Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Right,” said Danny, after a brief pause, trying hard to hit just the right note, falling a little flat. What was Farish getting at, with all this broken-record talk about surveillance and spying, unless he was using it to conceal his true suspicions?

Except he doesn’t know a thing , thought Danny in a sudden panic. He can’t . Farish didn’t even drive.

Farish cracked his neck and said, slyly: “Hell, you know it.”

“What?” said Danny, looking around; for a moment he thought he’d spoken aloud without meaning to. But before he could jump up and protest his innocence, Farish began to pace in a tight circle with his eyes fixed on the ground.

“This isn’t generally known, by the American people , the military application of these waves,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what the fuck else. Even the fucking Pentagon don’t know what these waves really are . Oh, they can generate ’em, and track ’em—” he laughed, a short, sharp-pitched laugh—“but they don’t know what the fuck they’re made of.”

I have got to cut this shit out . All I have to do, Danny told himself—horribly aware of a fly which buzzed, repetitively, at his ear, like a tape loop in some endless fucking nightmare— all I have to do is get on the ball, clean up, sleep for a day or two. I can go grab the crank and get out of town while he’s still sitting on the ground out here gibbering about radio waves and tearing up toasters with a screwdriver….

“Electrons damage the brain,” said Farish. As he said this, he looked keenly at Danny, as if he suspected that Danny disagreed with him on some point.

Danny felt faint. It was past time for his hourly bump. Pretty soon—without it—he’d have to crash, as his over-taxed heart fluttered, as his blood pressure sank to a thread, half-crazy with the fear it would stop altogether because sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; dammed up, irresistible, it rolled in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death.

“And what are radio waves?” said Farish.

Farish had been through this with Danny before. “Electrons.”

“Exactly, numbnuts!” Farish, with a manic, Charles Manson glitter, leaned forward and thumped his own skull with surprising violence. “Electrons! Electrons!”

The screwdriver glinted: bang , Danny saw it, on a giant movie screen, like a cold wind blowing from his future … saw himself lying on his sweaty little bed, knocked out and defenseless and too weak to move. Clock ticking, curtains stirring. Then creak went the trailer’s padded door, ever so slowly, Farish easing quietly to his bedside, butcher knife in his fist….

“ No !” he cried, and opened his eyes to see Farish’s good eye bearing down on him like a power drill.

For a long, bizarre moment, they stared at each other. Then Farish snapped: “Look at your hand. What you done to it?”

Confused, Danny brought both hands up, trembling, before his eyes and saw that his thumb was covered in blood where he’d been picking at the hangnail.

“Better look after yourself, brother,” Farish said.

In the morning, Edie—dressed soberly in navy blue—came by Harriet’s house to pick up Harriet’s mother, so the two of them could go out for breakfast before Edie met the accountant at ten. She’d called to arrange the date three days earlier, and Harriet—after answering the telephone, and getting her mother to pick up—had listened to the first part of their conversation before putting down the receiver. Edie had said that there was something personal they needed to talk about, that it was important, and that she didn’t want to talk about it over the telephone. Now, in the hallway, she refused to sit down and kept glancing at her wristwatch, glancing at the top of the stairs.

“They’ll be through serving breakfast by the time we get there,” she said, and recrossed her arms with an impatient little clucking sound: tch tch tch . Her cheeks were pale with powder and her lips (sharply drawn in a cupid’s bow, in the waxy scarlet lipstick that Edie usually saved for church) were less like a lady’s lips than the thin, pursed lips of old Sieur d’Iberville in Harriet’s Mississippi history book. Her suit—nipped at the waist, with three-quarter-length sleeves—was very severe, stylish too in its old-fashioned way, the suit that (Libby said) made Edie look like Mrs. Simpson who had married the King of England.

Harriet, who was sprawled across the bottom step and glowering at the carpet, raised her head and blurted: “But WHY can’t I go?”

“For one,” said Edie—looking not at Harriet but over her head—“your mother and I have something to discuss.”

“I’ll be quiet!”

“In private. For two,” Edie said, turning her chilly bright gaze quite ferociously on Harriet, “ you aren’t dressed to go anywhere. Why don’t you go upstairs and get in the bathtub?”

“If I do, will you bring me back some pancakes?”

“Oh, Mother,” said Charlotte, hurrying down the stairs in an unpressed dress with her hair still damp from the bath. “I’m so sorry. I—”

“Oh! That’s all right!” said Edie, but her voice made it plain that it wasn’t all right, not at all.

Out they went. Harriet—all in a sulk—watched them drive away, through the dusty organdy curtains.

Allison was still upstairs, asleep. She’d come in late the night before. Except for certain mechanical noises—the tick of the clock, the whir of the exhaust fan and the hum of the hot-water heater—the house was as silent as a submarine.

On the counter in the kitchen stood a tin of saltine crackers which had been purchased before Ida’s departure and Libby’s death. Harriet curled up in Ida’s chair and ate a few of them. The chair still smelled like Ida, if she closed her eyes and breathed deep, but it was an elusive scent that vanished if she tried too hard to capture it. Today was the the first day that she hadn’t waked up crying—or wanting to cry—since the morning she left for Camp de Selby but though her eyes were dry and her head was clear she felt restless; the entire house lay still, as if waiting for something to happen.

Harriet ate the rest of her crackers, dusted her hands, and then—climbing on a chair—stood on tiptoe to examine the pistols on the top shelf of the gun cabinet. From among the exotic gambler’s pistols (the pearl-handled Derringers, the rakish dueling sets) she chose the biggest and ugliest pistol of the lot—a double-action Colt revolver, which was most like the pistols she had seen policemen use on television.

She hopped down, closed the cabinet and—placing the gun carefully on the carpet, with both hands (it was heavier than it looked)—ran to the bookcase in the dining room for the Encyclopaedia Britannica .

Guns. See: Firearms.

She carried the F volume into the living room and used the revolver to prop it open as she sat, cross-legged on the carpet, puzzling over the diagram and text. The technical vocabulary baffled her; after half an hour or so she went back to the shelf for the dictionary but that wasn’t much help, either.

Again and again, she returned to the diagram, leaning over it on all fours. Trigger guard. Swing-out cylinder … but which way did it swing? The gun in the picture didn’t match the gun she had in front of her: crane latch, cylinder crane assembly, ejector rod ….

Suddenly something clicked; the cylinder swung out: empty. The first bullets she tried wouldn’t go in the holes, and neither would the second ones, but mixed in the same box were some different ones that seemed to slide in all right.