The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  Harriet hung up and—in the still, dingy light of the hallway—leaned with her elbows on the telephone table and thought. Had he forgot about Danny Ratliff? Or did he just not care? Her lack of concern over Hely’s distant manner took her by surprise, but she could not help being pleased by how little pain his indifference caused her.

  ————

  The night before, it had rained; and though the ground was wet, Harriet couldn’t tell if a car had recently passed through the broad gravel expanse (a loading area for cotton wagons, not really a road) that connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the river. With her backpack and her orange notebook under her arm, in case there were clues she needed to write down, she stood on the edge of the vast, black, mechanical plain, and gazed out at the scissors and loops and starts and stops of track, the white warning crosses and the dead signal lanterns, the rust-locked freight cars in the distance and the water tower rising up tall behind them, atop spindly legs: an enormous round tank with its roof peaked like the Tin Woodman’s hat in The Wizard of Oz. In early childhood, she’d formed an obscure attachment to the water tower, perhaps because of this resemblance; it seemed a dumb, friendly guardian of some sort; and when she went to sleep, she often thought of it standing lonely and unappreciated out somewhere in the dark. Then, when Harriet was six, some bad boys had climbed up the tower on Halloween and painted a scary jack-o’-lantern face on the tank, with slit eyes and sawteeth—and for many nights after, Harriet lay awake and agitated, and could not sleep for the thought of her steadfast companion (fanged now, and hostile) scowling out over the silent rooftops.

  The scary face had faded long ago. Someone else had sprayed Class of ’70 over it in gold paint, and now this too had faded, bleached by sun and washed dull by years and years of rain. Melancholy black drips of decay streaked the tank’s facade from top to bottom—but even though it wasn’t really there any more, the devil face, still it burned in Harriet’s memory, like a light’s afterburn in a recently darkened room.

  The sky was white and empty. With Hely, she thought, at least there’s somebody to talk to. Had Robin wandered down here to play, had he stood astride his bicycle to look across the train tracks? She tried to imagine seeing it all through his eyes. Things wouldn’t have changed much: maybe the telegraph wires would sag a little more, maybe the creeper and the bindweed would hang a little thicker on the trees. How would it all look in a hundred years, after she was dead?

  She cut through the freight yards—hopping over the tracks, humming to herself—towards the woods. Her voice was very loud in the silence; she had never ventured so far into this abandoned area by herself. What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me?

  I’d go live at the library, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home—peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes—and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on.…

  When she stepped on the footpath and into the shady woods (lush vegetation, crackling through the ruins of her death-stilled city, buckling up the sidewalks, snaking through the houses) the passage from warmth to cool was like swimming into a cool plume of spring water in the lake. Airy clouds of gnats swirled away from her, spinning from the sudden movement like pond creatures in green water. In the daylight, the path was narrower and more choked than she had imagined it to be in the dark; barbs of fox-tail and witch grass prickled up in tufts, and the ruts in the clay were coated in scummy green algae.

  Overhead, a raucous scream that made her jump: only a crow. Trees dripping in great chains and swags of kudzu loomed high on either side of the path like rotting sea monsters. Slowly she walked—gazing up at the dark canopy—and she did not notice the loud buzzing of flies, which grew louder and louder until she smelled a bad smell, and looked down. A glittering green snake—not poisonous, for its head was not pointed, but unlike any snake she had ever seen—lay dead on the path ahead of her. It was about three feet long, stomped flat in the middle, so that its guts were smashed out in rich dark globs, but the remarkable thing was its color: a sparkly chartreuse, with iridescent scales, like the color illustration of the King of the Snakes in an old book of fairy tales that Harriet had had since she was a baby. “Very well,” had said the King of the Snakes to the honest shepherd, “I shall spit into your mouth three times, and then you shall know the language of the beasts. But take care not to let other men know your secret, or they shall grow angry and kill you.”

  By the side of the path, Harriet saw the ridged print of a boot—a large boot—stamped distinctly in the mud; and at the same time she tasted the snake’s death-stink in the back of her throat and she began to run, heart pounding, as if the very devil was chasing her, ran without knowing why. The pages of the notebook flapped loudly in the silence. Drops of water, shaken loose from the vines, pittered all around her; a bewilderment of stunted ailanthus (varying heights, like stalagmites on a cave floor) rose pale and staggered from the strangle of brush on the ground, their lizard-skinned trunks luminous in the dim.

  She broke through into sunlight—and, suddenly, sensed that she was not alone, and stopped. Grasshoppers whirred high and frantic in the sumac; she shaded her eyes with the notebook, scanned the bright, baked expanse—

  High in the corner of her vision a silver flash jumped out at her—out of the sky, it seemed—and Harriet saw with a jolt a dark shape crawling hand over hand up the ladder of the water tower, about thirty feet high and sixty feet away. Again, the light flashed: a metal wristwatch, glinting like a signal mirror.

  Heart racing, she stepped back into the woods and squinted through the dripping, interlaced leaves. It was him. Black hair. Very thin. Tight T-shirt, with writing she couldn’t read on the back. Part of her tingled with excitement but another, cooler part stood back and marveled at the smallness and flatness of the moment. There he is, she told herself (jabbing herself with the thought, trying to provoke the proper excitement), it’s him, it’s him.…

  A branch was in her face; she ducked so she could see him better. Now he was climbing up the last rungs of the ladder. Once he’d hoisted himself up onto the top he stood on the narrow walkway with his head down, hands on hips, motionless against the harsh, unclouded sky. Then—with a sharp backwards glance—he stooped and put a hand on the metal railing (it was very low; he had to lean to the side a bit) and limped along it quick and light to the left and out of Harriet’s sight.

  Harriet waited. After some moments, he came into view on the other side. Just then a grasshopper popped up in Harriet’s face and she stepped backwards with a little rustle. A stick cracked under her foot. Danny Ratliff (for it was him; she saw his profile plainly, even in his crouched animal posture) swung his head in her direction. Impossible that he’d heard, such a slight noise and so far away yet somehow incredibly he had heard because his gaze lingered, luminous and queer, without moving.…

  Harriet stood very still. A tendril of vine hung over her face, quivering gently with her breath. His eyes—passing coldly over her, as he scanned the ground—shone with the bizarre, blind, marble-like cast that Harriet had seen in old photographs of Confederate soldiers: sunburnt boys with light-pinned eyes, staring fixedly into the heart of a great emptiness.

  Then he looked away. To her horror, he started to climb down the ladder: fast, looking over his shoulder.

  He was more than halfway to the bottom before Harriet came to her senses and turned and ran, as fast as she could, back down the damp, buzzing path. She dropped the notebook, flustered back to pick it up. The green snake lay fish-hooked across the path all sparkly in the dim. She jumped over it—batting with both hands the flies that rose humming in her face—and kept running.

  She burst through in the clearing where stood the cotton warehouse: tin roof, windows boarded up and dead-looking. Far be
hind, she heard the crash of underbrush; panicked, she froze for an instant, despairing in her indecision. Inside the warehouse, she knew, were lots of good places to hide—the stacked bales, the empty wagons—but if he managed to corner her in there, she’d never get out again.

  She heard him shouting in the distance. Breathing painfully, clutching the stitch in her side, Harriet ran behind the warehouse (faded tin signs: Purina Checkerboard, General Mills) and down a gravelled road: much wider, wide enough for a car to go down, with wide bare patches marbled with patterns of black and white sand swirled through the red clay and dappled with patchy shade from tall sycamores. Her blood pounded, her thoughts clattered and banged around her head like coins in a shaken piggy-bank and her legs were heavy, like running through mud or molasses in a nightmare and she couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t tell if the crash and snap of twigs (like gunshots, unnaturally loud) was only the crashing of her own feet or feet crashing down the path behind her.

  The road slanted sharply down hill. Faster and faster she ran, faster and faster, afraid of falling but afraid to slow down, her feet pounding along like they weren’t even a part of her but some rough machine propelling her along until the road dipped and then rose again—abruptly—to high earthen banks: the levee.

  The levee, the levee! Her pace wound down, slower and slower, and bore her halfway up the steep slope until she tipped over on the grass—gasping with fatigue—and crawled to the top on her hands and knees.

  She heard the water before she saw it … and when at last she stood, on wobbly knees, the breeze blew cool in her sweaty face and she saw the yellow water swirling in the cut-banks. And up and down the river—people. People black and white, young and old, people chatting and eating sandwiches and fishing. In the distance, motorboats purred. “Well, tell you the one I liked,” said a high, country voice—a man’s voice, distinct—“the one with the Spanish name, I thought he preached a good sermon.”

  “Dr. Mardi? Mardi ain’t a Spanish name.”

  “Well, whatever. He was the best if you ask me.”

  The air was fresh and muddy-smelling. Light-headed and trembling, Harriet stuffed the notebook in her backpack and made her way down from the levee, down to the quartet of fishermen directly below her (talking about Mardi Gras now, whether that festival was Spanish or French in origin) and—on light legs—walked down the river-bank, past a pair of warty old fishermen (brothers, from the look of them, in belted Bermuda shorts hitched high upon Humpty Dumpty waists), past a sunbathing lady in a lawn chair, like a sea turtle done up in hot pink lipstick and matching kerchief; past a family with a transistor radio and a cooler full of fish and all sorts of dirty children with scratched-up legs, scrambling and tumbling and running back and forth, daring each other to put their hands in the bait bucket, shrieking and running away again.…

  On she walked. The people all seemed to stop talking, she noticed, as she approached—maybe it was her imagination. Surely he couldn’t hurt her down here—too many people—but just then her neck prickled as if somebody was staring at her. Nervously, she glanced behind her—and stopped when she saw a scruffy man in jeans with long dark hair, only a few feet away. But it wasn’t Danny Ratliff, just someone who looked like him.

  The day itself—the people, the ice chests, the screams of the children—had taken on a bright menace all its own. Harriet walked a little faster. Sun flashed from the mirrored glasses of a well-upholstered man (lip puffed, repulsive with chewing tobacco) on the other side of the water. His face was perfectly expressionless; Harriet glanced away, quickly, almost as if he’d grimaced at her.

  Danger: everywhere now. What if he was waiting for her somewhere up on the street? That’s what he’d do, if he was smart: retrace his steps, circle around and wait for her, jump out from behind a parked car or a tree. She had to walk home, didn’t she? She would have to keep her eyes open, stick to the main streets and not take any shortcuts through lonely places. Too bad: there were a lot of lonely places in the old part of town. And once she was up on Natchez Street, with the bulldozers going so loudly over at the Baptist church, who would hear her if she screamed? If she screamed at the wrong moment: no one. Who’d heard Robin? And he’d been with his sisters in his own front yard.

  The riverbank had grown narrow and rocky now, and a little deserted. Lost in thought, climbing the stone steps (cracked, tufted with round little pincushions of grass) that wound to the street, she turned on the landing and almost stumbled over a dirty toddler with an even dirtier baby seated in his lap. Kneeling before them on a man’s old shirt, spread out beneath her like a picnic blanket, Lasharon Odum was busy re-arranging squares of a broken-up chocolate bar upon a large, fuzzy leaf. Beside her were three plastic cups of yellowy water that looked as if they had been dipped from the river. All three of the children were peppered with scabs and mosquito bites, but the main thing that Harriet noticed were the red gloves—her gloves, the gloves Ida had given her, filthy now, ruined—on Lasharon’s hands. Before Lasharon, blinking up, could say a word, Harriet slapped the leaf out of her hands so the chocolate squares went flying and jumped on top of her and knocked her on the pavement. The gloves were large, loose at the fingertip; Harriet tore off the left one without much trouble but as soon as Lasharon realized what she was after she began to fight.

  “Give me that! It’s mine!” Harriet roared, and—when Lasharon closed her eyes and shook her head—she grabbed a handful of Lasharon’s hair. Lasharon screamed; her hands flew to her temples and instantly Harriet peeled off the glove and stuffed it in her pocket.

  “It’s mine,” she hissed. “Thief.”

  “Mine!” shrieked Lasharon, in a voice of bewildered outrage. “Her gave them to me!”

  Gave? Harriet was taken aback. She started to ask who’d given her the gloves (Allison? their mother?) and then thought better of it. The toddler and the baby were staring at Harriet with large round frightened eyes.

  “Her GAVE them to—”

  “Shut up!” cried Harriet. She was a little embarrassed now that she’d flown into such a rage. “Don’t ever come begging at my house again!”

  In the small, confused pause that followed, she turned—heart pounding wildly—and started quickly up the steps. The incident had so violently disturbed her that she’d forgotten Danny Ratliff for the moment. At least, she told herself—stepping back hastily on the curb as a station wagon shot past her on the street; she needed to pay attention where she was going—at least I have the gloves back. My gloves. They were all she had left of Ida.

  Yet Harriet did not feel proud of herself, exactly, only defiant and a bit unsettled. The sun shone uncomfortably in her face. And just as she was about to step out into the street again without looking, she stopped herself, and held her hand against the glare as she glanced both ways and then darted across.

  ————

  “Oh, what would you give in exchange for your soul,” sang Farish, as he stabbed at the base of Gum’s electric can opener with a screwdriver. He was in a fine mood. Not so Danny, jangled to the backbone with nerves, horrors, premonitions. He sat on the aluminum steps of his trailer and picked at a bloody hangnail as Farish—amidst a glittering disarray of cylinders and snap-rings and gaskets strewn in the packed dust—hummed busily at his work. Like a demented plumber in his brown coverall, he was going methodically through their grandmother’s trailer, through the carport, through the sheds, opening fuse boxes and tearing up sections of floor and prying apart (with sighs and huffs of triumph) various small appliances that caught his eye, on a relentless hunt for cut wires, misplaced parts and hidden transistor tubes, any subtle evidence of sabotage in the electronic apparatus of the household. “Directly,” he snapped, throwing an arm out behind him, “I said directly,” whenever Gum crept up as if she was about to say something, “I’ll get around to it, okay?” But he had not got around to it yet; and the front yard was so scattered with bolts and pipes and plugs and wires
and switches and plates and odds and ends of metal debris that it looked as if a bomb had exploded and showered trash for thirty feet.

  On the dusty ground, two tab numbers from a clock radio—double zero, white on black—stared up at Danny, like a pair of cartoon google-eyes. Farish was grappling and groping with the can opener, dickering and dackering amidst the litter as if nothing at all was on his mind and though he wasn’t exactly looking at Danny he had a very strange smile on his face. Better to ignore Farish, with all his sly hints, his sneaky speed-freak games—but all the same, Farish obviously had something on his mind and it bothered Danny that he didn’t know quite what it was. For he suspected that Farish’s elaborate counter-spy activity was a display staged for his benefit.

  He stared at the side of his brother’s face. I didn’t do anything, he told himself. Just went up there to look at it. Ain’t took nothing.

  But he knows I wanted to take it. And there was something else besides. Somebody had been watching him. Down in the scrub of sumac and kudzu behind the tower, something had moved. White flash, like a face. A little face. On the scummy, shady clay of the path, the footprints were those of a child, dug deep and switching every which way, and this was creepy enough but farther on—alongside a dead snake on the trail—he’d found a flimsy little black-and-white picture of himself. Of himself! A tiny school picture, back from junior high, cut from a yearbook. He picked it up and stared at it, not believing what he saw. And all sorts of old memories and fears from that long-ago time rose and mingled with the mottled shadows, the red clay mud and the stench of the dead snake … he’d nearly fainted from the indescribable weirdness of it, of seeing his younger self in a new shirt smiling up at him from the ground, like the hopeful photographs on muddy new graves in country cemeteries.

  And it was real, he hadn’t imagined it, because the picture was now in his wallet and he’d taken it out to look at it maybe twenty or thirty times in sheer incredulity. Could Farish have left it there? As a warning? Or a sick joke, something to psych Danny out as he stepped on the toe-popper or walked into the fish-hook dangling invisibly at eye level?