Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Without warning, Hely seized Harriet’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom which connected his room with Pemberton’s and shot the bolt behind them. “Hurry!” he yelled to Pemberton—who was on the other side, in his room, trying to get the door open—and then they dashed out into Pemberton’s room (Harriet, in the dim, tripping on a tennis racket) and scurried out behind him and down the stairs.

“That was nuts,” said Pemberton. It was the first thing anyone had said for a while. The three of them were sitting at the lone picnic table behind Jumbo’s Drive-In, on a concrete slab next to a forlorn pair of kiddie rides: a circus elephant and a faded yellow duck, on springs. They had driven around in the Cadillac—aimlessly, all three of them in the front seat—for about ten minutes, no air-conditioning and about to roast with the top up, before Pem finally pulled in at Jumbo’s.

“Maybe we ought to stop by the tennis courts and tell Mother,” said Hely. He and Pem were being unusually cordial to each other, though in a subdued way, united by the quarrel with Essie.

Pemberton took a last slurp of his milkshake, tossed it into the trash. “Man, you called that one.” The afternoon glare, reflected off the plate-glass window, burned white at the edges of his pool-frizzed hair. “That woman is a freak. I was scared she was going to hurt you guys or something.”

“Hey,” said Hely, sitting up straighter. “That siren.” They all listened to it for a moment, off in the distance.

“That’s probably the fire truck,” said Hely, glumly. “Driving to our house.”

“Tell me again, what happened?” Pem said. “She just went berserk?”

“Totally nuts. Hey, give me a cigarette,” he added, casually, as Pem tossed a packet of Marlboros—squashed from the pocket of his cutoff jeans—onto the table and dug in the other pocket for a light.

Pem lit his cigarette, then moved both matches and cigarettes out of Hely’s reach. The smoke smelled unusually harsh and poisonous, there on the hot concrete amidst the backwash of fumes from the highway. “I have to say, I saw it coming,” he said, shaking his head. “I told Mama. That woman is deranged. She’s probably escaped from Whitfield.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” blurted Harriet, who’d hardly said a word since they’d bolted from the house.

Both Pem and Hely turned to stare at her as if she was insane. “Huh?” said Pem.

“Whose side are you on?” said Hely, aggrieved.

“She didn’t say she was going to burn down the house.”

“Yes she did!”

“No! All she said was burn down . She didn’t say the house . She was talking about Hely’s posters and stickers and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah?” Pemberton said reasonably. “Burn Hely’s posters? I guess you think that’s all right.”

“I thought you liked me, Harriet,” said Hely sulkily.

“But she didn’t say she was going to burn the house down,” said Harriet. “All she said was … I mean,” she said, as Pemberton rolled his eyes knowingly at Hely, “it just wasn’t that big a deal.”

Hely, ostentatiously, scooted away from her on the bench seat.

“But it wasn’t,” said Harriet, who was growing by the moment more unsure of herself. “She was just … mad.”

Pem rolled his eyes and blew out a cloud of smoke. “No kidding, Harriet.”

“But … but y'all are acting like she chased us with a butcher knife.”

Hely snorted. “Well, next time, she might! I’m not staying by myself with her any more,” he repeated, self-pityingly, as he stared down at the concrete. “I’m sick of getting death threats all the time.”

The drive through Alexandria was short, and contained no more novelty or diversion than the Pledge of Allegiance. Down the east side of Alexandria and hooking in again at the south, the Houma River coiled around two-thirds of the town. Houma meant red, in the Choctaw language, but the river was yellow: fat, sluggish, with the sheen of ochre oil paint squeezed from the tube. One crossed it from the south, on a two-lane iron bridge dating from FDR’s administration, into what visitors called the historic district. A wide, flat, inhospitable avenue—painfully still in the strong sun—gave into the town square with its disconsolate statue of the Confederate soldier slouching against his propped rifle. Once he had been shaded by oak trees, but these had all been sawn down a year or two before to make way for a confused but enthusiastic aggregate of commemorative civic structures: clock tower, gazebos, lamp-posts, bandstand, bristling over the tiny and now shadeless plot like toys jumbled together in an unseemly crowd.

On Main Street, up to First Baptist Church, the houses were mostly big and old. To the east, past Margin and High Street, were the train tracks, the abandoned cotton gin and the warehouses where Hely and Harriet played. Beyond—towards Levee Street, and the river—was desolation: junkyards, salvage lots, tin-roofed shacks with sagging porches and chickens scratching in the mud.

At its grimmest point—by the Alexandria Hotel—Main Street turned into Highway 5. The Interstate had passed Alexandria by; and now the highway suffered the same dereliction as the shops on the square: defunct grocery stores and car lots, baking in a poisonous gray heat haze; the Checkerboard Feed Store and the old Southland gas station, boarded up now (its faded sign: a saucy black kitten with white bib and stockings, batting with its paw at a cotton boll). A north turn, onto County Line Road, took them by Oak Lawn Estates and under an abandoned overpass, into cow pastures and cotton fields and tiny, dusty little sharecropper farms, laboriously cut from dry red-clay barrens. Harriet and Hely’s school—Alexandria Academy—was out here, a fifteenminute drive from town: a low building of cinder block and corrugated metal which sprawled in the middle of a dusty field like an airplane hangar. Ten miles north, past the academy, the pines took over from the pastures entirely and pressed against either side of the road in a dark, high, claustrophobic wall which bore down relentlessly almost to the Tennessee border.

Instead of heading out into the country, however, they stopped at the red light by Jumbo’s, where the rearing circus elephant held aloft in his sun-bleached trunk a neon ball advertising:

CONES

SHAKES

BURGERS

and—past the town cemetery, rising high upon its hill like a stage backdrop (black iron fences, graceful-throated stone angels guarding the marble gateposts to north, south, east, and west)—they circled around through town again.

When Harriet was younger, the east end of Natchez Street had been all white. Now both blacks and whites lived here, harmoniously for the most part. The black families were young and prosperous, with children; most of the whites—like Allison’s piano teacher, and Libby’s friend Mrs. Newman McLemore—were old, widowed ladies without family.

“Hey, Pem, slow down in front of the Mormon house here,” said Hely.

Pem blinked at him. “What’s the matter?” he said, but he slowed down, anyway.

Curtis was gone, and so was Mr. Dial’s car. A pickup was parked in the driveway but Harriet could see that it wasn’t the same truck. The gate was down, and the bed was empty except for a metal tool chest.

“They’re in that ?” said Hely, breaking off short in the midst of his complaints about Essie Lee.

“Man, what is that up there?” said Pemberton, stopping the car in the middle of the street. “Is that tin foil on the windows?”