Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Can’t complain.”

“Glad to hear it. Now girl,” he said to Harriet, “what do you require? Would you like a Coca-Cola?”

“Oh, John,” she heard Adelaide murmur. “She doesn’t need it.”

John! Harriet stared straight ahead.

“I just want you to know that I loved your aunt Libby better than anything in the world,” she heard Mr. Sumner say. His voice was old and quavery and very Southern. “I would have asked that girl to marry me if I’d thought she’d have me!”

Tears welled infuriatingly in Harriet’s eyes. She pressed her lips tight and tried not to cry. The inside of the car was suffocating.

Mr. Sumner said: “After yo’ great-granddaddy died I did ask Libby to come on and marry me. Old as we both were then.” He chuckled. “Know what she said?” When he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he tapped lightly on the car door. “Hmm? Know what she said, honey? She reckoned she might be able to do it if she didn’t have to get on an airplane . Ha ha ha! Just to give you an idea, young lady, I was working down in Venezuela at the time.”

Behind, Adelaide said something. The old man said under his breath: “Darn if she ain’t Edith all over again!”

Adelaide laughed coquettishly—and at this, Harriet’s shoulders began to heave, of their own accord, and the sobs burst forth unwilling.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Sumner, with genuine distress; his shadow—in the car window—fell across her again. “Bless your little heart!”

“No, no. No ,” said Adelaide firmly, leading him away. “Leave her alone. She’ll be fine, John.”

The car door still stood open. Harriet’s sobs were loud and repugnant in the silence. Up front, the limousine driver observed her silently in the rear-view mirror, over the top of a drugstore paperback (astrology wheel on the cover) entitled Your Love Signs . Presently he inquired: “Yo mama die?”

Harriet shook her head. In the mirror, the driver raised an eyebrow. “I say, yo mama die?”

“No .”

“Well, then.” He punched in the cigarette lighter. “You ain’t got nothing to cry about.”

The cigarette lighter clicked out, and the driver lit his cigarette and blew a long breath of smoke out the open window. “You don’t know what sadness is,” he said. “Till that day.” Then he opened the glove compartment and handed her a few tissues across the seat.

“Who died, then?” he asked. “Yo daddy?”

“My aunt,” Harriet managed to say.

“Yo wha?”

“My aunt .”

“Oh! Yo auntee!” Silence. “You live with her?”

After waiting patiently for some moments the driver shrugged and turned back to the front, where he sat quietly with his elbow out the open window, smoking his cigarette. Every so often he looked down at his book, which he held open beside his right thigh with one hand.

“When you born?” he asked Harriet after a while. “What month?”

“ December ,” said Harriet, just as he’d started to ask her a second time.

“December?” He glanced over the seat at her; his face was doubtful. “You a Sagitaria?”

“Capricorn.”

“Capricorn!” His laugh was rather unpleasant and insinuating. “You a little goat , then. Ha ha ha!”

Across the street, at the Baptist church the bells chimed noon; their icy, mechanical peal brought back one of Harriet’s earliest memories: Libby (fall afternoon, vivid sky, red and yellow leaves in the gutter) stooping beside Harriet in her red parka, her hands around Harriet’s waist. “Listen!” And, together, they had listened in the cold, bright air: a minor note—which rang out unchanged a decade later, chilly and sad as a note struck on a child’s toy piano—a note that even in summertime sounded like bare tree branches, and skies in winter, and lost things.

“You mind if I put on the radio?” said the driver. When Harriet did not reply, for crying, he switched it on, anyway.

“You got a boyfrien?” he inquired.

Out on the street, a car honked. “Yo,” called the limo driver, flashing a palm at it—and Harriet, electrified, sat up rigid as Danny Ratliff ‘s eyes struck her own and flared with recognition; she saw her shock mirrored on his face. The next instant he was gone and she was staring after the indecently cocked rear of the Trans Am.

“Say. I say,” repeated the driver—and, with a start, Harriet realized that he was leaning over the seat looking at her. “You got a boyfrien?”

Harriet tried to look after the Trans Am, without appearing to—and saw it turn left, a few blocks ahead, toward the train station and the old freight yards. Across the street the church bell—on the last dying note of its carol—struck the hour with sudden violence: dong dong dong dong dong ….

“You stuck up,” said the driver. His voice was teasing and coquettish. “Ain't you?”

All of a sudden it occurred to Harriet that he might turn around and come back. She glanced up at the front steps of the funeral home. There were several people milling about—a group of old men, smoking cigarettes; Adelaide and Mr. Sumner, standing off to the side, Mr. Sumner bent over her solicitously—was he lighting a cigarette for her? Addie hadn’t smoked in years. But there she was, arms crossed, throwing her head back like a stranger, blowing out a plume of smoke.

“Boys don’t like no stuck-up acting girl,” the driver was saying.

Harriet got out of the car—the door was still open—and walked up the steps of the funeral home, fast.

A despairing glassine shiver ran down Danny’s neck as he sped past the funeral home. Airy methamphetamine clarity gliddered over him in nine hundred directions simultaneously. Hours he’d looked for the girl, looking everywhere, combing the town, cruising the residential streets, loop after endless crawling loop. And now, just as he’d made up his mind to forget about Farish’s order and stop looking: here she was.

With Catfish, no less: that was the hell of it. Of course, you never could tell exactly where Catfish might pop up, since his uncle was one of the richest men in town, white or black, presiding over a sizable business empire which included grave-digging, tree-pruning, house-painting, stump-grinding, roof contracting, numbers running, car and small-appliance repair, and half a dozen other businesses. You never knew where Catfish might pop up: in Niggertown, collecting his uncle’s rents; on a ladder at the courthouse, washing windows; behind the wheel of a taxicab or a hearse.

But explain this: this twenty-car pile–up of freaked-out reality. Because it was a little too much of a coincidence to see the girl (of all people) sitting there with Catfish in the back of a de Bienville funeral limousine. Catfish knew there was a very large shipment of product waiting to go out, and he was just a little too casually curious about where Danny and Farish were keeping it. Yes, he’d been a little too inquisitive, in his easy-going talkative way, had twice made a point of “dropping by” the trailer, nosing up unannounced in his Gran Torino, shadowy behind the tinted windows. He’d spent an unusually long time in the bathroom, knocking around, running the taps full-blast; he’d stood up a little too quick when Danny came outside and caught him looking underneath the Trans Am. Flat tire, he’d said. Thought you had a flat tire, man. But the tire was fine and they both knew it.

No, Catfish and the girl were the least of his problems—he thought, with a hopeless feeling of inevitability, as he bumped down the gravel road to the water tower; seemed like he was bumping down it all the time, in his bed, in his dreams, twenty-five times a day hitting this exact same pothole. No, it wasn’t just the drugs, all this feeling of being watched . The break-in at Eugene’s, and the attack upon Gum, had them all glancing over their shoulders constantly, and jumping at the slightest sound, but the biggest worry now was Farish, who was overheated to the boiling point.