Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

From the car, Farish shouted: “Don’t make me come after you!”

“Listen,” said Danny, casting a nervous glance back at the Trans Am, “will you look after Curtis? Promise me?”

“What for? Where you going?” said Eugene, and looked up at him sharply. Then he turned his head.

“No,” he said, blinking, “no, don’t tell me, don’t say another word—”

“I’m going to count three,” screamed Farish.

“Promise?”

“Promise and swear to God.”

“ One .”

“Don’t listen to Gum,” said Danny, over another blare from the car horn. “She ain’t going to do a thing but discourage you.”

“ Two !”

Danny put a hand on Eugene’s shoulder. Looking quickly over at the Trans Am (the only motion he could see was the dogs, tails thumping against the window glass), he said: “Do me a favor. Stand here a minute and don’t let him in.” Quickly he slipped inside the trailer and, from its place on the shelf behind the television, grabbed Gum’s little.22 pistol, pulled up his pants leg and stuck it muzzle-first in the top of his boot. Gum liked to keep it loaded, and he prayed that it still was; no time to fool with bullets.

Outside, heavy fast footsteps. He heard Eugene say, in a high frightened voice: “Don’t you raise your hand to me.”

Danny straightened his pants leg, opened the door. He was about to blurt his excuse (“my wallet”) when Farish snatched him up by the collar. “Don’t try to run from me , son.”

He hauled Danny down the steps. Halfway to the car Curtis scuttled over and tried to throw his arms around Danny’s waist. He was crying—or, rather, he was coughing and choking for breath, the way he did when he was upset. Danny, stumbling along behind Farish, managed to reach back and pat him on the head.

“Get back, baby,” he called after Curtis. “Be good….” Eugene was watching anxiously from the door of the trailer; poor Curtis was crying now, crying to beat the band. Danny noticed that his wrist was smeared with orange lipstick, where Curtis had pressed his mouth.

The color was garish, shocking; for a fraction of a second, it stopped Danny cold. I’m too tired to do this , he thought, too tired .Then, the next thing he knew, Farish had opened the driver’s side door of the Trans Am and slung him inside. “Drive,” he said.

The top of the water tank was more rickety than Harriet remembered: furred gray boards, with nails popped loose in some places and, in others, dark gaps where the wood had shrunk and split. Peppering it all were plump white fishhooks and squiggles of bird dropping.

Harriet, from the ladder, examined it at eye level. Then she stepped up, cautiously, and began to climb toward the middle—and something tore loose in her chest as a plank screeched and sank sharply under her foot, like a pressed piano key.

Carefully, carefully, she took a giant step backward. The plank sprang up with a shriek. Stiff, heart pounding, she crept to the margin of the tank, by the railing, where the boards were more stable—why was the air so strange and thin, up high? altitude sickness , pilots and mountain climbers suffered from it, and whatever those words actually meant, they described how she felt, a queasiness in her stomach and sparkles at the corners of her eyes. Tin roofs glittered in the hazy distance. On the other side lay the dense green woods where she and Hely had played so often, fighting their all-day wars, bombing each other with clods of red mud: a jungle, lush and singing, a palmy little Vietnam to parachute into.

She circled the tank twice. The door was nowhere to be seen. She was just starting to think that there wasn’t a door at all when at last she noticed it: weather-worn, almost perfectly camouflaged in the monotone surface except for a chip or two of chrome paint that hadn’t quite peeled off the handle.

She dropped to her knees. With a wide, windshield-wiper swing of her arm, she pulled it open (squeaky hinges, like a horror movie) and dropped it with a bang which vibrated in the boards beneath her.

Inside: dark, a bad smell. A low, intimate whine of mosquitos hung in the stagnant air. From the roof, a prickle of tiny sun shafts—narrow as pencils—bristled from the holes up top, and crisscrossed in dusty beams which were powdery and pollen-heavy like goldenrod in the darkness. Below, the water was thick and inky, the color of motor oil. At the far end, she made out the dim form of a bloated animal, floating on its side.

A corroded metal ladder—rickety, rusted half-through—went down for about six feet, stopping just short of the water. As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the dim, she saw, with a thrill, that something shiny was taped to the top rung: a package of some sort, rolled up in a black plastic garbage bag.

Harriet prodded it with her toe of her shoe. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got on her stomach and reached inside and patted it. Something soft but solid was inside—not money, nothing stacked or sharp or definite, but something that gave under pressure like sand.

The package was bound around and around with heavy duct tape. Harriet picked and pulled at it, tugged with both hands, tried to work her fingernails under the edges of the tape. Finally she gave up and tore through several layers of plastic right into the heart of the package.

Inside: something slick and cool, dead to the touch. Harriet withdrew her hand quickly. Dust sifted from the package, spread upon the water in a pearly film. Harriet peered down at the dry iridescence (poison? explosives?) swirling in a powdery glaze upon the surface. She knew all about narcotics (from TV, from the colored pictures in her Health workbook) but those were flamboyant, unmistakable: hand-rolled cigarettes, hypodermics, colorful pills. Maybe this was a decoy package, like on Dragnet ; maybe the real package was hidden elsewhere, and this was just a well-wrapped bag of … what?

Inside the torn bag something gleamed shiny and pale. Carefully, Harriet pushed aside the plastic, and saw a mysterious nest of shiny white sacs, like a cluster of giant insect eggs. One of them toppled into the water with a plunk—Harriet drew her hand back, fast—and floated there, half-submerged, like a jellyfish.

For an awful instant, she’d thought the sacs were alive. In the watery reflections, dancing in the tank’s interior, they had seemed to pulsate slightly. Now she saw that they were nothing more than a number of clear plastic bags, each packed with white powder.

Harriet, cautiously, reached down and touched one of the tiny bags (the little blue line of the zip lock was plainly visible at the top) and then lifted it out and hefted it in her hand. The powder looked white—like sugar or salt—but the texture was different, crunchier and more crystalline, and the weight curiously light. She opened it and brought it to her nose. No smell, except for a faint clean aroma that reminded her of the Comet powder that Ida used to clean the bathroom.

Well, whatever it was: it was his. With an underhand toss, she threw the little bag into the water. There it floated. Harriet looked at it, and then, without much considering what she was doing, or why, she reached inside the cache of black plastic (more white sacs, clustered like seeds in a pod) and pulled them out and dropped them by idle handfuls, threes and fours, into the black water.

Now that they were in the car, Farish had forgotten what was eating him, or so it seemed. As Danny drove through cottonfields hazy with morning heat and pesticides he kept glancing nervously at Farish, who was settled back in his seat and humming along with the radio. Hardly had they turned off the gravel onto the blacktop than Farish’s tense violent mood had shifted, inexplicably, to a happier key. He’d closed his eyes and breathed a deep contented sigh at the cool air blasting out of the air conditioner, and now they were flying along the highway into town, listening to The Morning Show with Betty Brownell and Casey McMasters on WNAT (“Worst Noise Around Town,” as Farish claimed the call letters stood for). WNAT was Top 40, which Farish hated. But now he was liking it, nodding his head, drumming on his knee, the armrest, the dashboard.