Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“What is it?” The stench was incredible.

“A possum.”

A dark lump—whirring with flies—lay bunched and shapeless on the footpath. Despite the twigs and branches scratching at her face, Harriet turned her head away as they edged past it.

They pushed ahead until the metallic drone of the flies had faded and the stink was well behind them, then stopped for a moment to rest. Harriet switched on the flashlight and lifted a corner of the beach towel between her thumb and forefinger. In the beam, the cobra’s small eyes glittered at her spitefully when he opened his mouth to hiss at her, and the open slit of his mouth was horribly like a smile.

“How’s he doing?” said Hely, gruffly, hands on his knees.

“Fine,” said Harriet—and jumped back (so that the circle of light swung up crazily in the treetops) as the snake struck against the screen.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Harriet. She switched off the flashlight. “He must not mind being in the box too much.” Her voice seemed very loud in the silence. “I guess he must have lived in it his whole life. They can’t exactly let him out to crawl around, can they?”

After a moment or two of silence, they started up once more, a bit reluctantly.

“I don’t guess the heat bothers him,” Harriet said. “He’s from India. That’s hotter than here.”

Hely was careful where he put his foot—as careful as he could be, in the dark. From the black pines on either side a chorus of tree frogs shrilled back and forth across the road, their song pulsing vertiginously between left ear and right in stereophonic sound.

The path opened into a clearing, where stood the cotton warehouse, washed bone-gray in the moonlight. The recesses of the loading dock—where they’d sat, many afternoons, dangling their legs and talking—were alien in the deep shadow, but on the moon-washed doors, the muddy round marks they’d made by throwing tennis balls were perfectly distinct.

Together they eased the wagon over a ditch. The worst was over now. County Line Road was forty-five minutes from Hely’s house by bicycle, but the road behind the warehouse was a shortcut. Just beyond it were the railroad tracks and then—after a minute or so—the path emerged like magic at County Line Road, just past Highway 5.

From behind the warehouse, they could just see the tracks. Telegraph poles, sagging with honeysuckle, stood out black against a lurid purple sky. Hely looked back and saw in the moonlight that Harriet was glancing around, nervously, in the saw-grass which rose past her knees.

“What’s the matter?” said Hely. “Lose something?”

“Something stung me.”

Hely wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow. “The train doesn’t come through for another hour,” he said.

Together, they struggled to lift the wagon onto the train tracks. While it was true that the passenger train to Chicago wouldn’t be in for a while, they both knew that freight trains sometimes passed through unexpectedly. Local freights, ones that stopped at the depot, crept along so slowly you could practically out-run them on foot but the express freights to New Orleans screamed by so fast that—when waiting with his mother, behind the crossing gate of Highway 5—Hely could scarcely read the words on the boxcars.

Now that they were clear of the underbrush they moved along much faster, the wagon jolting explosively on the cross-ties. Hely’s teeth ached. They were making a lot of racket; and though there was nobody around to hear them, he was afraid that—between the clatter and the frogs—they would be deaf to an oncoming freight train until it was right on top of them. He kept his eyes on the tracks as he ran—half-hypnotized by the roll of the dim bars under his feet, and by the fast, repetitive rhythm of his breath—and he had just begun to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to slow down and switch on the flashlight, after all, when Harriet let out an extravagant sigh and he glanced up and drew a deep breath of relief at the sight of flickering red neon in the distance.

On the margin of the highway, in a bristle of weeds, they huddled by the wagon and peeped out at the railroad crossing, with its sign that said STOP LOOK AND LISTEN. A small breeze blew in their faces, fresh and cool, like rain. If they glanced down the highway to the left—south, towards home—they could just make out the Texaco sign in the distance, the pink-and-green neon of Jumbo’s Drive-In. Here, the lights were farther apart: no shops, no traffic lights or parking lots, only weedy fields and sheds of corrugated metal.

A car whooshed past, startling them. Once they’d looked both ways to make sure no more were coming, they dashed over the tracks and across the silent highway. With the wagon bumping along between them in the dark, they cut across a cow pasture toward County Line Road. County Line was desolate this far out, past the Country Club: fenced pastureland interspersed with vast tracts of dust scraped flat by bulldozers.

A pungent stink of manure wafted up in Hely’s face. Only moments later did he feel the repulsive slipperiness on the bottom of his sneaker. He stopped.

“What is it?”

“Hang on,” he said, miserably, dragging his shoe on the grass. Though there weren’t any lights this far out the moon was bright enough for them to see exactly where they were. Parallel to County Line Road ran an isolated strip of black-top which went for twenty yards or so, then stopped—a frontage road, whose construction had been halted when the Highway Commission had decided to route the Interstate on the opposite side of the Houma, by-passing Alexandria. Grass poked through the buckled asphalt. Ahead, the abandoned overpass arched pale over County Line.

Together, they started up again. They’d thought of hiding the snake in the woods, but the experience at Oak Lawn Estates was still vivid and they faltered at the idea of tramping into dense brush after dark—crashing through thickets, stepping blindly over rotten logs—while encumbered with a fifty-pound box. They’d thought too of hiding it in or around one of the warehouses but even the deserted ones, with plywood nailed over the windows, were posted as private property.

The concrete overpass presented none of these dangers. From Natchez Street, it was easily accessible, via shortcut; it crossed over County Line Road in plain view; yet it was closed to traffic, and far enough from town so that there was little danger of workmen, nosy old folks, or other kids.

The overpass was not stable enough to take cars—and, even if it was, no vehicle could get to it short of a Jeep—but the red wagon slid easily enough up the ramp, with Harriet pushing from behind. On either side rose a concrete retaining wall, three feet high—easy enough to duck behind, in case of a car on the road beneath, but when Harriet raised her head to look, the road was dark both ways. Beyond, broad lowlands rolled off into darkness, with a white sparkle of lights in the direction of town.

When they reached the top, the wind was stronger: fresh, dangerous, exhilarating. Ashen dust powdered the road surface and the retaining wall. Hely brushed his chalky-white hands on his shorts, clicked on his flashlight and jumped it around, over a caked metal trough filled with crumpled waste paper; a skewed cinderblock; a pile of cement bags and a glass bottle with a sticky half-inch of orange soda still inside. Grasping the wall, Harriet stood leaning out over the dark road below as if over the railing of an ocean liner. Her hair was blown back from her face and she looked less miserable than Hely had seen her look all day.

In the distance they heard the long, eerie whistle of a train. “Gosh,” said Harriet, “it’s not eight yet, is it?”