Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

She moved the gun across the dark sky, following some night bird across the moonlit clouds. A car door slammed. Quickly, she swivelled toward the sound and zeroed in on Mrs. Fountain—returning late from choir practice, tottering up her front walk in the haze of the street lamps—oblivious, entirely unaware that one sparkly earring shone dead in the center of Harriet’s crosshairs. Porch lights off, kitchen lights on. Mrs. Fountain’s slope-shouldered, goat-faced silhouette gliding past the window shade, like a puppet in a shadow play.

“Bang,” Harriet whispered. One twitch, one squeeze of the knuckle, that’s all it took and Mrs. Fountain would be where she belonged—down with the Devil. She would fit right in—horns curling out of her permanent and an arrow-tipped tail poking from the back of her dress. Ramming that grocery cart around through Hell.

A car was approaching. She swung from Mrs. Fountain and followed it, magnified and bouncing, in her scope—teenagers, windows down, going too fast—until the red tail-lights swept around the corner and vanished.

On her way back to Mrs. Fountain, she saw a lighted window blur over the lens and then, to her delight, she was smack in the Godfreys’ dining room, across the road. The Godfreys were rosy and cheerful and well into their forties—childless, sociable, active in the Baptist church—and to see the two of them up and moving around was comforting. Mrs. Godfrey stood scooping yellow ice cream from a carton into a dish. Mr. Godfrey sat at the table with his back to Harriet. The two of them were alone, lace tablecloth, pink-shaded lamp burning low in the corner; everything sharp and intimate, down to the grape-leaf patterns on the Godfreys’ icecream dishes and the bobby pins in Mrs. Godfrey’s hair.

The Winchester was a pair of binoculars, a camera, a way of seeing things. She laid her cheek against the stock, which was smooth and very cool.

Robin, she was certain, watched over her on these nights much the way she watched over him. She could feel him breathing at her back: quiet, sociable, glad for her company. But the creaks and shadows of the dark house still frightened her sometimes.

Restless, her arms aching from the gun’s weight, Harriet shifted in the armchair. Occasionally, on nights like this, she smoked her mother’s cigarettes. On the worst nights she was unable even to read, and the letters of her books—even Treasure Island, Kidnapped , books she loved and never tired of—changed into some kind of savage Chinese: illegible, vicious, an itch she couldn’t scratch. Once, out of sheer frustration, she had smashed a china figurine of a kitten belonging to her mother: then, panic-stricken (for her mother was fond of the figurine, and had had it since she was a little girl), she wrapped the fragments in a paper towel and shoved them inside an empty cereal box and put the cereal box at the very bottom of the garbage can. That had been two years ago. As far as Harriet knew, her mother still was not aware that the kitten was missing from the china cabinet. But whenever Harriet thought of this, especially when she was tempted to do something of the sort again (break a teacup, rip up a tablecloth with scissors), it gave her a heady, sick feeling. She could set the house on fire if she wanted to, and no one would be there to stop her.

A rusty cloud had drifted halfway over the moon. She swept the rifle back to the Godfreys’ window. Now Mrs. Godfrey had some ice cream too. She was talking to her husband, between lazy spoonfuls, with a rather cool, annoyed expression on her face. Mr. Godfrey had both elbows propped on the lace tablecloth. All she could see was the back of his bald head—which was dead in the center of the crosshairs—and she couldn’t tell if he was answering Mrs. Godfrey or even if he was listening.

Suddenly, he got up, made a stretching movement, and walked out. Mrs. Godfrey, alone now at the table, said something. As she ate the last spoonful of her ice cream, she turned her head slightly, as if listening to Mr. Godfrey’s response in the other room, and then stood and walked to the door, smoothing her skirt with the back of her hand. Then the picture went black. Theirs had been the only light on the street. Mrs. Fountain’s had gone out long ago.

Harriet glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was past eleven, and she had to be up at nine in the morning for Sunday school.

There was nothing to be scared of—the lamps shone bright on the calm street—but the house was very still and Harriet was a little edgy. Even though he had come to her house in broad daylight, she was most afraid of the killer at night. When he returned in her nightmares it was always dark: a cold breeze blowing through the house, curtains fluttering, and all the windows and doors ajar as she ran to and fro slamming the sashes, fumbling with the locks, her mother sitting unconcerned on the sofa with cold-cream on her face, never moving a finger to help, and never enough time before the glass shattered and the gloved hand reached through to turn the knob. Sometimes Harriet saw the door opening but she always woke up before she saw a face.

On hands and knees, she gathered the shells. Neatly, she restacked them in their box; wiped the gun clean of fingerprints and replaced it, then locked the cabinet and dropped the key back in the red leather box in her father’s desk where it belonged: along with the nail clippers, some mis-matched cufflinks and a pair of dice in a green suede pouch, and a stack of faded matchbooks from nightclubs in Memphis and Miami and New Orleans.

Upstairs, she undressed quietly without turning on the lamp. In the next bed, Allison lay face down in a dead man’s float. The moonlight shifted over the bedspread in dappled patterns which changed and played when the wind stirred through the trees. A jumble of stuffed animals were packed in the bed around her as if on a life raft—a patchwork elephant, a piebald dog with a button eye missing, a woolly black lambkin and a kangaroo of purple velveteen and a whole family of teddy bears—and their innocent shapes crowded around her head in sweet, shadowed grotesquerie, as if they were creatures in Allison’s dreams.

“Now, boys and girls,” said Mr. Dial. With one chilly, whale-gray eye, he surveyed Harriet and Hely’s Sunday School class, which—due to Mr. Dial’s enthusiasm for Camp Lake de Selby, and unwelcome advocacy of it among the parents of his pupils—was more than half empty. “I want y'all to think for a minute about Moses. Why was Moses so focused on leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land?”

Silence. Mr. Dial’s appraising, salesman’s gaze roved over the small group of uninterested faces. The church—not knowing what to do with the new school bus—had begun an outreach program, picking up underprivileged white children from out in the country and hauling them in to the prosperous cool halls of First Baptist for Sunday school. Dirty-faced, furtive, in clothing inappropriate for church, their downcast gazes strayed across the floor. Only gigantic Curtis Ratliff, who was retarded, and several years older than the rest of the children, goggled at Mr. Dial with open-mouthed appreciation.

“Or, let’s take another example,” said Mr. Dial. “What about John the Baptist? Why was he so determined to go forth in the wilderness and prepare the way for Christ’s arrival?”

There was no point attempting to reach these little Ratliffs and Scurlees and Odums, these youngsters with their rheumy eyes and pinched faces, their glue-sniffing mothers, their tattooed fornicating fathers. They were pitiful. Only the day before, Mr. Dial had been forced to send his son-in-law Ralph—whom he employed at Dial Chevrolet—down to some of the Scurlees to repossess a new Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was an old, old story: these sad dogs drove around in top-end automobiles chewing tobacco and swilling beer from the quart bottle, little caring that they were six months late on the payments. Another Scurlee and two Odums were due for a little visit from Ralph on Monday morning, though they didn’t know it.