stayed if you asked her.”

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “Honey, I feel as bad about it as you do, but Ida didn’t want to stay. Your father was constantly complaining about her, how little work she did. He and I fought about this all the time over the phone, did you know that?” She looked up at the ceiling. “He thought she didn’t do enough, that for what we paid her—”

“You didn’t pay her anything!”

“Harriet, I don’t think Ida had been happy here for … for a long time. She’ll get a better salary somewhere else.… It’s not like I need her any more, like when you and Allison were little.…”

Harriet listened, icily.

“Ida was with us for so many years that I guess I sort of talked myself into thinking I couldn’t do without her, but … we’ve been fine, haven’t we?”

Harriet bit her upper lip, stared obstinately into the corner of the room—mess everywhere, the corner table littered with pens, envelopes, coasters, old handkerchiefs, an overflowing ashtray atop a stack of magazines.

“Haven’t we? Been fine? Ida—” her mother looked around, helplessly—“Ida just rode roughshod over me, didn’t you see that?”

There was a long silence during which—out of the corner of her eye—Harriet saw a bullet she’d missed lying on the carpet under the table.

“Don’t get me wrong. When you girls were little, I couldn’t have done without Ida. She helped me enormously. Especially with …” Harriet’s mother sighed. “But for the last few years, she hasn’t been pleased with anything that went on around here. I guess she was fine with you all but with me, she was so resentful, just standing there with her arms folded and judging me.…”

Harriet stared fixedly at the bullet. A little bored now, listening to her mother’s voice without really hearing it, she kept her eyes on the floor and soon drifted away into a favorite daydream. The time machine was leaving; she was carrying emergency supplies to Scott’s party at the pole; everything depended on her. Packing lists, packing lists, and he’d brought all the wrong things. Must fight it out to the last biscuit.… She would save them all, with stores brought from the future: instant cocoa and vitamin C tablets, canned heat, peanut butter, gasoline for the sledges and fresh vegetables from the garden and battery-powered flashlights.…

Suddenly, the different position of her mother’s voice got her attention. Harriet looked up. Her mother was standing in the doorway now.

“I guess I can’t do anything right, can I?” she said.

She turned and left the room. It was not yet ten o’clock. The living room was still shady and cool; beyond, the depressing depths of the hallway. A faint, fruity trace of her mother’s perfume still hung in the dusty air.

Hangers jingled and rasped in the coat closet. Harriet stood where she was, and when, after several minutes, she heard her mother still scratching around out in the hall, she edged over to where the stray bullet lay and kicked it under the sofa. She sat down on the edge of Ida’s chair; she waited. Finally, after a long time, she ventured out into the hall, and found her mother standing in the open door of the closet, refolding—not very neatly—some linens that she’d pulled down from the top shelf.

As if nothing at all had happened, her mother smiled. With a comical little sigh, she stepped back from the mess and said: “My goodness. Sometimes I think we should just pack up the car and move in with your father.”

She cut her eyes over at Harriet. “Hmn?” she said, brightly, as if she’d suggested some great treat. “What would you think about that?”

She’ll do what she wants, Harriet thought, hopelessly. It doesn’t matter what I say.

“I don’t know about you,” said her mother, returning to her linens, “but I think it’s time for us to start acting more like a family.”

“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause. Her mother’s choice of words was alarming. Often, when Harriet’s father was about to issue some unreasonable order, he preceded it with the observation: we need to start acting more like a family here.

“Well, it’s just too much,” her mother said dreamily. “Raising two girls on my own.”

Harriet went upstairs and sat on her window seat and looked out her bedroom window. The streets were hot and empty. All day long, the clouds passed by. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she walked over to Edie’s house and sat on the front steps with her chin in her hands until Edie’s car rolled around the corner at five o’clock.

Harriet ran to meet her. Edie rapped on the window and smiled. Her navy suit was a little less sharp now, rumpled from the heat, and as she climbed out of the car her movements were creaky and slow. Harriet galloped along the walk beside her, up the steps and onto the porch, breathlessly explaining that her mother had proposed moving to Nashville—and was shocked when Edie only breathed deeply, and shook her head.

“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

Harriet waited.

“If your mother wants to be married, she’s going to have to make a little effort, I’m afraid.” Edie stood still a moment, sighed—then turned the key in the door. “Things can’t continue like this.”

“But why?” wailed Harriet.

Edie stopped, closed her eyes, as if her head hurt. “He’s your father, Harriet.”

“But I don’t like him.”

“I don’t care for him either,” snapped Edie. “But if they’re going to stay married I reckon they should live in the same state, don’t you?”

“Dad doesn’t care,” said Harriet, after an appalled little pause. “He likes things just the way they are.”

Edie sniffed. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

“Won’t you miss me? If we move?”

“Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we think it ought to,” Edie said, as if relating some cheery but little-known fact. “When school starts …”

Where? thought Harriet. Here, or Tennessee?

“… you should throw yourself into your studies. That’ll take your mind off things.”

Soon she’ll be dead, thought Harriet, staring at Edie’s hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, and speckled with chocolate-brown spots like a bird’s egg. Libby’s hands—though similar in shape—had been whiter and more slender, with the veins showing blue on the back.

She glanced up from her reverie, and was a bit shocked at Edie’s cold, speculative eyes observing her closely.

“You ought not to have quit your piano lessons,” she said.

“That was Allison!” Harriet was always horribly taken aback when Edie made mistakes like this. “I never took piano.”

“Well, you ought to start. You don’t have half enough to do, that’s your problem, Harriet. When I was your age,” said Edie, “I rode, and played violin, and made all my own clothes. If you learned how to sew, you might start taking a little more interest in your appearance.”

“Will you take me out to see Tribulation?” Harriet said suddenly.

Edie looked startled. “There’s nothing to see.”

“But will you take me to the place? Please? Where it was?”

Edie didn’t answer. She was gazing over Harriet’s shoulder with a rather blank look on her face. At the roar of a car accelerating in the street, Harriet glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a metallic flash vanish around the corner.

“Wrong house,” said Edie, and sneezed: ka-choo. “Thank goodness. No,” she said, blinking, fishing in her pocketbook for a tissue, “there’s not much to see out at Tribulation any more. The fellow that owns the land now is a chicken farmer, and he may not even let us up to look at the place where the house was.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a fat old rascal. Everything out there’s gone to pieces.” She patted Harriet on the back, distractedly. “Now run along home and let Edie get out of these high heels.”

“If they move to Nashville, can I stay here and live with you?”

“Why Harriet!” said Edie, after a shocked little pause. “Don’t you want to be with your mother and Allison?”

“No. Maam,” Harriet added, observing Edie closely.

But Edie only raised her eyebrows, as if amused. In her infuriating, chipper way, she said: “Oh, I expect you’d change your mind about that after a week or two!”

Tears rose to Harriet’s eyes. “No!” she cried, after a sullen, unsatisfying pause. “Why do you always say that? I know what I want, I never change my—”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we,” said Edie. “Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when he was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass. ‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’ Or something of the sort.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think it’ll take a torpedo to get your mother out of that house, but that’s my opinion. Now run along,” she said to Harriet, who stood staring at her balefully, with red eyes.

————

As soon as he swung round the corner, Danny pulled over in front of the Presbyterian church. “Godamighty,” said Farish. He was breathing hard, through the nostrils. “Was that her?”

Danny—too high and overcome to speak—nodded his head. He could hear all kinds of small, frightening noises: trees breathing, wires singing, grass crackling as it grew.

Farish turned in his seat to look out the back window. “Damn it, I told you to look for that kid. You’re telling me this is the first time you’ve seen her?”

“Yes,” said Danny sharply. He was shaken by how suddenly the girl had jumped into view, at the uncomfortable tail end of his sight, just like she’d done at the water tower (though he couldn’t tell Farish about the water tower; he wasn’t supposed to be at the water tower). And now, on this roundabout circuit, going nowhere (vary your route, said Farish, vary your travel times, keep checking your mirrors) he’d turned the corner and seen—who but the girl? standing on a porch.

All kinds of echoes. Breathing shining stirring. A thousand mirrors glinted out of the treetops. Who was the old lady? As the car slowed, she’d met Danny’s gaze, had met it dead on for a confused and curious flash, and her eyes were exactly the same as the girl’s.… For a heartbeat, everything had dropped away.

“Go,” Farish had said, slapping the dash; and then, when they were around the corner, Danny had to pull the car over because he felt way too high, because something weird was going on, some whacking multi-level speed telepathy (escalators going up and up, disco balls revolving on every floor); they both sensed it, they didn’t even have to say a word and Danny could hardly even look at Farish because he knew they were both remembering the same exact damn freaky thing that had happened about six o’clock that morning: how (after being up all night) Farish had walked into the living room in undershorts, with a carton of milk, and at the same time a bearded cartoon character in undershorts holding a carton of milk had strode out across the television set. Farish stopped; the character stopped.

Are you seeing this? said Farish.

Yes, said Danny. He was sweating. His eyes met Farish’s for an instant. When they looked back at the television, the picture had changed to something else.

Together they sat in the hot car, their hearts pounding almost audibly.

“Did you notice,” said Farish, suddenly, “how every single truck we seen on the way here was black?”

“What?”

“They’re moving something. Damn if I know what.”

Danny said nothing. Part of him knew it was bullshit, Farish’s paranoid talk, but another part knew that it meant something. Three times the previous night, an hour apart exactly, the phone had rung; and someone had hung up without talking. Then there was the spent rifle shell Farish had found on the windowsill of the laboratory. What was that about?

And now this: the girl again, the girl. The lush, sprinkled lawn of the Presbyterian church glowed blue-green in the shadows of the ornamental spruce: curvy brick walks, clipped boxwoods, everything as neat and twinkly as a toy train set.

“What I can’t figure out is who the hell she is,” said Farish, scrabbling in his pocket for the crank. “You shouldn’t have let her get away.”

“It was Eugene let her go, not me.” Danny gnawed on the inside of his mouth. No, it wasn’t his imagination: the girl had vanished off the face of the earth in the weeks after Gum’s accident, when he’d driven the town looking for her. But now: think of her, mention her and there she was, glowing at a distance with that black Chinese haircut and those spiteful eyes.

They each had a toot, which steadied them somewhat.

“Somebody,” said Danny, and inhaled, “somebody has put that kid out to spy on us.” High as he was, he was sorry the instant he’d said it.

Farish’s brow darkened. “Say what? If somebody,” he growled, scouring his wet nostrils with the back of his hand, “if somebody put that little dab out to spy on me, I’ll rip her wide open.”

“She knows something,” said Danny. Why? Because she’d looked at him from the window of a hearse. Because she’d invaded his dreams. Because she was haunting him, hunting him, messing with his head.

“Well, I’d sure like to know what she was doing up at Eugene’s. If that little bitch busted out my tail-lights …”

His melodramatic manner made Danny suspicious. “If she busted the tail-lights,” he said, carefully avoiding Farish’s eye, “why you reckon she knocked on the door and told us about it?”

Farish shrugged. He was picking at a crusty patch on his pants leg, had all at once got very preoccupied with it, and Danny—suddenly—was convinced that he knew more about the girl (and about all of it) than he was saying.

No, it didn’t make sense, but all the same there was something to it. Dogs barked in the distance.

“Somebody,” said Farish, suddenly—shifting his weight—“some body clumb up there and turned them snakes aloose at Eugene’s. The windows is painted shut except for that one in the bathroom. Nobody could have got through that but a kid.”

“I’m on talk to her,” said Danny. Ask her lots of things. Like why I never saw you in my life before, and now I see you everywhere? Like why do you brush and flitter against my windows at night like a death’s-head moth?

He’d been so long without sleep that when he closed his eyes, he was in a place with weeds and dark lakes, wrecked skiffs awash in scummy water. There she was, with her moth-white face and her crow-black hair, whispering something in the moist cicada-shrieking gloom, something he almost understood but couldn’t quite.…

I can’t hear you, he said.

“Can’t hear what?”

Bing: black dashboard, blue Presbyterian spruces, Farish staring from the passenger’s seat. “Can’t hear what?” he repeated.

Danny blinked, wiped his forehead. “Forget it,” he said. He was sweating.

“In Nam, them little sapper girls was tough sons of bitches,” said Farish cheerfully. “Running with live grenades, it was all a game to them. You can get a kid to do shit wouldn’t nobody but a crazy man try.”

“Right,” Danny said. This was one of Farish’s pet theories. During Danny’s childhood, he had used it to justify getting Danny and Eugene and Mike and Ricky Lee to do all his dirty work for him, climbing in windows while he, Farish, sat eating Honey Buns and getting high in the car.

“Kid gets caught? So what? Juvenile Hall? Hell—” Farish laughed—“when yall was boys, I had yall trained to it. Ricky was crawling in windows soon as he could stand up on my shoulders. And if a cop come by—”

“God amighty,” said Danny, soberly, and sat up; for in the rear view mirror he’d just seen the girl—alone—walk around the corner.

————

Harriet—head down, brow clouded with thought—was walking down the sidewalk towards the Presbyterian church (and, three streets over, her desolate home) when the door of a car parked about twenty feet ahead of her suddenly clicked open.

It was the Trans Am. Almost before she had time to think she doubled back, darted into the dank, mossy yard of the Presbyterian church and kept running.

The side yard of the church led through to Mrs. Claiborne’s garden (hydrangea bushes, tiny greenhouse) directly to Edie’s back yard—which was cut off by a board fence, six feet high. Harriet ran through the dark passageway (Edie’s fence on one side; a prickly, inpenetrable row of arborvitae bordering the yard adjacent) and ran smack into another fence: Mrs. Davenport’s, chain-link. In a panic, Harriet scrambled over it; a wire on top caught her shorts and with a twist of her whole body she wrenched free and hopped down, panting.

Behind, in the leafy passage, the burst and crash of footsteps. There was not much cover in Mrs. Davenport’s yard, and she looked about helplessly before she ran across it and unlatched the gate and ran down the driveway. She’d intended to double back to Edie’s house, but when she got out to the sidewalk something stopped her (where were those footsteps coming from?) and, after a split-second pause of deliberation, she ran straight ahead, towards the O’Bryants’ house. To her shock, while she was in the middle of the street, the Trans Am swung around the corner.

So they’d split up. That was smart. Harriet ran—under the tall pines, through the pine needles that carpeted the O’Bryants’ deeply shaded front yard—directly to the little house out back where Mr. O’Bryant kept his pool table. She seized the handle, shook it: locked. Harriet, breathless, stared in at the yellowy pine-panelled walls—at bookshelves, empty except for a few old yearbooks from Alexandria Academy; at the glass lamp that said Coca-Cola dangling from a chain over the dark table—and then darted off to the right.

No good: another fence. The dog in the next yard was barking. If she stayed off the street, the guy in the Trans Am obviously couldn’t catch her, but she had to take care that the one on foot didn’t corner her, or flush her out into the open.

Heart galloping, lungs aching, she swerved to the left. Behind, she heard heavy breaths, the crash of heavy feet. On she zig-zagged, through labyrinths of shrubbery, crossing and re-crossing and veering off at right angles when her path closed off in front of her: through strange gardens, over fences and into a perplexity of lawns checkered with patios and flagstones, past swing-sets and clothes-posts and barbecue grills, past a round-eyed baby who gazed at her fearfully and sat down hard in his playpen. Further down—an ugly old man with a bulldog face hoisted himself halfway from his porch chair and bawled “Get away!” when Harriet, in relief (for he was the first grown-up she’d seen), slowed to catch her breath.

His words were like a slap; as frightened as she was, the shock of them stopped her for a heartbeat and she blinked in astonishment at the inflamed eyes, blazing away at her, at the freckled, puffy old fist, raised as if to strike. “That’s right, you!” he cried. “Get away from here!”

Harriet ran. Though she’d heard the names of some of the people on this street (the Wrights, the Motleys, Mr. and Mrs. Price) she didn’t know them except by sight, not well enough to run up breathless and pound on their doors: why had she let herself be chased here, into unfamiliar territory? Think, think, she told herself. A few houses back—just before the old man shook his fist at her—she’d passed an El Camino with paint cans and plastic drop cloths in the bed; it would have been the perfect place to hide.…

She ducked behind a propane tank and—bent double, hands on knees—gulped for breath. Had she lost them? No: a renewed fracas of barking from the penned Airedale, down at the end of the block, who’d thrown himself against his fence when she ran past.

Blindly she turned and plunged on. She crashed through a gap in a privet hedge—and nearly fell flat across an astonished Chester, who was on his knees fooling with a soaker hose in a thickly mulched flower bed.

He threw up his arms as if at an explosion. “Watch out!” Chester did odd jobs for all sorts of people, but she didn’t know he worked over here. “What in thunder—”

“—Where can I hide?”

“Hide? This aint no place for you to play.” He swallowed, flung a muddy hand at her. “Go on. Scat.”

Harriet, panic-stricken, glanced around: glass hummingbird feeder, glassed-in porch, pristine picnic table. The opposite side of the yard was walled-in with a thicket of holly; in the back, a bank of rosebushes cut off her retreat.

“Scat I said. Look at this hole you done knocked in the hedge.”

A flagstone path lined with marigolds led to a persnickety dollhouse of a toolshed, painted to match the house: gingerbread trim, green door standing ajar. In desperation, Harriet dashed down the walk and ran inside (“Hey!” called Chester) and threw herself down between a stack of firewood and a fat roll of fiberglass insulation.

The air was thick and dusty. Harriet pinched her nose shut. In the dimness—chest heaving, scalp aprickle—she stared at an old frayed badminton birdie lying on the floor by the stacked logs, at a group of colorful metal cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone.

Voices: male. Harriet stiffened. Along time passed, during which it seemed that the cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone were the last three artifacts in the universe. What can they do to me? she thought wildly. In front of Chester? Though she strained to listen, the rasp of her breath deafened her. Just scream, she told herself, if they grab you scream and break free, scream and run.… For some reason, the car was what she feared most. Though she could not say why, she had a sense that if they got her in the car, it was all over.

She didn’t think Chester would let them take her. But there were two of them, and only one of Chester. And Chester’s word probably wouldn’t go very far against two white men.

Moments ticked by. What were they saying, what was taking so long? Intently, Harriet stared at a dried-up honeycomb underneath the work-bench. Then, suddenly, she sensed a form approaching.

The door creaked open. A triangle of washed-out light fell across the dirt floor. All the blood rushed from Harriet’s head, and for a moment she thought she was going to black out, but it was only Chester, only Chester saying: “Come on out, now.”

It was as if a glass barrier had shattered. Noises came washing back: birds twittering, a cricket chirping stridently on the floor behind an oil can.

“You in there?”

Harriet swallowed; her voice, when she spoke, was faint and scratchy. “Are they gone?”

“What’d you do to them men?” The light was behind him; she couldn’t see his face but it was Chester, all right: Chester’s sandpapery voice, his loose-jointed silhouette. “They act like you picked they pocket.”

“Are they gone?”

“Yes they gone,” said Chester impatiently. “Get on from out of there.”

Harriet stood up behind the roll of insulation and smeared her forehead with the back of her arm. She was peppered all over with grit and cobwebs were stuck to the side of her face.

“You aint knock anything over in there, did you?” said Chester, peering back into the recesses of the shed and then, down at her: “Aint you a sight.” He opened the door for her. “Why they get after you?”

Harriet—still breathless—shook her head.

“Men like that got no business running after some child,” said Chester, glancing over his shoulder as he reached in his breast pocket for a cigarette. “What’d you do? You threw a rock at they car?”

Harriet craned her neck to see around him. Through the dense shrubbery (privet, holly) she had no view at all of the street.

“Tell you what.” Chester exhaled sharply through his nostrils. “You’re lucky I’s working over here today. Mrs. Mulver-hill, she not at her choir practice, she call the police on you for busting through here. Last week, she make me turn the hose on some poor old dog wunder up in the yard.”

He smoked his cigarette. Harriet’s heart still pounded in her ears.

“What you doing, anyway,” said Chester, “tearing around in people’s bushes? I ought to tell yo’ grandmother.”

“What’d they say to you?”

“Say? They aint say nothing. One of him got his car parked out on the street there. The other one stick his head through the hedge there and peep in, like he the electrician looking for a meter.” Chester parted invisible branches and imitated the gesture, complete with weird eyeroll. “Got on a coverall like Mississippi Power and Light.”

Overhead, a branch popped; it was only a squirrel, but Harriet started violently.

“You aint gone tell me why you run from those men?”

“I—I was …”

“What?”

“I was playing,” said Harriet weakly.

“You ought not to get yourself so worked up.” Through a haze of smoke, Chester observed her shrewdly. “What you lookin at so fearful, over thataway? You want me to walk you over to your house?”

“No,” said Harriet, but as she said it Chester laughed and she realized that her head was nodding yes.

Chester put a hand on her shoulder. “You all mixed up,” he said; but despite his cheerful tone he had a worried look. “Tell you what. I’s going home by your house. Give me a minute to wash off under the hydrant and I’ll walk you on down.”

————

“Black trucks,” said Farish abruptly, when they turned onto the highway towards home. He was all hopped-up, breathing with loud asthmatic rasps. “I never seen so many black trucks in my life.”

Danny made an ambiguous noise and passed a hand over his face. His muscles trembled and he was still shaky. What would they have done to the girl if they’d caught her?

“Dammit,” he said, “somebody could’ve called the cops on us back there.” He had—as he had so often nowadays—the sense of coming to his senses in the midst of some preposterous high-wire stunt in a dream. Were they out of their minds? Chasing a kid like that, in a residential neighborhood in broad daylight? Kidnapping carried a death penalty in Mississippi.

“This is nuts,” he said aloud.

But Farish was pointing excitedly out the window, his big heavy rings (pinky ring shaped like a dice) flashing outlandishly in the afternoon sun. “There,” he said, “and there.”

“What,” said Danny, “what?” Cars everywhere; light pouring off cottonfields so intense, it was like light on water.

“Black trucks.”

“Where?” The speed of the moving automobile made him feel like he was forgetting something or had left something important behind.

“There, there, there.”

“That truck’s green.”

“No it’s not—there!” Farish cried triumphantly. “See, there goes another one!”

Danny—heart hammering, pressure rising in his head—felt like saying so fucking what but—for fear of setting Farish off—refrained. Crashing over fences, through tidy town yards with barbecue grills: ridiculous. The craziness of it made him feel faint. This was the part of the story where you were supposed to snap to your senses and straighten up: stop cold, turn the car around, change your life forever, the part that Danny never quite believed.

“Look there.” Farish slapped the dashboard, so loudly Danny nearly jumped out of his skin. “I know you seen that one. Them trucks are mobilizing. Getting ready to go.”

Light everywhere: too much light. Sunspots, molecules. The car had become a foreign idea. “I have to pull over,” Danny said.

“What?” said Farish.

“I can’t drive.” He could feel his voice getting high and hysterical; cars swooshed by, colored energy streaks, crowded dreams.

In the parking lot of the White Kitchen, he sat with his forehead on the wheel and took deep breaths while Farish explained, pounding his fist into his palm, that it wasn’t the meth itself that wore you down, but not eating. That was how he—Farish—kept from getting strung out. He ate regular meals, whether he wanted them or not. “But you, you’re just like Gum,” he said, prodding Danny’s bicep with his forefinger. “You forget to eat. That’s why you’re thin as a bone.”

Danny stared at the dashboard. Monoxide vapors and nausea. It was not pleasant to think of himself as being like Gum in any way, and yet with his burnt skin and hollow cheeks and sharp, thin, wasted build, he was the only one of all the grandsons who really looked much like her. It had never occurred to him before.

“Here,” said Farish, hoisting his hip, feeling busily for his wallet: happy to be of service, happy to instruct. “I know just what you need. A fountain Coke and a hot ham sandwich. That’ll fix you right up.”

Laboriously, he opened the car door and hoisted himself out (gamely, stiff in his legs, swaying like an old sea captain) and went inside to get the fountain Coke and the hot ham sandwich.

Danny sat in silence. Farish’s smell hung plump and extravagant in the stifling car. The last thing in the world he wanted was a hot ham sandwich; somehow he would have to choke the thing down.

The girl’s afterburn raced through his mind like jet trails: a dark-headed blur, a moving target. But it was the face of the old lady on the porch that stayed with him. As he drove past that house (her house?) in what felt like slow motion, the old lady’s eyes (powerful eyes, full of light) had passed over him without seeing him and he’d felt a gliddery, queasy shock of recognition. For he knew the old lady—intimately, but distantly, like something from a long-ago dream.

Through the plate glass window, he saw Farish leaning on the counter, jawing expansively with a bony little waitress he liked. Possibly because they were afraid of him, or because they needed the business, or maybe because they were just kind, the waitresses at the White Kitchen listened respectfully to Farish’s wild stories, and didn’t seem irritated by his grooming or his bad eye or his hectoring know-it-all streak. If he raised his voice, if he got agitated and started waving his arms around or knocked over his coffee, they remained calm and polite. Farish, in turn, refrained from foul language in their presence, even when he was wired out of his mind, and on Valentine’s Day, he’d even brought a bunch of flowers down to the restaurant.

Keeping an eye on his brother, Danny got out of the car and walked around to the side of the restaurant, past a margin of dried-up shrubs, to the phone booth. Half the pages in the directory had been torn out, but luckily the last half, and he ran a trembling fingertip down the C’s. The name on the mailbox had been Cleve. Sure enough, right there in black and white: on Margin Street, an E. Cleve.

And—strangely—it chimed. Danny stood in the stifling hot phone booth, letting the connection sink in. For he had met the old lady, so long ago that it seemed from a different life. She was known around the county—not so much for herself but for her father, who had been a big cheese politically, and for the former house of her family, which was called Tribulation. But the house—famous in its day—was long gone, and now survived in name only. On the Interstate, not far from where the house had been, there was a greasy-spoon restaurant (with a white-columned mansion on the billboard) calling itself Tribulation Steak House. The billboard was still there, but now even the restaurant was boarded up and haunted-looking, with graffiti-covered signs that said No Trespassing and weeds growing in the planters out front, as if something about the land itself had sucked all the newness out of the building and made it look old.

When he was a kid (what grade, he couldn’t remember, school was all a dreary blur to him) he’d gone to a birthday party at Tribulation. The memory had stayed with him: huge rooms, spooky and dim and historical, with rusty wallpaper and chandeliers. The old lady who the house belonged to was Robin’s grandmother, and Robin was a schoolmate of Danny’s. Robin lived in town, and Danny—who often roamed the streets on foot, while Farish was in the pool hall—had spotted him late one windy afternoon in fall, playing alone in front of his house. They stood and looked at each other for a while—Danny in the street, Robin in his yard—like wary little animals. Then Robin said: “I like Batman.”

“I like Batman, too,” said Danny. Then they ran up and down the sidewalk together and played until it got dark.

Since Robin had invited everybody in the class to his party (raising his hand for permission, walking up and down the rows and handing an envelope to every single kid) it was easy for Danny to hitch a ride without his father or Gum knowing. Kids like Danny didn’t have birthday parties, and Danny’s father didn’t want him attending them even if he was invited (which he usually wasn’t) because no boy of his was going to pay for something useless like a present, not for some rich man’s son or daughter. Jimmy George Ratliff wasn’t bankrolling that nonsense. Their grandmother reasoned differently. If Danny went to a party, he’d be obligated to the host: “beholden.” Why accept invitations of town folk who (no doubt) had only invited Danny to make fun of him: of his hand-me-down clothes, of his country manners? Danny’s family were poor; they were “plain people.” The fanciness of cake and party clothes was not for them. Gum was forever reminding her grandsons of this, so there was never any danger of them growing exuberant and forgetting it.

Danny was expecting the party to be at Robin’s house (which was nice enough) but he’d been stunned when the packed station wagon piloted by the mother of some girl he didn’t know drove out of the city limits, past cotton fields, down a long alley of trees and up to the columned house. He didn’t belong in a place like this. And, even worse, he hadn’t brought a present. At school, he’d tried to wrap up a Matchbox car he’d found, in some notebook paper, but he didn’t have any tape and it didn’t look like a present at all, only a wadded-up sheet of old homework.

But no one seemed to notice he didn’t have a present; at least no one said anything. And, up close, the house wasn’t so grand as it had looked from far away—in fact, it was falling to pieces, with moth-eaten rugs and broken plaster and cracks on the ceiling. The old lady—Robin’s grandmother—had presided over the party, and she too was large and formal and frightening; when she’d opened the front door she’d scared him to death, looming over him with her stiff posture, her black, rich-looking clothes and her angry eyebrows. Her voice was sharp, and so were her footsteps, clicking fast through the echoing rooms, so brisk and witchy that the children stopped talking when she walked into their midst. But she had handed him a beautiful piece of white cake on a glass plate: a piece with a fat icing rose, and writing too, the big pink H in HAPPY. She had looked over the heads of the other children, crowding around her at the beautiful table; and she had reached out over their heads and handed to Danny (hanging in the back) the special piece with the pink rose, as if Danny was the one person in the room who she wanted to have it.

So that was the old lady. E. Cleve. He had not seen her or thought of her in years. When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not help but relish the spectacle of “the high and mighty” brought down a notch or two, and Gum resented Tribulation in particular, since as a girl she’d picked cotton in its fields. There was a certain snooty class of white—traitors to their race, said Danny’s father—who regarded white folks down on their luck as no better than the common yard nigger.

Yes: the old lady had come down, and to fall in the world as she had fallen was foreign, and sad and mysterious. Danny’s own family had nowhere much to fall from. And Robin (a generous, friendly kid) was dead—dead many years now—murdered by some creep passing through, or some filthy old tramp who wandered up from the train tracks, nobody knew. At school that Monday morning, the teacher, Mrs. Marter (a mean fat-ass with a beehive, who had made Danny wear a woman’s yellow wig for a whole week at school, punishment for something or other, he couldn’t remember what), stood whispering with the other teachers in the hall, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. After the bell rang, she sat down at her desk and said, “Class, I have some very sad news.”

Most of the town kids had already heard—but not Danny. At first, he’d thought Mrs. Marter was bullshitting them, but when she made them get out crayons and construction paper and start making cards to send to Robin’s family, he realized she wasn’t. On his card, he drew careful pictures of Batman and Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, standing in front of Robin’s house, all in a line. He wanted to draw them in action postures—rescuing Robin, pulverizing bad guys—but he wasn’t a good enough artist, he’d just had to draw them standing in a line staring straight ahead. As an afterthought, he drew himself in the picture too, off to the side. He’d let Robin down, he felt. Usually the maid wasn’t around on Sundays, but that day, she was. If he hadn’t let her chase him off, earlier in the afternoon, then Robin might still be alive.

As it was, Danny felt narrowly missed. He and Curtis were often left by their father to roam the town alone—often at night—and it wasn’t like they had a home or any friendly neighbors to run to if some creep came after them. Though Curtis hid obligingly enough, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t talk, and had to be constantly shushed—but still, Danny was glad of his company, even when Curtis got scared and had coughing fits. The worst nights were when Danny was alone. Still as a mouse, he hid in toolsheds and behind people’s hedges, breathing fast and shallow in the dark, until the pool hall closed at twelve. Out he crept from his hiding place; down the dark streets he hurried, all the way to the lighted pool hall, looking over his shoulder at the slightest noise. And the fact that he never saw anybody particularly scary during his night wanderings somehow made him more afraid, as if Robin’s murderer was invisible or had secret powers. He started having bad dreams about Batman, where Batman turned in an empty place and started walking towards him, fast, with glowy evil eyes.

Danny wasn’t a cryer—his father didn’t permit any of that, even from Curtis—but one day, in front of his whole family, Danny broke down sobbing, surprising himself as much as anyone. And when he couldn’t stop, his father yanked him up by the arm and offered to give him something to cry about. After the belt-whipping, Ricky Lee cornered him in the trailer’s narrow hallway. “Guess he was your boyfriend.”

“Guess you’d rather it was you,” said his grandmother, kindly.

The very next day, Danny had gone to school bragging of what he had not done. In some strange way, he’d only been trying to save face—he wasn’t afraid of anything, not him—but still he felt uneasy when he thought about it, how sadness had turned to lies and swaggering, how part of it was jealousy, even, as if Robin’s life was all parties and presents and cake. Because sure: things hadn’t been easy for Danny, but at least he wasn’t dead.

The bell over the door tinkled and Farish strode out into the parking lot with a greasy paper bag. He stopped cold when he saw the empty car.

Smoothly, Danny stepped out of the phone booth: no sudden moves. For the last few days, Farish’s behavior had been so erratic that Danny was starting to feel like a hostage.

Farish turned to look at Danny and his eyes were glassy. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“Uh, no problem, I was just looking in the phone book,” said Danny, moving quickly to the car, making sure to keep a pleasant neutral expression on his face. These days, any little thing out of the ordinary could set Farish off; the night before, upset over something he’d seen on television, he’d slammed a glass of milk on the table so hard that the glass broke in his hand.

Farish was staring at him aggressively, tracking him with his eyes. “You’re not my brother.”

Danny stopped, his hand on the car door. “What?”

With absolutely no warning, Farish charged forward and knocked Danny flat on the pavement.

————

When Harriet got home, her mother was upstairs talking to her father on the telephone. What this meant, Harriet didn’t know, but it seemed like a bad sign. Chin in hands, she sat on the stairs, waiting. But after a long time had passed—half an hour or so—and still her mother did not appear, she pushed backwards to sit a step higher, and then a step higher, until finally she had worked all the way up and was perched at the very top of the stairs, with her back to the bolt of light which shone from under her mother’s bedroom door. Carefully, she listened, but though the tone of her mother’s voice was clear (husky, whispery) the words weren’t.

Finally she gave up and went down to the kitchen. Her breath was still shallow, and every now and then, a muscle twitched painfully in her chest wall. Through the window over the sink, the sunset streamed into the kitchen all red and purple, grandiose, the way it got in the late summer as hurricane weather approached. Thank God I didn’t run back to Edie’s, she thought, blinking rapidly. In her panic, she’d come very close to leading them directly to Edie’s front door. Edie was tough: but she was still an old lady, with broken ribs.

Locks in the house: all old, box-type locks, easy to break. The front and back doors had old-fashioned barrel bolts at the top, which were useless. Harriet herself had got in trouble for breaking the lock on the back door. She’d thought it was stuck, and thrown her weight against it from the outside; now, months later, the fitting still dangled from the rotten frame by a single nail.

From the open window, a little shivery breeze blew in across Harriet’s cheek. Upstairs and down: open windows everywhere, propped by fans, open windows in practically every room. To think of them all gave her a nightmarish sense of being unprotected, exposed. What was to keep him from coming right up to the house? And why should he bother with the windows, when he could open pretty much any door he wanted?

Allison ran barefoot into the kitchen and picked up the phone as if she was going to call someone—and listened for several seconds, with a funny look on her face, before she pressed the receiver button and then, gingerly, hung up.

“Who’s she talking to?” asked Harriet.

“Dad.”

“Still?”

Allison shrugged—but she looked troubled, and hurried from the room with her head down. Harriet stood in the kitchen for a minute, brow knotted, and then went to the telephone and eased up the receiver.

In the background, Harriet could hear a television. “—shouldn’t blame you,” her mother was saying querulously.

“Don’t be silly.” Her father’s boredom and impatience was perfectly audible in the way he was breathing. “Why don’t you come up here if you don’t believe me?”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t mean.”

Quietly, Harriet pressed the button and then put the phone down. She’d feared that the two of them were talking about her, but this was worse. Things were bad enough when her father visited, and the house was noisy and violent and charged with his presence, but he cared what people thought of him, and he behaved better around Edie and the aunts. To know that they were only a few blocks away made Harriet feel safer. And the house was large enough so she could tiptoe around and avoid him much of the time. But his apartment in Nashville was small—only five rooms. There would be no getting away from him.

As if in response to these thoughts, bang, a crash behind her, and she jumped with her hand to her throat. The window-sash had fallen, a confusion of objects (magazines, a red geranium in a clay pot) tumbled to the kitchen floor. For an eerie, vacuum-sealed moment (curtains flat, breeze vanished) she stared at the broken pot, the black crumbs of dirt spilled across the linoleum and then up, apprehensively, into the four shadowy corners of the room. The sunset glow on the ceiling was lurid, ghastly.

“Hello?” she finally whispered, to whatever spirit (friendly or not) had blown through the room. For she had a sense of being observed. But all was silence; and after some moments, Harriet turned and hurried from the room as if the very Devil were skimming after her.

————

Eugene, in some reading glasses from the drugstore, sat quietly at Gum’s kitchen table in the summer twilight. He was reading a smeary old booklet from the County Extension Office called Home Gardens: Fruits and Ornamentals. His snake-bit hand, though long out of the bandage, still had a useless look about it, the fingers stiff, propping the book open like a paperweight.

Eugene had returned from the hospital a changed man. He’d had an epiphany, lying awake listening to the idiot laughter of the television floating down the hall—waxed checkerboard tile, straight lines converging on white double doors that swung inward to Infinity. Through the nights, he prayed until dawn, staring up at the chilly harp of light on the ceiling, trembling in the antiseptic air of death: the hum of X rays, the robot beep of the heart monitors, the rubbery, secretive footsteps of the nurses and the agonized breaths of the man in the bed next to him.

Eugene’s epiphany had been threefold. One: Because he was not spiritually prepared to handle serpents, and had no anointment from the Lord, God in His mercy and justice had lashed out and smote him. Two: Not everybody in the world—every Christian, every believer—was meant to be a minister of the Word; it had been Eugene’s mistake to think that the ministry (for which he was unqualified, in nearly all respects) was the only ladder by which the righteous could attain Heaven. The Lord, it seemed, had different plans for Eugene, had had them all along—for Eugene was no speaker; he had no education, or gift for tongues, or easy rapport with his fellow man; even the mark on his face rendered him an unlikely messenger, as people quailed and shrunk from such visible signs of the Living God’s vengeance.

But if Gene was unfit to prophesy or preach the gospel: what then? A sign, he’d prayed, lying wakeful in his hospital bed, in the cool gray shadows … and, as he prayed, his eyes returned repeatedly to a ribboned vase of red carnations by the bed of his neighbor—a very large, very brown old man, very wrinkled in the face, whose mouth opened and closed like a hooked fish; whose dry, gingerbread-brown hands—tufted with black hairs—grasped and pulled at the bland coverlet with a desperation that was terrible to see.

The flowers were the only pinprick of color in the room. When Gum was in the hospital, Eugene had returned to look in the door at his poor neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word. The bed was empty but the flowers were still there, blazing up red from the bed table as if in sympathy with the deep, red, basso pain that throbbed in his bitten arm, and suddenly the veil fell away, and it was revealed to Eugene that the flowers themselves were the sign he’d prayed for. They were little live things, the flowers, created by God and living like his heart was: tender, slender lovelies that had veins, and vessels, that sipped water from their hobnail vase, that breathed their weak, pretty scent of cloves even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And as he was thinking on these things, the Lord himself had spoken to Eugene, there as he stood in the quiet of the afternoon, saying: Plant my gardens.

This was the third epiphany. That very afternoon, Eugene had hunted through the seed packs on the back porch and planted a row of collards and another of winter turnip greens in a moist, dark patch of earth where—until recently—a stack of old tractor tires had sat atop a sheet of black plastic. He’d also purchased two rosebushes on sale at the feed store and planted them in the scrubby grass in front of his grandmother’s trailer. Gum, typically, was suspicious, as if the roses were a sly trick at her expense; Eugene, several times, had caught her standing in the front yard staring at the poor little shrubs as if they were dangerous intruders, freeloaders and parasites, there to rob them all blind. “What I want to know,” she said, limping after Eugene as he ministered to the roses with pesticide and watering can, “is, who’s gone attend to them thangs? Who’s gone pay for all that fancy spray, and fertilizer? Who’s gone get stuck with watering them, and dusting them, and nursing them, and fooling with them all the time?” And she cast a cloudy old martyred eye at Eugene, as if to say that she knew that the burden of their care would only crush down joylessly on her own shoulders.

The door of the trailer squeaked open—so loudly that Eugene jumped—and in trudged Danny: dirty, unshaven, hollow-eyed and dehydrated-looking, as if he’d been wandering the desert for days. He was so thin that his jeans were falling off his hip-bones.

Eugene said: “You look awful.”

Danny gave him a sharp look, then collapsed at the table with his head in his hands.

“It’s your own fault. You ort to just stop taking that stuff.”

Danny raised his head. His vacant stare was frightening. Suddenly he said: “Do you remember that little black-haired girl come up to the back door of the Mission the night you got bit?”

“Well, yes,” said Eugene, closing the booklet on his finger. “Yes, I do. Farsh can go around saying any crazy thing he wants to, and can’t nobody question it—”

“You remember her, then.”

“Yes. And it’s funny you mention it.” Eugene considered where to begin. “That girl run off from me,” he said, “before the snakes was even out of the window. She was nervous, down there on the sidewalk with me, and the second that yell come from up there she was off.” Eugene set the booklet aside. “And I can tell you another thing, I did not leave that door unlocked. I don’t care what Farsh says. It was standing open when we come back, and—”

He drew his neck back and blinked at the tiny photograph which Danny had suddenly shoved in his face.

“Why, that’s you,” he said.

“I—” Danny shuddered and turned up his red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling.

“Where’d this come from?”

“She left it.”

“Left it where?” said Eugene, and then said: “What’s that noise?” Outside, someone was wailing loudly. “Is that Curtis?” he said, standing up.

“No—” Danny drew a deep, ragged breath—“it’s Farish.”

“Farish?”

Danny scraped back his chair; he looked wildly about the room. The sobs were broken, guttural, as despairing as a child’s sobs but more violent, as if Farish was spitting and choking up his own heart.

“My gosh,” said Eugene, awed. “Listen at that.”

“I had a bad time with him just now, in the parking lot of the White Kitchen,” said Danny. He held up his hands, which were dirty and skinned up.

“What happened?” said Eugene. He went to the window and peered out. “Where’s Curtis?” Curtis, who had bronchial and breathing problems, often went into savage coughing fits when he was upset—or when someone else was, which got him more upset than anything.

Danny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained, as from overuse. “I’m sick of being scared all the time.” To Eugene’s astonishment he drew a mean-looking bill-hook knife from his boot and—with a stoned but significant look—set it down on the table with a solid clack.

“This is my protection,” he said. “From him.” And he rolled up his eyes in a particularly squidlike way—whites showing—that Eugene took to mean Farish.

The awful crying had died down. Eugene left the window and sat down by Danny. “You’re killing yourself,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Get some sleep,” Danny repeated. He stood up, as if he was about to make a speech, and then sat back down.

“When I us coming up,” said Gum, creeping in on her walker, rocking forward an inch at a time, click click, click click, “my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that’ll sit down in a chair and read a book.”

This she said with a sort of peaceful tenderness, as if the plain wisdom of the remark did her father credit. The booklet lay on the table. With a trembling old hand, she reached out and picked it up. Holding it at arm’s length, she looked at the front of it, and then she turned it around and looked at the back. “Bless ye heart, Gene.”

Eugene looked over the tops of his glasses. “What is it?”

“Oh,” said Gum, after a tolerant pause. “Well. I just hate to see ye get your hopes up. It’s a hard old world for folks like us. I sure do hate to think of all them young college professors, standing up in the job line ahead of you.”

“Hon? Can’t I just look at the dern thing?” Certainly she meant no harm, his grandmother: she was just a poor little broken-down old lady who’d worked hard her whole life, and never had anything, and never had a chance, and never knew what a chance was. But why this meant her grandsons didn’t have a chance, either, Eugene wasn’t quite sure.

“It’s just something I picked up at the Extension Office, hun,” he said. “For free. You ought to go down there and look sometime. They have things there on how to grow just about every crop and vegetable and tree there is.”

Danny—who had been sitting quietly all this time, staring into space—stood up, a little too suddenly. He had a glazed look, and swayed on his feet. Both Eugene and Gum looked at him. He took a step backwards.

“Them glasses look good on you,” he said to Eugene.

“Thank you,” said Eugene, reaching up self-consciously to adjust them.

“They look good,” said Danny. His eyes were glassy with an uncomfortable fascination. “You ort to wear them all the time.”

He turned; and as he did, his knees buckled under him and he fell to the floor.

————

All the dreams Danny had fought off for the past two weeks thundered down on him all at once, like a cataract from a burst dam, with wrecks and jetsam from various stages of his life jumbled and crashing down along with it—so that he was thirteen again, and lying on a cot his first night in Juvenile Hall (tan cinder block, industrial fan rocking back and forth on the concrete floor like it was about to take off and fly away) but also five—in first grade—and nine, with his mother in the hospital, missing her so terribly, so afraid of her dying, and of his drunk father in the next room, that he lay awake in a delirium of terror memorizing every single spice on the printed curtains which had then hung in his bedroom. They were old kitchen curtains: Danny still didn’t know what Coriander was, or Mace, but he could still see the brown letters jingling along the mustard-yellow cotton (mace, nutmeg, coriander, clove) and the very names were a poem that called up grinning Nightmare, in top hat, to his very bedside.…

Tossing on his bed, Danny was all these ages at once and yet himself, and twenty—with a record, with a habit, with a virtual fortune of his brother’s crank calling him in a shrill eerie voice from its hiding place high above the town—so that the water tower was confused in his mind with a tree he’d climbed and thrown a bird-dog puppy out of once, when he was a kid, to see what would happen (it died) and his guilty thoughts about ripping Farish off were stoppered and shaken up with shameful childhood lies he’d told about driving race cars, and beating up and killing people; with memories of school, and court, and prison, and the guitar his father had made him quit playing because he said it took too much work (where was that guitar? he needed to find it, people were waiting for him out in the car, if he didn’t hurry they’d go off and leave him). The tug of all these contradictory times and places made him roll back and forth on his pillow from the confusion of it all. He saw his mother—his mother!—looking in the window at him, and the concern on her swollen, kindly face made him want to weep; other faces made him start back in terror. How to tell the difference between the living and the dead? Some were friendly; some weren’t. And they all spoke to him and to each other, though they’d never known each other in life, walking in and out in large, businesslike groups, and it was hard to know who belonged where and what they were all doing together here in his room, where they didn’t belong, their voices mingled with the rain striking down on the tin roof of the trailer and themselves as gray and formless as the rain.

Eugene—wearing the strange, scholarly drugstore glasses—sat by his bed. Lighted by the occasional flash of heat lightning, he and the chair he sat in were the only stationary objects amidst a bewildering and ever-changing swirl of people. Every so often, the room seemed to empty, and Danny bolted upright, for fear he was dying, for fear that his pulse had stopped and his blood was cooling and even his ghosts were trailing away from him.…

“Set down, set,” said Eugene. Eugene: nutty as a fruitcake, but—besides Curtis—the gentlest of the brothers. Farish had a big dose of their father’s meanness—not so much since he’d shot himself in the head. That had knocked some of the starch out of him. Ricky Lee probably had it the worst, that mean streak. It was serving him well in Angola.

But Eugene wasn’t so much like Daddy, with his tobacco-stained teeth and billy-goat eyes, but more like their poor drunk mother who’d died raving about an Angel of God standing barefoot on the chimney. She’d been plain, God bless her, and Eugene—who was plain, too, with his close-set eyes and his honest, lumpy nose—looked very much like her in the face. Something about the glasses softened the ugliness of his scar. Poof: the lightning through the window lit him up blue from behind; the burn splashed over his left eye beneath the glasses was like a red star. “Problem is,” he was saying, hands clasped between his knees, “I didn’t see that you couldn’t separate that creeping serpent out of all creation. If you do, oh man, it’s going to bite you.” Danny stared at him in wonder. The glasses gave him an alien, learned presence, a schoolmaster from a dream. Eugene had come back from prison with a habit of talking in long, disjointed paragraphs—like a man talking to four walls, nobody listening—and this too was like their mother, who rolled around on the bed and spoke out to visitors who weren’t there and called on Eleanor Roosevelt and Isaiah and Jesus.

“You see,” Eugene was saying, “that snake’s a servant of the Lord, it’s His creature, too, you see. Noah taken it on the ark with all the others. You can’t just say ‘oh, the rattlesnake is evil’ because God made it all. It’s all good. His hand hath wrought the serpent, just as it wrought the little lamb.” And he cast his eyes over to a corner of the room where the light didn’t really shine, where Danny—horrified—stifled with his fist a scream at the breathless black creature of his old nightmare, shuddering, tugging, struggling small and frantic on the floor by Eugene’s feet … and though it was nothing to retell or speak of, a thing more piteous than horrible, still the rank old fluttering flavor of it was, to Danny, horror beyond bloodshed or description, black bird, black men and women and children scrambling for the safety of the creek bank, terror and explosions, a foul oily taste in his mouth and a trembling as if his very body was falling to pieces: spasmed muscles, snapped tendons, dissolving to black feathers and washed bone.

————

Harriet too—early the same morning, just as it was light out—started up from her bed in a panic. What had scared her, what dream, she hardly knew. It was daylight, but only just. The rain had stopped, and the room was still and shadowy. From Allison’s bed: jumbled teddy bears, a cock-eyed kangaroo, stared at her fixedly over a drift of bedclothes, nothing of Allison visible except a long wisp of hair floating and fanning across the pillow, like the hair of a drowned girl awash at water’s surface.

No clean shirts were in the bureau. Quietly, she eased Allison’s drawer open—and was delighted to find, among the tangle of dirty clothes, a pressed and neatly folded shirt: an old Girl Scout shirt. Harriet brought it up to her face for a long dreamy breath: it still smelled, just faintly, of Ida’s washing.

Harriet put on her shoes and tiptoed downstairs. All was silence except the tick of the clock; the clutter and mess was less sordid, somehow, in the morning light which glowed rich upon the banister and the dusty mahogany tabletop. In the stairwell smiled the lush schoolgirl portrait of Harriet’s mother: pink lips, white teeth, sparkling gigantic eyes with white stars that flashed, ting, in dazzled pupils. Harriet crept by it—like a burglar past a motion detector, all doubled over—and into the living room, where she stooped and retrieved the gun from under Ida’s chair.

In the hall closet, she searched for something to carry it in, and found a thick plastic drawstring bag. But the outline, she noticed, was obvious through the plastic. So she took it out again, wrapped it in several thick layers of newspaper, and slung the bundle over her shoulder like Dick Whittington in the storybook gone to seek his fortune.

As soon as she stepped outside a bird sang out, practically in her ear it seemed: a sweet clear laddering phrase which burst and fell and surged up again. Though August was not yet over something dusty and cool, like fall, tingled in the morning air; the zinnias in Mrs. Fountain’s yard—firecracker reds, hot orange and gold—were starting to nod, their raggedy heads freckled and fading.

Except for the birds—which sang loud and piercingly, with a loony optimism akin to emergency—the street was solitary and still. A sprinkler whirred on an empty lawn; the street lamps, the lighted porches glowed in long, empty perspectives and even the insignificant sound of her footsteps on the pavement seemed to echo, and carry far.

Dewy grass, wet streets that rolled out black and wide like they went on forever. As she drew closer to the freight yards, the lawns got smaller, the houses shabbier and closer together. Several streets over—towards Italian Town—a solitary car roared past. Cheerleader practice would be starting soon, only a few blocks away, on the shady grounds of the Old Hospital. Harriet had heard them shouting and yelling over there the last few mornings.

Past Natchez Street, the sidewalks were buckled and cracked and very narrow, hardly a foot wide. Harriet walked past boarded-up buildings with sagging porches, yards with rusted propane tanks and grass that hadn’t been cut in weeks. A red Chow dog with matted fur hit his chain-link fence with a rattle, teeth flashing in his blue mouth: chop chop. Mean as he was, the Chow, Harriet felt sorry for him. He looked as if he’d never been bathed in his life and in winter his owners left him outside with nothing but an aluminum pie tin of frozen water.

Past the food stamp office; past the burned-out grocery store (struck by lightning, never rebuilt), she turned off on the gravel road that led to the freight yards and the railroad water tower. She had no very clear idea what she was going to do, or what lay ahead of her—and it was best if she didn’t think about it too much. Studiously, she kept her eyes on the wet gravel, which was littered with black sticks and leafy branches blown down by the storm the night before.

Long ago, the water tower had provided the water for steam engines, but if it was used for anything now, she didn’t know. A couple of years before, Harriet and a boy named Dick Pillow had climbed up there to see how far they could see—which was pretty far, practically to the Interstate. The view had captivated her: wash fluttering on lines, peaked roofs like a field of origami arks, roofs red and green and black and silver, roofs of shingle and copper and tar and tin, spread out below them in the airy dreamy distance. It was like seeing into another country. The vista had a whimsical, toy quality which reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Orient—of China, of Japan. Beyond crawled the river, its yellow surface wrinkled and glinting, and the distances seemed so vast that it was easy to believe that a glittering clockwork Asia lay hammering and humming and clanging its million miniature bells just beyond the horizon, past the river’s muddy dragon-coils.

The view had captivated her so completely that she had paid little attention to the tank. Try as she might, she could not remember exactly what it was like up top, or how it was constructed, only that it was wooden and that a door was cut into the roof. This, in Harriet’s memory, was an outline about two feet square with hinges and a handle like a kitchen cabinet. Though her imagination was so vivid that she could never be quite sure what she actually remembered, and what her fancy had colored in to fill the blanks, the more she thought of Danny Ratliff, crouched at the top of the tower (his tense posture, the agitated way he kept looking over his shoulder), the more it seemed to her that he was hiding something or trying to hide himself. But what rose up again and again in her mind was the jangled, off-centered agitation as his gaze had brushed across her own, and flared up, like a sunbeam striking a signal mirror: it was as if he were bouncing back a code, a distress alarm, a recognition. Somehow he knew she was out here; she was in his field of awareness; in a strange way (and it gave Harriet a chill to realize it) Danny Ratliff was the only person who’d really looked at her for a long time.

The sunlit rails gleamed like dark mercury, arteries branching out silver from the switch points; the old telegraph poles were shaggy with kudzu and Virginia creeper and, above them, rose the water tower, its surface all washed out by the sun. Harriet, cautiously, stepped towards it in the weedy clearing. Around and around it she walked, around the rusted metal legs, at a distance of about ten feet.

Then, with a nervous glance over her shoulder (no cars, or sounds of cars, no noise but bird cries) she came forward to look up at the ladder. The bottom rung was higher than she remembered. A very tall man might not have to jump for it, but anybody else would. Two years ago, when she’d come with Dick, she’d stood on his shoulders and then—precariously—he’d climbed up on the banana seat of his bicycle to follow her.

Dandelions, tufts of dead grass poking through the gravel, crickets singing frantically; they seemed to know that it was the end of summer, that soon they would be dying, and the urgency of their song gave the morning air a fevered, unstable, shimmery feeling. Harriet examined the legs of the tank: metal H-girders, perforated every two feet or so with oblong holes, angling in towards the tank ever so slightly. Higher up, the substructure was supported by metal poles that crossed diagonally in a giant X. If she shimmied up high enough on a front leg (it was a long way up; Harriet was no good at estimating distances) she might possibly inch her way over to the ladder on one of the lower crossbars.

Gamely, she started up. Though the cut had healed, her left palm was still sore, forcing her to favor her right hand. The perforations were just large enough to give her the smallest possible openings in which to wedge her fingers and the tip of her sneakers.

Up she climbed, breathing hard. It was slow going. The girder was powdered with heavy rust that came off brick red on her hands. Though she was not afraid of heights—heights exhilarated her; she loved to climb—there was not much to hold on to and every inch was an effort.

Even if I fall, she told herself, it won’t kill me. Harriet had fallen (and jumped) from some very high places—the roof of the toolshed, the big limb of the pecan tree in Edie’s yard, the scaffolding in front of the Presbyterian church—and never broken a bone. All the same, she felt exposed to prying eyes so high up, and every sound from below, every crackle or bird-cry, made her want to look away from the rusted beam six inches in front of her nose. Close up, the beam, it was a world all to itself, the desert surface of a rusty red planet.…

Her hands were growing numb. Sometimes, on the playground—when playing tug of war, hanging from a rope or from the top bar of a jungle gym—Harriet was overcome by a strange impulse to relax her grip and let herself fall, and this was the impulse she now fought. Up she hauled herself, gritting her teeth, concentrating all her strength into her aching fingertips, and a rhyme from an old book, a baby book, shook loose and jingled through her mind:

Old Mr. Chang, I’ve oft heard it said,

You wear a basket upon your head,

You’ve two pairs of scissors to cut your meat,

And two pairs of chopsticks with which you eat …

With her last surge of willpower, she grabbed the lowest crossbar and pulled herself up. Old Mr. Chang! His picture in the storybook had scared her to death when she was little: with his pointed Chinese hat, and his threadlike mustache, and his long sly Mandarin eyes, but what had scared her most about him was the slender pair of scissors he held up, ever so delicately, and his long thin mocking smile.…

Harriet paused and took stock of her position. Next—this was the tricky part—she was going to have to swing her leg out into open space, to the crossbeam. She took a deep breath and hoisted herself into the emptiness.

A sideways view of the ground heaved up at her all cock-eyed, and for a heartbeat, Harriet was sure she was falling. The next instant she found herself astraddle the bar, clutching it like a sloth. She was very high up now, high enough to break her neck, and she closed her eyes and rested for a moment, her cheek against the rough iron.

Old Mr. Chang, I’ve oft heard it said,

You wear a basket upon your head,

You’ve two pairs of scissors to cut your meat …

Carefully, Harriet opened her eyes and—bracing herself on the girder—sat up. How high above the ground she was! Just like this she’d sat—astraddle a branch, muddy underpants and the ants stinging her legs—the time she’d climbed the tree and couldn’t get down. That was the summer after first grade. Off she had wandered—from Vacation Bible School, was that it? Up she had climbed, fearless, “like a dern squirrel!” exclaimed the old man who had happened to hear Harriet’s flat, embarrassed little voice calling for help from on high.

Slowly, Harriet stood, clutching the girder, knees wobbling as she rose. She transferred her grip to the overhead crossbar, and—hand over hand—walked herself down. She could still see that old man with his humped back and his flat, bloodstained face, peering up at her through a wilderness of branches. “Who you belong to?” he’d cried up to her in a hoarse voice. He had used to live in the gray stucco house by the Baptist church, that old man, lived there alone. Now he was dead; and there was only a stump in his front yard where the pecan tree had been. How he had started to hear her emotionless cries (“Help … help …”) floating down from out of nowhere—looking up, down, around and all about, as if a ghost had tapped him on the shoulder!

The angle of the X had grown too shallow to stand in. Harriet sat again, straddling the bars, grasped the bars on the other side. The angle was difficult; there wasn’t much feeling in her hands any more and her heart flip-flopped violently as she swung herself out into open space—arms trembling with fatigue—and around to the other side.…

Safe now. Down she slid, down the lower left crossbar of the X, as if sliding down the banister in her own house. He’d died a terrible death, that old man, and Harriet could scarcely bear to think of it. Robbers had broken into his house, forced him to lie on the floor by his bed and beat him senseless with a baseball bat; by the time his neighbors got worried and came to check on him, he was lying dead in a pool of blood.

She’d come to rest against the opposite girder; the ladder was just beyond. It wasn’t such a tricky stretch, but she was tired and growing careless—and only when she found herself gripping the ladder did a jolt of terror snap through her body, for her foot had slipped, and she’d caught herself only at the last instant. Now it was over, the dangerous moment, before she’d even known it was happening.

She closed her eyes, held on tight until her breathing returned to normal. When she opened them again, it was as if she were suspended from the rope ladder of a hot air balloon. All the earth seemed to spread itself out before her in a panoramic view, like the castle view in her old storybook From the Tower Window:

The Splendour falls on Castle walls

And snowy Summits old in Story,

The long light shakes across the lakes

And the wild Cataract leaps in glory.…

But there was no time for daydreaming. The roar of a crop duster—which she took, momentarily, for a car—startled her badly; and she turned and scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder as fast as she could.

————

Danny lay quietly on his back, staring at the ceiling. The light was harsh and sour; he felt weak, as if recovering from a fever, and suddenly he realized that he’d been looking up at the same bar of sunlight for quite some time. Somewhere outside, he heard Curtis singing, some word that sounded like “gumdrop,” over and over again; as he lay there, he gradually became aware of a strange thumping noise, as of a dog scratching itself, on the floor beside his bed.

Danny struggled to his elbows—and recoiled violently at the sight of Farish, who (arms crossed, foot tapping) sat in Eugene’s vacated chair, regarding him with a gluey, deliberative eye. His knee was jittering; his beard was dripping wet around the mouth, as if he had spilled something on himself or else had been drooling and gnawing on his own lips.

A bird—a bluebird or something, sweet little tweedle dee like on television—twittered outside the window. Danny shifted and was about to sit up when Farish lunged forward and prodded him in the chest.

“Oh no ye don’t.” His amphetamine breath struck hot and foul in Danny’s face. “I’m onto your ass.”

“Come on,” said Danny wearily, and turned his face away, “let me up.”

Farish reared back; and for an instant their dead father blazed up—arms crossed—out of Hell, and glared scornfully from behind Farish’s eyes.

“Shut your mouth,” he hissed, and shoved Danny back on the pillow, “don’t say a word, you listen to me. You report to me now.”

Danny lay in confusion, very still.

“I seen interrogations,” said Farish, “and I seen people doped. Carelessness. It’ll get us all killed. Sleep waves are magnetic,” he said, tapping his forehead with two fingers, “get it? Get it? They can erase your whole mentality. You’re opening yourself to electromagnetic capacity that’ll fuck up and destroy your whole loyalty system just like that.”

He is wack out of his mind, thought Danny. Farish, breathing fast through the nostrils, ran a hand through his hair—and then winced, and shook it spread-fingered away from his body as if he’d touched something slimy, or nasty.

“Don’t get smart with me!” he roared, when he caught Danny looking at him.

Danny dropped his eyes—and saw Curtis, his chin on a level with the threshold, peeping in the open door of the trailer. He had orange around his mouth, like he’d been playing with their grandmother’s lipstick, and a secretive, amused expression on his face.

Glad for the distraction, Danny smiled at him. “Hey, Alligator,” he said, but before he could ask about the orange on his mouth Farish spun and flung out an arm—like an orchestra conductor, some hysterical bearded Russian—and shrieked: “Get out get out get out!”

In an instant, Curtis was gone: bump bump bump down the trailer’s metal steps. Danny inched up and started to creep out of bed, but Farish spun back around and stabbed a finger at him.

“Did I say get up? Did I?” His face was flushed almost purple. “Let me explain something.”

Danny sat, agreeably.

“We are operating at a military awareness. Copy? Copy?”

“Copy,” said Danny, as soon he realized that was what he was supposed to say.

“All right now. Here’s your four levels—” Farish counted them out on his fingers—“within the system. Code Green. Code Yellow. Code Orange. Code Red. Now.” Farish held up a trembling forefinger. “You might be able to guess Code Green from your experience in driving a motor vehicle.”

“Go?” said Danny, after a long, strange, sleepy pause.

“Affirmative. Affirmative. All Systems Go. In Code Green you are relaxed and unalert and there is no threat from the environment. Now listen up,” said Farish, between gritted teeth. “There is no Code Green. Code Green does not exist.”

Danny stared at a tangle of orange and black extension cords on the floor.

“Code Green is not an option and here’s why. I’m only going to say it once.” He was pacing—with Farish, never a good sign. “If you are attacked on a level of Code Green, your ass will be destroyed.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Danny saw Curtis’s plump little paw reach out and place a package of Sweet Tarts upon the sill of the open window, by his bed. Silently, Danny scooted over and retrieved the gift. Curtis’s fingers waggled happily, in acknowledgment, and then dropped stealthily from view.

“We are currently operating at Code Orange,” said Farish. “In Code Orange the danger is clear and present and your attention is focused on it at all times. Repeat: all times.”

Danny slipped the packet of Sweet Tarts under his pillow. “Take it easy, man,” he said, “you’re working yourself up.” He’d meant it to come out sounding.… well, easy, but somehow it didn’t, and Farish wheeled around. His face was clotted and quivering with rage, bruised and engorged and empurpled with it.

“Tell you what,” he said, unexpectedly. “You and me’s going to take a little ride. I can read your mind, numbnuts!” he screamed, thumping the side of his head as Danny stared at him, aghast. “Don’t think you can pull your shit on me!”

Danny closed his eyes for a moment, then re-opened them. He had to take a piss like a racehorse. “Look, man,” he said pleadingly, as Farish gnawed his lip and glowered down at the floor, “just calm down a second. Easy,” he said, palms up, as Farish glanced up—a little too quick for comfort, eyes a little too jitterbugged and unfocused.

Before he knew what was happening, Farish had jerked him up by the collar and punched him in the mouth. “Look at you,” he hissed, jerking him up again by the shirtfront. “I know you inside out. Motherfucker.”

“Farish—” In a daze of pain, Danny felt his jaw, worked it back and forth. This was the point you never wanted it to come to. Farish outweighed Danny by at least a hundred pounds.

Farish slung him back on the bed. “Get your shoes on. You’re driving.”

“Fine,” said Danny, fingering his jaw, “where?” and if it came out sounding flip (it did) part of the reason was because Danny always drove, everywhere they went.

“Don’t you get smart with me.” Ringing backhand slap across the face. “If one ounce of that product is missing—no, set down, did I say to get up?”

Danny sat, without a word, and tugged his motorcycle boots onto his bare, sticky feet.

“That’s right. Just keep looking right where you’re looking.”

The screen door of Gum’s trailer whined, and a moment later Danny heard her scraping along the gravel in her house shoes.

“Farish?” she called, in her thin, dry voice. “All right? Farish?” Typical, thought Danny, just about typical that he was the one she’d be so worried about.

“Up,” said Farish. He grabbed Danny by the elbow and marched him towards the door and shoved him out.

Danny—flung headlong down the steps—landed face-down in the dirt. As he rose and dusted himself off, Gum stood expressionless: all bone and leathery skin, like a lizard in her thin housedress. Slowly, slowly, she turned her head. To Farish, she said: “What’s got into him?”

At this, Farish reared back in the doorway. “Oh, something’s got into him, all right!” he screamed. “She sees it, too! Oh, you think you can fool me—” Farish laughed, a high unnatural laugh—“but you can’t even fool your own grandmother!”

Gum gazed long at Farish, then Danny, eyelids half-closed and permanently sleepy-looking from the cobra venom. Then she reached out her hand and caught the meat of Danny’s upper arm and twisted it between thumb and forefinger—hard, but in a sneaky, gentle way, so that her face and her little, bright eyes remained calm.

“Oh, Farish,” she said, “you ort not be so hard on him,” but there was something in her voice which suggested that Farish had good reason to be hard on Danny, hard on him indeed.

“Hah!” shouted Farish. “They did it,” he said, as if to hidden cameras at the tree line. “They got to him. My own brother.”

“What are you talking about?” said Danny, in the intense vibrating silence that followed, and was shocked by how weak and dishonest his voice sounded.

In his confusion, he stepped back as slowly, slowly, Gum crept up the steps of Danny’s trailer, up to where Farish stood, glaring daggers and breathing fast through the nose: foul, hot little huffs. Danny had to turn his head, he couldn’t even look at her because he could see only too painfully how her slowness infuriated Farish, drove him nuts, was driving him psychotic and bug-eyed even as he stood there: tapping that foot like dammit, how the hell could she be so freaking poky? Everybody saw it (everybody but Farish) how even being in the same room with her (scratch … scratch …) made him tremble with impatience, drove him apeshit, violent, bonkers—but of course Farish never got mad at Gum, only took his frustration out on everybody else.

When finally she got to the top step, Farish was scarlet in the face, shaking all over like a machine about to blow. Gently, gently, she cringed up to Farish and patted him on the sleeve.

“Is it really that important?” she asked, in a kindly tone that somehow suggested yes, it was very important indeed.

“Hell yes!” roared Farish. “I won’t be spied on! I won’t be stoled from! I won’t be lied to—no, no,” he said, jerking his head in response to her light little papery claw upon his arm.

“Oh, my. Gum’s so sorry yall boys can’t get along.” But it was Danny she was looking at as she said it.

“Don’t feel sorry for me!” screamed Farish. Dramatically, he stepped in front of Gum, as if Danny might rush in and kill them both. “He’s the one you need to feel sorry for!”

“I don’t feel sorry for either one of ye.” She’d edged past Farish and was creeping into the open door of Danny’s trailer.

“Gum, please,” Danny said hopelessly, stepping up as far as he dared, craning to watch the pink of her faded house-dress as it vanished into the dim. “Gum, please don’t go in there.”

“Good night,” he heard her say, faintly. “Let me make up this bed.…”

“Don’t you be worrying over that!” cried Farish, glaring at Danny as if it was all his fault.

Danny darted past Farish and into the trailer. “Gum, don’t,” he said in anguish, “please.” Nothing was more certain to launch Farish into an ass-kicking rage than Gum taking it into her head to “clean up” after Danny or Gene, not that either one of them wanted her to. One day years ago (and Danny would never forget it, never) he had walked in to find her methodically spraying his pillow and bedclothes with Raid insecticide.…

“Lord, these curtains is filthy,” said Gum, shuffling into Danny’s bedroom.

A long shadow slanted in from the threshold. “I’m the one thatas talking to you,” said Farish in a low, frightening voice. “You get your ass out here and listen.” Abruptly he snatched Danny by the back of the shirt and slung him back down the stairs, down into the packed dust and litter of the yard (broken lawn chairs, empty cans of beer and soda pop and WD-40 and a whole battlefield of screws and transistors and cogs and dismantled gears) and—before Danny could rise to his feet—he jumped down and kicked him viciously in the ribs.

“So where do you go to when you go driving off by yourself?” he screamed. “Huh? Huh?”

Danny’s heart sank. Had he talked in his sleep?

“You said you went to mail Gum’s bills. But you aint mailed them. There they sat on the seat of the car for two days after you come back from wherever, mud splashed on your tires a foot deep, you aint got that driving down Main Street to the post office, did you?”

Again he kicked Danny. Danny rolled over on his side in a ball, clutching his knees.

“Is Catfish in on this with you?”

Danny shook his head. He tasted blood in his mouth.

“Because I will. I’ll kill that nigger. I’m on kill the both of you.” Farish opened the passenger door of the Trans Am and slung Danny in by the scruff of his neck.

“You drive,” he shouted.

Danny—wondering how he was supposed to drive from the wrong side of the car—reached up to feel his bloody nose. Thank God, I’m not wired, he thought, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, split lip and all, thank God I’m not wired or I’d lose my mind.…

“Go?” said Curtis brightly, toddling up to the open window; with his smeary orange lips, he made a vroom vroom noise. Then, stricken, he noticed the blood on Danny’s face.

“No, sugar,” said Danny, “you’re not going anywhere,” but all at once, Curtis’s face slackened, and—gasping for breath—he turned and scurried off just as Farish opened the door on the driver’s side: click. A whistle. “In,” he said; and before Danny realized what was happening Farish’s two German shepherds leapt into the back seat. The one named Van Zant panted noisily into his ear; its breath was hot, and smelled like rotten meat.

Danny’s stomach contracted. This was a bad sign. The dogs were trained to attack. On one occasion, the bitch had dug out of her pen and bit Curtis on the leg through his blue jeans so bad he had to get stitched-up at the hospital.

“Farish, please,” he said, as Farish popped the seat back in place and sat down behind the wheel.

“Shut your mouth.” Farish stared straight ahead, his eyes queerly dead. “The dogs are coming.”

Danny made a big show of feeling around in his pocket. “If I’m on drive, I need to get my wallet.” Actually, what he needed was a weapon of some sort, if only a knife.

The interior of the car was blazing hot. Danny swallowed. “Farish?” he said. “If I’m on drive, I need my license. I’ll just go inside now and get it.”

Farish leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes and stayed like that for a moment—very still, eyelids fluttering, as if trying to fight off an impending heart attack. Then, very suddenly, he started up and roared, in full throat: “Eugene!”

“Hey,” said Danny, over the piercing barks from the back seat, “no need in calling him out here, let me get it myself, okay?”

He reached for the door handle. “Ho, I seen that!” shouted Farish.

“Farish—”

“I seen that, too!” Farish’s hand had shot to the top of his boot. Has he got a knife in there? thought Danny. Great.

Half breathless from the heat, throbbing all over with pain, he sat still for a moment, thinking. How best to proceed, so Farish wouldn’t jump on him again?

“I can’t drive from this side,” he said at last. “I’ll go in and get my wallet, and then we can trade places.”

Attentively, Danny watched his brother. But Farish’s thoughts had strayed elsewhere for the moment. He had turned around to face the back seat, and was allowing the German shepherds to lick him all over the face.

“These dogs,” he said, threateningly, lifting his chin over their frantic attentions, “these dogs mean more to me than any human being ever born. I care more about these two dogs here than any human life that was ever lived.”

Danny waited. Farish kissed and fondled the dogs, murmuring to them in indistinct baby-talk. After a moment or two (the UPS coveralls were ugly enough, but one thing Danny could say for them: they made it hard if not impossible for Farish to conceal a gun on his person) he eased the door open and got out of the Trans Am and started across the yard.

The door of Gum’s trailer squeaked open with a rubbery, refrigerator sound. Eugene poked his head out. “Tell him I don’t care to be spoke to in that tone.”

From the car, the horn blared, throwing the shepherd dogs into a fresh fit of barking. Eugene pulled his glasses low on his nose and peered over Danny’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t let those animals ride in the car if I was you,” he said.

Farish threw back his head and bellowed: “Get back out here! Now!”

Eugene took a deep breath, rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Scarcely moving his lips, he said: “If he don’t end up in Whitfield again he’s gone kill somebody. He come in there this morning and like to set me on fire.”

“What?”

“You was asleep,” said Eugene, looking apprehensively over Danny’s shoulder at the Trans Am; whatever was going on with Farish and the car, it was making him plenty nervous. “He taken his lighter out and said he’d burn the rest of my face off. Don’t get in the car with him. Not with them dogs. Aint no telling what he’ll do.”

From the car, Farish shouted: “Don’t make me come after you!”

“Listen,” said Danny, casting a nervous glance back at the Trans Am, “will you look after Curtis? Promise me?”

“What for? Where you going?” said Eugene, and looked up at him sharply. Then he turned his head.

“No,” he said, blinking, “no, don’t tell me, don’t say another word—”

“I’m going to count three,” screamed Farish.

“Promise?”

“Promise and swear to God.”

“One.”

“Don’t listen to Gum,” said Danny, over another blare from the car horn. “She aint going to do a thing but discourage you.”

“Two!”

Danny put a hand on Eugene’s shoulder. Looking quickly over at the Trans Am (the only motion he could see was the dogs, tails thumping against the window glass), he said: “Do me a favor. Stand here a minute and don’t let him in.” Quickly he slipped inside the trailer and, from its place on the shelf behind the television, grabbed Gum’s little .22 pistol, pulled up his pants leg and stuck it muzzle-first in the top of his boot. Gum liked to keep it loaded, and he prayed that it still was; no time to fool with bullets.

Outside, heavy fast footsteps. He heard Eugene say, in a high frightened voice: “Don’t you raise your hand to me.”

Danny straightened his pants leg, opened the door. He was about to blurt his excuse (“my wallet”) when Farish snatched him up by the collar. “Don’t try to run from me, son.”

He hauled Danny down the steps. Halfway to the car Curtis scuttled over and tried to throw his arms around Danny’s waist. He was crying—or, rather, he was coughing and choking for breath, the way he did when he was upset. Danny, stumbling along behind Farish, managed to reach back and pat him on the head.

“Get back, baby,” he called after Curtis. “Be good.…” Eugene was watching anxiously from the door of the trailer; poor Curtis was crying now, crying to beat the band. Danny noticed that his wrist was smeared with orange lipstick, where Curtis had pressed his mouth.

The color was garish, shocking; for a fraction of a second, it stopped Danny cold. I’m too tired to do this, he thought, too tired. Then, the next thing he knew, Farish had opened the driver’s side door of the Trans Am and slung him inside. “Drive,” he said.

————

The top of the water tank was more rickety than Harriet remembered: furred gray boards, with nails popped loose in some places and, in others, dark gaps where the wood had shrunk and split. Peppering it all were plump white fishhooks and squiggles of bird dropping.

Harriet, from the ladder, examined it at eye level. Then she stepped up, cautiously, and began to climb toward the middle—and something tore loose in her chest as a plank screeched and sank sharply under her foot, like a pressed piano key.

Carefully, carefully, she took a giant step backward. The plank sprang up with a shriek. Stiff, heart pounding, she crept to the margin of the tank, by the railing, where the boards were more stable—why was the air so strange and thin, up high? Altitude sickness, pilots and mountain climbers suffered from it, and whatever those words actually meant, they described how she felt, a queasiness in her stomach and sparkles at the corners of her eyes. Tin roofs glittered in the hazy distance. On the other side lay the dense green woods where she and Hely had played so often, fighting their all-day wars, bombing each other with clods of red mud: a jungle, lush and singing, a palmy little Vietnam to parachute into.

She circled the tank twice. The door was nowhere to be seen. She was just starting to think that there wasn’t a door at all when at last she noticed it: weather-worn, almost perfectly camouflaged in the monotone surface except for a chip or two of chrome paint that hadn’t quite peeled off the handle.

She dropped to her knees. With a wide, windshield-wiper swing of her arm, she pulled it open (squeaky hinges, like a horror movie) and dropped it with a bang which vibrated in the boards beneath her.

Inside: dark, a bad smell. A low, intimate whine of mosquitos hung in the stagnant air. From the roof, a prickle of tiny sun shafts—narrow as pencils—bristled from the holes up top, and crisscrossed in dusty beams which were powdery and pollen-heavy like goldenrod in the darkness. Below, the water was thick and inky, the color of motor oil. At the far end, she made out the dim form of a bloated animal, floating on its side.

A corroded metal ladder—rickety, rusted half-through—went down for about six feet, stopping just short of the water. As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the dim, she saw, with a thrill, that something shiny was taped to the top rung: a package of some sort, rolled up in a black plastic garbage bag.

Harriet prodded it with her toe of her shoe. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got on her stomach and reached inside and patted it. Something soft but solid was inside—not money, nothing stacked or sharp or definite, but something that gave under pressure like sand.

The package was bound around and around with heavy duct tape. Harriet picked and pulled at it, tugged with both hands, tried to work her fingernails under the edges of the tape. Finally she gave up and tore through several layers of plastic right into the heart of the package.

Inside: something slick and cool, dead to the touch. Harriet withdrew her hand quickly. Dust sifted from the package, spread upon the water in a pearly film. Harriet peered down at the dry iridescence (poison? explosives?) swirling in a powdery glaze upon the surface. She knew all about narcotics (from TV, from the colored pictures in her Health workbook) but those were flamboyant, unmistakable: hand-rolled cigarettes, hypodermics, colorful pills. Maybe this was a decoy package, like on Dragnet; maybe the real package was hidden elsewhere, and this was just a well-wrapped bag of … what?

Inside the torn bag something gleamed shiny and pale. Carefully, Harriet pushed aside the plastic, and saw a mysterious nest of shiny white sacs, like a cluster of giant insect eggs. One of them toppled into the water with a plunk—Harriet drew her hand back, fast—and floated there, half-submerged, like a jellyfish.

For an awful instant, she’d thought the sacs were alive. In the watery reflections, dancing in the tank’s interior, they had seemed to pulsate slightly. Now she saw that they were nothing more than a number of clear plastic bags, each packed with white powder.

Harriet, cautiously, reached down and touched one of the tiny bags (the little blue line of the zip lock was plainly visible at the top) and then lifted it out and hefted it in her hand. The powder looked white—like sugar or salt—but the texture was different, crunchier and more crystalline, and the weight curiously light. She opened it and brought it to her nose. No smell, except for a faint clean aroma that reminded her of the Comet powder that Ida used to clean the bathroom.

Well, whatever it was: it was his. With an underhand toss, she threw the little bag into the water. There it floated. Harriet looked at it, and then, without much considering what she was doing, or why, she reached inside the cache of black plastic (more white sacs, clustered like seeds in a pod) and pulled them out and dropped them by idle handfuls, threes and fours, into the black water.

————

Now that they were in the car, Farish had forgotten what was eating him, or so it seemed. As Danny drove through cottonfields hazy with morning heat and pesticides he kept glancing nervously at Farish, who was settled back in his seat and humming along with the radio. Hardly had they turned off the gravel onto the blacktop than Farish’s tense violent mood had shifted, inexplicably, to a happier key. He’d closed his eyes and breathed a deep contented sigh at the cool air blasting out of the air conditioner, and now they were flying along the highway into town, listening to The Morning Show with Betty Brownell and Casey McMasters on WNAT (“Worst Noise Around Town,” as Farish claimed the call letters stood for). WNAT was Top 40, which Farish hated. But now he was liking it, nodding his head, drumming on his knee, the armrest, the dashboard.

Except he was drumming a little too hard. It made Danny nervous. The older Farish got, the more he behaved like their father: the particular way he smiled before he said something mean, the unnatural liveliness—talkative, overly friendly—that came before a bad outburst.

Rebellient! Rebellient! Once Danny had said that word in school, rebellient, his father’s favorite word, and the teacher told him it wasn’t even a word. But Danny could still hear that high crazy crack in his father’s voice, rebellient! the belt coming down hard on the bel as Danny stared at his hands: freckled, porous, hatched with scars, white-knuckled from clutching the kitchen table. Danny knew his own hands very well, very well indeed; every hard bad moment in his life, he’d studied them like a book. They were a ticket back in time: to beatings, deathbeds, funerals, failure; to humiliation on the playground and sentencing in the courtroom; to memories more real than this steering wheel, this street.

Now they were on the outskirts of town. They drove by the shady grounds of the Old Hospital, where some high-school cheerleaders—in a V formation—jumped all at once into the air: hey! They weren’t in uniform, or even in matching shirts, and despite their crisp unified movements they looked ragged. Arms chopped in semaphore, fists struck the air.

Another day—any other—Danny might have parked behind the old pharmacy and watched them in privacy. Now, as he drove slowly through the dappled leaf-shade, ponytails and tan limbs flashing in the background, he was chilled by the sudden appearance, in the foreground, of a smaller, hunchbacked sort of creature, all in black, which—mega-phone in hand—stopped in its soggy, squelchy walk to observe him from the sidewalk. It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat … and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere. Even stranger: that it remembered him. And as he glanced in the rear view mirror he saw it again, a small black form with black wings, looking after his car like an unwelcome little messenger from the other world.

Boundaries wearing thin. Danny’s scalp tingled. The lush road had taken on the quality of a conveyor-belt corridor in a nightmare, deep green feverish shade pressing in on either side.

He looked in the mirror. The creature was gone.

It wasn’t the drugs, he’d sweated those out in his sleep: no, the river had flooded its banks and all sorts of trash and outrageous garbage had floated up from the bottom and into the daylight, a disaster film, dreams and memories and unconfessable fears slopping down the public street. And Danny had (not for the first time) the sensation that he had dreamed this day already, that he was driving down Natchez Street towards something that had already taken place.

He rubbed his mouth. He had to pee. As bad as his ribs and his head hurt from Farish’s beating, he could think of little else but how badly he had to pee. And coming off the drugs had left him with a sick chemical undertaste in his mouth.

He stole a glance at Farish. He was still caught up in the music: nodding his head, humming to himself, drumming on the armrest with his knuckle. But the police-dog bitch in the back seat glared at Danny as if she knew exactly what was on his mind.

He tried to psych himself up. Eugene—for all his holy-rolling—would look after Curtis. And then there was Gum. Her very name triggered an avalanche of guilty thoughts, but though Danny bore down hard and willed himself to feel affection for his grandmother he felt nothing. Sometimes, especially when he heard Gum coughing in her room in the middle of the night, he got all choked up and sentimental about the hardships she’d suffered—the poverty, the overwork, the cancers and the ulcers and the arthritis and all the rest of it—but love was an emotion he felt for his grandmother only in her presence and then only occasionally: never out of it.

And what did any of that even matter? Danny had to pee so bad that his eyeballs were about to burst; he squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. I’ll send money home. As soon as I move that shit and set myself up …