The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  “How much you plan on taking him for?” said Catfish, presently, sliding back to his pal’s side.

  The kid cackled; and at the crack in his laugh, Hely nearly dropped the comic book. He’d had plenty of time to get used to that high-pitched, derisive laughter; it had rung at his back from the creek bridge for a long, long time as he stumbled through the undergrowth, the echoes of the gunshots singing off the bluffs.

  It was him. Without the cowboy hat—that was why Hely hadn’t recognized him. As the blood rushed to his face, he stared down furiously at his comic book, at the gasping girl who clutched Johnny Peril’s shoulder (“Johnny! That figure of wax! It moved!”)

  “Odum aint a bad player, Danny,” Catfish was saying quietly. “Fingers or no fingers.”

  “Well, he might could beat Farish when he’s sober. But not when he’s drunk.”

  Twin light bulbs popped on in Hely’s head. Danny? Farish? Being shot at by rednecks was exciting enough, but being shot at by the Ratliffs was something else. He could not wait to get home and tell Harriet about all this. Could this bearded Sasquatch actually be the fabled Farish Ratliff? There was only one Farish that Hely had ever heard of—in Alexandria or anywhere else.

  With difficulty, Hely forced himself to look down at his comic. He had never seen Farish Ratliff up close—only at a distance, pointed out from a moving car, or pictured blurrily in the local paper—but he had heard stories about him all his life. At one time Farish Ratliff had been the most notorious crook in Alexandria, masterminding a family gang which incorporated every kind of burglary and petty theft imaginable. He had also written and distributed a number of educational pamphlets over the years featuring such titles as “Your Money or Your Life” (a protest against the Federal income tax), “Rebel Pride: Answering the Critics,” and “Not MY Daughter!” All this had stopped, however, with an incident with a bulldozer a few years back.

  Hely didn’t know why Farish had decided to steal the bulldozer. The newspaper had said that the foreman discovered it missing from a construction site out behind the Party Ice Company and then the next thing anyone knew Farish was spotted tearing down the highway on it. He wouldn’t pull over when signaled, but turned and took defensive action with the bulldozer shovel. Then, when the cops opened fire, he bolted across a cow pasture, tearing down a barbed-wire fence, scattering panicked cattle in all directions, until he managed to tip the bulldozer into a ditch. As they ran across the pasture, shouting for Farish to exit the vehicle with his hands above his head, they stopped dead in their tracks to see the distant figure of Farish, in the bulldozer’s cab, stick a .22 to his temple and fire. There’d been a picture in the paper of a cop named Jackie Sparks, looking genuinely shaken, standing over the body out there in the cow pasture as he shouted instructions to the ambulance attendants.

  Though it was a mystery why Farish had stolen the bulldozer in the first place, the real mystery was why Farish had shot himself. Some people claimed that it was because he was afraid of going back to prison but others said no, prison was nothing to a man like Farish, the offense wasn’t that serious and he would have gotten out again in a year or two. The bullet wound was grave, and Farish had very nearly died of it. He’d made news again when he awakened asking for mashed potatoes from what the doctors believed was a vegetative state. When he was released from the hospital—legally blind in his right eye—he was sent down to the state mental farm at Whitfield on an insanity plea, a measure perhaps not unjustified.

  Since his release from the mental hospital, Farish was in several aspects an altered man. It wasn’t just the eye. People said he had stopped drinking; as far as anyone knew, he no longer broke into gas stations or stole cars and chainsaws from people’s garages (though his younger brothers took up the slack as far as such activities were concerned). His racial concerns had also slipped from the forefront. No more did he stand on the sidewalk in front of the public school handing out his home-made pamphlets decrying school integration. He ran a taxidermy business, and along with his disability checks and his proceeds from stuffing deer heads and bass for local hunters he had become a fairly law-abiding citizen—or so it was said.

  And now here he was, Farish Ratliff in the flesh—twice in the same week, if you counted the bridge. The only Ratliffs Hely had occasion to see in his own part of town were Curtis (who roamed freely over Greater Alexandria, shooting his squirt gun at passing cars) and Brother Eugene, a preacher of some sort. This Eugene was occasionally to be seen preaching on the town square or, more frequently, reeling in the vaporous heat off the highway as he shouted about the Pentecost and shook his fist at the traffic. Though Farish was said to be not quite right in the head since he’d shot himself, Eugene (Hely had heard his father say) was frankly demented. He ate red clay from people’s yards and fell out on the sidewalk in fits where he heard the voice of God in thunder.

  Catfish was having a quiet word with a group of middle-aged men at the table beside Odum’s. One of them—a fat man in a yellow sports shirt, with piggy, suspicious eyes like raisins sunk in dough—glanced over at Farish and Odum and then, regally, strode to the other side of the table and sank a low ball. Without glancing at Catfish, he reached carefully for his back pocket and, after half a beat, one of the three spectators standing behind him did the same.

  “Hey,” Danny Ratliff said across the room to Odum. “Hold your horses. If it’s for money now, Farish has the next game.”

  Farish hawked, with a loud, retching noise, and shifted his weight to the other foot.

  “Old Farish only got him the one eye now,” said Catfish, sidling over and slapping Farish on the back.

  “Watch it,” Farish said, rather menacingly, with an angry jerk of his head that did not seem entirely show.

  Catfish, suavely, leaned across the table and offered his hand to Odum. “Name of Catfish de Bienville,” he said.

  Odum, irritably, waved him away. “I know who you are.”

  Farish slid a couple of quarters into the metal slide and jerked it, hard. The balls chunked loose from the undercarriage.

  “I’ve beat this blind man a time or two. I’ll shoot pool with any man in here that can see,” said Odum, staggering back, righting himself by jabbing his cue to the floor. “Why don’t you step on back and quit crowding me,” he snapped at Catfish, who had slipped behind him again; “yes, you—”

  Catfish leaned to whisper something in his ear. Slowly, Odum’s white-blond eyebrows pulled together in a befuddled knot.

  “Don’t like to play for money, Odum?” Farish said derisively, after a slight pause, as he reached beneath the table and began to rack the balls. “You a deacon over at the Baptist church?”

  “Naw,” said Odum. The greedy thought planted in his ear by Catfish was beginning to work its way across his sunburnt face, as visible as a cloud moving across empty sky.

  “Diddy,” said a small, acid voice from the doorway.

  It was Lasharon Odum. Her scrawny hip was thrown to the side in what was, to Hely, a disgustingly adult-looking posture. Across it was straddled a baby just as dirty as she was, their mouths encircled with orange rings from Popsicles, or Fanta.

  “Well look a here,” said Catfish stagily.

  “Diddy, you said come get you when the big hand was on the three.”

  “A hundred bucks,” said Farish, in the silence that followed. “Take it or leave it.”

  Odum twisted the chalk on his cue and hitched up a pair of imaginary shirtsleeves. Then he said, abruptly, without looking at his daughter: “Diddy’s not ready to go yet, sugar. Here’s yall a dime apiece. Run look at the funny books.”

  “Diddy, you said remind you—”

  “I said run along. Your break,” he said to Farish.

  “I racked.”

  “I know it,” said Odum, flicking his hand. “Go on, I’m giving it to you.”

  Farish slumped forward, his weight on the table. He looked down the cue with his good eye—straight at Hely—and his gaze was as col
d as if he was looking down the barrel of a gun.

  Crack. The balls spun apart. Odum walked to the opposite side and studied the table for several moments. Then he popped his neck quickly, by swinging it to the side, and leaned down to make his shot.

  Catfish slipped in amongst the men who’d drifted from the pinball machines and the adjoining tables to watch. Inconspicuously, he whispered something to the man in the yellow shirt just as Odum made a showy leap-shot which sank not one, but two striped balls.

  Whoops and cheers. Catfish drifted back to Danny’s side, in the confused conversation from the spectators. “Odum can hold the table all day,” he whispered, “as long as they stick to eight ball.”

  “Farish can run it just as good when he gets going.”

  Odum rolled in another combination—a delicate shot, where the cue ball hit a solid ball that tipped another one into a pocket. More cheers.

  “Who’s in?” Danny said. “Them two by the pinball?”

  “Not interested,” said Catfish, glancing casually over his shoulder and above Hely’s head as he reached in the watch pocket of his leather vest and palmed a small metal object about the size and shape of a golf tee. In the instant before his beringed fingers closed over it, Hely saw that it was a bronze figurine of a naked lady with high-heeled shoes and a big Afro hairdo.

  “Why not? Who are they?”

  “Just a couple good Christian boys,” said Catfish, as Odum sank an easy ball into a side pocket. Stealthily, with his hand half in, half out of his jacket pocket, he unscrewed the lady’s head from her body and flicked it into the jacket pocket with his thumb. “Them other group”—he rolled his eyes at the man in the yellow sport shirt and his fat friends—“is passing through from Texas.” Catfish glanced around casually and then, turning as if to sneeze, he raised the vial and took a quick, covert sniff. “Work a shrimping boat,” he said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his smoking jacket, his gaze passing blankly across the comic-book rack and over the top of Hely’s head as he palmed the vial to Danny.

  Danny sniffed, loudly, and pinched his nostrils shut. Water welled in his eyes. “God almighty,” he said.

  Odum smacked in another ball. Amidst the hoots of the men from the shrimping boat Farish glared down at the table, the pool cue balanced horizontally along the back of his neck and his elbows slung over either side, paws dangling.

  Catfish stepped backward with a loose, comical little dance movement. He seemed exhilarated all of a sudden. “Mistah Farish,” he said gaily, across the room—his tone mimicking that of a popular black comedian on television—“has apprised himself of the situation.”

  Hely was excited and so confused that his head felt as though it might pop. The significance of the vial had escaped him, but Catfish’s bad language and suspicious manner had not; and though Hely was not sure exactly what was going on he knew it was gambling, and that it was against the law. Just as it was against the law to shoot guns off a bridge, even if nobody got killed. His ears burned; they always got red when he was excited—he hoped nobody noticed. Casually, he replaced the comic he was looking at and took a new one from the rack—Secrets of Sinister House. A skeleton seated in a witness chair flung out a fleshless arm at the spectators as a ghostly attorney boomed: “And now, my witness—who was the VICTIM—will point out …

  “THE MAN WHO KILLED HIM!!!”

  “Come on, kick it!” shouted Odum unexpectedly, as the eight ball zinged across the baize, ricocheted, and clunked into the corner pocket opposite.

  In the pandemonium that followed, Odum removed a small bottle of whiskey from his back pocket and had a long thirsty pull from it. “Let’s see that hundred dollars, Ratliff.”

  “I’m good for it. And I’m good for anotherun, too,” snapped Farish, as the balls fell from the undercarriage and he began to rack them up again. “Winner’s break.”

  Odum shrugged, and squinted down the cue—nose wrinkled, upper lip baring his rabbity front teeth—then smashed in a break that not only left the cue ball still spinning where it had hit the rack of balls, but shot the eight ball in a corner pocket.

  The men who worked on the shrimping boat hooted and clapped. They looked like guys who felt they were on to a good thing. Catfish lolloped over to them jauntily—knees loose, chin high—to confer over the finances.

  “That’s the fastest money you ever lost!” Danny called across the room.

  Hely became aware that Lasharon Odum was standing right behind him—not because she said anything but because the baby had a bad cold and breathed with wet, repellent wheezes. “Get away from me,” he muttered, edging a little to the side.

  Shyly, she moved after him, obtruding into the corner of his vision. “Let me borry a quarter.”

  The wheedling hopelessness of her voice revolted him even more than the baby’s snotty breathing. Pointedly, he turned his back. Farish—to the rolled eyes of the men from the shrimping boat—was reaching again in the undercarriage.

  Odum grabbed his jaw between both hands, and cracked his neck to the left and then right: snick. “Still aint had enough?”

  “Oh, all right now,” Catfish crooned, along to the jukebox, popping his fingers: “Baby what I say.”

  “What’s all this trash on the music box?” snarled Farish, dropping the balls in an angry clatter.

  Catfish, teasingly, undulated his meager hips. “Loosen up, Farish.”

  “Go on,” said Hely to Lasharon, who had sidled up again, nearly touching him. “I don’t want your booger breath.”

  He was so sickened by her nearness that he said this louder than he meant to; and he froze when Odum’s unfocused gaze swung vaguely in their direction. Farish looked up, too; and his good eye pinned Hely like a thrown knife.

  Odum took a deep, drunken breath, and put down the pool cue. “Yall see that little old gal standing yonder?” he said melodramatically to Farish and company. “It’s against me to tell you this, but that little gal does the work of a grown woman.”

  Catfish and Danny Ratliff exchanged a quick glance of alarm.

  “I ask you. Where would you find a sweet little old girl like this that looks after the house, and looks after the little ones, and puts food on the table and totes and fetches and goes without so’s her poor old Diddy can have?”

  I wouldn’t want any food she put on the table, thought Hely.

  “Younguns today all think they have to have,” Farish said flatly. “They would do just as well to be like yourn and go without.”

  “When me and my brothers and sisters were coming up, we didn’t even have us an icebox,” said Odum in a quaver. He was getting good and wound-up. “All the summer long I had to chop cotton out in the fields—”

  “I’ve chopped my share of cotton, too.”

  “—and my mama, I’m telling you, she worked those fields like a nigger man. Me—I couldn’t go to school! Mama and Daddy, they needed me at home! Naw, we never had a thing but if I had the money it’s nothin in the world I wouldn’t buy those little ones over there. They know old Diddy’d rather give it to them than have it himself. Hmm? Don’t yall know that?”

  His unfocused eyes wavered from Lasharon and the baby to Hely himself. “I said, Don’t Yall Know That,” he repeated, in an amplified and less pleasant tone.

  He was staring straight at Hely. Hely was shocked: Geez, he thought, is the old coot so drunk he don’t know I’m not his kid? He stared back with his mouth open.

  “Yes, Diddy,” Lasharon whispered, just audible.

  Odum’s red-rimmed eyes softened, and moved unsteadily to his daughter; and the moist, self-pitying tremor of his lip made Hely more uneasy than anything else he had seen that afternoon.

  “Hear that? Hear that little old gal? Come here and hug old Diddy around the neck,” he said, dashing away a tear with his knuckle.

  Lasharon hoisted the baby on her bony hip and went slowly to him. Something about the possessiveness of Odum’s embrace, and the vacant way she accepted it—like a miserable
old dog, accepting the touch of its owner—disgusted Hely but scared him a bit, too.

  “This little gal loves her old Diddy, don’t she?” He pressed her to his shirt front with tears in his eyes.

  Hely was gratified to see, by the way they rolled their eyes at each other, that Catfish and Danny Ratliff were just as disgusted by Odum’s slop as he was.

  “She knows her Diddy’s a pore man! She don’t have to have a bunch of old toys and candy and fancy clothes!”

  “And why should she?” said Farish abruptly.

  Odum—intoxicated by the sound of his own voice—turned foggily and puckered his brow.

  “Yeah. You heard right. Why should she have all that mess? Why should any of em have it? We didn’t have anything when we was coming up, did we?”

  A slow wave of astonishment illumined Odum’s face.

  “Naw, brother!” he cried gaily.

  “Was we ashamed of being poor? Was we too good to work? What’s good enough for us is good enough for her, aint it?”

  “Dern right!”

  “Who says that kids should grow up to think they’re better than their own parents? The Federal Government, that’s who! Why do you reckon Government sticks its nose into a man’s home, and doles out all these food stamps, and vaccinations, and liberal educations on a silver platter? I’ll sure tell you why. It’s so they can brainwash kids to think they got to have more than their folks did, and look down on what they come from, and raise themselves above their own flesh and blood. I don’t know about you, sir, but my daddy never give me a thing for free.”

  Low murmurs of approval, from all over the poolroom.

  “Nope,” said Odum, wagging his head mournfully. “Mama and Diddy never give me nothing. I worked for it all. Everything I have.”

  Farish nodded curtly at Lasharon and the baby. “So tell me this. Why should she have what we didn’t?”