The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  “Let’s all go inside,” said Edie; for the morning was getting hot. “I have a pot of coffee on. For those who can drink it, that is.”

  “My,” said Adelaide, stopping to admire a bank of rosy pink lilies, “these are certainly going great guns!”

  “Those zephyr lilies? I brought those from out on the place. Dug them up in the dead of winter and put them in pots, and only one came up the next summer.”

  “Look at them now!” Adelaide leaned down.

  “Mother used to call them,” said Libby, peering over the porch railing, “Mother used to call those her pink rain lilies.”

  “Zephyr is their real name.”

  “Pink rain is what Mother called them. We had these at her funeral, and tuberose. It was so hot when she died—”

  “I’m going to have to go on in,” said Edie, “I’m about to have the heat stroke, I’ll be inside having a cup of coffee whenever yall are ready.”

  “Will it be too much trouble to heat up a kettle of water for me?” said Adelaide. “I can’t have coffee, it makes me—”

  “Wild?” Edie raised an eyebrow at her. “Well, we certainly don’t want you to be wild, do we, Adelaide.”

  ————

  Though Hely had ridden his bicycle all over the neighborhood, Harriet was nowhere to be found. At her house, the strange atmosphere (strange even for Harriet’s) was worrying. No one had come to the door. He’d just walked in and found Allison crying at the kitchen table, and Ida bustling around and mopping the floor as if she didn’t hear or see it. Neither of them had said a word. It gave him the chills.

  He decided to try the library. A drift of artificially cooled air hit him as soon as he pushed open the glass door—the library was always chilly, winter and summer. Mrs. Fawcett swivelled in her chair at the check-out desk and waved to him, with a jingle of her bangle bracelets.

  Hely waved back—and, before she could collar him and try to sign him up for the Summer Reading Program—he walked as fast as he politely could to the Reference Room. Harriet, with her elbows on the table, was sitting underneath a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Open in front of her was the largest book that he had ever seen.

  “Hey,” he said, slipping into the chair beside her. He was so excited that he could barely keep his voice down. “Guess what. Danny Ratliff’s car is parked out in front of the courthouse.”

  His eyes fell on the huge book—which, he now saw, was a book of bound newspapers—and he was startled to see on the yellowed newsprint a ghastly, grainy photograph of Harriet’s mother, with her mouth open and her hair all messed up, out in front of Harriet’s house. MOTHER’S DAY TRAGEDY, said the headline. In the front, a blurred male figure was sliding a stretcher into what looked like the back of an ambulance, but you couldn’t quite see what was on it.

  “Hey,” he said—aloud, pleased with himself—“that’s your house.”

  Harriet shut the book; she pointed to the sign that said No Talking.

  “Come on,” whispered Hely, and gestured for her to follow him. Without a word, Harriet pushed back her chair and followed him out.

  Hely and Harriet stepped out onto the sidewalk, into heat and blinding glare. “Listen, it’s Danny Ratliff’s car, I know it,” said Hely, shading his eyes with his hand. “There’s only one Trans Am like that in town. If it wasn’t parked right in front of the courthouse, what I’d do is put a piece of glass under the tire.”

  Harriet thought of Ida Rhew and Allison: at home now, curtains drawn, watching their stupid soap opera with the ghosts and vampires.

  “Let’s go get that snake and put it in his car,” she said.

  “No way,” said Hely, sobered abruptly. “We can’t bring it all the way back down here on the wagon. Everybody’ll see.”

  “What’s the point of taking it?” said Harriet bitterly. “Unless we make it bite him.”

  They stood on the library steps, without talking, for some time. At length, Harriet sighed and said: “I’m going back inside.”

  “Wait!”

  She turned.

  “Here’s what I was thinking.” He hadn’t been thinking anything, but he felt compelled to say something in order to save face. “I was thinking … That Trans Am has a T-top. A roof that opens,” he added, seeing Harriet’s blank expression. “And I bet you a million dollars he has to go down County Line Road to get home. All those hicks live out that way, over the river.”

  “He does live out there,” said Harriet. “I looked it up in the phone book.”

  “Well, great. Because the snake’s up at the overpass already.”

  Harriet made a scornful face.

  “Come on,” said Hely. “Didn’t you see that on the news the other day, about those kids in Memphis chunking rocks on cars from the overpass?”

  Harriet knit her eyebrows. Nobody watched the news at her house.

  “There was a whole big story. Two people died. Some man from the police came on and told you to change lanes if you saw kids looking down at you. Come on,” he said, nudging her foot hopefully with the toe of his sneaker. “You’re not doing anything. At least let’s go check on the snake. I want to see him again, don’t you? Where’s your bike?”

  “I walked over.”

  “That’s okay. Hop on the handlebars. I’ll ride you out there if you ride me back.”

  ————

  Life without Ida. If Ida didn’t exist, thought Harriet—sitting cross-legged on the dusty, sun-bleached overpass—then I wouldn’t feel so bad now. All I have to do is pretend I never knew her. Simple.

  For the house itself wouldn’t be different when Ida left. Traces of her presence had always been faint. There was the bottle of dark Karo syrup she kept in the pantry, to pour on her biscuits; there was the red plastic drinking glass that she filled with ice on summer mornings and carried around to drink from during the day. (Harriet’s parents didn’t like Ida to drink from the regular kitchen glasses; it made Harriet ashamed even to think about it.) There was the apron Ida kept out on the back porch; there were the snuff cans filled with tomato seedlings, and the vegetable patch by the house.

  And that was all. Ida had worked in Harriet’s house for all of Harriet’s life. But when those few possessions of Ida’s were gone—the plastic glass, the snuff cans, the bottle of syrup—there would be no sign that she had ever been there at all. Realizing this made Harriet feel immeasurably worse. She imagined the vegetable patch abandoned, in weeds.

  I’ll take care of it, she told herself. I’ll order some seeds from the back of a magazine. She pictured herself in straw hat and garden smock, like the brown smock that Edie wore, stepping down hard on the edge of a shovel. Edie grew flowers: how different could vegetables be? Edie could tell her how to do it, Edie would probably be glad she was taking an interest in something useful.…

  The red gloves popped into her mind and, at the thought of them, fright and confusion and emptiness rose up in a strong wave and swept over her in the heat. The only present that Ida had ever given her, and she had lost them.… No, she told herself, you’ll find the gloves, don’t think about it now, think about something else.…

  About what? About how famous she would someday be as a prize-winning botanist. She imagined herself like George Washington Carver, walking among rows of flowers in a white lab coat. She would be a brilliant scientist, yet humble, taking no money for her many inventions of genius.

  Things looked different from the overpass in the daytime. The pastures were not green, but crisped and brown, with dusty red patches where cattle had tramped it bald. Along the barbed-wire fences flourished a lush growth of honeysuckle intertwined with poison ivy. Beyond, a trackless stretch of nothing, nothing but a skeleton barn—gray board, rusted tin—like a wrecked ship washed up on a beach.

  The shade of the stacked cement bags was surprisingly deep and cool—and the cement itself was cool, against her back. All my life, she thought, I will remember this day, how I feel. Over the hill, out of sight, a farm machine dron
ed monotonously. Above it sailed three buzzards like black paper kites. The day she lost Ida would always be about those black wings gliding through cloudless sky, about shadowless pastures and air like dry glass.

  Hely—cross-legged in the white dust—sat opposite, his back against the retaining wall, reading a comic book whose cover showed a convict in a striped suit crawling through a graveyard on hands and knees. He looked half-asleep, though for a while—an hour or so—he had watched vigilantly, on his knees, hissing sssh! sssh! every time a truck passed.

  With effort, she turned her thoughts back to her vegetable garden. It would be the most beautiful garden in the world, with fruit trees, and ornamental hedges, and cabbages planted in patterns: eventually it would take over the whole yard, and Mrs. Fountain’s too. People driving by would stop in their cars and ask to be taken through it. The Ida Rhew Brownlee Memorial Gardens … no, not memorial, she thought hastily, because that made it sound as if Ida were dead.

  Very suddenly one of the buzzards fell; the other two dropped after it, as if reeled in by the same kite-string, down to devour whatever mangled field mouse or ground-hog the tractor had rolled over. In the distance a car was approaching, indistinct in the wavy air. Harriet shaded her eyes with both hands. After a moment she said: “Hely!”

  The comic book went flapping. “Are you sure?” he said, scrambling to look. She’d already given two false alarms.

  “It’s him,” she said, and dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the white dust to the opposite wall, where the box sat atop four bags of cement.

  Hely squinted at the road. A car shimmered in the distance, in a ripple of gasoline fumes and dust. It didn’t look like it was coming fast enough to be the Trans Am, but just as he was about to say so the sun struck and glittered off the hood a hard, metallic bronze. Through the wavering heat-mirage burst the snarling grille: shining, shark-faced, unmistakable.

  He ducked behind the wall (the Ratliffs carried pistols; somehow he hadn’t remembered until this instant) and crawled to help her. Together they tipped the box on its side with the screen facing the road. Already, on their first false alarm, they’d been paralyzed when it came to reaching blindly around the screened front to pull the bolt, scrabbling around in confusion as the car shot beneath them; now, the latch was loosened, a Popsicle stick to the ready so they could shoot the bolt without touching it.

  Hely glanced back. The Trans Am was rolling towards them—disturbingly slow. He’s seen us; he must have. But the car didn’t stop. Nervously, he glanced up at the box, which was propped above the level of their heads.

  Harriet, breathing like she had asthma, glanced over her shoulder. “Okay …” she said, “here we go, one, two …”

  The car disappeared beneath the bridge; she shot the bolt; and the world went into slow motion as together, in a single effort, they tipped the box. As the cobra slid and shifted, flipping his tail in an attempt to right himself, several thoughts flashed through Hely’s mind at once: chief among them, how they were going to get away. Could they outrun him? For certainly he’d stop—any fool would, with a cobra falling on the roof of his car—and take out after them.…

  The concrete rumbled beneath their feet just as the cobra slid free, and fell through empty air. Harriet stood up, her hands on the railing, and her face as hard and mean as any eighth-grade boy’s. “Bombs away,” she said.

  They leaned over the railing to watch. Hely felt dizzy. Down the cobra writhed through space, filliping toward the asphalt below. We missed, he thought, looking down at the empty road, and just at that moment the Trans Am—with its T-top open—shot from under their feet and directly beneath the falling snake.…

  Several years before, Pem had been throwing baseballs to Hely down the street from their grandmother’s house: an old house with a modern addition—mostly glass—on the Parkway in Memphis. “Put it through that window,” said Pem, “and I’ll give you a million dollars.” “All right,” said Hely, and swung without thinking, and hit the ball crack without even looking at it, hit it so far that even Pem’s jaw dropped as it flew overhead and sailed far far far, straight and undeviating on its path until it crashed, bang: right through the sun-porch window and practically into the lap of his grandmother, who was talking on the telephone—to Hely’s dad, as it turned out. It was a million-to-one shot, impossible: Hely was no good at baseball; he was always the last non-gay or -retarded kid to get picked for a team; never had he hit any ball so high and hard and sure, and the bat had clunked to the ground as he stared in wonder at its clean, pure arc, curving straight for the center panel of his grandma’s glassed-in porch.…

  And the thing was, he’d known the ball was going to break his grandma’s window, known it the second he felt the ball strike solid against the bat; as he’d watched it speeding for the center pane like a guided missile he’d had no time to feel anything but the most bracing joy, and for a breathless heartbeat or two (right before it struck the glass, that impossible and distant mark) Hely and the baseball had become one; he’d felt he was guiding it with his mind, that God had for some reason this strange moment decided to grant him absolute mental control over this dumb object hurtling at top speed towards its inevitable target, splash, whackeroo, banzai.…

  Despite what came later (tears, a whipping) it remained one of the most satisfying moments of his life. And it was with the same disbelief—and terror, and exhilaration, and dumbstruck goggling awe at all the invisible powers of the universe rising in concert and bearing down simultaneously upon this one impossible point—that Hely watched the five-foot cobra strike the open T-top unevenly, at a diagonal, so that his top-heavy tail slid abruptly inside the Trans Am and pulled the rest of him in after it.

  Hely—unable to contain himself—jumped up, struck the air with his fist: “Yes!” Yipping and capering like a demon, he grabbed Harriet’s arm and shook it, stabbing a gleeful finger at the Trans Am, which had braked with a screech and swerved to the other side of the road. Gently, in a cloud of dust, it coasted onto the pebbly shoulder, the gravel cracking under its tires.

  Then it stopped. Before either of them could move, or speak, the door opened and out tumbled not Danny Ratliff but an emaciated mummy of a creature: frail, sexless, clad in a repellent mustard-yellow pants suit. Feebly, it clawed at itself, tottered onto the highway, then halted, and wobbled a few feet in the opposite direction. Aiiiieeeeeeee, it wailed. Its cries were thin and strangely bloodless considering that the cobra was fastened to the creature’s shoulder: five feet of long black body hanging down solid and pendulous from the hood (wicked spectacle-marks clearly visible) ending in a length of narrow and frightfully active black tail that lashed up a thunderous cloud of red dust.

  Harriet stood transfixed. Though she’d envisioned the moment clearly enough, somehow it was happening wrong-side-out, through the small end of the telescope—cries remote and inhuman, gestures flat, stretched thin with a spacey, ritualized horror. Impossible to quit now, put the toys up, knock down the chessboard and start again.

  She turned and ran. At her back, a clatter and a rush of wind and the next instant Hely’s bike swerved past her, bounced on the ramp, and flew off and away down the highway—every man for himself now, Hely hunched like one of the Winged Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz and pedalling furiously.

  Harriet ran, her heart pounding, the creature’s weak cries (aiiii … aiii …) echoing senseless in the distance. The sky blazed bright and murderous. Off the shoulder … here, on the grass now, past this fence post with the No Trespass sign and half across the pasture … What they’d aimed for, and struck, in the depthless glare off the overpass, was not so much the car itself as a point of no return: time a rear view mirror now, the past rushing backward to the vanishing point. Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only
place she wanted to be.

  ————

  Gladly, the cobra slipped into the high weeds of the cow pasture, into a heat and vegetation not unlike that of its native land, away into the fable and legend of the town. In India, it had hunted on the outskirts of villages and cultivated areas (slipping into grain bins at twilight, feeding upon rats) and it adapted with alacrity to the barns and corncribs and garbage dumps of its new home. For years to come, farmers and hunters and drunks would sight the cobra; curiosity seekers would attempt to hunt it down, and photograph or kill it; and many, many tales of mysterious death would hover about its silent, lonely path.

  ————

  “Why wasn’t you with her?” demanded Farish in the waiting room of Intensive Care. “That’s what I want to know. I thought you was responsible for driving her home.”

  “How was I to know she got out early? She should have called me at the pool hall. When I come on back to the courthouse at five she was gone.” Leaving me stranded was what Danny felt like saying, and didn’t. He’d had to walk down to the car wash and find Catfish to drive him home.

  Farish was breathing very noisily, through his nose, as he always did when he was about to lose his temper. “All right then, you should of waited there with her.”

  “At the courthouse? Outside in the car? All day?”

  Farish swore. “I should of took her myself,” he said, turning away. “I should of known something like this’d happen.”

  “Farish,” said Danny, and then stopped. It was better not to remind Farish that he couldn’t drive.

  “Just why the hell didn’t you take her in the truck?” Farish snapped. “Tell me that.”

  “She said the truck was too high for her to climb up in. Too high,” repeated Danny when Farish’s face darkened in suspicion.

  “I heard you,” said Farish. He looked at Danny for a long, uncomfortable moment.