The Little Friend полностью

Adelaide laughed, flirtatiously. “Not that little. Harriet, I thought you’d like to talk to Mr. Sumner because you’re so interested in King Tut and all.”

“I wasn’t in Cairo long,” said Mr. Sumner. “Only during the war. Everybody and his brother was in Cairo then.” He shuffled up to the open passenger window of a long black Cadillac limousine—the funeral-home limo—and stooped a little to speak to the driver. “Will you look after this young lady here? She’s going to lie down in the back seat for a few minutes.”

The driver—whose face was as white as Harriet’s, though he had a gigantic rust-red Afro—started, and switched off the radio. “Wha?” he said, glancing from side to side and not knowing where to look first—at the tottery old white man leaning in his window or at Harriet, climbing into the back. “She aint feeling well?”

“Tell you what!” said Mr. Sumner, stooping down to peer into the dark interior after Harriet. “It looks like this thing might have a bar in it!”

The driver seemed to shake himself and perk up. “No sir, boss, that’s my other car!” he said, in a jokey, indulgent, artificially friendly tone.

Mr. Sumner, appreciatively, slapped the car’s roof as he laughed along with the driver. “All right!” he said. His hands were trembling; though he seemed sharp enough he was one of the oldest and frailest people Harriet had ever seen up and walking around. “All right! You’re doing all right for yourself, aint you?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Glad to hear it. Now girl,” he said to Harriet, “what do you require? Would you like a Coca-Cola?”

“Oh, John,” she heard Adelaide murmur. “She doesn’t need it.”

John! Harriet stared straight ahead.

“I just want you to know that I loved your aunt Libby better than anything in the world,” she heard Mr. Sumner say. His voice was old and quavery and very Southern. “I would have asked that girl to marry me if I’d thought she’d have me!”

Tears welled infuriatingly in Harriet’s eyes. She pressed her lips tight and tried not to cry. The inside of the car was suffocating.

Mr. Sumner said: “After yo’ great-granddaddy died I did ask Libby to come on and marry me. Old as we both were then.” He chuckled. “Know what she said?” When he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he tapped lightly on the car door. “Hmn? Know what she said, honey? She reckoned she might be able to do it if she didn’t have to get on an airplane. Ha ha ha! Just to give you an idea, young lady, I was working down in Venezuela at the time.”

Behind, Adelaide said something. The old man said under his breath: “Darn if she aint Edith all over again!”

Adelaide laughed coquettishly—and at this, Harriet’s shoulders began to heave, of their own accord, and the sobs burst forth unwilling.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Sumner, with genuine distress; his shadow—in the car window—fell across her again. “Bless your little heart!”

“No, no. No,” said Adelaide firmly, leading him away. “Leave her alone. She’ll be fine, John.”

The car door still stood open. Harriet’s sobs were loud and repugnant in the silence. Up front, the limousine driver observed her silently in the rear-view mirror, over the top of a drugstore paperback (astrology wheel on the cover) entitled Your Love Signs. Presently he inquired: “Yo mama die?”

Harriet shook her head. In the mirror, the driver raised an eyebrow. “I say, yo mama die?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” He punched in the cigarette lighter. “You aint got nothing to cry about.”

The cigarette lighter clicked out, and the driver lit his cigarette and blew a long breath of smoke out the open window. “You don’t know what sadness is,” he said. “Till that day.” Then he opened the glove compartment and handed her a few tissues across the seat.

“Who died, then?” he asked. “Yo daddy?”

“My aunt,” Harriet managed to say.

“Yo wha?”

“My aunt.”

“Oh! Yo auntee!” Silence. “You live with her?”

After waiting patiently for some moments the driver shrugged and turned back to the front, where he sat quietly with his elbow out the open window, smoking his cigarette. Every so often he looked down at his book, which he held open beside his right thigh with one hand.

“When you born?” he asked Harriet after a while. “What month?”

“December,” said Harriet, just as he’d started to ask her a second time.

“December?” He glanced over the seat at her; his face was doubtful. “You a Sagitaria?”

“Capricorn.”

“Capricorn!” His laugh was rather unpleasant and insinuating. “You a little goat, then. Ha ha ha!”