Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet stood transfixed. Though she’d envisioned the moment clearly enough, somehow it was happening wrong-side-out, through the small end of the telescope—cries remote and inhuman, gestures flat, stretched thin with a spacey, ritualized horror. Impossible to quit now, put the toys up, knock down the chessboard and start again.

She turned and ran. At her back, a clatter and a rush of wind and the next instant Hely’s bike swerved past her, bounced on the ramp, and flew off and away down the highway—every man for himself now, Hely hunched like one of the Winged Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz and pedalling furiously.

Harriet ran, her heart pounding, the creature’s weak cries ( aiiii … aiii …) echoing senseless in the distance. The sky blazed bright and murderous. Off the shoulder … here, on the grass now, past this fence post with the No Trespass sign and half across the pasture … What they’d aimed for, and struck, in the depthless glare off the overpass, was not so much the car itself as a point of no return: time a rear view mirror now, the past rushing backward to the vanishing point. Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.

Gladly, the cobra slipped into the high weeds of the cow pasture, into a heat and vegetation not unlike that of its native land, away into the fable and legend of the town. In India, it had hunted on the outskirts of villages and cultivated areas (slipping into grain bins at twilight, feeding upon rats) and it adapted with alacrity to the barns and corncribs and garbage dumps of its new home. For years to come, farmers and hunters and drunks would sight the cobra; curiosity seekers would attempt to hunt it down, and photograph or kill it; and many, many tales of mysterious death would hover about its silent, lonely path.

“Why wasn’t you with her?” demanded Farish in the waiting room of Intensive Care. “That’s what I want to know. I thought you was responsible for driving her home.”

“How was I to know she got out early? She should have called me at the pool hall. When I come on back to the courthouse at five she was gone.” Leaving me stranded was what Danny felt like saying, and didn’t. He’d had to walk down to the car wash and find Catfish to drive him home.

Farish was breathing very noisily, through his nose, as he always did when he was about to lose his temper. “All right then, you should of waited there with her.”

“At the courthouse? Outside in the car? All day?”

Farish swore. “I should of took her myself,” he said, turning away. “I should of known something like this’d happen.”

“Farish,” said Danny, and then stopped. It was better not to remind Farish that he couldn’t drive.

“Just why the hell didn’t you take her in the truck?” Farish snapped. “Tell me that.”

“She said the truck was too high for her to climb up in. Too high , ” repeated Danny when Farish’s face darkened in suspicion.

“I heard you,” said Farish. He looked at Danny for a long, uncomfortable moment.

Gum was in Intensive Care, on two IVs and a cardiorespira-tory monitor. A passing truck driver had brought her in. He had happened to drive along just in time to see the astonishing sight of an old lady staggering on the highway with a king cobra latched onto her shoulder. He’d pulled over, hopped out and swiped at the thing with a six-foot length of flexible plastic irrigation pipe from the back of his truck. When he’d knocked it off her, the snake had shot into the weeds—but no doubt about it, he told the doctor at the Emergency room when he brought Gum in, it was a cobra snake, spread hood, spectacle marks, and all. He knew how they looked, he said, from the picture on the pellet-gun box.

“It’s just like armadillos and killer bees,” offered the truck driver—a stumpy little fellow, with a broad red, cheerful face—as Dr. Breedlove searched through the Venomous Reptiles chapter in his Internal Medicine textbook. “Crawling up from Texas and going wild.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” said Dr. Breedlove, “it came from a lot farther away than Texas.”

Dr. Breedlove knew Mrs. Ratliff from his years in the Emergency room, where she was a frequent visitor. One of the younger paramedics did a passable impersonation of her: clasping her chest, wheezing out instructions to her grandsons as she staggered to the ambulance. The cobra story sounded like a lot of bosh but indeed—as incredible as it seemed—the old woman’s symptoms were consistent with cobra bite, and not at all with the bite of any native reptile. Her eyelids drooped; her blood pressure was low; she complained of chest pains and difficulty breathing. There was no spectacular swelling around the puncture, as with a rattlesnake bite. It seemed that the creature had not bitten her very deeply. The shoulder pad of her pants suit had prevented it from sinking its fangs too far into her shoulder.

Dr. Breedlove washed his large pink hands and went out to speak to the cluster of grandsons, standing moodily outside Intensive Care.

“She’s displaying neurotoxic symptoms,” he said. “Ptosis, respiratory distress, falling blood pressure, lack of localized edema. We’re monitoring her closely since she may need to be intubated and placed on a ventilator.”

The grandsons—startled—gazed at him suspiciously, while the retarded-looking child waved at Dr. Breedlove with enthusiasm. “Hi!” he said.

Farish stepped forward in a way that made it clear he was in charge.

“Where is she?” He pushed past the doctor. “Let me talk to her.”

“Sir. Sir . I’m afraid that’s impossible. Sir? I’ll have to ask you to come back out in the hall right now.”

“Where is she?” said Farish, standing confounded among tubes and machines and beeping equipment.

Dr. Breedlove stepped in front of him. “Sir, she’s resting comfortably.” Expertly, with the aid of a pair of orderlies, he herded Farish out into the hall. “She doesn’t need to be disturbed now. There’s nothing you can do for her. See, there’s a waiting area down there where you can sit. There . ”

Farish shrugged his arm off. “What are y'all doing for her?” he said, as if whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

Dr. Breedlove went back into his smooth speech about the cardiorespiratory monitor and the ptosis and the lack of local edema. What he did not say was that the hospital had no cobra antitoxin and no way of obtaining any. The last few minutes with the Internal Medicine textbook had offered Dr. Breedlove quite a little education in a subject which had not been covered in medical school. For cobra bites, only the specific antitox would do. But only the very largest zoos and medical centers kept it in stock, and it had to be administered within a few hours, or it was useless. So the old lady was on her own. Cobra bite, said his textbook, was anywhere from ten to fifty percent fatal. That was a big margin—especially when the figures didn’t specify if the survival percentage was based upon treated or untreated bites. Besides, she was old, and she had an awful lot wrong with her beside snakebite. The records on her were an inch thick. And if pressed for odds on whether or not the old lady would live the night—or even the next hour—Dr. Breedlove would have had absolutely no idea what to hazard.