Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

So that was the old lady. E. Cleve . He had not seen her or thought of her in years. When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not help but relish the spectacle of “the high and mighty” brought down a notch or two, and Gum resented Tribulation in particular, since as a girl she’d picked cotton in its fields. There was a certain snooty class of white—traitors to their race, said Danny’s father—who regarded white folks down on their luck as no better than the common yard nigger.

Yes: the old lady had come down, and to fall in the world as she had fallen was foreign, and sad and mysterious. Danny’s own family had nowhere much to fall from. And Robin (a generous, friendly kid) was dead—dead many years now—murdered by some creep passing through, or some filthy old tramp who wandered up from the train tracks, nobody knew. At school that Monday morning, the teacher, Mrs. Marter (a mean fat-ass with a beehive, who had made Danny wear a woman’s yellow wig for a whole week at school, punishment for something or other, he couldn’t remember what), stood whispering with the other teachers in the hall, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. After the bell rang, she sat down at her desk and said, “Class, I have some very sad news.”

Most of the town kids had already heard—but not Danny. At first, he’d thought Mrs. Marter was bullshitting them, but when she made them get out crayons and construction paper and start making cards to send to Robin’s family, he realized she wasn’t. On his card, he drew careful pictures of Batman and Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, standing in front of Robin’s house, all in a line. He wanted to draw them in action postures—rescuing Robin, pulverizing bad guys—but he wasn’t a good enough artist, he’d just had to draw them standing in a line staring straight ahead. As an afterthought, he drew himself in the picture too, off to the side. He’d let Robin down, he felt. Usually the maid wasn’t around on Sundays, but that day, she was. If he hadn’t let her chase him off, earlier in the afternoon, then Robin might still be alive.

As it was, Danny felt narrowly missed. He and Curtis were often left by their father to roam the town alone—often at night—and it wasn’t like they had a home or any friendly neighbors to run to if some creep came after them. Though Curtis hid obligingly enough, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t talk, and had to be constantly shushed—but still, Danny was glad of his company, even when Curtis got scared and had coughing fits. The worst nights were when Danny was alone. Still as a mouse, he hid in toolsheds and behind people’s hedges, breathing fast and shallow in the dark, until the pool hall closed at twelve. Out he crept from his hiding place; down the dark streets he hurried, all the way to the lighted pool hall, looking over his shoulder at the slightest noise. And the fact that he never saw anybody particularly scary during his night wanderings somehow made him more afraid, as if Robin’s murderer was invisible or had secret powers. He started having bad dreams about Batman, where Batman turned in an empty place and started walking towards him, fast, with glowy evil eyes.

Danny wasn’t a cryer—his father didn’t permit any of that, even from Curtis—but one day, in front of his whole family, Danny broke down sobbing, surprising himself as much as anyone. And when he couldn’t stop, his father yanked him up by the arm and offered to give him something to cry about. After the belt-whipping, Ricky Lee cornered him in the trailer’s narrow hallway. “Guess he was your boyfriend.”

“Guess you’d rather it was you ,” said his grandmother, kindly.

The very next day, Danny had gone to school bragging of what he had not done. In some strange way, he’d only been trying to save face— he wasn’t afraid of anything, not him—but still he felt uneasy when he thought about it, how sadness had turned to lies and swaggering, how part of it was jealousy, even, as if Robin’s life was all parties and presents and cake. Because sure: things hadn’t been easy for Danny, but at least he wasn’t dead.

The bell over the door tinkled and Farish strode out into the parking lot with a greasy paper bag. He stopped cold when he saw the empty car.

Smoothly, Danny stepped out of the phone booth: no sudden moves. For the last few days, Farish’s behavior had been so erratic that Danny was starting to feel like a hostage.

Farish turned to look at Danny and his eyes were glassy. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“Uh, no problem, I was just looking in the phone book,” said Danny, moving quickly to the car, making sure to keep a pleasant neutral expression on his face. These days, any little thing out of the ordinary could set Farish off; the night before, upset over something he’d seen on television, he’d slammed a glass of milk on the table so hard that the glass broke in his hand.

Farish was staring at him aggressively, tracking him with his eyes. “You’re not my brother.”

Danny stopped, his hand on the car door. “What?”

With absolutely no warning, Farish charged forward and knocked Danny flat on the pavement.

When Harriet got home, her mother was upstairs talking to her father on the telephone. What this meant, Harriet didn’t know, but it seemed like a bad sign. Chin in hands, she sat on the stairs, waiting. But after a long time had passed—half an hour or so—and still her mother did not appear, she pushed backwards to sit a step higher, and then a step higher, until finally she had worked all the way up and was perched at the very top of the stairs, with her back to the bolt of light which shone from under her mother’s bedroom door. Carefully, she listened, but though the tone of her mother’s voice was clear (husky, whispery) the words weren’t.

Finally she gave up and went down to the kitchen. Her breath was still shallow, and every now and then, a muscle twitched painfully in her chest wall. Through the window over the sink, the sunset streamed into the kitchen all red and purple, grandiose, the way it got in the late summer as hurricane weather approached. Thank God I didn’t run back to Edie’s , she thought, blinking rapidly. In her panic, she’d come very close to leading them directly to Edie’s front door. Edie was tough: but she was still an old lady, with broken ribs.

Locks in the house: all old, box-type locks, easy to break. The front and back doors had old-fashioned barrel bolts at the top, which were useless. Harriet herself had got in trouble for breaking the lock on the back door. She’d thought it was stuck, and thrown her weight against it from the outside; now, months later, the fitting still dangled from the rotten frame by a single nail.

From the open window, a little shivery breeze blew in across Harriet’s cheek. Upstairs and down: open windows everywhere, propped by fans, open windows in practically every room. To think of them all gave her a nightmarish sense of being unprotected, exposed. What was to keep him from coming right up to the house? And why should he bother with the windows, when he could open pretty much any door he wanted?

Allison ran barefoot into the kitchen and picked up the phone as if she was going to call someone—and listened for several seconds, with a funny look on her face, before she pressed the receiver button and then, gingerly, hung up.

“Who’s she talking to?” asked Harriet.

“Dad.”

“ Still ?”