Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Dandelions, tufts of dead grass poking through the gravel, crickets singing frantically; they seemed to know that it was the end of summer, that soon they would be dying, and the urgency of their song gave the morning air a fevered, unstable, shimmery feeling. Harriet examined the legs of the tank: metal H-girders, perforated every two feet or so with oblong holes, angling in towards the tank ever so slightly. Higher up, the substructure was supported by metal poles that crossed diagonally in a giant X. If she shimmied up high enough on a front leg (it was a long way up; Harriet was no good at estimating distances) she might possibly inch her way over to the ladder on one of the lower crossbars.

Gamely, she started up. Though the cut had healed, her left palm was still sore, forcing her to favor her right hand. The perforations were just large enough to give her the smallest possible openings in which to wedge her fingers and the tip of her sneakers.

Up she climbed, breathing hard. It was slow going. The girder was powdered with heavy rust that came off brick red on her hands. Though she was not afraid of heights—heights exhilarated her; she loved to climb—there was not much to hold on to and every inch was an effort.

Even if I fall , she told herself, it won’t kill me . Harriet had fallen (and jumped) from some very high places—the roof of the toolshed, the big limb of the pecan tree in Edie’s yard, the scaffolding in front of the Presbyterian church—and never broken a bone. All the same, she felt exposed to prying eyes so high up, and every sound from below, every crackle or bird-cry, made her want to look away from the rusted beam six inches in front of her nose. Close up, the beam, it was a world all to itself, the desert surface of a rusty red planet….

Her hands were growing numb. Sometimes, on the play-ground—when playing tug of war, hanging from a rope or from the top bar of a jungle gym—Harriet was overcome by a strange impulse to relax her grip and let herself fall, and this was the impulse she now fought. Up she hauled herself, gritting her teeth, concentrating all her strength into her aching fingertips, and a rhyme from an old book, a baby book, shook loose and jingled through her mind:

Old Mr. Chang, I’ve oft heard it said,

You wear a basket upon your head,

You’ve two pairs of scissors to cut your meat,

And two pairs of chopsticks with which you eat …

With her last surge of willpower, she grabbed the lowest crossbar and pulled herself up. Old Mr. Chang! His picture in the storybook had scared her to death when she was little: with his pointed Chinese hat, and his threadlike moustache, and his long sly Mandarin eyes, but what had scared her most about him was the slender pair of scissors he held up, ever so delicately, and his long thin mocking smile….

Harriet paused and took stock of her position. Next—this was the tricky part—she was going to have to swing her leg out into open space, to the crossbeam. She took a deep breath and hoisted herself into the emptiness.

A sideways view of the ground heaved up at her all cock-eyed, and for a heartbeat, Harriet was sure she was falling. The next instant she found herself astraddle the bar, clutching it like a sloth. She was very high up now, high enough to break her neck, and she closed her eyes and rested for a moment, her cheek against the rough iron.

Old Mr. Chang, I’ve oft heard it said,

You wear a basket upon your head,

You’ve two pairs of scissors to cut your meat …

Carefully, Harriet opened her eyes and—bracing herself on the girder—sat up. How high above the ground she was! Just like this she’d sat—astraddle a branch, muddy underpants and the ants stinging her legs—the time she’d climbed the tree and couldn’t get down. That was the summer after first grade. Off she had wandered—from Vacation Bible School, was that it? Up she had climbed, fearless, “like a dern squirrel!” exclaimed the old man who had happened to hear Harriet’s flat, embarrassed little voice calling for help from on high.

Slowly, Harriet stood, clutching the girder, knees wobbling as she rose. She transferred her grip to the overhead crossbar, and—hand over hand—walked herself down. She could still see that old man with his humped back and his flat, bloodstained face, peering up at her through a wilderness of branches. “Who you belong to?” he’d cried up to her in a hoarse voice. He had used to live in the gray stucco house by the Baptist church, that old man, lived there alone. Now he was dead; and there was only a stump in his front yard where the pecan tree had been. How he had started to hear her emotionless cries (“Help … help …”) floating down from out of nowhere—looking up, down, around and all about, as if a ghost had tapped him on the shoulder!

The angle of the X had grown too shallow to stand in. Harriet sat again, straddling the bars, grasped the bars on the other side. The angle was difficult; there wasn’t much feeling in her hands any more and her heart flip-flopped violently as she swung herself out into open space—arms trembling with fatigue—and around to the other side….

Safe now. Down she slid, down the lower left crossbar of the X, as if sliding down the banister in her own house. He’d died a terrible death, that old man, and Harriet could scarcely bear to think of it. Robbers had broken into his house, forced him to lie on the floor by his bed and beat him senseless with a baseball bat; by the time his neighbors got worried and came to check on him, he was lying dead in a pool of blood.

She’d come to rest against the opposite girder; the ladder was just beyond. It wasn’t such a tricky stretch, but she was tired and growing careless—and only when she found herself gripping the ladder did a jolt of terror snap through her body, for her foot had slipped, and she’d caught herself only at the last instant. Now it was over, the dangerous moment, before she’d even known it was happening.

She closed her eyes, held on tight until her breathing returned to normal. When she opened them again, it was as if she were suspended from the rope ladder of a hot air balloon. All the earth seemed to spread itself out before her in a panoramic view, like the castle view in her old storybook From the Tower Window :

The Splendour falls on Castle walls And snowy

Summits old in Story,

The long light shakes across the lakes

And the wild Cataract leaps in glory ….

But there was no time for daydreaming. The roar of a crop duster—which she took, momentarily, for a car—startled her badly; and she turned and scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder as fast as she could.

Danny lay quietly on his back, staring at the ceiling. The light was harsh and sour; he felt weak, as if recovering from a fever, and suddenly he realized that he’d been looking up at the same bar of sunlight for quite some time. Somewhere outside, he heard Curtis singing, some word that sounded like “gumdrop,” over and over again; as he lay there, he gradually became aware of a strange thumping noise, as of a dog scratching itself, on the floor beside his bed.

Danny struggled to his elbows—and recoiled violently at the sight of Farish, who (arms crossed, foot tapping) sat in Eugene’s vacated chair, regarding him with a gluey, deliberative eye. His knee was jittering; his beard was dripping wet around the mouth, as if he had spilled something on himself or else had been drooling and gnawing on his own lips.

A bird—a bluebird or something, sweet little tweedle dee like on television—twittered outside the window. Danny shifted and was about to sit up when Farish lunged forward and prodded him in the chest.