Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Quickly, she ducked behind the first truck—the Kentucky one. Then she took the chunk of concrete (which, she now noticed, was not just any old chunk of concrete but a lawn ornament in the shape of a curled-up kitten) and knocked it against the headlight.

Pop went the lights as they broke—easily, with an explosion like a flashbulb; pop pop . Then she ran back and broke out all the lights on the Ratliff truck, the headlights and the tail-lights too. Though she felt like smashing them with all her strength, she held herself back; she was afraid of rousing the neighbors, and a good hard rap—like cracking the shell of an egg—was all it took to shatter them, so that big triangles of glass fell out upon the gravel.

From the tail-lights, she gathered up the biggest and most pointed shards and wedged them into the treads of the back tires, as firmly as she could without cutting her hands. Then she circled to the front of the truck and did the same. Heart pounding, she took two or three deep breaths. Then, with both hands, and with all the strength she could muster, she stood and lifted the concrete kitten as high as she could and hurled it through the windshield.

It broke with a bright splash. A shower of glass pebbles pattered to the dashboard. Across the street, a porch light snapped on, followed by the light next door, but the moonlit driveway—sparkling with broken glass—was deserted now, for Harriet was already halfway up the stairs.

“What was that?”

Silence. All at once—to Hely’s horror—a hundred and fifty watts of white electricity poured down on him from the overhead bulb. Aghast, blinded by the dazzle, he cringed against the sleazy panel board and almost before he could blink (there had been an awful lot of snakes on the carpet) somebody cursed and the room went black again.

A bulky form stepped through the door and into the dark room. Lightly, for its size, it slipped past Hely and toward the front windows.

Hely froze: the blood drained in a rapid whoosh from his head clear down to his ankles but just as the room was starting to swing back and forth a disturbance broke out in the front room. Agitated talk, not quite audible. A chair scraped back. “No, don’t,” someone said, clearly.

Fierce whispers. In the dark, only a few feet away, Farish Ratliff stood listening in the shadows—motionless, his chin high and his stumpy legs parted, like a bear poised to attack.

In the next room, the door squeaked open. “Farsh?” said one of the men. Then, to Hely’s surprise, he heard a child’s voice: whiny, breathless, indistinct.

Horribly near, Farish snapped: “Who’s that?”

Commotion. Farish—only steps from Hely—drew a long, exasperated breath then wheeled and thundered back into the lighted room as if he meant to choke someone.

One of the men cleared his throat and said: “Farish, look here—”

“Downstars … Come see …” The new voice—the child—was countrified and whiny; a little too whiny, Hely realized, with an incredulous surge of hope.

“Farsh, she says the truck—”

“He done broke your windows out,” piped the acid, tiny voice. “If you hurry—”

There was a general scramble, cut short by a bellow loud enough to bring down the walls.

“—if you hurry, you can catch him,” said Harriet; the accent had slipped, the voice—high, pedantic—recognizably hers, but nobody seemed to notice over the ecstasy of stuttering and curses. Feet thundered down the back stairs.

“Goddamn it!” shrieked someone, from outside.

From below floated an extraordinary ruckus of curses and shouts. Hely, cautiously, edged to the door. For several moments he stood and listened, so intently that he took no notice in the weak light of a small rattlesnake, coiled to strike, only ten or twelve inches from his foot.

“Harriet?” he whispered, at last—or tried to whisper, for he had almost completely lost his voice. For the first time, he realized how horribly thirsty he was. From downstairs, in the driveway, came confused shouts, a fist pounding on metal—hollow, repetitive, like the galvanized washtub that rendered the thunder sound effects in the middle-school plays and dance recitals.

Carefully, he peered around the door. The chairs were pushed back all cock-eyed; glasses of melting ice stood, in linked rings of water, on the card table beside an ashtray and two packs of cigarettes. The door to the landing was ajar. Another small snake had crawled into the room and was lying inconspicuously beneath the column radiator, but Hely had forgotten all about the snakes. Without wasting another moment, without even looking where he put his feet, he ran through the kitchen for the back door.

The preacher, hugging himself, leaned out over the pavement and looked down it as if waiting for a train. The scalded side of his face was turned away from Harriet but even in profile he was unnerving, with a furtive and disconcerting habit of putting his tongue out between his lips from time to time. Harriet stood as far from him as she reasonably could, with her face turned to the side so that neither he nor the others (still cursing, back in the driveway) could get a good look at her. She wanted—badly—to break and run for it; she had drifted down to the sidewalk with the idea of doing exactly that; but the preacher had disengaged himself from the confusion and trailed along behind her and she was not sure that she could out-run him. Upstairs, she’d trembled and quailed inside as the brothers towered over her in the lighted doorway: giants all, overpowering in their bulk, sunburnt and scarred and tattooed and greasy, glaring down at her with their stony light-colored eyes. The dirtiest and most massive of them—bearded, with bushy black hair and a ghastly white fish-eye like blind Pew in Treasure Island —had slammed his fist against a door frame, cursed so foully and fluently and with such an alarming violence that Harriet backed away in shock; now, methodically, his gray-streaked mane flying, he was kicking the remnants of one of the tail-lights to splinters with his boot. He was like the Cowardly Lion, but evil, with his strongman torso and his little short legs.

“Say they wasn’t in a car?” said the preacher, turning scar and all to scrutinize her.

Harriet, dumbly, kept her eyes down and shook her head. The lady with the Chihuahua—gaunt, in sleeveless nightgown and flip-flop pool sandals, a pink plastic hospital band around her wrist—was shuffling back toward her own house. She’d come outside carrying the dog, and her cigarettes and lighter in a tooled leather case, and stood at the edge of her yard to watch what was going on. Over her shoulder, the Chihuahua dog—still yapping—was staring Harriet straight in the eye and wriggling as if he wanted nothing more in the world than to escape from his mistress’s grasp and chew Harriet to pieces.

“He was white?” said the preacher. He wore a leather vest over his short-sleeved white shirt, and his gray hair was slicked back in a high, wavy pompadour. “You sure about that?”

Harriet nodded; with a show of shyness she pulled a strand of hair over her face.

“You’re running around out here mighty late this evening. Ain't I seen you down at the square earlier?”

Harriet shook her head, glanced back studiously at the house—and saw Hely, blank-faced, white as a bedsheet, skimming rapidly down the stairs. Down he flew, without seeing Harriet or anybody—and bumped smack into the one-eyed man, who was muttering into his beard and striding towards the house with his head down, very fast.