The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  ————

  “How often do you think he eats?” said Harriet, who was stooped over pushing the wagon from behind as Hely tugged it ahead in front—not very fast, because it was almost too dark to see. “Maybe we should give him a frog.”

  Hely heaved the wagon down from the curb and into the street. A beach towel from his house was draped over the box. “I’m not feeding this thing any frog,” he said.

  He had been correct in his hunch that the Mormon house was empty. It had been only a hunch, nothing more: based on a conviction that he, personally, would rather spend the night locked in a car trunk than a house where rattlesnakes had been found crawling loose. He still had not mentioned to Harriet what he had done, but all the same he had brooded upon his actions sufficiently to justify his innocence. Little did he realize that the Mormons, in a room at the Holiday Inn, were at that very moment discussing with a real-estate lawyer in Salt Lake whether the presence of poisonous vermin in a rental property constituted a breach of contract.

  Hely hoped that nobody drove by and saw them. He and Harriet were supposed to be at the movies. His father had given them money to go. She’d spent the whole afternoon at Hely’s house, which wasn’t like her (usually she got tired of him and went home early, even when he begged her to stay) and for hours they’d sat cross-legged on the floor of Hely’s bedroom playing tiddlywinks as they talked quietly about the stolen cobra and what to do with it. The box was too big to conceal on the premises of her house, or his. At length they’d settled on an abandoned overpass west of town, which spanned County Line Road at a particularly desolate stretch, outside the city limits.

  Lugging the dynamite box out from under the house and loading it on Hely’s old red kiddie wagon had been easier than they’d imagined; they hadn’t seen a soul. The night was hazy and sweltering, with rumbles of thunder in the still distance. Cushions had been removed from porch furniture, sprinklers turned off and cats called indoors.

  Down the sidewalk they rattled. It was only two blocks up High Street on open sidewalks to the train depot, and the farther east they got—closer to the freight yards, and the river—the fewer lights they saw. Tall weeds jingled in neglected yards, which were posted with signs which read FOR SALE and NO TRESPASSING.

  Only two passenger trains a day stopped at the Alexandria station. At 7:14 in the morning, the City of New Orleans stopped in Alexandria on her way home from Chicago; at 8:47 in the evening, she stopped again on her way back, and the rest of the time, the station was more or less deserted. The rickety little ticket office, with its steeply pitched roof and its peeling paint, was dark, though the ticket master would arrive in an hour to open it up. Behind, a series of unused gravel roads connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the gin, and the lumber mill, and the river.

  Together, Hely and Harriet stopped to ease the wagon off the sidewalk and down onto the gravel. Dogs were barking—big dogs, but far away. To the south of the depot were the lights of the lumberyard and, further back, the friendly streetlamps of their own neighborhood. Turning their backs upon these last glimmers of civilization, they headed off resolutely in the opposite direction—into outer darkness, and the broad, flat, uninhabited wastes stretching off to the north, past the dead freight yards with their open boxcars and empty cotton wagons, and towards a narrow gravel path vanishing into black pine woods.

  Hely and Harriet had played along this isolated road—which led to the abandoned cotton warehouse—but not often. The woods were still and frightening; even in broad daylight the gloomy footpath—choked to a thread—was always dark beneath the dense, vine-strangled canopy of ailanthus, stunted sweetgum, and pine. The air was damp and unwholesome, whining with mosquitos, and the silence broken only occasionally: by the startling crash of a rabbit through the thicket, or the harsh caws of unseen birds. Several years ago, it had sheltered a team of convicts escaped from a chain gang. Never before had they seen a living soul in that wasteland—except, once, a tiny black boy in red underpants who, bent at the knee, had chunked a rock underhand at them and then tottered back, shrieking, into the underbrush. It was a lonely spot, and neither Harriet nor Hely enjoyed playing there, though neither admitted it.

  The wagon tires crackled loud on the gravel. Clouds of gnats—undeterred by the fumes of the insect repellent they’d sprayed themselves with, head to foot—floated around them in the dank, airless clearing. In the shadow and dusk, they could only just see what was in front of them. Hely had brought a flashlight, but now they were here, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to shine lights all over the place.

  As they went along, the path grew narrower and more choked with brush, pressing in close on either side like a pair of walls, and they had to roll along very slowly, stopping every now and then to push branches and twigs out of their faces in the dense, blue twilight. “Phew!” said Hely, up front, and as they rolled forward the buzz of the flies grew louder and Harriet was struck in the face by a moist, rotten odor.

  “Gross!” she heard Hely cry.

  “What?” It was getting so dark that she couldn’t see much more than the wide white bands on the back of Hely’s rugby shirt. Then gravel crunched as Hely lifted the front of the wagon and pushed it sharply to the left.

  “What is it?” The stench was incredible.

  “A possum.”

  A dark lump—whirring with flies—lay bunched and shapeless on the footpath. Despite the twigs and branches scratching at her face, Harriet turned her head away as they edged past it.

  They pushed ahead until the metallic drone of the flies had faded and the stink was well behind them, then stopped for a moment to rest. Harriet switched on the flashlight and lifted a corner of the beach towel between her thumb and forefinger. In the beam, the cobra’s small eyes glittered at her spitefully when he opened his mouth to hiss at her, and the open slit of his mouth was horribly like a smile.

  “How’s he doing?” said Hely, gruffly, hands on his knees.

  “Fine,” said Harriet—and jumped back (so that the circle of light swung up crazily in the treetops) as the snake struck against the screen.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said Harriet. She switched off the flashlight. “He must not mind being in the box too much.” Her voice seemed very loud in the silence. “I guess he must have lived in it his whole life. They can’t exactly let him out to crawl around, can they?”

  After a moment or two of silence, they started up once more, a bit reluctantly.

  “I don’t guess the heat bothers him,” Harriet said. “He’s from India. That’s hotter than here.”

  Hely was careful where he put his foot—as careful as he could be, in the dark. From the black pines on either side a chorus of tree frogs shrilled back and forth across the road, their song pulsing vertiginously between left ear and right in stereophonic sound.

  The path opened into a clearing, where stood the cotton warehouse, washed bone-gray in the moonlight. The recesses of the loading dock—where they’d sat, many afternoons, dangling their legs and talking—were alien in the deep shadow, but on the moon-washed doors, the muddy round marks they’d made by throwing tennis balls were perfectly distinct.

  Together they eased the wagon over a ditch. The worst was over now. County Line Road was forty-five minutes from Hely’s house by bicycle, but the road behind the warehouse was a shortcut. Just beyond it were the railroad tracks and then—after a minute or so—the path emerged like magic at County Line Road, just past Highway 5.

  From behind the warehouse, they could just see the tracks. Telegraph poles, sagging with honeysuckle, stood out black against a lurid purple sky. Hely looked back and saw in the moonlight that Harriet was glancing around, nervously, in the sawgrass which rose past her knees.

  “What’s the matter?” said Hely. “Lose something?”

  “Something stung me.”

  Hely wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. “The train doesn’t come thro
ugh for another hour,” he said.

  Together, they struggled to lift the wagon onto the train tracks. While it was true that the passenger train to Chicago wouldn’t be in for a while, they both knew that freight trains sometimes passed through unexpectedly. Local freights, ones that stopped at the depot, crept along so slowly you could practically out-run them on foot but the express freights to New Orleans screamed by so fast that—when waiting with his mother, behind the crossing gate of Highway 5—Hely could scarcely read the words on the boxcars.

  Now that they were clear of the underbrush they moved along much faster, the wagon jolting explosively on the crossties. Hely’s teeth ached. They were making a lot of racket; and though there was nobody around to hear them, he was afraid that—between the clatter and the frogs—they would be deaf to an oncoming freight train until it was right on top of them. He kept his eyes on the tracks as he ran—half-hypnotized by the roll of the dim bars under his feet, and by the fast, repetitive rhythm of his breath—and he had just begun to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to slow down and switch on the flashlight, after all, when Harriet let out an extravagant sigh and he glanced up and drew a deep breath of relief at the sight of flickering red neon in the distance.

  On the margin of the highway, in a bristle of weeds, they huddled by the wagon and peeped out at the railroad crossing, with its sign that said STOP LOOK AND LISTEN. A small breeze blew in their faces, fresh and cool, like rain. If they glanced down the highway to the left—south, towards home—they could just make out the Texaco sign in the distance, the pink-and-green neon of Jumbo’s Drive-In. Here, the lights were farther apart: no shops, no traffic lights or parking lots, only weedy fields and sheds of corrugated metal.

  A car whooshed past, startling them. Once they’d looked both ways to make sure no more were coming, they dashed over the tracks and across the silent highway. With the wagon bumping along between them in the dark, they cut across a cow pasture toward County Line Road. County Line was desolate this far out, past the Country Club: fenced pastureland interspersed with vast tracts of dust scraped flat by bulldozers.

  A pungent stink of manure wafted up in Hely’s face. Only moments later did he feel the repulsive slipperiness on the bottom of his sneaker. He stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “Hang on,” he said, miserably, dragging his shoe on the grass. Though there weren’t any lights this far out the moon was bright enough for them to see exactly where they were. Parallel to County Line Road ran an isolated strip of blacktop which went for twenty yards or so, then stopped—a frontage road, whose construction had been halted when the Highway Commission had decided to route the Interstate on the opposite side of the Houma, by-passing Alexandria. Grass poked through the buckled asphalt. Ahead, the abandoned overpass arched pale over County Line.

  Together, they started up again. They’d thought of hiding the snake in the woods, but the experience at Oak Lawn Estates was still vivid and they faltered at the idea of tramping into dense brush after dark—crashing through thickets, stepping blindly over rotten logs—while encumbered with a fifty-pound box. They’d thought too of hiding it in or around one of the warehouses but even the deserted ones, with plywood nailed over the windows, were posted as private property.

  The concrete overpass presented none of these dangers. From Natchez Street, it was easily accessible, via shortcut; it crossed over County Line Road in plain view; yet it was closed to traffic, and far enough from town so that there was little danger of workmen, nosy old folks, or other kids.

  The overpass was not stable enough to take cars—and, even if it was, no vehicle could get to it short of a Jeep—but the red wagon slid easily enough up the ramp, with Harriet pushing from behind. On either side rose a concrete retaining wall, three feet high—easy enough to duck behind, in case of a car on the road beneath, but when Harriet raised her head to look, the road was dark both ways. Beyond, broad lowlands rolled off into darkness, with a white sparkle of lights in the direction of town.

  When they reached the top, the wind was stronger: fresh, dangerous, exhilarating. Ashen dust powdered the road surface and the retaining wall. Hely brushed his chalky-white hands on his shorts, clicked on his flashlight and jumped it around, over a caked metal trough filled with crumpled waste paper; a skewed cinderblock; a pile of cement bags and a glass bottle with a sticky half-inch of orange soda still inside. Grasping the wall, Harriet stood leaning out over the dark road below as if over the railing of an ocean liner. Her hair was blown back from her face and she looked less miserable than Hely had seen her look all day.

  In the distance they heard the long, eerie whistle of a train. “Gosh,” said Harriet, “it’s not eight yet, is it?”

  Hely felt weak at the knees. “Nope,” he said. He could hear the breakneck rattle of the boxcars, somewhere in the singing darkness, clattering down the tracks toward the Highway 5 crossing, louder and louder and louder.…

  The whistle screamed, nearer this time, and the freight train ran past in a long whoosh as they stood and watched it go, over the tracks where they’d been pushing the wagon not fifteen minutes before. The echo of the warning bell vibrated sternly in the distance. Over the river, in the fat clouds to the east, twitched a silent, mercury-blue vein of lightning.

  “We should come up here more,” Harriet said. She was looking not at the sky but at the sticky black pour of asphalt which rushed through the tunnel beneath their feet; and even though Hely was at her back it was almost like she didn’t expect him to hear her, as if she were leaning over the spillway of a dam, spray churning in her face, deaf to everything but the water.

  The snake knocked inside his box, startling them both.

  “Okay,” said Harriet, in a goofy, affectionate voice, “settle down, now—”

  Together, they lifted out the box and wedged it between the retaining wall and the stacked cement bags. Harriet knelt on the ground, amongst the litter of smashed cups and cigarette filters left by the workmen, and tried to tug an empty cement bag from under the stack.

  “We have to hurry,” said Hely. The heat lay on him like an itchy damp blanket and his nose tickled from the cement dust, from the hay in the fields and from the charged, staticky air.

  Harriet wrenched free the empty sack, which caught and whipped up in the night air like some eerie banner from a lunar expedition. Quickly she plucked it down and dropped behind the cement barricade. Hely dropped beside her. With their heads together, they stretched it over the snake’s box, then weighted it at the edges with cement chunks so it wouldn’t blow off.

  What were the grown-ups doing, wondered Hely, back in town and shut up in their houses: balancing checkbooks, watching television, brushing their cocker spaniels? The night wind was fresh, and bracing, and lonely; never had he felt so far from the known world. Shipwrecked on a desert planet … flapping flags, military funeral for the casualties … homemade crosses in the dust. Back on the horizon, the sparse lights of an alien settlement: hostile, probably, enemies of the Federation. Stay clear of the inhabitants, said the stern voice in his head. To do otherwise will spell death for you and the girl.…

  “He’ll be okay here,” said Harriet, standing up.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Hely, in his deep, space-commander voice.

  “Snakes don’t have to eat every day. I just hope he had a good drink of water before he left.”

  Lightning flashed—bright this time, with a sharp crack. Almost simultaneously there was a growl of thunder.

  “Let’s go back the long way,” said Hely, brushing the hair from his eyes. “By the road.”

  “How come? The train from Chicago isn’t due in for a while,” she said, when he didn’t answer.

  Hely was alarmed at the intensity of her gaze. “It’ll be through in half an hour.”

  “We can make it.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Hely, and he was glad that his voice came out sounding tougher than he felt. “I’m taking the road.”

&nbs
p; Silence. “What do you want to do with the wagon, then?” she said.

  Hely thought for a moment. “Leave it up here, I guess.”

  “Out in the open?”

  “Who cares?” said Hely. “I don’t play with it any more.”

  “Somebody might find it.”

  “Nobody’s going to come up here.”

  They ran down the concrete ramp—it was fun, wind in their hair—and the momentum carried them halfway across the dark pastureland before they got breathless and slowed to a jog.

  “It’s about to rain,” said Harriet.

  “So what,” said Hely. He felt invincible: ranking officer, conqueror of the planet. “Hey, Harriet,” he said, pointing to a fancy illumined sign glowing gently in a moonscape of bulldozed clay scraped in the pasture opposite. It read:

  Heritage Groves

  Homes of the Future

  “The future must suck, huh?” said Hely.

  They scurried down the margin of Highway 5 (Hely mindful of the dangers; for all he knew, his mom wanted ice cream and had asked his dad to run to Jumbo’s before it closed) ducking behind lamp posts and garbage bins. As soon as they were able they turned off into the dark side streets and made their way down to the square, to the Pix Cinema.

  “The feature’s half over,” said the shiny-faced girl at the ticket window, glancing at them over the top of her compact.

  “That’s okay.” Hely pushed his two dollars through the glass window and stepped back—swinging his arms, legs jittering nervously. Sitting through the last half of a movie about a talking Volkswagen was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. Just as the girl snapped shut her compact and reached for her key ring so that she could come around and unlock the door for them, a steam whistle blew in the distance: the 8:47, bound for New Orleans, on her way in to the Alexandria Station.