Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Where?” The speed of the moving automobile made him feel like he was forgetting something or had left something important behind.

“There, there, there.”

“That truck’s green .”

“No it’s not— there !” Farish cried triumphantly. “See, there goes another one!”

Danny—heart hammering, pressure rising in his head—felt like saying so fucking what but—for fear of setting Farish off—refrained. Crashing over fences, through tidy town yards with barbecue grills: ridiculous. The craziness of it made him feel faint. This was the part of the story where you were supposed to snap to your senses and straighten up: stop cold, turn the car around, change your life forever, the part that Danny never quite believed.

“Look there.” Farish slapped the dashboard, so loudly Danny nearly jumped out of his skin. “I know you seen that one. Them trucks are mobilizing. Getting ready to go.”

Light everywhere: too much light. Sunspots, molecules. The car had become a foreign idea. “I have to pull over,” Danny said.

“What?” said Farish.

“I can’t drive.” He could feel his voice getting high and hysterical; cars swooshed by, colored energy streaks, crowded dreams.

In the parking lot of the White Kitchen, he sat with his forehead on the wheel and took deep breaths while Farish explained, pounding his fist into his palm, that it wasn’t the meth itself that wore you down, but not eating. That was how he—Farish—kept from getting strung out. He ate regular meals, whether he wanted them or not. “But you, you’re just like Gum,” he said, prodding Danny’s bicep with his forefinger. “You forget to eat. That’s why you’re thin as a bone.”

Danny stared at the dashboard. Monoxide vapors and nausea. It was not pleasant to think of himself as being like Gum in any way, and yet with his burnt skin and hollow cheeks and sharp, thin, wasted build, he was the only one of all the grandsons who really looked much like her. It had never occurred to him before.

“Here,” said Farish, hoisting his hip, feeling busily for his wallet: happy to be of service, happy to instruct. “I know just what you need. A fountain Coke and a hot ham sandwich. That’ll fix you right up.”

Laboriously, he opened the car door and hoisted himself out (gamely, stiff in his legs, swaying like an old sea captain) and went inside to get the fountain Coke and the hot ham sandwich.

Danny sat in silence. Farish’s smell hung plump and extravagant in the stifling car. The last thing in the world he wanted was a hot ham sandwich; somehow he would have to choke the thing down.

The girl’s afterburn raced through his mind like jet trails: a dark-headed blur, a moving target. But it was the face of the old lady on the porch that stayed with him. As he drove past that house (her house?) in what felt like slow motion, the old lady’s eyes (powerful eyes, full of light) had passed over him without seeing him and he’d felt a gliddery, queasy shock of recognition. For he knew the old lady—intimately, but distantly, like something from a long-ago dream.

Through the plate glass window, he saw Farish leaning on the counter, jawing expansively with a bony little waitress he liked. Possibly because they were afraid of him, or because they needed the business, or maybe because they were just kind, the waitresses at the White Kitchen listened respectfully to Farish’s wild stories, and didn’t seem irritated by his grooming or his bad eye or his hectoring know-it-all streak. If he raised his voice, if he got agitated and started waving his arms around or knocked over his coffee, they remained calm and polite. Farish, in turn, refrained from foul language in their presence, even when he was wired out of his mind, and on Valentine’s Day, he’d even brought a bunch of flowers down to the restaurant.

Keeping an eye on his brother, Danny got out of the car and walked around to the side of the restaurant, past a margin of dried-up shrubs, to the phone booth. Half the pages in the directory had been torn out, but luckily the last half, and he ran a trembling fingertip down the C ’s. The name on the mailbox had been Cleve. Sure enough, right there in black and white: on Margin Street, an E. Cleve.

And—strangely—it chimed. Danny stood in the stifling hot phone booth, letting the connection sink in. For he had met the old lady, so long ago that it seemed from a different life. She was known around the county—not so much for herself but for her father, who had been a big cheese politically, and for the former house of her family, which was called Tribulation. But the house—famous in its day—was long gone, and now survived in name only. On the Interstate, not far from where the house had been, there was a greasy-spoon restaurant (with a white-columned mansion on the billboard) calling itself Tribulation Steak House. The billboard was still there, but now even the restaurant was boarded up and haunted-looking, with graffiti-covered signs that said No Trespassing and weeds growing in the planters out front, as if something about the land itself had sucked all the newness out of the building and made it look old.

When he was a kid (what grade, he couldn’t remember, school was all a dreary blur to him) he’d gone to a birthday party at Tribulation. The memory had stayed with him: huge rooms, spooky and dim and historical, with rusty wallpaper and chandeliers. The old lady who the house belonged to was Robin’s grandmother, and Robin was a schoolmate of Danny’s. Robin lived in town, and Danny—who often roamed the streets on foot, while Farish was in the pool hall—had spotted him late one windy afternoon in fall, playing alone in front of his house. They stood and looked at each other for a while—Danny in the street, Robin in his yard—like wary little animals. Then Robin said: “I like Batman.”

“I like Batman, too,” said Danny. Then they ran up and down the sidewalk together and played until it got dark.

Since Robin had invited everybody in the class to his party (raising his hand for permission, walking up and down the rows and handing an envelope to every single kid) it was easy for Danny to hitch a ride without his father or Gum knowing. Kids like Danny didn’t have birthday parties, and Danny’s father didn’t want him attending them even if he was invited (which he usually wasn’t) because no boy of his was going to pay for something useless like a present, not for some rich man’s son or daughter. Jimmy George Ratliff wasn’t bankrolling that nonsense. Their grandmother reasoned differently. If Danny went to a party, he’d be obligated to the host: “beholden.” Why accept invitations of town folk who (no doubt) had only invited Danny to make fun of him: of his hand-me-down clothes, of his country manners? Danny’s family were poor; they were “plain people.” The fanciness of cake and party clothes was not for them. Gum was forever reminding her grandsons of this, so there was never any danger of them growing exuberant and forgetting it.

Danny was expecting the party to be at Robin’s house (which was nice enough) but he’d been stunned when the packed station wagon piloted by the mother of some girl he didn’t know drove out of the city limits, past cotton fields, down a long alley of trees and up to the columned house. He didn’t belong in a place like this. And, even worse, he hadn’t brought a present. At school, he’d tried to wrap up a Matchbox car he’d found, in some notebook paper, but he didn’t have any tape and it didn’t look like a present at all, only a wadded-up sheet of old homework.

But no one seemed to notice he didn’t have a present; at least no one said anything. And, up close, the house wasn’t so grand as it had looked from far away—in fact, it was falling to pieces, with moth-eaten rugs and broken plaster and cracks on the ceiling. The old lady—Robin’s grandmother—had presided over the party, and she too was large and formal and frightening; when she’d opened the front door she’d scared him to death, looming over him with her stiff posture, her black, rich-looking clothes and her angry eyebrows. Her voice was sharp, and so were her footsteps, clicking fast through the echoing rooms, so brisk and witchy that the children stopped talking when she walked into their midst. But she had handed him a beautiful piece of white cake on a glass plate: a piece with a fat icing rose, and writing too, the big pink H in HAPPY . She had looked over the heads of the other children, crowding around her at the beautiful table; and she had reached out over their heads and handed to Danny (hanging in the back) the special piece with the pink rose, as if Danny was the one person in the room who she wanted to have it.