Authors: Donna Tartt
“Get out!”
Harriet, uneasily, studied the carpet. Never had she got used to the flagrant dramas which erupted in Hely’s household when his parents were at work: Hely and Pem against each other (locks picked, posters torn from walls, homework stolen and ripped to pieces) or, more frequently, Hely and Pem against an ever-changing housekeeper: Ruby, who ate slices of white bread folded in half, and would not let them watch anything that came on television at the same time as
General Hospital;
Sister Bell, the Jehovah’s Witness; Shirley, with brown lipstick and lots of rings, always on the telephone; Mrs. Doane, a gloomy old woman terrified of break-ins who sat watching by the window with a butcher knife in her lap; Ramona, who went berserk and chased Hely with a hairbrush. None of them were very friendly or nice, but it was hard to blame them since they had to put up with Hely and Pemberton all the time.
“Listen at you,” said Essie, with contempt; “ugly thing.” She gestured, vaguely, at the hideous curtains, the stickers darkening his windows. “I’d like to take and burn down this whole ugly—”
“She
threatened to burn down our house!
” shrieked Hely, red in the face. “You heard her, Harriet. I have a witness. She just threatened to burn down—”
“I aint say one word about yo house. You better not—”
“Yes, you did. Didn’t she, Harriet? I’m going to tell my mother,” he cried—without waiting for a reply from Harriet, who was too stunned by all this to speak, “and she’s going to
call the employment office, and tell them you’re crazy, and not to send you out to anybody else’s house—”
Behind Essie, Pem’s head appeared in the doorway. He stuck his lower lip out at Hely, in a babyish, tremulous pout.
“Wook who’s in twouble,”
he piped, with fraudulent tenderness.
It was the wrong thing to say, at exactly the wrong moment. Essie Lee wheeled, eyes bulging. “What for you talk to me like that!” she screamed.
Pemberton—brows knit—blinked at her foggily.
“Sorry thing! Lay up in the bed all day, aint work a day in your life! I got to earn money. My child—”
“What’s eating
her?
” said Pemberton to Hely.
“Essie threatened to burn the house down,” said Hely, smugly. “Harriet’s my witness.”
“I aint done no such thing!” Essie’s plump cheeks quivered with emotion. “That’s a lie!”
Pemberton—in the hall, but out of view—cleared his throat. Behind Essie’s heaving shoulder, his hand popped up, then beckoned:
all clear
. With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated the stairs.
Without warning, Hely seized Harriet’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom which connected his room with Pemberton’s and shot the bolt behind them. “Hurry!” he yelled to Pemberton—who was on the other side, in his room, trying to get the door open—and then they dashed out into Pemberton’s room (Harriet, in the dim, tripping on a tennis racket) and scurried out behind him and down the stairs.
————
“That was nuts,” said Pemberton. It was the first thing anyone had said for a while. The three of them were sitting at the lone picnic table behind Jumbo’s Drive-In, on a concrete slab next to a forlorn pair of kiddie rides: a circus elephant and a faded yellow duck, on springs. They had driven around in the Cadillac—aimlessly, all three of them in the front seat—for about ten minutes, no air-conditioning and about to roast with the top up, before Pem finally pulled in at Jumbo’s.
“Maybe we ought to stop by the tennis courts and tell Mother,” said Hely. He and Pem were being unusually cordial to each other, though in a subdued way, united by the quarrel with Essie.
Pemberton took a last slurp of his milkshake, tossed it into the trash. “Man, you called that one.” The afternoon glare, reflected off the plate-glass window, burned white at the edges of his pool-frizzed hair. “That woman is a freak. I was scared she was going to hurt you guys or something.”
“Hey,” said Hely, sitting up straighter. “That siren.” They all listened to it for a moment, off in the distance.
“That’s probably the fire truck,” said Hely, glumly. “Driving to our house.”
“Tell me again, what happened?” Pem said. “She just went berserk?”
“Totally nuts. Hey, give me a cigarette,” he added, casually, as Pem tossed a packet of Marlboros—squashed from the pocket of his cutoff jeans—onto the table and dug in the other pocket for a light.
Pem lit his cigarette, then moved both matches and cigarettes out of Hely’s reach. The smoke smelled unusually harsh and poisonous, there on the hot concrete amidst the backwash of fumes from the highway. “I have to say, I saw it coming,” he said, shaking his head. “I told Mama. That woman is deranged. She’s probably escaped from Whitfield.”
“It wasn’t
that
bad,” blurted Harriet, who’d hardly said a word since they’d bolted from the house.
Both Pem and Hely turned to stare at her as if she was insane. “Huh?” said Pem.
“Whose side are you on?” said Hely, aggrieved.
“She didn’t
say
she was going to burn down the house.”
“Yes she did!”
“No! All she said was
burn down
. She didn’t say
the house
. She was talking about Hely’s posters and stickers and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah?” Pemberton said reasonably. “Burn Hely’s posters? I guess you think that’s all right.”
“I thought you liked me, Harriet,” said Hely sulkily.
“But she didn’t say she was going to burn the house
down,” said Harriet. “All she said was … I mean,” she said, as Pemberton rolled his eyes knowingly at Hely, “it just wasn’t that big a deal.”
Hely, ostentatiously, scooted away from her on the bench seat.
“But it wasn’t,” said Harriet, who was growing by the moment more unsure of herself. “She was just … mad.”
Pem rolled his eyes and blew out a cloud of smoke. “No kidding, Harriet.”
“But … but yall are acting like she chased us with a butcher knife.”
Hely snorted. “Well, next time, she might! I’m not staying by myself with her any more,” he repeated, self-pityingly, as he stared down at the concrete. “I’m sick of getting death threats all the time.”
————
The drive through Alexandria was short, and contained no more novelty or diversion than the Pledge of Allegiance. Down the east side of Alexandria and hooking in again at the south, the Houma River coiled around two-thirds of the town. Houma meant red, in the Choctaw language, but the river was yellow: fat, sluggish, with the sheen of ochre oil paint squeezed from the tube. One crossed it from the south, on a two-lane iron bridge dating from FDR’s administration, into what visitors called the historic district. A wide, flat, inhospitable avenue—painfully still in the strong sun—gave into the town square with its disconsolate statue of the Confederate soldier slouching against his propped rifle. Once he had been shaded by oak trees, but these had all been sawn down a year or two before to make way for a confused but enthusiastic aggregate of commemorative civic structures: clock tower, gazebos, lamp-posts, bandstand, bristling over the tiny and now shadeless plot like toys jumbled together in an unseemly crowd.
On Main Street, up to First Baptist Church, the houses were mostly big and old. To the east, past Margin and High Street, were the train tracks, the abandoned cotton gin and the warehouses where Hely and Harriet played. Beyond—towards Levee Street, and the river—was desolation: junkyards,
salvage lots, tin-roofed shacks with sagging porches and chickens scratching in the mud.
At its grimmest point—by the Alexandria Hotel—Main Street turned into Highway 5. The Interstate had passed Alexandria by; and now the highway suffered the same dereliction as the shops on the square: defunct grocery stores and car lots, baking in a poisonous gray heat haze; the Checkerboard Feed Store and the old Southland gas station, boarded up now (its faded sign: a saucy black kitten with white bib and stockings, batting with its paw at a cotton boll). A north turn, onto County Line Road, took them by Oak Lawn Estates and under an abandoned overpass, into cow pastures and cotton fields and tiny, dusty little sharecropper farms, laboriously cut from dry red-clay barrens. Harriet and Hely’s school—Alexandria Academy—was out here, a fifteen-minute drive from town: a low building of cinder block and corrugated metal which sprawled in the middle of a dusty field like an airplane hangar. Ten miles north, past the academy, the pines took over from the pastures entirely and pressed against either side of the road in a dark, high, claustrophobic wall which bore down relentlessly almost to the Tennessee border.
Instead of heading out into the country, however, they stopped at the red light by Jumbo’s, where the rearing circus elephant held aloft in his sun-bleached trunk a neon ball advertising:
C
ONES
S
HAKES
B
URGERS
and—past the town cemetery, rising high upon its hill like a stage backdrop (black iron fences, graceful-throated stone angels guarding the marble gateposts to north, south, east, and west)—they circled around through town again.
When Harriet was younger, the east end of Natchez Street had been all white. Now both blacks and whites lived here, harmoniously for the most part. The black families were young and prosperous, with children; most of the whites—like Allison’s piano teacher, and Libby’s friend Mrs. Newman McLemore—were old, widowed ladies without family.
“Hey, Pem, slow down in front of the Mormon house here,” said Hely.
Pem blinked at him. “What’s the matter?” he said, but he slowed down, anyway.
Curtis was gone, and so was Mr. Dial’s car. A pickup was parked in the driveway but Harriet could see that it wasn’t the same truck. The gate was down, and the bed was empty except for a metal tool chest.
“They’re in
that?
” said Hely, breaking off short in the midst of his complaints about Essie Lee.
“Man, what
is
that up there?” said Pemberton, stopping the car in the middle of the street. “Is that tin foil on the windows?”
“Harriet, tell him what you saw. She said she saw—”
“I don’t even want to know what goes on up there. Are they making dirty movies, or what? Man,” said Pemberton, throwing the car into park, peering upward with his hand shading his eyes, “
what kind of a creep
rolls tin foil over all their windows?”
“Oh my gosh.” Hely flounced around in the seat and stared straight ahead.
“What’s your problem?”
“Pem, come on, let’s go.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Look,” said Harriet, after several moments of fascinated silence. A triangle of black had appeared in the center window, where the tinfoil was being peeled back from within by some anonymous but artful claw.
————
As the car sped off, Eugene rolled the tin foil back over the window with trembling fingers. He was coming down with a migraine headache. Tears streamed from his eye; as he stepped from the window, in the darkness and confusion, he bumped into a crate of soda bottles, and the racket slashed in a brilliant zig-zag of pain down the left side of his face.
Migraine headaches ran in the Ratliff family. It was said of Eugene’s grandfather—“Papaw” Ratliff, long deceased—that when suffering from what he called “a sick headache,” he
had beaten out a cow’s eye with a two-by-four. And Eugene’s father, similarly afflicted, had slapped Danny so hard on some long-ago Christmas Eve that he flew head-first against the freezer and cracked a permanent tooth.
This headache had descended with less warning than most. The snakes were enough to make anybody sick, not to mention the anxiety of Roy Dial rolling up unannounced; but neither cops, nor Dial, was likely to come snooping in a flashy old gunboat like the car that had stopped out front.
He went into the other room, where it was cooler, and sat down at the card table with his head in his hands. He could still taste the ham sandwich he had for lunch. He had enjoyed it very little, and the bitter, aspirin overtaste in his mouth rendered the memory even more unpleasant.
The headaches made him sensitive to noise. When he’d heard the engine idling in front, he’d gone immediately to the window, fully expecting to see the Clay County sheriff—or, at the very least, a cop car. But the incongruity of the convertible fretted at him. Now, against his better judgment, he dragged the telephone over to him and dialed Farish’s number—for, as much as he hated to call Farish, he was out of his depth in a matter like this. It was a light-colored car; between the glare and his aching head, he hadn’t been able to make out the exact model: maybe a Lincoln, maybe a Cadillac, maybe even a big Chrysler. And all he’d been able to see of its occupants was their race—white—though one of them had pointed up to the window clearly enough. What business had an old-fashioned parade car like that stopping right in front of the Mission? Farish had met a lot of gaudy characters in prison—characters worse to tangle with, in many instances, than the cops.
As Eugene (eyes shut) held the receiver so it wouldn’t touch his face, and tried to explain what had just happened, Farish ate noisily and steadily, something that sounded like a bowl of cornflakes, crunch slop crunch slop. For a long time after he had finished speaking, there was no noise on the other end except Farish’s chews and gulps.
Presently Eugene—clutching his left eye in the darkness—said: “Farsh?”
“Well, you’re right about one thing. No cop, or repo man, isn’t going to drive a car stands out like that,” said Farish. “Maybe syndicate from down on the Gulf Coast. Brother Dolphus used do a little business down that way.”
The bowl clicked against the receiver as Farish—from the sound of it—tipped his bowl up and drank down the leftover milk. Patiently, Eugene waited for him to resume the sentence, but Farish only smacked his lips, and sighed. Distant clatter of spoon on china.
“What would a Gulf Coast syndicate want with
me
?” he finally asked.
“Hell if I know. Something you aint being straight about?”
“Straight is the gate, brother,” Eugene replied stiffly. “I’m just running this mission and loving my Christian walk.”
“Well. Assuming that’s correct. Could be little Reese they come after. Who knows what kind of hot water he’s got himself into.”