Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Maybe. It looked like there was going to be a fight. The guys from the boat were mad.”

Harriet sneezed.“I want to see him. I’m going to ride my bike down there right now.”

“Whoa. No way,” said Hely in alarm, but she’d already hung up.

There had been no fight—nothing that Danny would call a fight, anyway. When, for a moment, it had looked like Odum was reluctant to pay up, Farish had picked up a chair and knocked him to the floor and begun to kick him methodically (while his kids cowered in the doorway) so that soon enough Odum was howling and begging Farish to take the money. The real worry was the men from the shrimp boat, who could have caused a lot of trouble if they’d wanted to. But though the fat man in the yellow sports shirt had some colorful things to say, the rest only muttered among themselves and even chuckled, though a bit angrily. They were on leave, and had money to burn.

To Odum’s pitiful appeals, Farish reacted most impassively. Eat or be eaten was his philosophy, and anything he was able to take from somebody else he regarded as his own rightful property. As Odum limped frantically back and forth, begging Farish to think of the kids, Farish’s attentive, cheerful expression reminded Danny of the way that Farish’s twin German shepherds looked after they had just killed, or were about to kill, a cat: alert, businesslike, playful. No hard feelings, kitty. Better luck next time .

Danny admired Farish’s no-nonsense attitude, though he had little stomach for such things. He lit a cigarette even though he had a bad taste in his mouth from smoking too much.

“Relax,” said Catfish, sliding up behind Odum and laying a hand upon his shoulder. Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.

With a feeble, half-crazed bluster—more pitiable than threatening—Odum swaggered back weakly and cried: “Get your hand off me, nigger.”

Catfish was unperturbed. “Anybody can play like you, brother, not going to have trouble winning that money back. Later on, if you feel like it, come find me over at the Esquire Lounge and maybe we can work out a little something.”

Odum stumbled back against the cinder-block wall. “My car,” he said. His eye was swollen and his mouth was bloody.

Unbidden, an ugly memory from early childhood flashed into Danny’s mind: pictures of naked women tucked inside a fish-and-game magazine his father had left by the commode in the bathroom. Excitement, but sick excitement, the black and pink between the women’s legs mixed up with a bleeding buck with an arrow through its eye on one page, and with a hooked fish on the next. And all this—the dying buck, sunk to its forelegs, the gasping fish—was mixed up with the memory of the struggling breathless thing in his nightmare.

“Stop it,” he said, aloud.

“Stop what?” said Catfish absent-mindedly, patting the pockets of his smoking jacket for the little vial.

“This noise in my ears. It just goes on and on.”

Catfish took a quick snort, and passed the vial to Danny. “Don’t let it drag you down. Hey Odum,” he called, across the room. “The Lord loveth a cheerful loser.”

“Ho,” said Danny, pinching his nose. Tears rose to his eyes. The icy, disinfectant taste at the back of his throat made him feel clean: everything surface again, everything sparkle on the glossy face of these waters which swept like thunder over a cesspool he was sick to death of: poverty, grease and rot, blue intestines full of shit.

He handed the vial back to Catfish. An icy fresh wind blew through his head. The pool-room’s seedy, contaminated mood—all heeltaps and grime—waxed bright and clean and comical all of a sudden. With a high, melodious ping , he was struck by the hilarious insight that weepy Odum, with his hayseed clothes and his large pink pumpkin-head, looked exactly like Elmer Fudd. Long skinny Catfish, like Bugs himself popped up from the rabbit hole, lounged against the jukebox. Big feet, big front teeth, even the way he held his cigarette: Bugs Bunny held his carrot out like that, like a cigar, just that cocky.

Feeling sweet and giddy and grateful, Danny reached in his pocket and peeled a twenty off his roll; he had a hundred more, right in his hand. “Give him that for his kids, man,” he said, palming Catfish the money. “I’m on take off.”

“Where you off to?”

“Just off,” Danny heard himself say.

He strolled out to his car. It was Saturday evening, the streets were deserted and a clear summer night lay ahead, with stars and warm wind and night skies full of neon. The car was a beauty: a Trans Am, this nice bronze, with sun roof, side vents, and air option. Danny had just given her a wash and wax, and the light poured off her so glittery and hot that she looked like a spaceship about to take off.

One of Odum’s kids—rather clean, for one of Odum’s, and black-headed, too; possibly she had a different mother—was sitting directly across the street in front of the hardware store. She was looking at a book and waiting for her sorry father to come out. Suddenly he became aware that she was looking at him; she hadn’t moved a muscle, but her eyes weren’t on the book any more, they were fastened on him and they had been fastened on him, the way it sometimes happened with meth when you saw a street sign and you kept on seeing it for two hours; it freaked him out, like the cowboy hat on the bed earlier. Speed fucked with your sense of time, all right ( that’s why they call it speed ! he thought, with a hot burst of exhilaration at his own cleverness: tweaker speeds up! time slows down !), yes, it stretched time like a rubber band, snapped it back and forth, and sometimes it seemed to Danny like everything in the world was staring at him, even cats and cows and pictures in magazines; yet an eternity seemed to have passed, clouds flying overhead like in a sped-up nature film and still the girl held his gaze without blinking—her eyes a chill green, like a bobcat from Hell, like the very Devil.

But no: she wasn’t staring at him after all. She was looking down at her book like she’d been reading it forever. Stores closed, no cars on the street, long shadows and pavement shimmering like in a bad dream. Danny flashed back to a morning the previous week when he’d gone to the White Kitchen after watching the sun come up over the reservoir: waitress, cop, milkman and postman all turning their heads to stare at him when he pushed the door open—moving casually, pretending that they were only curious at the twinkle of the bell—but they meant business, it was him yes him they were looking at, eyes everywhere, all shining green like Day-Glo Satan. He’d been up for seventy-two hours at that point, faint and clammy, had wondered if his heart was just going to pop in his chest like a fat water balloon, right there in the White Kitchen with the strange little teenage waitresses staring green daggers at him….

Steady, steady , he said to his frantic heart. What if the kid had stared at him? So what? So fucking what? Danny had spent plenty of hot, dreary hours on that same bench, waiting for his own father. It wasn’t the waiting that was so bad, but dread of what he and Curtis might get later if the game hadn’t gone right. There was no reason to believe that Odum shouldn’t seek consolation for his losses in exactly the same manner: that was the way of the world. “As long as you’re under my roof—” the light bulb over the kitchen table swinging by its cord, their grandmother stirring something on the stove as if the curses and slaps and cries were noise from the television.