The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
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!”
Across the street, at the Baptist church the bells chimed noon; their icy, mechanical peal brought back one of Harriet’s earliest memories: Libby (fall afternoon, vivid sky, red and yellow leaves in the gutter) stooping beside Harriet in her red parka, her hands around Harriet’s waist. “Listen!” And, together, they had listened in the cold, bright air: a minor note—which rang out unchanged a decade later, chilly and sad as a note struck on a child’s toy piano—a note that even in summertime sounded like bare tree branches, and skies in winter, and lost things.
“You mind if I put on the radio?” said the driver. When Harriet did not reply, for crying, he switched it on, anyway.
“You got a boyfrien?” he inquired.
Out on the street, a car honked. “Yo,” called the limo driver, flashing a palm at it—and Harriet, electrified, sat up rigid as Danny Ratliff’s eyes struck her own and flared with recognition; she saw her shock mirrored on his face. The next instant he was gone and she was staring after the indecently cocked rear of the Trans Am.
“Say. I say,” repeated the driver—and, with a start, Harriet realized that he was leaning over the seat looking at her. “You got a boyfrien?”
Harriet tried to look after the Trans Am, without appearing to—and saw it turn left, a few blocks ahead, toward the train station and the old freight yards. Across the street the church bell—on the last dying note of its carol—struck the hour with sudden violence: dong dong dong dong dong.…
“You stuck up,” said the driver. His voice was teasing and coquettish. “Aint you?”
All of a sudden it occurred to Harriet that he might turn around and come back. She glanced up at the front steps of the funeral home. There were several people milling about—a group of old men, smoking cigarettes; Adelaide and Mr. Sumner, standing off to the side, Mr. Sumner bent over her —solicitously was he lighting a cigarette for her? Addie hadn’t smoked in years. But there she was, arms crossed, throwing her head back like a stranger, blowing out a plume of smoke.
“Boys don’t like no stuck-up acting girl,” the driver was saying.
Harriet got out of the car—the door was still open—and walked up the steps of the funeral home, fast.
————
A despairing glassine shiver ran down Danny’s neck as he sped past the funeral home. Airy methamphetamine clarity gliddered over him in nine hundred directions simultaneously. Hours he’d looked for the girl, looking everywhere, combing the town, cruising the residential streets, loop after endless crawling loop. And now, just as he’d made up his mind to forget about Farish’s order and stop looking: here she was.
With Catfish, no less: that was the hell of it. Of course, you never could tell exactly where Catfish might pop up, since his uncle was one of the richest men in town, white or black, presiding over a sizable business empire which included grave-digging, tree-pruning, house-painting, stump-grinding, roof contracting, numbers running, car and small-appliance repair, and half a dozen other businesses. You never knew where Catfish might pop up: in Niggertown, collecting his uncle’s rents; on a ladder at the courthouse, washing windows; behind the wheel of a taxicab or a hearse.
But explain this: this twenty-car pile-up of freaked-out reality. Because it was a little too much of a coincidence to see the girl (of all people) sitting there with Catfish in the back of a de Bienville funeral limousine. Catfish knew there was a very large shipment of product waiting to go out, and he was just a little too casually curious about where Danny and Farish were keeping it. Yes, he’d been a little too inquisitive, in his easy-going talkative way, had twice made a point of “dropping by” the trailer, nosing up unannounced in his Gran Torino, shadowy behind the tinted windows. He’d spent an unusually long time in the bathroom, knocking around, running the taps full-blast; he’d stood up a little too quick when Danny came outside and caught him looking underneath the Trans Am. Flat tire, he’d said. Thought you had a flat tire, man. But the tire was fine and they both knew it.
No, Catfish and the girl were the least of his problems—he thought, with a hopeless feeling of inevitability, as he bumped down the gravel road to the water tower; seemed like he was bumping down it all the time, in his bed, in his dreams, twenty-five times a day hitting this exact same pothole. No, it wasn’t just the drugs, all this feeling of being watched. The break-in at Eugene’s, and the attack upon Gum, had them all glancing over their shoulders constantly, and jumping at the slightest sound, but the biggest worry now was Farish, who was overheated to the boiling point.
With Gum in the hospital, there had been no reason for Farish even to pretend to go to bed any more. Instead he sat up all night, every night, and he made Danny sit up with him: pacing, plotting, with the curtains drawn against the sunrise, chopping drugs on the mirror and talking himself hoarse. And now that Gum was home again (stoic, incurious, shuffling sleepy-eyed past the doorway on her way to the toilet) her presence in the house didn’t break the pattern, but increased Farish’s anxiety to a very nearly unbearable pitch. A loaded .38 appeared on the coffee table, beside the mirror and the razor blades. Parties—dangerous parties—were out to get him. Their grandmother’s safety was at risk. And yes, Danny might shake his head at certain of Farish’s theories, but who knew? Do
“It aint me,” said Farish, pinching his nose and sitting back, “whew, it aint me I’m worried about, it’s poor little Gum in there. What kind of motherfuckers are we dealing with? I don’t give a shit about my own life. Hell, I’ve been chased barefoot through the jungle, I hid in a mud-ass rice paddy for a solid week breathing through a bamboo pole. There isn’t shit they can do to me. Do you hear?” said Farish, pointing the blade of his clasp knife at the test pattern on the television. “There isn’t shit you can do to me.”
Danny crossed his legs to keep his knee from jittering and said nothing. Farish’s ever-more frequent discussion of his war record disturbed him, since Farish had spent most of the Vietnam years in the state asylum at Whitfield. Usually, Farish saved his Nam stories for the pool hall. Danny had thought it was bullshit. Only recently had Farish revealed to him that the government shook certain prisoners and mental patients out of their beds at night—rapists, nuts, expendable folk—and sent them on top-secret military operations they weren’t expected to come back from. Black helicopters in the prison’s cotton fields at night, the guard towers empty, a mighty wind gusting through dry stalks. Men in balaclavas, toting AK-47s. “And tell you what,” said Farish, glancing over his shoulder before he spat into the can he carried around with him. “They wasn’t all speaking English.”
What had worried Danny was that the meth was still on the property (though Farish hid and re-hid it compulsively, several times a day). According to Farish, he had to “sit on it a while” before he could move it, but moving it (Danny knew) was the real problem, now that Dolphus was out of the picture. Catfish had offered to hook them up with someone, some cousin in South Louisiana, but that was before Farish had witnessed the snooping-under-the-car episode and charged outside with the knife and threatened to cut Catfish’s head off.
And Catfish—wisely—hadn’t come around since then, hadn’t even called on the telephone, but unfortunately Farish’s suspicions did not end here. He was watching Danny too, and he wanted Danny to know it. Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he’d figured something out and—with a great big smile on his face—said, “You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.” And sometimes he just jumped up with no warning and started screaming, charging Danny with all kinds of imaginary lies and betrayals. The only way for Danny to keep Farish from going really nuts and beating the shit out of him was to remain calm at all times, no matter what Farish said or did; patiently, he endured Farish’s accusations (which came unpredictably and explosively, at bewildering intervals): answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head.
Then, one morning before sunrise, just as the birds were starting to sing, Farish had leapt to his feet. Raving, muttering, blowing his nose repeatedly into a bloody handkerchief, he’d produced a knapsack and demanded to be driven into town. Once there, he ordered Danny to drop him off in the middle of town and then drive back home and wait for his phone call.
But Danny (pissed off, finally, after all the abuse, the groundless accusations) had not done this. Instead, he’d driven around the corner, parked the car in the empty parking lot at the Presbyterian church and—on foot, at a cautious distance—followed Farish, stumping angrily down the sidewalk with his army knapsack.
He’d hidden the drugs in the old water tower behind the train tracks. Danny was fairly sure of this because—after losing Farish, in the overgrown wilderness around the switching yards—he’d caught sight of him away in the distance on the tower ladder, high in the air, climbing laboriously, his knapsack in his teeth, a portly silhouette against the preposterously rosy dawn sky.
He’d turned right around, walked back to his car and driven straight home: outwardly calm, but his mind all abuzz. That’s where it was hidden, in the tower, and there it still sat: five thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine, ten thousand when stepped on. Farish’s money, not his. He’d see a few hundred dollars—whatever Farish decided to give him—whenever it got sold. But a few hundred bucks wasn’t enough to move to Shreveport, or Baton Rouge, not enough to get himself an apartment and a girlfriend and set himself up in the long-distance truck driving business. Heavy metal on the eight-track, no more country music once he got away from this hillbilly town, not ever. Big chrome truck (smoked windows, air-conditioned cab) screaming down the Interstate, west. Away from Gum. Away from Curtis, with the sad teenage pimples that were starting to spring up on his face. Away from the faded school picture of himself that hung over the television in Gum’s trailer: skinny, furtive-looking, with long dark bangs.
Danny parked the car, lit a cigarette, and sat. The tank itself, some forty-five feet off the ground, was a wooden barrel with a peaked cap, atop spindly metal legs. A rickety utility ladder led to the top of the tank, where a trap-door opened onto a reservoir of water.
Night and day, the image of the knapsack stayed with Danny, like a Christmas present on a high shelf he wasn’t supposed to climb up and look at. Whenever he got in his car, it tugged at him with a magnetic fascination. Twice already he’d driven alone to the tank, just to sit and look up at it and daydream. A fortune. His getaway.
If it was his, which it wasn’t. And he was more than a little worried about climbing up to get it, for fear that Farish had sawn through a rung of the ladder or rigged the trap door with a spring gun or otherwise booby-trapped the tower—Farish, who had taught Danny how to construct a pipe bomb; Farish, whose laboratory was surrounded with home-made punji traps fashioned from boards and rusty nail, and laced about with trip wires concealed in the weeds; Farish, who had recently ordered, from an advertisement in the back of Soldier of Fortune, a kit for constructing spring-loaded ballistic knives. “Trip this sweetheart and—whing!” he said, leaping up exhilarated from his work on the cluttered floor while Danny—appalled—read a sentence on the back of the cardboard box that said Disables Attackers at a Range of up to Thirty Five Feet.
Who knew how he’d rigged the tower? If it was rigged at all, it was (knowing Farish) rigged to maim not kill, but Danny did not relish losing a finger or an eye. And yet, an insistent little whisper kept reminding him that Farish might not have rigged the tower at all. Twenty minutes earlier, while driving to the post office to mail his grandmother’s light bill, an insane burst of optimism had struck Danny, a dazzling vision of the carefree life awaiting him in South Louisiana and he’d turned on Main Street and driven to the switching yards with the intention of climbing straight up the tower, fishing out the bag, hiding it in the trunk—in the spare tire—and driving right out of town without looking back.
But now he was here, he was reluctant to get out of the car. Nervy little silver glints—like wire—glinted in the weeds at the tower’s foot. Hands trembling from the crank, Danny lit a cigarette and stared up at the water tower. Having a finger or a toe blown off would be pleasant compared to what Farish would do if he had even the slightest clue what Danny was thinking.
And you could read a whole lot into the fact that Farish had hidden the drugs in a water tank of all places: a deliberate slap in Danny’s face. Farish knew how afraid Danny was of water—ever since their father had tried to teach him to swim when he was four or five, by chunking him off a pier into a lake. But instead of swimming—as Farish and Mike and his other brothers had done, when the trick was tried on them—he sank. He remembered it all very clearly, the terror of sinking, and then the terror of choking and spitting up the gritty brown water as his father (furious at having to jump in the lake fully clothed) screamed at him; and when Danny came away from that worn-out pier it was without much desire t
Farish, perversely, had also ignored the practical dangers of storing crystal in such a nasty damp place. Danny had been in the lab with Farish one rainy day in March when the stuff refused to crystallize because of the humidity. No matter how they fooled with it, it stuck together and caked on the mirror under their fingertips in a sticky, solid patty—useless.
Danny—feeling defeated—had a little bump to steady his nerves, and then threw his cigarette out the window and started the car. Once he was out on the street again, he forgot his real errand (his grandmother’s bill to mail) and took another spin by the funeral home. But though Catfish was still sitting in the limo, the girl wasn’t, and there were too many people milling around on the front steps.
Maybe I’ll circle the block again, he thought.
Alexandria: flat and desolate, a circuit of repeating street signs, a giant train set. The sense of unreality was what got you after a while. Airless streets, colorless skies. Buildings empty, only pasteboard and sham. And if you drive long enough, he thought, you always end up right back where you started.
————
Grace Fountain, rather self-consciously, came up the front steps and in the front door of Edie’s house. She followed the voices and the festive tinkle of glass through a hallway narrowed by massive glass-front bookcases to a crowded parlor. A fan whirred. The room was packed with people: men with jackets off, ladies with pink faces. On the lace tablecloth stood a bowl of punch, and plates of beaten biscuits and ham; silver compotes of peanuts and candied almonds; a stack of red paper napkins (tacky, noted Mrs. Fountain) with Edie’s monogram in gold.
Mrs. Fountain, clutching her purse, stood in the doorway and waited to be acknowledged. As houses went, Edie’s house (a bungalow, really) was smaller than her own, but Mrs. Fountain came from country people—“good Christians,” as she liked to point out, but hill folk all the same—and she was intimidated by the punch bowl, by the gold silk draperies and the big plantation dining table—which, even with a leaf out, sat twelve, at least—and by the overbearing portrait of Judge Cleve’s father which dwarfed the tiny mantel. Around the perimeters of the room stood at taut attention—as if at a dancing school—twenty-four lyre-back dining chairs with petit-point seats; and, if the room was a bit small, and a bit low in the ceiling, to accommodate so much large dark furniture, Mrs. Fountain felt daunted by it all the same.