The Little Friend полностью

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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