Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet ducked—his posture, tense and violent, had frightened her—and the next moment she realized what she’d seen and slowly she rose again.

Yes: bright red. Sprayed in drops on the windshield, so bright and shocking it popped out even at a distance. Beyond—within the car, beyond the semi-transparent scrim of droplets—she had the impression of horrible movement: something thrashing and thumping, flailing around. And whatever it was, that dark confusion, Danny Ratliff seemed frightened of it, too. His backward steps were slow, robotic, like the last few backward steps of a shot cowboy in the movies.

Harriet was overcome all of a sudden with a strange blankness and languor. From where she was, so high up, it all looked flat and unimportant somehow, accidental. The sun beat down white and fierce, and in her head thrummed the same curious, airy lightness that—when she was climbing—had made her feel like relaxing her grip and letting go.

I’m in trouble , she told herself, big trouble , but it was hard to make herself feel it, even though it was true.

In the bright distance, Danny Ratliff stooped to pick up something shiny on the grass, and Harriet’s heart gave a queasy flutter when she realized more from the way that he was holding it than anything else that it was a gun. In the dreadful silence, she imagined for a moment that she could hear a faint strain of trumpet music—Hely’s marching band, to the east, far away—and when, in confusion, she cast her eye over in that direction, it seemed to her that the slightest gold twinkle, like sun striking brass, flashed up in the hazy distance.

Birds—birds everywhere, great black cawing explosions of them, like radioactive fallout, like shrapnel. They were a bad sign: words and dreams and laws and numbers, storms of information in his head, indecipherable, on the wing and spiraling. Danny put his hands over his ears: he could see his own reflection, slanted, in the blood-spattered windshield, a whirling red galaxy frozen on glass, clouds moving in a thin film behind his head. He was sick and exhausted; he needed a shower and a good meal; he needed to be home, in bed. He didn’t need this shit. I shot my brother and why? Because I needed to take a leak so bad I couldn’t think straight . Farish would get a big yuk out of that. Sick stories in the newspaper, he laughed his head off over them: the drunk who’d slipped while peeing off an overpass and fallen to his death on the highway; the dumb ass who’d awakened to a ringing telephone at his bedside, and reached for his pistol and shot himself in the head.

The gun lay in the weeds at Danny’s feet, where he’d dropped it. Stiffly, he bent to retrieve it. Sable was sniffing around Farish’s cheek and neck with a rooting, butting motion that made Danny queasy, while Van Zant tracked his every move with her acid yellow eyes. When he stepped towards the car, she reared back and barked with renewed energy. Just you open that car door, she seemed to be saying. Just you open that motherfucking door. Danny thought of the training sessions out in the back yard, where Farish rolled his arms in quilt batting and burlap sacks and yelled Destroy! Destroy ! Cottony little puffs floating all over the yard.

His knees were trembling. He rubbed his mouth, tried to compose himself. Then he took aim across his arm, at the yellow eye of the dog Van Zant, and squeezed the trigger. A hole the size of a silver dollar exploded in the window. Gritting his teeth against the screams, the thrashing and sobbing inside the car, Danny leaned down with his eye to the glass and put the pistol through the hole and shot her again, then angled the gun and got in a good clear center shot at the other one. Then he pulled back his arm and threw the gun away from him as far as he could.

He stood in the morning glare panting as if he’d run a mile. The screaming from the car was the worst noise he’d ever heard in his life: high, unearthly, like broken machinery, a metallic sobbing note that went on and on without fatigue, a noise that gave Danny actual pain, so he felt that if it didn’t stop, he’d have to drive a stick in his ear—

But it didn’t stop; and after what seemed a ridiculously long time, standing there with his back half-turned, Danny walked stiffly to where he’d thrown the gun, with the screams of the dogs still ringing in his ears. Grimly, he got down on his knees and searched through the thin weeds, parting them with his hands, and his back tensed against the keen energetic cries.

But the gun was empty: no more bullets. Danny wiped it clean with his shirt and tossed it deeper in the woods. He was on the verge of forcing himself over to the car, to look, when silence rolled in on him, in crushing waves—each wave with its own crest and fall, like the screams which had preceded them.

She’d be walking over with our coffee , he thought, rubbing his mouth, if I’d drove on to the White Kitchen, if I hadn’t turned down this road . The waitress named Tracey, the scrawny one with the dangly earrings and the little flat ass, always brought it without asking. He imagined Farish pushed back in his chair with his stomach preceding him grandly, delivering the speech he always gave about his eggs (how he didn’t like to drink ’em, tell the cook she couldn’t get ’em too hard) and Danny across the table looking at his matted old nasty head like black seaweed and thinking: you never know how close I come .

All that vanished, and he found himself staring at a broken bottle in the weeds. He opened and shut one hand, then the other. His palms were slimy and cold. I got to get moving here , he thought, with a rush of panic.

And yet he still stood. It was like he’d blown the fuse connecting his body with his brain. Now that the car window was shattered and the dogs had shut up wailing and crying, he could hear just the faintest thread of music drifting from the radio. Did those people who sang that song (some shit about stardust in your hair) did they ever think for a minute that somebody’d be listening to it on a dirt road by an abandoned railroad track with a dead body in front of them? No: those people just swished around Los Angeles and Hollywood in their white outfits with sparkles, and their sunglasses dark at the top and clear at the bottom, drinking champagne and snorting coke off of silver trays. They never figured—standing there in the studio by their grand pianos, with their sparkly scarves and their fancy cocktails—they never figured that some poor person was going to be standing on a dirt road in Mississippi and working through some major problems while the radio played on the day that you were born the angels got together ….

People like that never had to make a tough decision, he thought, dully, staring at his blood-spattered vehicle. They never had to do shit. It was all handed to them like a set of new car keys.

He took a step towards the car, one step. His knees trembled; the crunch of his feet on the gravel terrified him. Got to move ! he told himself, with a kind of high, hearty hysteria, looking wildly all around him (left, right, up in the sky) and a hand out to brace himself in case he fell. Get this show on the road ! It was clear enough what he had to do; the question was how, since there was no getting around the fact that basically he would rather take a hacksaw and cut his arm off than lay a finger on his brother’s body.

On the dashboard—resting quite naturally—lay his brother’s grubby red hand, tobacco-stained fingers, the big gold pinky ring shaped like a dice. As Danny stared at it, he tried to think his way back into the situation. What he needed was a bump, to concentrate his mind and get his heart up and kicking. Upstairs in the tower there was plenty of product, product galore; and the longer he stood around, the longer the Trans Am would stand in the weeds with a dead man and two dead police dogs bleeding on the seats.