Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

He had dragged her all the way across the street, up into the driveway behind the pickup truck. Paws dangling peacefully under his chin, in his Cookie Monster posture,—he lumbered over to the rear and lifted the tarpaulin. “Look, Hat!”

“I don’t want to,” said Harriet, grumpily, but even as she turned away a dry, furious whir rolled up from the truck bed.

Snakes. Harriet blinked with amazement. The truck was stacked with screened boxes and in the boxes were rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, serpents large and small, twined in great mottled knots, scaly white snouts licking out from the mass this way and that, like flames, bumping the crate walls, pointed heads retreating, coiling back upon themselves and striking at the screen, and the wood, and each other, then snapping back and—emotionless, staring—sliding along with their white throats low upon the floor, pouring into a fluid S shape … tick tick tick …until they bumped the sides of the box and reared back into the mass, hissing.

“Not friendly, Hat,” she heard Curtis say, behind her, in his thick voice. “Not to touch.”

The boxes were hinged and screened at the top and fitted with handles on each end. Most were painted: white, black, the brick red of country barns; some had writing—Bible verses—in tiny, scraggled printing, and patterns worked in brass nailheads: crosses, skulls, stars of David, suns and moons and fishes. Others were decorated with bottle caps, buttons, bits of broken glass and even photographs: faded Polaroids of caskets, solemn families,staring country boys holding rattlesnakes aloft in a dark place where bonfires burned in the background. One photograph, washed-out and ghostly, showed a beautiful girl with her hair scraped back hard, her eyes shut tight and her sharp, lovely face tipped up to Heaven. Her fingertips were poised at her temples, over a wicked fat timber rattlesnake which lay draped across her head, its tail partially coiled around her neck. Above it, a jangle of yellowed letters—scissored from newspaper—spelled out the message:

SLEep witH JESuS

REESiE fOrd

1935–52

Behind her, Curtis crooned, an indistinct moan that sounded like “Spook.”

In the profusion of boxes—sparkly and various and awash with messages—Harriet’s eye was arrested by a startling sight. For a moment she hardly believed what she saw. In a vertical box, a king cobra swayed grandly in his solitary quarters. Below the hinge, where the screen joined the wood, red thumbtacks spelled out the words LORD JESUS. He was not white, like the cobra Mowgli had met in the Cold Lairs, but black: black like Nag and his wife Nagaina, whom the mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi had fought to the death in the gardens of the big bungalow at Segowlee Cantonment, over the boy Teddy.

Silence. The cobra’s hood was spread. Upright, calm, he gazed at Harriet, his body oscillating soundlessly to and fro, to and fro, as softly as her own breath. Look and be afraid . His tiny red eyes were the steady eyes of a god: here were jungles, cruelty, revolts and ceremonies, wisdom. On the back of his spread hood, she knew, was the spectacle mark which the great god Brahm had put on all the cobra’s people when the first cobra rose up and opened his hood to shelter Brahm as he slept.

From the house, a muffled noise—a door shutting. Harriet glanced up, and for the first time noticed that the second-floor windows glinted blank and metallic: silvered out with tin foil. As she stared up at this (for it was an eerie sight, as unsettling as the snakes in its way), Curtis bunched his fingertips together and snaked his arm out in front of Harriet’s face. Slowly, slowly, he opened his hand, in a motion which was like a mouth opening. “Munster,” he whispered, and closed his hand, twice: snap snap . “ Bite .”

The door had shut upstairs. Harriet stepped back from the truck and listened, hard. A voice—muffled, but rich with disapproval—had just interrupted another speaker: Mr. Dial was still up there, behind those silvered-out windows, and for once in her life Harriet was glad to hear his voice.

All at once Curtis grabbed her arm again and began to pull her toward the stairs. For a moment Harriet was too startled to protest and then—when she saw where he was going—she struggled and kicked and tried to dig her heels in. “No, Curtis,” she cried, “I don’t want to, stop, please—”

She was on the verge of biting his arm when her eye lit on his large white tennis shoe.

“Curtis, hey Curtis , your shoe’s untied,” she said.

Curtis stopped; he clapped a hand to his mouth. “Uh-oh!” He stooped to the ground, all in a fluster—and Harriet ran, as hard as she could.

“They’re with the carnival,” said Hely, in his annoying way, like he knew everything there was to know about it. He and Harriet were in his room with the door shut, sitting on the lower bunk of his bed. Nearly everything in Hely’s bedroom was black or gold, in honor of the New Orleans Saints, his favorite football team.

“I don’t think so,” Harriet said, scratching with her thumbnail at the raised cord of the black bedspread. A muffled bass from the stereo thumped from Pemberton’s room, down the hall.

“If you go to the Rattlesnake Ranch, there’s pictures and stuff painted on the buildings.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, reluctantly. Though she could not put it into words, the crates she’d seen in the back of the truck—with their skulls and stars and crescent moons, their wobbly, misspelled bands of scripture—felt very different from the Rattlesnake Ranch’s florid old billboard: a winking lime-green snake wrapped around a cheesy woman in a two-piece swimsuit.

“Well, who’d they belong to?” said Hely. He was sorting through a stack of bubble-gum cards. “The Mormons, had to be. They’re the ones that rent rooms over there.”

“Hmm.” The Mormons who lived at the bottom of Mr. Dial’s apartment building were a dull pair. They seemed very isolated, just the two of them; they didn’t even have real jobs.

Hely said: “My grandpa said the Mormons believe they get their own little planet to live on when they die. Also that they think it’s okay to have more than one wife.”

“Those ones that live over at Mr. Dial’s don’t have any wife at all.” One afternoon they had knocked on Edie’s door while Harriet was visiting. Edie had let them in, accepted their literature, even offered them lemonade after they refused a Coca-Cola; she had told them they seemed like nice young men but that what they believed was a lot of nonsense.

“Hey, let’s call Mr. Dial,” said Hely unexpectedly.

“Yeah, right.”

“I mean, call him and pretend to be somebody else, ask him what’s going on over there.”

“Pretend to be who?”

“I don’t know—Do you want this?” He tossed her a Wacky Packs sticker: a green monster with bloodshot eyes on stalks, driving a dune buggy. “I’ve got two.”

“No thanks.” Between the black-and-gold curtains, and the stickers plastered thick on the windowpanes—Wacky Packs, STP, Harley-Davidson—Hely had blocked nearly all the sunlight from his room; it was depressing, like being in a basement.

“He’s their landlord,” said Hely. “Come on, call him.”

“And say what?”

“Call Edie then. If she knows so much about Mormons.”

All of a sudden, Harriet realized why he was so interested in making phone calls: it was the new telephone on the bedside table, which had a push-button earpiece housed inside a Saints football helmet.

“If they think they get to live on their own personal planets and all that,” said Hely, nodding at the phone, “who knows what else they think? Maybe the snakes are something to do with their church.”