by Donna Tartt
“Ho,” said Danny, pinching his nose. Tears rose to his eyes. The icy, disinfectant taste at the back of his throat made him feel clean: everything surface again, everything sparkle on the glossy face of these waters which swept like thunder over a cesspool he was sick to death of: poverty, grease and rot, blue intestines full of shit.
He handed the vial back to Catfish. An icy fresh wind blew through his head. The poolroom’s seedy, contaminated mood—all heeltaps and grime—waxed bright and clean and comical all of a sudden. With a high, melodious ping, he was struck by the hilarious insight that weepy Odum, with his hayseed clothes and his large pink pumpkin-head, looked exactly like Elmer Fudd. Long skinny Catfish, like Bugs himself popped up from the rabbit hole, lounged against the jukebox. Big feet, big front teeth, even the way he held his cigarette: Bugs Bunny held his carrot out like that, like a cigar, just that cocky.
Feeling sweet and giddy and grateful, Danny reached in his pocket and peeled a twenty off his roll; he had a hundred more, right in his hand. “Give him that for his kids, man,” he said, palming Catfish the money. “I’m on take off.”
“Where you off to?”
“Just off,” Danny heard himself say.
He strolled out to his car. It was Saturday evening, the streets were deserted and a clear summer night lay ahead, with stars and warm wind and night skies full of neon. The car was a beauty: a Trans Am, this nice bronze, with sun roof, side vents, and air option. Danny had just given her a wash and wax, and the light poured off her so glittery and hot that she looked like a spaceship about to take off.
One of Odum’s kids—rather clean, for one of Odum’s, and black-headed, too; possibly she had a different mother—was sitting directly across the street in front of the hardware store. She was looking at a book and waiting for her sorry father to come out. Suddenly he became aware that she was looking at him; she hadn’t moved a muscle, but her eyes weren’t on the book any more, they were fastened on him and they had been fastened on him, the way it sometimes happened with meth when you saw a street sign and you kept on seeing it for two hours; it freaked him out, like the cowboy hat on the bed earlier. Speed fucked with your sense of time, all right (that’s why they call it speed! he thought, with a hot burst of exhilaration at his own cleverness: tweaker speeds up! time slows down!), yes, it stretched time like a rubber band, snapped it back and forth, and sometimes it seemed to Danny like everything in the world was staring at him, even cats and cows and pictures in magazines; yet an eternity seemed to have passed, clouds flying overhead like in a sped-up nature film and still the girl held his gaze without blinking—her eyes a chill green, like a bobcat from Hell, like the very Devil.
But no: she wasn’t staring at him after all. She was looking down at her book like she’d been reading it forever. Stores closed, no cars on the street, long shadows and pavement shimmering like in a bad dream. Danny flashed back to a morning the previous week when he’d gone to the White Kitchen after watching the sun come up over the reservoir: waitress, cop, milkman and postman all turning their heads to stare at him when he pushed the door open—moving casually, pretending that they were only curious at the twinkle of the bell—but they meant business, it was him yes him they were looking at, eyes everywhere, all shining green like Day-Glo Satan. He’d been up for seventy-two hours at that point, faint and clammy, had wondered if his heart was just going to pop in his chest like a fat water balloon, right there in the White Kitchen with the strange little teenage waitresses staring green daggers at him.…
Steady, steady, he said to his frantic heart. What if the kid had stared at him? So what? So fucking what? Danny had spent plenty of hot, dreary hours on that same bench, waiting for his own father. It wasn’t the waiting that was so bad, but dread of what he and Curtis might get later if the game hadn’t gone right. There was no reason to believe that Odum shouldn’t seek consolation for his losses in exactly the same manner: that was the way of the world. “As long as you’re under my roof—” the light bulb over the kitchen table swinging by its cord, their grandmother stirring something on the stove as if the curses and slaps and cries were noise from the television.
Rather spasmodically Danny twisted, and dug into his pocket for some change to toss at the girl. His father had occasionally done the same with other men’s kids, when he’d won and was in a good mood. All at once an unwelcome memory of Odum himself floated up out of the past—a scrawny teenager in a two-tone sports shirt, his white-blond ducktail yellowed from the grease he slicked it back with—squatting next to little Curtis with a pack of gum and telling him not to cry.…
With a pop of astonishment—an audible pop, one he could feel, like a small detonation inside his head—Danny realized that he’d been speaking aloud, the whole time he thought he’d been thinking quietly to himself. Or had he? The quarters were still in his hand, but as he raised his arm to toss them over, yet another shock bolted through his head because the girl was gone. The bench was empty; there was no sign of her—or, indeed, of any living being, not so much as a stray cat—either up or down the street.
“Yodel-ay-hee-hoo,” he said to himself, very softly, beneath his breath.
————
“But what happened?” said Hely in an agony of impatience. The two of them were sitting on the rusted metal steps of an abandoned cotton warehouse near the railroad tracks. It was a marshy spot, secluded by scrubby pine trees, and the stinking black mud attracted flies. The doors of the warehouse were peppered with dark spots from two summers before when Hely and Harriet and Dick Pillow, who was now at Camp de Selby, had amused themselves for several days by throwing muddy tennis balls against them.
Harriet didn’t answer. She was so quiet that it was making him uncomfortable. In his agitation he stood and began to pace.
Moments passed. She didn’t seem impressed by his expert pacing. A small breeze wrinkled the surface of a puddle cut by a tire track in the mud.
Uneasily—anxious not to irritate her but anxious too to make her talk—he bumped her with his elbow. “Come on,” he said encouragingly. “Did he do something to you?”
“No.”
“He better not have. I’ll kick his ass.”
The pine woods—loblollys, mostly, trash trees no good for lumber—were close and stifling. The red bark was shaggy and sloughed off in great red and silvery patches, like snakeskin. Beyond the warehouse, grasshoppers whirred in the high sawgrass.
“Come on.” Hely leapt up and struck a karate chop at the air, followed by a masterful kick. “You can tell me.”
Nearby, a locust trilled. Hely, in mid-punch, squinted up: locusts meant a storm gathering, rain on the way, but through the black snarl of branches the sky still burned a clear, suffocating blue.
He did another pair of karate punches, with twin grunts beneath his breath: huh, huh; but Harriet wasn’t even watching him.
“What’s eating you?” he said, aggressively, tossing the long hair off his forehead. Her preoccupied manner was beginning to make him feel strangely panicked, and he was starting to suspect that she had devised some sort of secret plan that didn’t include him.
She glanced up at him, so quickly that for a second he thought she was going to jump up and kick his ass. But all she said was: “I was thinking about the fall when I was in the second grade. I dug a grave in the back yard.”
“A grave?” Hely was skeptical. He’d tried to dig plenty of holes in his own yard (underground bunkers, passsages to China) but had never got past two feet or so. “How’d you climb in and out?”
“It wasn’t deep. Just—” she held her hands a foot apart—“so deep. And long enough for me to lie down in.”
“Why’d you want to do something like that? Hey, Harriet!” he exclaimed—for on the ground he’d just noticed a gigantic beetle with pincers and horns, two inches long. “Look at that, would you? Man! That’s the biggest bug I’ve ever seen!”
Harriet leaned forward and looked at it, without curiosity. “Yeah, t
hat’s something,” she said. “Anyway. Remember when I was in the hospital with bronchitis? When I missed the Halloween party at school?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Hely, averting his eyes from the beetle and suppressing, with difficulty, the urge to pick it up and mess with it.
“That’s why I got sick. The ground was really cold. I’d cover up with dead leaves and lie there until it got dark and Ida called me to come in.”
“You know what?” said Hely, who—unable to resist—had stretched out a foot to prod the beetle with his toe. “There’s this woman in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! that’s got a telephone in her grave. You call the number, and the phone rings under the ground. Isn’t that crazy?” He sat down beside her. “Hey, what about this? Listen, this is great. Like, what if Mrs. Bohannon had a phone in her coffin, and she called you up in the middle of the night, and says, I want my golden wig. Give me back my goooolden wig.…”
“You’d better not,” said Harriet sharply, eyeing his hand creeping stealthily towards her. Mrs. Bohannon was the church organist; she had died in January after a long illness. “Anyway, they buried Mrs. Bohannon with her wig on.”
“How do you know?”
“Ida told me. Her real hair fell out from the cancer.”
They sat without talking for some time. Hely glanced around for the gigantic beetle, but—sadly—it had disappeared; he swayed from side to side, kicked the heel of his sneaker, rhythmically, against the metal riser of the stairs, bong bong bong bong.…
What was all this business about the grave—what was she talking about? He told her everything. He had been more than geared up for a session of dire whispers in the toolshed, threats and plots and suspense—and even having Harriet attack him would have been better than nothing.
At last, with an exaggerated sigh and stretch, he stood up. “All right,” he said importantly. “Here’s the plan. We practice with the slingshot until supper. Out back in the training area.” The “training area” was what Hely liked to call the secluded area of his backyard which lay between the vegetable garden and the shed where his father kept the lawn mower. “Then, in a day or two, we switch to bows and arrows—”
“I don’t feel like playing.”
“Well, I don’t either,” said Hely, stung. It was only a baby bow-and-arrow set, with blue suction cups at the tip, and though he was humiliated by them they were better than nothing.
But none of his plans interested Harriet. After thinking hard for a moment or two, he suggested—with a calculated “Hey!” to suggest dawning excitement—that they run to his house at once and make what he called “an inventory of weapons” (even though he knew the only weapons he had were the BB gun, a rusted pocketknife, and a boomerang that neither of them knew how to throw). When this too met with a shrug, he suggested (wildly, in desperation, for her indifference was unbearable) that they go find one of his mother’s Good Housekeeping magazines and sign up Danny Ratliff for the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Harriet turned her head at this, but the look she gave him was far from heartening.
“I’m telling you.” He was slightly embarrassed, but enough convinced of the efficacy of the book-club tactic to continue. “It’s the worst thing in the world you can do to somebody. A kid from school did it to Dad. If we sign enough of those rednecks up, enough times … Hey, look,” he said, unnerved by Harriet’s unwavering gaze. “I don’t care.” The horrific boredom of sitting around at home by himself all day was still fresh in his mind, and he would gladly have taken off his clothes and lain down naked in the street if she had asked him.
“Look, I’m tired,” she said irritably. “I’m going to go over to Libby’s for a while.”
“Okay then,” said Hely after a stoic, bewildered pause. “I’ll ride you over there.”
Silently, they walked their bikes along the dirt road towards the street. Hely accepted the primacy of Libby in Harriet’s life without quite understanding it. She was different from Edie and the other aunts—kinder, more motherly. Back in kindergarten, Harriet had told Hely and the other kids that Libby was her mother; and oddly, no one—even Hely—had questioned this. Libby was old, and lived in a different house from Harriet, yet Libby was the one who had led Harriet in by the hand on the first day; who brought cupcakes for Harriet’s birthday and who helped with the costumes for Cinderella (in which Hely had portrayed a helpful mouse; Harriet was the smallest—and the meanest—of the wicked stepsisters). Though Edie also made appearances at school when Harriet got in trouble for fighting, or talking back, it never occurred to anybody that she was Harriet’s parent: she was far too stern, like one of the mean algebra teachers up at the high school.
Unfortunately, Libby wasn’t around. “Miss Cleve at the cemetery,” said a sleepy-eyed Odean (who had taken quite a while to answer the back door). “She pulling weeds from off the graves.”
“You want to go over there?” Hely asked Harriet when they were back on the sidewalk. “I don’t mind.” The bicycle ride to the Confederate Cemetery was a hot, hard, demanding one, which crossed the highway and wound through questionable neighborhoods with hot-tamale shacks, little Greek and Italian and black kids playing kick-ball together on the street, a seedy, vivacious grocery where an old man with a gold tooth in front sold hard Italian cookies and colored Italian sherbets and loose cigarettes at the counter for a nickel apiece.
“Yes, but Edie’s at the cemetery too. She’s the president of the Garden Club.”
Hely accepted this excuse without question. He stayed out of Edie’s way whenever he could and Harriet’s desire to avoid her did not strike him as odd in the slightest. “We can go to my house then,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Come on.”
“Maybe my aunt Tatty’s at home.”
“Why don’t we just play on your porch or mine?” said Hely, tossing a peanut shell from his pocket rather bitterly at the windshield of a parked car. Libby was all right, but the other two aunts were nearly as bad as Edie.
————
Harriet’s aunt Tat had been at the cemetery with the rest of the Garden Club, but had asked to be driven home because of hay fever; she was fretful, her eyes itched, whopping red wheals had risen on the backs of her hand from the bindweed, and she could understand no better than Hely this dogged insistence upon her house for the afternoon’s play. She’d answered the door still in her dirty gardening clothes: Bermuda shorts and a smock-length African dashiki. Edie had a garment very similar; they were presents from a Baptist missionary friend stationed in Nigeria. The Kente cloth was colorful and cool and both old ladies wore the exotic gifts frequently, for light gardening and errands—quite oblivious to the Black Power symbolism which their “caftans” broadcast to curious onlookers. Young black men leaned out the windows of passing cars and saluted Edie and Tatty with raised fists. “Gray Panthers!” they shouted; and “Eldridge and Bobby, right on!”
Tattycorum did not enjoy working outdoors; Edie had bullied her into the Garden Club project and she wanted to get her khakis and “caftan” off and into the washing machine. She wanted a Benadryl; she wanted a bath; she wanted to finish her library book before it was due the next day. She was not pleased when she opened the door to see the children but she greeted them graciously and with only a touch of irony. “As you can see, Hely, I’m very informal here,” she said for the second time as she led them in a threading pathway through a dim hall narrowed with heavy old barrister’s bookcases, into a trim living-dining area overpowered with a massive mahogany sideboard and buffet from Tribulation and a spotty old gilt-edged mirror so tall it touched the ceiling. Audubon birds of prey glared down at them from on high. An enormous Malayer carpet—also from Tribulation, much too large for any room of the house—lay rolled up a foot thick across the doorway at the far end, like a velvety log rotting obstinately across the path. “Watch your step, now,” she said, extending a hand to help the children over it one at a time, like a scout leader guiding them over a fallen tree in the forest. “H
arriet will tell you that her aunt Adelaide is the housekeeper in the family, Libby is good with the little ones, and Edith keeps the trains running on time, but I’m no good at any of that. No, my Daddy always called me the archivist. Do you know what that is?”
She glanced back, sharp and merry, with her red-rimmed eyes. There was a smudge of dirt under her cheekbone. Hely, unobtrusively, cut his own eyes away, for he was a little afraid of all Harriet’s old ladies, with their long noses and their shrewd, birdlike manners, like a pack of witches.
“No?” Tat turned her head and sneezed, violently. “An archivist,” she said, with a gasp, “is just a fancy word for pack rat.… Harriet, darling, please forgive your old auntie for rambling on to your poor company. She doesn’t mean to be tiresome, she only hopes that Hely won’t go home and tell that nice little mother of his what a mess I am over here. Next time,” and her voice dropped as she fell behind with Harriet, “next time, before you come all the way over here, darling, you should call Aunt Tatty on the telephone. What if I hadn’t been here to let you in?”
With a smack, she kissed impassive Harriet on her round cheek (the child was filthy, though the little boy was cleanly, if queerly, dressed in a long white T-shirt which came past his knees like Grandpa’s nightgown). She left them on the back porch and hurried to the kitchen where—teaspoon clattering—she mixed lemonade from tap water and a pouch of citrus-flavored powder from the grocery. Tattycorum had real lemons and sugar—but nowadays they all turned up their noses at the real thing, said Tatty’s friends in the Circle who had grandchildren.
She called to the children to fetch their drinks (“I’m afraid we’re very informal here, Hely, I hope you don’t mind serving yourself”) and hurried to the back of the house to freshen up.
————
On Tat’s clothes-line, which ran across the back porch, hung a checkered quilt with large tan and black squares. The card table where they sat was placed in front of it like a stage set, and the quilt’s squares mirrored the small squares of the game board between them.
