Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Farish pushed Loyal to the ground. “I got all night,” he said. “ Motherfucker . Double-cross me and I’m on break ye teeth out and blow a hole in your chest.”

Danny caught Farish’s arm. “Leave him, Farish, come on . We need the gun upstairs.”

Loyal, on the ground, raised himself up on his elbows. “Is they out?” he said; and his voice was full of such innocent astonishment that even Farish stopped cold.

Danny staggered back in his motorcycle boots and wiped a dirty arm across his forehead. He looked shellshocked. “All over the fucking place,” he said.

“We’re missing one,” said Loyal, ten minutes later, wiping the blood-tinged spit from his mouth with his knuckle. His left eye was purple and swollen to a slit.

Danny said: “I smell something funny. This place smells like piss. Do you smell it, Gene?” he asked his brother.

“There he goes!” cried Farish suddenly, and lunged for a defunct heating register from which protruded six inches of snake tail.

The tail flicked, with a parting rattle, and disappeared down the register like a whiplash.

“Quit,” said Loyal to Farish, who was pounding the register with the toe of his motorcycle boot. Moving quickly to the register, he bent over it fearlessly (Eugene and Danny and even Farish, ceasing his dance, stepping well back). Pursing his lips, he emitted an eerie, cutting little whistle: eeeeeeeee , like a cross between a teakettle and a wet finger rubbed across a balloon.

Silence. Loyal puckered up again, with bloodied and swollen lips —eeeeeeee , a whistle to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Then he listened, with his ear to the ground. After a full five minutes of silence he climbed painfully to his feet and rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs.

“He’s gone,” he announced.

“Gone?” cried Eugene. “Gone where?”

Loyal wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s went down in that other apartment,” he said gloomily.

“You ought to be in the circus,” said Farish, looking at Loyal with newfound respect. “That’s some trick. Who taught you how to whistle like that?”

“Snakes mind me,” said Loyal, modestly, as they all stood staring at him.

“Ho!” Farish clapped an arm around him; the whistle had so impressed him that he’d forgotten all about being angry. “Reckon you can teach me to do that?”

Staring out the window, Danny muttered: “Something funny’s going on around here.”

“What’s that?” snapped Farish, wheeling on him. “You got something to say to me, Danny boy, you say it to my face.”

“I said something funny’s going on around here . That door was open when we come up here tonight.”

“Gene,” said Loyal, clearing his throat, “you need to call these people downstairs. I know exactly where that fellow’s gone. He’s went down that retchister, and he’s making himself comfortable in the hot water pipes.”

“Reckon why he don’t come on back?” said Farish. He pursed his lips and tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate the unearthly whistle that Loyal had employed to lure six timber rattlers, one by one, from varying parts of the room. “Ain't he trained as good as the others?”

“Ain't none of em trained. They don’t like all this hollering and stomping. Nope,” said Loyal, scratching his head as he looked down into the register, “he’s gone.”

“Hi you going to get him back?”

“Listen, I got to get to the doctor!” wailed Eugene, wringing his wrist. His hand was so swollen that it looked like a blown-up rubber glove.

“I be damned,” Farish said brightly. “You are bit.”

“I told you I was bit! There, there, and there!”

Loyal said, coming over to see: “He don’t always use all his venom in one strike.”

“The thing was hanging off of me!” The room was starting to turn black at the edges; Eugene’s hand burned, he felt high and not unpleasant, the way he felt in the sixties, back in prison before he was saved, when he’d got off by huffing cleaning fluid in the laundry room, when the steamy cinder-block corridors closed in around him until he was seeing everything in a narrow but queerly pleasing circle, like looking through an empty toilet-paper roll.

“I been bit worse,” said Farish; and he had, years before, while lifting a rock from a field he was bush-hogging. “Loyle, you got a whistle to fix that?”

Loyal picked up Eugene’s swollen hand. “ Oh , my,” he said glumly.

“Go on!” said Farish gaily. “Pray for him, preacher! Call down the Lord for us! Do your stuff!”

“It don’t work like that. Boy, that little fellow got you good!” Loyal said to Eugene. “Right in the vein here.”

Restlessly, Danny ran a hand through his hair and turned away. He was stiff and aching from adrenaline, muscles strung like a high-tension wire; he wanted another bump; he wanted to get the hell out of the Mission; he didn’t care if Eugene’s arm fell off, and he was good and sick of Farish too. Here Farish had dragged him all the way into town—but had Farish gone out and secured the drugs in Loyal’s truck while he had the chance? No. He’d sat around for nearly half an hour, reared back luxuriantly in his chair, relishing the captive audience he had in the polite little preacher, bragging and boasting and telling stories that his brothers had heard a million times already and just generally running his mouth. Despite all the not-so-subtle hints that Danny had dropped, he still hadn’t gone out and moved the drugs from the army-surplus bag to wherever he was going to hide them. No: he was far too interested now in Loyal Reese and the rattlesnake roundup. And he’d let up on Reese too easy: way too easy. Sometimes, when Farish was high, he locked into ideas and fancies and couldn’t shake them loose; you could never tell what was going to seize his attention. Any irrelevant little thing—a joke, a cartoon on television—could distract him like a baby. Their father had been the same. He might be beating Danny or Mike or Ricky Lee half to death over some triviality, but let him overhear some irrelevant news item and he’d stop in mid-blow (leaving his son crumpled and crying on the floor) and run into the next room to turn up the radio. Cattle prices rising! Well, imagine that.

Aloud, he said: “Tell you what I want to know.” He’d never trusted Dolphus, and he didn’t trust this Loyal, either. “How’d them snakes get out of the box in the first place?”

“ Oh , shit,” said Farish, and darted to the window. After several moments Danny realized that the faint staticky pop pop sparking in his ears was not his imagination, but an actual car pulling up on the gravel outside.

A hot pin-head—like a tick lit on fire—sizzled and flared in his visual field. The next thing Danny knew, Loyal had vanished into the back room and Farish, by the door, was saying: “Get over here. Tell him the ruckus—Eugene?—Tell him you was snake-bit out in the yard—”

“Tell him,” said Eugene—who was glassy-eyed, and wobbling, in the glare of the overhead bulb—”tell him to pack his damn reptiles. Tell him he’d better not be here when I wake up in the morning.”

“Sorry, mister,” said Farish—stepping to block the passage of the enraged and gibbering figure who was attempting to gain entry.

“What’s going on here? What kind of a party is this—”

“This ain’t a party sir, no, don’t come in,” said Farish, blocking his way with his large body, “no time to stand around and visit. We need some help here, my brother’s snake-bit—out of his head, see? Help me get him out to the car.”