by Donna Tartt
Gum was in Intensive Care, on two IVs and a cardiorespiratory monitor. A passing truck driver had brought her in. He had happened to drive along just in time to see the astonishing sight of an old lady staggering on the highway with a king cobra latched onto her shoulder. He’d pulled over, hopped out and swiped at the thing with a six-foot length of flexible plastic irrigation pipe from the back of his truck. When he’d knocked it off her, the snake had shot into the weeds—but no doubt about it, he told the doctor at the Emergency room when he brought Gum in, it was a cobra snake, spread hood, spectacle marks, and all. He knew how they looked, he said, from the picture on the pellet-gun box.
“It’s just like armadillos and killer bees,” offered the truck driver—a stumpy little fellow, with a broad red, cheerful face—as Dr. Breedlove searched through the Venomous Reptiles chapter in his Internal Medicine textbook. “Crawling up from Texas and going wild.”
“If what you’re saying is true,” said Dr. Breedlove, “it came from a lot farther away than Texas.”
Dr. Breedlove knew Mrs. Ratliff from his years in the Emergency room, where she was a frequent visitor. One of the younger paramedics did a passable impersonation of her: clasping her chest, wheezing out instructions to her grandsons as she staggered to the ambulance. The cobra story sounded like a lot of bosh but indeed—as incredible as it seemed—the old woman’s symptoms were consistent with cobra bite, and not at all with the bite of any native reptile. Her eyelids drooped; her blood pressure was low; she complained of chest pains and difficulty breathing. There was no spectacular swelling around the puncture, as with a rattlesnake bite. It seemed that the creature had not bitten her very deeply. The shoulder pad of her pants suit had prevented it from sinking its fangs too far into her shoulder.
Dr. Breedlove washed his large pink hands and went out to speak to the cluster of grandsons, standing moodily outside Intensive Care.
“She’s displaying neurotoxic symptoms,” he said. “Ptosis, respiratory distress, falling blood pressure, lack of localized edema. We’re monitoring her closely since she may need to be intubated and placed on a ventilator.”
The grandsons—startled—gazed at him suspiciously, while the retarded-looking child waved at Dr. Breedlove with enthusiasm. “Hi!” he said.
Farish stepped forward in a way that made it clear he was in charge.
“Where is she?” He pushed past the doctor. “Let me talk to her.”
“Sir. Sir. I’m afraid that’s impossible. Sir? I’ll have to ask you to come back out in the hall right now.”
“Where is she?” said Farish, standing confounded among tubes and machines and beeping equipment.
Dr. Breedlove stepped in front of him. “Sir, she’s resting comfortably.” Expertly, with the aid of a pair of orderlies, he herded Farish out into the hall. “She doesn’t need to be disturbed now. There’s nothing you can do for her. See, there’s a waiting area down there where you can sit. There.”
Farish shrugged his arm off. “What are yall doing for her?” he said, as if whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.
Dr. Breedlove went back into his smooth speech about the cardiorespiratory monitor and the ptosis and the lack of local edema. What he did not say was that the hospital had no cobra antitoxin and no way of obtaining any. The last few minutes with the Internal Medicine textbook had offered Dr. Breedlove quite a little education in a subject which had not been covered in medical school. For cobra bites, only the specific antitox would do. But only the very largest zoos and medical centers kept it in stock, and it had to be administered within a few hours, or it was useless. So the old lady was on her own. Cobra bite, said his textbook, was anywhere from ten to fifty percent fatal. That was a big margin—especially when the figures didn’t specify if the survival percentage was based upon treated or untreated bites. Besides, she was old, and she had an awful lot wrong with her besides snakebite. The records on her were an inch thick. And if pressed for odds on whether or not the old lady would live the night—or even the next hour—Dr. Breedlove would have had absolutely no idea what to hazard.
————
Harriet hung up the telephone, walked upstairs and into her mother’s bedroom—without knocking—and presented herself at the foot of the bed. “Tomorrow I’m going to Camp Lake de Selby,” she announced.
Harriet’s mother glanced up from her copy of the Ole Miss alumni magazine. She had been half-drowsing over a profile of a former classmate, who had some complicated job on Capitol Hill that Charlotte couldn’t quite get the gist of.
“I’ve called Edie. She’s driving me.”
“What?”
“The second session already started, and they told Edie it was against the rules but they’ll take me anyway. They even gave her a discount.”
She waited, impassively. Her mother didn’t say anything; but it didn’t matter what—if anything—she had to say because the matter was now squarely in Edie’s hands. And as much as she hated Camp de Selby, it wasn’t as bad as reform school or jail.
For Harriet had called her grandmother out of sheer panic. Running down Natchez Street she’d heard sirens wailing—she didn’t know whether it was ambulance or police—before she even made it home. Panting, limping, with cramps in her legs and a burning pain in her lungs, Harriet locked herself in the downstairs bathroom, stripped out of her clothes and threw them in the hamper, and ran herself a bath. Several times—while sitting rigidly in the bathtub, staring at the narrow tropical slashes of light that fell into the dim room through the venetian blinds—she’d heard sounds like voices at the front door. What on earth would she do if it was the police?
Petrified with fear, fully expecting someone to bang on the bathroom door at any moment, Harriet sat in the tub until the water was cold. Once out of the bath, and dressed, she tiptoed down to the front hall and peeked through the lace curtains, but there was nobody in the street. Ida had gone home for the day, and the house was ominously still. It seemed as if years had passed, but in reality it was only forty-five minutes.
Tensely, Harriet stood in the front hall, watching at the window. After a while she got tired of standing there, but still she could not bring herself to go upstairs and she walked back and forth, between the hall and the living room, looking out the front window every so often. Then, again, she heard sirens; for a heart-stopping moment, she thought she heard them turning down George Street. She stood in the middle of the living room, almost too frightened to move, and in a very short time her nerves got the better of her and she dialed Edie’s number—breathless, carrying the telephone over to the lace-curtained sidelights so she could watch the street as they talked.
Edie, to give her credit, had leapt into action with gratifying speed, so swiftly that Harriet almost felt a little stir of renewed affection for her. She’d asked no questions when Harriet stammered out that she’d changed her mind about church camp, and would like to leave as soon as possible. She’d got right on the phone to Lake de Selby; and—at initial reluctance from some mealy-mouthed girl in the office—demanded to be put on directly to Dr. Vance. From there, she’d sewed up the arrangements, and when she called back—within ten minutes—it was with a packing list, a water-ski permit, an upper bunk in Chickadee Wigwam, and plans to pick Harriet up at six the next morning. She had not (as Harriet believed) forgotten about camp; she had merely grown weary of struggling with Harriet on the one hand, and on the other hand Harriet’s mother, who did not back her up in these matters. Edie was convinced that Harriet’s problem lay in not mingling sufficiently with other children, especially nice little ordinary Baptist ones; and as Harriet—with effort—kept her silence, she had talked enthusiastically over the telephone of what a grand time Harriet would have, and the wonders which a little discipline and Christian sportsmanship would work for her.
The silence in her mother’s bedroom was deafening. “Well,” said Charlotte. She laid the magazine aside. “This is all very sudden. I thought you had such a terrible time at that camp
last year.”
“We’re leaving before you wake up. Edie wants to get on the road early. I thought I should let you know.”
“Why the change of heart?” said Charlotte.
Harriet shrugged, insolently.
“Well … I’m proud of you.” Charlotte couldn’t think what else to say. Harriet, she noticed, had got terribly sunburnt, and thin; who did she look like? With that straight black hair, and her chin stuck out that way?
“I wonder,” she said, aloud, “whatever happened to that book of the child Hiawatha that used to be around the house?”
Harriet glanced away—toward the window, as if she were expecting someone.
“It’s important …” Charlotte tried, gamely, to recover the thread. It’s the arms folded across the chest, she thought, and the haircut. “What I mean is, it’s good for you to be involved in … in things.”
Allison was loitering outside their mother’s bedroom door—eavesdropping, Harriet supposed. She followed Harriet down the hall and stood in the door of their room as Harriet opened her dresser drawer and took out tennis socks, underwear, her green Camp de Selby shirt from the summer before.
“What did you do?” she said.
Harriet stopped. “Nothing,” she said. “What makes you think I did something?”
“You act like you’re in trouble.”
After a long pause, Harriet—face burning—returned to her packing.
Allison said: “Ida’ll be gone when you get back.”
“I don’t care.”
“This is her last week. If you leave, you won’t see her again.”
“So what?” Harriet jammed her tennis shoes in the knapsack. “She doesn’t really love us.”
“I know.”
“Well why should I care then?” replied Harriet, smoothly, though her heart skidded and jumped a beat.
“Because we love her.”
“I don’t,” said Harriet swiftly. She zipped up the knapsack and threw it on the bed.
————
Downstairs, Harriet got a sheet of stationery from the table in the front hall and, in the fading light, sat down and wrote the following note:
Dear Hely,
I am going to camp tomorrow. I hope the rest of your summer is good. Maybe we will be in the same home room when you are in seventh grade next year.
Your friend,
Harriet C. Dufresnes
She had no sooner finished it than the telephone rang. Harriet started not to answer, but relented after three or four rings and—cautiously—picked up the receiver.
“Dude,” said Hely, his voice crackly and very faint on the football-helmet phone. “Did you hear all those sirens just now?”
“I just wrote you a letter,” said Harriet. The hall felt like winter, not August. From the vine-choked porch—through the curtained side-lights, and the spoked fanlight on top of the door—the light filtered ashy and sober and wan. “Edie’s taking me to camp tomorrow.”
“No way!” He sounded like he was talking from the bottom of the ocean. “Don’t go! You’re out of your mind!”
“I’m not staying here.”
“Let’s run away!”
“I can’t.” With her toe, Harriet drew a shiny black mark through the dust—pristine, like the dust on a black plum—that frosted the table’s curved rosewood pedestal.
“What if somebody saw us? Harriet?”
“I’m here,” Harriet said.
“What about my wagon?”
“I don’t know,” said Harriet. She had been thinking about Hely’s wagon herself. It was still sitting up on the overpass, and the empty box, too.
“Should I go back and get it?”
“No. Somebody might see you. Your name’s not on it, is it?”
“Nope. I never use it. Say, Harriet, who was that person?”
“Dunno.”
“They looked real old. That person.”
A tense, grown-up silence followed—not like their usual silences, when they’d run out of things to say and sat waiting amiably for the other to speak up.
“I have to go,” said Hely at last. “My mom’s making tacos for supper.”
“Okay.”
They sat breathing, on each end of the line: Harriet in the high, musty hall, Hely in his room on the top bunk.
“What ever happened to those kids you were talking about?” said Harriet.
“What?”
“Those kids on the Memphis news. That threw rocks from the overpass.”
“Oh, them. They got caught.”
“What’d they do to them?”
“I don’t know. I guess they went to jail.”
There followed another long silence.
“I’ll write you a postcard. So you’ll have something to read at Mail Call,” said Hely. “If anything happens, I’ll tell you.”
“No, don’t. Don’t write anything down. Not about that.”
“I’m not going to tell!”
“I know you’re not going to tell,” said Harriet irritably. “Just don’t talk about any of this.”
“Well—not to just anybody.”
“Not anybody at all. Listen, you can’t go around telling people like … like … Greg DeLoach. I mean it, Hely,” she said over his objection. “Promise me you won’t tell him.”
“Greg lives way out at Hickory Circle. I never see him except at school. Besides, Greg wouldn’t tell on us, I know he wouldn’t.”
“Well don’t tell him anyway. Because if you tell even one person—”
“I wish I was going with you. I wish I was going somewhere,” said Hely miserably. “I’m scared. I think that was maybe Curtis’s grandma we threw that snake on.”
“Listen to me. I want you to promise. Don’t tell anybody. Because—”
“If it’s Curtis’s grandmother, then it’s the others’, too. Danny and Farish and the preacher.” To Harriet’s surprise, he erupted into shrill, hysterical laughter. “Those guys will murder me.”
“Yes,” said Harriet, seriously, “and that’s why you can’t tell anybody ever. If you don’t tell, and I don’t tell—”
Sensing something, she glanced up—and was badly startled to see Allison standing in the door of the living room, only a few feet away.
“It sucks that you’re leaving.” Hely’s voice sounded tinny on the other end. “Except I cannot believe you are going to that shitty damn Baptist camp.”
Harriet, turning pointedly from her sister, made an ambiguous noise, to indicate that she couldn’t talk with freedom, but Hely didn’t catch it.
“I wish I could go somewhere. We were supposed to go on a vacation to the Smoky Mountains this year but Dad said he didn’t want to put the miles on the car. Say, do you think you can leave me some quarters so I can call you if I have to?”
“I don’t have any money.” Typical of Hely: trying to weasel money out of her when he was the one who got an allowance. Allison had disappeared.
“Gosh I hope it’s not his grandmother. Please please let it not be his grandmother.”
“I have to go.” Why was the light so sad? Harriet’s heart felt as though it were breaking. In the mirror opposite, across the tarnished reflection of the wall above her head (cracked plaster, dark photographs, dead giltwood sconces) swirled a mildewy cloud of black specks.
She could still hear Hely’s ragged breath on the other end. Nothing in Hely’s house was sad—everything cheerful and new, television always going—but even his breath sounded altered, tragic, when it traveled through the telephone wires into her house.
“My mom’s requested Miss Erlichson for my home room teacher when I start seventh grade this fall,” said Hely. “So I don’t guess we’ll be seeing each other that much when school starts.”
Harriet made an indifferent noise, disguising the pain which bit her at this treachery. Edie’s old friend Mrs. Clarence Hackney (nickname: “Hatchet-head”) had taught Harriet in the seventh grade, and would teach her again in the eighth.
But if Hely had chosen Miss Erlichson (who was young, and blonde, and new at the school) that meant Hely and Harriet would have different study halls, different lunchtimes, different classrooms, different everything.
“Miss Erlichson’s cool. Mom said that no way was she going to force another kid of hers through a year of Mrs. Hackney. She lets you do your book report on whatever you want and—Okay,” said Hely in response to an off-stage voice. To Harriet he said: “Suppertime. Talk to you later.”
Harriet sat holding the heavy black receiver until the dial tone came on at the other end. She replaced it on the cradle with a solid click. Hely—with his thin, cheery voice, his plans for Miss Erlichson’s room—even Hely felt like something that was lost now, or about to be lost, an impermanence like lightning bugs or summer. The light in the narrow hallway was almost completely gone. And without Hely’s voice—tinny and faint as it was—to break the gloom, her sorrow blackened and roared up like a cataract.
Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust. What did Hely—eating his tacos for supper, sailing off blithely to Miss Erlichson’s home room in the fall—what did Hely care about chill and loneliness? What did he know of her world?
Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees. What might they have talked of? She would never know. It would pain her that she’d run off, cravenly, before Ida’s last work-week was over; it would pain her that somehow, strangely, the whole misunderstanding had been her fault; it would pain her, terribly, that she hadn’t told Ida goodbye. But, most of all, it would pain her that she’d been too proud to tell Ida that she loved her. In her anger, and her pride, she had failed to realize that she would never see Ida again. A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.
