by Donna Tartt
“Now answer me, you little bitch!” he screamed.
————
In truth, Danny trembled as much from shock as anger. He’d acted so fast he hadn’t had time to think; and even though the girl was in his grasp, he could hardly believe it.
The girl’s nose was bloody; her face—rippling in the watery light—was streaked with rust and dirt. Balefully, she stared at him, all puffed up like a little barn owl.
“You’d better start talking,” he shouted, “and I mean now.” His voice boomed and ricocheted crazily inside the tank. Sunbeams filtered in through the dilapidated roof, breathing and flickering heavily on the claustrophobic walls, a sickly, remote light like a mine-shaft or a collapsed well.
In the dimness, the girl’s face floated above the water like a white moon. He became aware of the fast, small noise of her breaths.
“Answer me,” he screamed, “what the hell are you doing up here,” and he shook her again, as hard as he could, leaning out over the water and holding tight to the ladder with his other hand, shook her by the neck until a scream burst from her throat; and as tired and frightened as he was, a surge of anger twisted through him and he roared over her cries so ferociously that her face went blank and the cries died upon her lips.
His head hurt. Think, he told himself, think. He had her, all right—but what to do with her? He was in a tricky position. Danny had always told himself he could dog-paddle in a pinch, but now (chest-deep in water, hanging on to the flimsy ladder) he wasn’t so sure. How hard could it be, swimming? Cows could swim, even cats—why not him?
He became aware of the kid, craftily, trying to ease out of his grip. Sharply he caught her up again, digging his fingers deep into the flesh of her neck so that she yelped out.
“Listen here, prissy,” he said. “You speak up right quick and tell me who you are and maybe I won’t drownd you.”
It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie. From her ashy face, he could tell that she knew that, too. It made him feel bad because she was just a kid but there wasn’t any other way.
“I’ll let you go,” he said, convincingly he thought.
To his annoyance, the girl puffed out her cheeks and settled down into herself even further. He jerked her into the light so that he could see her better and a beam of sunlight fell across her white forehead in a clammy streak. Warm as it was, she looked half-frozen; he could practically hear her teeth clacking.
Again he shook her, so hard his shoulder hurt—but though the tears streamed down her face, her lips were clamped tight and she didn’t make a sound. Then, suddenly, from the corner of his eye, Danny caught sight of something pale floating in the water: little white blobs, two or three of them, half-sunk and washing in the water near his chest.
He drew back—frog eggs?—and the next instant screamed: a scream that astonished him, that boiled up high and scalding from his very bowels.
“Jesus Christ!” He stared at what he was seeing, unable to believe it, and then up at the top of the ladder, at the shreds of black plastic hanging in ribbons from the top rung. It was a nightmare, it wasn’t real: the drugs spoilt, his fortune gone. Farish dead, for nothing. Murder One if they caught him. Jesus.
“You done this? You?”
The kid’s lips moved.
Danny spotted a waterlogged bubble of black plastic floating on the water, and a howl broke from his throat like he’d stuck his hand in the fire. “What’s this? What’s this?” he screamed, forcing her head to the water.
Strangled reply, the first words she’d spoken: “A garbage bag.”
“What you done to it? Huh? Huh?” The hand tightened on Harriet’s neck. Down—quick—he plunged her head to the water.
————
Harriet had just enough time to breathe (horrified, eyes starting at the dark water) before he pushed her under. Bubbles charged white before her face. Soundlessly, she fought, amidst phosphorescence, pistol shots and echoes. In her mind, she saw a locked suitcase clatter along a riverbed, thump thump, thump thump, swept by the current, rolling end over end over smooth mucky stones, and Harriet’s heart was a struck piano key, the same deep note thumped sharp and urgent, as a vision like scratched sulfur flared behind her closed eyelids, a white Lucifer-streak leaping in the dark—
Pain tore through Harriet’s scalp as splash, up he jerked her, up by the roots of the hair. She was deafened by coughs; the din and echo overwhelmed her; he was shouting words she couldn’t understand and his face was stony red, swollen with rage and fearful to see. Retching, choking, she beat the water with her arms and kicked out for something to brace herself against, and when her toe struck the wall of the tank, she drew a full, satisfying breath. The relief was heavenly, indescribable (magical chord, harmony of the spheres); in she breathed, in and in until he shrieked and pushed her head down and the water crashed in her ears again.
————
Danny gritted his teeth and held on. Fat ropes of pain twisted deep in his shoulders, and the screeching and bouncing of the ladder had broken him out in a sweat. Against his hand, her head bobbed light and unstable, a balloon that might slide from beneath his hand at any moment, and the kicking and churning of her body made him seasick. No matter how he tried to brace himself, or settle into his position, he couldn’t get comfortable; dangling off the ladder, with nothing solid under him, he kept kicking his legs around in the water and trying to step on something that wasn’t there. How long did it take to drown somebody? It was an ugly job and twice as ugly if you were doing it with only one arm.
A mosquito whined infuriatingly around his ear. He’d been jerking his head from side to side, trying to avoid it, but it seemed to sense, the fucker, that his hands weren’t free to swat it.
Mosquitos everywhere: everywhere. They’d finally found him, and they understood he wasn’t moving. Maddeningly, luxuriously, the stingers sank into his chin, his neck, the trembling flesh of his arms.
Come on, come on, just get it over with, he told himself. He was holding her down with the right hand—the stronger hand—but his eyes were fixed on the hand that gripped the ladder. He’d lost a lot of the feeling in it, and the only way he could be sure he was still holding on was by staring at his fingers wrapped tight around the rung. Besides, the water frightened him, and if he looked at it, he was afraid he would black out. A drowning kid could pull down a grown man—a trained swimmer, a lifeguard. He’d heard those stories.…
All at once he realized she’d stopped struggling. For a moment he was quiet, waiting. Her head was soft beneath his palm. He let up a little. Then, turning to look, because he had to (but not really wanting to look) he was relieved to see her form washing limply in the green water.
Cautiously he eased up the pressure. She didn’t move. Pins and needles showered down his aching arms and he swung around on the ladder, swapping his grip and swatting the mosquitos out of his face as he did so. For a while longer he looked at her: indirectly, from the tail of his eye, as if at some accident on the highway.
All of a sudden, his arms started shaking so hard that he could scarcely hold on to the ladder. With a forearm, he wiped the sweat from his face, spit out a mouthful of something sour. Then, trembling all over, he grasped the rung above and straightened both elbows and hoisted himself up, the rusted iron squealing loudly beneath him. As tired as he was, as badly as he wanted to get away from the water, he forced himself to turn back and give her body one long, last stare. Then he prodded her with his foot and watched her spin away, as inert as any log, off into the shadows.
————
Harriet had stopped being scared. Something strange had taken her over. Chains snapped, locks broke, gravity rolled away; up she floated, up and up, suspended in airless night: arms out, an astronaut, weightless. Darkness trembled in her wake, interlinked circlets, swelling and expanding like raindrop rings on water.
Grandeur and strangeness. Her ears buzzed; she could almost feel the sun, beating hot across her back, as she soa
red above ashy plains, vast desolations. I know what it feels like to die. If she opened her eyes, it would be to her own shadow (arms spread, a Christmas angel) shimmering blue on the floor of the swimming pool.
The water lapped the underside of Harriet’s body, and the roll approximated, soothingly, the rhythm of breath. It was as if the water—outside her body—were doing the breathing for her. Breath itself was a forgotten song: a song that angels sang. Breath in: a chord. Breath out: exultation, triumph, the lost choirs of paradise. She’d been holding her breath for a long time; she could keep on holding it for just a little longer.
A little longer. A little longer. Suddenly a foot pushed Harriet’s shoulder and she felt herself spinning, to the dark side of the tank. Gentle shower of sparks. On she sailed in the cold. Twinkle twinkle: shooting stars, lights far below, cities sparkling in the dark atmosphere. An urgent pain burned in her lungs, stronger every second but a little longer, she told herself, just a little longer, must fight it out to the last …
Her head bumped the opposite wall of the tank. The force rolled her back; and in the same movement, the same backwards wash, her head bobbed just enough for her to sneak the tiniest split-second breath before she sloshed face down again.
Darkness again. A darker darkness, if that were possible, draining the last glimmer of light from her eyes. Harriet hung in the water and waited, her clothes washing gently about her.
She was on the sunless side of the tank near the wall. The shadows, she hoped, and the motion of the water had camouflaged the breath (only the tiniest breath, at the very top of her lungs); it hadn’t been enough to relieve the terrible pain in her chest but it was enough to keep her going a little longer.
A little longer. Somewhere a stopwatch was ticking. For it was only a game, and a game she was good at. Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this. Sparkling needle-pricks, like icy raindrops, pattered over her scalp and the back of her arms. Hot concrete and chlorine smells, striped beach balls and kiddie floats, I’ll stand in line to get a frozen Snickers bar or maybe a Dreamsicle.…
A little longer. A little longer. Deeper she sank, down into airlessness, her lungs glowing bright with pain. She was a small white moon, floating high over trackless deserts.
————
Danny clung to the ladder, breathing hard. The ordeal of drowning the kid had made him forget, temporarily, about the drugs, but now the reality of his situation had sunk in on him again, and he wanted to claw his face, to wail aloud. How the fuck was he going to get out of town with a blood-spattered car and no money? He’d been counting on the crystal meth, on moving that, in bars or on streetcorners if he had to. He had maybe forty dollars on him (had considered that driving over; couldn’t very well pay the man at the Texaco with methamphetamine) and there was also that Best Friend of Farish’s, that bill-stuffed wallet Farish always kept in his hip pocket. Farish liked to pull it out sometimes, and flash it around, at the poker table or at the pool hall, but how much money was actually in it, Danny didn’t know. If he was lucky—really lucky—maybe as much as a thousand dollars.
So there was Farish’s jewelry (the Iron Cross wasn’t worth anything, but the rings were) and the wallet. Danny passed a hand over his face. The money in the wallet would keep him going for a month or two. But after that—
Maybe he could get a fake ID. Or maybe he could get a job where he wouldn’t need one, doing migrant work, picking oranges or tobacco. But it was a poor reward, a poor future, next to the jackpot he’d expected.
And when they found the body, they’d be looking for him. The gun lay in the weeds, wiped clean, Mafia style. The smart thing to do would be to dump it in the river, but now that the drugs were gone, the gun was one of his only remaining assets. The more he thought about his choices the fewer and shittier they seemed.
He looked at the shape sloshing in the water. Why had she destroyed his drugs? Why? He was superstitious about the kid; she was a shadow and a jinx but now that she was dead he feared that maybe she’d been his good-luck charm, too. For all he knew he’d made a huge mistake—the mistake of his life—by killing her, but so help me, he said, to her form in the water, and couldn’t finish the sentence. From that first moment outside the pool hall he’d been caught up with her somehow, in something that he didn’t understand; and the mystery of it still pressed in on him. If he’d had her on dry ground he would have knocked it out of her, but it was too late for that now.
He fished one of the packets of speed out of the nasty water. It was stuck together and melted, but maybe—if cooked down—shootable. Fishing around, he came up with half a dozen more or less waterlogged bags. He’d never shot drugs, but why not start.
One last look, and he started up the ladder. The rungs—rusted nearly through—shrieked and buckled under his weight; he could feel movement in the thing, it was wobbling under him a whole lot more than he liked, and he was grateful to emerge at last from the close dankness into the brightness and heat. On shaky legs, he climbed to his feet. He was sore all over, a muscular soreness, as if he’d been beaten—which, come to think of it, he had been. A storm was rolling in over the river. To the east, the sky was sunny and blue; to the west, gunmetal black with thunderclouds rolling and surging in over the river. Shady spots sailed over the low roofs of the town.
Danny stretched, rubbed the small of his back. He was sodden, dripping; long strands of green slime clung to his arms but in spite of everything, his spirits had lifted absurdly, just to be out of the dark and damp. The air was humid, but there was a little breeze and he could breathe again. He stepped across the roof to the edge of the tank—and his knees went watery with relief when off in the distance he saw the car, undisturbed, a single set of tracks winding through the tall weeds behind it.
Gladly, without thinking, he started to the ladder—but he was a little off balance and before he knew what was happening, crack, his foot was through a rotten plank. Suddenly the world pitched sideways: diagonal slash of gray boards, blue sky. For a wild moment—arms windmilling—he flailed to recover his balance, but there was an answering crack and he fell through the boards to the waist.
————
Harriet—floating face downward—was seized with a spasm of shuddering. She’d been trying, stealthily, to ease her head to the side so she could draw another little breath through her nose, but with no luck. Her lungs could stand no more; they bucked uncontrollably, heaving for air, and if not air then water, and just as her mouth opened of its own accord, she broke the surface with a shudder and inhaled, deep deep deep.
The relief was so great it nearly sank her. Clumsily, with one hand, she braced herself against the slimy wall and gasped, and gasped, and gasped: air delicious, air pure and profound, air pouring through her body like song. She didn’t know where Danny Ratliff was; she didn’t know if he was watching and she didn’t care; breathing was all that mattered any more, and if this was the last breath of her life, so be it.
From overhead: a loud crack. Though Harriet’s first thought was the pistol, she made no move to get away. Let him shoot me, she thought, gasping, eyes damp with gratitude; anything was better than drowning.
Then a slash of sunlight struck bright green and velvety on the dark water, and Harriet looked up just in time to see a pair of legs waggling through a hole in the roof.
Snap went the plank.
————
As the water rushed toward him, Danny was gripped with a sickness of fear. In a confused flash his father’s warning from long ago came back, to hold his breath and keep his mouth shut. Then the water slammed into his ears and he was screaming a closed-off scream, staring out horrified into the green darkness.
Down he plunged. Then—miraculously—his feet struck bottom. Danny jumped—clawing, spluttering, climbing up through the water—and broke through the surface of the water like a torpedo. At the height of the jump, he had just enough time to gulp a breath of air before slipping under again.
Murk and s
ilence. The water, it seemed, was only about a foot over his head. Above him, the surface shone bright green, and again he jumped from the bottom—layers of green that grew paler and paler as he rose—and broke back through into light with a crash. It seemed to work better if he kept his arms to his sides and didn’t beat them around like swimmers were supposed to.
Between jumps, and breaths, he oriented himself. The tank was awash in sun. Light streamed in through the collapsed section of the roof; the slimy green walls were lurid, ghastly. After two or three jumps he caught sight of the ladder, off to his left.
Could he make it? he wondered, as the water closed over his head. If he jumped toward it, gradually, why not? He would have to try for it; it was the best he could do.
He broke the surface. Then—with a painful shock, so sharp that he breathed in at the wrong time—he saw the kid. She was clinging with both hands to the bottom rung of the ladder.
Was he seeing things? he wondered on the way down, coughing, bubbles streaming past his eyes. For the face had struck him oddly; for a weird moment it hadn’t been the kid at all he was looking at, but the old lady: E. Cleve.
Choking, gasping, he burst through the water again. No, no doubt about it, it was the kid, and she was still alive: half-drowned and pinched-looking, eyes dark in a sickly-white face. The afterimage glowed round behind Danny’s eyelids as he sank into the dark water.
Up he jumped, explosively. The girl was struggling now, grappling, swinging a knee up, pulling herself up on the ladder. In a burst of white spray he swiped for her ankle, and missed, and the water closed over his head.
On his next jump, he caught the bottom rung, which was rusted and slippery, and it slid right through his fingers. Up he jumped again, grabbing for it with both hands, and this time got a grip on it. She was above him on the ladder, scrambling up ahead of him like a monkey. Water streamed off her and into his upturned face. With an energy born of rage, Danny hoisted himself up, the rusted metal shrieking beneath his weight like a living creature. Directly above, a rung buckled under the kid’s sneaker; he saw her falter, grab the side rail as her foot struck empty air. It won’t hold her, he thought in astonishment, watching her catch herself, right herself, swinging a leg to the top of the tank now, if it won’t hold her it won’t hold—
