The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  Harriet—feet on the ladder, legs in the tank—sat without moving. As her gaze strayed in confusion, one of the birds caught her eye; it had a jaunty, wicked look, like a cartoon bird, cocking its head right at her, and it almost looked as if it was about to say something but as she looked at it, another popping sound echoed from below and the bird drew itself up and flew off.

  Harriet listened. Half in, half out of the tank, she stood partway, bracing herself with one hand, and winced as the ladder squealed beneath her weight. Hastily she clambered onto the planks, then crawled to the edge on her hands and knees and craned over as far as she could.

  Down below—far across the field, towards the woods, too far to see very well—was the Trans Am. Birds were starting to drop down to the clearing again, settling one by one, lighting in the branches, in the bushes, on the ground. By the car, a long way off, stood Danny Ratliff. He had his back to her and his hands were clapped over his ears like somebody was screaming at him.

  Harriet ducked—his posture, tense and violent, had frightened her—and the next moment she realized what she’d seen and slowly she rose again.

  Yes: bright red. Sprayed in drops on the windshield, so bright and shocking it popped out even at a distance. Beyond—within the car, beyond the semi-transparent scrim of droplets—she had the impression of horrible movement: something thrashing and thumping, flailing around. And whatever it was, that dark confusion, Danny Ratliff seemed frightened of it, too. His backward steps were slow, robotic, like the last few backward steps of a shot cowboy in the movies.

  Harriet was overcome all of a sudden with a strange blankness and languor. From where she was, so high up, it all looked flat and unimportant somehow, accidental. The sun beat down white and fierce, and in her head thrummed the same curious, airy lightness that—when she was climbing—had made her feel like relaxing her grip and letting go.

  I’m in trouble, she told herself, big trouble, but it was hard to make herself feel it, even though it was true.

  In the bright distance, Danny Ratliff stooped to pick up something shiny on the grass, and Harriet’s heart gave a queasy flutter when she realized more from the way that he was holding it than anything else that it was a gun. In the dreadful silence, she imagined for a moment that she could hear a faint strain of trumpet music—Hely’s marching band, to the east, far away—and when, in confusion, she cast her eye over in that direction, it seemed to her that the slightest gold twinkle, like sun striking brass, flashed up in the hazy distance.

  ————

  Birds—birds everywhere, great black cawing explosions of them, like radioactive fallout, like shrapnel. They were a bad sign: words and dreams and laws and numbers, storms of information in his head, indecipherable, on the wing and spiraling. Danny put his hands over his ears: he could see his own reflection, slanted, in the blood-spattered windshield, a whirling red galaxy frozen on glass, clouds moving in a thin film behind his head. He was sick and exhausted; he needed a shower and a good meal; he needed to be home, in bed. He didn’t need this shit. I shot my brother and why? Because I needed to take a leak so bad I couldn’t think straight. Farish would get a big yuk out of that. Sick stories in the newspaper, he laughed his head off over them: the drunk who’d slipped while peeing off an overpass and fallen to his death on the highway; the dumb ass who’d awakened to a ringing telephone at his bedside, and reached for his pistol and shot himself in the head.

  The gun lay in the weeds at Danny’s feet, where he’d dropped it. Stiffly, he bent to retrieve it. Sable was sniffing around Farish’s cheek and neck with a rooting, butting motion that made Danny queasy, while Van Zant tracked his every move with her acid yellow eyes. When he stepped towards the car, she reared back and barked with renewed energy. Just you open that car door, she seemed to be saying. Just you open that motherfucking door. Danny thought of the training sessions out in the back yard, where Farish rolled his arms in quilt batting and burlap sacks and yelled Destroy! Destroy! Cottony little puffs floating all over the yard.

  His knees were trembling. He rubbed his mouth, tried to compose himself. Then he took aim across his arm, at the yellow eye of the dog Van Zant, and squeezed the trigger. A hole the size of a silver dollar exploded in the window. Gritting his teeth against the screams, the thrashing and sobbing inside the car, Danny leaned down with his eye to the glass and put the pistol through the hole and shot her again, then angled the gun and got in a good clear center shot at the other one. Then he pulled back his arm and threw the gun away from him as far as he could.

  He stood in the morning glare panting as if he’d run a mile. The screaming from the car was the worst noise he’d ever heard in his life: high, unearthly, like broken machinery, a metallic sobbing note that went on and on without fatigue, a noise that gave Danny actual pain, so he felt that if it didn’t stop, he’d have to drive a stick in his ear—

  But it didn’t stop; and after what seemed a ridiculously long time, standing there with his back half-turned, Danny walked stiffly to where he’d thrown the gun, with the screams of the dogs still ringing in his ears. Grimly, he got down on his knees and searched through the thin weeds, parting them with his hands, and his back tensed against the keen energetic cries.

  But the gun was empty: no more bullets. Danny wiped it clean with his shirt and tossed it deeper in the woods. He was on the verge of forcing himself over to the car, to look, when silence rolled in on him, in crushing waves—each wave with its own crest and fall, like the screams which had preceded them.

  She’d be walking over with our coffee, he thought, rubbing his mouth, if I’d drove on to the White Kitchen, if I hadn’t turned down this road. The waitress named Tracey, the scrawny one with the dangly earrings and the little flat ass, always brought it without asking. He imagined Farish pushed back in his chair with his stomach preceding him grandly, delivering the speech he always gave about his eggs (how he didn’t like to drink ’em, tell the cook she couldn’t get ’em too hard) and Danny across the table looking at his matted old nasty head like black seaweed and thinking: you never know how close I come.

  All that vanished, and he found himself staring at a broken bottle in the weeds. He opened and shut one hand, then the other. His palms were slimy and cold. I got to get moving here, he thought, with a rush of panic.

  And yet he still stood. It was like he’d blown the fuse connecting his body with his brain. Now that the car window was shattered and the dogs had shut up wailing and crying, he could hear just the faintest thread of music drifting from the radio. Did those people who sang that song (some shit about stardust in your hair) did they ever think for a minute that somebody’d be listening to it on a dirt road by an abandoned railroad track with a dead body in front of them? No: those people just swished around Los Angeles and Hollywood in their white outfits with sparkles, and their sunglasses dark at the top and clear at the bottom, drinking champagne and snorting coke off of silver trays. They never figured—standing there in the studio by their grand pianos, with their sparkly scarves and their fancy cocktails—they never figured that some poor person was going to be standing on a dirt road in Mississippi and working through some major problems while the radio played on the day that you were born the angels got together.…

  People like that never had to make a tough decision, he thought, dully, staring at his blood-spattered vehicle. They never had to do shit. It was all handed to them like a set of new car keys.

  He took a step towards the car, one step. His knees trembled; the crunch of his feet on the gravel terrified him. Got to move! he told himself, with a kind of high, hearty hysteria, looking wildly all around him (left, right, up in the sky) and a hand out to brace himself in case he fell. Get this show on the road! It was clear enough what he had to do; the question was how, since there was no getting around the fact that basically he would rather take a hacksaw and cut his arm off than lay a finger on his brother’s body.

  On the dashboard—resting quite naturally—lay his brother�
�s grubby red hand, tobacco-stained fingers, the big gold pinky ring shaped like a dice. As Danny stared at it, he tried to think his way back into the situation. What he needed was a bump, to concentrate his mind and get his heart up and kicking. Upstairs in the tower there was plenty of product, product galore; and the longer he stood around, the longer the Trans Am would stand in the weeds with a dead man and two dead police dogs bleeding on the seats.

  ————

  Harriet, gripping the rail with both fists, lay on her stomach too terrified to breathe. Because her feet were above her head, all the blood had drained down to her face so that her heartbeat crashed in her temples. The screams from the car had ceased, the sharp high animal wails that had seemed as if they would never end, but even the silence seemed stretched and torn out of shape by those unearthly cries.

  There he still stood, Danny Ratliff, down on the ground, looking very small in the flat, placid distance. It was all as still as a picture. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree seemed combed and oiled and slicked into place.

  Harriet’s elbows were sore. She shifted slightly, in her trying position. She was unsure what she’d seen—she was too far away—but the gunshots and the cries she’d heard plainly enough, and the afterburn of the screams still rang in her ears: high-pitched, scalding, intolerable. All movement in the car had stopped; his victims (dark forms, more than one, it seemed) were still.

  Suddenly he turned; and Harriet’s heart clenched painfully. Please, God, she prayed, please, God, don’t let him come up here.…

  But he was walking towards the woods. Swiftly—after a backwards glance—he stooped in the clearing. A band of custard-white skin—at odds with the dark brown tan on his arms—appeared in the crack between his T-shirt and the waistband of his jeans. He broke the gun and examined it; he stood, and scoured it clean with his shirt. Then he threw it towards the woods, and the gun’s shadow flew dark over the weedy ground.

  Harriet—peeping over her forearm at all this—fought a strong impulse to look away. Though she was desperate to know what he was doing, still, it was a curious strain to keep her gaze fixed so intently on the same bright, distant spot; and she had to shake her head against a kind of fog that kept creeping over her vision, like the darkness that slid over the numbers on the chalkboard at school when she stared at them too hard.

  After a while, he turned from the woods and walked back to the car. There he stood, with his sweaty, muscled back to her, his head slightly down, his arms rigidly at his sides. His shadow lay tall before him on the gravel, a black plank pointing at two o’clock. In the glare it was comforting to look at, the shadow, restful and cool to the eyes. Then it slid away and vanished as he turned and began to walk towards the tower.

  Harriet’s stomach dropped away. The next instant she recovered herself, fumbled for the gun, began to unwrap it with stammering fingers. All at once, an old pistol that she didn’t know how to shoot (and wasn’t even sure she’d loaded right) seemed a very small thing to put between herself and Danny Ratliff, especially in so precarious a spot.

  Her gaze skipped around. Where to position herself? Here? Or on the other side, a little lower down, maybe? Then she heard a clang on the metal ladder.

  Frantically, Harriet glanced around. She’d never shot a gun in her life. Even if she hit him, she wouldn’t drop him instantly, and the rickety roof of the tank afforded no ground for retreat.

  Clang … clang … clang …

  Harriet—feeling it in her body for a moment, the terror of being bodily grabbed and thrown off the side—floundered to her feet, but just as she was about to fling herself, gun and all, down through the trapdoor and into the water something stopped her. Arms walloping—she reared back and recovered her balance. The tank was a trap. Bad enough to meet him face-on, in the sunlight, but down there she wouldn’t have a chance.

  Clang … clang …

  The gun was heavy and cold. Gripping it awkwardly, Harriet crawled sideways down the roof, and then turned around on her stomach with the gun in both hands and inched forward on her elbows as far as she could without actually sticking her head over the edge of the tank. Her vision had narrowed and darkened, and squeezed itself down to a single eye-slit like the visor in a knight’s helmet, and Harriet found herself looking out through it with a curious detachment, everything distant and unreal except a sort of sharp desperate wish to squander her life like a firecracker, in a single explosion, right in Danny Ratliff’s face.

  Clang … clang …

  She edged forward, the gun trembling in her grasp, just enough to see over the side. Leaning out a little more, she saw the top of his head, about fifteen feet down.

  Don’t look up, thought Harriet frantically. She balanced herself on her elbows, brought the gun up and centered it on the bridge of her nose and then—looking down the barrel, lining up the shot as straight as she could—she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  Bang. The pistol struck her square in the nose with a loud crack and she cried out and rolled over on her back to clutch her nose with both hands. A shower of orange sparks spat up in the darkness behind her eyelids. Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, she heard the pistol clattering to the ground, striking the rungs of the ladder with a series of hollow clangs that sounded like somebody running a stick down metal bars at the zoo but the pain in her nose was so fierce and bright that there had never been anything else like it. Blood gushed between her fingers, hot and slippery: it was all over her hands, she could taste it in her mouth and as she looked at her red fingertips she couldn’t remember exactly where she was for a moment, or why she was there.

  ————

  The explosion startled Danny so badly that he nearly lost his grip. A heavy clang rang out on the bar above him and the next instant something hit him hard on the crown of the head.

  For a moment he thought he was falling, and didn’t know what to grab for, and then with a dreamlike jolt he realized that he was still holding tight to the ladder with both hands. Pain swam out from his head in big flat waves like a struck clock, waves that hung in mid-air and were slow to dissolve.

  He’d felt something fall past him; it seemed to him that he’d heard it hit the gravel. He touched his scalp—a knot was rising, he could feel it—and then he turned around as far as he dared and looked down to see if he could make out what had hit him. The sun was in his face and all he could see below was the elongated shadow of the tank, and his own shadow an elongated scarecrow on the ladder.

  In the clearing, the windows of the Trans Am were mirrored and blind-looking in the glare. Had Farish rigged the tower? Danny hadn’t thought so—but now he realized he really didn’t know for sure.

  And here he was. He took a step up the ladder, and stopped. He thought of going down again, to see if he could find the thing that had hit him, and then realized that it would only be a waste of time. What he’d done there, down below, was done: what he had to do now was keep climbing, focus on getting to the top. He did not wish to be blown up, but if I am, he thought desperately, looking down at the bloody car, fuck it.

  There was nothing to do but keep going. He rubbed the sore place on his head, took a deep breath, and started to climb again.

  ————

  Something in Harriet snapped to, and she found herself in her body again, lying on her side; and it was like returning to a window that she’d walked away from, but to a different pane. Her hand was bloody. For a moment she stared at it without quite knowing what it was.

  Then she remembered, and sat up with a bolt. He was coming, not a moment to waste. She stood, groggily. Suddenly a hand shot out from behind and seized hold of her ankle, and she screamed and kicked at it and—unexpectedly—broke free. She lunged for the trapdoor, just as Danny Ratliff’s battered face and blood-spattered shirt rose up behind her on the ladder, like a swimmer climbing from a pool.

  He was scary, smelly, huge. Harriet—gasping, practically weeping with terror—clattered down towards t
he water. His shadow fell across the open trapdoor, blocking out the sun. Clang: ugly motorcycle boots stepped on the ladder overhead. Down he came after her, clang clang clang clang.

  Harriet turned and threw herself off the ladder. She hit the water feet-first. Down she plunged, into the dark and cold, down until her feet struck bottom. Sputtering, gagging from the filthy taste, she pulled back her arms and shot up to the surface in a mighty breaststroke.

  But just as she broke the surface, a strong hand closed fast on her wrist and hauled her up out of the water. He was chest-deep in the water, holding on to the ladder and leaning out sideways to grasp her by the arm, and his silvery eyes—glowing light and powerful in his sunburnt face—pierced her like a stab.

  Flailing, twisting, fighting as hard as it was possible for her to fight and with a strength she’d never known she had before, Harriet struggled to get away but though she raised a tremendous spray of water it was no use. Up he hauled her—her waterlogged clothes were heavy; she could feel his muscles trembling from the strain—as Harriet kicked fan after fan of nasty water up into his face.

  “Who you?” he shouted. His lip was split, his cheeks greasy and unshaven. “What you want with me?”

  Harriet let out a strangled gasp. The pain in her shoulder was breathtaking. On his bicep squirmed a blue tattoo: murky octopus shape, a blurred Old English script, illegible.

  “What are you doing up here? Speak up!” He shook Harriet by the arm until a scream burst unwilling from her throat and she kicked around desperately in the water for something to brace herself on. In a flash he pinned her leg with his knee and—with a high, womanish cackle—caught her up by the hair of the head. Swiftly, he pushed her face down into the filthy water and then hauled her up again, dripping. He was trembling all over.