Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“You see,” Eugene was saying, “that snake’s a servant of the Lord, it’s His creature, too, you see. Noah taken it on the ark with all the others. You can’t just say ‘oh, the rattlesnake is evil’ because God made it all . It’s all good. His hand hath wrought the serpent, just as it wrought the little lamb.” And he cast his eyes over to a corner of the room where the light didn’t really shine, where Danny—horrified—stifled with his fist a scream at the breathless black creature of his old nightmare, shuddering, tugging, struggling small and frantic on the floor by Eugene’s feet … and though it was nothing to retell or speak of, a thing more piteous than horrible, still the rank old fluttering flavor of it was, to Danny, horror beyond bloodshed or description, black bird, black men and women and children scrambling for the safety of the creek bank, terror and explosions, a foul oily taste in his mouth and a trembling as if his very body was falling to pieces: spasmed muscles, snapped tendons, dissolving to black feathers and washed bone.

Harriet too—early the same morning, just as it was light out—started up from her bed in a panic. What had scared her, what dream, she hardly knew. It was daylight, but only just. The rain had stopped, and the room was still and shadowy. From Allison’s bed: jumbled teddy bears, a cock-eyed kangaroo, stared at her fixedly over a drift of bedclothes, nothing of Allison visible except a long wisp of hair floating and fanning across the pillow, like the hair of a drowned girl awash at water’s surface.

No clean shirts were in the bureau. Quietly, she eased Allison’s drawer open—and was delighted to find, among the tangle of dirty clothes, a pressed and neatly folded shirt: an old Girl Scout shirt. Harriet brought it up to her face for a long dreamy breath: it still smelled, just faintly, of Ida’s washing.

Harriet put on her shoes and tiptoed downstairs. All was silence except the tick of the clock; the clutter and mess was less sordid, somehow, in the morning light which glowed rich upon the banister and the dusty mahogany tabletop. In the stairwell smiled the lush schoolgirl portrait of Harriet’s mother: pink lips, white teeth, sparkling gigantic eyes with white stars that flashed, ting , in dazzled pupils. Harriet crept by it—like a burglar past a motion detector, all doubled over—and into the living room, where she stooped and retrieved the gun from under Ida’s chair.

In the hall closet, she searched for something to carry it in, and found a thick plastic drawstring bag. But the outline, she noticed, was obvious through the plastic. So she took it out again, wrapped it in several thick layers of newspaper, and slung the bundle over her shoulder like Dick Whittington in the storybook gone to seek his fortune.

As soon as she stepped outside a bird sang out, practically in her ear it seemed: a sweet clear laddering phrase which burst and fell and surged up again. Though August was not yet over something dusty and cool, like fall, tingled in the morning air; the zinnias in Mrs. Fountain’s yard—firecracker reds, hot orange and gold—were starting to nod, their raggedy heads freckled and fading.

Except for the birds—which sang loud and piercingly, with a loony optimism akin to emergency—the street was solitary and still. A sprinkler whirred on an empty lawn; the street lamps, the lighted porches glowed in long, empty perspectives and even the insignificant sound of her footsteps on the pavement seemed to echo, and carry far.

Dewy grass, wet streets that rolled out black and wide like they went on forever. As she drew closer to the freight yards, the lawns got smaller, the houses shabbier and closer together. Several streets over—towards Italian Town—a solitary car roared past. Cheerleader practice would be starting soon, only a few blocks away, on the shady grounds of the Old Hospital. Harriet had heard them shouting and yelling over there the last few mornings.

Past Natchez Street, the sidewalks were buckled and cracked and very narrow, hardly a foot wide. Harriet walked past boarded-up buildings with sagging porches, yards with rusted propane tanks and grass that hadn’t been cut in weeks. A red Chow dog with matted fur hit his chain-link fence with a rattle, teeth flashing in his blue mouth: chop chop . Mean as he was, the Chow, Harriet felt sorry for him. He looked as if he’d never been bathed in his life and in winter his owners left him outside with nothing but an aluminum pie tin of frozen water.

Past the food stamp office; past the burned-out grocery store (struck by lightning, never rebuilt), she turned off on the gravel road that led to the freight yards and the railroad water tower. She had no very clear idea what she was going to do, or what lay ahead of her—and it was best if she didn’t think about it too much. Studiously, she kept her eyes on the wet gravel, which was littered with black sticks and leafy branches blown down by the storm the night before.

Long ago, the water tower had provided the water for steam engines, but if it was used for anything now, she didn’t know. A couple of years before, Harriet and a boy named Dick Pillow had climbed up there to see how far they could see—which was pretty far, practically to the Interstate. The view had captivated her: wash fluttering on lines, peaked roofs like a field of origami arks, roofs red and green and black and silver, roofs of shingle and copper and tar and tin, spread out below them in the airy dreamy distance. It was like seeing into another country. The vista had a whimsical, toy quality which reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Orient—of China, of Japan. Beyond crawled the river, its yellow surface wrinkled and glinting, and the distances seemed so vast that it was easy to believe that a glittering clockwork Asia lay hammering and humming and clanging its million miniature bells just beyond the horizon, past the river’s muddy dragon-coils.

The view had captivated her so completely that she had paid little attention to the tank. Try as she might, she could not remember exactly what it was like up top, or how it was constructed, only that it was wooden and that a door was cut into the roof. This, in Harriet’s memory, was an outline about two feet square with hinges and a handle like a kitchen cabinet. Though her imagination was so vivid that she could never be quite sure what she actually remembered, and what her fancy had colored in to fill the blanks, the more she thought of Danny Ratliff, crouched at the top of the tower (his tense posture, the agitated way he kept looking over his shoulder), the more it seemed to her that he was hiding something or trying to hide himself. But what rose up again and again in her mind was the jangled, off-centered agitation as his gaze had brushed across her own, and flared up, like a sunbeam striking a signal mirror: it was as if he were bouncing back a code, a distress alarm, a recognition. Somehow he knew she was out here ; she was in his field of awareness; in a strange way (and it gave Harriet a chill to realize it) Danny Ratliff was the only person who’d really looked at her for a long time.

The sunlit rails gleamed like dark mercury, arteries branching out silver from the switch points; the old telegraph poles were shaggy with kudzu and Virginia creeper and, above them, rose the water tower, its surface all washed out by the sun. Harriet, cautiously, stepped towards it in the weedy clearing. Around and around it she walked, around the rusted metal legs, at a distance of about ten feet.

Then, with a nervous glance over her shoulder (no cars, or sounds of cars, no noise but bird cries) she came forward to look up at the ladder. The bottom rung was higher than she remembered. A very tall man might not have to jump for it, but anybody else would. Two years ago, when she’d come with Dick, she’d stood on his shoulders and then—precariously—he’d climbed up on the banana seat of his bicycle to follow her.