Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

With Gum in the hospital, there had been no reason for Farish even to pretend to go to bed any more. Instead he sat up all night, every night, and he made Danny sit up with him: pacing, plotting, with the curtains drawn against the sunrise, chopping drugs on the mirror and talking himself hoarse. And now that Gum was home again (stoic, incurious, shuffling sleepy-eyed past the doorway on her way to the toilet) her presence in the house didn’t break the pattern, but increased Farish’s anxiety to a very nearly unbearable pitch. A loaded.38 appeared on the coffee table, beside the mirror and the razor blades. Parties—dangerous parties—were out to get him. Their grandmother’s safety was at risk. And yes, Danny might shake his head at certain of Farish’s theories, but who knew? Dolphus Reese (persona non grata since the cobra incident) often bragged of his connections with organized crime. And organized crime, who handled the distribution end of the drug business, had been in bed with the CIA ever since the Kennedy assassination.

“It ain’t me,” said Farish, pinching his nose and sitting back, “ whew , it ain’t me I’m worried about, it’s poor little Gum in there.What kind of motherfuckers are we dealing with? I don’t give a shit about my own life. Hell, I’ve been chased barefoot through the jungle, I hid in a mud-ass rice paddy for a solid week breathing through a bamboo pole. There isn’t shit they can do to me. Do you hear?” said Farish, pointing the blade of his clasp knife at the test pattern on the television. “There isn’t shit you can do to me.”

Danny crossed his legs to keep his knee from jittering and said nothing. Farish’s ever-more frequent discussion of his war record disturbed him, since Farish had spent most of the Vietnam years in the state asylum at Whitfield. Usually, Farish saved his Nam stories for the pool hall. Danny had thought it was bullshit. Only recently had Farish revealed to him that the government shook certain prisoners and mental patients out of their beds at night—rapists, nuts, expendable folk—and sent them on top-secret military operations they weren’t expected to come back from. Black helicopters in the prison’s cotton fields at night, the guard towers empty, a mighty wind gusting through dry stalks. Men in balaclavas, toting AK-47s. “And tell you what,” said Farish, glancing over his shoulder before he spat into the can he carried around with him. “They wasn’t all speaking English.”

What had worried Danny was that the meth was still on the property (though Farish hid and re-hid it compulsively, several times a day). According to Farish, he had to “sit on it a while” before he could move it, but moving it (Danny knew) was the real problem, now that Dolphus was out of the picture. Catfish had offered to hook them up with someone, some cousin in South Louisiana, but that was before Farish had witnessed the snooping-under-the-car episode and charged outside with the knife and threatened to cut Catfish’s head off.

And Catfish—wisely—hadn’t come around since then, hadn’t even called on the telephone, but unfortunately Farish’s suspicions did not end here. He was watching Danny too, and he wanted Danny to know it. Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he’d figured something out and—with a great big smile on his face—said, “You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch .” And sometimes he just jumped up with no warning and started screaming, charging Danny with all kinds of imaginary lies and betrayals. The only way for Danny to keep Farish from going really nuts and beating the shit out of him was to remain calm at all times, no matter what Farish said or did; patiently, he endured Farish’s accusations (which came unpredictably and explosively, at bewildering intervals): answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head.

Then, one morning before sunrise, just as the birds were starting to sing, Farish had leapt to his feet. Raving, muttering, blowing his nose repeatedly into a bloody handkerchief, he’d produced a knapsack and demanded to be driven into town. Once there, he ordered Danny to drop him off in the middle of town and then drive back home and wait for his phone call.

But Danny (pissed off, finally, after all the abuse, the groundless accusations) had not done this. Instead, he’d driven around the corner, parked the car in the empty parking lot at the Presbyterian church and—on foot, at a cautious distance—followed Farish, stumping angrily down the sidewalk with his army knapsack.

He’d hidden the drugs in the old water tower behind the train tracks. Danny was fairly sure of this because—after losing Farish, in the overgrown wilderness around the switching yards—he’d caught sight of him away in the distance on the tower ladder, high in the air, climbing laboriously, his knapsack in his teeth, a portly silhouette against the preposterously rosy dawn sky.

He’d turned right around, walked back to his car and driven straight home: outwardly calm, but his mind all abuzz. That’s where it was hidden, in the tower, and there it still sat: five thousand dollars’ worth of methamphetamine, ten thousand when stepped on. Farish’s money, not his. He’d see a few hundred dollars—whatever Farish decided to give him—whenever it got sold. But a few hundred bucks wasn’t enough to move to Shreveport, or Baton Rouge, not enough to get himself an apartment and a girlfriend and set himself up in the long-distance truck driving business. Heavy metal on the eight-track, no more country music once he got away from this hillbilly town, not ever. Big chrome truck (smoked windows, air-conditioned cab) screaming down the Interstate, west. Away from Gum. Away from Curtis, with the sad teenage pimples that were starting to spring up on his face. Away from the faded school picture of himself that hung over the television in Gum’s trailer: skinny, furtive-looking, with long dark bangs.

Danny parked the car, lit a cigarette, and sat. The tank itself, some forty-five feet off the ground, was a wooden barrel with a peaked cap, atop spindly metal legs. A rickety utility ladder led to the top of the tank, where a trap-door opened onto a reservoir of water.

Night and day, the image of the knapsack stayed with Danny,like a Christmas present on a high shelf he wasn’t supposed to climb up and look at. Whenever he got in his car, it tugged at him with a magnetic fascination. Twice already he’d driven alone to the tank, just to sit and look up at it and daydream. A fortune. His getaway.

If it was his, which it wasn’t. And he was more than a little worried about climbing up to get it, for fear that Farish had sawn through a rung of the ladder or rigged the trap door with a spring gun or otherwise booby-trapped the tower—Farish, who had taught Danny how to construct a pipe bomb; Farish, whose laboratory was surrounded with home-made punji traps fashioned from boards and rusty nail, and laced about with trip wires concealed in the weeds; Farish, who had recently ordered, from an advertisement in the back of Soldier of Fortune , a kit for constructing spring-loaded ballistic knives. “Trip this sweetheart and—whing!” he said, leaping up exhilarated from his work on the cluttered floor while Danny—appalled—read a sentence on the back of the cardboard box that said Disables Attackers at a Range of up to Thirty Five Feet .

Who knew how he’d rigged the tower? If it was rigged at all, it was (knowing Farish) rigged to maim not kill, but Danny did not relish losing a finger or an eye. And yet, an insistent little whisper kept reminding him that Farish might not have rigged the tower at all. Twenty minutes earlier, while driving to the post office to mail his grandmother’s light bill, an insane burst of optimism had struck Danny, a dazzling vision of the carefree life awaiting him in South Louisiana and he’d turned on Main Street and driven to the switching yards with the intention of climbing straight up the tower, fishing out the bag, hiding it in the trunk—in the spare tire—and driving right out of town without looking back.