Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Put that thing down,” called Mrs. Fountain. “You’re going to get rabies. They have to give you the shots in your stomach.”

“Hurry, Harriet,” cried Allison, plucking at her sleeve, “come on, hurry, let’s take it to Edie,” but the bird gave a spasmodic shudder and went limp in her blood-slick hands, the glossy head drooping. The sheen of its feathers—green on black—was as brilliant as ever, but the bright black glaze of pain and fright in its eyes had already dulled to a dumb incredulity, the horror of death without understanding.

“ Hurry , Harriet,” cried Allison. “It’s dying. It’s dying.”

“It’s dead,” Harriet heard herself say.

“What’s wrong with you?” shouted Ida Rhew to Hely, who had just run in through the back door—past the stove, where Ida, sweating, stood stirring the custard for a banana pudding—through the kitchen, pounded up the stairs to Harriet’s room, leaving the screen door to slam shut behind him.

He burst into Harriet’s bedroom without knocking. She was lying on the bed and his pulse—already racing—quickened at the arm flung over her head and the hollow white armpit, the dirty brown soles of her feet. Though it was only three-thirty in the afternoon she had her pajamas on; and her shorts and shirt, with something sticky and black smeared all over them, lay wadded on the rug beside the bed.

Hely kicked them out of the way and plumped himself, panting, at her feet. “Harriet!” He was so excited he could hardly talk. “I got shot at! Somebody shot me!”

“Shot you?” With a sleepy creak of the bedsprings, Harriet rolled over and looked at him. “With what?”

“A gun. Well, they almost shot me. I was on the bank, see, and pow , there’s this big splash, water—” Frantically he fanned the air with his free hand.

“How can somebody almost shoot you?”

“ I’m not kidding , Harriet. A bullet went right by my head. I jumped in some sticker bushes to get away. Look at my legs! I—”

He broke off in consternation. She was leaning back on her elbows, looking at him; and her gaze, though attentive, was not at all commiserating or even very startled. Too late, he realized his mistake: her admiration was hard enough to win, but going for sympathy would get him nowhere.

He sprang from his seat at the foot of her bed and paced over to the door. “I threw some rocks at them,” he said bravely. “I yelled at them, too. Then they ran off.”

“What were they shooting with?” said Harriet. “A BB gun or something?”

“ No ,” said Hely after a slight, shocked pause; how could he make her grasp the urgency of this, the danger? “It was a real gun , Harriet. Real bullets. Niggers running everywhere—” He flung out an arm, overwhelmed with the difficulty of making her see it all, the hot sun, the echoes off the bluff, the laughter and the panic….

“Why didn’t you come with me?” he wailed. “I begged you to come—”

“If it was a real gun they were shooting, I think you were stupid to stand around throwing rocks.”

“ No ! That’s not what—”

“That’s exactly what you said.”

Hely took a deep breath and then, all of a sudden, he felt limp with exhaustion and hopelessness. The bedsprings whined as he sat down again. “Don’t you even want to know who it was?” he said. “It was so weird, Harriet. Just this … weird …”

“Sure, I want to know,” said Harriet, but she didn’t seem too worried or anything. “Who was it? Some kids?”

“ No ,” said Hely, aggrieved. “Grown-ups. Big guys. Trying to shoot the corks off the fishing poles.”

“Why were they shooting at you?”

“They were shooting at everybody . It wasn’t just me. They were—”

He broke off as Harriet stood up. For the first time Hely took in fully her pajamas, her grimy black hands, the smeared clothes on the sun-soaked rug.

“Hey, man. What’s all this black mess?” he inquired sympathetically. “Are you in trouble?”

“I tore a bird’s wing off by mistake.”

“Yuck. How come?” said Hely, forgetting his own troubles for the moment.

“He was stuck in some tar. He would have died anyway, or a cat got him.”

“A live bird?”

“I was trying to save him.”

“What about your clothes?”

She gave him a vague, puzzled glance.

“That won’t come off. Not tar. Ida’s going to whip your ass.”

“I don’t care.”

“Look here. And here. It’s all over the rug.”

For several moments, there was no noise in the room except the whir of the window fan.

“My mother has a book at home that tells how to take out different stains,” said Hely in a quieter voice. “I looked up chocolate one time when I left a candy bar on a chair and it melted.”

“Did you get it off?”

“Not all the way, but she would have killed me if she’d seen it before. Give me the clothes. I can take them to my house.”

“I bet tar’s not in the book.”

“Then I’ll throw them away,” said Hely, gratified at finally having got her attention. “You’re nuts if you put them in your own garbage can. Here,” and he circled to the other side of the bed, “help me move this so she won’t see it on the rug.”

Odean, Libby’s maid, who was capricious about her comings and goings, had abandoned Libby’s kitchen in the middle of rolling out some pie crust. Harriet wandered in to find the kitchen table dusted with flour and strewn with apple peels and scraps of dough. At the far end—looking tiny and frail—sat Libby, drinking a cup of weak tea, the cup outsized in her little speckled hands. She was bent over the crossword puzzle from the newspaper.

“Oh, how glad I am you’ve come, darling,” she said, without remarking Harriet’s unannounced entry and without scolding her—as Edie would have been swift to do—for going out in public with a pajama top over her blue jeans and with black all over her hands. Absent-mindedly, she patted the seat of the chair beside her. “The Commercial Appeal has a new man on the crossword puzzles and he makes them so hard. All kinds of old French words and science and things.” She indicated some smudged squares with the blunt lead of her pencil. “ ‘ Metallic element .’ I know it starts with T because the Torah is certainly the first five books of Hebrew scripture but there isn’t a metal that starts with T. Is there?”

Harriet studied it for a moment. “You need another letter. Titanium has eight letters and so does Tungsten.”

“Darling, you’re so clever. I never heard of any such.”

“Here we go,” said Harriet. “Six down, ‘Referee or judge.’ That’s Umpire, so the metal must be Tungsten.”

“My goodness! They teach you children so much in school nowadays! When we were girls we didn’t learn a bit about these horrible old metals and things. It was all arithmetic and European History.”

Together, they worked on the puzzle—they were stumped on a five-letter word for Objectionable Woman beginning with S—until Odean finally came in and began to clatter pans so energetically around the kitchen that they were forced to retreat to Libby’s bedroom.

Libby, the eldest of the Cleve sisters, was the only one who had never married, though all of them (except thrice-married Adelaide) were spinsters at heart. Edie was divorced. Nobody would talk about this mysterious alliance which had produced Harriet’s mother, though Harriet was desperate to know about it, and badgered her aunts for information. But apart from a few old photographs she’d seen (weak chin, fair hair, thin smile) and certain tantalizing phrases she’d overheard (“… liked to take a drink …” “… his own worst enemy …”) all Harriet really knew about her maternal grandfather was that he’d spent time in an Alabama hospital, where he’d died a few years ago. When younger, Harriet had derived (from Heidi ) the idea that she herself could be a force for family reconciliation, if only she were taken to the hospital to see him. Had not Heidi enchanted the dour Swiss grandpapa up in the Alps, brought him “back to life”?