The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Pem ducked. “What’s the matter?” he said teasingly. He knew very well—irritatingly well—how handsome he was, with his superior smile and his marigold-colored hair streaming out behind him in the blue water, like the laughing merman in Edie’s illustrated Tennyson:
Who would be
A merman bold
Sitting alone
Singing alone
Under the sea
With a crown of gold?
“Hmmn?” Pemberton let go her ankle and splashed her, lightly, then shook his head so that the drops flew. “Where’s my money?”
“What money?” said Harriet, startled.
“I taught you how to hyperventilate, didn’t I? Just like they tell scuba divers to do in those expensive courses.”
“Yes, but that’s all you told me. I practice holding my breath every day.”
Pem drew back, looking pained. “I thought we had a deal, Harriet.”
“No we don’t!” said Harriet, who couldn’t bear to be teased.
Pem laughed. “Forget it. I ought to be paying you for lessons. Listen—” he dipped his head in the water, then bobbed up again—“is your sister still bummed out about that cat?”
“I guess. Why?” said Harriet, rather suspiciously. Pem’s interest in Allison made no sense to her.
“She ought to get a dog. Dogs can learn tricks but you can’t teach a cat to do anything. They don’t give a shit.”
“Neither does she.”
Pemberton laughed. “Well then, I think a puppy is just what she needs,” he said. “There’s a notice in the clubhouse about some chow-chow puppies for sale.”
“She’d rather have a cat.”
“Has she ever had a dog?”
“No.”
“Well, then. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Cats look like they know what’s going on, but all they do is sit around and stare.”
“Not Weenie. He was a genius.”
“Sure he was.”
“No, really. He understood every word we said. And he tried to talk to us. Allison worked with him all the time. He did the best he could but his mouth was just too different and the sounds didn’t come out right.”
“I bet they didn’t,” said Pemberton, rolling over to float on his back. His eyes were the same bright blue as the pool water.
“He did learn a few words.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like ‘nose.’ ”
“Nose? That’s a weird word to teach him,” said Pemberton idly, looking up at the sky, his yellow hair spread out like a fan on the surface of the water.
“She wanted to start with names of things, things she could point to. Like Miss Sullivan with Helen Keller. She’d touch Weenie’s nose, and say: ‘Nose! That’s your nose! You’ve got a nose!’ Then she’d touch her own nose. Then his again. Back and forth.”
“She must not have had much to do.”
“Well, she didn’t really. They’d sit there all afternoon. And after a while all Allison had to do was touch her nose and Weenie would reach up like this with his paw and touch his own nose and—I’m not kidding,” she said, over Pemberton’s loud derision—“no, really, he would make a weird little meow like he was trying to say ‘nose.’ ”
Pemberton rolled over on his stomach and resurfaced with a splash. “Come on.”
“It’s true. Ask Allison.”
Pem looked bored. “Just because he made a noise …”
“Yes, but it wasn’t any old noise.” She cleared her throat and tried to imitate the sound.
“You don’t expect me to believe that.”
“She has it on tape! Allison recorded a bunch of tapes of him! Most of it just sounds like plain old meows but if you listen hard you can really hear him saying a couple of words in there.”
“Harriet, you crack me up.”
“It’s the truth. Ask Ida Rhew. And he could tell time, too. Every afternoon at two-forty-five on the dot he scratched on the back door for Ida to let him out so he could meet Allison’s bus.”
Pemberton bobbed under the water to slick his hair back, then pinched his nostrils shut and blew, noisily, to clear his ears. “How come Ida Rhew doesn’t like me?” he said cheerfully.
“I don’t know.”
“She never has liked me. She was always mean to me when I came over to play with Robin, even when I was in kindergarten. She would pick a switch off one of those bushes you have out back there and chase my little ass all over the yard.”
“She doesn’t like Hely, either.”
Pemberton sneezed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “What’s going on with you and Hely, anyway? Is he not your boyfriend any more?”
Harriet was horrified. “He never was my boyfriend.”
“That’s not what he says.”
Harriet kept her mouth shut. Hely got provoked and shouted out things he didn’t mean when Pemberton pulled this trick, but she wasn’t going to fall for it.
————
Hely’s mother, Martha Price Hull—who had gone to high school with Harriet’s mother—was notorious for spoiling her sons rotten. She adored them frantically, and allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, never mind what their father had to say; and though it was too soon to tell with Hely, this indulgence was thought to be the reason why Pemberton had turned out so disappointingly. Her fond child-rearing methods were legend. Grandmothers and mothers-in-law always pulled out Martha Price and her boys as a cautionary example to doting young mothers, of the heavy grievance someday to fall if (for instance) one allowed one’s child for three whole years to refuse all food but chocolate pie, as Pemberton had been famously permitted to do. From the ages of four to seven, Pemberton had eaten no food but chocolate pie: moreover (it was stressed, grimly) a special kind of chocolate pie, which called for condensed milk and all sorts of costly ingredients, and which doting Martha Price had been forced to rise at six a.m. daily in order to bake. The aunts still talked about an occasion when Pem—a guest of Robin’s—had refused lunch at Libby’s house, beating on the table with his fists (“like King Henry the Eighth”) demanding chocolate pie. (“Can you imagine? ‘Mama gives me chocolate pie.’ ” “I would have given him a good whipping.”) That Pemberton had grown to adulthood enjoying a full head of teeth was a miracle; but his lack of industry and gainful employment were fully explainable, all felt, by this early catastrophe.
It was often speculated what a bitter embarrassment Pem’s father must find his eldest son, since he was the headmaster of Alexandria Academy and disciplining young people was his job. Mr. Hull was not the shouting, red-faced ex-athlete customary at private academies like Alexandria; he was not even a coach: he taught science to junior-high-school students, and spent the rest of his time in his office with the door shut, reading books on aeronautical engineering. But though Mr. Hull held the school under tight control, and students were terrified by his silences, his wife undercut his authority at home and he had a tough time keeping order with his own boys—Pemberton in particular, who was always joking and smirking and making rabbit ears behind his father’s head when the group photographs were taken. Parents sympathized with Mr. Hull; it was clear to everyone that nothing short of knocking the boy unconscious was going to shut him up; and though the withering way he barked at Pemberton on public occasions made everyone in the room nervous, Pem himself seemed not bothered by it in the slightest, and kept right up with the easy wisecracks and smart remarks.
But though Martha Hull did not mind if her sons ran all over town, grew their hair past their shoulders, drank wine with dinner or ate dessert for breakfast, a few rules in the Hull household were inviolable. Pemberton, though twenty, was not allowed to smoke in his mother’s presence; and Hely, of course, not at all. Loud rock-and-roll music on the hi-fi was forbidden (though when his parents were out, Pemberton and his friends blasted the Who and the Rolling Stones across the entire neighborhood—to Charlotte’s befuddlement, Mrs. Fountain’s complaints, and Edie’s v
It was the Pool Hall where Hely—still in his sulk over Harriet—now found himself. He had parked his bicycle down the street, in the alley by the City Hall, in case his mother or father happened to drive by. Now he stood morosely crunching barbecued potato chips—which were sold along with cigarettes and gum at the dusty counter—and browsing through the comic books at the rack by the door.
Though the Pool Hall was only a block or two from the town square, and had no liquor license, it was nonetheless the roughest place in Alexandria, worse even than the Black Door or the Esquire Lounge over in Pine Hill. Dope was said to be sold at the Pool Hall; gambling was rampant; it was the site of numerous shootings and slashings and mysterious fires. Poorly lit, with cinder-block walls painted prison green, and fluorescent tubes flickering on the foam-panelled ceiling, it was on this afternoon fairly empty. Of the six tables, only two were in use, and a couple of country boys with slicked hair and snap-front denim shirts played a subdued game of pinball in the back.
Though the Pool Hall’s mildewy, depraved atmosphere appealed to Hely’s sense of desperation, he did not know how to play pool, and he was scared to loiter near the tables and watch. But he felt invigorated just to stand by the door, unnoticed, munching his barbecued potato chips and breathing the same perilous ozone of corruption.
What drew Hely to the Pool Hall were the comic books. Their selection was the best in town. The drugstore carried Richie Rich, and Betty and Veronica; the Big Star grocery had all these and Superman, too (on a rack situated uncomfortably, by the rotisserie chicken, so that Hely couldn’t browse too long without thoroughly roasting his ass); but the Pool Hall had Sergeant Rock and Weird War Tales and G.I. Combat (real soldiers killing real gooks); they had Rima the Jungle Girl in her panther-fur bathing suit; best of all, they had a rich selection of horror comics (werewolves, premature burials, drooling carrions shuffling forth from the graveyard), all of which were, to Hely, of unbelievably riveting interest: Weird Mystery Tales and House of Secrets, The Witching Hour and The Specter’s Notebook and Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion.… He had not been aware that such galvanizing reading matter existed—much less that it was available for him, Hely, to purchase in his own town—until one afternoon, when he had been forced to stay after school, he had discovered in an empty desk a copy of Secrets of Sinister House. On its cover was a picture of a crippled girl in a creepy old house, screaming and frantically trying to roll her wheelchair away from a giant cobra. Inside, the crippled girl perished in a froth of convulsions. And there was more—vampires, gouged eyes, fratricides. Hely was enthralled. He read it five or six times from cover to cover, and then took it home and read it some more until he knew it backwards and forward by heart, every single story—“Satan’s Roommate,” “Come Share My Coffin,” “Transylvania Travel Agency.” It was without question the greatest comic book he had ever seen; he believed it to be one of a kind, some marvelous fluke of nature, unobtainable, and he was beside himself when some weeks later he saw a kid at school named Benny Landreth reading one quite similar, this one called Black Magic with a picture of a mummy strangling an archaeologist on the cover. He pleaded with Benny—who was a grade older, and mean—to sell the comic to him; and then, when that didn’t work, he offered to pay Benny two dollars and then three if Benny would only let him look at the comic for a minute, just one minute.
“Go down to the Pool Hall and buy your own,” Benny had said, rolling up the comic book and slapping Hely across the side of the head.
That was two years ago. Now, horror comic books were all that got Hely through certain difficult stretches of life: chicken pox, boring car trips, Camp Lake de Selby. Because of his limited funds and the strict interdiction against the Pool Hall, his expeditions to purchase them were infrequent, once a month perhaps, and much anticipated. The fat man at the cash register didn’t seem to mind that Hely stood around the rack for so long; in fact, he hardly noticed Hely at all, which was just as well as Hely sometimes stood studying the comics for hours in order to make the wisest possible selection.
He had come up here to get his mind off Harriet, but he only had thirty-five cents after the potato chips, and the comic books were twenty cents each. Half-heartedly, he leafed through a story in Dark Mansions called “Demon at the Door” (“AARRRGGGHH—!!!—I—I—HAVE UNLEASHED A—A—LOATHESOME EVIL … TO HAUNT THIS LAND UNTIL SUNRISE!!!!!) but his eye kept straying to the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisement on the page opposite. “Take a good honest look at yourself. Do you have the dynamic tension that women admire? Or are you a skinny, scrawny, ninety-seven-pound half-alive weakling?”
Hely was not sure how much he weighed, but ninety-seven pounds sounded like a lot. Glumly, he studied the “Before” cartoon—a scarecrow, basically—and wondered if he should send for the information or if it was a rip-off, like the X-Ray Spex he’d ordered from an ad in Weird Mystery. The X-Ray Spex were advertised as enabling one to see through flesh and walls and women’s clothing. They had cost a dollar ninety-eight plus thirty-five cents for postage, and they had taken forever to arrive, and when they finally came they were nothing more than a pair of plastic frames with two sets of cardboard inserts: one with a cartoon drawing of a hand through which you could see the bones, the other with a cartoon of a sexy secretary in a see-through dress with a black bikini underneath.
A shadow fell over Hely. He glanced up to see two figures with their backs half to him, who had drifted from the pool tables to the comic-book rack to converse privately. Hely recognized one of them: Catfish de Bienville, who was a slumlord, something of a local celebrity; he wore his rust-red hair in a giant Afro, and drove a custom Gran Torino with tinted windows. Hely often saw him at the pool hall, also standing around talking to people outside the car wash on summer evenings. Though his features were like a black man’s, he was not actually dark in color; his eyes were blue, and his skin was freckled, and as white as Hely’s. But he was mostly recognizable around town for his clothes: silk shirts, bell-bottom pants, belt buckles the size of salad plates. People said he bought them from Lansky Brothers, in Memphis, where Elvis was said to shop. Now—as hot as it was—he wore a red corduroy smoking jacket, white flares, and red patent-leather platform loafers.
It was not Catfish who had spoken, however, but the other: underfed, tough, with bitten fingernails. He was little more than a teenager, not too tall or too clean, with sharp cheekbones and lank hippie hair parted in the middle, but there was a scruffy, mean-edged coolness about him like a rock star; and he held himself erect, like he was somebody important, though he obviously wasn’t.
“Where’d he get playing money?” Catfish was whispering to him.
“Disability, I reckon,” said the hippie-haired kid, glancing up. His eyes were a startling silvery blue, and there was something staring and rather fixed about them.
They seemed to be talking about poor Carl Odum, who was racking balls across the room and offering to take on any comers for any sum they wished to lose. Carl—widowed, with what seemed like about nine or ten squalid little children—was only about thirty but looked twice as old: face and neck ruined with sunburn, his pale eyes pink around the rims. He’d lost a few fingers in an accident down at the egg-packing plant, not long after his wife’s death. Now he was drunk, and bragging how he could whip anybody in the room, fingers or not. “Here’s my bridge,” he said, holding up his mutilated hand. “This here’s all I need.” Dirt etched the lines of his palm and the nails of the only two fingers remaining: the pointer and the thumb.
Odum was addressing these remarks to a guy beside him at the table: a gigantic, bearded guy, a bear of a guy, who wore a brown coverall with a ragged hole cut in the breast where the name tag should have been. He wasn’t paying any attention to Odum; his eyes were fixed upon the table. Lo
“Anything pertaining to pool or the playing of pool,” Odum was saying. “It’s what I guess you’d have to call second nature.”
“Well, some of us has gifts that way,” said the big guy in the brown jumpsuit, in a deep but not unpleasant voice. As he said this he glanced up, and Hely saw with a jolt that one of his eyes was all creepy: a milky wall-eye rolled out to the side of his head.
Much closer—only a few feet from where Hely stood—the tough-looking kid tossed his hair out of his face and said tensely to Catfish: “Twenty bucks a pop. Ever time he loses.” Deftly, with the other hand, he shook a cigarette from the pack in a tricky flick like he was throwing dice—and Hely noted, with interest, that despite the practiced cool of the gesture his hands trembled like an old person’s. Then he leaned forward and whispered something in Catfish’s ear.
Catfish laughed aloud. “Lose, my yellow ass,” he said. In an easy, graceful movement, he spun and sauntered off to the pinball machines in the back.
The tough kid lit his cigarette and gazed out across the room. His eyes—burning pale and silvery out of his sunburnt face—gave Hely a little shiver as they passed over him without seeing him: wild-looking eyes, with a lot of light in them, that reminded Hely of old pictures he’d seen of Confederate soldier boys.
Across the room, over by the pool table, the bearded man in the brown jumpsuit had only the one good eye—but it shone with something of the same silvery light. Hely—studying them over the top of his comic book—noted a squeak of family resemblance between the two of them. Though they were very different at first glance (the bearded man was older, and much heavier than the kid), still they had the same long dark hair and sunburnt complexion, the same fixity of eye and stiffness of neck, a similar tight-mouthed way of talking, as if to conceal bad teeth.