The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  “It would be better,” said Edie angrily, “if he just went on and divorced her. Charlotte is still young. And there’s that nice young Willory man who just bought that property out by Glenwild—he’s from the Delta, he’s got some money—”

  “Well,” murmured Adelaide, “Dixon is a good provider.”

  “What I’m saying is, she could get somebody so much better.”

  “What I’m saying, Edith, is that there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. I don’t know what would happen to little Charlotte and those girls if Dix wasn’t earning a good salary.”

  “Well, yes,” said Edie, “there is that.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” said Libby tremulously, “if we did the right thing by not urging Charlotte to move to Dallas.”

  There had been talk of this not long after Robin died. The bank had offered Dix a promotion if he would relocate to Texas. Several years later, he had tried to get them all to move to some town in Nebraska. So far from not urging Charlotte and the girls to go, the aunts had been panic-stricken on both occasions and Adelaide and Libby and even Ida Rhew had wept for weeks at the very thought.

  Harriet blew on her father’s signature, though the ink was dry. Her mother wrote checks on this account all the time—it was how she paid the bills—but, as Harriet had learned, she didn’t keep track of the balance. She would have paid the Country Club bill happily enough if Harriet had asked; but the threat of Camp Lake de Selby grumbled black at the horizon, and Harriet did not wish to risk reminding her, by mention of Country Club and swimming pool, that the registration forms had not arrived.

  ————

  She got on her bicycle and rode over to the Country Club. The office was locked. Everybody was at lunch in the dining room. She walked down the hall to the Pro Shop, where she found Hely’s big brother, Pemberton, smoking a cigarette behind the counter and reading a stereo magazine.

  “Can I give this money to you?” she asked him. She liked Pemberton. He was Robin’s age, and had been Robin’s friend. Now he was twenty-one and some people said it was a shame that his mother had talked his father out of sending him to military school back when it might have made a difference. Though Pem had been popular in high school, and his picture was on practically every page of his senior class yearbook, he was a loafer and a little bit of a beatnik, and he hadn’t lasted long at Vanderbilt, or at Ole Miss or even Delta State. Now he lived at home. His hair was a lot longer even than Hely’s; in the summer he was a lifeguard at the Country Club, and in the winter all he did was work on his car and listen to loud music.

  “Hey, Harriet,” said Pemberton. He was probably lonesome, Harriet thought, there all by himself in the Pro Shop. He wore a torn T-shirt, madras plaid shorts, and golf shoes with no socks; the remains of a hamburger and french fries, on one of the Country Club’s monogrammed dishes, were near his elbow on the counter. “Come over here and help me pick out a car stereo.”

  “I don’t know anything about car stereos. I want to leave this check with you.”

  Pem hooked his hair behind his ears with a big-knuckled hand, then took the check and examined it. He was long-boned, easy in his demeanor, and much taller than Hely; his hair was the same tangled, stripey blonde, light on top and darker underneath. His features were like Hely’s, too, but more finely cut, and his teeth were slightly crooked but in a way that was somehow more pleasing than if they were straight.

  “Well, you can leave it with me,” he said at last, “but I’m not sure what to do with it. Say, I didn’t know your dad was in town.”

  “He’s not.”

  Pemberton, cocking a sly eyebrow at her, indicated the date.

  “He sent it in the mail,” said Harriet.

  “Where is old Dix, anyway? I haven’t seen him around in ages.”

  Harriet shrugged. Though she didn’t like her father, she knew she wasn’t supposed to gossip or complain about him, either.

  “Well, when you see him, why don’t you ask him if he’ll send me a check, too. I really want these speakers.” He pushed the magazine across the counter and showed them to her.

  Harriet studied them. “They all look the same.”

  “No way, sweetie. These Blaupunkts are the sexiest thing around. See? All black, with black buttons on the receiver? See how little it is compared to the Pioneers?”

  “Well, get that one, then.”

  “I will when you get your dad to send me three hundred bucks.” He took a last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on his plate with a hiss. “Say, where’s that dingbat brother of mine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pemberton leaned forward, with a confidential shift of the shoulders. “How come you let him hang around with you?”

  Harriet stared at the ruins of Pem’s lunch: cold french fries, cigarette crooked and hissing in a puddle of ketchup.

  “Doesn’t he get on your nerves?” Pemberton said. “How come you make him dress up like a woman?”

  Harriet looked up, startled.

  “You know, in Martha’s housecoats.” Martha was Pem and Hely’s mother. “He loves it. Every time I see him he’s running out of the house with some kind of weird pillowcase or towel over his head or something. He says you make him do it.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Come on, Harriet.” He pronounced her name as if he found something faintly ridiculous about it. “I drive by your house and you’ve always got about seven or eight little boys in bedsheets hanging around out in your yard. Ricky Ashmore calls yall the baby Ku Klux Klan but I think you just enjoy making them dress up like girls.”

  “It’s a game,” said Harriet, stolidly. She was annoyed at his persistence; the Bible pageants were a thing of the past. “Listen. I wanted to talk to you. About my brother.”

  Now it was Pemberton’s turn to be uncomfortable. He picked up the stereo magazine and began to leaf through it with studied care.

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “Well,” said Pemberton slyly. He put down the stereo magazine. “I’ll tell you something if you promise not to tell a soul. You know old Mrs. Fountain that lives next door to you?”

  Harriet was looking at him with such undisguised contempt that he collapsed in laughter.

  “What?” he said. “You don’t believe it about Mrs. Fountain and all them people buried up under her house?” Several years ago, Pem had scared Hely stiff by telling him somebody had found human bones poking out of Mrs. Fountain’s flowerbed, also that Mrs. Fountain had stuffed her dead husband and propped him up in a recliner to keep her company at night.

  “So you don’t know who did it, then.”

  “Nope,” said Pemberton, a bit curtly. He still remembered his mother coming up to his bedroom (he had been putting together a model airplane; weird, the things that stuck in your mind sometimes) and calling him out into the hall to tell him Robin was dead. It was the only time he’d ever seen her cry. Pem hadn’t cried: he was nine years old, didn’t have a clue, he’d just gone back to his room and shut the door and—under a cloud of growing unease—continued work on the Sop-with Camel; and he could still remember how the glue beaded up in the seams, it looked like shit, eventually he’d thrown it away without finishing it.

  “You shouldn’t joke around about this kind of stuff,” he said to Harriet.

  “I am not joking. I am in deadly earnest,” said Harriet loftily. Not for the first time, Pemberton thought how different she was from Robin, so different you could hardly believe they were related. Maybe it was partly the dark hair that made her seem so serious, but unlike Robin she had a ponderous quality about her: poker-faced and pompous, never laughing. There was a whimsical flutter of Robin’s ghost about Allison (who, now she was in high school, was starting to get a nice little walk on her; she had turned Pem’s head on the street the other day without his realizing who she was) but Harriet was not sweet or whimsical by any stretch of the imagination. Harriet was a trip.

  “I think you’ve been
reading too much Nancy Drew, sweetie,” he said to her. “All that stuff happened before Hely was even born.” He practiced a golf swing with an invisible club. “There used to be three or four trains that stopped here every day, and you had a lot more tramps over around the railroad tracks.”

  “Maybe whoever did it is still around.”

  “If that’s true, why haven’t they caught him?”

  “Did anything seem odd before it happened?”

  Pem snorted derisively. “What, you mean like spooky?”

  “No, just strange.”

  “Look, this wasn’t like in the movies. Nobody saw some big pervert or creep hanging around and just forgot to mention it.” He sighed. At school, for years afterward, the favorite game at recess was to re-enact Robin’s murder: a game which—passed down, and mutated over the years—was still popular at the elementary school. But in the playground version, the killer was caught and punished. Children gathered in a circle by the swing-set, raining death blows upon the invisible villain who lay prostrate in their midst.

  “For a while there,” he said aloud, “some kind of cop or preacher came to talk to us every day. Kids at school used to brag about knowing who did it, or even that they did it themselves. Just to get attention.”

  Harriet was gazing at him intently.

  “Kids do that. Danny Ratliff—geez. He used to brag all the time about stuff he never did, like shooting people in the kneecaps and throwing rattlesnakes in old ladies’ cars. You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stuff I’ve heard him say at the pool hall.…” Pemberton paused. He had known Danny Ratliff since childhood: weak and swaggering, throwing his arms around, full of empty boasts and threats. But though the picture was clear enough in his own mind, he wasn’t sure how to convey it to Harriet.

  “He—Danny’s just nuts,” he said.

  “Where can I find this Danny?”

  “Whoa. You don’t want to mess around with Danny Ratliff. He just got out of prison.”

  “What for?”

  “Knife fight or something. Can’t remember. Every single one of the Ratliffs has been in the penitentiary for armed robbery or killing somebody except the baby, the little retarded guy. And Hely told me he beat the shit out of Mr. Dial the other day.”

  Harriet was appalled. “That’s not true. Curtis didn’t lay a finger on him.”

  Pemberton chortled. “I’m sorry to hear that. I never saw anybody needed to get the shit beat out of them as bad as Mr. Dial.”

  “You never did tell me where I can find this Danny.”

  Pemberton sighed. “Look, Harriet,” he said. “Danny Ratliff is, like, my age. All that with Robin happened back when we were in the fourth grade.”

  “Maybe it was a kid who did it. Maybe that’s how come they never caught him.”

  “Look, I don’t see why you think you’re such a genius, figuring this out when nobody else could.”

  “You say he goes to the Pool Hall?”

  “Yes, and the Black Door Tavern. But I’m telling you, Harriet, he didn’t have anything to do with it and even if he did you better leave him alone. There’s a bunch of those brothers and they’re all kind of crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Not like that. I mean … one of them is a preacher—you’ve probably seen him, he stands around on the highway yelling about the Atonement and shit. And the big brother, Farish, was in the mental hospital down at Whitfield for a while.”

  “What for?”

  “Because he got hit in the head with a shovel or something. I can’t remember. Every single one of them is getting arrested all the time. For stealing cars,” he added, when he saw how Harriet was looking at him. “Breaking into houses. Nothing like what you’re talking about. If they’d had anything to do with Robin the cops would have beat it out of them years ago.”

  He picked up Harriet’s check, which was still lying on the counter. “All right, kiddo? This is for you and Allison, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At home.”

  “What’s she doing?” Pem said, leaning forward on his elbows.

  “Watching Dark Shadows.”

  “Reckon she’ll be coming to the pool any this summer?”

  “If she wants to.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “Boys call her on the phone.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Pemberton. “Like who?”

  “She doesn’t like to talk to them.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Reckon if I called her sometime, she’d talk to me?”

  Abruptly, Harriet said: “Guess what I’m going to do this summer?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m going to swim the length of the pool underwater.”

  Pemberton—who was growing a little tired of her—rolled his eyes. “What’s next?” he said. “Cover of Rolling Stone?”

  “I know I can do it. I held my breath for almost two minutes last night.”

  “Forget it, sweetie,” said Pemberton, who did not believe a word of this. “You’ll drown. I’ll have to fish you out of the pool.”

  ————

  Harriet spent the afternoon reading on the front porch. Ida was washing clothes, as she always did on Monday afternoons; her mother and sister were asleep. She was nearing the end of King Solomon’s Mines when Allison, barefoot and yawning, tottered outside, in a flowery dress that looked like it belonged to their mother. With a sigh, she lay down on the pillowed porch swing and pushed herself with the tip of her big toe to set herself rocking.

  Immediately, Harriet put down the book and went to sit by her sister.

  “Did you have any dreams during your nap?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “If you don’t remember, then maybe you did.”

  Allison didn’t answer. Harriet counted to fifteen and then—more slowly this time—politely repeated what she had just said.

  “I didn’t have any dreams.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t remember.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Hey,” said a nasal little voice bravely from the sidewalk.

  Allison raised herself up on her elbows. Harriet—extremely annoyed at the interruption—turned and saw Lasharon Odum, the grimy little girl whom Mrs. Fawcett had pointed out earlier at the library. She was gripping the wrist of a little white-haired creature of indeterminate sex, in a stained shirt that did not quite cover its stomach, and a baby in plastic diapers was straddled on her opposite hip. Like little wild animals, afraid to come too close, they stood back and watched with flat eyes that glowed eerie and silvery in their sunburnt faces.

  “Well, hello there,” said Allison, standing up and moving cautiously down the steps to greet them. Shy as Allison was, she liked children—white or black, and the smaller the better. Often she struck up conversations with the dirty ragamuffins who wandered up from the shacks by the river, though Ida Rhew had forbidden her to do this. “You not going to think they so cute when you come down with the lice or the ringworm,” she said.

  The children watched Allison warily, but stood their ground as she approached. Allison stroked the baby’s head. “What’s his name?” she said.

  Lasharon Odum did not answer. She was looking past Allison, at Harriet. Young as she was, there was something pinched and old about her face; her eyes were a ringing, primitive ice gray, like a wolf cub’s. “I seen you at the libery,” she said.

  Harriet, stony-faced, met her gaze but did not reply. She was uninterested in babies and small children, and agreed with Ida that they had no business venturing up uninvited into the yard.

  “My name is Allison,” Allison said to her. “What’s yours?”

  Lasharon fidgeted.

  “Are these your brothers? What are their names? Hmm?” she said, squatting on her heels to look into the face of the smaller child, who was holding a library book by its back cover, so that the op
en pages dragged on the sidewalk. “Will you tell me what your name is?”

  “Go on, Randy,” said the girl, prodding the toddler.

  “Randy? Is that your name?”

  “Say yesm, Randy.” She jostled the baby on her hip. “Say, That there’s Randy and I’m Rusty,” she said, speaking for the baby in a high-pitched, acidic little voice.

  “Randy and Rusty?”

  Nasty and Dirty, more like it, thought Harriet.

  With scarcely concealed impatience, she sat on the swing tapping her foot as Allison patiently coaxed all their ages out of Lasharon and complimented her for being such a good babysitter.

  “And will you let me see your library book?” Allison was saying to the little boy called Randy. “Hmn?” She reached for it but, coyly, he turned himself away from her with his whole body, grinning infuriatingly.

  “It aint hisn,” said Lasharon. Her voice—though sharp, and richly nasal—was also dainty and clear. “It’s mine.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Ferdinand the Bull.”

  “I remember Ferdinand. He was the little fellow who liked to smell flowers instead of fight, wasn’t he?”

  “You’re pretty, lady,” burst out Randy, who until this moment had said nothing. Excitedly, he swung his arm back and forth so the pages of the open book scrubbed against the sidewalk.

  “Is that the right way to treat library books?” said Allison.

  Randy, flustered, let the book drop altogether.

  “You pick that up,” said his big sister, making as if to slap him.

  Randy flinched easily from the slap and, aware that Allison’s eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.