by Donna Tartt
“It’s night. Tuesday night,” said Allison.
Charlotte was dead-still for a moment, eyes wide and her mouth slightly parted. Then she ran down the stairs—her heel-less slippers slapping loudly—and looked out the window by the front door.
“Oh, my word,” she said, leaning forward, both hands on the sill. She unsnapped the deadbolt; she stepped onto the front porch in the twilight. Very slowly—like she was dreaming—she walked to a rocking chair and sat down.
“Heavens,” she said. “You’re right. I woke up and the clock said six-thirty and, so help me, I thought it was six in the morning.”
For a while, there was no sound at all except the crickets, and the voices from up the street. The Godfreys had company: an unfamiliar white car stood in the driveway, and a station wagon was pulled along the curb in front. Wisps of smoke from the barbecue grill rose in the yellowy light on their back porch.
Charlotte looked up at Harriet. Her face was sweaty, too white, and the pupils of her eyes so huge and black and swallowing that the irises were shrunk to nothing, blue coronas glowing at the edges of eclipsed moons.
“Harriet, I thought you’d been gone all night.…” She was clammy and gasping, as if half-drowned. “Oh, baby. I thought you were kidnapped or dead. Mama had a bad dream and—oh, dear God. I hit you.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry.
“Come inside, Mama,” said Allison, quietly. “Please.” It wouldn’t do for the Godfreys or Mrs. Fountain to see their mother crying on the front porch in her nightgown.
“Harriet, come here. How can you ever forgive me? Mama’s crazy,” she sobbed, wetly, into Harriet’s hair. “I’m so sorry.…”
Harriet, squashed against her mother’s chest at an uncomfortable angle, tried not to squirm. She felt suffocated. Up above, as if from a distance, her mother wept and coughed with muffled hacking sounds, like a shipwreck victim washed up on a beach. The pink fabric of the nightgown, pressed against Harriet’s cheek, was so magnified that it didn’t even look like cloth, but a technical cross-hatch of coarse, ropy skeins. It was interesting. Harriet shut the eye against her mother’s breast. The pink vanished. Both eyes open: back it popped. She experimented with alternate winks, watching the optical illusion leap back and forth until a fat tear—inordinately huge—dripped onto the cloth and spread in a crimson stain.
Suddenly her mother caught her by the shoulders. Her face was shiny, and smelled of cold-cream; her eyes were inky black, and alien, like the eyes of a nurse shark that Harriet had seen in an aquarium on the Gulf Coast.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.
Once more, Harriet found herself crushed to the front of her mother’s nightgown. Concentrate, she told herself. If she thought hard enough, she could be somewhere else.
A parallelogram of light slanted onto the front porch. The front door stood ajar. “Mama?” she heard Allison say, very faintly. “Please.…”
When, at last, Harriet’s mother allowed herself to be taken by the hand and coaxed inside, Allison led her carefully to the couch, settled her down with a cushion behind her head, and turned on the television—its chatter a frank relief, the bouncy music, the unconcerned voices. She then trailed in and out bringing Kleenex, headache powders, cigarettes and an ashtray, a glass of iced tea and an ice pack their mother kept in the freezer—clear plastic, swimming-pool blue, shaped like a harlequin half-mask from Mardi Gras—which she wore over her eyes when her sinuses were bothering her or when she suffered what she called sick headaches.
Their mother accepted the Kleenex and the tea from the little heap of comforts, and, murmuring distractedly all the while, pressed the aquamarine ice pack to her forehead. “What must you think of me? … I’m so ashamed of myself.…” The ice mask did not escape Harriet, who sat studying her mother from the armchair opposite. She had several times seen her father, the morning after he’d been drinking, sitting stiffly at his desk with the blue ice mask tied onto his head as he made phone calls or flipped angrily through his papers. But there was no liquor on her mother’s breath. Pressed to her mother’s chest, out on the porch, she hadn’t smelled a thing. In fact, her mother didn’t drink—not the way that Harriet’s father did. Every now and then she mixed herself a bourbon and Coke, but usually she carried it around all evening until the ice melted and the paper napkin got soggy, and fell asleep before she managed to drink the whole thing.
Allison reappeared in the doorway. She glanced over at their mother, quickly, to make sure she wasn’t looking, and then, silently, mouthed the words to Harriet: It’s his birthday.
Harriet blinked. Of course: how could she have forgotten? Usually it was the anniversary of his death, in May, that set their mother off: crying fits, inexplicable panics. A few years ago, it had been so bad that she had been unable to leave the house to attend Allison’s eighth-grade graduation. But this May, the date had come and gone without incident.
Allison cleared her throat. “Mama, I’m running you a bath,” she said. Her voice was strangely crisp and adult. “You don’t have to get in if you don’t want to.”
Harriet stood to go upstairs but her mother flung out an arm in a panicky, lightning-quick gesture, as if she were about to walk in front of a car.
“Girls! My two sweet girls!” She patted the sofa on either side, and though her face was swollen from crying, in her voice was a will o’ the wisp—faint, but bright—of the sorority girl in the hall portrait.
“Harriet, why in the world didn’t you speak up?” she said. “Did you have a good time with Tatty? What did you talk about?”
Once again, Harriet found herself struck dumb in the unwelcome glare of her mother’s attention. For some reason, all she could think of was a carnival ride she had been on when she was small, with a ghost sailing placidly back and forth along a length of fishing line in the dark, and how—unexpectedly—the ghost had jumped its track and shot right in her face. Every now and then, she still woke bolt-upright from a sound sleep when the white shape flew at her out of the dark.
“What did you do at Tatty’s house?”
“Played chess.” In the silence that followed, Harriet tried to think of some funny or entertaining observation to tack on to this reply.
Her mother put an arm around Allison, to make her feel included, too. “And why didn’t you go, honey? Have you had your supper yet?”
“And now we present the ABC Movie of the Week,” said the television. “Me, Natalie, starring Patty Duke, James Farentino, and Martin Balsam.”
During the opening credits of the movie, Harriet stood and started up to her room, only to have her mother follow her up the stairs.
“Do you hate Mother for acting so crazy?” she asked, standing forlornly in the open door of Harriet’s room. “Why don’t you come watch the movie with us? Just the three of us?”
“No, thank you,” said Harriet politely. Her mother was staring down at the rug—alarmingly close, Harriet realized, to the tar-stained spot. Part of the stain was visible near the edge of the bed.
“I …” A string in her mother’s throat seemed to pop; helplessly, her glance darted over Allison’s stuffed animals, the pile of books on the window seat by Harriet’s bed. “You must hate me,” she said, in a rusty voice.
Harriet looked at the floor. She couldn’t stand it when her mother was melodramatic like this. “No, Mama,” she said. “I just don’t want to watch that movie.”
“Oh, Harriet. I had the worst dream. And it was so terrible when I woke up and you weren’t here. You know that Mother loves you, don’t you, Harriet?”
Harriet had a hard time answering. She felt slightly numbed, as if she were underwater: the long shadows, the eerie, greenish lamplight, the breeze washing in the curtains.
“Don’t you know I love you?”
“Yes,” said Harriet; but her voice sounded thin like it came from a long way off, or belonged to somebody else.
CHAPTER
4
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The Mission
It was odd, thought Harriet, that she hadn’t come to hate Curtis despite what she now knew about his family. Far down the street—in the same spot she’d last run into him—he was stomping flat-footed and very purposefully along the curb. To and fro he swayed, his water pistol clenched in both fists and his roly-poly body swinging side to side.
From the ramshackle house he was guarding—low-rent apartments of some sort—a screen door banged. Two men stepped out onto the outside staircase, hefting between them a large box with a tarpaulin slung over it. The man facing Harriet was very young, and very awkward, and very shiny on the forehead; his hair stood on end and his eyes were round and shocked-looking as if he’d just stepped out of an explosion. The other, backing down first, fairly stumbled in his haste; and despite the weight of the box, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the precarious drape of the tarpaulin—which seemed liable to slide off and entangle them at any moment—they did not pause for even an instant but thumped down in an agonizing rush.
Curtis, with a mooing cry, wobbled and pointed the water pistol at them as they turned the box sideways, and edged with it to a pickup truck parked in the driveway. Another tarpaulin was draped across the truck’s bed. The older and heavier of the two men (white shirt, black trousers and open black vest) nudged it aside with his elbow, then lifted his end of the box over the side.
“Careful!” cried the young, wild-haired fellow as the crate toppled with a solid crash.
The other—his back still to Harriet—swiped his brow with a handkerchief. His gray hair was slicked back in an oily ducktail. Together, they replaced the tarpaulin and went back up the stairs again.
Harriet observed this mysterious toil without being very curious about it. Hely could entertain himself for hours by gawking at laborers on the street, and if he was really interested he went up and pestered them with questions but cargo, workmen, equipment—all this bored Harriet. What interested her was Curtis. If what Harriet had heard all her life was true, Curtis’s brothers weren’t good to him. Sometimes Curtis showed up at school with eerie red bruises on his arms and legs, bruises of a color peculiar to Curtis alone, the color of cranberry sauce. People said that he was just more delicate than he looked, and bruised easily, just like he caught cold more easily than other kids; but teachers sometimes sat him down all the same, and asked questions about the bruises—what exact questions, or Curtis’s exact answers, Harriet didn’t know; but among the children there was a vague but widespread belief that Curtis was mistreated at home. He had no parents, only the brothers and a tottery old grandmother who complained that she was too feeble to look out for him. Often he arrived at school with no jacket in winter, and no lunch money, and no lunch (or else some unwholesome lunch, like a jar of jelly, which had to be taken away from him). The grandmother’s chronic excuses about all this provoked incredulous glances among the teachers. Alexandria Academy, after all, was a private school. If Curtis’s family could afford the tuition—a thousand dollars a year—why couldn’t they afford lunch for him, and a coat?
Harriet felt sorry for Curtis—but from afar. Good-natured as he was, his broad, awkward movements made people nervous. Little kids were scared of him; girls wouldn’t sit by him on the school bus because he tried to touch their faces and clothes and hair. And though he had not yet spotted her, she dreaded to think what would happen if he did. Almost automatically, staring at the ground and feeling ashamed of herself even as she did it, she crossed to the other side of the street.
The screen door banged again and the two men came clattering back down the steps with another crate, just as a long, slick, pearl-gray Lincoln Continental swung around the corner. Mr. Dial, in profile, swept grandly past. To Harriet’s amazement, he turned into the driveway.
Having heaved the last box into the back of the truck, and pulled the tarp over it, the two men were climbing back up the stairs at a more creaky and comfortable pace. The car door opened: snick. “Eugene?” called Mr. Dial, climbing out of the car and brushing right past Curtis, apparently without seeing him. “Eugene. Half a second.”
The man with the gray ducktail had stiffened. When he turned Harriet saw—with a nightmarish jolt—the splashy red mark on his face, like a handprint in red paint.
“I sure am glad to run into you out here! You’re a tough man to get aholt of, Eugene,” said Mr. Dial, heading up the stairs after them uninvited. To the young, wiry man—whose eyes were rolling, as if he was about to bolt—he extended a hand. “Roy Dial, Dial Chevrolet.”
“This is—This is Loyal Reese,” said the older man, visibly uncomfortable, fingering the edge of the red mark on his cheek.
“Reese?” Mr. Dial surveyed the stranger pleasantly. “Not from around here, are you?”
The young man stammered something in response, and though Harriet couldn’t make out the words, his accent was clear enough: a high, hill-country voice, nasal and bright.
“Ah! Glad to have you with us, Loyal.… Just a visit, yes? Because,” Mr. Dial said, holding up a palm to forestall any protestations, “there are the terms of the lease. Single occupancy. No harm, is there, in making sure that we understand each other, Gene?” Mr. Dial folded his arms, much the way he did in Harriet’s Sunday-school class. “By the way, how have you been enjoying the new screen door I put in for you?”
Eugene managed a smile and said: “It’s nice, Mr. Dial. It works better than the otherun.” Between the scar, and the smile, he looked like a good-natured ghoul from a horror movie.
“And the water heater?” said Mr. Dial, screwing his hands together. “Now, that’s a lot faster now, I know, heating your bath water, and all. Got all the hot water you can use now, don’t you? Ha ha ha.”
“Well sir, Mr. Dial …”
“Eugene, if you don’t mind, I’ll cut to the chase here,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head cozily to the side. “It’s in your interest as well as mine to keep our lines of communication open, don’t you agree?”
Eugene looked confused.
“Now, the last two times I’ve stopped by to see you you’ve denied me access to this rental unit. Help me out here, Eugene,” he said—holding up a palm, expertly blocking Eugene’s interruption. “What’s going on here? How can we improve on this situation?”
“Mr. Dial, I kindly don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Eugene, that as your landlord, I have the right to enter the premises as I see fit. Let’s help each other out here, shall we?” He was moving up the stairs. Young Loyal Reese—looking more shocked than ever—was quietly backing up the steps to the apartment.
“I kindly don’t understand the problem, Mr. Dial! If I done something wrong—”
“Eugene, I’ll be frank about my concerns. I’ve received complaints about an odor. When I dropped by the other day, I noticed it myself.”
“If you’d like to step inside a minute, Mr. Dial?”
“I certainly would like to do that, Eugene, if you don’t mind. Because you see it’s like this. I’ve got certain responsibilities to all my tenants at a property.”
“Hat!”
Harriet jumped. Curtis was weaving from side to side and waving to her with his eyes closed.
“Blind,” he called to her.
Mr. Dial turned, halfway. “Well, hello there, Curtis! Careful, there,” he said, brightly, stepping aside with an expression of slight distaste.
At this, Curtis swung around, with a long goose-step, and began to stomp across the street towards Harriet with his arms straight out in front of him, hands dangling, like Frankenstein.
“Munster,” he gurgled. “Ooo, munstrer.”
Harriet was mortified. But Mr. Dial hadn’t seen her. He turned away and—still talking (“No, wait a second, Eugene, I really do want you to understand my position here”)—he headed up the steps in a very determined fashion as the two men retreated nervously before him.
Curtis stopped in front of Harriet. Be
fore she could say anything, his eyes popped open. “Tie my shoes,” he demanded.
“They’re tied, Curtis.” This was a habitual exchange. Because Curtis didn’t know how to tie his shoes, he was always going up to kids on the playground and asking for help. Now, it was how he started a conversation, whether his shoes needed tying or not.
With no warning, Curtis shot out an arm and grabbed Harriet by the wrist. “Gotchoo,” he burbled happily.
The next thing she knew, he was towing her firmly across the street. “Stop,” she said crossly, and tried to yank free. “Let me go!”
But Curtis plowed on. He was very strong. Harriet stumbled along behind him. “Stop,” she cried, and kicked him in the shin as hard as she could.
Curtis stopped. He slackened his moist, meaty grip around her wrist. His expression was blank and rather frightening but then he reached over and patted her on the head: a big, flat, splay-fingered pat that didn’t quite connect, like a baby trying to pat a kitten. “You strong, Hat,” he said.
Harriet stepped away and rubbed her wrist. “Don’t do that any more,” she mumbled. “Jerking people around.”
“Me a good munster, Hat!” growled Curtis, in his grumbly monster voice. “Friendly!” He patted his stomach. “Eat only cookies!”
He had dragged her all the way across the street, up into the driveway behind the pickup truck. Paws dangling peacefully under his chin, in his Cookie Monster posture, he lumbered over to the rear and lifted the tarpaulin. “Look, Hat!”
“I don’t want to,” said Harriet, grumpily, but even as she turned away a dry, furious whir rolled up from the truck bed.
Snakes. Harriet blinked with amazement. The truck was stacked with screened boxes and in the boxes were rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, serpents large and small, twined in great mottled knots, scaly white snouts licking out from the mass this way and that, like flames, bumping the crate walls, pointed heads retreating, coiling back upon themselves and striking at the screen, and the wood, and each other, then snapping back and—emotionless, staring—sliding along with their white throats low upon the floor, pouring into a fluid S shape … tick tick tick … until they bumped the sides of the box and reared back into the mass, hissing.
