The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  There was no Danny Ratliff in Pem’s class for the previous year (though there was Pem again, as Jolly Junior) but running her finger down the alphabetized list of the class behind Pemberton’s, suddenly she landed on his name: Danny Ratliff.

  Her eye jumped to the column opposite. Instead of a photograph there was only a spiky cartoon of a teenager with his elbows on a table, poring over a piece of paper that said “Exam Cheat Sheet.” Below the drawing, jangly beatnik capitals read: TOO BUSY—PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE.

  So he’d failed at least one year. Had he dropped out of school after the tenth grade?

  When she went back another year, she finally found him: a boy with thick bangs brushed low on his forehead, covering his eyebrows—handsome, but in a threatening way, like a hoodlum pop star. He looked older than a ninth-grader. His eyes were half-hidden beneath the low fringe of hair, which gave him a mean, hooded look; his lips were insolently pursed as if he was about to spit out a piece of gum or blow a raspberry.

  She studied the picture for a long time. Then, carefully, she scissored it out, and tucked it in her orange notebook.

  “Harriet, get down here.” Ida’s voice, at the foot of the stairs.

  “Maam?” called Harriet, hastening to finish.

  “Who been poking holes in this lunch bucket?”

  ————

  Hely did not call that afternoon, or that night. The next morning—which was rainy—he didn’t come by either so Harriet decided to walk over to Edie’s house to see if she had made breakfast.

  “A deacon!” said Edie. “Trying to turn a profit from a church outing of widows and retired ladies!” She was dressed—handsomely—in khaki shirt and dungarees, for she was to spend the day working at the Confederate cemetery with the Garden Club. “ ‘Well,’ he said to me,” (lips pursed, mimicking Mr. Dial’s voice) “ ‘but Greyhound would charge you eighty dollars.’ Greyhound! ‘Well!’ I said. ‘I find that not at all surprising! The last I heard, Greyhound was still running a money-making concern!’ ”

  She was looking at the newspaper over the tops of her half-moon spectacles as she said this: her voice was queenly, withering. She had taken no notice of her granddaughter’s silence, which had driven Harriet (crunching quietly at her toast) into a deeper and more determined sulk. She had felt quite hard towards Edie ever since her conversation with Ida—more so, because Edie was always writing letters to congressmen and senators, getting up petitions, fighting to save this old landmark or that endangered species. Was not Ida’s welfare as important as whatever Mississippi waterfowl occupied Edie’s energies so profoundly?

  “Of course, I didn’t bring it up,” said Edie, and sniffed an imperious sniff as if to say: and he’d better be glad I didn’t as she picked up her paper and gave it a rattle, “but I never will forgive Roy Dial for the way he did Daddy on that last car he bought. Daddy got mixed up about things there at the last. He might as well have knocked Daddy on the pavement and stolen the money out of his pocket.”

  Harriet realized that she was staring at the back door too pointedly, and turned back to her breakfast. If Hely went to her house and she wasn’t home, he came looking for her over here, and this was sometimes uncomfortable since Edie loved nothing better than to tease Harriet about Hely, with murmured asides about sweethearts and romance, humming infuriating little love songs under her breath. Harriet bore teasing of any sort very badly, but she could not endure being teased about boys. Edie pretended not to know this, and drew back from the results of her handiwork (tears, denial) in theatrical astonishment. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” she said, gaily, in a merry, mocking tone that Harriet loathed; or, more smugly, “You must really like that little boy if it upsets you so much to talk about him.”

  “I think,” said Edie—startling Harriet from these recollections—“I think they ought to give them a hot lunch at school but they ought not to give the parents a dime.” She was talking about a story in the newspaper. A little earlier she’d been talking about the Panama Canal, how crazy it was to just give the thing away.

  “I guess I’ll read the obituaries,” she said. “That’s what Daddy used to say. ‘Guess I’d better go to the obituaries first and see if anybody I know has died.’ ”

  She turned to the back of the paper. “I wish this rain would clear up,” she said, glancing out the window, seemingly quite oblivious to Harriet. “There’s plenty to do inside—the potting shed needs to be cleaned and those pots disinfected—but I guarantee you that people will wake up, and take one look at this weather—”

  As if on cue, the telephone rang.

  “Here we go,” said Edie, clapping her hands, rising from the table. “The first cancellation of the morning.”

  ————

  Harriet walked home in the drizzle with her head down, under a gigantic borrowed umbrella of Edie’s which—when she was smaller—she had used to play Mary Poppins. Water sang in the gutters; long rows of orange day lilies, beaten down by the rain, leaned towards the sidewalk at frenetic angles as if to shout at her. She half-expected Hely to run up splashing through the puddles in his yellow slicker; she was determined to ignore him if he did, but the steamy streets were empty: no people, no cars.

  Since there was no one around to prevent her from playing in the rain, she hopped ostentatiously from puddle to puddle. Were she and Hely not speaking? The longest time they had ever gone without talking was in fourth grade. They had gotten into an argument at school, during a winter recess in February, with sleet driving at the windowpanes and all the kids agitated from being kept off the playground three days in a row. The classroom was overcrowded, and stank: of mildew and chalk dust and milk gone sour, but mainly of urine. The wall-to-wall carpet reeked of it; on damp days the smell drove everyone wild, so the kids pinched their noses shut, or pretended to gag; and even the teacher, Mrs. Miley, roamed the back part of the classroom with a can of Glade Floral Bouquet air freshener, which she sprayed in steady, relentless sweeps—even while she explained long division or gave dictation—so that a gentle deodorizing mist was perpetually settling about the heads of the children, and they went home smelling like commodes in a ladies’ rest room.

  Mrs. Miley was not supposed to leave her class unsupervised: but she didn’t enjoy the pee smell any more than the children and often plodded across the hall to gossip with the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rideout. She always picked a child to be in charge while she was gone and on this occasion she had picked Harriet.

  Being “left in charge” was no fun. While Harriet stood by the door and watched for Mrs. Miley to come back, the other kids—who had nothing to worry about except getting to their seats in time—raced around the smelly, overheated room: laughing, whining, playing tag and throwing checkers, thumping footballs of folded notebook paper into each other’s faces. Hely and a boy named Greg DeLoach had been amusing themselves by attempting to hit Harriet in the back of the head with these thumped paper footballs as she stood watch. Both were unconcerned that she would tell. People were so afraid of Mrs. Miley that no one ever told. But Harriet was in a terrible mood because she needed to go to the bathroom and because she hated Greg DeLoach, who did things like picking his nose and eating the boogers. When Hely played with Greg, Greg’s personality infected him like a disease. Together, they threw spitballs and shouted insults at Harriet, and shrieked if she went anywhere near them.

  So when Mrs. Miley returned, Harriet told on Greg and Hely, too, and for good measure she added that Greg had called her a whore. In the past, Greg had indeed called Harriet a whore (once he had even called her some mysterious name that sounded like “whore-hupper”) but on this particular occasion he hadn’t called her anything worse than Gross. Hely was made to memorize fifty extra vocabulary words, but Greg got the vocabulary words and nine licks with the paddle (one for each letter in the words “Damn” and “Whore”) from tough old yellow-toothed Mrs. Kennedy, who was as big as a man, and did all the paddling at the elementary school.
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br />   The main reason Hely was mad at Harriet for so long over this was because it took him three weeks to memorize the vocabulary words sufficiently to pass a written test. Harriet had reconciled herself stolidly and without much pain to life without Hely, which was life the way it always was, only lonelier; but two days after the test, there he was at Harriet’s back door asking her to ride bikes. Generally, after quarrels, it was Hely who struck up relations again, whether he was the one at fault or not—because he had the shorter memory, and because he was the first to panic when he found himself with an hour on his hands and no one to play with.

  Harriet shook the umbrella, left it on the back porch, and went through the kitchen to the hall. Ida Rhew stepped out of the living room and in front of her before she could go up the stairs to her room.

  “Listen here!” she said. “You and me aint finished with that lunch bucket. I know it was you gone and poke holes in that thing.”

  Harriet shook her head. Though she felt compelled to stick by her previous denial, she did not have the energy for a more vigorous lie.

  “Reckon you want me to think somebody broke in the house and done it?”

  “It’s Allison’s lunchbox.”

  “You know yo’ sister aint poke holes in that thing,” Ida called up the stairs after her. “You aint fool me for one second.”

  ————

  We’re gonna turn it on …

  We’re gonna bring you the power …

  Hely, blankly, sat crosslegged on the floor in front of the television with a half-eaten bowl of Giggle Pops in his lap and his Rock’em Sock’em Robots—one robot unsprung, elbow dangling—shoved to the side. Beside them, face down, lay a GI Joe who’d been serving as referee.

  The Electric Company was an educational program but at least it wasn’t as dumb as Mister Rogers. He ate another listless spoonful of the Giggle Pops—they were soggy now, and the dye had turned the milk green, but the mini marshmallows were still like aquarium gravel. His mother, a few minutes before, had run downstairs and popped her head into the family room to ask if he felt like helping her make some cookies; and he was angry when he remembered how little his scornful refusal had troubled her. Okay, she’d replied, in all good cheer, suit yourself.

  No: he would not give her the satisfaction of appearing interested. Cooking was for girls. If his mother really loved him, she would drive him to the bowling alley.

  He ate another spoonful of the Giggle Pops. All the sugar had soaked off them and they didn’t taste so good any more.

  ————

  At Harriet’s, the day dragged on. Nobody seemed to notice that Hely hadn’t been around—except, oddly, Harriet’s mother, who could not be expected with absolute certainty to notice if a hurricane rose up and tore the roof off the house. “Where’s little Price?” she called out to Harriet from the sun-porch that afternoon. She called Hely little Price because Price was his mother’s maiden name.

  “Don’t know,” said Harriet curtly, and went upstairs. But soon she was bored—drifting fretfully between bed and window seat, watching the rain slash against the windowpanes—and soon she wandered downstairs again.

  After loitering aimlessly for some time, and being chased from the kitchen, she finally sat down in a neglected spot on the hall floor where the boards were particularly smooth, to play a game of jacks. As she played, she counted out loud in a dull singsong which alternated numbingly with the thump of the ball, and with Ida’s monotonous song in the kitchen:

  Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain

  Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain

  Daniel saw that stone, hewn out the mountain …

  The jacks ball was a hard miracle plastic that bounced higher than rubber. If it struck a particular raised nail head it zinged off at a crazy angle. And this particular raised nail head—black, slanted to one side at an angle that suggested a Chinaman’s tiny sampan hat—even this nail head was an innocent, well-meaning little object that Harriet could fasten her attention to, a welcome still point in the chaos of time. How many times had Harriet stepped on this raised nail head with her bare foot? It was bent over at the neck by the force of the hammer, not sharp enough to cut, though once when she was about four years old, and sliding on her rear end down the hall floor, this nail had snagged and torn the seat of her underpants: blue underpants, part of a matched set from the Kiddie Korner, embroidered in pink script with the days of the week.

  Three, six, nine, one to grow on. The nail head was steadfast; it hadn’t changed since she was a baby. No: it had stayed where it was, residing quietly in its dark tidal pool behind the hall door while the rest of the world ran haywire. Even the Kiddie Korner—where, until recently, all Harriet’s clothes had been bought—was now closed. Tiny, pink-powdered Mrs. Rice—a changeless fixture of Harriet’s early life, with her big black eyeglasses and big gold charm bracelet—had sold it and gone into a nursing home. Harriet did not like walking past the vacant shop, though she always put her hand to her forehead and stopped to peer through the dusty plate-glass window whenever she did. Somebody had torn the curtains off their rings, and the display cases were empty. The floor was littered with sheets of newspaper, and spooky little child-sized mannequins—tanned, naked, with molded pageboy haircuts—stood staring this way and that in the vacant dim.

  Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

  Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

  Jesus was the stone, hewn out the mountain

  Tearing down the kingdom of this world.

  Foursies. Fivesies. She was the jacks champion of America. She was the jacks champion of the world. With an enthusiasm only slightly forced, she shouted out scores, cheered for herself, rocked back on her heels in amazement at her own performance. For a while, her agitation even felt like fun. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t quite forget that nobody cared if she was having fun or not.

  ————

  Danny Ratliff woke from his nap with a bad start. He’d got by on very little sleep in recent weeks, since his oldest brother, Farish, had set up a methamphetamine laboratory in the taxidermy shed behind their grandmother’s trailer. Farish was no chemist, but the amphetamine was good enough and the scheme itself was pure profit. Between the drugs, his disability checks, and the deer heads he stuffed for local hunters, Farish earned five times what he’d made in the old days: burgling houses, stealing batteries out of cars. He wouldn’t go anywhere near that business now. Ever since he’d got out of the mental hospital, Farish refused to use his considerable talents in any but an advisory capacity. Though he himself had taught his brothers everything they knew, he no longer joined them in their errands; he refused to listen to details of specific jobs, refused even to ride along in the car. Though he was vastly more gifted than his brothers in lock-picking, hot-wiring, tactical reconnaissance, getaway, and nearly every aspect of the trade, this new hands-off policy was wiser for all in the end; for Farish was a master, and he was of more use at home than behind bars.

  The genius of the methamphetamine lab was that the taxidermy business (which Farish had run, quite legitimately, on and off for twenty years) gave him access to chemicals otherwise tricky to obtain; moreover, the stink from the taxidermy operation went a long, long way towards masking the distinctive cat-piss smell of the meth manufacture. The Ratliffs lived in the woods, a good distance from the road, but even so the smell was a dead tip-off; and many a laboratory (said Farish) had been brought down by nosy neighbors or winds that blew the wrong direction, right into the window of a passing police car.

  The rain had stopped; the sun shone through the curtains. Danny closed his eyes against it and then rolled over with a shriek of bedsprings and turned his face into his pillow. His trailer—one of two units behind the larger mobile home where his grandmother lived—was fifty yards from the methamphetamine lab but between the meth and the heat and the taxidermy, the stink traveled; and Danny was sick of it nearly to vomiting. Part cat pi
ss, part formaldehyde, part rot and death, it had penetrated nearly everything: clothes and furniture, water and air, his grandmother’s plastic cups and dishes. His brother smelled so strongly of it you could hardly stand within six feet of him and, once or twice, Danny had been horrified to detect a whiff of it in his own sweat.

  He lay stiff, heart pounding. For several weeks, he’d been cranked up pretty much non-stop, no sleep except a jerky catnap now and then. Blue sky, fast music on the radio, long speedy nights that skimmed on and on towards some imaginary vanishing point while he kept his foot hard to the gas and sped right through them, one after the other, dark after light after dark again, like skimming through summer rainstorms on a long flat stretch of highway. It wasn’t about going anyplace, just about going fast. Some people (not Danny) ran so fast and far and ragged that one too many black mornings grinding their teeth and listening to the birdies tweet before sunup and snap: bye-bye. Permanently ripped, wild-eyed and flapping and twisting every which way: convinced that maggots were eating their bone marrow, that their girlfriends were cheating on them and the government was watching them through the television set and the dogs were barking out messages in Morse code. Danny had seen one emaciated freak (K. C. Rockingham, now deceased) jabbing at himself with a sewing needle until his arms looked as if they’d been plunged to the elbow in a deep fryer. Miniature hookworms were burrowing into his skin, he said. Over two long weeks, in a state close to triumph, he’d sat in front of the television twenty-four hours a day and pried the flesh off his forearms, shouting “Gotcha” and “Hah!” at the imaginary vermin. Farish had come close to that shrieking frequency a time or two (one bad incident in particular, swinging a poker and screaming about John F. Kennedy) and it wasn’t anywhere that Danny was ever going to be.

  No: he was fine, just dandy, only sweating like a tiger, too hot and a little edgy. A tic fluttered in his eyelid. Noises, even tiny ones, were starting to jerk on his nerves but mostly he was hammered down from having the same nightmare on and off for a week now. It seemed to hover for him, waiting for him to drop off; as he lay on his bed, sliding uneasily into sleep, it pounced and grabbed him by the ankles and towed him down with sickening speed.