Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

The woman whacked him with the flat of her palm across the top of his head. “Shut your trap!”

Mrs. Dorrier laughed—slightly uncomfortable—and picked up her bag and started down the steps. “Next Tuesday then.”

“He’s all worked up,” called the woman, still wrestling with Pancho. “We had a winder-peeper last night. And the police come next door.”

“Great day!” Mrs. Dorrier paused, at the door of her sedan. “You don’t mean it!”

Pancho was still barking up a storm. As Mrs. Dorrier got in her car and slowly rolled away, the woman—standing on the sidewalk now—whacked Pancho again, then carried him inside and slammed the door.

Hely and Harriet waited, for a moment or two, breathless; and when they were sure that no cars were coming, they dashed across the street to the grassy median and dropped to their knees by the bicycles.

Harriet jerked her head at the driveway of the frame house. “Nobody’s home over there.” The stone in her chest had lifted somewhat and she felt lighter now, level and swift.

With a grunt, Hely wrenched his bicycle free.

“I need to get that snake from under there.”

The brusqueness of her voice made him feel sorry for her without understanding why. He stood his bike up. Harriet was astride her own bicycle, glaring at him.

“We’ll come back,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He hopped on and, together, they kicked off and glided down the street.

Harriet overtook him, and passed, aggressively, cutting him off at the corner. She was acting like she’d just had the shit beaten out of her, he thought, looking after her hunched low on the bike and pedalling furiously down the street, like Dennis Peet, or Tommy Scoggs, mean kids who beat up on smaller kids and got beaten up themselves by larger ones. Maybe it was because she was a girl—but when Harriet got in these mean daredevil moods, it excited him. The thought of the cobra excited him too; and though he didn’t feel comfortable explaining to Harriet—not yet—that he’d set half a dozen rattlesnakes loose in the apartment, it had just occurred to him that the frame house was empty, and might be for some time.

“How often do you think he eats?” said Harriet, who was stooped over pushing the wagon from behind as Hely tugged it ahead in front—not very fast, because it was almost too dark to see. “Maybe we should give him a frog.”

Hely heaved the wagon down from the curb and into the street. A beach towel from his house was draped over the box. “I’m not feeding this thing any frog,” he said.

He had been correct in his hunch that the Mormon house was empty. It had been only a hunch, nothing more: based on a conviction that he, personally, would rather spend the night locked in a car trunk than a house where rattlesnakes had been found crawling loose. He still had not mentioned to Harriet what he had done, but all the same he had brooded upon his actions sufficiently to justify his innocence. Little did he realize that the Mormons, in a room at the Holiday Inn, were at that very moment discussing with a real-estate lawyer in Salt Lake whether the presence of poisonous vermin in a rental property constituted a breach of contract.

Hely hoped that nobody drove by and saw them. He and Harriet were supposed to be at the movies. His father had given them money to go. She’d spent the whole afternoon at Hely’s house, which wasn’t like her (usually she got tired of him and went home early, even when he begged her to stay) and for hours they’d sat cross-legged on the floor of Hely’s bedroom playing tiddlywinks as they talked quietly about the stolen cobra and what to do with it. The box was too big to conceal on the premises of her house, or his. At length they’d settled on an abandoned overpass west of town, which spanned County Line Road at a particularly desolate stretch, outside the city limits.

Lugging the dynamite box out from under the house and loading it on Hely’s old red kiddie wagon had been easier than they’d imagined; they hadn’t seen a soul. The night was hazy and sweltering, with rumbles of thunder in the still distance. Cushions had been removed from porch furniture, sprinklers turned off and cats called indoors.

Down the sidewalk they rattled. It was only two blocks up High Street on open sidewalks to the train depot, and the farther east they got—closer to the freight yards, and the river—the fewer lights they saw. Tall weeds jingled in neglected yards, which were posted with signs which read FOR SALE and NO TRESPASSING.

Only two passenger trains a day stopped at the Alexandria station. At 7:14 in the morning, the City of New Orleans stopped in Alexandria on her way home from Chicago; at 8:47 in the evening, she stopped again on her way back, and the rest of the time, the station was more or less deserted. The rickety little ticket office, with its steeply pitched roof and its peeling paint, was dark, though the ticket master would arrive in an hour to open it up. Behind, a series of unused gravel roads connected the switching yards with the freight yards, and the freight yards with the gin, and the lumber mill, and the river.

Together, Hely and Harriet stopped to ease the wagon off the sidewalk and down onto the gravel. Dogs were barking—big dogs, but far away. To the south of the depot were the lights of the lumberyard and, further back, the friendly streetlamps of their own neighborhood. Turning their backs upon these last glimmers of civilization, they headed off resolutely in the opposite direction—into outer darkness, and the broad, flat, uninhabited wastes stretching off to the north, past the dead freight yards with their open boxcars and empty cotton wagons, and towards a narrow gravel path vanishing into black pine woods.

Hely and Harriet had played along this isolated road—which led to the abandoned cotton warehouse—but not often. The woods were still and frightening; even in broad daylight the gloomy foot-path—choked to a thread—was always dark beneath the dense, vine-strangled canopy of ailanthus, stunted sweetgum, and pine. The air was damp and unwholesome, whining with mosquitos, and the silence broken only occasionally: by the startling crash of a rabbit through the thicket, or the harsh caws of unseen birds. Several years ago, it had sheltered a team of convicts escaped from a chain gang. Never before had they seen a living soul in that wasteland—except, once, a tiny black boy in red underpants who, bent at the knee, had chunked a rock underhand at them and then tottered back, shrieking, into the underbrush. It was a lonely spot, and neither Harriet nor Hely enjoyed playing there, though neither admitted it.

The wagon tires crackled loud on the gravel. Clouds of gnats—undeterred by the fumes of the insect repellent they’d sprayed themselves with, head to foot—floated around them in the dank, airless clearing. In the shadow and dusk, they could only just see what was in front of them. Hely had brought a flashlight, but now they were here, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to shine lights all over the place.

As they went along, the path grew narrower and more choked with brush, pressing in close on either side like a pair of walls, and they had to roll along very slowly, stopping every now and then to push branches and twigs out of their faces in the dense, blue twilight. “Phew!” said Hely, up front, and as they rolled forward the buzz of the flies grew louder and Harriet was struck in the face by a moist, rotten odor.

“Gross!” she heard Hely cry.

“What?” It was getting so dark that she couldn’t see much more than the wide white bands on the back of Hely’s rugby shirt. Then gravel crunched as Hely lifted the front of the wagon and pushed it sharply to the left.