The Little Friend

Was there another way? No. There was no way—apart from what lay ahead of him—to the house by the water in another state. He had to fix his mind on that future, really see it, move toward it smoothly and without stopping.

They drove past the old Alexandria Hotel, with its sagging porch and rotten shutters—haunted, people said, and no wonder, all the people who had died there; you could feel it radiating from the place, all that old historical death. And Danny wanted to howl at the universe that had dumped him here: in this hell-hole town, in this broken-down county that hadn’t seen money since the Civil War. His first felony conviction hadn’t even been his fault: it was his father’s, for sending him to steal a ridiculously expensive Stihl chainsaw from the workshop of a rich old German farmer who was sitting up guarding his property with a gun. It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism. The only thing for it was to go someplace that nobody knew you and nobody knew your family and try to start your life all over again.

Street signs repeating, and words. Natchez, Natchez, Natchez. Chamber of Commerce: ALEXANDRIA: THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE! No, not the way things ought to be, Danny thought bitterly; it’s the way things fucking are.

Sharply he turned into the freight yards. Farish clutched the dashboard and looked at him with something like astonishment. “What you doing?”

“This is where you told me to go,” Danny said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible.

“I did?”

Danny felt he should say something, but he didn’t know what to say. Had Farish mentioned the tower? All of a sudden he wasn’t sure.

“You said you was going to check up on me,” he said, tentatively—just tossing it out there, just to see what might happen.

Farish shrugged, and—to Danny’s surprise—settled back in his seat again and looked out the window. Driving around tended to put him in a good mood. Danny could still hear Farish’s low whistle, the first time he’d pulled up in the Trans Am. How he loved to ride, just climb in the car and go! In those first few months they’d joy-rode it up to Indiana, just the two of them, another time all the way to West Texas—no reason, nothing to see in those places, just clear weather and the highway signs flashing overhead, punching around on the FM band looking for a song.

“Tell you what. Let’s go get us some breakfast,” Farish said.

Danny’s intentions wavered. He was hungry. Then he remembered his plan. It was settled, it was fixed, it was the only way out. Black wings, waving him around the corner, into a future he couldn’t see.

He didn’t turn; he kept driving. Trees crowded close around the car. They were so far off the paved road that it wasn’t even a road any more, just potholes in rutted gravel.

“Just trying to find a place to turn around,” he said, realizing how stupid it sounded even as he said it.

Then he stopped the car. It was a good long walk from the tower (the road was bad and the weeds were high, he didn’t care to drive any farther and risk getting stuck). The dogs started barking like crazy, jumping all over the place and trying to push their way into the front seat. Danny turned, as if to get out of the car. “Here we are,” he said nonsensically. Quickly, he pulled the little pistol out of his boot and pointed it at Farish.

But Farish didn’t see. He had turned sideways in the seat, swinging his large stomach around towards the door. “Git down from there,” he was saying to the bitch named Van Zant, “down, I said down.” He raised his hand; the dog shrank.

“Try it with me? Try that rebellient shit with me?”

He had not so much as glanced at Danny, or the gun. To get his attention, Danny had to clear his throat.

Farish raised a dirty red hand. “Hold your horses,” he said, without looking, “hang on, I got to discipline this dog. I am sick of you” (whack, on the head) “you sorry bitch, don’t you pull this uppity shit on me.” He and the dog glared at each other. Her ears were pinned against her skull; her yellow eyes glowed steadily.

“Go on. Do it. I’ll whack you so hard—no, wait,” he said, raising an arm and half-turning to Danny, with the bad eye towards him. “I got to teach this bitch a lesson.” It was as cold and blue as an oyster, that bad eye. “Go on,” he said to the dog. “Try it. It’ll be the last time you ever—”

Danny pulled back the hammer and shot Farish in the head. It was just like that, just that fast: crack. Farish’s head snapped forward and his mouth fell open. With a gesture that was strangely easy, he reached for the dashboard to brace himself—and then turned towards Danny, his good eye half-shut, but his blind one wide open. A bubble of spit, mixed with blood, came blopping out of his mouth; he looked like a fish, like a hooked mud-cat, blop blop.

Danny shot him again, in the neck this time, and—in the silence that rang and dissolved about him in tinny circles—got out of the car and slammed the door. It was done now; no going back. Blood had sprayed across the front of his shirt; he touched his cheek, and looked at the rusty smear on his fingertips. Farish had collapsed forward with his arms on the dash; his neck was a mess but his mouth, full of blood, was still moving. Sable, the smaller of the two dogs, had his paws over the back of the passenger seat and—rear legs pedalling—was working to clamber over it and on top of his master’s head. The other dog—the motherfucker, the bitch named Van Zant—had scrambled over from the back seat. With her nose down, she circled twice, reversed direction, and then plunked her rear end down in the driver’s seat, her black ears pricked up like a devil’s. For a moment, she glared at Danny with her wolfish eyes, and then began to bark: short, sharp barks, clear and carrying.

The alarm was as plain as if she was shouting “Fire! Fire!” Danny stepped backwards. A multitude of birds had flown up, like shrapnel, at the small crack of the gun. Now they were settling again, in the trees, on the ground. Blood was everywhere inside his car: blood on the windshield, on the dashboard, on the passenger window.

I should have had breakfast, he thought hysterically. When did I eat?

And with this thought, he became aware that more than anything, he needed to urinate, and had needed to, desperately, since the very instant he woke that morning.

A wonderful relief descended upon him, and seeped into his bloodstream. Everything’s fine, he thought, as he zipped his pants up, and then—

His beautiful car; his car. Moments ago it had been a cherry, a showpiece, and now it was a crime scene from True Detective. Within, the dogs moved frantically back and forth. Farish lay slumped over the dashboard, face down. His posture was strangely relaxed and natural; he might have been bent forward to look for dropped keys except for the rich pool of blood spreading from his head and ticking to the floor. Blood was sprayed all over the windshield—fat dark glossy drops, a spray of fat florist’s hollyberries clinging to the glass. In the back seat, Sable rushed back and forth, his tail thumping against the windows. Van Zant—seated beside her master—lunged towards him, in quick, repeated feints: nudging his cheek with her nose, pulling back, springing forward to nudge him again, and barking, barking, those short, piercing barks which—she was a dog, damn it, but yet that short sharp urgency was unmistakable, as good as a raised voice shouting for help.

Danny rubbed his chin and looked around wildly. Whatever itch had goaded him to pull the trigger was gone now, while his troubles had multiplied until they blackened out the sun. Why on earth had he shot Farish inside the car? If only he’d held off for two seconds. But no: he’d been dying to get it over with, had jumped like an idiot to pull the trigger and get his shot off instead of waiting for the right moment.

He crouched over, put his hands on his knees. He felt sick and clammy; his heart was hammering and he hadn’t eaten a square meal in weeks, nothing but junk, ice-cream sandwiches and 7-Up; the hard adrenaline slap had drained away, and with it what little strength he’d had, and he wanted nothing so bad in all the world as to lie down on the hot green ground and close his eyes.

He stared at the ground as if hypnotized, then shook himself and pulled himself aright. A little bump would fix him right up—a bump, good God, the thought made his eyes water—but he’d left the house with nothing on him and the last thing he wanted to do was open the car door and root around on Farish’s body, zipping and unzipping the pockets on that filthy old shitty UPS coverall.

He limped around to the front of the car. Van Zant lunged at him, and her snout hit the windshield with a cracking thump that sent him reeling back.

Amidst the sudden racket of barks, he stood still for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly, trying to steady his nerves. He didn’t want to be here but here he was. And he was going to have to start thinking now, taking it slow, one baby step at a time.

————

It was the birds—rising in a noisy clamor—which startled Harriet. All at once, they exploded all around her, so that she flinched and flung her arm over her eyes. Four or five crows settled near her, clasping the railing of the tank with their feet. They turned their heads to look at her and the nearest crow walloped his wings and took off. Below, far away, she could hear something that sounded like dogs barking, dogs going nuts. But before this, it seemed to her she’d heard a different noise, a slight crack, very faint in the windy, sun-bleached distance.

Harriet—feet on the ladder, legs in the tank—sat without moving. As her gaze strayed in confusion, one of the birds caught her eye; it had a jaunty, wicked look, like a cartoon bird, cocking its head right at her, and it almost looked as if it was about to say something but as she looked at it, another popping sound echoed from below and the bird drew itself up and flew off.

Harriet listened. Half in, half out of the tank, she stood partway, bracing herself with one hand, and winced as the ladder squealed beneath her weight. Hastily she clambered onto the planks, then crawled to the edge on her hands and knees and craned over as far as she could.

Down below—far across the field, towards the woods, too far to see very well—was the Trans Am. Birds were starting to drop down to the clearing again, settling one by one, lighting in the branches, in the bushes, on the ground. By the car, a long way off, stood Danny Ratliff. He had his back to her and his hands were clapped over his ears like somebody was screaming at him.

Harriet ducked—his posture, tense and violent, had frightened her—and the next moment she realized what she’d seen and slowly she rose again.

Yes: bright red. Sprayed in drops on the windshield, so bright and shocking it popped out even at a distance. Beyond—within the car, beyond the semi-transparent scrim of droplets—she had the impression of horrible movement: something thrashing and thumping, flailing around. And whatever it was, that dark confusion, Danny Ratliff seemed frightened of it, too. His backward steps were slow, robotic, like the last few backward steps of a shot cowboy in the movies.

Harriet was overcome all of a sudden with a strange blankness and languor. From where she was, so high up, it all looked flat and unimportant somehow, accidental. The sun beat down white and fierce, and in her head thrummed the same curious, airy lightness that—when she was climbing—had made her feel like relaxing her grip and letting go.

I’m in trouble, she told herself, big trouble, but it was hard to make herself feel it, even though it was true.

In the bright distance, Danny Ratliff stooped to pick up something shiny on the grass, and Harriet’s heart gave a queasy flutter when she realized more from the way that he was holding it than anything else that it was a gun. In the dreadful silence, she imagined for a moment that she could hear a faint strain of trumpet music—Hely’s marching band, to the east, far away—and when, in confusion, she cast her eye over in that direction, it seemed to her that the slightest gold twinkle, like sun striking brass, flashed up in the hazy distance.

————

Birds—birds everywhere, great black cawing explosions of them, like radioactive fallout, like shrapnel. They were a bad sign: words and dreams and laws and numbers, storms of information in his head, indecipherable, on the wing and spiraling. Danny put his hands over his ears: he could see his own reflection, slanted, in the blood-spattered windshield, a whirling red galaxy frozen on glass, clouds moving in a thin film behind his head. He was sick and exhausted; he needed a shower and a good meal; he needed to be home, in bed. He didn’t need this shit. I shot my brother and why? Because I needed to take a leak so bad I couldn’t think straight. Farish would get a big yuk out of that. Sick stories in the newspaper, he laughed his head off over them: the drunk who’d slipped while peeing off an overpass and fallen to his death on the highway; the dumb ass who’d awakened to a ringing telephone at his bedside, and reached for his pistol and shot himself in the head.

The gun lay in the weeds at Danny’s feet, where he’d dropped it. Stiffly, he bent to retrieve it. Sable was sniffing around Farish’s cheek and neck with a rooting, butting motion that made Danny queasy, while Van Zant tracked his every move with her acid yellow eyes. When he stepped towards the car, she reared back and barked with renewed energy. Just you open that car door, she seemed to be saying. Just you open that motherfucking door. Danny thought of the training sessions out in the back yard, where Farish rolled his arms in quilt batting and burlap sacks and yelled Destroy! Destroy! Cottony little puffs floating all over the yard.

His knees were trembling. He rubbed his mouth, tried to compose himself. Then he took aim across his arm, at the yellow eye of the dog Van Zant, and squeezed the trigger. A hole the size of a silver dollar exploded in the window. Gritting his teeth against the screams, the thrashing and sobbing inside the car, Danny leaned down with his eye to the glass and put the pistol through the hole and shot her again, then angled the gun and got in a good clear center shot at the other one. Then he pulled back his arm and threw the gun away from him as far as he could.

He stood in the morning glare panting as if he’d run a mile. The screaming from the car was the worst noise he’d ever heard in his life: high, unearthly, like broken machinery, a metallic sobbing note that went on and on without fatigue, a noise that gave Danny actual pain, so he felt that if it didn’t stop, he’d have to drive a stick in his ear—

But it didn’t stop; and after what seemed a ridiculously long time, standing there with his back half-turned, Danny walked stiffly to where he’d thrown the gun, with the screams of the dogs still ringing in his ears. Grimly, he got down on his knees and searched through the thin weeds, parting them with his hands, and his back tensed against the keen energetic cries.

But the gun was empty: no more bullets. Danny wiped it clean with his shirt and tossed it deeper in the woods. He was on the verge of forcing himself over to the car, to look, when silence rolled in on him, in crushing waves—each wave with its own crest and fall, like the screams which had preceded them.

She’d be walking over with our coffee, he thought, rubbing his mouth, if I’d drove on to the White Kitchen, if I hadn’t turned down this road. The waitress named Tracey, the scrawny one with the dangly earrings and the little flat ass, always brought it without asking. He imagined Farish pushed back in his chair with his stomach preceding him grandly, delivering the speech he always gave about his eggs (how he didn’t like to drink ’em, tell the cook she couldn’t get ’em too hard) and Danny across the table looking at his matted old nasty head like black seaweed and thinking: you never know how close I come.

All that vanished, and he found himself staring at a broken bottle in the weeds. He opened and shut one hand, then the other. His palms were slimy and cold. I got to get moving here, he thought, with a rush of panic.

And yet he still stood. It was like he’d blown the fuse connecting his body with his brain. Now that the car window was shattered and the dogs had shut up wailing and crying, he could hear just the faintest thread of music drifting from the radio. Did those people who sang that song (some shit about stardust in your hair) did they ever think for a minute that somebody’d be listening to it on a dirt road by an abandoned railroad track with a dead body in front of them? No: those people just swished around Los Angeles and Hollywood in their white outfits with sparkles, and their sunglasses dark at the top and clear at the bottom, drinking champagne and snorting coke off of silver trays. They never figured—standing there in the studio by their grand pianos, with their sparkly scarves and their fancy cocktails—they never figured that some poor person was going to be standing on a dirt road in Mississippi and working through some major problems while the radio played on the day that you were born the angels got together.…

People like that never had to make a tough decision, he thought, dully, staring at his blood-spattered vehicle. They never had to do shit. It was all handed to them like a set of new car keys.

He took a step towards the car, one step. His knees trembled; the crunch of his feet on the gravel terrified him. Got to move! he told himself, with a kind of high, hearty hysteria, looking wildly all around him (left, right, up in the sky) and a hand out to brace himself in case he fell. Get this show on the road! It was clear enough what he had to do; the question was how, since there was no getting around the fact that basically he would rather take a hacksaw and cut his arm off than lay a finger on his brother’s body.

On the dashboard—resting quite naturally—lay his brother’s grubby red hand, tobacco-stained fingers, the big gold pinky ring shaped like a dice. As Danny stared at it, he tried to think his way back into the situation. What he needed was a bump, to concentrate his mind and get his heart up and kicking. Upstairs in the tower there was plenty of product, product galore; and the longer he stood around, the longer the Trans Am would stand in the weeds with a dead man and two dead police dogs bleeding on the seats.

————

Harriet, gripping the rail with both fists, lay on her stomach too terrified to breathe. Because her feet were above her head, all the blood had drained down to her face so that her heartbeat crashed in her temples. The screams from the car had ceased, the sharp high animal wails that had seemed as if they would never end, but even the silence seemed stretched and torn out of shape by those unearthly cries.

There he still stood, Danny Ratliff, down on the ground, looking very small in the flat, placid distance. It was all as still as a picture. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree seemed combed and oiled and slicked into place.

Harriet’s elbows were sore. She shifted slightly, in her trying position. She was unsure what she’d seen—she was too far away—but the gunshots and the cries she’d heard plainly enough, and the afterburn of the screams still rang in her ears: high-pitched, scalding, intolerable. All movement in the car had stopped; his victims (dark forms, more than one, it seemed) were still.

Suddenly he turned; and Harriet’s heart clenched painfully. Please, God, she prayed, please, God, don’t let him come up here.…

But he was walking towards the woods. Swiftly—after a backwards glance—he stooped in the clearing. A band of custard-white skin—at odds with the dark brown tan on his arms—appeared in the crack between his T-shirt and the waistband of his jeans. He broke the gun and examined it; he stood, and scoured it clean with his shirt. Then he threw it towards the woods, and the gun’s shadow flew dark over the weedy ground.

Harriet—peeping over her forearm at all this—fought a strong impulse to look away. Though she was desperate to know what he was doing, still, it was a curious strain to keep her gaze fixed so intently on the same bright, distant spot; and she had to shake her head against a kind of fog that kept creeping over her vision, like the darkness that slid over the numbers on the chalkboard at school when she stared at them too hard.

After a while, he turned from the woods and walked back to the car. There he stood, with his sweaty, muscled back to her, his head slightly down, his arms rigidly at his sides. His shadow lay tall before him on the gravel, a black plank pointing at two o’clock. In the glare it was comforting to look at, the shadow, restful and cool to the eyes. Then it slid away and vanished as he turned and began to walk towards the tower.

Harriet’s stomach dropped away. The next instant she recovered herself, fumbled for the gun, began to unwrap it with stammering fingers. All at once, an old pistol that she didn’t know how to shoot (and wasn’t even sure she’d loaded right) seemed a very small thing to put between herself and Danny Ratliff, especially in so precarious a spot.

Her gaze skipped around. Where to position herself? Here? Or on the other side, a little lower down, maybe? Then she heard a clang on the metal ladder.

Frantically, Harriet glanced around. She’d never shot a gun in her life. Even if she hit him, she wouldn’t drop him instantly, and the rickety roof of the tank afforded no ground for retreat.

Clang … clang … clang …

Harriet—feeling it in her body for a moment, the terror of being bodily grabbed and thrown off the side—floundered to her feet, but just as she was about to fling herself, gun and all, down through the trapdoor and into the water something stopped her. Arms walloping—she reared back and recovered her balance. The tank was a trap. Bad enough to meet him face-on, in the sunlight, but down there she wouldn’t have a chance.

Clang … clang …

The gun was heavy and cold. Gripping it awkwardly, Harriet crawled sideways down the roof, and then turned around on her stomach with the gun in both hands and inched forward on her elbows as far as she could without actually sticking her head over the edge of the tank. Her vision had narrowed and darkened, and squeezed itself down to a single eye-slit like the visor in a knight’s helmet, and Harriet found herself looking out through it with a curious detachment, everything distant and unreal except a sort of sharp desperate wish to squander her life like a firecracker, in a single explosion, right in Danny Ratliff’s face.

Clang … clang …

She edged forward, the gun trembling in her grasp, just enough to see over the side. Leaning out a little more, she saw the top of his head, about fifteen feet down.

Don’t look up, thought Harriet frantically. She balanced herself on her elbows, brought the gun up and centered it on the bridge of her nose and then—looking down the barrel, lining up the shot as straight as she could—she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Bang. The pistol struck her square in the nose with a loud crack and she cried out and rolled over on her back to clutch her nose with both hands. A shower of orange sparks spat up in the darkness behind her eyelids. Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, she heard the pistol clattering to the ground, striking the rungs of the ladder with a series of hollow clangs that sounded like somebody running a stick down metal bars at the zoo but the pain in her nose was so fierce and bright that there had never been anything else like it. Blood gushed between her fingers, hot and slippery: it was all over her hands, she could taste it in her mouth and as she looked at her red fingertips she couldn’t remember exactly where she was for a moment, or why she was there.

————

The explosion startled Danny so badly that he nearly lost his grip. A heavy clang rang out on the bar above him and the next instant something hit him hard on the crown of the head.

For a moment he thought he was falling, and didn’t know what to grab for, and then with a dreamlike jolt he realized that he was still holding tight to the ladder with both hands. Pain swam out from his head in big flat waves like a struck clock, waves that hung in mid-air and were slow to dissolve.

He’d felt something fall past him; it seemed to him that he’d heard it hit the gravel. He touched his scalp—a knot was rising, he could feel it—and then he turned around as far as he dared and looked down to see if he could make out what had hit him. The sun was in his face and all he could see below was the elongated shadow of the tank, and his own shadow an elongated scarecrow on the ladder.

In the clearing, the windows of the Trans Am were mirrored and blind-looking in the glare. Had Farish rigged the tower? Danny hadn’t thought so—but now he realized he really didn’t know for sure.

And here he was. He took a step up the ladder, and stopped. He thought of going down again, to see if he could find the thing that had hit him, and then realized that it would only be a waste of time. What he’d done there, down below, was done: what he had to do now was keep climbing, focus on getting to the top. He did not wish to be blown up, but if I am, he thought desperately, looking down at the bloody car, fuck it.

There was nothing to do but keep going. He rubbed the sore place on his head, took a deep breath, and started to climb again.

————

Something in Harriet snapped to, and she found herself in her body again, lying on her side; and it was like returning to a window that she’d walked away from, but to a different pane. Her hand was bloody. For a moment she stared at it without quite knowing what it was.

Then she remembered, and sat up with a bolt. He was coming, not a moment to waste. She stood, groggily. Suddenly a hand shot out from behind and seized hold of her ankle, and she screamed and kicked at it and—unexpectedly—broke free. She lunged for the trapdoor, just as Danny Ratliff’s battered face and blood-spattered shirt rose up behind her on the ladder, like a swimmer climbing from a pool.

He was scary, smelly, huge. Harriet—gasping, practically weeping with terror—clattered down towards the water. His shadow fell across the open trapdoor, blocking out the sun. Clang: ugly motorcycle boots stepped on the ladder overhead. Down he came after her, clang clang clang clang.

Harriet turned and threw herself off the ladder. She hit the water feet-first. Down she plunged, into the dark and cold, down until her feet struck bottom. Sputtering, gagging from the filthy taste, she pulled back her arms and shot up to the surface in a mighty breaststroke.

But just as she broke the surface, a strong hand closed fast on her wrist and hauled her up out of the water. He was chest-deep in the water, holding on to the ladder and leaning out sideways to grasp her by the arm, and his silvery eyes—glowing light and powerful in his sunburnt face—pierced her like a stab.

Flailing, twisting, fighting as hard as it was possible for her to fight and with a strength she’d never known she had before, Harriet struggled to get away but though she raised a tremendous spray of water it was no use. Up he hauled her—her waterlogged clothes were heavy; she could feel his muscles trembling from the strain—as Harriet kicked fan after fan of nasty water up into his face.

“Who you?” he shouted. His lip was split, his cheeks greasy and unshaven. “What you want with me?”

Harriet let out a strangled gasp. The pain in her shoulder was breathtaking. On his bicep squirmed a blue tattoo: murky octopus shape, a blurred Old English script, illegible.

“What are you doing up here? Speak up!” He shook Harriet by the arm until a scream burst unwilling from her throat and she kicked around desperately in the water for something to brace herself on. In a flash he pinned her leg with his knee and—with a high, womanish cackle—caught her up by the hair of the head. Swiftly, he pushed her face down into the filthy water and then hauled her up again, dripping. He was trembling all over.

“Now answer me, you little bitch!” he screamed.

————

In truth, Danny trembled as much from shock as anger. He’d acted so fast he hadn’t had time to think; and even though the girl was in his grasp, he could hardly believe it.

The girl’s nose was bloody; her face—rippling in the watery light—was streaked with rust and dirt. Balefully, she stared at him, all puffed up like a little barn owl.

“You’d better start talking,” he shouted, “and I mean now.” His voice boomed and ricocheted crazily inside the tank. Sunbeams filtered in through the dilapidated roof, breathing and flickering heavily on the claustrophobic walls, a sickly, remote light like a mine-shaft or a collapsed well.

In the dimness, the girl’s face floated above the water like a white moon. He became aware of the fast, small noise of her breaths.

“Answer me,” he screamed, “what the hell are you doing up here,” and he shook her again, as hard as he could, leaning out over the water and holding tight to the ladder with his other hand, shook her by the neck until a scream burst from her throat; and as tired and frightened as he was, a surge of anger twisted through him and he roared over her cries so ferociously that her face went blank and the cries died upon her lips.

His head hurt. Think, he told himself, think. He had her, all right—but what to do with her? He was in a tricky position. Danny had always told himself he could dog-paddle in a pinch, but now (chest-deep in water, hanging on to the flimsy ladder) he wasn’t so sure. How hard could it be, swimming? Cows could swim, even cats—why not him?

He became aware of the kid, craftily, trying to ease out of his grip. Sharply he caught her up again, digging his fingers deep into the flesh of her neck so that she yelped out.

“Listen here, prissy,” he said. “You speak up right quick and tell me who you are and maybe I won’t drownd you.”

It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie. From her ashy face, he could tell that she knew that, too. It made him feel bad because she was just a kid but there wasn’t any other way.

“I’ll let you go,” he said, convincingly he thought.

To his annoyance, the girl puffed out her cheeks and settled down into herself even further. He jerked her into the light so that he could see her better and a beam of sunlight fell across her white forehead in a clammy streak. Warm as it was, she looked half-frozen; he could practically hear her teeth clacking.

Again he shook her, so hard his shoulder hurt—but though the tears streamed down her face, her lips were clamped tight and she didn’t make a sound. Then, suddenly, from the corner of his eye, Danny caught sight of something pale floating in the water: little white blobs, two or three of them, half-sunk and washing in the water near his chest.

He drew back—frog eggs?—and the next instant screamed: a scream that astonished him, that boiled up high and scalding from his very bowels.

“Jesus Christ!” He stared at what he was seeing, unable to believe it, and then up at the top of the ladder, at the shreds of black plastic hanging in ribbons from the top rung. It was a nightmare, it wasn’t real: the drugs spoilt, his fortune gone. Farish dead, for nothing. Murder One if they caught him. Jesus.

“You done this? You?”

The kid’s lips moved.

Danny spotted a waterlogged bubble of black plastic floating on the water, and a howl broke from his throat like he’d stuck his hand in the fire. “What’s this? What’s this?” he screamed, forcing her head to the water.

Strangled reply, the first words she’d spoken: “A garbage bag.”

“What you done to it? Huh? Huh?” The hand tightened on Harriet’s neck. Down—quick—he plunged her head to the water.

————

Harriet had just enough time to breathe (horrified, eyes starting at the dark water) before he pushed her under. Bubbles charged white before her face. Soundlessly, she fought, amidst phosphorescence, pistol shots and echoes. In her mind, she saw a locked suitcase clatter along a riverbed, thump thump, thump thump, swept by the current, rolling end over end over smooth mucky stones, and Harriet’s heart was a struck piano key, the same deep note thumped sharp and urgent, as a vision like scratched sulfur flared behind her closed eyelids, a white Lucifer-streak leaping in the dark—

Pain tore through Harriet’s scalp as splash, up he jerked her, up by the roots of the hair. She was deafened by coughs; the din and echo overwhelmed her; he was shouting words she couldn’t understand and his face was stony red, swollen with rage and fearful to see. Retching, choking, she beat the water with her arms and kicked out for something to brace herself against, and when her toe struck the wall of the tank, she drew a full, satisfying breath. The relief was heavenly, indescribable (magical chord, harmony of the spheres); in she breathed, in and in until he shrieked and pushed her head down and the water crashed in her ears again.

————

Danny gritted his teeth and held on. Fat ropes of pain twisted deep in his shoulders, and the screeching and bouncing of the ladder had broken him out in a sweat. Against his hand, her head bobbed light and unstable, a balloon that might slide from beneath his hand at any moment, and the kicking and churning of her body made him seasick. No matter how he tried to brace himself, or settle into his position, he couldn’t get comfortable; dangling off the ladder, with nothing solid under him, he kept kicking his legs around in the water and trying to step on something that wasn’t there. How long did it take to drown somebody? It was an ugly job and twice as ugly if you were doing it with only one arm.

A mosquito whined infuriatingly around his ear. He’d been jerking his head from side to side, trying to avoid it, but it seemed to sense, the fucker, that his hands weren’t free to swat it.

Mosquitos everywhere: everywhere. They’d finally found him, and they understood he wasn’t moving. Maddeningly, luxuriously, the stingers sank into his chin, his neck, the trembling flesh of his arms.

Come on, come on, just get it over with, he told himself. He was holding her down with the right hand—the stronger hand—but his eyes were fixed on the hand that gripped the ladder. He’d lost a lot of the feeling in it, and the only way he could be sure he was still holding on was by staring at his fingers wrapped tight around the rung. Besides, the water frightened him, and if he looked at it, he was afraid he would black out. A drowning kid could pull down a grown man—a trained swimmer, a lifeguard. He’d heard those stories.…

All at once he realized she’d stopped struggling. For a moment he was quiet, waiting. Her head was soft beneath his palm. He let up a little. Then, turning to look, because he had to (but not really wanting to look) he was relieved to see her form washing limply in the green water.

Cautiously he eased up the pressure. She didn’t move. Pins and needles showered down his aching arms and he swung around on the ladder, swapping his grip and swatting the mosquitos out of his face as he did so. For a while longer he looked at her: indirectly, from the tail of his eye, as if at some accident on the highway.

All of a sudden, his arms started shaking so hard that he could scarcely hold on to the ladder. With a forearm, he wiped the sweat from his face, spit out a mouthful of something sour. Then, trembling all over, he grasped the rung above and straightened both elbows and hoisted himself up, the rusted iron squealing loudly beneath him. As tired as he was, as badly as he wanted to get away from the water, he forced himself to turn back and give her body one long, last stare. Then he prodded her with his foot and watched her spin away, as inert as any log, off into the shadows.

————

Harriet had stopped being scared. Something strange had taken her over. Chains snapped, locks broke, gravity rolled away; up she floated, up and up, suspended in airless night: arms out, an astronaut, weightless. Darkness trembled in her wake, interlinked circlets, swelling and expanding like raindrop rings on water.

Grandeur and strangeness. Her ears buzzed; she could almost feel the sun, beating hot across her back, as she soared above ashy plains, vast desolations. I know what it feels like to die. If she opened her eyes, it would be to her own shadow (arms spread, a Christmas angel) shimmering blue on the floor of the swimming pool.

The water lapped the underside of Harriet’s body, and the roll approximated, soothingly, the rhythm of breath. It was as if the water—outside her body—were doing the breathing for her. Breath itself was a forgotten song: a song that angels sang. Breath in: a chord. Breath out: exultation, triumph, the lost choirs of paradise. She’d been holding her breath for a long time; she could keep on holding it for just a little longer.

A little longer. A little longer. Suddenly a foot pushed Harriet’s shoulder and she felt herself spinning, to the dark side of the tank. Gentle shower of sparks. On she sailed in the cold. Twinkle twinkle: shooting stars, lights far below, cities sparkling in the dark atmosphere. An urgent pain burned in her lungs, stronger every second but a little longer, she told herself, just a little longer, must fight it out to the last …

Her head bumped the opposite wall of the tank. The force rolled her back; and in the same movement, the same backwards wash, her head bobbed just enough for her to sneak the tiniest split-second breath before she sloshed face down again.

Darkness again. A darker darkness, if that were possible, draining the last glimmer of light from her eyes. Harriet hung in the water and waited, her clothes washing gently about her.

She was on the sunless side of the tank near the wall. The shadows, she hoped, and the motion of the water had camouflaged the breath (only the tiniest breath, at the very top of her lungs); it hadn’t been enough to relieve the terrible pain in her chest but it was enough to keep her going a little longer.

A little longer. Somewhere a stopwatch was ticking. For it was only a game, and a game she was good at. Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this. Sparkling needle-pricks, like icy raindrops, pattered over her scalp and the back of her arms. Hot concrete and chlorine smells, striped beach balls and kiddie floats, I’ll stand in line to get a frozen Snickers bar or maybe a Dreamsicle.…

A little longer. A little longer. Deeper she sank, down into airlessness, her lungs glowing bright with pain. She was a small white moon, floating high over trackless deserts.

————

Danny clung to the ladder, breathing hard. The ordeal of drowning the kid had made him forget, temporarily, about the drugs, but now the reality of his situation had sunk in on him again, and he wanted to claw his face, to wail aloud. How the fuck was he going to get out of town with a blood-spattered car and no money? He’d been counting on the crystal meth, on moving that, in bars or on streetcorners if he had to. He had maybe forty dollars on him (had considered that driving over; couldn’t very well pay the man at the Texaco with methamphetamine) and there was also that Best Friend of Farish’s, that bill-stuffed wallet Farish always kept in his hip pocket. Farish liked to pull it out sometimes, and flash it around, at the poker table or at the pool hall, but how much money was actually in it, Danny didn’t know. If he was lucky—really lucky—maybe as much as a thousand dollars.

So there was Farish’s jewelry (the Iron Cross wasn’t worth anything, but the rings were) and the wallet. Danny passed a hand over his face. The money in the wallet would keep him going for a month or two. But after that—

Maybe he could get a fake ID. Or maybe he could get a job where he wouldn’t need one, doing migrant work, picking oranges or tobacco. But it was a poor reward, a poor future, next to the jackpot he’d expected.

And when they found the body, they’d be looking for him. The gun lay in the weeds, wiped clean, Mafia style. The smart thing to do would be to dump it in the river, but now that the drugs were gone, the gun was one of his only remaining assets. The more he thought about his choices the fewer and shittier they seemed.

He looked at the shape sloshing in the water. Why had she destroyed his drugs? Why? He was superstitious about the kid; she was a shadow and a jinx but now that she was dead he feared that maybe she’d been his good-luck charm, too. For all he knew he’d made a huge mistake—the mistake of his life—by killing her, but so help me, he said, to her form in the water, and couldn’t finish the sentence. From that first moment outside the pool hall he’d been caught up with her somehow, in something that he didn’t understand; and the mystery of it still pressed in on him. If he’d had her on dry ground he would have knocked it out of her, but it was too late for that now.

He fished one of the packets of speed out of the nasty water. It was stuck together and melted, but maybe—if cooked down—shootable. Fishing around, he came up with half a dozen more or less waterlogged bags. He’d never shot drugs, but why not start.

One last look, and he started up the ladder. The rungs—rusted nearly through—shrieked and buckled under his weight; he could feel movement in the thing, it was wobbling under him a whole lot more than he liked, and he was grateful to emerge at last from the close dankness into the brightness and heat. On shaky legs, he climbed to his feet. He was sore all over, a muscular soreness, as if he’d been beaten—which, come to think of it, he had been. A storm was rolling in over the river. To the east, the sky was sunny and blue; to the west, gunmetal black with thunderclouds rolling and surging in over the river. Shady spots sailed over the low roofs of the town.

Danny stretched, rubbed the small of his back. He was sodden, dripping; long strands of green slime clung to his arms but in spite of everything, his spirits had lifted absurdly, just to be out of the dark and damp. The air was humid, but there was a little breeze and he could breathe again. He stepped across the roof to the edge of the tank—and his knees went watery with relief when off in the distance he saw the car, undisturbed, a single set of tracks winding through the tall weeds behind it.

Gladly, without thinking, he started to the ladder—but he was a little off balance and before he knew what was happening, crack, his foot was through a rotten plank. Suddenly the world pitched sideways: diagonal slash of gray boards, blue sky. For a wild moment—arms windmilling—he flailed to recover his balance, but there was an answering crack and he fell through the boards to the waist.

————

Harriet—floating face downward—was seized with a spasm of shuddering. She’d been trying, stealthily, to ease her head to the side so she could draw another little breath through her nose, but with no luck. Her lungs could stand no more; they bucked uncontrollably, heaving for air, and if not air then water, and just as her mouth opened of its own accord, she broke the surface with a shudder and inhaled, deep deep deep.

The relief was so great it nearly sank her. Clumsily, with one hand, she braced herself against the slimy wall and gasped, and gasped, and gasped: air delicious, air pure and profound, air pouring through her body like song. She didn’t know where Danny Ratliff was; she didn’t know if he was watching and she didn’t care; breathing was all that mattered any more, and if this was the last breath of her life, so be it.

From overhead: a loud crack. Though Harriet’s first thought was the pistol, she made no move to get away. Let him shoot me, she thought, gasping, eyes damp with gratitude; anything was better than drowning.

Then a slash of sunlight struck bright green and velvety on the dark water, and Harriet looked up just in time to see a pair of legs waggling through a hole in the roof.

Snap went the plank.

————

As the water rushed toward him, Danny was gripped with a sickness of fear. In a confused flash his father’s warning from long ago came back, to hold his breath and keep his mouth shut. Then the water slammed into his ears and he was screaming a closed-off scream, staring out horrified into the green darkness.

Down he plunged. Then—miraculously—his feet struck bottom. Danny jumped—clawing, spluttering, climbing up through the water—and broke through the surface of the water like a torpedo. At the height of the jump, he had just enough time to gulp a breath of air before slipping under again.

Murk and silence. The water, it seemed, was only about a foot over his head. Above him, the surface shone bright green, and again he jumped from the bottom—layers of green that grew paler and paler as he rose—and broke back through into light with a crash. It seemed to work better if he kept his arms to his sides and didn’t beat them around like swimmers were supposed to.

Between jumps, and breaths, he oriented himself. The tank was awash in sun. Light streamed in through the collapsed section of the roof; the slimy green walls were lurid, ghastly. After two or three jumps he caught sight of the ladder, off to his left.

Could he make it? he wondered, as the water closed over his head. If he jumped toward it, gradually, why not? He would have to try for it; it was the best he could do.

He broke the surface. Then—with a painful shock, so sharp that he breathed in at the wrong time—he saw the kid. She was clinging with both hands to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Was he seeing things? he wondered on the way down, coughing, bubbles streaming past his eyes. For the face had struck him oddly; for a weird moment it hadn’t been the kid at all he was looking at, but the old lady: E. Cleve.

Choking, gasping, he burst through the water again. No, no doubt about it, it was the kid, and she was still alive: half-drowned and pinched-looking, eyes dark in a sickly-white face. The afterimage glowed round behind Danny’s eyelids as he sank into the dark water.

Up he jumped, explosively. The girl was struggling now, grappling, swinging a knee up, pulling herself up on the ladder. In a burst of white spray he swiped for her ankle, and missed, and the water closed over his head.

On his next jump, he caught the bottom rung, which was rusted and slippery, and it slid right through his fingers. Up he jumped again, grabbing for it with both hands, and this time got a grip on it. She was above him on the ladder, scrambling up ahead of him like a monkey. Water streamed off her and into his upturned face. With an energy born of rage, Danny hoisted himself up, the rusted metal shrieking beneath his weight like a living creature. Directly above, a rung buckled under the kid’s sneaker; he saw her falter, grab the side rail as her foot struck empty air. It won’t hold her, he thought in astonishment, watching her catch herself, right herself, swinging a leg to the top of the tank now, if it won’t hold her it won’t hold—

The bar snapped in Danny’s fists. In a single, swift, slicing movement—like brittle stems stripped from a branch—down through the ladder he fell, down through the rust-corroded rungs and back into the tank.

————

With rust-reddened hands, Harriet pulled herself up, and fell forward gasping onto the hot boards. Thunder rumbled in the deep blue distance. The sun had gone under a cloud, and the restless breeze tossing in the treetops set her shivering. Between herself and the ladder, the roof was partially caved in, sprung boards slanting downward to an enormous hole; her breath rasped noisy and uncontrollable, a panicky sound that made her feel sick just to hear it, and as she rose to her hands and knees, a sharp pain stabbed her in the side.

Then, from inside the tank, burst a flurry of agitated splashing. She dropped to her stomach; breathing raggedly, she began to scramble around the collapsed portion of the roof—and her heart clenched as the boards sank sharply under her weight and groaned precariously toward the water.

Back and away she scrambled, panting—just in time, as part of a board snapped off into the water. Then—up through the hole, high in the air—spattered a startling fan of water, flung drops striking her face and arms.

A strangled howl—wet and burbling—spouted violently from below. Stiff now, practically waxen with terror, Harriet inched forward on her hands and knees; though looking down into the hole made her dizzy, she couldn’t help herself. Daylight flooded in through the broken roof; the inside of the tank glowed a lush, emerald green: the green of swamps and jungles, of Mowgli’s abandoned cities. The grass-green blanket of algae had broken up like pack ice, black veins cracking the opaque surface of the water.

Then splash: up burst Danny Ratliff, white-faced and gasping, hair plastered dark on his forehead. His hand grappled and groped, grasping for the ladder—but there wasn’t any more ladder, Harriet saw, blinking down at the green water. It had broken off about five feet above the surface, too high for him to reach.

As she watched in horror, the hand sank into the water, the last part of him to vanish: broken fingernails, clutching at the air. Then up bobbed his head—not quite high enough, eyelids fluttering, an ugly wet gurgle in his breath.

He could see her, up top; he was trying to say something. Like a wingless bird, he guttered and struggled in the water, and his struggles gave her a feeling that she could not name. The words broke from his mouth in an indistinct burble as he slipped under, flailing, and was gone, nothing of him visible but a weedy tuft of hair, bubbles foaming white at the slimy surface.

All quiet, bubbles boiling. Up he burst again: his face melted-looking somehow, his mouth a black hole. He was clutching at some floating boards but they wouldn’t hold his weight and as he crashed back into the water his wide eyes met hers—accusatory, helpless, the eyes of a guillotined head held up before a mob. His mouth worked; he tried to speak, some glubbing gasping incomprehensible word that was swallowed as he sank.

A strong wind blew, raising goose bumps on Harriet’s arms, shivering the leaves on all the trees; and all at once, in a single breath, the sky darkened to slate-gray. Then, in a long sweeping gust, raindrops rattled across the roof like a shower of pebbles.

It was a warm, drenching, tropical-feeling rain: a squall like the ones that blew in on the Gulf Coast during hurricane season. It clattered loudly on the broken roof—but not so loudly that the gurgles and splashing from below were dinned out. Raindrops leaped like little silver fish on the surface of the water.

Harriet was seized by a fit of coughing. The water had gone in her mouth and up her nose, and the rotten taste soaked her to her marrow; now, with the rain driving in her face, she spat on the boards, turned on her back and rolled her head to and fro, driven nearly mad with the wretched noise that was echoing up the tank—a noise, it occurred to her, that probably was not much different from the noises that Robin had made as he was strangling to death. She’d imagined it happening clean and quick, no floundering or ugly wet strangles, only clapped hands and a puff of smoke. And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body: poof, like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.

Steam rose from the hot, verdant ground. Far below, in the weeds, the Trans Am was hunched in a disturbing, confidential stillness, raindrops shimmering on the hood in a fine white mist; a couple might have been inside it, kissing. Often, in the years to come, she would see it just so—blind, intimate, unreflecting—off in the thin speechless margins of her dreams.

————

It was two o’clock when Harriet—after pausing to listen (all clear)—let herself in through the back door. Apart from Mr. Godfrey (who didn’t seem to have recognized her), and Mrs. Fountain, who had given her an exceedingly strange look from the porch (dirty as she was, striped with dark filaments of slime that had stuck to her skin and baked on in the heat), she had encountered no one. Cautiously, after looking both ways, she scurried down the hall to the downstairs bathroom and bolted the door behind her. The taste of decay fumed and smoldered in her mouth, unendurable. She stripped off her clothes (the smell was horrific; the Girl Scout shirt coming over her head made her gag) and threw them into the bathtub and turned the faucets on them.

Edie often told the story about the time she almost died from an oyster at a New Orleans wedding. “Sickest I’ve ever been.” She’d known the oyster was bad, she said, the moment she bit into it; she’d spit it right out in her napkin, but within hours collapsed and had to be taken to Baptist Hospital. In much the same way, from the instant she tasted the water in the tank, Harriet had known it was going to make her sick. The rottenness had seeped into her flesh. Nothing would wash it away. She rinsed her hands and mouth; she gargled with Listerine and spat it out, cupped her hands under the cold tap and drank and drank and drank, but the smell permeated everything, even the clean water. It rose from the dirty clothes in the bathtub; it rose ripe and warm from the pores of her skin. Harriet dumped half a box of Mr. Bubble into the tub and ran the hot water until the foam churned up outrageously. But even under the numbing mouthwash, the taste lingered ugly like a stain on Harriet’s tongue, and it called up vividly and quite particularly the bloated creature half-sunk and bobbing against the dark wall of the tank.

A knock at the door. “Harriet,” called her mother, “is that you?” Harriet never took baths in the downstairs bathroom.

“Yes maam,” called Harriet, after an instant, over the pounding water.

“Are you making a mess in there?”

“No, maam,” called Harriet, looking bleakly at the mess.

“You know I don’t like you to bathe in that bathroom.”

Harriet couldn’t answer. A wave of cramps had gripped her. Sitting on the side of the tub, staring at the bolted door, she clamped both hands over her mouth and rocked back and forth.

“There’d better not be a mess in there,” her mother called.

The water Harriet had drunk from the tap was coming right back up. With one eye on the door, she got out of the bathtub and—doubled over by the pain in her abdomen—she tiptoed to the commode as quietly as she could. As soon as she removed her hands from her mouth, out it poured, whoosh, a clear, startling gush of putrid water that smelled exactly like the stagnant water Danny Ratliff had drowned in.

————

In the bath, Harriet drank more water from the cold tap, washed her clothes and washed herself. She drained the tub; she scrubbed it with Comet; she rinsed out the slime and grit and climbed in again to rinse herself. But the dark odor of decay had soaked her through and through, so that even after all the soap and water she still felt pickled and drenched in foulness, discolored, wretched, hanging her head with it, like an oil-soaked penguin she’d seen in a National Geographic magazine over at Edie’s house, standing miserably in a wash pail, holding its little greasy flippers out to the side to keep them from touching its befouled body.

Harriet drained the tub again, and scrubbed it; she wrung out her dripping clothes and hung them to dry. She sprayed Lysol; she sprayed herself with a dusty bottle of green cologne that had a flamenco dancer on the label. She was clean and pink now, dizzy with the heat, but just beneath the perfume, the moisture in the steamy bathroom was still heavy with the suggestion of rot, the same ripe flavor that lay heavy on her tongue.

More mouthwash, she thought—and, without warning, another noisome spout of clear vomit came up, pouring out of her mouth in a ridiculous flood.

When it was over, Harriet lay on the cold floor, cheek against sea-green tile. As soon as she was able to stand she dragged herself to the sink and cleaned up with a washrag. Then she wrapped herself in a towel and crept upstairs to her room.

She was so sick, so giddy and tired that—before she’d realized what she’d done—she’d pulled down the covers and climbed into bed, the bed she hadn’t slept in for weeks. But it felt so heavenly that she didn’t care; and—despite the griping pains in her stomach—she fell into heavy sleep.

————

She was awakened by her mother. It was twilight. Harriet’s stomach ached, and her eyes felt scratchy like when she’d had the pink-eye.

“What?” she said raising herself heavily on her elbows.

“I said, are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

Harriet’s mother bent close to feel her forehead, then knitted her eyebrows and drew back. “What’s that smell?” When Harriet didn’t answer, she leaned forward and sniffed her neck suspiciously.

“Did you put on some of that green cologne?” she said.

“No, maam.” Lying a habit now: best now, when in doubt, always to say no.

“That stuff’s no good.” Harriet’s father had given it to Harriet’s mother for Christmas, the lime-green perfume with the flamenco dancer; it had sat on the shelf, unused, for years, a fixture of Harriet’s childhood. “If you want some perfume, I’ll get you a little bottle of Chanel No. 5 at the drugstore. Or Norell—that’s what Mother wears. I don’t care for Norell myself, it’s a little strong …”

Harriet closed her eyes. Sitting up had made her feel sick to her stomach all over again. Scarcely had she laid her head on the pillow than her mother was back again, this time with a glass of water and an aspirin.

“Maybe you’d better have a can of broth,” she said. “I’ll call Mother and see if she has any.”

While she was gone, Harriet climbed out of bed and—wrapping herself in the scratchy crochet afghan—trailed down the hall to the bathroom. The floor was cold, and so was the toilet seat. Vomit (a little) gave way to diarrhea (a lot). Washing up at the sink afterwards, she was shocked to see in the medicine-cabinet mirror how red her eyes were.

Shivering, she crept back to her bed. Though the covers were heavy on her limbs, they didn’t feel very warm.

Then her mother was shaking down the thermometer. “Here,” she said, “open your mouth,” and she stuck it in.

Harriet lay looking at the ceiling. Her stomach boiled; the swampy taste of the water still haunted her. She fell into a dream where a nurse who looked like Mrs. Dorrier from the health service was explaining to her that she’d been bitten by a poisonous spider, and that a blood transfusion would save her life.

It was me, Harriet said. I killed him.

Mrs. Dorrier and some other people were setting up equipment for the transfusion. Someone said: She’s ready now.

I don’t want it, Harriet said. Leave me alone.

All right, said Mrs. Dorrier and left. Harriet was uneasy. There were some other ladies lingering around, smiling at Harriet and whispering, but none of them offered any help or questioned Harriet about her decision to die, even though she slightly wanted them to.

“Harriet?” said her mother—and with a jolt, she sat up. The bedroom was dark; the thermometer was gone from her mouth.

“Here,” Harriet’s mother was saying. The meaty-smelling steam from the cup was ripe and sickening.

Harriet said, smearing her hand over her face: “I don’t want it.”

“Please, darling!” Fretfully, Harriet’s mother pushed the punch cup at her. It was ruby glass, and Harriet loved it; one afternoon, quite by surprise, Libby had taken it from her china cabinet and wrapped it up in some newspaper and given it to Harriet to take home with her, because she knew that Harriet loved it so. Now, in the dim room it glowed black, with one sinister ruby spark at the heart.

“No,” said Harriet, turning her head from the cup continually nudging at her face, “no, no.”

“Harriet!” It was the old debutante snap, thin-skinned and tetchy, a petulance that brooked no argument.

There it was again, under her nose. There was nothing for Harriet to do but sit up and take it. Down she gulped it, the meaty sickening liquid, trying not to gag. When she was done, she wiped her mouth with the paper napkin that her mother offered—and then, without warning, up it came again, glub, all over the coverlet, parsley snips and everything.

Harriet’s mother let out a little yelp. Her crossness made her look strangely young, like a sulky babysitter on a bad night.

“I’m sorry,” Harriet said miserably. The slop smelled like swamp water with chicken broth mixed into it.

“Oh, darling, what a mess. No, don’t—” said Charlotte, with a panicky catch in her voice as Harriet—overcome with exhaustion—attempted to lie back down in the mess.

Then something very strange and sudden happened. A strong light from overhead blared in Harriet’s face. It was the cut-glass ceiling fixture in the hall. With amazement, Harriet realized that she wasn’t in her bed, or even in her bedroom, but lying on the floor in the upstairs hall in a narrow passage between some stacked newspapers. Strangest of all, Edie knelt beside her, with a grim, pale set to her face and no lipstick.

Harriet—wholly disoriented—put an arm up and rolled her head from side to side, and as she did it, her mother swooped down, crying loudly. Edie flung out an arm to bar her. “Let her breathe!”

Harriet lay on the hardwood floor, marveling. Besides the wonder of being in a different place, the first thought that struck her was that her head and neck hurt: really hurt. The second was that Edie wasn’t supposed to be upstairs. Harriet couldn’t even remember the last time Edie had been inside the house beyond the front hall (which was kept relatively clean, for benefit of visitors).

How did I get here? she asked Edie, but it didn’t come out quite the way it was supposed to (her thoughts were all jumbled and crunched together) and she swallowed and tried again.

Edie shushed her. She helped Harriet to sit up—and Harriet, looking down at her arms and legs, noticed with a strange thrill that she was wearing different clothes.

Why are my clothes different? she tried to ask—but that didn’t come out right either. Gamely, she chewed over the sentence.

“Hush,” said Edie, putting a finger to Harriet’s lips. To Harriet’s mother (weeping in the background, Allison standing behind, hunted-looking, biting her fingers) she said: “How long did it last?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet’s mother, clutching her temples.

“Charlotte, it’s important, she’s had a seizure.”

————

The hospital waiting room was unstable and shimmery like a dream. Everything was too bright—sparkling clean, on the surface—but the chairs were worn and grubby if you looked too close. Allison was reading a raggedy children’s magazine and a pair of official-looking ladies with nametags were trying to talk to a slack-faced old man across the aisle. He was slumped forward heavily in his chair as if drunk, staring at the floor, his hands between his knees and his jaunty, Tyrolean-looking hat tipped down over one eye. “Well, you can’t tell her a thing,” he was saying, shaking his head, “she won’t slow down for the world.”

The ladies looked at each other. One of them sat down beside the old man.

Then it was dark and Harriet was walking alone, in a strange town with tall buildings. She had to take some books back to the library, before it closed, but the streets got narrower and narrower until finally they were only a foot wide and she found herself standing in front of a large pile of stones. I need to find a telephone, she thought.

“Harriet?”

It was Edie. She was standing up now. A nurse had emerged from a swinging door in the back, pushing an empty wheelchair before her.

She was a young nurse, plump and pretty, with black mascara and eyeliner drawn in fanciful wings and lots and lots of rouge, ringing the outer edge of her eye socket, a rosy semicircle from cheekbone to browbone—and it made her look (thought Harriet) like pictures of the painted singers in the Peking opera. Rainy afternoons at Tatty’s house, lying on the floor with Kabuki Theatre of Japan and Illustrated Marco Polo of 1880. Kublai Khan on a painted palanquin, ah, masks and dragons, gilt pages and tissue paper, all Japan and China in the narrow Mission book-case at the foot of the stair!

Down the bright hall they floated. The tower, the body in the water had already faded into a kind of distant dream, nothing left of it but her stomach ache (which was fierce, spikes of pain that stabbed and receded) and the terrible pain in her head. The water was what had made her sick and she knew that she needed to tell them, they needed to know so they could make her better but I mustn’t tell, she thought, I can’t.

The certainty flooded her with a dreamy, settled feeling. As the nurse pushed Harriet down the shiny spaceship corridor she reached down to pat Harriet’s cheek and Harriet—being ill, and more malleable than usual—permitted this, without complaint. It was a soft, cool hand, with gold rings.

“All right?” the nurse inquired as she wheeled Harriet (Edie clicking rapidly behind, footsteps echoing on the tile) to a small, semi-private area and jerked the curtain.

Harriet suffered herself to be got into a gown, and then lay down on the crackly paper and let the nurse take her temperature

my goodness!

yes, she’s a sick girl

—and draw her blood. Then she sat up and obediently drank a tiny cup of chalky-tasting medicine that the nurse said would help her stomach. Edie sat on a stool opposite, near a glass case of medicine and an upright scale with a sliding balance. There they were, by themselves after the nurse had pulled the curtain and walked away, and Edie asked a question which Harriet only half-answered because she was partly in the room with the chalky medicine taste in her mouth but at the same time swimming in a cold river that had an evil silver sheen like light off petroleum, moonlight, and an undercurrent grabbed her legs and swept her away, some horrible old man in a wet fur hat running along the banks and shouting out words that she couldn’t hear.…

“All right. Sit up, please.”

Harriet found herself looking up into the face of a white-coated stranger. He was not an American, but an Indian, from India, with blue-black hair and droopy, melancholy eyes. He asked her if she knew her name and where she was; shone a pointy light in her face; looked into her eyes and nose and ears; felt her stomach and under her armpits with icy-cold hands that made her squirm.

“—her first seizure?” Again that word.

“Yes.”

“Did you smell or taste anything funny?” the doctor asked Harriet.

His steady black eyes made her uneasy. Harriet shook her head no.

Delicately, the doctor turned her chin up with his forefinger. Harriet saw his nostrils flare.

“Does your throat hurt?” he asked, in his buttery voice.

From far away, she heard Edie exclaim: “Good heavens, what’s that on her neck?”

“Discoloration,” said the doctor, stroking it with his fingertips, and then pressing hard with a thumb. “Does this hurt?”

Harriet made an indistinct noise. It wasn’t her throat which hurt so much as her neck. And her nose—struck by the gun’s kick—was bitterly tender to the touch, but though it felt very swollen, no one else seemed to have noticed it.

The doctor listened to Harriet’s heart and made her stick her tongue out. With fixed intensity, he looked down her throat with a light. Uncomfortably, jaw aching, Harriet cut her eyes over to the swab dispenser and disinfectant jar on the adjacent table.

“Okay,” said the doctor, with a sigh, removing the depressor.

Harriet lay down. Sharply, her stomach twisted itself and cramped. The light pulsed orange through her closed eyelids.

Edie and the doctor were talking. “The neurologist comes every two weeks,” he was saying. “Maybe he can drive up from Jackson tomorrow or the next day.…”

On he talked, in his monotonous voice. Another stab in Harriet’s stomach—a horrible one, that made her curl up on her side and clutch her abdomen. Then it stopped. Okay, thought Harriet, weak and grateful with relief, it’s over now, its over.…

“Harriet,” Edie said loudly—so loudly Harriet realized that she must have fallen asleep, or just nearly—“look at me.”

Obligingly, Harriet opened her eyes, to painful brightness.

“Look at her eyes. See how red they are? They look infected.”

“The symptoms are questionable. We’ll have to wait until the tests come back.”

Harriet’s stomach twisted again, violently; she rolled on her stomach, away from the light. She knew why her eyes were red; the water had burned them.

“What about the diarrhea? And the fever? And, good Lord, those black marks on her neck? It looks like somebody’s taken and choked her. If you ask me—”

“There may be an infection of some sort, but the seizures aren’t febrile. Febrile—”

“I know what it means, I was a nurse, sir,” said Edie curtly.

“Well, then, you should know that any dysfunction of the nervous system is the first priority,” replied the doctor, just as curtly.

“And the other symptoms—”

“Are questionable. As I said. First we’ll give her an antibiotic and start her on some fluids. We should have her electrolytes and her blood count back by tomorrow afternoon.”

Harriet was now following the conversation closely, waiting for her turn to talk. But finally she couldn’t wait any longer, and she blurted: “I have to go.”

Edie and the doctor turned and looked at her. “Well, go ahead, go,” said the doctor, flicking his hand in what was to Harriet a kingly and exotic gesture, lifting his throat like a maharajah. As she hopped off the table, she heard him call for a nurse.

But there was no nurse outside the curtain, and none came, and Harriet, desperate, struck off down the hall. A different nurse—her eyes as small and twinkly as an elephant’s—lumbered out from behind a desk. “Are you looking for something?” she said. Creakily, sluggishly, she reached for Harriet’s hand.

Harriet, panicked by her slowness, shook her head and darted off. As she skimmed light-headed down the windowless hall, her attention was fully fixed on the door at the end of the corridor that said Ladies and as she hurried past an alcove with some chairs, she didn’t stop to look when she thought she heard a voice calling: “Hat!”

Then suddenly there was Curtis, stepping out in front of her. Behind him, with his hand on Curtis’s shoulder and the mark on his face standing out blood red like a bull’s-eye, stood the preacher (thunderstorms, rattlesnakes) all in black.

Harriet stared. Then she turned and ran, down the bright antiseptic hallway. The floor was slick; her feet skidded from under her and forward she pitched, onto her face, rolling onto her back and throwing a hand over her eyes.

Fast footsteps—rubber shoes squeaking on the tile—and the next thing Harriet knew, her original nurse (the young one, with the rings and the colorful make-up) was kneeling beside her. Bonnie Fenton read her name-tag, “Upsy Daisy!” she said in a cheery voice. “Hurt yourself?”

Harriet clung to her arm, stared into the nurse’s brightly painted face with all her concentration. Bonnie Fenton, she repeated to herself, as if the name was a magic formula to keep her safe. Bonnie Fenton, Bonnie Fenton, Bonnie Fenton R.N.…

“This is why we’re not supposed to run in the halls!” said the nurse. She was talking not to Harriet, but stagily, to a third party, and—down the hall—Harriet saw Edie and the doctor emerging from the curtained enclosure. Feeling the eyes of the preacher, burning into her back, Harriet scrambled up and ran to Edie and threw her arms around Edie’s waist.

“Edie,” she cried, “take me home, take me home!”

“Harriet! What’s got into you?”

“If you go home,” said the doctor, “how can we find out what’s wrong with you?” He was trying to be friendly, but his droopy face had a waxen melted look under the eye sockets that was suddenly very frightening. Harriet began to cry.

Abstracted pat on her back: very Edie-like, that pat, brisk and businesslike, and it only made Harriet cry harder.

“She’s out of her head.”

“Usually they’re sleepy, after a seizure. But if she’s fretful we can give her a little something to help her relax.”

Fearfully, Harriet glanced over her shoulder. But the hall was empty. She reached down and touched her knee, which hurt from skidding on the floor. She’d been running from somebody; she’d fallen and hurt herself; that part was true, not something she’d dreamed.

Nurse Bonnie was disengaging Harriet from Edie. Nurse Bonnie was leading Harriet back to the curtained room.… Nurse Bonnie was unlatching a cabinet, filling a syringe from a little glass bottle.…

“Edie,” screamed Harriet.

“Harriet?” Edie poked her head through the curtain. “Don’t be silly, it’s just a shot.”

Her voice sent Harriet into a fresh hiccuping of tears. “Edie,” she said, “Edie, take me home. I’m scared. I’m scared. I can’t stay here. Those people are after me. I—”

She turned her head; she winced as the nurse pushed the needle in her arm. Then she was sliding off the table but the nurse seized her wrist. “No, we’re not finished yet, honey.”

“Edie? I … No, I don’t want that,” she said, recoiling from Nurse Bonnie, who had circled to the other side and was coming at her with a new syringe.

Politely, but without much amusement, the nurse laughed at this, while casting her eyes over to Edie for assistance.

“I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to go to sleep,” Harriet cried, all at once surrounded, shrugging off Edie on the one side and Nurse Bonnie’s soft, insistent, gold-ringed grasp on the other. “I’m afraid! I’m—”

“Not of this little needle, sweet.” Nurse Bonnie’s voice—soothing at first—had turned cool and a little frightening. “Don’t be silly. Just a little pinch and—”

Edie said: “Well, I’m just going to run home—”

“EDIE!”

“Let’s keep our voice down, sugar,” said the nurse, as she stuck the needle in Harriet’s arm and pushed the plunger home.

“Edie! No! They’re here! Don’t leave me! Don’t—”

“I’ll be back—Listen to me,” said Edie, raising her chin, her voice cutting sharp and efficient above Harriet’s panicked blithering. “I’ve got to take Allison home and then I’ll just stop at my house for a few things.” She turned to the nurse. “Will you set up a cot in her room?”

“Certainly, maam.”

Harriet rubbed the stung place on her arm. Cot. The word had a comforting, nursery sound, like poppet, like cotton, like Harriet’s old baby nickname: Hottentot. She could almost taste it on her tongue, that round, sweet word: smooth and hard, dark like a malted milk ball.

She smiled at the smiling faces around the table.

“Somebody’s sleepy now,” she heard Nurse Bonnie say.

Where was Edie? Harriet fought hard to keep her eyes open. Immense skies weighed upon her, clouds rushing in a fabulous darkness. Harriet closed her eyes, and saw tree branches tossing, and before she knew it she was asleep.

————

Eugene roamed the chilly halls, hands clasped behind his back. When at last an orderly arrived, and wheeled the child out of the examination room, he sauntered behind at a safe distance to see where they took her.

The orderly stopped by the elevator and pressed the button. Eugene turned and went back down the hall to the stairs. Emerging from the echoing stairwell, on the second floor, he heard the bell ding and then, down the hall, the gurney emerged feet-first through the stainless-steel doors, the orderly maneuvering at the head.

Down the hall they glided. Eugene closed the metal fire door as quietly as he could and—shoes clicking—strolled after them at a discreet distance. From a safe remove, he took note of the room they turned into. Then he wandered away, back towards the elevator, and had a long look at an exhibition of children’s drawings pinned on the bulletin board, also at the illumined candies in the humming snack machine.

He’d always heard it said that dogs howled before an earthquake. Well, lately when anything bad had happened, or was about to, this black-headed child was somewhere close by. And it was the child: no question. He’d got a good long look at her out in front of the Mission, the night he got bit.

And here she was again. Casually, he passed by her open door and stole a brief glance inside. A low light glowed from a ceiling recess, deepening gradually into shadow. Little was visible in the bed but a small huddle of covers. Above—up towards the light, like a jellyfish hanging in still water—floated a translucent IV bag of clear fluid with a tentacle trailing down.

Eugene walked to the water fountain, had a drink, stood around for a while examining a display for the March of Dimes. From his post, he watched a nurse come and go. But when Eugene moseyed up to the room again, and stuck his head in at the open door, he saw that the girl was not alone. A black orderly was fussing about, setting up a cot, and he was not at all responsive to Eugene’s questions.

Eugene loitered, trying not to look too conspicuous (though of course that was difficult, in the empty hall), and when, at last, he saw the nurse returning with her arms full of sheets, he stopped her going in the door.

“Who is thet child in there?” he asked, in his friendliest voice.

“Harriet’s her name. Belongs to some people named Dufresnes.”

“Ah.” The name rang a bell; he wasn’t sure why. He looked past the nurse, into the room. “Aint she got nobody with her?”

“I haven’t seen the parents, only the grandmother.” The nurse turned, with an air of finality.

“Pore little thing,” said Eugene, reluctant to let the conversation go, putting his head in the door. “What’s the matter with her?”

Before she said a word, Eugene knew from the look on her face that he’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to give out that information.”

Eugene smiled, engagingly he hoped. “You know,” he said, “I know this mark on my face aint very handsome. But it don’t make me a bad person.”

Women tended to cave in a little when Eugene referred to his infirmity, but the nurse only looked at him as if he’d said something in Spanish.

“Just asking,” said Eugene, amiably, holding up a hand. “Sorry to bother you. Maam,” he said, stepping after her. But the nurse was busy with the sheets. He thought of offering to help, but the set of her back warned him that he’d better not push his luck.

Eugene drifted back towards the candy machine. Dufresnes. Why did he know that name? Farish was the person to ask about this sort of thing; Farish knew who was who in town; Farish remembered addresses, family connections, scandals, everything. But Farish was downstairs lying in a coma and not expected to live the night.

Across from the elevator, Eugene stopped at the nurse’s station: nobody there. He leaned for a while on the counter and—pretending to inspect a photo collage, a spider plant in a gift basket—he waited. Dufresnes. Even before his word with the nurse, the episode in the hallway (and particularly the old lady, whose crispness reeked money and Baptist position) had convinced him that the child wasn’t one of Odum’s—and this was too bad, because if the girl belonged to Odum, it would have fit neatly with certain of his suspicions. Odum had good reason to get back at Farish and Danny.

Presently, the nurse emerged from the child’s room—and when she did, she gave Eugene a look. She was a pretty girl but all reddened up with lipstick and paint like the horse’s ass. Eugene turned—casually, with a casual wave—and then sauntered off back down the hall and down the stairs, past the night nurse (desk light shining spookily up into her face), down to the windowless waiting room for Intensive Care, where the shaded lamps glowed round-the-clock with a muted glow, where Gum and Curtis slept on the couch. There was no point in hanging around upstairs and calling attention to himself. He would go back upstairs once that painted-up whore went off shift.

————

Allison, at home in bed, lay on her side staring out the window at the moon. She was scarcely conscious of Harriet’s empty bed—stripped nude, vomity sheets piled in a heap on the floor. In her mind, she was singing to herself—not so much a song as an impromptu series of low-pitched notes that repeated, with variations, up and down monotonously and on and on like the song of some mournful, unknown night bird. Whether Harriet was there or not hardly made a difference to her; but presently, encouraged by the stillness on the other side of the room, she began to hum aloud, random tones and phrases that spiraled on in the darkness.

She was having a hard time falling asleep, though she didn’t know why. Sleep was Allison’s refuge; it welcomed her with open arms the moment she lay down. But now, she lay on her side, open-eyed and untroubled, humming to herself in the darkness; and sleep was a shadowy forgetful distance, a curling like smoke in abandoned attics and a singing like the sea in a pearly shell.

————

Edie, on her cot by Harriet’s bed, was awakened by the light in her face. It was late: 8:15, by her wristwatch, and she had an appointment with the accountant at nine. She got up and went into the bathroom, and her wan, drained reflection in the mirror stopped her for a moment: it was mostly the fluorescent light, but still.

She brushed her teeth, and gamely set to work on her face: pencilling her eyebrows, drawing in her lips. Edie did not trust doctors. In her experience they didn’t listen, preferring instead to strut around pretending that they had all the answers. They jumped to conclusions; they ignored what didn’t fit with their theories. And this doctor was a foreigner, on top of everything. The instant he’d heard the word seizure, this Dr. Dagoo or whatever his name was, the child’s other symptoms faded into insignificance; they were “questionable.” Questionable, thought Edie, exiting the bathroom and examining her sleeping granddaughter (with intent curiosity, as if Harriet were a diseased shrub, or mysteriously sickened house plant) because epilepsy aint what’s wrong with her.

With academic interest, she studied Harriet for several moments longer, then went back into the bathroom to dress. Harriet was a hardy child, and Edie was not terribly worried about her except in a generalized sort of way. What did worry her—and what had kept her open-eyed on the hospital cot for much of the night—was the disastrous state of her daughter’s house. Now that Edie thought about it, she had not actually been upstairs since Harriet was just a little thing. Charlotte was a pack rat, and the tendency (Edie knew) had increased since Robin’s death, but the condition of the house had shocked her thoroughly. Squalor: there was no other word. No wonder the child was sick, with garbage and trash all over the place; it was a wonder they weren’t all three in the hospital. Edie—zipping up the back of her dress—bit the inside of her cheek. Dirty dishes; piles of newspaper, towers of it, certain to attract vermin. Worst of all: the smell. All sorts of unpleasant scenarios had threaded through Edie’s mind as she lay awake, turning this way and that way on the lumpy hospital cot. The child might have been poisoned, or contracted hepatitis; she might have been bitten by a rat in her sleep. Edie had been too stunned and ashamed to confide any of these suspicions to a strange doctor—and she still was, even in the cold light of morning. What was one to say? Oh, by the way, Doctor, my daughter keeps a filthy house?

There would be roaches, and worse. Something had to be done before Grace Fountain or some other nosy neighbor called the Health Department. Confronting Charlotte would only mean excuses and tears. An appeal to the adulterous Dix was risky, because if it came to divorce (and it might) the squalor would only give Dix an edge in court. Why on earth had Charlotte let the colored woman go?

Edie pinned her hair back, swallowed a couple of aspirin with a glass of water (her ribs hurt mightily, after the night on the cot) and stepped out into the room again. All roads lead to the hospital, she thought. Since Libby’s death, she had been returning to the hospital nightly in her dreams—wandering the corridors, riding the elevator up and down, searching for floors and room numbers that didn’t exist—and now it was daytime and here she was again, in a room very like the one where Libby had died.

Harriet was still asleep—which was fine. The doctor had said she’d sleep most of the day. After the accountant, and yet another morning wasted in poring through Judge Cleve’s books (which were written practically in cypher), she had to meet with the lawyer. He was urging her to settle with this awful Mr. Rixey person—which was all well and good, except that the “reasonable compromise” he was suggesting would leave her practically destitute. Lost in thought, (Mr. Rixey had not even accepted the “reasonable compromise”; she would find out today if he had) Edie gave herself one last glance in the mirror, got her purse, and walked out of the room without noticing the preacher loitering at the end of the hall.

————

The bedsheets felt cool and delicious. Harriet lay in the morning light with her eyes tight shut. She had been dreaming of stone steps in a bright grassy field, steps that led nowhere, steps so crumbled with age that they might have been boulders tumbled and sunken in the buzzing pasture. The needle was a hateful ping in the crook of her elbow, silver and chill, cumbrous apparatus winding away from it up through the ceiling and into the white skies of dream.

For some minutes she hung between sleep and waking. Footsteps knocked across the floor (cold corridors, echoing like palaces) and she lay very still, hoping that some kindly official person would walk over and take notice of her: Harriet small, Harriet pale and ill.

The footsteps neared the bed, and stopped. Harriet sensed a presence leaning over her. Quietly she lay there, eyelids fluttering, allowing herself to be examined. Then she opened her eyes and started back in horror at the preacher, whose face was inches from her own. His scar stood out a bright, turkey-wattle red; beneath the melted tissue of the brow bone, his eye shone wet and fierce.

“Be quiet, now,” he said, with a parrot-like cock of his head. His voice was high and singsong, with an eerieness to it. “Aint no need in making noise, innit?”

Harriet would have liked to make noise—a lot of it. Frozen with fear and confusion, she stared up at him.

“I know who you are.” His mouth moved very little as he spoke. “You was at the Mission that night.”

Harriet cut her eyes over at the empty doorway. Pain flicked through her temples like electricity.

The preacher furrowed his brow at her as he leaned closer. “You was messing with them snakes. I think it was you that let em aloose, wannit?” he said, in his curious high-pitched voice. His hair pomade smelled like lilac. “And you was following my brother Danny, wasn’t you?”

Harriet stared at him. Did he know about the tower?

“How come you run from me in the hall back there?”

He didn’t know. Harriet was careful to sit very still. At school, nobody could beat her in the game where the kids tried to outstare each other. Dim bells clanged in her head. She wasn’t well; she longed to rub her eyes, start the morning over. Something about the position of her own face, as opposed to the preacher’s, didn’t make sense; it was as if he were a reflection she ought to be seeing from a different angle.

The preacher squinted at her. “You’re a bold little piece,” he said. “Bold as brass.”

Harriet felt weak and giddy. He doesn’t know, she told herself fiercely, he doesn’t know.… There was a call button for the nurse on the side of her bed, and though she wanted very badly to turn her head and look at it, she forced herself to keep still.

He was watching her closely. Beyond, the whiteness of the room swept away into airy distances, an emptiness just as sickening in its way as the close darkness of the water tank.

“Lookahere,” he said, leaning even closer. “What you so scared of? Aint nobody laid a finger on you.”

Rigidly, Harriet looked up in his face and did not flinch.

“Maybe you done something to be scared of, then? I want to know what you was up to, sneaking around my house. And if you don’t tell me, I’m on find out.”

Suddenly a cheerful voice said from the doorway: “Knock knock!”

Hastily, the preacher straightened and turned around. There, waving from the doorway, stood Roy Dial with some Sunday-school booklets and a box of candy.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” said Mr. Dial, striding in unafraid. He was in casual dress instead of the suit and tie that he wore to Sunday school: all sporty in his deck shoes and khakis, a whiff about him of Florida and Sea World. “Why Eugene. What are you doing here?”

“Mr. Dial!” The preacher sprang to offer his hand.

His tone had changed—charged with a new kind of energy—and even in her illness and fright, Harriet noted this. He’s afraid, she thought.

“Ah—yes.” Mr. Dial looked at Eugene. “Wasn’t a Ratliff admitted yesterday? In the newspaper …”

“Yes sir! My brother Farsh. He …” Eugene made a visible effort to slow down. “Well, he’s been shot, sir.”

Shot? thought Harriet, dazed.

“Shot in the neck, sir. They found him last night. He—”

“Well, my goodness!” cried Mr. Dial gaily, rearing back with a drollery which told how little he cared to hear about Eugene’s family. “Goodness gracious! I sure do hate that! I’ll be sure and stop in and see him as soon as he feels a little better! I—”

Without giving Eugene the chance to explain that Farish wasn’t going to get better, Mr. Dial threw up his hands as if to say: what do you do? and set down the box of candy on the night-stand. “I’m afraid this isn’t for you, Harriet,” he said, in dolphinly profile, leaning in cozily to peer at her with his left eye. “I was just running out before work to visit with dear Agnes Upchurch” (Miss Upchurch was a rickety old Baptist invalid, a banker’s widow, high on Mr. Dial’s list of prospects for the Building Fund) “and who should I bump into downstairs but your grandmother! Why my goodness! I said. Miss Edith! I—”

The preacher, Harriet noticed, was edging towards the door. Mr. Dial saw her looking at him, and turned.

“And how do you know this fine young lady?”

The preacher—arrested in his retreat—made the best of it. “Yes, sir,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand and stepping back to Mr. Dial’s side as if that was what he had meant to do all along, “well, sir, I was here when they brung her in last night. Too weak to walk. She was a mighty sick little girl and that’s the truth.” This he said with a conclusive air, as if further explanation could not possibly be necessary.

“And so you were just—” Mr. Dial looked as if he could hardly bring himself to say it—“visiting? With Harriet here?”

Eugene cleared his throat and looked away. “There’s my brother, sir,” he said, “and while I’m out here, I might as well try to visit and bring some comfort to others. It’s a joy to get out amongst the little ones and pour out that precious seed.”

Mr. Dial looked at Harriet, as if to say: has this man been bothering you?

“It don’t take nothing but a set of knees and a Bible. You know,” said Eugene, nodding at the television set, “that there’s the greatest detriment to a child’s salvation you can have in the house. The Sin Box, is what I call it.”

“Mr. Dial,” said Harriet suddenly—and her voice sounded thin and faraway—“where’s my grandmother?”

“Downstairs, I think,” said Mr. Dial, fixing her with his chilly porpoise eye. “On the telephone. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t feel good,” said Harriet, truthfully.

The preacher, she noticed, was easing out of the room. When he saw Harriet watching him, he gave her a look before he slid away.

“What’s the matter?” said Mr. Dial, bending down over her, overwhelming her with his sharp, fruity aftershave. “Do you want some water? Do you want some breakfast? Are you sick to your stomach?”

“I—I—” Harriet struggled to sit up. What she wanted she couldn’t ask for, not in so many words. She was afraid of being left alone, but she could not think exactly how to tell Mr. Dial this without telling him what she was afraid of, and why.

Just at that instant, the telephone at her bedside rang.

“Here, let me get that,” said Mr. Dial, snatching up the receiver and passing it to her.

“Mama?” said Harriet, faintly.

“Congratulations! A brilliant coup!”

It was Hely. His voice—though exuberant—was tinny and remote. From the hiss on the line, Harriet knew he was calling from the Saints phone in his bedroom.

“Harriet? Hah! Man, you destroyed him! You nailed him!”

“I—” Harriet’s brain wasn’t working at top speed and she couldn’t think quick enough what to say. Despite the connection, his hoots and yelps were so loud on the other end that Harriet feared Mr. Dial could hear him.

“Way to go!” In his excitement he dropped the phone, with an enormous clatter; his voice rushed back at her, breathy, deafening. “It was in the paper—”

“What?”

“I knew it was you. What are you doing in the hospital? What happened? Are you hurt? Are you shot?”

Harriet cleared her throat in a special way they had, which meant she wasn’t free to talk.

“Oh, right,” said Hely, after a somber pause. “Sorry.”

Mr. Dial, taking his candy, mouthed at her: I have to run.

“No, don’t,” said Harriet, in sudden panic, but Mr. Dial kept right on backing out the door.

See you later! he mouthed, with bright gesticulations. I got to go sell me some cars!

“Just answer yes or no, then,” Hely was saying. “Are you in trouble?”

Fearfully, Harriet gazed at the empty doorway. Mr. Dial was far from the kindest or most understanding of adults, but at least he was competent: all rectitude and pickiness, sweet moral outrage itself. Nobody would dare to hurt her if he was around.

“Are they going to arrest you? Is a policeman on guard?”

“Hely, can you do something for me?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, serious suddenly, alert as a terrier.

Harriet—an eye on the door—said: “Promise.” Though she was half-whispering, her voice carried farther than she wanted it to in the frosty silence, all Formica and slickness.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Promise me first.”

“Harriet, come on, just tell me!”

“At the water tower.” Harriet took a deep breath; there was no way to say it without coming right out and saying it. “There’s a gun lying on the ground. I need you to go—”

“A gun?”

“—to get it and throw it away,” she said hopelessly. Why even bother keeping her voice down? Who knew who was listening, on his end or even hers? She’d just watched a nurse walk past the door; now here came another, glancing in curiously as she passed.

“Jeez, Harriet!”

“Hely, I can’t go.” She felt like crying.

“But I’ve got band practice. And we have to stay late today.”

Band practice. Harriet’s heart sank. How was this ever going to work?

“Or,” Hely was saying, “or I could go now. If I hurry. Mom’s dropping me off in half an hour.”

Wanly, Harriet smiled at the nurse who put her head in at the door. What difference was it going to make, either way? Leave her father’s gun on the ground, for the police to find, or let Hely go get it? It would be all over the band hall by noon.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Hely was saying. “Hide it in your yard?”

“No,” said Harriet, so sharply that the nurse raised her eyebrows. “Throw it—” jeez, she thought, closing her eyes, just go ahead and say it—“Throw it in the …”

“The river?” Hely inquired, helpfully.

“Right,” said Harriet, shifting as the nurse (a big square woman, with stiff gray hair and large hands) reached over to plump her pillow.

“What if it won’t sink?”

It took a moment for this to register. Hely repeated the question as the nurse unhooked Harriet’s chart off the foot of the bed and departed, with a heavy side-swaying gait.

“It’s … metal,” said Harriet.

Hely, she realized with a shock, was talking to somebody on the other end.

Rapidly, he came back on. “All right! Gotta go!”

Click. Harriet sat with the dead phone to her ear, sat stunned until the dial tone came on and, fearfully (for she had never taken her eyes from the doorway, not for a moment), hung up the receiver and settled back on the pillows, looking about the room in apprehension.

————

The hours dragged, interminable, white on white. Harriet had nothing to read, and though her head ached terribly she was too afraid to go to sleep. Mr. Dial had left a Sunday-school booklet, called “Apron String Devotionals,” with a picture of a rosy baby in an old-fashioned sun bonnet pushing a flower cart, and at last, in desperation, she turned to this. It was designed for the mothers of young children, and it disgusted Harriet in a matter of moments.

As disgusted as she was, she read the whole thing from cover to flimsy cover and then sat. And sat. There was no clock in the room, no pictures to look at and nothing to keep her thoughts and fears from roiling miserably about, nothing except the pain which—intermittently—pitched through her stomach in waves. When it rolled away, she lay beached and gasping, washed clean for the moment, but soon her worries set in gnawing again with renewed energy. Hely hadn’t actually promised anything. Who knew if he’d get the gun or not? And even if he did go get it: would he have the sense to throw it away? Hely in the band hall, showing off her father’s gun. “Hey Dave, look at this!” She winced and pressed her head deep in the pillow. Her father’s gun. Her fingerprints all over it. And Hely, the biggest blabbermouth in the world. Yet who could she have asked to help her but Hely? No one. No one.

After a long while the nurse lumbered in again (her thick-soled shoes all worn down on the outer edge) to give Harriet a shot. Harriet, who was rolling her head around, and talking to herself a bit, struggled to pull away from her worries. With effort, she turned her attention to the nurse. She had a jolly weatherbeaten face with wrinkled cheeks, thick ankles and a rolling, off-centered walk. Except for her nurse’s uniform, she might have been the captain of a sailing ship, striding across decks. Her nametag said Gladys Coots.

“Now, I’m going to get this over with as quick as I can,” she was saying.

Harriet—too weak and too worried to put up her customary resistance—rolled on her stomach and grimaced as the needle slid into her hip. She hated shots, and—when younger—had screamed and cried and fought to escape, to such a degree that Edie (who knew how to give injections) had on several occasions impatiently rolled up her sleeves right in the doctor’s office and taken over with the needle.

“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked as she rolled over, rubbing the stung place on her bottom.

“Mercy! Aint nobody told you?”

“What?” cried Harriet, scrabbling back in the bed like a crab. “What happened? Where is she?”

“Sssh. Calm down!” Energetically, the nurse began to plump up the pillows. “She had to go downtown for a while, is all. Is all,” she repeated, when Harriet looked at her doubtfully. “Now lie on back and make yourself comfortable.”

Never, never again in her life would Harriet know such a long day. Pain pulsed and spangled merciless in her temples; a parallelogram of sun shimmered motionless on the wall. Nurse Coots, swaying in and out with the bedpan, was a rarity: a white elephant, much heralded, returning every century or so. In the course of the interminable morning she drew blood, administered eye-drops, brought Harriet iced water, ginger ale, a dish of green gelatin which Harriet tasted and pushed aside, cutlery clattering fretful on her bright plastic tray.

Fearfully, she sat upright in bed and listened. The corridor was a sedate net of echoes: talk at the desk, occasional laughter, the tap of canes and the scrape of walkers as gray convalescents from Physical Therapy drifted up and down the hall. Every so often, a woman’s voice came on the intercom, calling out strings of numbers, obscure commands, Carla, step into the hallway, orderly on two, orderly on two.…

As if counting out sums, Harriet worked out what she knew on her fingers, muttering under her breath, not caring if she looked like a crazy person. The preacher didn’t know about the tower. He’d said nothing to indicate he knew Danny was up there (or dead). But all that might change if the doctor figured out that bad water was what had made Harriet sick. The Trans Am was parked far enough from the tower that probably no one had thought to look up there—and if they hadn’t already, who knows, maybe they wouldn’t.

But maybe they would. And then there was her father’s gun. Why hadn’t she picked it up, how could she have forgotten? Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anybody; but the gun had been shot, they’d know that, and the fact that it was at the base of the tower would surely be enough to make somebody go up and look in the tower.

And Hely. All his cheerful questions: had she been arrested, was a policeman on guard. It would be immensely entertaining for Hely if she was arrested: not a consoling thought.

Then a horrible idea occurred to her. What if policemen were watching the Trans Am? Wasn’t the car a crime scene, like on television? Wouldn’t cops and photographers be standing around it, keeping guard? And sure, the car was parked a good bit away from the tower—but would Hely have the sense to avoid a crowd, if he saw it? For that matter—would he be able to get near the tower at all? There were the warehouses, sure, closer to where the car was parked, and probably they’d look there first. But eventually they’d spread out toward the tower, wouldn’t they? She cursed herself for not warning him to be careful. If there were a lot of people, he’d have no choice but to turn around and come home.

Around midmorning, the doctor interrupted these worries. He was Harriet’s regular doctor, who saw her when she had red throat or tonsillitis, but Harriet didn’t like him much. He was young, with a heavy drab face and prematurely heavy jowls; his features were stiff and his manner cold and sarcastic. His name was Dr. Breedlove but—partly because of the steep prices he charged—Edie had given him the nickname (grown popular locally) of “Dr. Greedy.” His unfriendliness, it was said, had kept him from a more desirable post in a better town—but he was so very curt that Harriet didn’t feel she had to keep up a false front of chumminess and smiles as she did with most adults, and for this reason she respected him grudgingly in spite of everything.

As Dr. Greedy circled her bed, he and Harriet avoided each other’s eyes like two hostile cats. Coolly he surveyed her. He looked at her chart. Presently he demanded: “Do you eat a lot of lettuce?”

“Yes,” said Harriet, although she did no such thing.

“Do you soak it in salt water?”

“No,” said Harriet, as soon as she saw that no was the answer expected of her.

He muttered something about dysentery, and unwashed lettuce from Mexico, and—after a brooding pause—he hung her chart back on the foot of her bed with a clang and turned and left.

Suddenly the telephone rang. Harriet—heedless of the IV in her arm—grabbed for it before the first ring was done.

“Hey!” It was Hely. In the background, gymnasium echoes. The high-school orchestra practiced in folding chairs on the basketball court. Harriet could hear a whole zoo of tuning-up noises: honks and chirps, clarinet squeaks and trumpet blatts.

“Wait,” said Harriet, when he started talking without interruption, “no, stop a second.” The pay phone in the school gymnasium was in a high-traffic area, no place to have a private conversation. “Just answer yes or no. Did you get it?”

“Yes, sir.” He was talking in a voice which didn’t sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice. “I retrieved the weapon.”

“Did you throw it where I told you?”

Hely crowed. “Q,” he cried, “have I ever let you down?”

In the small, sour pause that followed, Harriet became aware of noise in the background, jostles and whispers.

“Hely,” she said, sitting up straighter, “who’s there with you?”

“Nobody,” said Hely, a little too fast. But she could hear the bump in his voice as he said it, like he was knocking some kid with his elbow.

Whispers. Somebody giggled: a girl. Anger flashed through Harriet like a jolt of electricity.

“Hely,” she said, “you’d better not have anybody there with you, no,” she said, above Hely’s protestations, “listen to me. Because—”

“Hey!” Was he laughing? “What’s your problem?”

“Because,” said Harriet, raising her voice as far as she dared, “your fingerprints are on the gun.”

Except for the band, and the jostles and whispers of the kids in the background, there was no sound on the other end at all.

“Hely?”

When finally he spoke, his voice was cracked and distant. “I—Get away,” he said crossly, to some anonymous sniggerer in the background. Slight scuffle. The receiver banged against the wall. Hely came on again after a moment or two.

“Hang on, would you?” he said.

Bang went the receiver again. Harriet listened. Agitated whispers.

“No, you—” said someone.

More scuffling. Harriet waited. Footsteps, running away; something shouted, indistinct. When Hely returned, he was out of breath.

“Jeez,” he said, in an aggrieved whisper. “You set me up.”

Harriet—breathing hard herself—was silent. Her own fingerprints were on the gun too, though certainly there was no point in reminding him of that.

“Who have you told?” she demanded, after a cold silence.

“Nobody. Well—only Greg and Anton. And Jessica.”

Jessica? thought Harriet. Jessica Dees?

“Come on, Harriet.” Now he was being all whiny. “Don’t be so mean. I did what you told me to.”

“I didn’t ask you to tell Jessica Dees.”

Hely made an exasperated noise.

“It’s your fault. You shouldn’t have told anybody. Now you’re in trouble and I can’t help you.”

“But—” Hely struggled for words. “That’s not fair!” he said at last. “I didn’t tell anybody it was you!”

“Me that what?”

“I don’t know—whatever it was you did.”

“What makes you think I did anything?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Who went to the tower with you?”

“Nobody. I mean …” said Hely unhappily, realizing his mistake too late.

“Nobody.”

Silence.

“Then,” said Harriet (Jessica Dees! was he nuts?), “it’s your gun. You can’t even prove I asked you.”

“I can so!”

“Yeah? How?”

“I can,” he said sullenly, but without conviction. “I can too. Because …”

Harriet waited.

“Because …”

“You can’t prove a thing,” said Harriet. “And your fingerprints are all over it, the you-know-what. So you better go right now and think of something to tell Jessica and Greg and Anton unless you want to go to jail and die in the electric chair.”

At this, Harriet thought she had strained even Hely’s credulity but—judging from the stunned silence on the other end—apparently not.

“Look, Heal,” she said, taking pity on him. “I’m not going to tell on you.”

“You won’t?” he said faintly.

“No! It’s just you and me. Nobody knows if you didn’t tell ’em.”

“They don’t?”

“Look, just go tell Greg and those people you were pulling their leg,” said Harriet—waving goodbye to Nurse Coots, who was sticking her head in the door to say goodbye at the end of her shift. “I don’t know what you told them but say you made it up.”

“What if somebody finds it?” said Hely hopelessly. “What then?”

“When you went down to the tower, did you see anybody?”

“No.”

“Did you see the car?”

“No,” said Hely, after a moment of puzzlement. “What car?”

Good, thought Harriet. He must have stayed away from the road, and come around the back way.

“What car, Harriet? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Did you throw it in the deep part of the river?”

“Yes. Off the railroad bridge.”

“That’s good.” Hely had taken a risk, climbing up there, but he couldn’t have picked a lonelier spot. “And nobody saw? You’re sure?”

“No. But they can drag the river.” Silence. “You know,” he said. “My prints.”

Harriet didn’t correct him. “Look,” she said. With Hely you had to just keep saying the same thing over and over until he got the message. “If Jessica and those people don’t tell, nobody’ll ever know to look for any … item.”

Silence.

“So what exactly did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them the exact story.”

True enough, thought Harriet. Hely didn’t know the exact story.

“What, then?” she said.

“It was basically—I mean, it was sort of what was in the paper this morning. About Farish Ratliff getting shot. They didn’t say a whole lot, except that the dogcatcher found him last night when he was chasing a wild dog that ran off the street and back toward the old gin. Except I left out that part, about the dogcatcher. I made it, you know …”

Harriet waited.

“… more spy.”

“Well, go make it some more spy,” suggested Harriet. “Tell ’em—”

“I know!” Now he was excited again. “That’s a great idea! I can make it like From Russia with Love. You know, with the briefcase—”

“—that shoots bullets and teargas.”

“That shoots bullets and teargas! And the shoes! The shoes!” He was talking about Agent Klebb’s shoes that had switchblades in the toes.

“Yeah, that’s great. Hely—”

“And the brass knuckles, you know, on the Training Ground, you know, where she punches that big blond guy in the stomach?”

“Hely? I wouldn’t say too much.”

“No. Not too much. Like a story, though,” Hely suggested cheerfully.

“Right,” said Harriet. “Like a story.”

————

“Lawrence Eugene Ratliff?”

The stranger stopped Eugene before he got to the stairwell. He was a large, cordial-looking man with a bristly blond mustache and hard, gray, prominent eyes.

“Where you going?”

“Ah—” Eugene looked at his hands. He had been going up to the child’s room again, to see if he could get anything else out of her, but of course he couldn’t say that.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“No problem!” said Eugene, in the personable voice that so far that day had not served him well.

Steps echoing loudly, they walked past the stairwell, all the way down to the end of the chilly hall to the door marked Exit.

“I hate to bother you,” said the man, as he pushed open the door, “especially at a time like this, but I’d like to have a word with you, if you don’t mind.”

Out they stepped, from antiseptic dim to scorching heat. “What can I do for you?” said Eugene, slicking back his hair with one hand. He felt exhausted and stiff, from spending the night sitting up in a chair, and though he’d spent too much time at the hospital lately, the roasting afternoon sun was the last place he wanted to be.

The stranger sat down on a concrete bench, and motioned for Eugene to do the same. “I’m looking for your brother Danny.”

Eugene sat down beside him and said nothing. He’d had enough commerce with the police to know that the wisest policy—always—was to play it close to the vest.

The cop clapped his hands. “Gosh, it’s hot out here, aint it?” he said. He rummaged in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and took his time lighting one. “Your brother Danny is friendly with an individual named Alphonse de Bienville,” he said, blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth. “Know him?”

“Know of him.” Alphonse was Catfish’s given name.

“He seems like a real busy fellow.” Then, confidentially: “He’s got a finger in every kind of damn thing going on around here, don’t he?”

“I couldn’t say.” Eugene had as little to do with Catfish as possible. Catfish’s loose, easy, irreverent manner made him extremely uncomfortable; Eugene was tongue-tied and awkward around him, always at a loss for a reply, and he sensed that Catfish made fun of him behind his back.

“How does he fit into that little business yall are running out there?”

Eugene, stiffening inside, sat with his hands dangling between his knees and tried to keep his face composed.

The cop stifled a yawn, and then stretched his arm out along the back of the bench. He had a habit of nervously patting his stomach, like a man who’s just lost some weight and wants to make sure that his stomach is still flat.

“Listen, we know all about it, Eugene,” he said, “what yall got going on out there. We got a half-dozen men out at your grandmother’s place. So come on, be straight with me and save us both a little time.”

“I’m on be honest with you,” said Eugene, turning to look directly into his face. “I’ve got nothing to do with any of that out there in the shed.”

“You know about the lab, then. Tell me where the drugs are.”

“Sir, you know more about it than I do, and that’s the truth.”

“Well, here’s a little something else you might like to know. We’ve got an officer injured out there from one of those … punji sticks yall have rigged up around the place. Lucky for us he fell down hollering before somebody stepped on one of those trip wires and blowed the place up.”

“Farsh has some mental problems,” said Eugene, after a small, stunned silence. The sun was shining right into his eyes and he felt very uncomfortable. “He’s been in the hospital.”

“Yes, and he’s a convicted felon, too.”

He was looking at Eugene steadily. “Listen,” said Eugene, crossing his legs spasmodically, “I know what you’re thinking, I’ve had some problems, I admit it, but that’s all in the past. I’ve asked forgiveness from God and rendered my debt unto the state. Now my life belongs to Jesus Christ.”

“Uh huh.” The cop was quiet for a moment. “So tell me. How does your brother Danny fit into all this?”

“Him and Farsh drove off together, yesterday morning. That’s all I know, and nothing more.”

“Your grandmother says they quarreled.”

“I wouldn’t say quarled exactly,” Eugene said, after a thoughtful pause. There was no reason for him to make things worse for Danny than they already were. If Danny hadn’t shot Farish—well, then, he’d have an explanation. And if he had—as Eugene feared—well, then, there was nothing that Eugene could say or do to help him.

“Your grandmother says it nearly come to blows. Danny done something to Farish to get him mad.”

“I never saw it.” Typical of Gum, to say something like that. Farish never let Gum go anywhere near the police. She was so partisan in her relationships with her grandsons that she was liable to start complaining about Danny or Eugene and tattling on them about one thing and another even as she was extolling Farish to the skies.

“All right, then.” The cop stubbed out his cigarette. “I just want to make something clear, all right? This is an interview, Eugene, not an interrogation. There’s no point in me taking you down to the station and reading you your rights unless I have to, are we agreed on that?”

“Yes sir,” said Eugene—meeting his eye, looking quickly away. “I appreciate it, sir.”

“So. Just between the two of us, where do you think Danny is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Now, from what I hear, yall were real close,” said the cop in the same confidential tone. “I can’t believe he’d take off somewhere without telling you. Any friends I should know about? Connections out of state? He can’t have got too far on his own, on foot, not without some kind of help.”

“What makes you think he took off? How do you know he aint laying dead or hurt somewhere like Farsh?”

The cop clasped his knee. “Now, it’s interesting you ask that. Because we took Alphonse de Bienville into custody just this morning to ask him the very same thing.”

Eugene sat pondering this new wrinkle. “You think Catfish done it?”

“Done what?” said the cop casually.

“Shot my brother.”

“Well.” For a moment the cop sat staring into space. “Catfish is an enterprising businessman. Certainly he saw a chance to make a quick buck, moving in on yall’s concern, and that’s what it looks like he planned to do. But here’s the problem, Eugene. We can’t find Danny, and we can’t find the drugs. And we got no evidence that Catfish knows where they are, either. So we’re back to square one. That’s why I was hoping you could maybe help me out a little.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Eugene sat rubbing his mouth. “I just don’t know what I can do for you.”

“Well, maybe you’d better think about it some more. Since we’re talking murder and all.”

“Murder?” Eugene sat stunned. “Farish is dead?” For a moment, he couldn’t catch his breath in the heat. He hadn’t been up to Intensive Care in over an hour; he’d allowed Gum and Curtis to go back up by themselves from the cafeteria, after their vegetable soup and banana pudding, while he sat and drank a cup of coffee.

The cop looked surprised—but whether it was real surprise, or fake surprise, Eugene couldn’t tell.

“You didn’t know?” he said. “I seen you coming down the hall thataway and I just thought—”

“Listen,” said Eugene, who had already stood up, and was moving away, “listen. I need to get in there and be with my grandmother. I—”

“Go on, go on,” said the cop, still looking away, flinging out a hand, “get back in there and do what you need to.”

————

Eugene went in at the side door, and stood dazed for a moment. A passing nurse caught his eye, gave him a grave look and a little shake of her head, and all of a sudden he began to run, shoes slapping noisily, past wide-eyed nurses and all the way down to Intensive Care. He heard Gum before he saw her—a dry, small, lonely-sounding wail that made his heart swell with a sharp pain. Curtis—frightened-looking, gasping for breath—sat in a chair in the hall, clutching a large stuffed animal he hadn’t had before. A lady from Patient Services—she’d been kind when they’d arrived at the hospital, ushered them directly back to Intensive Care with no nonsense—was holding his hand and talking to him quietly. She stood when she saw Eugene. “Here he is,” she said to Curtis, “he’s back, sweetie, don’t worry.” Then she glanced at the door of the next room. To Eugene she said: “Your grandmother …”

Eugene—arms outstretched—went to her. She pushed by him and staggered into the hallway, crying out Farish’s name in a strange, thin, high-pitched voice.

The lady from Patient Services caught the sleeve of Dr. Breedlove as he was passing. “Doctor,” she said, nodding at Curtis, who was choking for breath and practically blue in the face, “he’s having some breathing difficulty.”

The doctor stopped, for half a second, and looked at Curtis. Then he snapped: “Epinephrine.” A nurse hastened away. To another nurse, he snapped: “Why hasn’t Mrs. Ratliff been sedated yet?”

And somehow, in the middle of all the confusion—orderlies, a shot in the arm for Curtis (“here, honey, this’ll make you feel better right away”) and a pair of nurses converging on his grandmother—there was the cop again.

“Listen,” he was saying, palms in the air, “you just do what you have to.”

“What?” said Eugene, looking around.

“I’ll be waiting for you out here.” He nodded. “Because I think it’ll speed things up if you come on down to the station with me. Whenever you’re ready.”

Eugene looked around. Things hadn’t sunk in yet; it was like he was seeing everything through a cloud. His grandmother had grown quiet and was being shuffled away down the cold gray hall between a pair of nurses. Curtis was rubbing his arm—but, miraculously, his wheezing and choking had quieted. He showed Eugene the stuffed animal—a rabbit, it looked like.

“Mine!” he said, rubbing his swollen eyes with his fist.

The cop was still looking at Eugene as if expecting him to say something.

“My little brother,” he said, wiping a hand over his face. “He’s retarded. I can’t just leave him here by himself.”

“Well, bring him along,” said the cop. “I’ll bet we can find a candy bar for him.”

“Honey?” said Eugene—and was knocked backwards by Curtis rushing towards him. He threw his arms around Eugene and mashed his damp face in Eugene’s shirt.

“Love,” he said, in a muffled voice.

“Well, Curtis,” said Eugene, patting him awkwardly on the back, “well there, stop it now, I love you too.”

“They’re sweet things, aint they?” said the cop indulgently. “My sister had one of those Down’s syndromes. Didn’t live past his fifteenth birthday, but my Lord we all loved him. That’s the saddest funeral I’ve ever been to.”

Eugene made an indistinct noise. Curtis suffered from numerous illnesses, some of them serious, and this was the last thing he wanted to think about right now. He realized that what he actually needed to do was to ask somebody if he could see Farish’s body, spend a few minutes alone with it, say a little prayer. Farish had never seemed too concerned with his destiny after death (or his destiny on earth, for that matter) but that didn’t mean he hadn’t received grace at the last. After all: God had smiled unexpectedly on Farish before. When he’d shot himself in the head, after the bulldozer incident, and the doctors all said the machines were the only thing keeping him alive, he’d surprised them all by rising up like Lazarus. How many men had woken almost literally from the dead, sitting up suddenly amidst the life-support machines, asking for mashed potatoes? Would God pluck a soul so dramatically from the grave, just to cast it down to damnation? If he could see the body—look upon it with his own eyes—he felt he would know the state in which Farish had passed away.

“I want to see my brother, before they take him away,” he said. “I’m going to find the doctor.”

The cop nodded. Eugene turned to walk away, but Curtis—in a sudden panic—clutched his wrist.

“You can leave him out here with me, if you want,” said the cop. “I’ll look after him.”

“No,” said Eugene, “no, that’s fine, he can come, too.”

The cop looked at Curtis; he shook his head. “When something like this happens, it’s a blessing for them,” he said. “Not understanding, I mean.”

“Don’t none of us understand it,” said Eugene.

————

The medicine they gave Harriet made her sleepy. Presently, there was a knock outside her door: Tatty. “Darling!” she cried, swooping in. “How’s my child?”

Harriet—elated—struggled up in bed and held out her arms. Then, suddenly, it seemed to her that she was dreaming, and that the room was empty. The strangeness so overwhelmed her that she rubbed her eyes and tried to hide her confusion.

But it was Tatty. She kissed Harriet on the cheek. “But she looks well, Edith,” she was crying. “She looks alert.”

“Well, she’s much improved,” said Edie crisply. She set a book on Harriet’s bed table. “Here, I thought you might like this to keep you company.”

Harriet lay back on the pillow and listened to the two of them talking, their familiar voices mingling in a radiant and harmonious nonsense. Then she was somewhere else, in a dark blue gallery with shrouded furniture. Rain fell and fell.

“Tatty?” she said, sitting up in the bright room. It was later in the day. The sunlight on the opposite wall had stretched, and shifted, and slunk down the wall until it spilled in a glazed pool upon the floor.

They were gone. She felt dazed, as if she’d walked from a dark movie matinee out into the startling afternoon. A fat, familiar-looking blue book sat on her bed table: Captain Scott. At the sight of it, her heart lifted; just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she reached out and put her hand on it, and then—despite her headache and her grogginess—she laboriously sat up in bed and tried to read for a while. But as she read, the silence of the hospital room sank gradually into a glacial and otherworldly stillness, and soon she got the unpleasant sense that the book was speaking to her—Harriet—in a direct and most disturbing way. Every few lines, a phrase would stand out quite sharply and with pointed meaning, as if Captain Scott were addressing her directly, as if he had deliberately encoded a series of personal messages to her in his journals from the Pole. Every few lines, some new significance struck her. She tried to argue herself out of it, but it was no use, and soon she grew so afraid that she was forced to put the book aside.

Dr. Breedlove walked past her open door, and stopped short to see her sitting upright in bed, looking fearful and agitated.

“Why are you awake?” he demanded. He came in and examined the chart, his jowly face expressionless, and clomped off. Within five minutes, a nurse hurried into the room with yet another hypodermic needle.

“Well, go on, roll over,” she said crossly. She seemed angry at Harriet for some reason.

After she left, Harriet kept her face pressed into the pillow. The blankets were soft. Noises stretched out and ran smoothly over her head. Then down she spun quickly, into wide heartsick emptiness, the old weightlessness of first nightmares.

————

“But I didn’t want tea,” said a fretful, familiar voice.

The room was now dark. There were two people in it. A weak light burned in a corona behind their heads. Then, to her dismay, Harriet heard a voice she hadn’t heard in a long time: her father’s.

“Tea’s all they had.” He spoke with an exaggerated politeness that verged on sarcasm. “Except coffee and juice.”

“I told you not to go all the way down to the cafeteria. There’s a Coke machine in the hall.”

“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”

Harriet lay very still, with her eyes half-closed. Whenever both of her parents were in the room, the atmosphere grew chilled and uncomfortable, no matter how civil they were to each other. Why are they here? she thought drowsily. I wish it was Tatty and Edie.

Then, with a shock, she realized that she’d heard her father say Danny Ratliff’s name.

“Isn’t that too bad?” he was saying. “They were all talking about it, down in the cafeteria.”

“What?”

“Danny Ratliff. Robin’s little friend, don’t you remember? He used to come up in the yard and play sometimes.”

Friend? thought Harriet.

Fully awake now, her heart pounding so wildly that it was an effort not to tremble, she lay with her eyes closed, and listened. She heard her father take a sip of coffee. Then he continued: “Came by the house. Afterwards. Raggedy little boy, don’t you remember him? Knocked on the door and said he was sorry he wasn’t at the funeral, he didn’t have a ride.”

But that’s not true, thought Harriet, panicked now. They hated each other. Ida told me so.

“Oh, yes!” Her mother’s voice lively now, with a kind of pain. “Poor little thing. I do remember him. Oh, that’s too bad.”

“It’s strange.” Harriet’s father sighed, heavily. “Seems like yesterday he and Robin were playing around the yard.”

Harriet lay rigid with horror.

“I was so sorry,” said Harriet’s mother, “I was so sorry when I heard he’d started getting into trouble a while ago.”

“It was bound to happen, with a family like that.”

“Well, they’re not all bad. I saw Roy Dial in the hall and he told me that one of the other brothers had dropped in to see about Harriet.”

“Oh, really?” Her father took another long sip of his coffee. “Do you think he knew who she was?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. That’s probably why he stopped in.”

Their talk turned to other things as Harriet—seized by fear—lay with her face pressed in the pillow, very still. Never had it occurred to her that she might be wrong in her suspicions about Danny Ratliff—simply wrong. What if he hadn’t killed Robin at all?

She had not bargained for the black horror that fell over her at this thought, as if of a trap clicking shut behind her, and immediately she tried to push the thought from her mind. Danny Ratliff was guilty, she knew it, knew it for a fact; it was the only explanation that made any sense. She knew what he’d done, even if nobody else did.

But all the same, doubt had come down on her suddenly and with great force, and with it the fear that she’d stumbled blindly into something terrible. She tried to calm herself down. Danny Ratliff had killed Robin; she knew it was true, it had to be. And yet when she tried to remind herself exactly how she knew it was true, the reasons were no longer so clear in her mind as they had been and now, when she tried to recall them, she couldn’t.

She bit the inside of her cheek. Why had she been so sure it was him? At one time, she was very sure; the idea had felt right, and that was the important thing. But—like the foul taste in her mouth—a queasy fear now lingered close, and would not leave her. Why had she been so sure? Yes, Ida had told her a lot of things—but all of a sudden those accounts (the quarrels, the stolen bicycle) no longer seemed quite so convincing. Didn’t Ida hate Hely, for absolutely no reason? And when Hely came over to play, didn’t Ida often get outraged on Harriet’s behalf without bothering to find out whose fault the quarrel was?

Maybe she was right. Maybe he had done it. But now, how would she ever know for sure? With a sickening feeling, she remembered the hand clawing up from the green water.

Why didn’t I ask? she thought. He was right there. But no, she was too frightened, all she’d wanted was to get away.

“Oh, look!” said Harriet’s mother suddenly, standing up. “She’s awake!”

Harriet froze. She’d been so caught up in her thoughts, she’d forgotten to keep her eyes shut.

“Look who’s here, Harriet!”

Her father rose, advanced to the bed. Even in the shadowy room, Harriet could tell that he had put on a bit of weight since she had last seen him.

“Haven’t seen old Daddy in a while, have you?” he said. When he was in a jocular mood, he liked to refer to himself as “old Daddy.” “How’s my girl?”

Harriet suffered herself to be kissed on the forehead and cuffed on the cheek—briskly, with a cupped hand. This was her father’s customary endearment, but Harriet disliked it intensely, especially from the hand that sometimes slapped her in anger.

“How you doing?” he was saying. He’d been smoking cigars; she could smell it on him. “You’ve fooled these doctors but good, girl!” He said it as if she’d pulled off some great academic or sports triumph.

Harriet’s mother was hovering anxiously. “She may not feel like talking, Dix.”

Her father said, without turning around: “Well, she doesn’t have to talk if she doesn’t feel like it.”

Looking up into her father’s stout red face, his quick, observant eyes, Harriet had an intense urge to ask him about Danny Ratliff. But she was afraid.

“What?” her father said.

“I didn’t say anything.” Harriet’s voice surprised her, it was so scratchy and feeble.

“No, but you were about to.” Her father regarded her cordially. “What is it?”

“Leave her alone, Dix,” said her mother in a low murmur.

Her father turned his head—quickly, without saying a word—in a manner that Harriet knew very well.

“But she’s tired!”

“I know she’s tired. I’m tired,” said Harriet’s father, in the cold and excessively polite voice. “I drove eight hours in the car to get here. Now I’m not supposed to speak to her?”

————

After they finally left—the visiting hours were over at nine—Harriet was much too afraid to go to sleep, and sat up in bed with her eyes on the door for fear that the preacher would come back. An un-announced visit from her father was in itself occasion for anxiety—especially given the new threat of moving up to Nashville—but now he was the least of her worries; who knew what the preacher might do, with Danny Ratliff dead?

Then she thought of the gun cabinet, and her heart sank. Her father didn’t check it every time he came home—usually only in hunting season—but it would be just her luck if he did check it. Maybe throwing the gun in the river had been a mistake. If Hely had hidden it in the yard, she could have put it back where it belonged, but it was too late for that now.

Never had she dreamed he’d be home so soon. Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anyone with the gun—for some reason she kept forgetting that—and if Hely was telling the truth, it was at the bottom of the river now. If her father checked the cabinet, and noticed it was missing, he couldn’t connect it to her, could he?

And then there was Hely. She’d told him almost nothing of the real story—and that was good—but she hoped he wouldn’t think too much about the fingerprints. Would he realize eventually that nothing prevented him from telling on her? By the time he understood that it was her word against his—by then, maybe enough time would have passed.

People didn’t pay attention. They didn’t care; they would forget. Soon whatever trail she had left would be quite cold. That was what had happened with Robin, hadn’t it? The trail had got cold. And the ugly thought dawned on Harriet that Robin’s killer—whoever he was—must have at some point sat thinking some of these very same thoughts.

But I didn’t kill anybody, she told herself, staring at the coverlet. He drowned. I couldn’t help it.

“What, hun?” said the nurse who had come in to check her IV bottle. “Need something?”

Harriet sat very still, with her knuckles in her mouth, staring at the white coverlet until the nurse had departed.

No: she hadn’t killed anybody. But it was her fault he was dead. And maybe he had never hurt Robin at all.

Thoughts like these made Harriet feel sick, and she tried—willfully—to think of something else. She had done what she had to; it was silly to start doubting herself and her methods at this stage. She thought of the pirate Israel Hands, floating in the blood-warm waters off the Hispaniola, and there was something nightmarish and gorgeous in those heroic shallows: horror, false skies, vast delirium. The ship was lost; she had tried to recapture it all on her own. She had almost been a hero. But now, she feared, she wasn’t a hero at all, but something else entirely.

At the end—at the very end, as the winds billowed and beat in the walls of the tent, as a single candle flame guttered in a lost continent—Captain Scott had written with numbed fingers in a small notebook of his failure. Yes, he’d struck out bravely for the impossible, reached the dead untraveled center of the world—but for nothing. All the daydreams had failed him. And she realized how sad he must have been out there on the ice fields, in the Antarctic night, with Evans and Titus Oates lost already, under immense snows, and Birdie and Dr. Wilson still and silent in the sleeping bags, drifting away, dreaming of green fields.

Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

————

Harriet woke late, after a troubled sleep, to a depressing breakfast tray: fruit gelatin, apple juice, and—mysteriously—a small dish of boiled white rice. All night long, she’d had bad dreams about her father standing oppressively around her bed, walking back and forth and scolding her about something she’d broken, something that belonged to him.

Then she realized where she was, and her stomach contracted with fear. Rubbing her eyes in confusion she sat up to take the tray—and saw Edie in the armchair by her bed. She was drinking coffee—not coffee from the hospital cafeteria, but coffee she’d brought from home, in the plaid thermos—and reading the morning newspaper.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “Your mother is coming out soon.”

Her manner was crisp and perfectly normal. Harriet tried to force her uneasiness out of her mind. Nothing had changed overnight, had it?

“You need to eat your breakfast,” said Edie. “Today is a big day for you, Harriet. After the neurologist checks you out, they may even discharge you this afternoon.”

Harriet made an effort to compose herself. She must try to pretend that everything was all right; she must try to convince the neurologist—even if it meant lying to him—that she was perfectly well. It was vital that she be allowed to go home; she must concentrate all her energies on escaping the hospital before the preacher came back to her room or somebody figured out what was going on. Dr. Breedlove had said something about unwashed lettuce. She must hold on to that, fix it in her mind, bring it up if she was questioned; she must keep them at all costs from making the connection between her illness and the water tower.

With a violent exertion of will, she turned her attention away from her thoughts and to her breakfast tray. She would eat the rice; it would be like eating breakfast in China. Here I am, she told herself, I’m Marco Polo, I’m having breakfast with the Kublai Khan. But I don’t know how to eat with chopsticks, so I’m eating with this fork instead.

Edie had gone back to her newspaper. Harriet glanced at the front of it—and stopped with the fork halfway to her mouth. MURDER SUSPECT FOUND, read the headline. In the picture, two men were lifting a limp, sagging body by the armpits. The face was ghastly white, with long hair plastered down at the sides, and so distorted that it looked less like an actual face than a sculpture of melted wax: a twisted black hole for a mouth and big black eyeholes like a skull. But—distorted as it was—there was no question that it was Danny Ratliff.

Harriet sat up straight in bed, and tilted her head sideways, trying to read the article from where she sat. Edie turned the page and—noticing Harriet’s stare, and the odd angle of her head—put down the paper and said sharply: “Are you sick? Do you need me to fetch the basin?”

“May I see the paper?”

“Certainly.” Edie reached into the back section, pulled out the funnies, handed them to Harriet, and then, tranquilly, returned to her reading.

“They’re raising our city taxes again,” she said. “I don’t know what they do with all this money they ask for. They’ll build some more roads they never finish, that’s what they’ll do with it.”

Furiously, Harriet stared down at the Comics page without actually seeing it. MURDER SUSPECT FOUND. If Danny Ratliff was a suspect—if suspect was the word they’d used—that meant he was alive, didn’t it?

She stole another glance at the paper. Edie had now folded it in half, so the front page was invisible, and had started work on the crossword puzzle.

“I hear Dixon paid you a visit last night,” she said, with the coolness that crept into her voice whenever she mentioned Harriet’s father. “And how was that?”

“Fine.” Harriet—her breakfast forgotten—sat upright in bed and tried to conceal her agitation, but she felt that if she didn’t see the front page, and find out what had happened, she would die.

He doesn’t even know my name, she told herself. At least she didn’t think he knew it. If her own name was mentioned in the paper, Edie would not be sitting so calmly in front of her at the moment, working the crossword puzzle.

He tried to drown me, she thought. He would hardly want to go around telling people about that.

At length, she worked up the courage and said: “Edie, who is that man on the front page of the paper?”

Edie looked blank; she turned the newspaper over. “Oh, that,” she said. “He killed somebody. He was hiding from the police up in that old water tower and got trapped up there and nearly drowned. I expect he was pretty glad when somebody showed up to get him.” She looked at the paper for a moment. “There are a bunch of people named Ratliff who live out past the river,” she said. “I seem to remember an old Ratliff man that worked out at Tribulation for a while. Tatty and I were scared to death of him because he didn’t have his front teeth.”

“What did they do with him?” said Harriet.

“Who?”

“That man.”

“He confessed to killing his brother,” said Edie, returning to her crossword, “and they were looking for him on a drugs charge, too. So I would expect that they’ve carried him away to jail.”

“Jail?” Harriet was silent. “Does it say so in the paper?”

“Oh, he’ll be out again soon enough, never you worry,” said Edie crisply. “They hardly catch these people and lock them up before they let them out again. Don’t you want your breakfast?” she said, noting Harriet’s untouched tray.

Harriet made a conspicuous display of returning to her rice. If he’s not dead, she thought, then I’m not a murderer. I haven’t done anything. Or have I?

“There. That’s better. You’ll want to eat a little something before they run these tests, whatever they are,” said Edie. “If they take blood, it may make you a little dizzy.”

Harriet ate, diligently, with her eyes down, but her mind raced back and forth like an animal in a cage, and suddenly a thought so horrible leapt afresh to her mind that she blurted, aloud: “Is he sick?”

“Who? That boy, you mean?” said Edie crossly, without looking up from her puzzle. “I don’t hold with all this nonsense about criminals being sick.”

Just then, someone knocked loudly on the open door of the room, and Harriet started up from her bed in such alarm that she nearly upset her tray.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Baxter,” said the man, offering Edie his hand. Though he was young-looking—younger than Dr. Breedlove—his hair was thinning at the top; he was carrying an old-fashioned black doctor bag which looked very heavy. “I’m the neurologist.”

“Ah.” Edie looked suspiciously at his shoes—running shoes with fat soles and blue suede trim, like the shoes the track team wore up at the high school.

“I’m surprised yall aren’t having rain up here,” the doctor said, opening his bag and beginning to fish around in it. “I drove up from Jackson early this morning—”

“Well,” said Edie briskly, “you’ll be the first person that hasn’t made us wait all day around here.” She was still looking at his shoes.

“When I left home,” said the doctor, “at six o’clock, there was a severe thunderstorm warning for Central Mississippi. It was raining down there like you wouldn’t believe.” He unrolled a rectangle of gray flannel on the bedside table; upon it, in a neat line, he placed a light, a silver hammer, a black gadget with dials.

“I drove through some terrible weather to get here,” he said. “For a while I was afraid I was going to have to go back home.”

“Well, I declare,” said Edie politely.

“It’s lucky I made it,” said the doctor. “Around Vaiden, the roads were really bad—”

He turned, and as he did so, observed Harriet’s expression.

“My goodness! Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not going to hurt you.” He looked her over for a moment, and then he closed the bag.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll just start out by asking you some questions.” He got her chart off the foot of the bed and gazed at it steadily, his breaths loud in the stillness.

“How about that?” he said, looking up at Harriet. “You’re not afraid of answering a few questions, are you?”

“No.”

“No sir,” said Edie, putting the newspaper aside.

“Now, these are going to be some real easy questions,” said the doctor, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “You’re going to be wishing that all the questions on your tests at school were this easy. What’s your name?”

“Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.”

“Good. How old are you, Harriet?”

“Twelve and a half.”

“When’s your birthday?”

He asked Harriet to count backward from ten; he asked her to smile, and frown, and stick out her tongue; he asked her to keep her head still and follow his finger with her eyes. Harriet did as she was told—shrugging her shoulders for him, touching her nose with her finger, bending her knees and then straightening them—while all the time keeping her expression composed and her breath calm.

“Now, this is an ophthalmoscope,” the doctor said to Harriet. He smelled distinctly of alcohol—whether rubbing alcohol, or drinking alcohol, or even a sharp, alcohol-smelling aftershave, Harriet could not tell. “Nothing to worry about, all it’s going to do is flash a real strong light back there on your optic nerve so I can see if you’ve got any pressure on your brain …”

Harriet gazed fixedly ahead. An uneasy thought had just occurred to her: if Danny Ratliff wasn’t dead, how was she going to keep Hely from talking about what had happened? When Hely found out that Danny was alive, he wouldn’t care any more about his fingerprints on the gun; he would feel free to say what he wanted, without fear of the electric chair. And he would want to talk about what had happened; of that, Harriet was sure. She would have to think of a way to keep him quiet …

The doctor was not true to his word, as the tests grew more and more unpleasant as they went along—a stick down Harriet’s throat, to make her gag; wisps of cotton on her eyeball, to make her blink; a hammer rapped on her funny bone and a sharp pin stuck here and there on her body, to see if she could feel it. Edie—arms crossed—stood off to the side, observing him closely.

“You look mighty young to be a doctor,” she said.

The doctor did not answer. He was still busy with the pin. “Feel that?” he said to Harriet.

Harriet—her eyes closed—twitched fretfully as he jabbed her forehead and then her cheek. At least the gun was gone. Hely didn’t have any proof that he had gone down there to get it for her. She must keep telling herself that. As bad as things might seem, it was still his word against hers.

But he would be full of questions. He would want to know all about it—everything that had happened down at the water tower—and now what could she say? That Danny Ratliff had gotten away from her, that she hadn’t actually done what she set out to do? Or, worse: that maybe she’d been mistaken all along; that maybe she didn’t really know who murdered Robin, and maybe she never would?

No, she thought in a sudden panic, that’s not good enough. I have to think of something else.

“What?” said the doctor. “Did I hurt you?”

“A little.”

“That’s a good sign,” said Edie. “If it hurts.”

Maybe, thought Harriet—looking up at the ceiling, pressing her lips together as the doctor dragged something sharp down the sole of her foot—maybe Danny Ratliff really had killed Robin. It would be easier if he had. Certainly it would be the easiest thing to tell Hely: that Danny Ratliff had confessed to her at the end (maybe it was an accident, maybe he hadn’t meant to do it?), maybe that he’d even begged her forgiveness. Rich possibilities of story began to open like poisonous flowers all around her. She could say that she’d spared Danny Ratliff’s life, standing over him in a grand gesture of mercy; she could say that she’d taken pity on him at the last and left him up in the tower to be rescued.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the doctor said, standing up.

Harriet said, rapidly: “Now can I go home?”

The doctor laughed. “Ho!” he said. “Not so fast. I’m just going to go out in the hall and talk to your grandmother for a few minutes, is that all right?”

Edie stood up. Harriet heard her say, as the two of them were walking out of the room, “It’s not meningitis, is it?”

“No, maam.”

“Did they tell you about the vomiting and diarrhea? And the fever?”

Quietly, Harriet sat in her bed. She could hear the doctor talking out in the hall, but though she was anxious to know what he was saying about her, the murmur of his voice was remote and mysterious and much too low for her to hear. She stared at her hands on the white coverlet. Danny Ratliff was alive, and though she never would have believed it, even half an hour ago, she was glad. Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

————

“Geez,” said Pem, and pushed back from the table, where he was eating a slice of Boston cream pie for breakfast. “Two whole days he was up there. Poor guy. Even if he did kill his brother.”

Hely looked up from his cereal and—with an almost unbearable effort—managed to keep his mouth shut.

Pem shook his head. His hair was still damp from the shower. “He couldn’t even swim. Imagine that. He was in there jumping up and down for two whole days, trying to keep his head above water. It’s like this thing I read, I think it was World War II and this plane went down in the Pacific. These guys were in the water for days, and there were tons of sharks. You couldn’t go to sleep, you had to be swimming around and watching for sharks constantly, or else they’d slip up and bite your leg off.” He looked hard at the picture, and shuddered. “Poor guy. Two whole days stuck up in that nasty thing, like a rat in a bucket. It’s a stupid place to hide, if you couldn’t swim.”

Hely, unable to resist, blurted: “That’s not how it happened.”

“Right,” said Pem, in a bored voice. “Like you know.”

Hely—agitated, swinging his legs—waited for his brother to look up from the newspaper or say something else.

“It was Harriet,” he said at last. “She did it.”

“Hmm?”

“It was her. She was the one pushed him in there.”

Pem looked at him. “Pushed who?” he said. “You mean Danny Ratliff?”

“Yes. Because he killed her brother.”

Pem snorted. “Danny Ratliff didn’t kill Robin, any more than I did,” he said, turning the page of the newspaper. “We were all in the same class in school.”

“He did,” said Hely devoutly. “Harriet has proof.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know—a lot of stuff. But she can prove it.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway,” said Hely, unable to contain himself, “she followed them down there, and chased them with a gun, and she shot Farish Ratliff, and then she made Danny Ratliff climb up the water tower and jump in.”

Pemberton turned to the back of the paper, to the comic strips. “I think Mom’s been letting you drink too much Coke,” he said.

“It’s true! I swear!” said Hely in agitation. “Because—” And then he remembered that he couldn’t say just how he knew, and looked down.

“If she had a gun,” said Pemberton, “why didn’t she just shoot them both and get it over with?” He pushed his plate aside and looked at Hely like he was a cretin. “How the hell is Harriet going to make Danny Ratliff of all people climb up that thing? Danny Ratliff is a tough son of a bitch. Even if she had a gun, he could take it away from her in two seconds. Hell, he could take a gun away from me in two seconds. If you’re going to make up lies, Hely, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“I don’t know how she did it,” said Hely, stubbornly, staring into his cereal bowl, “but she did it. I know she did.”

“Read the thing yourself,” said Pem, pushing the paper at him, “and see what an idiot you are. They had drugs hidden at the tower. And they were fighting over them. There were drugs floating in the water. That’s why they were up there in the first place.”

Hely—with a gigantic effort—remained silent. He was suddenly, uneasily conscious that he’d said a whole lot more than he should have.

“Besides,” said Pemberton, “Harriet’s in the hospital. You know that, dum-dum.”

“Well, what if she was down at the water tower with a gun?” said Hely angrily. “What if she got in a fight with those guys? And got hurt? And what if she left the gun at the water tower, and what if she asked somebody to go and—”

“No. Harriet is in the hospital because she has epilepsy. Epilepsy,” said Pemberton, tapping his forehead. “You moron.”

“Oh, Pem!” said their mother from the doorway. Her hair was freshly blow-dried; she was in a short little tennis dress that showed off her tan. “Why’d you tell him?”

“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to,” said Pem sulkily.

“I told you not to!”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

Hely, in confusion, looked between the two of them.

“It’s such a stigma for a child at school,” said their mother, sitting down with them at the table. “It would be terrible for her if it got around. Although,” she said, reaching for Pem’s fork, taking a big bite of his leftover pie, “I wasn’t surprised when I heard it, and neither was your father. It explains a lot.”

“What is epilepsy?” said Hely uneasily. “Does it mean like nuts?”

“No, peanut,” said his mother hastily, putting down the fork, “no, no, no, that’s not true. Don’t go around saying that. It just means she blanks out sometimes. Has seizures. Like—”

“Like this,” said Pem. He did a wild imitation, tongue lolling, eyes rolled up, jittering in his chair.

“Pem! Stop!”

“Allison saw the whole thing,” said Pemberton. “She said it lasted like ten minutes.”

Hely’s mother—observing the odd expression on his face—reached out and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she said. “Epilepsy’s not dangerous.”

“Unless you’re driving a car,” said Pem. “Or flying a plane.”

His mother gave him a stern look—as stern as she ever gave him, which wasn’t very.

“I’m going over to the club now,” she said, standing up. “Dad said he’d drop you off at band this morning, Hely. But don’t you go around telling people at school about this. And don’t worry about Harriet. She’s going to be fine. I promise.”

After their mother left, and they heard her car pulling out of the driveway, Pemberton got up and went to the refrigerator and began to grapple around on the top shelf. Eventually he found what he was looking for—a can of Sprite.

“You are so retarded,” he said, leaning back against the refrigerator, pushing the hair out of his eyes. “It’s a miracle they don’t have you in Special Ed.”

Hely, though he wanted worse than anything in the world to tell Pemberton about going to the tower to get the gun—kept his lips clamped shut and glowered down at the table. He would call Harriet when he got home from band. Probably she wouldn’t be able to talk. But he could ask her questions, and she could answer yes or no.

Pemberton cracked open his soda and said: “You know, it’s embarrassing that you go around making up lies the way you do. You think it’s cool, but it just makes you look really dumb.”

Hely said nothing. He would call her, the first chance he got. If he could sneak away from the group, he might even go out to the pay phone and call her from school. And as soon as she got home, and they were by themselves, out in the toolshed, she would explain to him about the gun, and how she had masterminded the whole thing—shot Farish Ratliff, and trapped Danny in the tower—and it would be amazing. The mission was accomplished, the battle won; somehow—incredibly—she had done exactly what she said she would, and got away with the whole thing.

He looked up at Pemberton.

“Say what you want to, I don’t care,” he said. “But she’s a genius.”

Pem laughed. “Sure she is,” he said, as he headed out the door. “Compared to you.”