by Donna Tartt
Pop went the lights as they broke—easily, with an explosion like a flashbulb; pop pop. Then she ran back and broke out all the lights on the Ratliff truck, the headlights and the tail-lights too. Though she felt like smashing them with all her strength, she held herself back; she was afraid of rousing the neighbors, and a good hard rap—like cracking the shell of an egg—was all it took to shatter them, so that big triangles of glass fell out upon the gravel.
From the tail-lights, she gathered up the biggest and most pointed shards and wedged them into the treads of the back tires, as firmly as she could without cutting her hands. Then she circled to the front of the truck and did the same. Heart pounding, she took two or three deep breaths. Then, with both hands, and with all the strength she could muster, she stood and lifted the concrete kitten as high as she could and hurled it through the windshield.
It broke with a bright splash. A shower of glass pebbles pattered to the dashboard. Across the street, a porch light snapped on, followed by the light next door, but the moonlit driveway—sparkling with broken glass—was deserted now, for Harriet was already halfway up the stairs.
“What was that?”
Silence. All at once—to Hely’s horror—a hundred and fifty watts of white electricity poured down on him from the overhead bulb. Aghast, blinded by the dazzle, he cringed against the sleazy panel board and almost before he could blink (there had been an awful lot of snakes on the carpet) somebody cursed and the room went black again.
A bulky form stepped through the door and into the dark room. Lightly, for its size, it slipped past Hely and toward the front windows.
Hely froze: the blood drained in a rapid whoosh from his head clear down to his ankles but just as the room was starting to swing back and forth a disturbance broke out in the front room. Agitated talk, not quite audible. A chair scraped back. “No, don’t,” someone said, clearly.
Fierce whispers. In the dark, only a few feet away, Farish Ratliff stood listening in the shadows—motionless, his chin high and his stumpy legs parted, like a bear poised to attack.
In the next room, the door squeaked open. “Farsh?” said one of the men. Then, to Hely’s surprise, he heard a child’s voice: whiny, breathless, indistinct.
Horribly near, Farish snapped: “Who’s that?”
Commotion. Farish—only steps from Hely—drew a long, exasperated breath then wheeled and thundered back into the lighted room as if he meant to choke someone.
One of the men cleared his throat and said: “Farish, look here—”
“Downstars … Come see …” The new voice—the child—was countrified and whiny; a little too whiny, Hely realized, with an incredulous surge of hope.
“Farsh, she says the truck—”
“He done broke your windows out,” piped the acid, tiny voice. “If you hurry—”
There was a general scramble, cut short by a bellow loud enough to bring down the walls.
“—if you hurry, you can catch him,” said Harriet; the accent had slipped, the voice—high, pedantic—recognizably hers, but nobody seemed to notice over the ecstasy of stuttering and curses. Feet thundered down the back stairs.
“Goddamn it!” shrieked someone, from outside.
From below floated an extraordinary ruckus of curses and shouts. Hely, cautiously, edged to the door. For several moments he stood and listened, so intently that he took no notice in the weak light of a small rattlesnake, coiled to strike, only ten or twelve inches from his foot.
“Harriet?” he whispered, at last—or tried to whisper, for he had almost completely lost his voice. For the first time, he realized how horribly thirsty he was. From downstairs, in the driveway, came confused shouts, a fist pounding on metal—hollow, repetitive, like the galvanized washtub that rendered the thunder sound effects in the middle-school plays and dance recitals.
Carefully, he peered around the door. The chairs were pushed back all cock-eyed; glasses of melting ice stood, in linked rings of water, on the card table beside an ashtray and two packs of cigarettes. The door to the landing was ajar. Another small snake had crawled into the room and was lying inconspicuously beneath the column radiator, but Hely had forgotten all about the snakes. Without wasting another moment, without even looking where he put his feet, he ran through the kitchen for the back door.
————
The preacher, hugging himself, leaned out over the pavement and looked down it as if waiting for a train. The scalded side of his face was turned away from Harriet but even in profile he was unnerving, with a furtive and disconcerting habit of putting his tongue out between his lips from time to time. Harriet stood as far from him as she reasonably could, with her face turned to the side so that neither he nor the others (still cursing, back in the driveway) could get a good look at her. She wanted—badly—to break and run for it; she had drifted down to the sidewalk with the idea of doing exactly that; but the preacher had disengaged himself from the confusion and trailed along behind her and she was not sure that she could out-run him. Upstairs, she’d trembled and quailed inside as the brothers towered over her in the lighted doorway: giants all, overpowering in their bulk, sunburnt and scarred and tattooed and greasy, glaring down at her with their stony light-colored eyes. The dirtiest and most massive of them—bearded, with bushy black hair and a ghastly white fish-eye like blind Pew in Treasure Island—had slammed his fist against a door frame, cursed so foully and fluently and with such an alarming violence that Harriet backed away in shock; now, methodically, his gray-streaked mane flying, he was kicking the remnants of one of the tail-lights to splinters with his boot. He was like the Cowardly Lion, but evil, with his strongman torso and his little short legs.
“Say they wasn’t in a car?” said the preacher, turning scar and all to scrutinize her.
Harriet, dumbly, kept her eyes down and shook her head. The lady with the Chihuahua—gaunt, in sleeveless nightgown and flip-flop pool sandals, a pink plastic hospital band around her wrist—was shuffling back toward her own house. She’d come outside carrying the dog, and her cigarettes and lighter in a tooled leather case, and stood at the edge of her yard to watch what was going on. Over her shoulder, the Chihuahua dog—still yapping—was staring Harriet straight in the eye and wriggling as if he wanted nothing more in the world than to escape from his mistress’s grasp and chew Harriet to pieces.
“He was white?” said the preacher. He wore a leather vest over his short-sleeved white shirt, and his gray hair was slicked back in a high, wavy pompadour. “You sure about that?”
Harriet nodded; with a show of shyness she pulled a strand of hair over her face.
“You’re running around out here mighty late this evening. Aint I seen you down at the square earlier?”
Harriet shook her head, glanced back studiously at the house—and saw Hely, blank-faced, white as a bedsheet, skimming rapidly down the stairs. Down he flew, without seeing Harriet or anybody—and bumped smack into the one-eyed man, who was muttering into his beard and striding towards the house with his head down, very fast.
Hely staggered back, let out a ghastly, wheezing little scream. But Farish only shoved past him and clomped up the stairs. He was jerking his head, talking in a clipped, angry voice (“… better not try it, better not …”) as if to some invisible but definite creature about three feet high which was scrabbling up the steps after him. All at once his arm flew out and slapped empty air: hard, as if making contact with an actual presence, some pursuing hunchbacked evil.
Hely had vanished. Suddenly a shadow fell over Harriet. “Who you?”
Harriet—badly startled—glanced up to find Danny Ratliff standing over her.
“Just happened to see it?” he said, hands on hips, tossing the hair out of his face. “Where was you when all this window-breaking was going on? Where’d she come from?” he said to his brother.
Harriet stared up at him, flabbergasted. From the sudden surprised flare of Danny Ratliff’s nostrils she knew that her revulsion was written pl
ain all over her face.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. Up close, he was wolfishly brown and thin, dressed in jeans and a skanky-looking long-sleeved T-shirt; his eyes—hooded, under heavy brows—had a mean, off-center cast that made her nervous. “What’s the matter with you?”
The preacher, who seemed quite agitated, glancing up and down the street, crossed his arms over his shirt-front and tucked his hands into his armpits. “Don’t worry,” he said, in his high-pitched, over-friendly voice. “We aint gone bite you.”
As afraid as she was, Harriet could not help noticing the blotchy blue tattoo on his forearm, and wondering what the picture was supposed to be. What kind of a preacher had tattoos on his arms?
“What’s wrong?” the preacher said to her. “You’re afret of my face, aren’t you?” His voice was pleasant enough; but then, quite without warning, he caught Harriet by the shoulders and thrust his face in hers, in a manner suggesting that his face was something to be very afraid of indeed.
Harriet stiffened, less at the burn (glossy red, with the fibrous, bloody sheen of raw membrane) than at his hands on her shoulders. From beneath a slick, lashless eyelid, the preacher’s eye sparkled, colorfully, like a blue chip of glass. Abruptly, his cupped palm darted out, as if to slap her, but as she flinched his eyes lit up: “Uh uh uh!” he said, triumphantly. With a light, infuriating touch, he stroked her cheek with his knuckle—and, passing his hand in front of her, produced unexpectedly a bent stick of gum, which he twirled between his first and middle fingers.
“Aint got much to say now, do you?” said Danny. “You was talking pretty good up there a minute ago.”
Harriet stared diligently at his hands. Though they were bony and boyish-looking, they were heavily scarred, the bitten nails rimmed in black, and covered with big ugly rings (a silver skull; a motorcycle insignia) like a rock star might wear.
“Whoever it was done this sure run off mighty fast.”
Harriet glanced up at the side of his face. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. He was looking up and down the street, and his eyes jumped around in a quick, jittery, suspicious way, like a bully on the playground who wanted to make sure that the teacher wasn’t looking before he hauled off and punched somebody.
“Ont it?” said the preacher, dangling the stick of gum in front of her.
“No thank you,” said Harriet, and was sorry the instant it was out of her mouth.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” Danny Ratliff demanded suddenly, wheeling as if she’d insulted him. “What’s your name?”
“Mary,” whispered Harriet. Her heart pounded. No thank you, indeed. Grubby though she was (leaves in her hair, dirt on her arms and legs), who was going to believe she was a little redneck? Nobody: rednecks, least of all.
“Hoo!” Danny Ratliff’s high-pitched giggle was sharp and startling. “Can’t hear you.” He spoke fast, but without moving his lips much. “Speak up.”
“Mary.”
“Say Mary?” His boots were big and scary-looking, with lots of buckles. “Mary who? Who you belong to?”
A shivery little wind blew through the trees. Leaf-shadow trembled and shifted on the moonlit pavement.
“John—Johnson,” said Harriet, weakly. Good grief, she thought. Can’t I do better than that?
“Johnson?” the preacher said. “Which Johnson is that?”
“Funny, you look like one of Odum’s to me.” Danny’s jaw muscles worked, furtively, on the left side of his mouth, biting down on the inside of his cheek. “How come you out here all by yourself? Aint I seen you down at the pool hall?”
“Mama …” Harriet swallowed, decided to start over. “Mama, she aint …”
Danny Ratliff, she noticed, was eyeing the expensive new camp moccasins Edie had ordered for her from L. L. Bean.
“Mama aint allow me to go there,” she said, awkwardly, in a small voice.
“Who is your mama?”
“Odum’s wife is past on,” said the preacher, primly, folding his hands.
“I aint askin you, I ast her.” Danny was gnawing at the side of his thumbnail and staring at Harriet in a stony way that made her feel very uncomfortable. “Look at her eyes, Gene,” he said to his brother, with a nervous toss of his head.
Congenially, the preacher stooped to peer into her face. “Well, derned if they’re not green. Where you get them green eyes from?”
“Look at her, staring at me,” said Danny shrilly. “Staring like that. What’s the matter with you, girl?”
The Chihuahua was still barking. Harriet—off in the distance—heard something that sounded like a police siren. The men heard it, too, and stiffened: but just then, from upstairs, rang a hideous scream.
Danny and his brother glanced at each other, and then Danny bolted for the stairs. Eugene—too shocked to move, able to think of nothing but Mr. Dial (for if this caterwauling failed to bring Dial and the sheriff, nothing would)—passed a hand over his mouth. Behind, he heard the slap of feet on the sidewalk; he turned to see the girl running off.
“Girl!” he shouted after her. “You, girl!” He was about to go after her when up above, the window sailed up with a crash and out flew a snake, the white of its underbelly pale against the night sky.
Eugene jumped back. He was too startled to cry out. Though the thing was stomped flat in the middle and its head was a bloody pulp, it filliped and twitched in convulsions on the grass.
Loyal Reese was all of a sudden behind him. “This isn’t right,” he said to Eugene, looking down at the dead snake, but Farish was already pounding down the back stairs with fists clenched and murder in his eyes and before Loyal—blinking like a baby—could say another word Farish swung him around and punched him in the mouth and sent him staggering.
“Who you working for?” he bellowed.
Loyal stumbled backward and opened his mouth—which was wet and bleeding thinly—and when nothing came out of it after a moment or two, Farish glanced quickly over his shoulder and then punched him again, this time to the ground.
“Who sent you?” he screamed. Loyal’s mouth was bloody; Farish grabbed his shirtfront and jerked him up to his feet. “Whose idea was this? You and Dolphus, yall just thought you’d fuck with me, make some easy money, but yall are fucking with the wrong person—”
“Farish,” called Danny—white as chalk, running down the stairs two at a time—“you got that .38 in the truck?”
“Wait,” said Eugene, panic-stricken—guns in Mr. Dial’s rental apartment? a dead body? “Yall got it wrong,” he called, waving his hands in the air. “Everybody calm down.”
Farish pushed Loyal to the ground. “I got all night,” he said. “Motherfucker. Double-cross me and I’m on break ye teeth out and blow a hole in your chest.”
Danny caught Farish’s arm. “Leave him, Farish, come on. We need the gun upstairs.”
Loyal, on the ground, raised himself up on his elbows. “Is they out?” he said; and his voice was full of such innocent astonishment that even Farish stopped cold.
Danny staggered back in his motorcycle boots and wiped a dirty arm across his forehead. He looked shellshocked. “All over the fucking place,” he said.
————
“We’re missing one,” said Loyal, ten minutes later, wiping the blood-tinged spit from his mouth with his knuckle. His left eye was purple and swollen to a slit.
Danny said: “I smell something funny. This place smells like piss. Do you smell it, Gene?” he asked his brother.
“There he goes!” cried Farish suddenly, and lunged for a defunct heating register from which protruded six inches of snake tail.
The tail flicked, with a parting rattle, and disappeared down the register like a whiplash.
“Quit,” said Loyal to Farish, who was pounding the register with the toe of his motorcycle boot. Moving quickly to the register, he bent over it fearlessly (Eugene and Danny and even Farish, ceasing his dance, stepping well back). Pursing his lips, he emitt
ed an eerie, cutting little whistle: eeeeeeeee, like a cross between a teakettle and a wet finger rubbed across a balloon.
Silence. Loyal puckered up again, with bloodied and swollen lips—eeeeeeee, a whistle to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Then he listened, with his ear to the ground. After a full five minutes of silence he climbed painfully to his feet and rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs.
“He’s gone,” he announced.
“Gone?” cried Eugene. “Gone where?”
Loyal wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s went down in that other apartment,” he said gloomily.
“You ort to be in the circus,” said Farish, looking at Loyal with newfound respect. “That’s some trick. Who taught you how to whistle like that?”
“Snakes mind me,” said Loyal, modestly, as they all stood staring at him.
“Ho!” Farish clapped an arm around him; the whistle had so impressed him that he’d forgotten all about being angry. “Reckon you can teach me to do that?”
Staring out the window, Danny muttered: “Something funny’s going on around here.”
“What’s that?” snapped Farish, wheeling on him. “You got something to say to me, Danny boy, you say it to my face.”
“I said something funny’s going on around here. That door was open when we come up here tonight.”
“Gene,” said Loyal, clearing his throat, “you need to call these people downstairs. I know exactly where that fellow’s gone. He’s went down that retchister, and he’s making himself comfortable in the hot water pipes.”
“Reckon why he don’t come on back?” said Farish. He pursed his lips and tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate the unearthly whistle that Loyal had employed to lure six timber rattlers, one by one, from varying parts of the room. “Aint he trained as good as the others?”
“Aint none of em trained. They don’t like all this hollering and stomping. Nope,” said Loyal, scratching his head as he looked down into the register, “he’s gone.”
