The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Harriet ran. Though she’d heard the names of some of the people on this street (the Wrights, the Motleys, Mr. and Mrs. Price) she didn’t know them except by sight, not well enough to run up breathless and pound on their doors: why had she let herself be chased here, into unfamiliar territory? Think, think, she told herself. A few houses back—just before the old man shook his fist at her—she’d passed an El Camino with paint cans and plastic drop cloths in the bed; it would have been the perfect place to hide.…
She ducked behind a propane tank and—bent double, hands on knees—gulped for breath. Had she lost them? No: a renewed fracas of barking from the penned Airedale, down at the end of the block, who’d thrown himself against his fence when she ran past.
Blindly she turned and plunged on. She crashed through a gap in a privet hedge—and nearly fell flat across an astonished Chester, who was on his knees fooling with a soaker hose in a thickly mulched flower bed.
He threw up his arms as if at an explosion. “Watch out!” Chester did odd jobs for all sorts of people, but she didn’t know he worked over here. “What in thunder—”
“—Where can I hide?”
“Hide? This aint no place for you to play.” He swallowed, flung a muddy hand at her. “Go on. Scat.”
Harriet, panic-stricken, glanced around: glass hummingbird feeder, glassed-in porch, pristine picnic table. The opposite side of the yard was walled-in with a thicket of holly; in the back, a bank of rosebushes cut off her retreat.
“Scat I said. Look at this hole you done knocked in the hedge.”
A flagstone path lined with marigolds led to a persnickety dollhouse of a toolshed, painted to match the house: gingerbread trim, green door standing ajar. In desperation, Harriet dashed down the walk and ran inside (“Hey!” called Chester) and threw herself down between a stack of firewood and a fat roll of fiberglass insulation.
The air was thick and dusty. Harriet pinched her nose shut. In the dimness—chest heaving, scalp aprickle—she stared at an old frayed badminton birdie lying on the floor by the stacked logs, at a group of colorful metal cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone.
Voices: male. Harriet stiffened. Along time passed, during which it seemed that the cans that said Gasoline and Gear Oil and Prestone were the last three artifacts in the universe. What can they do to me? she thought wildly. In front of Chester? Though she strained to listen, the rasp of her breath deafened her. Just scream, she told herself, if they grab you scream and break free, scream and run.… For some reason, the car was what she feared most. Though she could not say why, she had a sense that if they got her in the car, it was all over.
She didn’t think Chester would let them take her. But there were two of them, and only one of Chester. And Chester’s word probably wouldn’t go very far against two white men.
Moments ticked by. What were they saying, what was taking so long? Intently, Harriet stared at a dried-up honeycomb underneath the work-bench. Then, suddenly, she sensed a form approaching.
The door creaked open. A triangle of washed-out light fell across the dirt floor. All the blood rushed from Harriet’s head, and for a moment she thought she was going to black out, but it was only Chester, only Chester saying: “Come on out, now.”
It was as if a glass barrier had shattered. Noises came washing back: birds twittering, a cricket chirping stridently on the floor behind an oil can.
“You in there?”
Harriet swallowed; her voice, when she spoke, was faint and scratchy. “Are they gone?”
“What’d you do to them men?” The light was behind him; she couldn’t see his face but it was Chester, all right: Chester’s sandpapery voice, his loose-jointed silhouette. “They act like you picked they pocket.”
“Are they gone?”
“Yes they gone,” said Chester impatiently. “Get on from out of there.”
Harriet stood up behind the roll of insulation and smeared her forehead with the back of her arm. She was peppered all over with grit and cobwebs were stuck to the side of her face.
“You aint knock anything over in there, did you?” said Chester, peering back into the recesses of the shed and then, down at her: “Aint you a sight.” He opened the door for her. “Why they get after you?”
Harriet—still breathless—shook her head.
“Men like that got no business running after some child,” said Chester, glancing over his shoulder as he reached in his breast pocket for a cigarette. “What’d you do? You threw a rock at they car?”
Harriet craned her neck to see around him. Through the dense shrubbery (privet, holly) she had no view at all of the street.
“Tell you what.” Chester exhaled sharply through his nostrils. “You’re lucky I’s working over here today. Mrs. Mulver-hill, she not at her choir practice, she call the police on you for busting through here. Last week, she make me turn the hose on some poor old dog wunder up in the yard.”
He smoked his cigarette. Harriet’s heart still pounded in her ears.
“What you doing, anyway,” said Chester, “tearing around in people’s bushes? I ought to tell yo’ grandmother.”
“What’d they say to you?”
“Say? They aint say nothing. One of him got his car parked out on the street there. The other one stick his head through the hedge there and peep in, like he the electrician looking for a meter.” Chester parted invisible branches and imitated the gesture, complete with weird eyeroll. “Got on a coverall like Mississippi Power and Light.”
Overhead, a branch popped; it was only a squirrel, but Harriet started violently.
“You aint gone tell me why you run from those men?”
“I—I was …”
“What?”
“I was playing,” said Harriet weakly.
“You ought not to get yourself so worked up.” Through a haze of smoke, Chester observed her shrewdly. “What you lookin at so fearful, over thataway? You want me to walk you over to your house?”
“No,” said Harriet, but as she said it Chester laughed and she realized that her head was nodding yes.
Chester put a hand on her shoulder. “You all mixed up,” he said; but despite his cheerful tone he had a worried look. “Tell you what. I’s going home by your house. Give me a minute to wash off under the hydrant and I’ll walk you on down.”
————
“Black trucks,” said Farish abruptly, when they turned onto the highway towards home. He was all hopped-up, breathing with loud asthmatic rasps. “I never seen so many black trucks in my life.”
Danny made an ambiguous noise and passed a hand over his face. His muscles trembled and he was still shaky. What would they have done to the girl if they’d caught her?
“Dammit,” he said, “somebody could’ve called the cops on us back there.” He had—as he had so often nowadays—the sense of coming to his senses in the midst of some preposterous high-wire stunt in a dream. Were they out of their minds? Chasing a kid like that, in a residential neighborhood in broad daylight? Kidnapping carried a death penalty in Mississippi.
“This is nuts,” he said aloud.
But Farish was pointing excitedly out the window, his big heavy rings (pinky ring shaped like a dice) flashing outlandishly in the afternoon sun. “There,” he said, “and there.”
“What,” said Danny, “what?” Cars everywhere; light pouring off cottonfields so intense, it was like light on water.
“Black trucks.”
“Where?” The speed of the moving automobile made him feel like he was forgetting something or had left something important behind.
“There, there, there.”
“That truck’s green.”
“No it’s not—there!” Farish cried triumphantly. “See, there goes another one!”
Danny—heart hammering, pressure rising in his head—felt like saying so fucking what but—for fear of setting Farish off—refrained. Crashing over fences, through tidy town yards with barbecue grills: ridiculous. The craziness
“Look there.” Farish slapped the dashboard, so loudly Danny nearly jumped out of his skin. “I know you seen that one. Them trucks are mobilizing. Getting ready to go.”
Light everywhere: too much light. Sunspots, molecules. The car had become a foreign idea. “I have to pull over,” Danny said.
“What?” said Farish.
“I can’t drive.” He could feel his voice getting high and hysterical; cars swooshed by, colored energy streaks, crowded dreams.
In the parking lot of the White Kitchen, he sat with his forehead on the wheel and took deep breaths while Farish explained, pounding his fist into his palm, that it wasn’t the meth itself that wore you down, but not eating. That was how he—Farish—kept from getting strung out. He ate regular meals, whether he wanted them or not. “But you, you’re just like Gum,” he said, prodding Danny’s bicep with his forefinger. “You forget to eat. That’s why you’re thin as a bone.”
Danny stared at the dashboard. Monoxide vapors and nausea. It was not pleasant to think of himself as being like Gum in any way, and yet with his burnt skin and hollow cheeks and sharp, thin, wasted build, he was the only one of all the grandsons who really looked much like her. It had never occurred to him before.
“Here,” said Farish, hoisting his hip, feeling busily for his wallet: happy to be of service, happy to instruct. “I know just what you need. A fountain Coke and a hot ham sandwich. That’ll fix you right up.”
Laboriously, he opened the car door and hoisted himself out (gamely, stiff in his legs, swaying like an old sea captain) and went inside to get the fountain Coke and the hot ham sandwich.
Danny sat in silence. Farish’s smell hung plump and extravagant in the stifling car. The last thing in the world he wanted was a hot ham sandwich; somehow he would have to choke the thing down.
The girl’s afterburn raced through his mind like jet trails: a dark-headed blur, a moving target. But it was the face of the old lady on the porch that stayed with him. As he drove past that house (her house?) in what felt like slow motion, the old lady’s eyes (powerful eyes, full of light) had passed over him without seeing him and he’d felt a gliddery, queasy shock of recognition. For he knew the old lady—intimately, but distantly, like something from a long-ago dream.
Through the plate glass window, he saw Farish leaning on the counter, jawing expansively with a bony little waitress he liked. Possibly because they were afraid of him, or because they needed the business, or maybe because they were just kind, the waitresses at the White Kitchen listened respectfully to Farish’s wild stories, and didn’t seem irritated by his grooming or his bad eye or his hectoring know-it-all streak. If he raised his voice, if he got agitated and started waving his arms around or knocked over his coffee, they remained calm and polite. Farish, in turn, refrained from foul language in their presence, even when he was wired out of his mind, and on Valentine’s Day, he’d even brought a bunch of flowers down to the restaurant.
Keeping an eye on his brother, Danny got out of the car and walked around to the side of the restaurant, past a margin of dried-up shrubs, to the phone booth. Half the pages in the directory had been torn out, but luckily the last half, and he ran a trembling fingertip down the C’s. The name on the mailbox had been Cleve. Sure enough, right there in black and white: on Margin Street, an E. Cleve.
And—strangely—it chimed. Danny stood in the stifling hot phone booth, letting the connection sink in. For he had met the old lady, so long ago that it seemed from a different life. She was known around the county—not so much for herself but for her father, who had been a big cheese politically, and for the former house of her family, which was called Tribulation. But the house—famous in its day—was long gone, and now survived in name only. On the Interstate, not far from where the house had been, there was a greasy-spoon restaurant (with a white-columned mansion on the billboard) calling itself Tribulation Steak House. The billboard was still there, but now even the restaurant was boarded up and haunted-looking, with graffiti-covered signs that said No Trespassing and weeds growing in the planters out front, as if something about the land itself had sucked all the newness out of the building and made it look old.
When he was a kid (what grade, he couldn’t remember, school was all a dreary blur to him) he’d gone to a birthday party at Tribulation. The memory had stayed with him: huge rooms, spooky and dim and historical, with rusty wallpaper and chandeliers. The old lady who the house belonged to was Robin’s grandmother, and Robin was a schoolmate of Danny’s. Robin lived in town, and Danny—who often roamed the streets on foot, while Farish was in the pool hall—had spotted him late one windy afternoon in fall, playing alone in front of his house. They stood and looked at each other for a while—Danny in the street, Robin in his yard—like wary little animals. Then Robin said: “I like Batman.”
“I like Batman, too,” said Danny. Then they ran up and down the sidewalk together and played until it got dark.
Since Robin had invited everybody in the class to his party (raising his hand for permission, walking up and down the rows and handing an envelope to every single kid) it was easy for Danny to hitch a ride without his father or Gum knowing. Kids like Danny didn’t have birthday parties, and Danny’s father didn’t want him attending them even if he was invited (which he usually wasn’t) because no boy of his was going to pay for something useless like a present, not for some rich man’s son or daughter. Jimmy George Ratliff wasn’t bankrolling that nonsense. Their grandmother reasoned differently. If Danny went to a party, he’d be obligated to the host: “beholden.” Why accept invitations of town folk who (no doubt) had only invited Danny to make fun of him: of his hand-me-down clothes, of his country manners? Danny’s family were poor; they were “plain people.” The fanciness of cake and party clothes was not for them. Gum was forever reminding her grandsons of this, so there was never any danger of them growing exuberant and forgetting it.
Danny was expecting the party to be at Robin’s house (which was nice enough) but he’d been stunned when the packed station wagon piloted by the mother of some girl he didn’t know drove out of the city limits, past cotton fields, down a long alley of trees and up to the columned house. He didn’t belong in a place like this. And, even worse, he hadn’t brought a present. At school, he’d tried to wrap up a Matchbox car he’d found, in some notebook paper, but he didn’t have any tape and it didn’t look like a present at all, only a wadded-up sheet of old homework.
But no one seemed to notice he didn’t have a present; at least no one said anything. And, up close, the house wasn’t so grand as it had looked from far away—in fact, it was falling to pieces, with moth-eaten rugs and broken plaster and cracks on the ceiling. The old lady—Robin’s grandmother—had presided over the party, and she too was large and formal and frightening; when she’d opened the front door she’d scared him to death, looming over him with her stiff posture, her black, rich-looking clothes and her angry eyebrows. Her voice was sharp, and so were her footsteps, clicking fast through the echoing rooms, so brisk and witchy that the children stopped talking when she walked into their midst. But she had handed him a beautiful piece of white cake on a glass plate: a piece with a fat icing rose, and writing too, the big pink H in HAPPY. She had looked over the heads of the other children, crowding around her at the beautiful table; and she had reached out over their heads and handed to Danny (hanging in the back) the special piece with the pink rose, as if Danny was the one person in the room who she wanted to have it.
So that was the old lady. E. Cleve. He had not seen her or thought of her in years. When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not hel
Yes: the old lady had come down, and to fall in the world as she had fallen was foreign, and sad and mysterious. Danny’s own family had nowhere much to fall from. And Robin (a generous, friendly kid) was dead—dead many years now—murdered by some creep passing through, or some filthy old tramp who wandered up from the train tracks, nobody knew. At school that Monday morning, the teacher, Mrs. Marter (a mean fat-ass with a beehive, who had made Danny wear a woman’s yellow wig for a whole week at school, punishment for something or other, he couldn’t remember what), stood whispering with the other teachers in the hall, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. After the bell rang, she sat down at her desk and said, “Class, I have some very sad news.”
Most of the town kids had already heard—but not Danny. At first, he’d thought Mrs. Marter was bullshitting them, but when she made them get out crayons and construction paper and start making cards to send to Robin’s family, he realized she wasn’t. On his card, he drew careful pictures of Batman and Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, standing in front of Robin’s house, all in a line. He wanted to draw them in action postures—rescuing Robin, pulverizing bad guys—but he wasn’t a good enough artist, he’d just had to draw them standing in a line staring straight ahead. As an afterthought, he drew himself in the picture too, off to the side. He’d let Robin down, he felt. Usually the maid wasn’t around on Sundays, but that day, she was. If he hadn’t let her chase him off, earlier in the afternoon, then Robin might still be alive.
As it was, Danny felt narrowly missed. He and Curtis were often left by their father to roam the town alone—often at night—and it wasn’t like they had a home or any friendly neighbors to run to if some creep came after them. Though Curtis hid obligingly enough, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t talk, and had to be constantly shushed—but still, Danny was glad of his company, even when Curtis got scared and had coughing fits. The worst nights were when Danny was alone. Still as a mouse, he hid in toolsheds and behind people’s hedges, breathing fast and shallow in the dark, until the pool hall closed at twelve. Out he crept from his hiding place; down the dark streets he hurried, all the way to the lighted pool hall, looking over his shoulder at the slightest noise. And the fact that he never saw anybody particularly scary during his night wanderings somehow made him more afraid, as if Robin’s murderer was invisible or had secret powers. He started having bad dreams about Batman, where Batman turned in an empty place and started walking towards him, fast, with glowy evil eyes.