Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

About what? About how famous she would someday be as a prize-winning botanist. She imagined herself like George Washington Carver, walking among rows of flowers in a white lab coat. She would be a brilliant scientist, yet humble, taking no money for her many inventions of genius.

Things looked different from the overpass in the daytime. The pastures were not green, but crisped and brown, with dusty red patches where cattle had tramped it bald. Along the barbed-wire fences flourished a lush growth of honeysuckle intertwined with poison ivy. Beyond, a trackless stretch of nothing, nothing but a skeleton barn—gray board, rusted tin—like a wrecked ship washed up on a beach.

The shade of the stacked cement bags was surprisingly deep and cool—and the cement itself was cool, against her back. All my life , she thought, I will remember this day, how I feel . Over the hill, out of sight, a farm machine droned monotonously. Above it sailed three buzzards like black paper kites. The day she lost Ida would always be about those black wings gliding through cloudless sky, about shadowless pastures and air like dry glass.

Hely—cross-legged in the white dust—sat opposite, his back against the retaining wall, reading a comic book whose cover showed a convict in a striped suit crawling through a graveyard on hands and knees. He looked half-asleep, though for a while—an hour or so—he had watched vigilantly, on his knees, hissing sssh! sssh! every time a truck passed.

With effort, she turned her thoughts back to her vegetable garden. It would be the most beautiful garden in the world, with fruit trees, and ornamental hedges, and cabbages planted in patterns: eventually it would take over the whole yard, and Mrs. Fountain’s too. People driving by would stop in their cars and ask to be taken through it. The Ida Rhew Brownlee Memorial Gardens … no, not memorial, she thought hastily, because that made it sound as if Ida were dead.

Very suddenly one of the buzzards fell; the other two dropped after it, as if reeled in by the same kite-string, down to devour whatever mangled field mouse or ground-hog the tractor had rolled over. In the distance a car was approaching, indistinct in the wavy air. Harriet shaded her eyes with both hands. After a moment she said: “Hely!”

The comic book went flapping. “Are you sure?” he said, scrambling to look. She’d already given two false alarms.

“It’s him,” she said, and dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the white dust to the opposite wall, where the box sat atop four bags of cement.

Hely squinted at the road. A car shimmered in the distance, in a ripple of gasoline fumes and dust. It didn’t look like it was coming fast enough to be the Trans Am, but just as he was about to say so the sun struck and glittered off the hood a hard, metallic bronze. Through the wavering heat-mirage burst the snarling grille: shining, shark-faced, unmistakable.

He ducked behind the wall (the Ratliffs carried pistols; somehow he hadn’t remembered until this instant) and crawled to help her. Together they tipped the box on its side with the screen facing the road. Already, on their first false alarm, they’d been paralyzed when it came to reaching blindly around the screened front to pull the bolt, scrabbling around in confusion as the car shot beneath them; now, the latch was loosened, a Popsicle stick to the ready so they could shoot the bolt without touching it.

Hely glanced back. The Trans Am was rolling towards them—disturbingly slow. He’s seen us; he must have . But the car didn’t stop. Nervously, he glanced up at the box, which was propped above the level of their heads.

Harriet, breathing like she had asthma, glanced over her shoulder. “Okay …” she said, “here we go, one, two …”

The car disappeared beneath the bridge; she shot the bolt; and the world went into slow motion as together, in a single effort, they tipped the box. As the cobra slid and shifted, flipping his tail in an attempt to right himself, several thoughts flashed through Hely’s mind at once: chief among them, how they were going to get away. Could they outrun him? For certainly he’d stop—any fool would, with a cobra falling on the roof of his car—and take out after them….

The concrete rumbled beneath their feet just as the cobra slid free, and fell through empty air. Harriet stood up, her hands on the railing, and her face as hard and mean as any eighth-grade boy’s. “Bombs away,” she said.

They leaned over the railing to watch. Hely felt dizzy. Down the cobra writhed through space, filliping toward the asphalt below. We missed , he thought, looking down at the empty road, and just at that moment the Trans Am—with its T-top open—shot from under their feet and directly beneath the falling snake….

Several years before, Pem had been throwing baseballs to Hely down the street from their grandmother’s house: an old house with a modern addition—mostly glass—on the Parkway in Memphis. “Put it through that window,” said Pem, “and I’ll give you a million dollars.” “All right,” said Hely, and swung without thinking, and hit the ball crack without even looking at it, hit it so far that even Pem’s jaw dropped as it flew overhead and sailed far far far, straight and undeviating on its path until it crashed, bang: right through the sun-porch window and practically into the lap of his grandmother, who was talking on the telephone—to Hely’s dad, as it turned out. It was a million-to-one shot, impossible: Hely was no good at baseball; he was always the last non-gay or -retarded kid to get picked for a team; never had he hit any ball so high and hard and sure, and the bat had clunked to the ground as he stared in wonder at its clean, pure arc, curving straight for the center panel of his grandma’s glassed-in porch….

And the thing was, he’d known the ball was going to break his grandma’s window, known it the second he felt the ball strike solid against the bat; as he’d watched it speeding for the center pane like a guided missile he’d had no time to feel anything but the most bracing joy, and for a breathless heartbeat or two (right before it struck the glass, that impossible and distant mark) Hely and the baseball had become one; he’d felt he was guiding it with his mind, that God had for some reason this strange moment decided to grant him absolute mental control over this dumb object hurtling at top speed towards its inevitable target, splash, whackeroo, banzai ….

Despite what came later (tears, a whipping) it remained one of the most satisfying moments of his life. And it was with the same disbelief—and terror, and exhilaration, and dumbstruck goggling awe at all the invisible powers of the universe rising in concert and bearing down simultaneously upon this one impossible point—that Hely watched the five-foot cobra strike the open T-top unevenly, at a diagonal, so that his top-heavy tail slid abruptly inside the Trans Am and pulled the rest of him in after it.

Hely—unable to contain himself—jumped up, struck the air with his fist: “Yes!” Yipping and capering like a demon, he grabbed Harriet’s arm and shook it, stabbing a gleeful finger at the Trans Am, which had braked with a screech and swerved to the other side of the road. Gently, in a cloud of dust, it coasted onto the pebbly shoulder, the gravel cracking under its tires.

Then it stopped. Before either of them could move, or speak, the door opened and out tumbled not Danny Ratliff but an emaciated mummy of a creature: frail, sexless, clad in a repellent mustard-yellow pants suit. Feebly, it clawed at itself, tottered onto the highway, then halted, and wobbled a few feet in the opposite direction. Aiiiieeeeeeee , it wailed. Its cries were thin and strangely bloodless considering that the cobra was fastened to the creature’s shoulder: five feet of long black body hanging down solid and pendulous from the hood (wicked spectacle-marks clearly visible) ending in a length of narrow and frightfully active black tail that lashed up a thunderous cloud of red dust.