Suttree Read online

  Summer dusk had crept long and blue and shadows risen high upon the western building faces when he came up Gay Street. He went along the shopfronts like a misplaced poacher, his eyes squirreling about and his broken clown's sneakers flapping. At Lockett's he paused to admire dusty charlatan's props in the window, small boxes of sneeze powder, cigars laced with cordite, a stamped tin inkstain. Stapled to display cards from which the sun had bleached all message. A china dog bowbacked and grunting. Harrogate filled with admiration at such things. He stepped slightly back to note the merchant's name and then went on. Passing under the Comer's Sport Center sign, a steep stairwell and the muted clack of balls overhead. There it is, he said. Bigger'n life.

  He turned up Union Avenue, past the Roxie Theatre, Webfoot Watts and Skinny Green on the bill with all-girl revue. Harrogate stepping around to see the tariffs. The girl looked down from her glass cage like a cat. He smiled and drew back. He went down Walnut Street past hardware stores and beer taverns and ramshackle poultry shops. He swung up Wall Avenue and into Market Square. His small face peering through the windows of the Gold Sun Cafe where supper plates were being sopped clean and rawlooking girls went up and back in their soiled white uniforms.

  Down Market Street countrymen sat beneath canopies in canebottomed chairs or on upended peachcrates or perched on the leadcolored fenders of old Fords fitted out with crude truckbeds nailed up out of boards. Folks putting up their stuffs for this day, shops being closed. A few sunfaded awnings winched shut. Two roustabouts collected a beggar from the walkway and set him in a truck. Harrogate went on. An old man seated before a basket of turnips hissed him and gestured with his chin, seeking a buyer, Harrogate to his worn eyes no worse a prospect than others coming along. Harrogate watching the gutters for anything edible fallen from the trucks. By the time he reached the end of the street he had a small bouquet of frazzled greenstuffs and a bruised tomato. He went into the markethouse and washed these things at the drinking fountain marked White and ate them while he wandered down the vast hall with its rich reek of meat and produce and woodchaff. A few vendors squatted yet in their stalls, old women with tawed faces and farmers with their quilted napes. A honeyseller sitting quietly in immaculate blue chambray, his jars on the low table before him arranged faultlessly, the labels marshaled aislewise. Harrogate went by, chewing his lettuce. Past a long glass coffin where a few lean fish leered up with cold and golden eyes from their beds of salted ice. Windchimes tinkled overhead in the slow fanwash. He pushed open the heavy doors at the end of the hall with their hundred years' accretion of navalgray paint and stepped out into the summer night. Standing there wiping his hands on the front of him, his eyes drawn by the cryptic piping of hot neon across the night and by the chittering of goatsuckers aloft in the upflung penumbra of the city's lights. A streetsweeper puttered past with his cart. Harrogate crossed the street and went up the alley. A family of trashpickers were packing flat cartons onto a child's wagon, the children scurrying among the rancid cans like rats and as graylooking. None spoke. They had tied the folded boxes down with twine, a parlous and tottering load that the man steadied with one hand while the woman drew the cart along and the children made forays into trashbins and cellar doors, watching Harrogate the while.

  He made his way by alleys and small dark streets to the lights at Henley Street where he'd earlier spied a church lawn. Here he found himself a nest among the curried clumps of phlox and boxwood and curled up like a dog. He had a few things he'd collected in his pocket and he took these out and set them alongside in the edging of mulch and lay back again in the grass. He could feel under his back the rumble of trucks passing in the street. He shifted his hips. He folded his hands behind his head. He must prop his upturned toes together to ease the weight of the enormous shoes from his bird's ankles. After a while he slipped them off and lay back again. Yellow lamplight clung in his lashes. He watched insects rise and wheel there. A hunting bat cut through the cone of light and sucked them scattering. They re-formed slowly. Soon two bats. Veering and rending the placid life that homed to ash in the columnar light. Harrogate awonder at how they did not collide.

  He was sitting up in the shrubbery long before good daylight, waiting for the day to come for him to set forth in, watching the glozy headlights come out of the fog on the bridge and draw past him into the town. Shapes evolved out of the gray dawn. What he'd thought to be another indigent hosteled on the grass below him was a newspaper winded up against a bush. He rose and stretched and crossed the lawn to the street and went toward Market where all sorts of country commerce had begun.

  Harrogate eased his way among the rotting trucks and carts at the curbside until he had the lay of things and then his scrawny hand darted out and seized a peach from a basket and tucked it down the windsock of a pocket that hung inside his trousers. The next thing he knew an old lady had him by the collar and was beating him over the head with a mealscoop. She was yelling in his face and spraying him with snuffjuice. Shit, said Harrogate, trying to pull away. A long ripping sound ensued.

  Quit it. You're tearin my goddamned shirt.

  Bong bong bong went the mealscoop on his bony head.

  Give it back, she squalled.

  Hell fire. Here. He thrust the peach at her and she immediately turned loose of him and took the peach and wobbled back to her truck and restored it to the basket.

  He felt his head. It was all knotty. Shit a brick, he said. I didnt want the goddamned thing that bad. A legless beggar mounted on a board like a piece of ghastly taxidermy had come awake to laugh at him. Fuck you, said Harrogate. The beggar shot forward on ballbearing wheels and seized Harrogate's leg and bit it.

  Shit! screamed Harrogate. He tried to pull away but the beggar had his teeth locked in the flesh of his calf. They danced and circled, Harrogate holding to the top of the beggar's head. The beggar gave a shake of his head and a tug in a last effort to remove the flesh from Harrogate's legbone and then turned loose and receded smoothly to his place against the wall and took up his pencils again. Harrogate went limping down the street holding his leg. Crazy sons of bitches, he said, hobbling among the shoppers. He was almost in tears.

  He crossed through the markethouse and went up the other side of the square. Something was pulling at his shoe. He bent to see. Chewing gum. He sat in the gutter with a stick and scraped at it. Turning a pink blob of it on the end of the stick ...

  Harrogate coasted by the blind man in front of Bower's, watching the crowd. No one watched back. He returned, bent lightly, jabbed with his stick at the cigarbox in the blind man's lap. The blind man raised his head and put one hand over the box and looked about. Harrogate going up the street tilted the stick. A dime clung to the end of it. He swung about and came back. The blind man sat warily. Paleblue and moldgrown grapes caved and wrinkled in his eyesockets. Harrogate executed a fencer's thrust and came up with a nickel.

  Hey you cocksucker, called the blind man.

  Fuck you, said Harrogate, skipping nimbly on.

  He went into the Gold Sun and ordered coffee and doughnuts, sitting at the counter among the morning smells of fried sausage and eggs. He rolled back the folds of his trouserlegs and examined his wound. The beggar's illspaced teeth had printed two little sickle shapes, the flesh blue, small pinlets of blood, Harrogate wet a paper napkin in his water glass and laved it over his queer stigmata. Son of a bitch, he muttered. He drank the coffee and slid his cup forward for more.

  In the streets again he rubbed his little belly and set out for Comer's. Climbing the stairs. A small bent person at the landing watched. Who knew every cop in town in or out of uniform. Harrogate pushed open the green door with its wiremesh covered glass and entered. To his surprise the place was nearly empty. A blond youth was practising three rail banks at the second table. The rack was brushing the tables in the rear. A whimsical man with a paunch hanging over his changeapron and jaws knobby with tobacco. At Harrogate's elbow tickertape hung from a glass bell and several old men sat along the benche
s to the front of the hall and watched the day start in the street below.

  Harrogate went to the counter where a man in an eyeshade was counting money. You know Suttree? he said.

  What? said the man.

  Suttree.

  Ask Jake. He tilted his head toward the rear of the hall and went on counting. Harrogate went wobbling down the aisle past the tables, the cues racked up on the walls like weapons in some ancient armory. Hey, said the blond youth.

  What?

  You want to play some nine ball?

  I dont know how to play.

  Rotation?

  I aint never shot no pool.

  The blond youth studied him a moment, chalking his cue with a little rotary motion. He bent to shoot.

  You know Suttree?

  He stroked. The one ball went down the table, circled the racked balls from rail to rail and returned to drop in the upper corner pocket. Harrogate waited for the shooter to answer but the shooter took the ball from the pocket and set it up and bent again with his cue and did not look up. Harrogate went on to the rear.

  You Jake? he said.

  Yep.

  You know Suttree?

  He turned and looked down at Harrogate. He spat into a steel cuspidor on the floor and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Yeah, he said. I know him.

  You know where he's at?

  What'll you take for them britches?

  Harrogate looked down. Them's all the ones I got, he said.

  Well. He aint here.

  I was wonderin if you might know where he's at.

  Home I reckon.

  Well where's he live?

  He lives down on the river. I believe in one of them houseboats.

  Houseboat?

  Yep. Jake bent, the change in his apronpocket swinging. He began to brush the dust toward the corner pocket. Harrogate had turned to go.

  What about that shirt?

  What about it?

  How would you trade?

  Hell fire, said Harrogate. Yourn'd do me for a overcoat.

  Jake grinned. Come back, little buddy, he said.

  At the bottom of Gay Street he stood leaning on the bridge rail looking down at the waterfront. There's the goddamned houseboats, he said.

  Coming down the steep and angled path behind the tall frame houses he thought he heard a voice. He tilted back his head to see. Half out from a housewindow high up the laddered face of sootcaulked clapboards hung some creature. Sprawled against the hot and sunpeeled siding with arms outstretched like a broken puppet. Hah, he called down. Spawn of Cerberus, the devil's close kin.

  Harrogate clutched his lower teeth.

  A long finger pointed down. Child of darkness, of Clooty's brood, mind me.

  Shit, said Harrogate.

  The window figure had raised itself to address some other audience.

  See him! Does he not offend thee? Does such iniquity not rise stinking to the very heavens?

  This viperous evangelist reared up, his elbows cocked and goat's eyes smoking, and thrust a bony finger down. Die! he screamed. Perish a terrible death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye, God save your soul amen.

  Shit fire, said Harrogate, scurrying down the path with one hand over his head. When he reached the street he looked back. The figure had wheeled to a new window the better to see the boy past his house and he leaned now with his face pressed to the glass, his dead jaundiced flesh splayed against the pane and one eye walled up in his head, a goggling visage misshapen with hatred. Harrogate went on. Great godamighty, he said.

  He went down Front Street past a rickety store where blacks lolled and eyed his advent doubtfully and he took a dogpath across the gray fields toward the shantyboats, emerging onto the railway with his curious trousers striped with sootprints of the weeds he'd forded, the air hot and breathless with the smell of cinders and creosote and the fainter reaches of oil and fish standing off in a sort of haze along the river itself.

  He climbed the mudstained cleated plank of the first houseboat and tapped at the door. A small eddy of garbage and empty bottles circled slowly in the water beneath him. When the door opened he was looking into the face of a coalcolored woman who wore an agate taw in one eyesocket. What you wants? she said.

  I thought maybe old Suttree lived here but I dont reckon he does.

  She didnt answer.

  You dont know where he lives do ye?

  Who you huntin?

  Suttree.

  What you wants with him.

  He's a old buddy of mine.

  She looked him up and down. He aint goin to mess with you, she said.

  Shit, said Harrogate. We go way back, me and Suttree do.

  Suttree was up at first light to run his lines. The gray shape of the city gathering out of the fog, upriver a gull, pale and alien bird in these midlands. On the bridge the lights of the cars crossed like candles in the mist.

  Maggeson was already on the river when he set forth, standing like some latterday Charon skulling through the fog. With a long pole he hooked condoms aboard and into a pail of soapy water. Suttree paused to watch him but the old man drifted past without looking up, standing with prurient vigilance, in the cropped shore currents watchful and silent.

  Suttree rowed in a sunless underregion of swirling mists, through bowls of cold and seething smoke. The bridgepier loomed and faded. Downriver a dredger. Two men at the rail smoking, stitched out of the fog and gone again, their voices faint above the puckered chug of the engine. The red of the wheelhouse light went watery pale and faded out. He oared slowly, waiting for the fog to lift.

  When he ran his lines some of the fish were dead. He cut the droppers and watched them slide and sink. The rising sun dried and warmed him.

  He was back by midmorning and sat on the rail and cleaned his catch. Ab's cat came and perched like an owl and watched him. He handed it a fish head and it bared a razorous yawn of teeth and took the head delicately and went back along the rail. Suttree skinned two catfish and wrapped them in newsprint and washed his knife and his hands in the river and rose.

  Going up the river path he passed two boys fishing.

  Hey boys, he said.

  They turned huge eyes up at him.

  Doin any good?

  Naw.

  Their bobbers lay quietly in the scum. Ringent pools of gas kept erupting in oily eyes on the surface. Mauves and yellows from the spectrum guttered and slewed in the dead current.

  You boys like to fish?

  We dont gots to.

  Good for you, said Suttree.

  At Ab's place he handed her the fish at the door and she motioned him past into the room. A thick funk of stale beer and smoke. She folded back the paper, old news repeated mirrorwise on the pale ribbed flesh. She poked a black finger in the meat.

  Where's the old man? said Suttree.

  He's in there. Go on.

  In the far corner sat an enormous figure obscured in the gloom.

  Come in Youngblood.

  Hey.

  Set down. Bring the man a beer old woman.

  I dont want anything.

  Bring him a Redtop.

  She shuffled past in her ruptured mules through a curtain to the rear. A squalid sunlight fell briefly. Everywhere from cracks or knotholes small hieroglyphs of light lay about in the cabin, on table and floor and across the cardboard beer signs.

  When she came back she leaned across Suttree and clicked a wet bottle down on the little stone table. He nodded to her and raised it and drank. The black man now coalesced out of the semidark seemed to fill half the room. Where you from in the world, Youngblood, he said.

  Right here. Knoxville.

  Knoxville, he said. Old Knoxville town.

  She was clattering about in the back room. After a while she came from behind the curtain again and sat in her chair with her feet up. She was instantly asleep, the blind eye half open like a drowsing cat's, her mouth agape. Toes peered from the mules like littl
e clusters of dark mice. On her broad face two intersecting circles, fairy ring or hagstrack, the crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand on some stone age matriarch. Annular treponema. Read here why he falls in the streets. Another Jena, another time.

  Suttree sat in the hot little room with the tombstone tables and sipped his beer. Water dripped constantly from the bottle. In the corner the poker table had been swept and the lamp filled. Flies walked about everywhere.

  Get you another beer, Youngblood.

  Suttree tilted the bottle and drained it. I got to go, he said.

  The black wiped his eyes with one huge hand. Stories of the days and nights writ there, the scars, the teeth, the ear betruncheoned in some old fray that clung in a toadlike node to the side of his shaven head. You come back, he said.

  Early afternoon in the city with his fish sold he ate the beef stew at Granny and Hazel's. He walked in the streets, a lonely figure. On Jackson Avenue he saw Maggeson in a dingy white suit and straw boater. The rubber baron, small eyes distorted behind the dished glass lenses.

  Someone called to him, he turned. Hoghead Henry's small and jaunty shape was coming from an alleyway heralded by pigeons flapping upward into the sad air with right alarm, immune to Hoghead's huckleberry insouciance. He swept his rumpled linen beneath the band of his trousers with a slice of his flattened hand and gave Suttree a crooked grin. When did you get out?

  Tuesday. Brother and Junior got out with me.

  Hoghead grinned. They started up the street. Old Junior, the cops brought him in one night and turned him over to Mrs Long, he was about three fourths drunk and been in some kind of trouble, I forget, and Mrs Long told the cops, said: I dont know what's wrong with him. My oldest boy Jimmy never causes me the least trouble. Next night here they come with Jim.

  Suttree smiled. I hear that old woman shot at you the other night.

  Old crazy nigger woman. She shot about four holes in the wall. Shot a picture down. I ducked behind the sofa and she shot a hole in that and John Clancy said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just a shittin and a gettin it. He was layin in the floor and he said it run right over the top of him.