by Donna Tartt
“Hunting for snakes to—Quit,” he snapped, his hand flying up, as Harriet yanked a handful of his hair.
“Well, if you feel like catching a snake, that’s the place to do it,” said Pemberton lazily. “Wayne that does maintenance at the Country Club told me that when they were landscaping a pool for some lady out there, the crew killed five dozen snakes. In one yard.”
“Poisonous snakes?”
“Who cares? I wouldn’t live out in that hell hole for a million dollars,” said Pemberton, with a contemptuous, princely toss of his head. “This same guy Wayne said that the exterminator found three hundred of them living under one of those shitty houses. One house. Soon as there’s a flood too big for the Corps of Engineers to sandbag you’re going to have every car-pool mommy out there bit to pieces.”
“I caught a moccasin,” said Hely primly.
“Yeah, right. What’d you do with him?”
“I went on and let him go.”
“I’ll bet you did.” Pemberton glanced at him sideways. “He come after you?”
“Naw.” Hely eased down a little in his seat.
“Well, I don’t care what anybody says about the snake being more scared of you than you are of it. Water moccasins are vicious. They’ll chase your ass. One time a big bull moccasin attacked me and Tink Pittmon in Oktobeha Lake, and I mean, we weren’t anywhere near him, he swam after us clear across the lake.” Pem made a sinuous, swishing movement with his hand. “All you could see on the water was that white mouth open. Then bam bam with his head, like a battering ram, up against the aluminum side of the canoe. People were standing on the pier watching it.”
“What’d you do?” said Harriet, who was sitting up now and leaning over the front seat.
“Well, there you are, Tiger. I thought we were going to have to carry you to the doctor.” Pem’s face, in the rear-view mirror, caught her by surprise: chalk-white lips and white sun cream down his nose, a deep sunburn that reminded her of the frost-bitten faces of Scott’s polar party.
“So you like to hunt snakes?” he said, to Harriet’s reflection.
“No,” said Harriet, at once defiant of and confused by his bemused manner. She retreated into the back seat.
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who said I was ashamed?”
Pem laughed. “You’re tough, Harriet,” he said. “You’re all right. I’ll tell you, though, you guys are nuts with that forked-stick business. What you want to do is get yourself a length of aluminum pipe and run a loop of clothesline through it. All you have to do is slip the loop over his head and pull the ends tight. Then you’ve got him. You can take him in a jar to the Science Fair and really impress everybody” (swiftly, he shot out his right arm and thumped Hely on the head) “right?”
“Shut up!” screamed Hely, rubbing angrily at his ear. Pem would never let Hely forget the butterfly cocoon he’d brought to school for his Science Fair project. He’d spent six weeks nursing it, reading books, taking notes, keeping it at the right temperature and doing everything he was supposed to; but when he finally brought the unhatched chrysalis to school on the day of the Science Fair—nestled tenderly in a jewelry box on a square of cotton—it turned out not to be a cocoon at all but a petrified cat turd.
“Maybe you just thought you caught a water moccasin,” said Pemberton, laughing, raising his voice above the hot stream of insults that Hely pelted at him. “Maybe it wasn’t a snake at all. A big fresh dog turd curled up in the grass can sure look a whole lot like—”
“—Like you,” shouted Hely, raining blows on his brother’s shoulder.
————
“I said, drop the subject, all right?” said Hely for what seemed like the tenth time.
He and Harriet were in the deep end of the pool, holding on to the side. The afternoon shadows were growing long. Five or six little kids—ignoring a fat, distracted mother who paced by the side, pleading with them to get out—yelled and splashed in the shallow end. On the side near the bar, a group of high-school girls in bikinis were stretched out on lounge chairs with towels over their shoulders, giggling and talking. Pemberton was off duty. Hely almost never swam while Pem was lifeguarding because Pem picked on him, shouting insults and unfair commands from his chair on high (like “No running by the pool!” when Hely wasn’t running, only walking fast), so he was very careful about checking Pemberton’s weekly schedule, taped to the refrigerator, before going down to the pool. And this was a pain because in the summer he wanted to swim every day.
“Stupid,” he muttered, thinking of Pem. He was still fuming about Pem mentioning the cat turd at the Science Fair.
Harriet looked at him with a blank and rather fishy expression. Her hair was plastered flat and slick against her skull; her face was criss-crossed with wavering streams of light that made her look small-eyed and ugly. Hely had been irritated with her all afternoon; without his noticing it, his embarrassment and discomfort had turned into resentment and, now, he felt a surge of anger. Harriet had laughed about the cat turd too, along with the teachers and the judges and everybody else at the science fair, and it made him boiling mad all over again just to remember it.
She was still looking at him. He made bug eyes at her. “What are you looking at?” he said.
Harriet kicked off from the side of the pool and—rather ostentatiously—did a backwards somersault. Big deal, thought Hely. Next thing you knew, she’d be wanting to have contests where they held their breath underwater, a game Hely couldn’t stand because she was good at it and he wasn’t.
When she came up again he pretended not to notice that she was annoyed. Nonchalantly, he squirted a jet of water at her—a well-aimed spurt that hit her right in the eye.
“I’m looking over my dead dog Rover,” he sang, in a sugary voice that he knew she hated:
That I overlooked before
One leg is missing
One leg is gone—
“Don’t come with me tomorrow, then. I’d rather go by myself.”
“One leg is scattered all over the lawn …” sang Hely, right over her, gazing up into the air with a rapt goody-two-shoes expression.
“I don’t care if you come or not.”
“At least I don’t fall down on the ground screaming like a big fat baby.” He fluttered his eyelashes. “ ‘Oh, Hely! Save me, save me!’ ” he cried in a high-pitched voice that made the high-school girls on the other side of the pool start laughing.
A sheet of water hit him in the face.
He squirted her with his fist, expertly, and ducked her answering squirt. “Harriet. Hey, Harriet,” he said, in a babyish voice. He felt unaccountably pleased with himself for having stirred her up. “Let’s play horsie, okay? I’ll be the front end, and you be yourself.”
Triumphantly, he kicked off—evading retaliation—and swam out to the middle of the pool, fast, with much noisy splashing. He had a blistering sunburn, and the pool chemicals burned his face like acid, but he’d drunk five Coca-Colas that afternoon (three when he got home, parched and exhausted; two more, with crushed ice and peppermint-striped straws, from the concession stand at the swimming pool) and his ears roared and the sugar trilled high and quick through his pulse. He felt exhilarated. Often, before, Harriet’s recklessness had shamed him. But though the snake hunt had stricken him, temporarily, rambling and crack-brained with terror, something in him still rejoiced over her fainting fit.
He burst exuberantly to the surface, spitting and treading water. When he blinked the sting from his eyes he realized that Harriet was no longer in the pool. Then he saw her, far away, walking rapidly towards the ladies’ locker room with her head down and a zig-zag of wet footprints on the concrete behind her.
“Harriet!” he shouted without thinking, and got a mouthful of water for his carelessness; he’d forgotten that he was in over his head.
————
The sky was dove-gray and the evening air heavy and soft. Down on the sidewalk Harriet still heard, fai
ntly, the shouts of the little kids in the shallow end of the pool. A small breeze raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. She drew her towel closer and began to walk home, very quickly.
A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.
None of them glanced at Harriet. She stared at the sidewalk as they shot past, in a jingly rocket-trail of pop music, her cheeks burning with an angry and mysterious shame. If Hely had been walking with her, they would almost certainly have slowed down to yell something, since Lisa and Pam both had crushes on Pemberton. But they probably didn’t know who Harriet was, though they’d been in Allison’s class since nursery school. In a collage by Allison’s bed at home were pasted happy kindergarten photographs of Allison playing London Bridge with Pam McCormick and Lisa Leavitt; of Allison and Ginger Herbert—red-nosed, laughing, the best of friends—holding hands in somebody’s wintry back yard. Labored first-grade valentines, printed in pencil: “2 Hugs 2 Kisses 4 you. Love Ginger!!!” To reconcile all this affection with the current Allison, and the current Ginger (gloved, glossy-lipped in chiffon beneath an arch of fake flowers) was inconceivable. Allison was as pretty as any of them (and a lot prettier than Sissy Arnold, who had long, witchy teeth and the body of a weasel) but somehow she’d devolved from the childhood friend and fellow of these princesses into a nonentity, someone who never got called except about missed homework assignments. It was the same with their mother. Though she’d been a sorority girl, popular, voted Best Dressed in her college class, she also had a whole lot of friends who didn’t call any more. The Thorntons and the Bowmonts—who at one time had played cards with Harriet’s parents every week, and shared vacation cabins with them on the Gulf Coast—didn’t come by now even when Harriet’s father was in town. There was a forced note about their friendliness when they ran into Harriet’s mother at church, the husbands overly hearty, a sort of shrieking bright vivacity in the women’s voices, and none of them ever quite looked Harriet’s mother in the eye. Ginger and the other girls on the school bus treated Allison in a similar fashion: bright chatty voices, but eyes averted, as if Allison carried an infection they might catch.
Harriet (staring bleakly at the sidewalk) was distracted from these thoughts by a gargling noise. Poor retarded Curtis Ratliff—who roamed the streets of Alexandria ceaselessly in the summertime squirting cats and cars with his water pistol—was lumbering across the road towards her. When he saw her looking at him, a wide smile broke across his smashed face.
“Hat!” He waved at her with both arms—the whole of his body wagging with the effort—and then began to jump up and down laboriously, feet together, as if stamping out a fire. “All wight? All wight?”
“Hello Alligator,” said Harriet, to humor him. Curtis had gone through a long phase where everybody and everything he saw was alligator: his teacher, his shoes, the school bus.
“All wight? All wight, Hat?” He wasn’t going to stop until he got an answer.
“Thank you, Curtis. I’m all right.” Though Curtis wasn’t deaf, he was a little hard of hearing, and you had to remember to speak up.
Curtis’s smile stretched even wider. His roly-poly body, his dim, sweet, toddly manner were like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
“I like cake,” he said.
“Curtis, hadn’t you better get out of the road?”
Curtis froze, hand to mouth. “Uh oh!” he crowed and then again: “Uh oh!” He bunny-hopped across the street and—with both feet, as if leaping a ditch—jumped over the curb and in front of her. “Uh oh!” he said, and dissolved into a jelly of giggles, his hands over his face.
“Sorry, you’re in my way,” Harriet said.
Through his spread fingers, Curtis peeped out at her. He was beaming so hard that his tiny dark eyes were narrowed to slits.
“Snakes bite,” he said unexpectedly.
Harriet was taken aback. Partly because of his hearing problem, Curtis didn’t speak too plain. Certainly she’d misunderstood him; certainly he’d said something else: Ask why? Cake’s nice? Bye-bye?
But before she could ask him, Curtis heaved a big, businesslike sigh and stuck his water pistol in the waistband of his stiff new denims. Then he picked up her hand and doddled it in his own large limp sticky one.
“Bite!” he said cheerfully. He pointed at himself, and to the house opposite—and then he turned and loped off down the street as Harriet—rather unnerved—blinked after him and pulled her towel a bit closer around her shoulders.
————
Though Harriet was unaware of it, poisonous snakes were also a topic of discussion less than thirty feet from where she stood: in the second-story apartment of a frame house across the street, one of several rental properties in Alexandria belonging to Roy Dial.
The house was nothing special: white, two stories, with a slat staircase running up the side so the second floor had its own entrance. This had been built by Mr. Dial, who had blocked off the inside staircase so that what had once been a single home was now two rental units. Before Mr. Dial had bought it, and cut it into apartments, the house had belonged to an old Baptist lady named Annie Mary Alford who was a retired bookkeeper for the lumber mill. After she’d fallen one rainy Sunday in the parking lot of the church and broken her hip, kindly Mr. Dial (who, as a Christian businessman, took an interest in the ailing and elderly, especially those of means who had no family to advise them) made it a special little point to visit Miss Annie Mary daily, offering canned soups, country drives, inspirational reading matter, fruits in the season, and his impartial services as executor of her estate and power of attorney.
Because Mr. Dial dutifully handed over his gains to the bursting First Baptist bank accounts, he felt himself justified in his methods. After all, was not he bringing comfort and Christian fellowship to these barren lives? Sometimes “the ladies” (as he called them) left Mr. Dial their property outright, so comforted were they by his friendly presence: but Miss Annie Mary—who, after all, had worked as a bookkeeper for forty-five years—was suspicious by both training and nature, and after her death he was shocked to discover that she—quite deceitfully, in his view—had called in a Memphis lawyer without his knowledge and made a will which entirely negated the informal little written agreement which Mr. Dial had suggested, ever so discreetly, while patting her hand at her hospital bedside.
Possibly Mr. Dial would not have purchased Miss Annie Mary’s house after her death (for it was not especially cheap) had he not accustomed himself, during her final illness, to considering it his own. After cutting the upstairs and downstairs into two different apartments, and chopping down the pecan trees and rosebushes (for trees and shrubberies meant maintenance dollars) he rented the first floor almost immediately to a couple of Mormon missionary boys. That was nearly ten years ago, and still the Mormons had it—this despite their mission’s stark failure in all that time to convert even one citizen of Alexandria to their wife-swapping Utah Jesus.
The Mormon boys believed that everyone who wasn’t a Mormon was going to Hell (“Yall sure are going to rattle around up there!” Mr. Dial liked to chortle, whenever he went around on the first of the month to collect the rent; it was a little joke he had with them). But they were clean-cut, polite boys, and would
not come right out and say the word “Hell” unless pressed. They also abstained from alcohol and all tobacco products and paid their bills on time. More problematic was the upper apartment. As Mr. Dial balked at the expense of installing a second kitchen, the place was almost impossible to get rid of short of renting to blacks. In ten years the upper story had housed a photography studio, a Girl Scout headquarters, a nursery school, a trophy showroom, and a large family of Eastern Europeans who, as soon as Mr. Dial’s back was turned, moved in all their friends and relations and nearly burnt down the whole building with a hot plate.
It was in this upper apartment that Eugene Ratliff now stood—in the front room, where the linoleum and wallpaper were still badly scorched from the incident with the hot plate. He was running a nervous hand over his hair (which he wore greased back, in the vanished hoodlum style of his teen years) and gazing out the window at his retarded baby brother, who had just left the apartment and was pestering some black-headed child out on the street. On the floor behind him were a dozen dynamite boxes filled with poisonous snakes: timber rattlers, canebrake rattlers, Eastern diamondbacks; cottonmouths and copperheads and—in a box by itself—a single king cobra, all the way from India.
Against the wall, covering a burned spot, was a hand-lettered sign which Eugene had painted himself, and which his landlord Mr. Dial had made him take out of the front yard:
With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding and Spreading the Protestant Religion and enforcement of all our Civil Laws. Mister Bootlegger, Mr. Pusher, Mr. Gambler, Mr. Communist, Mr. Homewrecker and all Law Breakers: the Lord Jesus has yr Number, there are 1 thousand Eyes upon you. You had better change your ocupation before the Grand Jury of Christ. Romans 7:4 This Ministry stands strictly for Clean Living and the Sanctity of Our Homes.
Beneath this was a decal of an American flag, and the following:
The Jews and its municipalities, which are the Antichrist, have stolen our oil and our Properties. Revelations 18:3. Rev. 18:11–15. Jesus will Unite. Rev. 19:17.
