The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  “Not friendly, Hat,” she heard Curtis say, behind her, in his thick voice. “Not to touch.”

  The boxes were hinged and screened at the top and fitted with handles on each end. Most were painted: white, black, the brick-red of country barns; some had writing—Bible verses—in tiny, scraggled printing, and patterns worked in brass nail-heads: crosses, skulls, stars of David, suns and moons and fishes. Others were decorated with bottle caps, buttons, bits of broken glass and even photographs: faded Polaroids of caskets, solemn families, staring country boys holding rattlesnakes aloft in a dark place where bonfires burned in the background. One photograph, washed-out and ghostly, showed a beautiful girl with her hair scraped back hard, her eyes shut tight and her sharp, lovely face tipped up to Heaven. Her fingertips were poised at her temples, over a wicked fat timber rattlesnake which lay draped across her head, its tail partially coiled around her neck. Above it, a jangle of yellowed letters—scissored from newspaper—spelled out the message:

  SLEep witH JESuS

  REESiE fOrd

  1935–52

  Behind her, Curtis crooned, an indistinct moan that sounded like “Spook.”

  In the profusion of boxes—sparkly and various and awash with messages—Harriet’s eye was arrested by a startling sight. For a moment she hardly believed what she saw. In a vertical box, a king cobra swayed grandly in his solitary quarters. Below the hinge, where the screen joined the wood, red thumbtacks spelled out the words LORD JESUS. He was not white, like the cobra Mowgli had met in the Cold Lairs, but black: black like Nag and his wife Nagaina, whom the mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi had fought to the death in the gardens of the big bungalow at Segowlee Cantonment, over the boy Teddy.

  Silence. The cobra’s hood was spread. Upright, calm, he gazed at Harriet, his body oscillating soundlessly to and fro, to and fro, as softly as her own breath. Look and be afraid. His tiny red eyes were the steady eyes of a god: here were jungles, cruelty, revolts and ceremonies, wisdom. On the back of his spread hood, she knew, was the spectacle mark which the great god Brahm had put on all the cobra’s people when the first cobra rose up and opened his hood to shelter Brahm as he slept.

  From the house, a muffled noise—a door shutting. Harriet glanced up, and for the first time noticed that the second-floor windows glinted blank and metallic: silvered out with tin foil. As she stared up at this (for it was an eerie sight, as unsettling as the snakes in its way), Curtis bunched his fingertips together and snaked his arm out in front of Harriet’s face. Slowly, slowly, he opened his hand, in a motion which was like a mouth opening. “Munster,” he whispered, and closed his hand, twice: snap snap. “Bite.”

  The door had shut upstairs. Harriet stepped back from the truck and listened, hard. A voice—muffled, but rich with disapproval—had just interrupted another speaker: Mr. Dial was still up there, behind those silvered-out windows, and for once in her life Harriet was glad to hear his voice.

  All at once Curtis grabbed her arm again and began to pull her toward the stairs. For a moment Harriet was too startled to protest and then—when she saw where he was going—she struggled and kicked and tried to dig her heels in. “No, Curtis,” she cried, “I don’t want to, stop, please—”

  She was on the verge of biting his arm when her eye lit on his large white tennis shoe.

  “Curtis, hey Curtis, your shoe’s untied,” she said.

  Curtis stopped; he clapped a hand to his mouth. “Uh-oh!” He stooped to the ground, all in a fluster—and Harriet ran, as hard as she could.

  ————

  “They’re with the carnival,” said Hely, in his annoying way, like he knew everything there was to know about it. He and Harriet were in his room with the door shut, sitting on the lower bunk of his bed. Nearly everything in Hely’s bedroom was black or gold, in honor of the New Orleans Saints, his favorite football team.

  “I don’t think so,” Harriet said, scratching with her thumbnail at the raised cord of the black bedspread. A muffled bass from the stereo thumped from Pemberton’s room, down the hall.

  “If you go to the Rattlesnake Ranch, there’s pictures and stuff painted on the buildings.”

  “Yes,” said Harriet, reluctantly. Though she could not put it into words, the crates she’d seen in the back of the truck—with their skulls and stars and crescent moons, their wobbly, misspelled bands of scripture—felt very different from the Rattlesnake Ranch’s florid old billboard: a winking lime-green snake wrapped around a cheesy woman in a two-piece swimsuit.

  “Well, who’d they belong to?” said Hely. He was sorting through a stack of bubble-gum cards. “The Mormons, had to be. They’re the ones that rent rooms over there.”

  “Hmn.” The Mormons who lived at the bottom of Mr. Dial’s apartment building were a dull pair. They seemed very isolated, just the two of them; they didn’t even have real jobs.

  Hely said: “My grandpa said the Mormons believe they get their own little planet to live on when they die. Also that they think it’s okay to have more than one wife.”

  “Those ones that live over at Mr. Dial’s don’t have any wife at all.” One afternoon they had knocked on Edie’s door while Harriet was visiting. Edie had let them in, accepted their literature, even offered them lemonade after they refused a Coca-Cola; she had told them they seemed like nice young men but that what they believed was a lot of nonsense.

  “Hey, let’s call Mr. Dial,” said Hely unexpectedly.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I mean, call him and pretend to be somebody else, ask him what’s going on over there.”

  “Pretend to be who?”

  “I don’t know—Do you want this?” He tossed her a Wacky Packs sticker: a green monster with bloodshot eyes on stalks, driving a dune buggy. “I’ve got two.”

  “No thanks.” Between the black-and-gold curtains, and the stickers plastered thick on the windowpanes—Wacky Packs, STP, Harley-Davidson—Hely had blocked nearly all the sunlight from his room; it was depressing, like being in a basement.

  “He’s their landlord,” said Hely. “Come on, call him.”

  “And say what?”

  “Call Edie then. If she knows so much about Mormons.”

  All of a sudden, Harriet realized why he was so interested in making phone calls: it was the new telephone on the bedside table, which had a push-button earpiece housed inside a Saints football helmet.

  “If they think they get to live on their own personal planets and all that,” said Hely, nodding at the phone, “who knows what else they think? Maybe the snakes are something to do with their church.”

  Because Hely kept looking at the telephone, and because she had no idea what else to do, Harriet pulled the telephone over to her and punched in Edie’s number.

  “Hello?” said Edie sharply, after two rings.

  “Edie,” said Harriet, into the football helmet, “do the Mormons believe anything about snakes?”

  “Harriet?”

  “Like for example, do they keep snakes as pets, or … I don’t know, have a lot of snakes and things living up in the house with them?”

  “Where on earth did you get such an idea? Harriet?”

  After an uncomfortable pause, Harriet said: “From TV.”

  “Television?” said Edie, incredulously. “What program?”

  “National Geographic.”

  “I didn’t know you liked snakes, Harriet. I thought you used to scream and holler Save me! Save me! whenever you saw a little grass snake out in the yard.”

  Harriet was silent, letting this low dig pass unremarked.

  “When we were girls, we used to hear stories about preachers handling snakes out in the woods. But they weren’t Mormons, just Tennessee hillbillies. By the way, Harriet, have you read A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Now, that has a lot of very good information about the Mormon faith.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Harriet. Edie had brought this story up with her Mormon visitors.

  “I think that old set
of Sherlock Holmes is over at your aunt Tat’s house. She may even have a copy of the Book of Mormon, in that boxed set my father used to have—you know with Confucius and the Koran and religious texts of the—”

  “Yes, but where can I read about these snake people?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. What’s that echo? Where are you calling from?”

  “Hely’s.”

  “It sounds like you’re calling from the toilet.”

  “No, this phone is just a funny shape.… Listen, Edie,” she said—for Hely was waving his arms back and forth and trying to get her attention—“what about these snake-handling people? Where are they?”

  “In the backwoods and mountains and the desolate places of the earth, that’s all I know,” said Edie grandly.

  The instant Harriet hung up, Hely said, in a rush: “You know, there used to be a trophy showroom in the upstairs of that house. I just remembered. I think the Mormons are only downstairs.”

  “Who rents it now?”

  Hely—excited—stabbed his finger at the telephone but Harriet shook her head; she was not about to call Edie back.

  “What about the truck? Did you get the license number?”

  “Gosh,” said Harriet. “No.” She hadn’t thought about it before, but the Mormons didn’t drive.

  “Did you notice if it was Alexandria County or not? Think, Harriet, think!” he said melodramatically. “You’ve got to remember!”

  “Well why don’t we just ride over there and see? Because if we go now—come on, stop it,” she said, irritably turning her head as Hely began to tick an imaginary hypnotist’s watch back and forth in front of her face.

  “You are growing vairy vairy sleepy,” said Hely, in a thick Transylvanian accent. “Vairy … vairy …”

  Harriet shoved him away; he circled to the other side, waggling his fingers in her face. “Vairy … vairy …”

  Harriet turned her head. Still he kept hovering, and finally she punched him as hard as she could. “Jesus!” screamed Hely. He clutched his arm and fell back on the bunk.

  “I said stop.”

  “Jeez, Harriet!” He sat up, rubbing his arm and making faces. “You hit me on the funny bone!”

  “Well, quit pestering me!”

  Suddenly, there was a furious flurry of fist-thumping on the closed door of Hely’s room. “Hely? Yo company in there with you? Yall open the do’ this minute.”

  “Essie!” screamed Hely, falling backwards in exasperation onto his bed. “We’re not doing anything.”

  “Open this do’. Open it.”

  “Open it yourself!”

  In burst Essie Lee, the new housekeeper, who was so new that she didn’t even know Harriet’s name—though Harriet suspected that she only pretended not to know. She was about forty-five, much younger than Ida, with chubby cheeks and artificially straightened hair which was broken and wispy at the ends.

  “What yall doing in here, screaming out the Lord’s name in vain? Yalls ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she cried. “Playing in here with the do’ shut. Yall aint shutting it no more, you hear?”

  “Pem keeps his door shut.”

  “And he aint got no girl company in there with him, either.” Essie swung round and glared at Harriet as if she were a puddle of cat-sick on the rug. “Screaming and cussing and carrying on.”

  “You better not talk to my company like that,” shrilled Hely. “You can’t do that. I’m going to tell my mother.”

  “I’m gonna tell my mama,” said Essie Lee, mimicking his whine, screwing her face up. “Run on and tell her. You tells on me all the time for stuff I aint even did, like you told yo mama I was the one ate those chocolate chips when you know you eat them yourself? Yes, you know you did it.”

  “Get out!”

  Harriet, uneasily, studied the carpet. Never had she got used to the flagrant dramas which erupted in Hely’s household when his parents were at work: Hely and Pem against each other (locks picked, posters torn from walls, homework stolen and ripped to pieces) or, more frequently, Hely and Pem against an ever-changing housekeeper: Ruby, who ate slices of white bread folded in half, and would not let them watch anything that came on television at the same time as General Hospital; Sister Bell, the Jehovah’s Witness; Shirley, with brown lipstick and lots of rings, always on the telephone; Mrs. Doane, a gloomy old woman terrified of break-ins who sat watching by the window with a butcher knife in her lap; Ramona, who went berserk and chased Hely with a hairbrush. None of them were very friendly or nice, but it was hard to blame them since they had to put up with Hely and Pemberton all the time.

  “Listen at you,” said Essie, with contempt; “ugly thing.” She gestured, vaguely, at the hideous curtains, the stickers darkening his windows. “I’d like to take and burn down this whole ugly—”

  “She threatened to burn down our house!” shrieked Hely, red in the face. “You heard her, Harriet. I have a witness. She just threatened to burn down—”

  “I aint say one word about yo house. You better not—”

  “Yes, you did. Didn’t she, Harriet? I’m going to tell my mother,” he cried—without waiting for a reply from Harriet, who was too stunned by all this to speak, “and she’s going to call the employment office, and tell them you’re crazy, and not to send you out to anybody else’s house—”

  Behind Essie, Pem’s head appeared in the doorway. He stuck his lower lip out at Hely, in a babyish, tremulous pout. “Wook who’s in twouble,” he piped, with fraudulent tenderness.

  It was the wrong thing to say, at exactly the wrong moment. Essie Lee wheeled, eyes bulging. “What for you talk to me like that!” she screamed.

  Pemberton—brows knit—blinked at her foggily.

  “Sorry thing! Lay up in the bed all day, aint work a day in your life! I got to earn money. My child—”

  “What’s eating her?” said Pemberton to Hely.

  “Essie threatened to burn the house down,” said Hely, smugly. “Harriet’s my witness.”

  “I aint done no such thing!” Essie’s plump cheeks quivered with emotion. “That’s a lie!”

  Pemberton—in the hall, but out of view—cleared his throat. Behind Essie’s heaving shoulder, his hand popped up, then beckoned: all clear. With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated the stairs.

  Without warning, Hely seized Harriet’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom which connected his room with Pemberton’s and shot the bolt behind them. “Hurry!” he yelled to Pemberton—who was on the other side, in his room, trying to get the door open—and then they dashed out into Pemberton’s room (Harriet, in the dim, tripping on a tennis racket) and scurried out behind him and down the stairs.

  ————

  “That was nuts,” said Pemberton. It was the first thing anyone had said for a while. The three of them were sitting at the lone picnic table behind Jumbo’s Drive-In, on a concrete slab next to a forlorn pair of kiddie rides: a circus elephant and a faded yellow duck, on springs. They had driven around in the Cadillac—aimlessly, all three of them in the front seat—for about ten minutes, no air-conditioning and about to roast with the top up, before Pem finally pulled in at Jumbo’s.

  “Maybe we ought to stop by the tennis courts and tell Mother,” said Hely. He and Pem were being unusually cordial to each other, though in a subdued way, united by the quarrel with Essie.

  Pemberton took a last slurp of his milkshake, tossed it into the trash. “Man, you called that one.” The afternoon glare, reflected off the plate-glass window, burned white at the edges of his pool-frizzed hair. “That woman is a freak. I was scared she was going to hurt you guys or something.”

  “Hey,” said Hely, sitting up straighter. “That siren.” They all listened to it for a moment, off in the distance.

  “That’s probably the fire truck,” said Hely, glumly. “Driving to our house.”

  “Tell me again, what happened?” Pem said. “She just went berserk?”

  “Totally nuts. Hey, give me a cigaret
te,” he added, casually, as Pem tossed a packet of Marlboros—squashed from the pocket of his cutoff jeans—onto the table and dug in the other pocket for a light.

  Pem lit his cigarette, then moved both matches and cigarettes out of Hely’s reach. The smoke smelled unusually harsh and poisonous, there on the hot concrete amidst the backwash of fumes from the highway. “I have to say, I saw it coming,” he said, shaking his head. “I told Mama. That woman is deranged. She’s probably escaped from Whitfield.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” blurted Harriet, who’d hardly said a word since they’d bolted from the house.

  Both Pem and Hely turned to stare at her as if she was insane. “Huh?” said Pem.

  “Whose side are you on?” said Hely, aggrieved.

  “She didn’t say she was going to burn down the house.”

  “Yes she did!”

  “No! All she said was burn down. She didn’t say the house. She was talking about Hely’s posters and stickers and stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Pemberton said reasonably. “Burn Hely’s posters? I guess you think that’s all right.”

  “I thought you liked me, Harriet,” said Hely sulkily.

  “But she didn’t say she was going to burn the house down,” said Harriet. “All she said was … I mean,” she said, as Pemberton rolled his eyes knowingly at Hely, “it just wasn’t that big a deal.”

  Hely, ostentatiously, scooted away from her on the bench seat.

  “But it wasn’t,” said Harriet, who was growing by the moment more unsure of herself. “She was just … mad.”

  Pem rolled his eyes and blew out a cloud of smoke. “No kidding, Harriet.”

  “But … but yall are acting like she chased us with a butcher knife.”

  Hely snorted. “Well, next time, she might! I’m not staying by myself with her any more,” he repeated, self-pityingly, as he stared down at the concrete. “I’m sick of getting death threats all the time.”

  ————