The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  He rolled on his back and stared up at the swimsuit poster taped to the ceiling. Like a nasty hang-over, the vapors of the dream still pressed in on him low and poisonous. Terrible as it was, he could never quite remember the details when he woke up, no people or situations (although there was always at least one other person) but only the astonishment of being sucked into a blind, breathless emptiness: struggles, dark wingbeats, terror. It wouldn’t sound so bad to tell about, but if he’d ever had a worse dream he couldn’t remember what it was.

  Black flies were clustered on the half-eaten doughnut—his lunch—that lay on the card table beside his bed. They rose in a hum when Danny stood and darted crazily for several moments before they settled on the doughnut again.

  Now that his brothers Mike and Ricky Lee were in jail for the time being, Danny had the trailer to himself. But it was old, and had low ceilings, and—though Danny kept it scrupulously clean, windows washed, never a dirty dish—still it was shabby and cramped. Back and forth droned the electric fan, stirring the flimsy curtains as it passed. From the breast pocket of his denim shirt, slung over a chair, he retrieved a snuff tin which contained not snuff but an ounce of powdered methamphetamine.

  He did a good-sized bump off the back of his hand. The burn felt so sweet, hitting the back of his throat just so, that his eyes misted. Almost instantly, the taint lifted: colors clearer, nerves stronger, life not so bad again. Quickly, with trembling hands, he tapped himself out another bump before the jump-start from the first kicked in all the way.

  Ah, yes: a week in the country. Rainbows and twinkles. Suddenly he felt bright, well-rested, on top of the situation. Danny made his bed, tight as a drum, emptied the ashtray and washed it out in the sink, threw away the Coke can and the remnants of the doughnut. On the card table was a half-worked jigsaw puzzle (pallid nature scene, winter trees and waterfall) which had been his entertainment for many a speedy night. Should he work on that for a while? Yes: the puzzle. But then his attention was arrested by the electrical-cord situation. Electrical cords were tangled around the fan, climbing up the walls, running all over the room. Clock radio, television, toaster, the whole bit. He batted a fly from around his head. Maybe he should take care of the cords—organize them a little bit. From the distant television in his grandmother’s quarters, an announcer’s voice from World Wrestling Federation cut through the fog, distinct: “Doctor Death is f-f-flying off the handle.…”

  “Get off of me,” Danny found himself shouting. Before he was aware of doing it, he’d smacked two flies dead and was examining the smears across the brim of his cowboy hat. He didn’t remember picking the hat up, didn’t even remember it being in the room.

  “Where did you come from?” he said to it. Freaky. The flies—agitated now—were zinging all around his head but it was the hat that concerned Danny at the moment. Why was it inside? He’d left it in the car; he was sure of it. He tossed it on the bed—suddenly, he didn’t want the thing touching him—and there was something about its jaunty angle, lying there on the neatly turned covers all by itself, that gave him the willies.

  Fuck it, thought Danny. He popped his neck, tugged on his jeans and stepped outside. He found his brother Farish reclining in an aluminum lounge chair in front of their grandmother’s mobile home, scraping the dirt from beneath his fingernails with a pocketknife. About him were strewn various cast-off distractions: a whetstone; a screwdriver and a partially disassembled transistor radio; a paperback book with a swastika on the cover. In the dirt amongst all this sat their youngest brother, Curtis, with his stumpy legs splayed out in a V in front of him, cuddling a dirty wet kitten to his cheek and humming. Danny’s mother had Curtis when she was forty-six years old and a bad drunk—but though their father (a drunk himself, also deceased) loudly bemoaned the birth, Curtis was a sweet creature, who loved cake, harmonica music, and Christmas, and apart from being clumsy and slow, had no fault in the world other than he was slightly deaf, and liked to listen to the television turned up a little too loud.

  Farish, jaw clenched, nodded at Danny and did not look up. He was good and wired himself. His brown jumpsuit (a United Parcel uniform, with a hole in the chest where the label was cut off) was unzipped nearly to the waist, exposing a thatch of black chest hair. Winter or summer, Farish wore no clothing but these brown uniform jumpsuits, except if he had to go to court or to a funeral. He bought them second hand by the dozen from the Parcel Service. Years before, Farish had actually been employed by the Post Office, though not in a parcel truck but as a mail carrier. According to him, there existed no smoother racket for casing affluent neighborhoods, knowing who was out of town, who left their windows unlocked and who left the papers to pile up every weekend and who had a dog who was likely to complicate things. It was this angle which cost Farish his job as a carrier and might have sent him to Leavenworth had the district attorney been able to prove that Farish had committed any of the burglaries while on duty.

  Whenever anybody at the Black Door Tavern teased Farish about his UPS attire or inquired why he wore it, Farish always replied, tersely, that he used to be with the Post Office. But this was no reason: Farish was eaten up with hatred for the Federal Government, and for the Post Office most of all. Danny suspected that the real reason Farish liked the jumpsuits was that he had got used to wearing a similar garment while in the mental hospital (another story), but this wasn’t the sort of thing about which Danny or anyone else felt comfortable speaking to Farish.

  He was about to head over to the big trailer when Farish pulled the back of his lawn chair into an upright position and snapped the pocketknife shut. His knee was jiggling to beat the band. Farish had a bad eye—white and milked-over—and even after all these years it still made Danny uneasy when Farish turned it on him suddenly, as he now did.

  “Gum and Eugene just had a little a set-to in there over the television,” he said. Gum was their grandmother—their father’s mother. “Eugene don’t think Gum ort to watch her people.”

  As he spoke, the two brothers stared off across the clearing and into the dense, silent woods without looking at each other—Farish slouched massively in his chair, Danny standing beside him, like passengers on a crowded train. My people was what their grandmother called her soap opera. Tall grass grew around a dead car; in the high weeds, a broken wheelbarrow wallowed belly-up.

  “Eugene says it aint Christian. Hah!” Farish said, and he slapped his knee with a whack that made Danny jump. “Wrestling he don’t think it’s anything wrong with. Or football. What’s so Christian about wrestling?”

  Except for Curtis—who loved everything in the world, even bees and wasps and the leaves that fell from the trees—all the Ratliffs had an uneasy relationship with Eugene. He was the second brother; he’d been Farish’s field marshal in the family business (which was larceny) after their father died. In this he was dutiful, if not particularly energetic or inspired, but then—while in Parchman Penitentiary for Grand Theft Auto in the late 1960s—he had received a vision instructing him to go forth and exalt Jesus. Relations between Eugene and the rest of the family had been somewhat strained ever since. He refused to dirty his hands any longer with what he called the Devil’s work, though—as Gum often pointed out, shrilly enough—he was happy enough to eat the food and live under the roof which the Devil and his works provided.

  Eugene didn’t care. He quoted scripture at them, bickered ceaselessly with his grandmother, and generally got on everybody’s nerves. He had inherited their father’s humorlessness (though not—thankfully—his violent temper); even in the old days, back when Eugene had been stealing cars and staying out drunk all night, he’d never been much fun to be around, and though he didn’t hold a grudge or nurse an insult, and was fundamentally a decent guy, his proselytizing bored them all to death.

  “What’s Eugene doing here, anyway?” said Danny. “I thought he’d be down at the Mission with Snake Boy.”

  Farish laughed—a startling, high-pitched giggle. “I expect Eugene�
��s going to leave it to Loyal while them snakes are in there.” Eugene was correct in suspecting motives other than revival and Christian fellowship in the visit of Loyal Reese, for the visit had been engineered by Loyal’s brother, Dolphus, from his prison cell. No shipments of amphetamine had gone out from Farish’s lab since Dolphus’s old courier got picked up on an outstanding warrant back in February. Danny had offered to drive the drugs up to Kentucky himself—but Dolphus didn’t want anybody moving in on his distribution territory (a genuine worry for a man behind bars) and besides, why hire a courier when he had a kid brother named Loyal who would drive it up for free? Loyal, of course, was in the dark here—because Loyal was devout, and would not cooperate knowingly with any such plans as Dolphus had hatched in prison. He had a church “homecoming” to attend in East Tennessee; he was driving down to Alexandria as a favor to Dolphus, whose old friend Farish had a brother (Eugene) who needed help getting started in the revival business. That was all Loyal knew. But when—in all innocence—Loyal drove back home to Kentucky, he would be carrying unawares along with his reptiles a number of securely wrapped bundles which Farish had concealed in the engine of his truck.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Danny, gazing off into the pine woods that pressed dark around their dusty little clearing, “is why do they handle the things in the first place? Don’t they get bit?”

  “All the damn time.” Farish jerked his head belligerently. “Go on in and ask Eugene. He’ll sure tell you more than you wanted to know about it.” His motorcycle boot was jittering away. “If you mess with the snake and it don’t bite you, that’s a miracle. If you mess with it and it does bite you, that’s a miracle too.”

  “Getting bit by a snake is no miracle.”

  “It is if you don’t go to the doctor, just roll around on the floor calling out to Jesus. And you live.”

  “Well what if you die?”

  “Another miracle. Lifted up to Heaven through getting took in the Signs.”

  Danny snorted. “Well, hell,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “If it’s miracles everywhere, what’s the point?” The sky was bright blue above the pine trees, reflecting blue in the puddles on the ground, and he felt high, fine, and twenty-one. Maybe he would hop in his car and drive over to the Black Door, maybe take a spin down to the reservoir.

  “They’ll find themselves a big old nest of miracles if they walk out in that brush and turn over a rock or two,” said Farish sourly.

  Danny laughed and said: “Tell you what’ll be the miracle, is if Eugene handles a snake.” There wasn’t much to Eugene’s preaching, which for all Eugene’s religious fervor was strangely flat and wooden. Apart from Curtis—who galumphed up front to get saved every time he went—he hadn’t converted a soul as far as Danny knew.

  “You aint never going to see Eugene handle a snake if you ast me. Eugene won’t put a worm on a fish-hook. Say brother—” Farish, his gaze fixed upon the scrub pines across the clearing, nodded briskly as if to switch the subject—“what you think of that big white rattlesnake done crawled up here yesterday?”

  He meant the meth, the batch he’d just finished. Or, at least, Danny thought that’s what he meant. Often it was hard to figure out what Farish was talking about, especially when he was wired or drunk.

  “Say what?” Farish glanced up at Danny, rather jerkily, and winked—a twitch of the eyelid, nearly imperceptible.

  “Not bad,” Danny said warily, lifting his head in a way that felt easy and turning to look in the opposite direction, really smooth. Farish was apt to explode if anyone dared misunderstand him, even though most people had no idea what he was talking about half the time.

  “Not bad.” Farish’s look could go either way, but then he shook his head. “Pure powder. It’ll thow you through the damn window. I like to lost my mind doctoring on that iodine-smelling product last week. Ran it through mineral spirits, ringworm medicine, what-have-you, stuff’s still so sticky I can hardly pound it up my damn nose. Tell you one thing for damn sure,” he chortled, falling back into his chair, clutching the arms as if readying for take-off, “a batch like this, don’t matter how you cut it—” Suddenly he bolted upright and shouted: “I said get that thing off me!”

  A slap, a strangled cry; Danny jumped, and from the corner of his eye saw the kitten go flying. Curtis, his lumpy features scrunched together in a rictus of grief and fear, ground a fist into his eye and stumbled after it. It was the last of the litter; Farish’s German shepherds had taken care of the rest.

  “I told him,” said Farish, rising dangerously to his feet, “I told him and told him never to let that cat near me.”

  “Right,” said Danny, looking away.

  ————

  Nights were always too quiet at Harriet’s house. The clocks ticked too loud; beyond the low corona of light from the table lamps, the rooms grew gloomy and cavernous, and the high ceilings receded into what seemed endless shadow. In autumn and winter, when the sun went down at five, it was worse; but being up and having no one but Allison for company was in some ways worse than being alone. She lay at the other end of the couch, her face ash-blue in the glow of the television, her bare feet resting in Harriet’s lap.

  Idly, Harriet stared down at Allison’s feet—which were damp and ham-pink, oddly clean considering that Allison walked around barefoot all the time. No wonder Allison and Weenie had got on so well with each other. Weenie had been more human than cat, but Allison was more cat than human, padding around on her own and ignoring everybody most of the time, yet perfectly comfortable to curl up by Harriet if she felt like it and stick her feet in Harriet’s lap without asking.

  Allison’s feet were very heavy. Suddenly—violently—they twitched. Harriet glanced up and saw Allison’s eyelids fluttering. She was dreaming. Quickly, Harriet seized her little toe and wrenched it backward, and Allison yelped and yanked her foot up to her body like a stork.

  “What are you dreaming about?” demanded Harriet.

  Allison—red waffle-patterns from the sofa stamped upon her cheek—turned her sleep-dulled eyes as if she didn’t recognize her … no, not quite, thought Harriet, observing her sister’s confusion with keen, clinical detachment. It’s like she sees me and something else.

  Allison cupped both hands over her eyes. She lay there like that for a moment, very still, and then she stood. Her cheeks were puffy, her eyelids heavy and inscrutable.

  “You were dreaming,” said Harriet, watching her closely.

  Allison yawned. Then—rubbing her eyes—she trudged towards the stairs, swaying sleepily as she walked.

  “Wait!” cried Harriet. “What were you dreaming? Tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? You mean you won’t.”

  Allison turned and looked at her—strangely, Harriet thought.

  “I don’t want it to come true,” she said, starting upstairs.

  “Don’t want what to come true?”

  “What I just dreamed.”

  “What was it? Was it about Robin?”

  Allison stopped on the bottom step and looked back. “No,” she said, “it was about you.”

  ————

  “That was only fifty-nine seconds,” said Harriet, coldly, over Pemberton’s coughs and splutters.

  Pem grasped the side of the pool and wiped his eyes with his forearm. “Bullshit,” he said, between gasps. He was maroon in the face, practically the color of Harriet’s penny loafers. “You were counting too slow.”

  Harriet, with a long, angry whoosh, blew out all the air in her lungs. She breathed deep and hard, a dozen times, until her head began to whirl, and at the top of the last breath she dove and kicked off.

  The way across was easy. On the return trip, through the chill blue tiger-stripes of light, everything thickened and ground down to slow motion—some kid’s arm floating past, dreamy and corpse-white; some kid’s leg, tiny white bubbles clinging to the leg hairs standing on end and rol
ling away with a slow, foamy kick as her blood crashed hard in her temples, and washed back, and crashed hard and washed back and crashed again, like ocean waves pounding on the beach. Up above—hard to imagine it—life clattered on in brilliant color, at high temperature and speed. Kids shouting, feet slapping on hot pavement, kids huddled with soggy towels around their shoulders and slurping on blue Popsicles the color of pool water. Bomb Pops, they were called. Bomb Pops. They were the fad, the favorite treat that year. Shivering penguins on the cold case at the concession stand. Blue lips … blue tongues … shivers and shivers and chattering teeth, cold …

  She burst through the surface with a deafening crack, as if through a pane of glass; the water was shallow but not quite shallow enough for her to stand in and she hopped about on tiptoe, gasping, as Pemberton—who’d been observing with interest—hit the water smoothly and glided out to her.

  Before she knew what was happening, he scooped her expertly off her feet and all of a sudden her ear was against his chest and she was looking up at the nicotine-yellow undersides of his teeth. His tawny smell—adult, foreign, and, to Harriet, not wholly pleasant—was sharp even over the pool chemicals.

  Harriet rolled out of his arms and they fell away from each other—Pemberton on his back, with a solid thwack that threw up a sheet of water as Harriet splashed to the side and clambered up, rather ostentatiously, in her yellow-and-black-striped bathing suit that (Libby said) made her look like a bumblebee.

  “What? Don’t you like to be picked up?”

  His tone was lordly, affectionate, as if she was a kitten who’d scratched him. Harriet scowled and kicked a spray of water into his face.