Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“You Babdist devil,” said Eugene, to the red-faced hallucination of Roy Dial—in plaid shorts and canary-yellow golf shirt—which wavered at black tunnel’s end, in a narrowing radius of light.

That night—while a beringed and whorish lady wept amidst crowds and flowers, wept on the flickering black-and-white screen for the big gate, and the broad way, and the multitudes rushing down it to destruction—Eugene tossed upon his hospital cot, a smell like burned clothes in his nostrils. Back and forth he wavered, between the white curtains and the hosannas of the whorish lady and a storm on the shores of a dark and far-away river. Images whirled in and out like prophecy: soiled doves; an evil bird’s nest, fashioned from scaly bits of cast-off snakeskin; a long black snake crawling out of a hole with birds in its stomach: tiny lumps that stirred, still living, struggling to sing even in the blackness of the snake’s belly….

Back at the Mission, Loyal—curled in his sleeping bag—slept soundly, black eye and all, untroubled by nightmares and reptiles alike. Before dawn he woke rested, said his prayers, washed his face and drank a glass of water, loaded his snakes in a hurry, came back upstairs and—sitting at the kitchen table—laboriously wrote out a thank-you note to Eugene on the back of a gas-station receipt, which he left on the table along with a fringed leatherette bookmark, a pamphlet entitled “Job’s Conversation,” and a stack of thirty-seven one-dollar bills. By sun-up, he was in the truck and on the highway, broken lights and all, heading back to his church homecoming in East Tennessee. He did not notice that the cobra (his prize snake, the only one he’d paid money for) was missing until Knoxville; when he called to tell Eugene, nobody answered the phone. And nobody was in the Mission to hear the scream of the Mormon boys—who, rising late (at eight o’clock, having returned late from Memphis the night before) were startled at their morning devotions by the sight of a timber rattlesnake, observing them from atop a basket of freshly laundered shirts.

CHAPTER 5.

The Red Gloves.

The next morning, Harriet woke late: itchy, unbathed, in gritty sheets. The smell in the crawlspace, the colorful boxes all jewelly with nail-heads, the long shadows in the lighted doorway—all this, and more, had bled into her sleep and mixed oddly with the pen-and-ink illustrations from her dime-store edition of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”—big-eyed Teddy, the mongoose, even the snakes rendered perky and adorable. There had been some poor creature tied up and thumping at the bottom of the page, like an end plate to a storybook; it was in pain; it needed her assistance in ways she could not divine but though its very presence was a reproach, a reminder of her own laxity and injustice, she was too repulsed to help it or even look in its direction.

Ignore it Harriet! sang Edie. She and the preacher were in the corner of her bedroom by the chest of drawers, setting up a torture contraption which was like a dentist’s chair with needles prickling from the padded arms and headrest. In some distressing way they seemed like sweethearts, eyebrows lifted, full of admiring glances for each other, Edie testing the needle points here and there with a delicate finger-tip as the preacher stepped back, grinning fondly, his hands crossed over his chest and tucked beneath his armpits….

As Harriet—fretfully—slid back into the stagnant waters of nightmare, Hely woke bolt upright in the top bunk, so fast that he knocked his head on the ceiling. Without thinking, he threw his legs over—and nearly fell, for he’d been so freaked out the night before about what might climb up after him, he’d unhitched the ladder and pushed it over on the carpet.

Self-consciously—as if he’d stumbled on the playground and people were watching—he righted himself and hopped to the floor, and was out of his dark, air-conditioned little room and halfway down the hall before it struck him how silent the house was. He crept downstairs to the kitchen (nobody around, driveway empty, his mom’s car keys gone) and poured himself a bowl of Giggle Pops and took it to the family room and switched on the television. A game show was on. He slurped up the cereal. Though the milk was cold enough, the crunchy pebbles scratched the roof of his mouth; they were strangely tasteless, not even sweet.

The silent house made Hely uncomfortable. He was reminded of the awful morning after he and his older cousin Todd had taken a bottle of rum from a paper bag in the front seat of someone’s unlocked Lincoln, at the Country Club, and drunk about half of it. While Hely and Todd’s parents stood chatting at the poolside luau, nibbling cocktail sausages on toothpicks, he and Todd borrowed a golf cart, rammed it into a pine tree, though Hely remembered very little of this: the main thing he remembered was lying on his side and rolling down a steep hill behind the golf course over and over again. Later, when his stomach started hurting, Todd told him to go to the buffet and eat as many cocktail weenies as fast as he could and that would make it stop. He’d vomited on his knees in the parking lot behind somebody’s Cadillac, while Todd laughed so hard that his mean, freckled face turned tomato-red. Though Hely didn’t remember it, somehow he’d walked home and got in his bed and gone to sleep. When he woke the next morning, the house was empty: they’d all gone to Memphis without him, to drive Todd and his parents back to the airport.

It had been the longest day of Hely’s life. He’d had to clatter around the house by himself for hours: lonesome, nothing to do, trying to piece together exactly what had happened the night before and worrying that he was in for a terrible punishment when his parents returned—which indeed he was. He’d had to hand over all his birthday money to help pay for the damage (his parents had to pay for most of it); he’d had to write a letter of apology to the owner of the golf cart. He’d lost his TV privileges for what seemed like forever. But worst was his mother wondering aloud where he had learned to be a thief. “It’s not so much the liquor”—she must have said it to his father a thousand times—”as him stealing it.” His father made no such distinctions; he acted as if Hely had robbed a bank. For ages, he had hardly spoken to Hely except to say things like Pass The Salt, wouldn’t even look at him, and life at home had never gone back to quite the same way it was before. Typically, Todd—Mr. Musical Genius, first-chair clarinet in his Illinois junior-high band—had blamed everything on Hely, which had been the way throughout their childhoods whenever they saw each other, thankfully not often.

A celebrity guest had just said a bad word on the game show (some rhyming game, the contestants had to come up with the rhyming word that completed a riddle)…. The host blipped it out, the bad word, with an obnoxious noise like a dog’s squeaky toy and wagged a finger at the celebrity guest, who clapped a hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes….

Where the hell were his parents? Why didn’t they just come on home and get it over with? Naughty, naughty! said the laughing host. The other celebrity on the panel had reared back in his chair and was clapping appreciatively.

He tried to stop thinking about the night before. The memory clouded and fouled the morning, like the after-taste of a bad dream; he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, hadn’t damaged property or hurt anyone or taken anything that didn’t belong to him. There was the snake—but they hadn’t really taken it; it was still under the house. And he’d set the other snakes loose but so what? It was Mississippi: snakes were crawling all over the place anyway; who was going to notice a few more? All he’d done was open a latch, one latch . What was the big deal about that? It wasn’t like he’d stolen a golf cart from a City Councilman and wrecked it….