Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Chris?” said Harriet, after a startled pause. The sound of her own voice startled her even more: it was all dry and rusty, like she hadn’t spoken for days.

“When I came to relieve him he was all like: ‘Look at that kid, laying in the water like a log.’ Those toddler moms kept bugging him about it, like he would just let some dead kid float in the pool all afternoon.” He laughed, and then, when he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he swam to the other side.

“Do you want a Coke?” he said; and there was a cheerful crack in his voice that reminded her of Hely. “Free? Chris left me the key to the cooler.”

“No thanks.”

“Say, why didn’t you tell me Allison was home when I called the other day?”

Harriet looked at him—blankly, a look that made Pemberton’s brow pucker—and then hopped along the bottom of the pool and began to swim away. It was true: she’d told him that Allison wasn’t there, and hung up, even though Allison was in the next room. Moreover: she didn’t know why she’d done it, couldn’t even invent a reason.

He hopped after her; she could hear him splashing. Why won’t he leave me alone ? she thought despairingly.

“Hey,” she heard him call. “I heard Ida Rhew quit.” The next thing she knew, he had glided in front of her.

“Say,” he said—and then did a double take. “Are you crying?”

Harriet dove—kicking a healthy spray of water in his face—and darted off underwater: whoosh . The shallow end was hot, like bathtub water.

“Harriet?” she heard him call as she surfaced by the ladder. In a grim hurry, she clambered out and—head down—scurried for the dressing room with a string of black footprints winding behind her.

“Hey!” he called. “Don’t be like that. You can play dead all you want. Harriet?” he called again as she ran behind the concrete barrier and into the ladies’ locker room, her ears burning.

The only thing that gave Harriet a sense of purpose was the idea of Danny Ratliff. The thought of him itched at her. Again and again—perversely, as if bearing down on a rotten tooth—she tested herself by thinking of him; and again and again outrage flared with sick predictability, fireworks sputtering from a raw nerve.

In her bedroom, in the fading light, she lay on the carpet, staring at the flimsy black-and-white photograph she’d scissored from the yearbook. Its casual, off-centered quality—which had shocked her at first—had long since burned away and now what she saw when she looked at the picture was not a boy or even a person, but the frank embodiment of evil. His face had grown so poisonous to her that now she wouldn’t even touch the photograph except to pick it up by the edges. The despair of her house was the work of his hand. He deserved to die.

Throwing the snake on his grandmother had given her no relief. It was him she wanted. She’d caught a glimpse of his face outside the funeral home, and of one thing she was now confident: he recognized her . Their eyes had met, and locked—and his bloodshot gaze had flashed up so fierce and strange at the sight of her that the memory made her heart pound. Some weird clarity had flared between them, a recognition of some sort, and though Harriet wasn’t sure what it meant, she had the curious impression that she troubled Danny Ratliff’s thoughts fully as much as he troubled hers.

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”

Well: Harriet would not see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles. For years, she’d lived in terror of turning nine—Robin was nine when he died—but her ninth birthday had come and gone and now she wasn’t afraid of anything. Whatever was to be done, she would do it. She would strike now—while she still could, before her nerve broke and her spirit failed her—with nothing to sustain her but her own gigantic solitude.

She turned her attention to the problem at hand. Why would Danny Ratliff go to the freight yards? There wasn’t much to steal. Most of the warehouses were boarded up and Harriet had climbed up and looked inside the windows of the ones that weren’t: empty, for the most part, except for raggedy cotton bales and age-blacked machinery and dusty pesticide tanks wallowing belly-up in the corners. Wild possibilities ran through her mind: prisoners sealed in a boxcar. Bodies buried; burlap sacks of stolen bills. Skeletons, murder weapons, secret meetings.

The only way to find out exactly what he was doing, she decided, was to go down to the freight yards and see for herself.

She hadn’t talked to Hely in ages. Because he was the only seventh grader at the Band Clinic, he now thought he was too good to associate with Harriet. Never mind that he’d only been invited because the brass section was short on trombones. The last time she and Hely had spoken—by telephone, and she had called him —he’d talked of nothing but band, volunteering gossip about the big kids as if he actually knew them, referring to the drum majorette and the hot-shot brass soloists by first name. In a chatty but remote tone—as if she were a teacher, or a friend of his parents—he informed her of the many, many technical details of the half-time number they were working on: a Beatles medley, which the band would conclude by playing “Yellow Submarine” while forming a gigantic submarine (its propeller represented by a twirled baton) on the football field. Harriet listened in silence. She was silent, too, at Hely’s vague but enthusiastic interjections about how “crazy” the kids in the high-school band were. “The football players don’t have any fun. They have to get up and run laps while it’s still dark, Coach Cogwell screams at them all the time, it’s like the National Guards or something. But Chuck, and Frank, and Rusty, and the sophomores in the trumpet section … they are so much wilder than any of the guys on the football team.”

“Hmmn.”

“ All they do is talk back and crack crazy jokes and they wear their sunglasses all day long. Mr. Wooburn’s cool, he doesn’t care. Like yesterday—wait, wait,” he said to Harriet, and then to some peevish voice in the background: “What?”

Conversation. Harriet waited. After a moment or two Hely returned.

“Sorry. I have to go practice,” he said virtuously. “Dad says I need to practice every day because my new trombone is worth a lot of money.”

Harriet hung up and—in the still, dingy light of the hallway—leaned with her elbows on the telephone table and thought. Had he forgot about Danny Ratliff? Or did he just not care? Her lack of concern over Hely’s distant manner took her by surprise, but she could not help being pleased by how little pain his indifference caused her.

The night before, it had rained; and though the ground was wet, Harriet couldn’t tell if a car had recently passed through the broad gravel expanse (a loading area for cotton wagons, not really a road) that connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the river. With her backpack and her orange notebook under her arm, in case there were clues she needed to write down, she stood on the edge of the vast, black, mechanical plain, and gazed out at the scissors and loops and starts and stops of track, the white warning crosses and the dead signal lanterns, the rust-locked freight cars in the distance and the water tower rising up tall behind them, atop spindly legs: an enormous round tank with its roof peaked like the Tin Woodman’s hat in The Wizard of Oz . In early childhood, she’d formed an obscure attachment to the water tower, perhaps because of this resemblance; it seemed a dumb, friendly guardian of some sort; and when she went to sleep, she often thought of it standing lonely and unappreciated out somewhere in the dark. Then, when Harriet was six, some bad boys had climbed up the tower on Halloween and painted a scary jack-o’-lantern face on the tank, with slit eyes and sawteeth—and for many nights after, Harriet lay awake and agitated, and could not sleep for the thought of her steadfast companion (fanged now, and hostile) scowling out over the silent rooftops.