The Little Friend полностью

“Did you,” said the policeman, “or did you not execute a U-turn?”

“I did not. I turned around right here in the parking lot.” From the highway, a car mirror flashed distractingly in the corner of Edie’s vision, and at the same time an inexplicable memory from childhood leapt up in her mind: Tatty’s old tin doll—dressed in draggled yellow—lying windmill-legged in the dust of Tribulation’s kitchen yard, beneath the fig trees where the chickens sometimes escaped to scratch. Edie herself had never played with dolls—never been the slightest bit interested in them—but she could see the tin doll now with a curious clarity: her body brown cloth, her nose glinting a macabre metallic silver where the paint had rubbed away. How many years had Tatty dragged that battered thing with its metal death’s head around the yard; how many years since Edie had thought of that eerie little face with the nose missing?

The policeman interrogated Edie for half an hour. With his droning voice, and his mirror sunglasses, it was slightly like being interrogated by The Fly in the Vincent Price horror movie of the same name. Edie, shading her eyes with her hand, tried to keep her mind on his questions but her eyes kept straying to the cars flashing past on the bright highway and all she could think of was Tatty’s ghastly old doll with the silver nose. What on earth had the thing been called? For the life of her, Edie couldn’t remember. Tatty hadn’t talked plain until she went to school; all Tat’s dolls had had ridiculous-sounding names, names she made up out of her head, names like Gryce and Lillium and Artemo.…

The little girls from the branch bank got bored and—inspecting their nails, twirling their hair around their fingertips—drifted back inside. Adelaide—whom Edie blamed, bitterly, for the whole business (she and her Sanka!)—appeared very put out, and stood a cool distance from the scene as if she weren’t a part of it, talking to a nosy choir friend, Mrs. Cartrett, who had pulled over to see what was going on. At some point she’d hopped in the car with Mrs. Cartrett and driven off without even telling Edie. “We’re driving to McDonald’s to get a sausage and biscuit,” she’d called out to Tat and poor Libby. McDonald’s! And—to top it all off—when the insect-faced policeman finally gave Edie permission to leave, her poor old car had of course refused to start, and she had been forced to square her shoulders and walk back into the horrible chilly branch bank, back in front of all the saucy little tellers, to ask if she could use the telephone. And all the while, Libby and Tat had sat, uncomplainingly, in the back of the Oldsmobile, in the frightful heat.

Their cab hadn’t taken long to come. From where she stood, at the manager’s desk in the front, talking on the phone to the man from the garage, Edie watched the two of them walking to the taxi through the plate-glass window: arm in arm, picking their way across the gravel in their Sunday shoes. She rapped on the glass; Tat, in the glare, turned halfway and raised an arm and all of a sudden the name of Tatty’s old doll came to Edie so suddenly that she laughed out loud. “What?” said the garage man; the manager—wall-eyed behind thick glasses—glanced up at Edie as if she were crazy but she didn’t care. Lycobus. Of course. That was the tin doll’s name. Lycobus, who was naughty, and sassed her mother; Lycobus, who invited Adelaide’s dolls to a tea party, and served them only water and radishes.

When the tow truck finally came, Edie accepted a ride home from the driver. It was the first time she’d been in a truck since World War II; the cab was high, and climbing up inside it with her cracked ribs had not been fun: but, as the Judge had been so fond of reminding his daughters, Beggars Can’t Be Choosers.

By the time she got home, it was nearly one o’clock. Edie hung up her clothes (not until she was undressing did she remember that the suitcases were still in the trunk of the Oldsmobile) and took a cool bath; sitting on the side of her bed, in her brassiere and panty-waist, she sucked in her breath and taped up her ribs as best as she could. Then she had a glass of water, and an Empirin with codeine left over from some dental work, and put on a kimono and lay down on the bed.

Much later, she’d been awakened by a telephone call. For a moment, she thought the thin little voice on the other end was the children’s mother. “Charlotte?” she barked; and then, when there was no answer: “Who is calling, please?”

“This is Allison. I’m over at Libby’s. She … she seems upset.”

“I don’t blame her,” said Edie; the pain of sitting up suddenly had caught her unawares, and she took her breath in sharply. “Now’s not the time for her to entertain company. You ought not be over there bothering her, Allison.”

“She doesn’t seem tired. She—she says she has to pickle some beets.”

“Pickling beets!” Edie snorted. “I’d be mighty upset if I had to pickle beets this afternoon.”

“But she says—”