Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Danny shrugged. “Kids,” he said. He lit a cigarette, taking the smoke up through his nose, and snapped the big Zippo lighter shut. “They’re dumb.”

“Whoever done this wasn’t dumb. To pull this off took some kind of balls and timing.”

“Or luck.”

“Whatever,” said Farish. His arms were crossed across his chest—military-looking in the brown coverall—and all of a sudden he was staring at the side of Danny’s face in a way that Danny didn’t like.

“You wouldn’t do anything to hurt Gum, would you?” he said.

Danny blinked. “No!” He was almost too shocked to speak. “Jesus!”

“She’s old.”

“I know it!” said Danny, tossing his long hair rather aggressively out of his face.

“I’m just trying to think who else knew that it was her, not you, driving the Trans Am that day.”

“Why?” said Danny after a short, stunned pause. The glare off the highway was shining up in his eyes and it increased his confusion. “What difference does it make? All she said was she didn’t like to climb up in the truck. I told you that. Ask her yourself.”

“Or me.”

“What?”

“Or me,” said Farish. He was breathing audibly, in moist little huffs. “You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?”

“No,” said Danny, after a long, tense pause, his voice as flat as he could make it. What he felt like saying but was afraid to was fuck you . He spent fully as much time on the drug business as Farish, running errands, working in the lab—hell, he had to drive him everywhere he went—and Farish paid him nothing like an equal share, in fact didn’t pay him shit, just tossed him a ten or a twenty from time to time. True: for a while, it had beat the hell out of having a regular job. Days squandered shooting pool or driving Farish around in the car, listening to music, staying up all night: fun and games, and all the drugs he could do. But watching the sun come up every morning was getting a little eerie and repetitive, and lately it had got downright scary. He was tired of the life, tired of getting high, and was Farish about to pay Danny what he actually owed him so that he could leave town and go someplace where people didn’t know him (you didn’t stand much of a chance in this town if your last name was Ratliff) and get a decent job for a change? No. Why should Farish pay Danny? He had a good deal going, with his unpaid slave.

Abruptly, Farish said: “Find that girl. That’s your number-one priority. I want you to find that girl and I want you to find out what all she knows about this. I don’t care if you have to wring her fucking neck.”

“ She’s already seen Colonial Williamsburg, she doesn’t care if I see it or not,” said Adelaide, and turned pettishly to look out the back window.

Edie took a deep breath, through her nostrils. Because of taking Harriet to camp, she was already good and tired of driving; because of Libby (who’d had to go back twice to make sure she’d turned off everything) and Adelaide (who’d made them wait in the car while she finished ironing a dress she’d decided to bring at the last minute) and Tat (who’d allowed them to get halfway out of town before she realized she’d left her wristwatch on the sink): because of disorganization sufficient to drive the devil out of a saint they were already two hours late in getting on the road and now—before they were even out of town—Adelaide was demanding detours to another state.

“Oh, we won’t miss Virginia, we’ll be seeing so much,” said Tat—rouged, fresh, redolent of lavender soap and Aqua Net and Souvenez-vous? toilet water. She was hunting through her yellow pocketbook for her asthma inhaler. “Though it does seem a shame … since we will be all the way up there …”

Adelaide began to fan herself with a copy of Mississippi Byways magazine that she’d brought to look at in the car.

“If you’re not getting enough air back there,” said Edie, “why don’t you let your windows down a little?”

“I don’t want to muss my hair up. I just had it fixed.”

“Well,” said Tat, leaning across, “if you crack it just a little …”

“No! Stop! That’s the door!”

“No, Adelaide, that’s the door. This is the window.”

“Please don’t bother. I’m fine like this.”

Edie said: “If I was you I wouldn’t worry too much about my hair, Addie. You’re going to get mighty hot back there.”

“Well, with all these other windows down,” Adelaide said stiffly, “I’m getting blown to pieces as it is.”

Tat laughed. “Well, I’m not closing my window!”

“Well,” said Adelaide primly, “I’m not opening mine.”

Libby—in the front seat, next to Edie—made a drowsy, fretful noise as if she couldn’t quite get comfortable. Her powdery little cologne was inoffensive, but in combination with the heat, and the powerful Asian clouds of Shalimar and Souvenez-vous? simmering in the rear, Edie’s sinuses had already begun to close up.

Suddenly, Tat shrieked: “Where’s my pocketbook?”

“What? What?” said everybody at once.

“I can’t find my pocketbook!”

“Edith, turn around!” said Libby. “She’s left her pocketbook!”

“I didn’t leave it. I just had it!”

Edie said: “Well, I can’t turn around in the middle of the street.”

“Where can it be? I just had it! I—”

“Oh, Tatty!” Merry laughter from Adelaide. “There it is! You’re sitting on it.”

“What did she say? Did she find it?” Libby asked, looking around in a panic. “Did you find your pocketbook, Tat?”

“Yes, I’ve got it now.”

“Oh, thank goodness. You don’t want to lose your pocketbook. What would you do if you lost your pocketbook?”

As if announcing something over the radio, Adelaide proclaimed: “This reminds me of that crazy Fourth of July weekend when we drove down to Natchez. I’ll never forget it.”

“No, I won’t forget it, either,” said Edie. That had been back in the fifties, before Adelaide quit smoking; Adelaide—busy talking—had caught the ashtray on fire while Edie was driving down the highway.

“Goodness what a long hot drive.”

Edie said tartly: “Yes, my hand certainly felt hot.” A red-hot drip of molten plastic—cellophane from Addie’s cigarette pack—had stuck to the back of Edie’s hand while she was slapping the flames out and trying to drive the car at the same time (Addie had done nothing but squeal and flap about in the passenger seat); it was a nasty burn that left a scar, and the pain and shock of it had nearly run Edie off the road. She had driven two hundred miles in August heat with her right hand jammed in a paper cup full of ice water and tears streaming down her face, listening to Adelaide fuss and complain every mile of the way.

“And what about that August we all drove to New Orleans?” Adelaide said, fluttering a hand comically over her chest. “I thought I was going to die of the heat stroke, Edith. I thought that you were going to look over here in the passenger seat and see that I had died .”

You! thought Edie. With your window shut! Whose fault was that?

“Yes!” said Tat. “What a trip! And that was—”

“ You weren’t with us.”

“Yes I was!”

“ Indeed she was, I’ll never forget it,” Adelaide said imperiously.

“Don’t you remember, Edith, that was the trip you went to the drive-through McDonald’s, in Jackson, and tried to tell our order to a garbage can in the parking lot?”