by Donna Tartt
She circled the tank twice. The door was nowhere to be seen. She was just starting to think that there wasn’t a door at all when at last she noticed it: weather-worn, almost perfectly camouflaged in the monotone surface except for a chip or two of chrome paint that hadn’t quite peeled off the handle.
She dropped to her knees. With a wide, windshield-wiper swing of her arm, she pulled it open (squeaky hinges, like a horror movie) and dropped it with a bang which vibrated in the boards beneath her.
Inside: dark, a bad smell. A low, intimate whine of mosquitos hung in the stagnant air. From the roof, a prickle of tiny sun shafts—narrow as pencils—bristled from the holes up top, and crisscrossed in dusty beams which were powdery and pollen-heavy like goldenrod in the darkness. Below, the water was thick and inky, the color of motor oil. At the far end, she made out the dim form of a bloated animal, floating on its side.
A corroded metal ladder—rickety, rusted half-through—went down for about six feet, stopping just short of the water. As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the dim, she saw, with a thrill, that something shiny was taped to the top rung: a package of some sort, rolled up in a black plastic garbage bag.
Harriet prodded it with her toe of her shoe. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got on her stomach and reached inside and patted it. Something soft but solid was inside—not money, nothing stacked or sharp or definite, but something that gave under pressure like sand.
The package was bound around and around with heavy duct tape. Harriet picked and pulled at it, tugged with both hands, tried to work her fingernails under the edges of the tape. Finally she gave up and tore through several layers of plastic right into the heart of the package.
Inside: something slick and cool, dead to the touch. Harriet withdrew her hand quickly. Dust sifted from the package, spread upon the water in a pearly film. Harriet peered down at the dry iridescence (poison? explosives?) swirling in a powdery glaze upon the surface. She knew all about narcotics (from TV, from the colored pictures in her Health workbook) but those were flamboyant, unmistakable: hand-rolled cigarettes, hypodermics, colorful pills. Maybe this was a decoy package, like on Dragnet; maybe the real package was hidden elsewhere, and this was just a well-wrapped bag of … what?
Inside the torn bag something gleamed shiny and pale. Carefully, Harriet pushed aside the plastic, and saw a mysterious nest of shiny white sacs, like a cluster of giant insect eggs. One of them toppled into the water with a plunk—Harriet drew her hand back, fast—and floated there, half-submerged, like a jellyfish.
For an awful instant, she’d thought the sacs were alive. In the watery reflections, dancing in the tank’s interior, they had seemed to pulsate slightly. Now she saw that they were nothing more than a number of clear plastic bags, each packed with white powder.
Harriet, cautiously, reached down and touched one of the tiny bags (the little blue line of the zip lock was plainly visible at the top) and then lifted it out and hefted it in her hand. The powder looked white—like sugar or salt—but the texture was different, crunchier and more crystalline, and the weight curiously light. She opened it and brought it to her nose. No smell, except for a faint clean aroma that reminded her of the Comet powder that Ida used to clean the bathroom.
Well, whatever it was: it was his. With an underhand toss, she threw the little bag into the water. There it floated. Harriet looked at it, and then, without much considering what she was doing, or why, she reached inside the cache of black plastic (more white sacs, clustered like seeds in a pod) and pulled them out and dropped them by idle handfuls, threes and fours, into the black water.
————
Now that they were in the car, Farish had forgotten what was eating him, or so it seemed. As Danny drove through cottonfields hazy with morning heat and pesticides he kept glancing nervously at Farish, who was settled back in his seat and humming along with the radio. Hardly had they turned off the gravel onto the blacktop than Farish’s tense violent mood had shifted, inexplicably, to a happier key. He’d closed his eyes and breathed a deep contented sigh at the cool air blasting out of the air conditioner, and now they were flying along the highway into town, listening to The Morning Show with Betty Brownell and Casey McMasters on WNAT (“Worst Noise Around Town,” as Farish claimed the call letters stood for). WNAT was Top 40, which Farish hated. But now he was liking it, nodding his head, drumming on his knee, the armrest, the dashboard.
Except he was drumming a little too hard. It made Danny nervous. The older Farish got, the more he behaved like their father: the particular way he smiled before he said something mean, the unnatural liveliness—talkative, overly friendly—that came before a bad outburst.
Rebellient! Rebellient! Once Danny had said that word in school, rebellient, his father’s favorite word, and the teacher told him it wasn’t even a word. But Danny could still hear that high crazy crack in his father’s voice, rebellient! the belt coming down hard on the bel as Danny stared at his hands: freckled, porous, hatched with scars, white-knuckled from clutching the kitchen table. Danny knew his own hands very well, very well indeed; every hard bad moment in his life, he’d studied them like a book. They were a ticket back in time: to beatings, deathbeds, funerals, failure; to humiliation on the playground and sentencing in the courtroom; to memories more real than this steering wheel, this street.
Now they were on the outskirts of town. They drove by the shady grounds of the Old Hospital, where some high-school cheerleaders—in a V formation—jumped all at once into the air: hey! They weren’t in uniform, or even in matching shirts, and despite their crisp unified movements they looked ragged. Arms chopped in semaphore, fists struck the air.
Another day—any other—Danny might have parked behind the old pharmacy and watched them in privacy. Now, as he drove slowly through the dappled leaf-shade, ponytails and tan limbs flashing in the background, he was chilled by the sudden appearance, in the foreground, of a smaller, hunchbacked sort of creature, all in black, which—mega-phone in hand—stopped in its soggy, squelchy walk to observe him from the sidewalk. It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat … and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere. Even stranger: that it remembered him. And as he glanced in the rear view mirror he saw it again, a small black form with black wings, looking after his car like an unwelcome little messenger from the other world.
Boundaries wearing thin. Danny’s scalp tingled. The lush road had taken on the quality of a conveyor-belt corridor in a nightmare, deep green feverish shade pressing in on either side.
He looked in the mirror. The creature was gone.
It wasn’t the drugs, he’d sweated those out in his sleep: no, the river had flooded its banks and all sorts of trash and outrageous garbage had floated up from the bottom and into the daylight, a disaster film, dreams and memories and unconfessable fears slopping down the public street. And Danny had (not for the first time) the sensation that he had dreamed this day already, that he was driving down Natchez Street towards something that had already taken place.
He rubbed his mouth. He had to pee. As bad as his ribs and his head hurt from Farish’s beating, he could think of little else but how badly he had to pee. And coming off the drugs had left him with a sick chemical undertaste in his mouth.
He stole a glance at Farish. He was still caught up in the music: nodding his head, humming to himself, drumming on the armrest with his knuckle. But the police-dog bitch in the back seat glared at Danny as if she knew exactly what was on his mind.
He tried to psych himself up. Eugene—for all his holy-rolling—would look after Curtis. And then there was Gum. Her very name triggered an avalanche of guilty thoughts, but though Danny bo
re down hard and willed himself to feel affection for his grandmother he felt nothing. Sometimes, especially when he heard Gum coughing in her room in the middle of the night, he got all choked up and sentimental about the hardships she’d suffered—the poverty, the overwork, the cancers and the ulcers and the arthritis and all the rest of it—but love was an emotion he felt for his grandmother only in her presence and then only occasionally: never out of it.
And what did any of that even matter? Danny had to pee so bad that his eyeballs were about to burst; he squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. I’ll send money home. As soon as I move that shit and set myself up …
Was there another way? No. There was no way—apart from what lay ahead of him—to the house by the water in another state. He had to fix his mind on that future, really see it, move toward it smoothly and without stopping.
They drove past the old Alexandria Hotel, with its sagging porch and rotten shutters—haunted, people said, and no wonder, all the people who had died there; you could feel it radiating from the place, all that old historical death. And Danny wanted to howl at the universe that had dumped him here: in this hell-hole town, in this broken-down county that hadn’t seen money since the Civil War. His first felony conviction hadn’t even been his fault: it was his father’s, for sending him to steal a ridiculously expensive Stihl chainsaw from the workshop of a rich old German farmer who was sitting up guarding his property with a gun. It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism. The only thing for it was to go someplace that nobody knew you and nobody knew your family and try to start your life all over again.
Street signs repeating, and words. Natchez, Natchez, Natchez. Chamber of Commerce: ALEXANDRIA: THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE! No, not the way things ought to be, Danny thought bitterly; it’s the way things fucking are.
Sharply he turned into the freight yards. Farish clutched the dashboard and looked at him with something like astonishment. “What you doing?”
“This is where you told me to go,” Danny said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible.
“I did?”
Danny felt he should say something, but he didn’t know what to say. Had Farish mentioned the tower? All of a sudden he wasn’t sure.
“You said you was going to check up on me,” he said, tentatively—just tossing it out there, just to see what might happen.
Farish shrugged, and—to Danny’s surprise—settled back in his seat again and looked out the window. Driving around tended to put him in a good mood. Danny could still hear Farish’s low whistle, the first time he’d pulled up in the Trans Am. How he loved to ride, just climb in the car and go! In those first few months they’d joy-rode it up to Indiana, just the two of them, another time all the way to West Texas—no reason, nothing to see in those places, just clear weather and the highway signs flashing overhead, punching around on the FM band looking for a song.
“Tell you what. Let’s go get us some breakfast,” Farish said.
Danny’s intentions wavered. He was hungry. Then he remembered his plan. It was settled, it was fixed, it was the only way out. Black wings, waving him around the corner, into a future he couldn’t see.
He didn’t turn; he kept driving. Trees crowded close around the car. They were so far off the paved road that it wasn’t even a road any more, just potholes in rutted gravel.
“Just trying to find a place to turn around,” he said, realizing how stupid it sounded even as he said it.
Then he stopped the car. It was a good long walk from the tower (the road was bad and the weeds were high, he didn’t care to drive any farther and risk getting stuck). The dogs started barking like crazy, jumping all over the place and trying to push their way into the front seat. Danny turned, as if to get out of the car. “Here we are,” he said nonsensically. Quickly, he pulled the little pistol out of his boot and pointed it at Farish.
But Farish didn’t see. He had turned sideways in the seat, swinging his large stomach around towards the door. “Git down from there,” he was saying to the bitch named Van Zant, “down, I said down.” He raised his hand; the dog shrank.
“Try it with me? Try that rebellient shit with me?”
He had not so much as glanced at Danny, or the gun. To get his attention, Danny had to clear his throat.
Farish raised a dirty red hand. “Hold your horses,” he said, without looking, “hang on, I got to discipline this dog. I am sick of you” (whack, on the head) “you sorry bitch, don’t you pull this uppity shit on me.” He and the dog glared at each other. Her ears were pinned against her skull; her yellow eyes glowed steadily.
“Go on. Do it. I’ll whack you so hard—no, wait,” he said, raising an arm and half-turning to Danny, with the bad eye towards him. “I got to teach this bitch a lesson.” It was as cold and blue as an oyster, that bad eye. “Go on,” he said to the dog. “Try it. It’ll be the last time you ever—”
Danny pulled back the hammer and shot Farish in the head. It was just like that, just that fast: crack. Farish’s head snapped forward and his mouth fell open. With a gesture that was strangely easy, he reached for the dashboard to brace himself—and then turned towards Danny, his good eye half-shut, but his blind one wide open. A bubble of spit, mixed with blood, came blopping out of his mouth; he looked like a fish, like a hooked mud-cat, blop blop.
Danny shot him again, in the neck this time, and—in the silence that rang and dissolved about him in tinny circles—got out of the car and slammed the door. It was done now; no going back. Blood had sprayed across the front of his shirt; he touched his cheek, and looked at the rusty smear on his fingertips. Farish had collapsed forward with his arms on the dash; his neck was a mess but his mouth, full of blood, was still moving. Sable, the smaller of the two dogs, had his paws over the back of the passenger seat and—rear legs pedalling—was working to clamber over it and on top of his master’s head. The other dog—the motherfucker, the bitch named Van Zant—had scrambled over from the back seat. With her nose down, she circled twice, reversed direction, and then plunked her rear end down in the driver’s seat, her black ears pricked up like a devil’s. For a moment, she glared at Danny with her wolfish eyes, and then began to bark: short, sharp barks, clear and carrying.
The alarm was as plain as if she was shouting “Fire! Fire!” Danny stepped backwards. A multitude of birds had flown up, like shrapnel, at the small crack of the gun. Now they were settling again, in the trees, on the ground. Blood was everywhere inside his car: blood on the windshield, on the dashboard, on the passenger window.
I should have had breakfast, he thought hysterically. When did I eat?
And with this thought, he became aware that more than anything, he needed to urinate, and had needed to, desperately, since the very instant he woke that morning.
A wonderful relief descended upon him, and seeped into his bloodstream. Everything’s fine, he thought, as he zipped his pants up, and then—
His beautiful car; his car. Moments ago it had been a cherry, a showpiece, and now it was a crime scene from True Detective. Within, the dogs moved frantically back and forth. Farish lay slumped over the dashboard, face down. His posture was strangely relaxed and natural; he might have been bent forward to look for dropped keys except for the rich pool of blood spreading from his head and ticking to the floor. Blood was sprayed all over the windshield—fat dark glossy drops, a spray of fat florist’s hollyberries clinging to the glass. In the back seat, Sable rushed back and forth, his tail thumping against the windows. Van Zant—seated beside her master—lunged towards him, in quick, repeated feints: nudging his cheek with her nose, pulling back, springing forward to nudge him again, and barking, barking, those short, pie
rcing barks which—she was a dog, damn it, but yet that short sharp urgency was unmistakable, as good as a raised voice shouting for help.
Danny rubbed his chin and looked around wildly. Whatever itch had goaded him to pull the trigger was gone now, while his troubles had multiplied until they blackened out the sun. Why on earth had he shot Farish inside the car? If only he’d held off for two seconds. But no: he’d been dying to get it over with, had jumped like an idiot to pull the trigger and get his shot off instead of waiting for the right moment.
He crouched over, put his hands on his knees. He felt sick and clammy; his heart was hammering and he hadn’t eaten a square meal in weeks, nothing but junk, ice-cream sandwiches and 7-Up; the hard adrenaline slap had drained away, and with it what little strength he’d had, and he wanted nothing so bad in all the world as to lie down on the hot green ground and close his eyes.
He stared at the ground as if hypnotized, then shook himself and pulled himself aright. A little bump would fix him right up—a bump, good God, the thought made his eyes water—but he’d left the house with nothing on him and the last thing he wanted to do was open the car door and root around on Farish’s body, zipping and unzipping the pockets on that filthy old shitty UPS coverall.
He limped around to the front of the car. Van Zant lunged at him, and her snout hit the windshield with a cracking thump that sent him reeling back.
Amidst the sudden racket of barks, he stood still for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly, trying to steady his nerves. He didn’t want to be here but here he was. And he was going to have to start thinking now, taking it slow, one baby step at a time.
————
It was the birds—rising in a noisy clamor—which startled Harriet. All at once, they exploded all around her, so that she flinched and flung her arm over her eyes. Four or five crows settled near her, clasping the railing of the tank with their feet. They turned their heads to look at her and the nearest crow walloped his wings and took off. Below, far away, she could hear something that sounded like dogs barking, dogs going nuts. But before this, it seemed to her she’d heard a different noise, a slight crack, very faint in the windy, sun-bleached distance.
