The Little Friend (78 page)

Boundaries wearing thin
. Danny’s scalp tingled. The lush road had taken on the quality of a conveyor-belt corridor in a nightmare, deep green feverish shade pressing in on either side.

He looked in the mirror. The creature was gone.

It wasn’t the drugs, he’d sweated those out in his sleep: no, the river had flooded its banks and all sorts of trash and outrageous garbage had floated up from the bottom and into
the daylight, a disaster film, dreams and memories and unconfessable fears slopping down the public street. And Danny had (not for the first time) the sensation that he had dreamed this day already, that he was driving down Natchez Street towards something that had already taken place.

He rubbed his mouth. He had to pee. As bad as his ribs and his head hurt from Farish’s beating, he could think of little else but how badly he had to pee. And coming off the drugs had left him with a sick chemical undertaste in his mouth.

He stole a glance at Farish. He was still caught up in the music: nodding his head, humming to himself, drumming on the armrest with his knuckle. But the police-dog bitch in the back seat glared at Danny as if she knew exactly what was on his mind.

He tried to psych himself up. Eugene—for all his holy-rolling—would look after Curtis. And then there was Gum. Her very name triggered an avalanche of guilty thoughts, but though Danny bore down hard and willed himself to feel affection for his grandmother he felt nothing. Sometimes, especially when he heard Gum coughing in her room in the middle of the night, he got all choked up and sentimental about the hardships she’d suffered—the poverty, the overwork, the cancers and the ulcers and the arthritis and all the rest of it—but love was an emotion he felt for his grandmother only in her presence and then only occasionally: never out of it.

And what did any of that even matter? Danny had to pee so bad that his eyeballs were about to burst; he squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again.
I’ll send money home. As soon as I move that shit and set myself up …

Was there another way? No. There was no way—apart from what lay ahead of him—to the house by the water in another state. He had to fix his mind on that future, really see it, move toward it smoothly and without stopping.

They drove past the old Alexandria Hotel, with its sagging porch and rotten shutters—haunted, people said, and no wonder, all the people who had died there; you could feel it radiating from the place, all that old historical death. And Danny wanted to howl at the universe that had dumped him
here: in this hell-hole town, in this broken-down county that hadn’t seen money since the Civil War. His first felony conviction hadn’t even been his fault: it was his father’s, for sending him to steal a ridiculously expensive Stihl chainsaw from the workshop of a rich old German farmer who was sitting up guarding his property with a gun. It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism. The only thing for it was to go someplace that nobody knew you and nobody knew your family and try to start your life all over again.

Street signs repeating, and words.
Natchez, Natchez, Natchez
. Chamber of Commerce: A
LEXANDRIA: THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE!
No
, not
the way things ought to be
, Danny thought bitterly;
it’s the way things fucking are
.

Sharply he turned into the freight yards. Farish clutched the dashboard and looked at him with something like astonishment. “What you doing?”

“This is where you told me to go,” Danny said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible.

“I did?”

Danny felt he should say something, but he didn’t know what to say.
Had
Farish mentioned the tower? All of a sudden he wasn’t sure.

“You said you was going to check up on me,” he said, tentatively—just tossing it out there, just to see what might happen.

Farish shrugged, and—to Danny’s surprise—settled back in his seat again and looked out the window. Driving around tended to put him in a good mood. Danny could still hear Farish’s low whistle, the first time he’d pulled up in the Trans Am. How he loved to ride, just climb in the car and go! In those first few months they’d joy-rode it up to Indiana, just the two of them, another time all the way to West Texas—no reason, nothing to see in those places, just clear weather and
the highway signs flashing overhead, punching around on the FM band looking for a song.

“Tell you what. Let’s go get us some breakfast,” Farish said.

Danny’s intentions wavered. He
was
hungry. Then he remembered his plan. It was settled, it was fixed, it was the only way out. Black wings, waving him around the corner, into a future he couldn’t see.

He didn’t turn; he kept driving. Trees crowded close around the car. They were so far off the paved road that it wasn’t even a road any more, just potholes in rutted gravel.

“Just trying to find a place to turn around,” he said, realizing how stupid it sounded even as he said it.

Then he stopped the car. It was a good long walk from the tower (the road was bad and the weeds were high, he didn’t care to drive any farther and risk getting stuck). The dogs started barking like crazy, jumping all over the place and trying to push their way into the front seat. Danny turned, as if to get out of the car. “Here we are,” he said nonsensically. Quickly, he pulled the little pistol out of his boot and pointed it at Farish.

But Farish didn’t see. He had turned sideways in the seat, swinging his large stomach around towards the door. “Git down from there,” he was saying to the bitch named Van Zant, “down, I said
down.
” He raised his hand; the dog shrank.

“Try it with
me?
Try that rebellient shit with me?”

He had not so much as glanced at Danny, or the gun. To get his attention, Danny had to clear his throat.

Farish raised a dirty red hand. “Hold your horses,” he said, without looking, “hang on, I got to discipline this dog. I am
sick
of you” (whack, on the head) “you sorry bitch, don’t you
pull
this uppity shit on me.” He and the dog glared at each other. Her ears were pinned against her skull; her yellow eyes glowed steadily.

“Go on. Do it. I’ll whack you so hard—no, wait,” he said, raising an arm and half-turning to Danny, with the bad eye towards him. “I got to teach this bitch a lesson.” It was as cold and blue as an oyster, that bad eye. “Go on,” he said to the dog. “
Try
it. It’ll be the last time you ever—”

Danny pulled back the hammer and shot Farish in the head. It was just like that, just that fast:
crack
. Farish’s head snapped forward and his mouth fell open. With a gesture that was strangely easy, he reached for the dashboard to brace himself—and then turned towards Danny, his good eye half-shut, but his blind one wide open. A bubble of spit, mixed with blood, came blopping out of his mouth; he looked like a fish, like a hooked mud-cat, blop blop.

Danny shot him again, in the neck this time, and—in the silence that rang and dissolved about him in tinny circles—got out of the car and slammed the door. It was done now; no going back. Blood had sprayed across the front of his shirt; he touched his cheek, and looked at the rusty smear on his fingertips. Farish had collapsed forward with his arms on the dash; his neck was a mess but his mouth, full of blood, was still moving. Sable, the smaller of the two dogs, had his paws over the back of the passenger seat and—rear legs pedalling—was working to clamber over it and on top of his master’s head. The other dog—the motherfucker, the bitch named Van Zant—had scrambled over from the back seat. With her nose down, she circled twice, reversed direction, and then plunked her rear end down in the driver’s seat, her black ears pricked up like a devil’s. For a moment, she glared at Danny with her wolfish eyes, and then began to bark: short, sharp barks, clear and carrying.

The alarm was as plain as if she was shouting “Fire! Fire!” Danny stepped backwards. A multitude of birds had flown up, like shrapnel, at the small crack of the gun. Now they were settling again, in the trees, on the ground. Blood was everywhere inside his car: blood on the windshield, on the dashboard, on the passenger window.

I should have had breakfast
, he thought hysterically.
When did I eat?

And with this thought, he became aware that more than anything, he needed to urinate, and had needed to, desperately, since the very instant he woke that morning.

A wonderful relief descended upon him, and seeped into his bloodstream.
Everything’s fine
, he thought, as he zipped his pants up, and then—

His beautiful car; his car. Moments ago it had been a cherry, a showpiece, and now it was a crime scene from
True Detective
. Within, the dogs moved frantically back and forth. Farish lay slumped over the dashboard, face down. His posture was strangely relaxed and natural; he might have been bent forward to look for dropped keys except for the rich pool of blood spreading from his head and ticking to the floor. Blood was sprayed all over the windshield—fat dark glossy drops, a spray of fat florist’s hollyberries clinging to the glass. In the back seat, Sable rushed back and forth, his tail thumping against the windows. Van Zant—seated beside her master—lunged towards him, in quick, repeated feints: nudging his cheek with her nose, pulling back, springing forward to nudge him again, and barking, barking, those short, piercing barks which—she was a dog, damn it, but yet that short sharp urgency was unmistakable, as good as a raised voice shouting for help.

Danny rubbed his chin and looked around wildly. Whatever itch had goaded him to pull the trigger was gone now, while his troubles had multiplied until they blackened out the sun. Why on earth had he shot Farish
inside
the car? If only he’d held off for two seconds. But no: he’d been dying to get it over with, had jumped like an idiot to pull the trigger and get his shot off instead of waiting for the right moment.

He crouched over, put his hands on his knees. He felt sick and clammy; his heart was hammering and he hadn’t eaten a square meal in weeks, nothing but junk, ice-cream sandwiches and 7-Up; the hard adrenaline slap had drained away, and with it what little strength he’d had, and he wanted nothing so bad in all the world as to lie down on the hot green ground and close his eyes.

He stared at the ground as if hypnotized, then shook himself and pulled himself aright. A little bump would fix him right up—a bump,
good God
, the thought made his eyes water—but he’d left the house with nothing on him and the last thing he wanted to do was open the car door and root around on Farish’s body, zipping and unzipping the pockets on that filthy old shitty UPS coverall.

He limped around to the front of the car. Van Zant lunged
at him, and her snout hit the windshield with a cracking thump that sent him reeling back.

Amidst the sudden racket of barks, he stood still for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly, trying to steady his nerves. He didn’t want to be here but here he was. And he was going to have to start thinking now, taking it slow, one baby step at a time.

————

It was the birds—rising in a noisy clamor—which startled Harriet. All at once, they exploded all around her, so that she flinched and flung her arm over her eyes. Four or five crows settled near her, clasping the railing of the tank with their feet. They turned their heads to look at her and the nearest crow walloped his wings and took off. Below, far away, she could hear something that sounded like dogs barking, dogs going nuts. But before this, it seemed to her she’d heard a different noise, a slight crack, very faint in the windy, sun-bleached distance.

Harriet—feet on the ladder, legs in the tank—sat without moving. As her gaze strayed in confusion, one of the birds caught her eye; it had a jaunty, wicked look, like a cartoon bird, cocking its head right at her, and it almost looked as if it was about to say something but as she looked at it, another popping sound echoed from below and the bird drew itself up and flew off.

Harriet listened. Half in, half out of the tank, she stood partway, bracing herself with one hand, and winced as the ladder squealed beneath her weight. Hastily she clambered onto the planks, then crawled to the edge on her hands and knees and craned over as far as she could.

Down below—far across the field, towards the woods, too far to see very well—was the Trans Am. Birds were starting to drop down to the clearing again, settling one by one, lighting in the branches, in the bushes, on the ground. By the car, a long way off, stood Danny Ratliff. He had his back to her and his hands were clapped over his ears like somebody was screaming at him.

Harriet ducked—his posture, tense and violent, had
frightened her—and the next moment she realized what she’d seen and slowly she rose again.

Yes: bright red. Sprayed in drops on the windshield, so bright and shocking it popped out even at a distance. Beyond—within the car, beyond the semi-transparent scrim of droplets—she had the impression of horrible movement: something thrashing and thumping, flailing around. And whatever it was, that dark confusion, Danny Ratliff seemed frightened of it, too. His backward steps were slow, robotic, like the last few backward steps of a shot cowboy in the movies.

Harriet was overcome all of a sudden with a strange blankness and languor. From where she was, so high up, it all looked flat and unimportant somehow, accidental. The sun beat down white and fierce, and in her head thrummed the same curious, airy lightness that—when she was climbing—had made her feel like relaxing her grip and letting go.

I’m in trouble
, she told herself,
big trouble
, but it was hard to make herself feel it, even though it was true.