Suttree Read online

  He cut down an alley and went past a row of warehouses and at the end he could see the Dale Avenue market sheds and beyond them the gang tracks of the L&N merging toward the yards. He crossed the tracks and climbed the bank on the far side to Grand Avenue. Two boys were throwing rocks at a row of bottles down in the railway cut. Smoke on the water, one called.

  Fuck you, said Suttree.

  A wave of nausea washed through him and he paused to rest on an old retaining wall. Looking under his hand he saw dimly the prints of trilobites, lime cameos of vanished bivalves and delicate seaferns. In these serried clefts stone armatures on which once hung the flesh of living fish. He lurched on.

  He stopped in the middle of the street before the tall frame house on Grand. Paintless boards smoked a bluish color. He called to a woman sitting on the porch. She leaned forward peering.

  Is Jimmy there?

  No. He's not come in from last night. Who is that?

  Cornelius Suttree.

  Lord have mercy I didnt know who that was. No, he's not here, Cornelius. I dont know where he's at.

  Well. Thank you mam.

  You come see us.

  I will. He waved a hand. A police car was turning the corner.

  They drove past. Before he got to the end of the street they had circled and pulled up alongside him from behind.

  Where you goin, boy?

  Home, he said.

  Where you live?

  Down off Front Avenue.

  Beefy face, small eyes looking him over. The face turned away. They said something between them. The one turned back. What's happened to you?

  Nothing, he said. I'm all right.

  I believe you a little drunk aint ye?

  No sir.

  Where you been?

  He looked at his crusted shoes and took a breath. I was visiting some people over here. I'm just on my way home.

  What you got all over the front of you there?

  He looked down. When he raised his head again he fixed his eyes across the cruiser's roof upon the bleak row of old houses with their cloven hanging clapboards and their cardboard windowpanes. A few blackened trees stood withering in the heat and in this obscure purgatory a thrush was singing. Mavis. Turdus Musicus. The lyrical shit-bird.

  I spilled something on me, he said.

  You smell like you been dipped in shit.

  Two boys were coming along the broken walk. When they saw the cruiser they turned and went back.

  The door opened and beefy got out.

  Maybe you better get in here, he said.

  Dont put that stinkin son of a bitch in here. Call the wagon.

  Well. You just stand right there.

  I'm not going anywhere.

  I'll tell you that, you aint.

  He listened dreamily to the crackling of the intercom.

  The paddy wagon came down off Western and Forest avenues and pulled up in front of the cruiser and two policemen got out. They opened the door and Suttree walked toward it.

  Boy if he aint a sweet blossom, one said.

  There was a drunk inside sitting on the bench that ran the length of the wagon. Suttree sat opposite. The door banged shut. The drunk leaned forward. Hey old buddy, he said. You got a cigarette? Suttree shut his eyes and rested his head against the side of the van.

  At the jail he stood before a little window and was asked to empty his pockets. He managed a faint smile.

  The officer at his side nudged him with a nightstick. Empty them pockets, boy.

  Suttree lifted his caked shirt. His pockets hung like socks.

  You got any identification on you.

  No sir.

  How come you aint.

  I've been robbed.

  What's your name.

  Jerome Johnson.

  The officer was writing. We've had trouble with you before aint we Johnson?

  No sir.

  He looked up. I bet we aint. Get his belt and his shoelaces there.

  They took him along the corridor toward the cells.

  They opened the door to a large cage and he went in and they shut the door behind him. Someone slept in one corner, his head in a pool of clabbered void. There were no benches, no place to sit. A concrete scupper ran the perimeter of the cage. Suttree shuddered in a seizure of skullpangs. He sat on the floor. It was cool. After a while he knelt and pressed his head against it.

  He must have slept. He heard the turnkey rapping along the bars, calling a name. When he came past Suttree spoke to him.

  Can you call me a bondsman back here?

  What's your name?

  Johnson.

  How long you been in?

  I dont know. I was asleep.

  You got to stay in six hours anyway.

  I know. I was wondering if you'd check for me.

  The turnkey didnt say he would or wouldnt.

  After a while Suttree stretched out on the floor and slept again. He woke from time to time to shift a bone where it wore against the concrete. It was evening before the bondsman came.

  A small dapper man in mesh shoes. He looked up at the foul enigma caged before him. You Johnson? he said.

  Yes.

  You want to make bail?

  Yes. I dont have any money. You'll have to call.

  Okay. Who do I call? He had out a pad and pencil.

  Suttree gave him the number.

  All right, he said. Wait here.

  Sure, said Suttree. Listen.

  What?

  Tell them Suttree. But to ask for Johnson.

  You can get in a lot of trouble that way.

  I can get in a lot the other way.

  Okay. What was it again?

  Suttree.

  The bondsman was shaking his head, writing the new name. You people are really something, he said.

  He was back in a few minutes. He aint home, he said.

  Did she say when he might be in?

  Nope.

  What time is it?

  Around seven. He flicked his cuff back. Ten after.

  Goddamn.

  Dont you know nobody else?

  No. Look, try it again in an hour, will you? You sure you got the right number?

  21505. Right?

  That's it.

  What's the guy's name anyways?

  Jim.

  I know that. What's his full name.

  Jim Long.

  The bondsman gave him a funny little look. Jim Long? he said.

  Yes.

  Got a brother named Junior?

  That's him.

  The bondsman looked at him sideways.

  What is it? said Suttree.

  Shit.

  What's the matter?

  Why hell fire, the bondsman said. Both of em are right behind you in number eight. They been here since this mornin and cant raise bond neither.

  He was looking at Suttree more curiously yet. Suttree's face began to wrinkle and go peculiar. A horse snigger leapt from his lips and his eyes wandered.

  You're crazy as shit, said the bondsman.

  Suttree sat down on the concrete floor and held his stomach. He sat there shaking and holding himself. You're a real nutwagon, aint ye? said the bondsman.

  Later he called through the bars to his friends but they didnt answer. A voice somewhere asked why he didnt shut the fuck up. Later still the lights in the corridor ceiling came on. The man in the corner had not moved and Suttree didnt want to look at him if he were dead. He lay on the floor again and drifted in and out of a poor sleep. He dreamt whole rivers of icewater down his parched throatpipe.

  At some hour unknown he woke to sounds of commotion. He had half his hand in his mouth. Looking up he saw a man stoop and swing a bucket of water through the bars over him. Sputtering, he got to his knees.

  The bucket clanged to the floor. The man studied him there in his cage. Suttree turned away. In the corner his cellmate was standing. When Suttree looked at him the cellmate said: You dont shut up that hollerin I'm goin to knock your
dick in your watchpocket.

  He closed his eyes. The gray water that dripped from him was rank with caustic. By the side of a dark dream road he'd seen a hawk nailed to a barn door. But what loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.

  He scouted in the weeds until he found a suitable tin before going out to the road. The kerosene had rendered soft a patch of tar in the roadsurface and he knelt and began to dig it up with an old kitchen knife, stringy viscous gobs of pitch, until he had as much as he needed.

  When Daddy Watson came by he had the skiff upturned on the bank and was patiently caulking the seams.

  Well, you still alive, the old man said.

  Suttree looked up, squinting in the sun. He wiped his nose against his forearm, sitting there holding the tarpot in one hand and the knife in the other. Hello Daddy, he said.

  I allowed ye'd gone under.

  Not yet. Why?

  Didnt see ye. Where ye been?

  Suttree daubed the rank black mastic along a seam and pressed it home. Jail, he said.

  Hey?

  I said I've been in jail.

  Have? What for?

  I fell in with a bad crowd. What brings you over here?

  The old man pushed back his striped engineer's cap and readjusted it. Just on my way to town. Thought long as I was this close I'd check on ye. I allowed ye must of gone under.

  I'm still in business. How's everything on the railroad?

  Just by god awful.

  Suttree waited for an enlargement upon this but none seemed coming. He looked up. The old man was rocking on his heels, watching.

  What's the problem, Daddy?

  Just railroadin is the problem, son. It's the nature of it, I'm convinced. He hauled forth an enormous railroader's timepiece and checked it and put it back.

  How's old number seventy-eight?

  Lord love her she's old and wore out about like me but she's faithful as a dog. Ort to give her a gold watch and chain.

  He was leaning forward watching over Suttree's shoulder as he caulked.

  You know, he said. I wish I could get you to come over to my yard with that stuff. I got a leak in my caboose roof needs somethin done about it.

  Suttree bent forward and averted his face. Got a what? he shouted, eyes half closed with mirth.

  Say I got leaky roof. Caboose roof.

  Suttree shook his head. He looked up at the old man. Well, he said. If I've got any left I'll bring it over.

  The old man straightened up. That's neighborly of ye and I'd take it as a favor, he said. He was hauling out the watch again.

  I'd best get on to town if I'm to get to the store fore it closes.

  What time is it, Daddy?

  Four nineteen.

  Well. Stop again when you can stay longer.

  I'll do it, said the railroader. And dont forget to save me some of that there pitch if you've got it to spare.

  Okay.

  I allowed ye'd gone under when I didnt see ye on the river.

  No.

  Well.

  Iie watched the old man go across the steaming fields, tottering stiffly in his overalls. When he reached the tracks he turned and lifted one hand farewell. Suttree lifted his chin and turned back to his work.

  When he had the underside of the skiff daubed up he set the tar by and turned the skiff over and eased it along the mud into the river. He took the rope and walked out along the gallery of the houseboat and tethered it to the railing. He took the oars from where they stood against the side of the house and lowered them into the skiff. Slouched on the railing he watched the dried silt in the bottom of the skiff darken along the joints where the boards would swell shut in the water. As he stood there the five oclock freight ran out on the trestle downriver. Crossing the high span of black wickered steel like an enormous millipede, balls of smoke coughing from the blowhole in the engine's head and the sootcolored cars clattering after and leaving the air curiously serene behind the racket of their passage.

  He pulled a bottle of orange soda from the river by a long cord and uncapped it and sat with his feet propped on the rail taking cool sips. A black woman appeared on the deck of the houseboat upriver and slung two rattling bags of trash overboard and went in again. Suttree leaned his head against the hot boards and watched the river go past. The shadow of the bridge had begun to lie long oblique and sprawling upstream and pigeons ascending into its concrete understructure evoked upon the water before him shapes of skates rising batwinged from the river floor to feed in the creeping dusk. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Plovers along the shore jerking like wired birds in a shooting gallery. Down there a pipe piping gouts of soapcurd and blue sewage. Dusk deepened. Swifts vanished back over the pewter face of the river toward the city. On thin falcon wings nighthawks dipped and wheeled and a bat fluttered past, circled, returned.

  Inside Suttree lit a lamp and adjusted the wick. With the same match he lit the burners of the little kerosene stove, two rosettes of pale blue teeth in the gloom. He set a saucepan of beans to warm and got down his skillet and sliced onions into it. He unwrapped a packet of hamburger. Small moths kept crossing the mouth of the lampchimney and spinning burntwinged into the hot grease. He picked them out on the tines of the brass fork with which he tended the cookery and flipped them against the wall. When all was ready he scraped the food from the pans onto a plate and took it together with the lamp to the small table by the window and laid everything out on the oilcloth and sat and ate leisurely. A barge passed upriver and he watched through the cracked glass the dip and flicker of her spotlight negotiating the narrows beneath the bridge, the long white taper shifting in quick sidelong sweeps, the shape of the beam breaking upriver over the trees with incredible speed and crossing the water like a comet. A white glare flooded the cabin and passed on. Suttree blinked. The dim shape of the barge came hoving. He watched the red lights slide in the dark. The houseboat rocked easy in the wake, the drums mumbling under the floor and the skiff sidling and bumping outside in the night. Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber's mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey's and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want?

  When the River Queen passed he was in bed, drifting toward sleep. He heard the labored sludging sound of her wheel beyond his window. As if she bore through liquid mud. A party on deck in song. The voices carrying the water's acoustic calm, the old sternwheeler plying upriver with hard liquor and ladies of quality, soft lights above the green baize blackjack tables and the barman polishing the glasses and the danceband musicians leaning on the rail between sets, until the voices waned with distance and the last echoes honed away to a faint murmur of wind.

  Right along here anywheres is okay, said Harrogate, pointing languidly out the open truck window.

  The driver glanced sidelong and bored. You got to have a address, peckerhead.

  What about the Smoky Mountain Market?

  That aint a address. It's got to be where people lives.

  He looked about, sitting up in the front of the cab like a child. What about the church yonder? he said.

  Church?

  Yeah.

  Well, I dont know.

  Do they not hold with goin to church?

  The driver cut the wheel and swung left and pulled up in front of the church. All right, he said. Get your ass out.

  He hopped down and reached and banged the door shut
. Thanks, he called, waving one hand up to the driver. The driver didnt look. He pulled away and the truck disappeared down the street in the noon traffic.

  Harrogate came batting his way through the jungle of kudzu that overhung the bluffs above the river until he found a red clay gully of a path going down the slope. He followed along through lush growths of poison ivy and past enormous mummy shapes of vinestrangled trees, banks of honeysuckle dusted in ocher, into a brief cindery wood where grew black sumacs, pokeweeds gorged with sooty drainage whose clustered fruit gleamed small baubles of a poisonous ebon blue.

  The path switchbacked and ran out on a cutbank above an abandoned railsiding. He descended into the roadbed and went on. The old right of way lay dim among the weeds, the rails rusted, curving away over rotted ties and dark slag. He trudged along happily in his outland garb, his thin shoes cupping the rails. The river ran below him surly and opaque and shaping itself on the curious forms of limestone that jutted from the bank. By and by he came upon two fishbutchers slick with blood by an old retaining wall, holding a goodsized carp between them. He greeted them with a smile, a curiously attired person emerging from the shrubbery. They stayed their gorestained hands a moment to study him while the fish bowed and shuddered.

  Hidy, he said.

  These two regarded each other a moment and then looked down at him. Blood dripped from the fish. Blood lay among the leaves in little jagged grails of bright vermilion. One beckoned with a dripping claw. Hey boy. Come here.

  What do you want?

  Come here a minute.

  I got to get on. He was going along sideways over the ties.

  Just come here a minute.

  He sidled away and broke into a run. They watched him without expression until he had gone from sight in the weeds and then turned back to their fish.

  A half mile down the track he came upon rolling stock on a siding, an old black iron locomotive with inscriptions of faded gilt and wooden cars quietly rotting in the sun. Creepers threaded the wrecked windows of the coaches, ancient and chalky brown with their riveted seams and welted coamings like something proofed for descents into the sea. He walked the aisle between the dusty green and gnawn brocaded seats. A bird flew. He came down the iron steps to the ground. A voice said: All right, young feller, off of them there cars.