The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Danny wasn’t a cryer—his father didn’t permit any of that, even from Curtis—but one day, in front of his whole family, Danny broke down sobbing, surprising himself as much as anyone. And when he couldn’t stop, his father yanked him up by the arm and offered to give him something to cry about. After the belt-whipping, Ricky Lee cornered him in the trailer’s narrow hallway. “Guess he was your boyfriend.”
“Guess you’d rather it was you,” said his grandmother, kindly.
The very next day, Danny had gone to school bragging of what he had not done. In some strange way, he’d only been trying to save face—he wasn’t afraid of anything, not him—but still he felt uneasy when he thought about it, how sadness had turned to lies and swaggering, how part of it was jealousy, even, as if Robin’s life was all parties and presents and cake. Because sure: things hadn’t been easy for Danny, but at least he wasn’t dead.
The bell over the door tinkled and Farish strode out into the parking lot with a greasy paper bag. He stopped cold when he saw the empty car.
Smoothly, Danny stepped out of the phone booth: no sudden moves. For the last few days, Farish’s behavior had been so erratic that Danny was starting to feel like a hostage.
Farish turned to look at Danny and his eyes were glassy. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“Uh, no problem, I was just looking in the phone book,” said Danny, moving quickly to the car, making sure to keep a pleasant neutral expression on his face. These days, any little thing out of the ordinary could set Farish off; the night before, upset over something he’d seen on television, he’d slammed a glass of milk on the table so hard that the glass broke in his hand.
Farish was staring at him aggressively, tracking him with his eyes. “You’re not my brother.”
Danny stopped, his hand on the car door. “What?”
With absolutely no warning, Farish charged forward and knocked Danny flat on the pavement.
————
When Harriet got home, her mother was upstairs talking to her father on the telephone. What this meant, Harriet didn’t know, but it seemed like a bad sign. Chin in hands, she sat on the stairs, waiting. But after a long time had passed—half an hour or so—and still her mother did not appear, she pushed backwards to sit a step higher, and then a step higher, until finally she had worked all the way up and was perched at the very top of the stairs, with her back to the bolt of light which shone from under her mother’s bedroom door. Carefully, she listened, but though the tone of her mother’s voice was clear (husky, whispery) the words weren’t.
Finally she gave up and went down to the kitchen. Her breath was still shallow, and every now and then, a muscle twitched painfully in her chest wall. Through the window over the sink, the sunset streamed into the kitchen all red and purple, grandiose, the way it got in the late summer as hurricane weather approached. Thank God I didn’t run back to Edie’s, she thought, blinking rapidly. In her panic, she’d come very close to leading them directly to Edie’s front door. Edie was tough: but she was still an old lady, with broken ribs.
Locks in the house: all old, box-type locks, easy to break. The front and back doors had old-fashioned barrel bolts at the top, which were useless. Harriet herself had got in trouble for breaking the lock on the back door. She’d thought it was stuck, and thrown her weight against it from the outside; now, months later, the fitting still dangled from the rotten frame by a single nail.
From the open window, a little shivery breeze blew in across Harriet’s cheek. Upstairs and down: open windows everywhere, propped by fans, open windows in practically every room. To think of them all gave her a nightmarish sense of being unprotected, exposed. What was to keep him from coming right up to the house? And why should he bother with the windows, when he could open pretty much any door he wanted?
Allison ran barefoot into the kitchen and picked up the phone as if she was going to call someone—and listened for several seconds, with a funny look on her face, before she pressed the receiver button and then, gingerly, hung up.
“Who’s she talking to?” asked Harriet.
“Dad.”
“Still?”
Allison shrugged—but she looked troubled, and hurried from the room with her head down. Harriet stood in the kitchen for a minute, brow knotted, and then went to the telephone and eased up the receiver.
In the background, Harriet could hear a television. “—shouldn’t blame you,” her mother was saying querulously.
“Don’t be silly.” Her father’s boredom and impatience was perfectly audible in the way he was breathing. “Why don’t you come up here if you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t mean.”
Quietly, Harriet pressed the button and then put the phone down. She’d feared that the two of them were talking about her, but this was worse. Things were bad enough when her father visited, and the house was noisy and violent and charged with his presence, but he cared what people thought of him, and he behaved better around Edie and the aunts. To know that they were only a few blocks away made Harriet feel safer. And the house was large enough so she could tiptoe around and avoid him much of the time. But his apartment in Nashville was small—only five rooms. There would be no getting away from him.
As if in response to these thoughts, bang, a crash behind her, and she jumped with her hand to her throat. The window-sash had fallen, a confusion of objects (magazines, a red geranium in a clay pot) tumbled to the kitchen floor. For an eerie, vacuum-sealed moment (curtains flat, breeze vanished) she stared at the broken pot, the black crumbs of dirt spilled across the linoleum and then up, apprehensively, into the four shadowy corners of the room. The sunset glow on the ceiling was lurid, ghastly.
“Hello?” she finally whispered, to whatever spirit (friendly or not) had blown through the room. For she had a sense of being observed. But all was silence; and after some moments, Harriet turned and hurried from the room as if the very Devil were skimming after her.
————
Eugene, in some reading glasses from the drugstore, sat quietly at Gum’s kitchen table in the summer twilight. He was reading a smeary old booklet from the County Extension Office called Home Gardens: Fruits and Ornamentals. His snake-bit hand, though long out of the bandage, still had a useless look about it, the fingers stiff, propping the book open like a paperweight.
Eugene had returned from the hospital a changed man. He’d had an epiphany, lying awake listening to the idiot laughter of the television floating down the hall—waxed checkerboard tile, straight lines converging on white double doors that swung inward to Infinity. Through the nights, he prayed until dawn, staring up at the chilly harp of light on the ceiling, trembling in the antiseptic air of death: the hum of X rays, the robot beep of the heart monitors, the rubbery, secretive footsteps of the nurses and the agonized breaths of the man in the bed next to him.
Eugene’s epiphany had been threefold. One: Because he was not spiritually prepared to handle serpents, and had no anointment from the Lord, God in His mercy and justice had lashed out and smote him. Two: Not everybody in the world—every Christian, every believer—was meant to be a minister of the Word; it had been Eugene’s mistake to think that the ministry (for which he was unqualified, in nearly all respects) was the only ladder by which the righteous could attain Heaven. The Lord, it seemed, had different plans for Eugene, had had them all along—for Eugene was no speaker; he had no education, or gift for tongues, or easy rapport with his fellow man; even the mark on his face rendered him an unlikely messenger, as people quailed and shrunk from such visible signs of the Living God’s vengeance.
But if Gene was unfit to prophesy or preach the gospel: what then? A sign, he’d prayed, lying wakeful in his hospital bed, in the cool gray shadows … and, as he prayed, his eyes returned repeatedly to a ribboned vase of red carnations by the bed of his neighbor—a very large, very brown old man, very wrinkled in the face, whose mouth opened and closed like a hooked f
The flowers were the only pinprick of color in the room. When Gum was in the hospital, Eugene had returned to look in the door at his poor neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word. The bed was empty but the flowers were still there, blazing up red from the bed table as if in sympathy with the deep, red, basso pain that throbbed in his bitten arm, and suddenly the veil fell away, and it was revealed to Eugene that the flowers themselves were the sign he’d prayed for. They were little live things, the flowers, created by God and living like his heart was: tender, slender lovelies that had veins, and vessels, that sipped water from their hobnail vase, that breathed their weak, pretty scent of cloves even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And as he was thinking on these things, the Lord himself had spoken to Eugene, there as he stood in the quiet of the afternoon, saying: Plant my gardens.
This was the third epiphany. That very afternoon, Eugene had hunted through the seed packs on the back porch and planted a row of collards and another of winter turnip greens in a moist, dark patch of earth where—until recently—a stack of old tractor tires had sat atop a sheet of black plastic. He’d also purchased two rosebushes on sale at the feed store and planted them in the scrubby grass in front of his grandmother’s trailer. Gum, typically, was suspicious, as if the roses were a sly trick at her expense; Eugene, several times, had caught her standing in the front yard staring at the poor little shrubs as if they were dangerous intruders, freeloaders and parasites, there to rob them all blind. “What I want to know,” she said, limping after Eugene as he ministered to the roses with pesticide and watering can, “is, who’s gone attend to them thangs? Who’s gone pay for all that fancy spray, and fertilizer? Who’s gone get stuck with watering them, and dusting them, and nursing them, and fooling with them all the time?” And she cast a cloudy old martyred eye at Eugene, as if to say that she knew that the burden of their care would only crush down joylessly on her own shoulders.
The door of the trailer squeaked open—so loudly that Eugene jumped—and in trudged Danny: dirty, unshaven, hollow-eyed and dehydrated-looking, as if he’d been wandering the desert for days. He was so thin that his jeans were falling off his hip-bones.
Eugene said: “You look awful.”
Danny gave him a sharp look, then collapsed at the table with his head in his hands.
“It’s your own fault. You ort to just stop taking that stuff.”
Danny raised his head. His vacant stare was frightening. Suddenly he said: “Do you remember that little black-haired girl come up to the back door of the Mission the night you got bit?”
“Well, yes,” said Eugene, closing the booklet on his finger. “Yes, I do. Farsh can go around saying any crazy thing he wants to, and can’t nobody question it—”
“You remember her, then.”
“Yes. And it’s funny you mention it.” Eugene considered where to begin. “That girl run off from me,” he said, “before the snakes was even out of the window. She was nervous, down there on the sidewalk with me, and the second that yell come from up there she was off.” Eugene set the booklet aside. “And I can tell you another thing, I did not leave that door unlocked. I don’t care what Farsh says. It was standing open when we come back, and—”
He drew his neck back and blinked at the tiny photograph which Danny had suddenly shoved in his face.
“Why, that’s you,” he said.
“I—” Danny shuddered and turned up his red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling.
“Where’d this come from?”
“She left it.”
“Left it where?” said Eugene, and then said: “What’s that noise?” Outside, someone was wailing loudly. “Is that Curtis?” he said, standing up.
“No—” Danny drew a deep, ragged breath—“it’s Farish.”
“Farish?”
Danny scraped back his chair; he looked wildly about the room. The sobs were broken, guttural, as despairing as a child’s sobs but more violent, as if Farish was spitting and choking up his own heart.
“My gosh,” said Eugene, awed. “Listen at that.”
“I had a bad time with him just now, in the parking lot of the White Kitchen,” said Danny. He held up his hands, which were dirty and skinned up.
“What happened?” said Eugene. He went to the window and peered out. “Where’s Curtis?” Curtis, who had bronchial and breathing problems, often went into savage coughing fits when he was upset—or when someone else was, which got him more upset than anything.
Danny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained, as from overuse. “I’m sick of being scared all the time.” To Eugene’s astonishment he drew a mean-looking bill-hook knife from his boot and—with a stoned but significant look—set it down on the table with a solid clack.
“This is my protection,” he said. “From him.” And he rolled up his eyes in a particularly squidlike way—whites showing—that Eugene took to mean Farish.
The awful crying had died down. Eugene left the window and sat down by Danny. “You’re killing yourself,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”
“Get some sleep,” Danny repeated. He stood up, as if he was about to make a speech, and then sat back down.
“When I us coming up,” said Gum, creeping in on her walker, rocking forward an inch at a time, click click, click click, “my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that’ll sit down in a chair and read a book.”
This she said with a sort of peaceful tenderness, as if the plain wisdom of the remark did her father credit. The booklet lay on the table. With a trembling old hand, she reached out and picked it up. Holding it at arm’s length, she looked at the front of it, and then she turned it around and looked at the back. “Bless ye heart, Gene.”
Eugene looked over the tops of his glasses. “What is it?”
“Oh,” said Gum, after a tolerant pause. “Well. I just hate to see ye get your hopes up. It’s a hard old world for folks like us. I sure do hate to think of all them young college professors, standing up in the job line ahead of you.”
“Hon? Can’t I just look at the dern thing?” Certainly she meant no harm, his grandmother: she was just a poor little broken-down old lady who’d worked hard her whole life, and never had anything, and never had a chance, and never knew what a chance was. But why this meant her grandsons didn’t have a chance, either, Eugene wasn’t quite sure.
“It’s just something I picked up at the Extension Office, hun,” he said. “For free. You ought to go down there and look sometime. They have things there on how to grow just about every crop and vegetable and tree there is.”
Danny—who had been sitting quietly all this time, staring into space—stood up, a little too suddenly. He had a glazed look, and swayed on his feet. Both Eugene and Gum looked at him. He took a step backwards.
“Them glasses look good on you,” he said to Eugene.
“Thank you,” said Eugene, reaching up self-consciously to adjust them.
“They look good,” said Danny. His eyes were glassy with an uncomfortable fascination. “You ort to wear them all the time.”
He turned; and as he did, his knees buckled under him and he fell to the floor.
————
All the dreams Danny had fought off for the past two weeks thundered down on him all at once, like a cataract from a burst dam, with wrecks and jetsam from various stages of his life jumbled and crashing down along with it—so that he was thirteen again, and lying on a cot his first night in Juvenile Hall (tan cinder block, industrial fan rocking back and forth on the concrete floor like it was about to take off and fly away) but also five—in first grade—and nine, with his mother in the hospital, missing her so terribly, so afraid of her dying, and of his drunk father in the next room, that he lay awake in a delirium of terror memorizing every single spice on the printed curtains which had the
Tossing on his bed, Danny was all these ages at once and yet himself, and twenty—with a record, with a habit, with a virtual fortune of his brother’s crank calling him in a shrill eerie voice from its hiding place high above the town—so that the water tower was confused in his mind with a tree he’d climbed and thrown a bird-dog puppy out of once, when he was a kid, to see what would happen (it died) and his guilty thoughts about ripping Farish off were stoppered and shaken up with shameful childhood lies he’d told about driving race cars, and beating up and killing people; with memories of school, and court, and prison, and the guitar his father had made him quit playing because he said it took too much work (where was that guitar? he needed to find it, people were waiting for him out in the car, if he didn’t hurry they’d go off and leave him). The tug of all these contradictory times and places made him roll back and forth on his pillow from the confusion of it all. He saw his mother—his mother!—looking in the window at him, and the concern on her swollen, kindly face made him want to weep; other faces made him start back in terror. How to tell the difference between the living and the dead? Some were friendly; some weren’t. And they all spoke to him and to each other, though they’d never known each other in life, walking in and out in large, businesslike groups, and it was hard to know who belonged where and what they were all doing together here in his room, where they didn’t belong, their voices mingled with the rain striking down on the tin roof of the trailer and themselves as gray and formless as the rain.