The Little Friend

Around the neighborhood there was talk of a Mysterious Prowler, and years after Robin’s death people still claimed to see him. He was, by all accounts, a giant of a man, but after this the descriptions diverged. Sometimes he was black, sometimes white; sometimes he bore dramatic distinguishing marks such as a missing finger, a clubfoot, a livid scar across one cheek. He was said to be a rogue hired man who had strangled a Texas senator’s child and fed it to the pigs; an ex–rodeo clown, luring little children to their deaths with fancy lariat tricks; a psychopathic half-wit, wanted in eleven states, escaped from the state mental hospital at Whitfield. But though parents in Alexandria warned their children about him, and though his massive form was regularly sighted limping around the vicinity of George Street each Halloween, the Prowler remained an elusive figure. Every tramp and itinerant and window-peeper for a hundred miles had been rounded up and questioned after the little Cleve boy’s death, but the investigation had turned up nothing. And while nobody liked to think of a killer walking around free, the fear persisted. The particular fear was that he still prowled the neighborhood: watching children at play from a discreetly parked sedan.

It was the people in the town who talked about this sort of thing. Robin’s family never discussed it, ever.

What Robin’s family talked about was Robin. They told anecdotes from baby days and kindergarten and Little League, all the sweet and funny and inconsequential things anyone remembered he’d ever said or done. His old aunts recalled mountains of trivia: toys he’d had, clothes he’d worn, teachers he’d liked or hated, games he’d played, dreams he’d recounted, things he’d disliked, and wished for, and most loved. Some of this was accurate; some of it was not; a good bit of it no one had any way of knowing, but when the Cleves chose to agree on some subjective matter it became—automatically and quite irrevocably—the truth, without any of them being aware of the collective alchemy which had made it so.

The mysterious, conflicted circumstances of Robin’s death were not subject to this alchemy. Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story. Robin himself, or what they remembered of him, was all they had; and their exquisite delineation of his character—painstakingly ornamented over a number of years—was their greatest masterpiece. Because he had been such an engaging little stray of a boy, and because his whims and peculiarities were precisely why they had all loved him so, in their reconstructions the impulsive quickness of the living Robin came through in places almost painfully clear and then he would practically be dashing down the street on his bicycle past you, leaning forward, hair blown back, stepping hard on the pedals so the bike wobbled slightly—a fitful, capricious, breathing child. But this clarity was deceptive, lending treacherous verisimilitude to what was largely a fabular whole, for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.

————

“How Robin would have loved this!” the aunts used to say fondly. “How Robin would have laughed!” In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child—somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others—and, in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they—being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next—were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

Robin’s younger sisters had grown up to be very different from Robin, and very different from each other.