“Harriet!” he shouted without thinking, and got a mouthful of water for his carelessness; he’d forgotten that he was in over his head.
————
The sky was dove-gray and the evening air heavy and soft. Down on the sidewalk Harriet still heard, faintly, the shouts of the little kids in the shallow end of the pool. A small breeze raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. She drew her towel closer and began to walk home, very quickly.
A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.
None of them glanced at Harriet. She stared at the sidewalk as they shot past, in a jingly rocket-trail of pop music, her cheeks burning with an angry and mysterious shame. If Hely had been walking with her, they would almost certainly have slowed down to yell something, since Lisa and Pam both had crushes on Pemberton. But they probably didn’t know who Harriet was, though they’d been in Allison’s class since nursery school. In a collage by Allison’s bed at home were pasted happy kindergarten photographs of Allison playing London Bridge with Pam McCormick and Lisa Leavitt; of Allison and Ginger Herbert—red-nosed, laughing, the best of friends—holding hands in somebody’s wintry back yard. Labored first-grade valentines, printed in penciclass="underline" “2 Hugs 2 Kisses 4 you. Love Ginger!!!” To reconcile all this affection with the current Allison, and the current Ginger (gloved, glossy-lipped in chiffon beneath an arch of fake flowers) was inconceivable. Allison was as pretty as any of them (and a lot prettier than Sissy Arnold, who had long, witchy teeth and the body of a weasel) but somehow she’d devolved from the childhood friend and fellow of these princesses into a nonentity, someone who never got called except about missed homework assignments. It was the same with their mother. Though she’d been a sorority girl, popular, voted Best Dressed in her college class, she also had a whole lot of friends who didn’t call any more. The Thorntons and the Bowmonts—who at one time had played cards with Harriet’s parents every week, and shared vacation cabins with them on the Gulf Coast—didn’t come by now even when Harriet’s father was in town. There was a forced note about their friendliness when they ran into Harriet’s mother at church, the husbands overly hearty, a sort of shrieking bright vivacity in the women’s voices, and none of them ever quite looked Harriet’s mother in the eye. Ginger and the other girls on the school bus treated Allison in a similar fashion: bright chatty voices, but eyes averted, as if Allison carried an infection they might catch.
Harriet (staring bleakly at the sidewalk) was distracted from these thoughts by a gargling noise. Poor retarded Curtis Ratliff—who roamed the streets of Alexandria ceaselessly in the summertime squirting cats and cars with his water pistol—was lumbering across the road towards her. When he saw her looking at him, a wide smile broke across his smashed face.
“Hat!” He waved at her with both arms—the whole of his body wagging with the effort—and then began to jump up and down laboriously, feet together, as if stamping out a fire. “All wight? All wight?”
“Hello Alligator,” said Harriet, to humor him. Curtis had gone through a long phase where everybody and everything he saw was alligator: his teacher, his shoes, the school bus.
“All wight? All wight, Hat?” He wasn’t going to stop until he got an answer.
“Thank you, Curtis. I’m all right.” Though Curtis wasn’t deaf, he was a little hard of hearing, and you had to remember to speak up.
Curtis’s smile stretched even wider. His roly-poly body, his dim, sweet, toddly manner were like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
“I like cake,” he said.
“Curtis, hadn’t you better get out of the road?”
Curtis froze, hand to mouth. “Uh oh!” he crowed and then again: “Uh oh!” He bunny-hopped across the street and—with both feet, as if leaping a ditch—jumped over the curb and in front of her. “Uh oh!” he said, and dissolved into a jelly of giggles, his hands over his face.
“Sorry, you’re in my way,” Harriet said.
Through his spread fingers, Curtis peeped out at her. He was beaming so hard that his tiny dark eyes were narrowed to slits.
“Snakes bite,” he said unexpectedly.
Harriet was taken aback. Partly because of his hearing problem, Curtis didn’t speak too plain. Certainly she’d misunderstood him; certainly he’d said something else: Ask why? Cake’s nice? Bye-bye?
But before she could ask him, Curtis heaved a big, businesslike sigh and stuck his water pistol in the waistband of his stiff new denims. Then he picked up her hand and doddled it in his own large limp sticky one.
“Bite!” he said cheerfully. He pointed at himself, and to the house opposite—and then he turned and loped off down the street as Harriet—rather unnerved—blinked after him and pulled her towel a bit closer around her shoulders.
————
Though Harriet was unaware of it, poisonous snakes were also a topic of discussion less than thirty feet from where she stood: in the second-story apartment of a frame house across the street, one of several rental properties in Alexandria belonging to Roy Dial.
The house was nothing speciaclass="underline" white, two stories, with a slat staircase running up the side so the second floor had its own entrance. This had been built by Mr. Dial, who had blocked off the inside staircase so that what had once been a single home was now two rental units. Before Mr. Dial had bought it, and cut it into apartments, the house had belonged to an old Baptist lady named Annie Mary Alford who was a retired bookkeeper for the lumber mill. After she’d fallen one rainy Sunday in the parking lot of the church and broken her hip, kindly Mr. Dial (who, as a Christian businessman, took an interest in the ailing and elderly, especially those of means who had no family to advise them) made it a special little point to visit Miss Annie Mary daily, offering canned soups, country drives, inspirational reading matter, fruits in the season, and his impartial services as executor of her estate and power of attorney.
Because Mr. Dial dutifully handed over his gains to the bursting First Baptist bank accounts, he felt himself justified in his methods. After all, was not he bringing comfort and Christian fellowship to these barren lives? Sometimes “the ladies” (as he called them) left Mr. Dial their property outright, so comforted were they by his friendly presence: but Miss Annie Mary—who, after all, had worked as a bookkeeper for forty-five years—was suspicious by both training and nature, and after her death he was shocked to discover that she—quite deceitfully, in his view—had called in a Memphis lawyer without his knowledge and made a will which entirely negated the informal little written agreement which Mr. Dial had suggested, ever so discreetly, while patting her hand at her hospital bedside.
Possibly Mr. Dial would not have purchased Miss Annie Mary’s house after her death (for it was not especially cheap) had he not accustomed himself, during her final illness, to considering it his own. After cutting the upstairs and downstairs into two different apartments, and chopping down the pecan trees and rosebushes (for trees and shrubberies meant maintenance dollars) he rented the first floor almost immediately to a couple of Mormon missionary boys. That was nearly ten years ago, and still the Mormons had it—this despite their mission’s stark failure in all that time to convert even one citizen of Alexandria to their wife-swapping Utah Jesus.