The Little Friend полностью

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————

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