Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Dr. Vance, in turn, gave Harriet a hard look that she did not like.

At the hospital, Farish played and replayed the scenario of their grandmother’s accident, speculating, theorizing, all night long and into the next day, so that his brothers had grown very, very tired of listening to him. Dull, red-eyed with fatigue, they slouched around in the waiting room of Intensive Care, partly listening to him but also partly watching a cartoon program about a dog solving a mystery.

“If you move, he’s going to bite you,” Farish said, addressing the air, almost as if he was talking to the absent Gum. “You shouldn’t of moved. I don’t care if he’s laying in your lap.”

He had stood—running his hands through his hair—and begun to pace, disturbing their view of the television. “Farsh,” said Eugene loudly, re-crossing his legs, “Gum had to drive the car, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have to drive it off in a ditch,” said Danny.

Farish drew his eyebrows down. “You couldn’t have knocked me out of that driver’s seat,” he said belligerently. “I would’ve sat still as a mouse. If you move—” he made a smooth, skating motion with the flat of his palm—”you’ve threatened him. He’s going to defend himself.”

“What the hell is she going to do, Farish? A snake is coming through the roof of the damn car?”

Suddenly Curtis clapped his hands and pointed at the television. “Gum!” he exclaimed.

Farish wheeled around. After a moment, Eugene and Danny burst into horrified laughter. In the cartoon, the dog and a group of young people were trooping through a spooky old castle. A grinning skeleton hung on the wall, along with a bunch of trumpets and axes—and, strange to say, the skeleton bore a strong resemblance to Gum. Suddenly it flew off the wall and sailed after the dog, who ran yowling.

“That,” said Eugene—he was having a hard time getting it out—“ that ’s what she looked like when the snake was after her.”

Farish, without a word, turned to look at them in weariness and despair. Curtis—aware that he’d done something wrong—stopped laughing instantly, staring at Farish with a disturbed look on his face. But just at this instant Dr. Breedlove appeared in the doorway, striking them all into silence.

“Your grandmother’s conscious,” he said. “It looks like she’s going to pull through. We’ve got her off the tubes.”

Farish put his face in his hands.

“Off the breathing tubes, anyway. She’s still got the IVs, since her heartbeat hasn’t stabilized yet. Would you like to see her?”

Solemnly, they all threaded single file behind him (all except Curtis, happy enough to stay watching Scooby-Doo ) through a wilderness of machines and mysterious equipment, to a curtained area concealing Gum. Though she lay very still, and the stillness itself was frightening, she actually did not look much more ragged than usual except for her eyelids, which drooped half-shut from muscle paralysis.

“Well, I’ll leave you alone for a minute now,” the doctor said, energetically rubbing his hands. “But just a minute. Don’t tire her out.”

Farish made his way to the bed first. “It’s me,” he said, leaning close.

Her eyelids fluttered; slowly, she lifted a hand from the coverlet, which Farish clasped in both his own.

“Who done this to you?” he said, in a stern-sounding voice, and bent his head close to her lips to listen.

After a moment or two she said: “I don’t know.” Her voice was dry and wispy and very faint. “All I seen was some kids off in the distance.”

Farish—shaking his head—stood and smacked his closed fist into his palm. He walked to the window and stood looking out into the parking lot.

“Forget about kids,” Eugene said. “You know who I figured, when I heard this? Porton Stiles .” His arm was still in a sling from his own snake bite. “Or Buddy Reebals. They always said Buddy had a hit list. That there was people he was coming after someday.”

“It wasn’t any of them people,” said Farish, glancing up with a sudden, cutting intelligence. “All this started at the Mission the other night.”

Eugene said: “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault.”

“You think Loyal did it?” said Danny to Farish.

“How could he?” said Eugene. “He left a week ago.”

“Well, we know one thing for damn sure. It’s his snake. No question about that,” Farish said.

“Well, it was you that asked him and his snakes to come here,” said Eugene angrily, “ not me . I mean, I’m scared to go in my own place now—”

“I said it was his snake ,” said Farish, tapping his foot with agitation. “I didn’t say he was the one that thrown it.”

“See, Farish, this is what bothers me, though,” Danny said. “Who broke that windshield? If they were looking for product—”

Danny noticed Eugene looking at him funny; he stopped talking and shoved his hands in his pockets. There was no need to go on about the drugs in front of Gum and Eugene.

“You think it was Dolphus?” he said to Farish. “Or somebody working for Dolphus maybe?”

Farish thought about it. “No,” he said. “All these snakes and shit ain’t Dolphus’s style. He’d just send somebody down to cut your ass up.”

“You know what I keep wondering about?” Danny said. “That girl who come upstairs to the door that night.”

“I was thinking about her, too,” said Farish. “I didn’t get a good look at her. Where’d she come from? What was she doing hanging around outside the house?”

Danny shrugged.

“You didn’t ask her?”

“Look, man,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice even, “there was an awful lot going on that night.”

“And you let her get away? You said you saw a kid,” said Farish to Gum. “Black or white? Boy or girl?”

“Yeah, Gum,” said Danny. “What’d you see?”

“Well, I tell you the truth,” said their grandmother, faintly, “I didn’t get a good look. You know how my eyes are.”

“Was it one? Or more than one?”

“I didn’t see a whole lot. When I run off the road, I heard a kid screaming and laughing from up on that overpass.”

“That girl,” Eugene said to Farish, “was down on the square watching Loyal and me preach earlier in the night. I remember her. She was riding a bicycle.”

“She wasn’t on any bicycle when she come to the Mission,” said Danny. “She ran away on foot.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“I believe I seen a bicycle, come to think of it,” said Gum. “I can’t be sure.”

“I want to talk to this girl,” Farish said. “Y'all say you don’t know who she is?”

“She told us her name but she couldn’t make up her mind. First it was Mary Jones. Then it was Mary Johnson.”

“Would you know her if you saw her again?”

“ I’d know her,” said Eugene. “I was standing there with her for ten minutes. I got a good look at her face, up close.”

“So did I,” Danny said.

Farish compressed his lips. “Are the cops involved in this?” he said abruptly to his grandmother. “Have they asked you any questions?”

“I didn’t tell ‘em a thing.”

“Good.” Awkwardly, Farish patted his grandmother on the shoulder. “I’m on find out who done this to you,” he said. “And when I find em, you bet they’ll be sorry.”

Ida’s last few days at work were like the last few days before Weenie died: those endless hours of lying on the kitchen floor beside his box, and part of him still there but most of him—the best part—gone already. Le Sueur’s Peas, his box had said. The black lettering was stamped in Allison’s memory with all the sickness of despair. She had lain with her nose only inches away from those letters, trying to breathe in time with his fast, agonized little gasps as if with her own lungs she could buoy him up. How vast the kitchen was, so low down, so late at night: all those shadows. Even now, Weenie’s death had the waxy sheen of the linoleum in Edie’s kitchen; it had the crowded feel of her glass-front cabinets (an audience of plates ranked in galleries, goggling helplessly); the useless cheer of red dishcloths and cherry-patterned curtains. Those dumb, well-meaning objects—cardboard box; cherry curtains and jumbled Fiestaware—had pressed close in Allison’s grief, sat up and watched with her all the long awful night. Now, with Ida leaving, nothing in the house shared Allison’s sorrow or reflected it but objects: the gloomy carpets, the cloudy mirrors; the armchairs hunched and grieving and even the tragic old tall-case clock holding itself very rigid and proper, as if it were about to collapse into sobs. Within the china cabinet, the Vienna bagpipers and crinolined Doulton ladies gestured imploringly, this way and that: cheeks hectic, their dark little gazes hollow and stunned.