Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Except he was drumming a little too hard. It made Danny nervous. The older Farish got, the more he behaved like their father: the particular way he smiled before he said something mean, the unnatural liveliness—talkative, overly friendly—that came before a bad outburst.

Re bel lient! Re bel lient ! Once Danny had said that word in school, rebellient , his father’s favorite word, and the teacher told him it wasn’t even a word. But Danny could still hear that high crazy crack in his father’s voice, re bel lient ! the belt coming down hard on the bel as Danny stared at his hands: freckled, porous, hatched with scars, white-knuckled from clutching the kitchen table. Danny knew his own hands very well, very well indeed; every hard bad moment in his life, he’d studied them like a book. They were a ticket back in time: to beatings, deathbeds, funerals, failure; to humiliation on the playground and sentencing in the courtroom; to memories more real than this steering wheel, this street.

Now they were on the outskirts of town. They drove by the shady grounds of the Old Hospital, where some high-school cheer-leaders—in a V formation—jumped all at once into the air: hey ! They weren’t in uniform, or even in matching shirts, and despite their crisp unified movements they looked ragged. Arms chopped in semaphore, fists struck the air.

Another day—any other—Danny might have parked behind the old pharmacy and watched them in privacy. Now, as he drove slowly through the dappled leaf-shade, ponytails and tan limbs flashing in the background, he was chilled by the sudden appearance, in the foreground, of a smaller, hunchbacked sort of creature, all in black, which—megaphone in hand—stopped in its soggy, squelchy walk to observe him from the sidewalk. It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat … and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere. Even stranger: that it remembered him . And as he glanced in the rear-view mirror he saw it again, a small black form with black wings, looking after his car like an unwelcome little messenger from the other world.

Boundaries wearing thin . Danny’s scalp tingled. The lush road had taken on the quality of a conveyor-belt corridor in a nightmare, deep green feverish shade pressing in on either side.

He looked in the mirror. The creature was gone.

It wasn’t the drugs, he’d sweated those out in his sleep: no, the river had flooded its banks and all sorts of trash and outrageous garbage had floated up from the bottom and into the daylight, a disaster film, dreams and memories and unconfessable fears slopping down the public street. And Danny had (not for the first time) the sensation that he had dreamed this day already, that he was driving down Natchez Street towards something that had already taken place.

He rubbed his mouth. He had to pee. As bad as his ribs and his head hurt from Farish’s beating, he could think of little else but how badly he had to pee. And coming off the drugs had left him with a sick chemical undertaste in his mouth.

He stole a glance at Farish. He was still caught up in the music: nodding his head, humming to himself, drumming on the armrest with his knuckle. But the police-dog bitch in the back seat glared at Danny as if she knew exactly what was on his mind.

He tried to psych himself up. Eugene—for all his holy-rolling—would look after Curtis. And then there was Gum. Her very name triggered an avalanche of guilty thoughts, but though Danny bore down hard and willed himself to feel affection for his grandmother he felt nothing. Sometimes, especially when he heard Gum coughing in her room in the middle of the night, he got all choked up and sentimental about the hardships she’d suffered—the poverty, the overwork, the cancers and the ulcers and the arthritis and all the rest of it—but love was an emotion he felt for his grandmother only in her presence and then only occasionally: never out of it.

And what did any of that even matter? Danny had to pee so bad that his eyeballs were about to burst; he squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. I’ll send money home. As soon as I move that shit and set myself up …

Was there another way? No. There was no way—apart from what lay ahead of him—to the house by the water in another state. He had to fix his mind on that future, really see it, move toward it smoothly and without stopping.

They drove past the old Alexandria Hotel, with its sagging porch and rotten shutters–haunted, people said, and no wonder, all the people who had died there; you could feel it radiating from the place, all that old historical death. And Danny wanted to howl at the universe that had dumped him here: in this hell-hole town, in this broken-down county that hadn’t seen money since the Civil War. His first felony conviction hadn’t even been his fault: it was his father’s, for sending him to steal a ridiculously expensive Stihl chainsaw from the workshop of a rich old German farmer who was sitting up guarding his property with a gun. It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism. The only thing for it was to go someplace that nobody knew you and nobody knew your family and try to start your life all over again.

Street signs repeating, and words. Natchez, Natchez, Natchez .Chamber of Commerce: ALEXANDRIA: THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE! No , not the way things ought to be , Danny thought bitterly; it’s the way things fucking are .

Sharply he turned into the freight yards. Farish clutched the dashboard and looked at him with something like astonishment. “What you doing?”

“This is where you told me to go,” Danny said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible.

“I did?”

Danny felt he should say something, but he didn’t know what to say. Had Farish mentioned the tower? All of a sudden he wasn’t sure.

“You said you was going to check up on me,” he said, tentatively—just tossing it out there, just to see what might happen.

Farish shrugged, and—to Danny’s surprise—settled back in his seat again and looked out the window. Driving around tended to put him in a good mood. Danny could still hear Farish’s low whistle, the first time he’d pulled up in the Trans Am. How he loved to ride, just climb in the car and go! In those first few months they’d joy-rode it up to Indiana, just the two of them, another time all the way to West Texas—no reason, nothing to see in those places, just clear weather and the highway signs flashing overhead, punching around on the FM band looking for a song.

“Tell you what. Let’s go get us some breakfast,” Farish said.

Danny’s intentions wavered. He was hungry. Then he remembered his plan. It was settled, it was fixed, it was the only way out. Black wings, waving him around the corner, into a future he couldn’t see.

He didn’t turn; he kept driving. Trees crowded close around the car. They were so far off the paved road that it wasn’t even a road any more, just potholes in rutted gravel.