Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Why, that’s you,” he said.

“I—” Danny shuddered and turned up his red-rimmed eyes at the ceiling.

“Where’d this come from?”

“ She left it.”

“Left it where?” said Eugene, and then said: “What’s that noise?” Outside, someone was wailing loudly. “Is that Curtis?” he said, standing up.

“No—” Danny drew a deep, ragged breath—“it’s Farish.”

“Farish?”

Danny scraped back his chair; he looked wildly about the room. The sobs were broken, guttural, as despairing as a child’s sobs but more violent, as if Farish was spitting and choking up his own heart.

“My gosh,” said Eugene, awed. “Listen at that.”

“I had a bad time with him just now, in the parking lot of the White Kitchen,” said Danny. He held up his hands, which were dirty and skinned up.

“What happened?” said Eugene. He went to the window and peered out. “Where’s Curtis?” Curtis, who had bronchial and breathing problems, often went into savage coughing fits when he was upset—or when someone else was, which got him more upset than anything.

Danny shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained, as from overuse. “I’m sick of being scared all the time.” To Eugene’s astonishment he drew a mean-looking billhook knife from his boot and—with a stoned but significant look—set it down on the table with a solid clack.

“This is my protection,” he said. “From him .” And he rolled up his eyes in a particularly squidlike way—whites showing—that Eugene took to mean Farish.

The awful crying had died down. Eugene left the window and sat down by Danny. “You’re killing yourself,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Get some sleep,” Danny repeated. He stood up, as if he was about to make a speech, and then sat back down.

“When I us coming up,” said Gum, creeping in on her walker, rocking forward an inch at a time, click click, click click , “my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that’ll sit down in a chair and read a book.”

This she said with a sort of peaceful tenderness, as if the plain wisdom of the remark did her father credit. The booklet lay on the table. With a trembling old hand, she reached out and picked it up. Holding it at arm’s length, she looked at the front of it, and then she turned it around and looked at the back. “Bless ye heart, Gene.”

Eugene looked over the tops of his glasses. “What is it?”

“Oh,” said Gum, after a tolerant pause. “Well. I just hate to see ye get your hopes up. It’s a hard old world for folks like us. I sure do hate to think of all them young college professors, standing up in the job line ahead of you.”

“Hon? Can’t I just look at the dern thing?” Certainly she meant no harm, his grandmother: she was just a poor little broken-down old lady who’d worked hard her whole life, and never had anything, and never had a chance, and never knew what a chance was. But why this meant her grandsons didn’t have a chance, either, Eugene wasn’t quite sure.

“It’s just something I picked up at the Extension Office, hun,” he said. “For free. You ought to go down there and look sometime. They have things there on how to grow just about every crop and vegetable and tree there is.”

Danny—who had been sitting quietly all this time, staring into space—stood up, a little too suddenly. He had a glazed look, and swayed on his feet. Both Eugene and Gum looked at him. He took a step backwards.

“Them glasses look good on you,” he said to Eugene.

“Thank you,” said Eugene, reaching up self-consciously to adjust them.

“They look good,” said Danny. His eyes were glassy with an uncomfortable fascination. “You ought to wear them all the time.”

He turned; and as he did, his knees buckled under him and he fell to the floor.

All the dreams Danny had fought off for the past two weeks thundered down on him all at once, like a cataract from a burst dam, with wrecks and jetsam from various stages of his life jumbled and crashing down along with it—so that he was thirteen again, and lying on a cot his first night in Juvenile Hall (tan cinder block, industrial fan rocking back and forth on the concrete floor like it was about to take off and fly away) but also five—in first grade—and nine, with his mother in the hospital, missing her so terribly, so afraid of her dying, and of his drunk father in the next room, that he lay awake in a delirium of terror memorizing every single spice on the printed curtains which had then hung in his bedroom. They were old kitchen curtains: Danny still didn’t know what Coriander was, or Mace, but he could still see the brown letters jingling along the mustard-yellow cotton ( mace, nutmeg, coriander, clove ) and the very names were a poem that called up grinning Nightmare, in top hat, to his very bedside….

Tossing on his bed, Danny was all these ages at once and yet himself, and twenty—with a record, with a habit, with a virtual fortune of his brother’s crank calling him in a shrill eerie voice from its hiding place high above the town—so that the water tower was confused in his mind with a tree he’d climbed and thrown a bird-dog puppy out of once, when he was a kid, to see what would happen (it died) and his guilty thoughts about ripping Farish off were stoppered and shaken up with shameful childhood lies he’d told about driving race cars, and beating up and killing people; with memories of school, and court, and prison, and the guitar his father had made him quit playing because he said it took too much work (where was that guitar? he needed to find it, people were waiting for him out in the car, if he didn’t hurry they’d go off and leave him). The tug of all these contradictory times and places made him roll back and forth on his pillow from the confusion of it all. He saw his mother—his mother!—looking in the window at him, and the concern on her swollen, kindly face made him want to weep; other faces made him start back in terror. How to tell the difference between the living and the dead? Some were friendly; some weren’t. And they all spoke to him and to each other, though they’d never known each other in life, walking in and out in large, businesslike groups, and it was hard to know who belonged where and what they were all doing together here in his room, where they didn’t belong, their voices mingled with the rain striking down on the tin roof of the trailer and themselves as gray and formless as the rain.

Eugene—wearing the strange, scholarly drugstore glasses—sat by his bed. Lighted by the occasional flash of heat lightning, he and the chair he sat in were the only stationary objects amidst a bewildering and ever-changing swirl of people. Every so often, the room seemed to empty, and Danny bolted upright, for fear he was dying, for fear that his pulse had stopped and his blood was cooling and even his ghosts were trailing away from him….

“Set down, set ,” said Eugene. Eugene: nutty as a fruitcake, but—besides Curtis—the gentlest of the brothers. Farish had a big dose of their father’s meanness—not so much since he’d shot himself in the head. That had knocked some of the starch out of him. Ricky Lee probably had it the worst, that mean streak. It was serving him well in Angola.

But Eugene wasn’t so much like Daddy, with his tobacco-stained teeth and billy-goat eyes, but more like their poor drunk mother who’d died raving about an Angel of God standing barefoot on the chimney. She’d been plain, God bless her, and Eugene—who was plain, too, with his close-set eyes and his honest, lumpy nose—looked very much like her in the face. Something about the glasses softened the ugliness of his scar. Poof: the lightning through the window lit him up blue from behind; the burn splashed over his left eye beneath the glasses was like a red star. “Problem is,” he was saying, hands clasped between his knees, “I didn’t see that you couldn’t separate that creeping serpent out of all creation. If you do, oh man, it’s going to bite you.” Danny stared at him in wonder. The glasses gave him an alien, learned presence, a schoolmaster from a dream. Eugene had come back from prison with a habit of talking in long, disjointed paragraphs—like a man talking to four walls, nobody listening—and this too was like their mother, who rolled around on the bed and spoke out to visitors who weren’t there and called on Eleanor Roosevelt and Isaiah and Jesus.