Suttree Read online

  At noon a gimplegged prisoner brought up sandwiches from the kitchen. Thin slices of rat cheese on thin slices of white bread. The prisoners bought matchboxes of coffee from the hallboy for a nickel and he poured hot water in their cups. Harrogate came awake from a deep nap and hopped to the floor to get his lunch. He drank plain water with his sandwich, crouched up there in his bunk, his cheeks jammed. Outside the cold gray winter rain fell across the county. By nightfall it would turn to snow.

  He'd finished his sandwiches and was back to tapping at his ring when a new thought changed his face. He put aside his work and climbed down to the floor and crawled under Suttree's bunk. Then he crawled out and back up topside where he fell to work again. In a little while he crawled down again.

  Toward dusk a few prisoners looked his way to see what went, the smallest prisoner sitting in the top of his bunk suddenly going whooo whoo like a chimpanzee and lapsing silent again.

  When the triangle rang for dinner all fell out save he. Suttree came by from his cardgame and shook him by the shoulder. Hey hotshot. Let's go.

  Harrogate raised up with one eye shut, his face matted where it had lain crushed in the blanket. Aaangh? he said.

  Let's go to supper.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and pitched out onto the floor face down.

  Suttree had turned to go when he heard the crash. He looked and saw Harrogate struggling in the floor and came back and helped him up. What the fuck's wrong with you?

  Yeeegh yeegh, said Harrogate.

  Shit, said Suttree. You better stay here. Can you get back in the bunk?

  Harrogate fended him away and focused one eye toward the cell door. Sup sup, he said.

  You crazy fucker. You cant even walk.

  Harrogate started across the tilted floor listing badly. The other prisoners were jammed at the door, filing out by twos and down the stairs. Some looked back.

  Look comin here.

  What's happened to him?

  Looks like one leg's grown longer'n the other one.

  Harrogate crashed into the end of a set of bunks and reeled away.

  Damned if the country mouse aint drunker'n hell.

  Them eyes look like two pissholes in the snow.

  He veered toward them like a misfired android. One caught him up by the sleeve.

  You goin to supper, Countrymouse?

  You fuckin ay, said Countrymouse.

  They covered for him in line, holding him erect, shielding him from the guards. The cook's helper who loaded his plate looked at his face probably because it was the only one in the line passing at that diminished altitude. Shit a brick, he said.

  Bet your ass, said Harrogate, winking profoundly.

  They went on to the messhall. Harrogate stepped over the bench and misbalanced and stepped back. He raised his foot to try again. One of the prisoners grabbed his leg and pulled it down and caught his tilting plate and jerked him into the bench alongside him.

  Hee hee, said Harrogate.

  Someone kicked him under the table. He peered about at nearby faces for the culprit. The blacks filing in at the table opposite seemed to have wind of him already and were ogling and grinning.

  Harrogate spooned up a load of pinto beans and shoved them toward his jaw. Some fell down the front of him. He looked after them. He began to spoon beans from his lap. Several guards were watching. He was having difficulty sitting on the bench. He was tottering about. The guard at the head of the table, a man named Wilson, walked down to get a better look. Harrogate sensed him standing there above him and turned to see, falling against the prisoner at his side as he did so. Wilson looked down into the thin face, now slightly green. Harrogate turned back to his food, holding onto the edge of the table with one hand.

  This man's drunk, said Wilson.

  Somewhere down the table someone muttered No shit and a ripple of tittering passed through the messhall. Wilson glared. All right, he said. Knock it off. You. Get up.

  Harrogate put down his spoon and took another grip on the table and raised himself up. But since the bench would not push back from the table he remained in a sort of crouched position, finally losing his balance and sitting down again. Now he turned in his seat and tried to get one foot over the bench, lifting his leg up by the cuff of his trousers, one elbow resting in his food.

  The clanking and scraping of spoons had ceased altogether. The only sound in the messhall was Harrogate struggling to free himself from the table. Wilson standing over him like a faith healer over a paraplegic. Until he actually raised up astraddle the bench, creamed corn dripping from his sleeve. Ick, he said.

  What? said Wilson menacingly.

  The country mouse closed his eyes, belched, opened them again. Sick, he said. He was trying to raise his other leg. The prisoner alongside looked up at him and leaned away. Harrogate lurched and his neck gave a sort of chickenlike jerk and he vomited on Wilson's shoes.

  The prisoners on either side of Harrogate leaped up. Wilson's slapstick was out. He was looking at his shoes. He couldnt believe it. Harrogate wore a look of terror. He seized hold of the table, looking about wildly, his gorge swollen. He spied his plate. He leaned toward it. He vomited on the table.

  You nasty little bastard, screamed Wilson. He was doing little kicks, trying to shake the puke from his shoes. The prisoners who'd been sitting opposite Harrogate had risen from the table and were watching the country mouse in awe. Harrogate looked up at them with weeping eyes and managed just the smallest blacktooth grin before he puked again.

  They did not see him for ten days. Then one morning as they filed through the kitchen with their plates there he was, grinning sheepishly, ladling up gravy for their biscuits. Beyond him through the steam, on a can with a cigarette in his mouth, sat Red Callahan. No one asked where Slusser was.

  That night when they came in he must have been showering in the kitchen cell because when they went past on their way to their own quarters silently in twos, exuding the aura of cold they'd brought in with them, Harrogate suddenly appeared naked at the bars, his thin face, his hands clutching, like a skinned spidermonkey.

  Sut, he called out softly. Hey Sut.

  Suttree heard his name. As he came abreast of the smallest prisoner he dropped out of the line. When will the phantom puker strike again, he said. What the fuck are you doing bare assed?

  Listen Sut, that fuckin Wilson's got it in for me. I got to get out of here.

  Out of where?

  Here. The joint.

  You mean run off?

  Yeah.

  Suttree shook his head. That's crazy, Gene, he said.

  I need you to help me.

  Suttree fell back in at the tail of the line. You're nuts, Gene, he said.

  He saw him again a week later on Thursday when he was assigned to the indigent food detail. The needy trooping through in rags, their eyes rheumy, snuffling, showing their papers at the desk and going on to where the prisoners unloaded bags of cornmeal from pallets or scooped dried beans into grocery bags. Suttree sought their eyes but few looked up. They took their dole and passed on. Old shapeless women in thin summer dresses, socks collapsed about their pale and naked ankles, shoes opened at the side with knives to ease their feet. The seams of their lower faces stained with snuff, their drawstrung mouths. To Suttree they seemed hardly real. Like pictureshow paupers costumed for a scene. At the noon dinner break he and Harrogate fell in together. They crouched with others among the palleted beans and unwrapped their sandwiches.

  What we got?

  Baloney.

  Anybody got a cheese?

  They aint no cheese.

  Sut.

  Yeah.

  Shhh. Do you know where we're at?

  Where we're at?

  I mean which way is town?

  Harrogate speaking in loud hoarse whispers, spewing bits of bread.

  Suttree jerked a thumb over his shoulders. It's thataway, he said.

  Harrogate motioned his thumb down and looke
d about. What I figure to do, he said ...

  Gene.

  Yeah.

  If you run off from here you'll wind up like Slusser.

  You mean with a pick on my leg?

  I mean you'll be in and out of institutions for the rest of your life.

  Save for one thing.

  What's that.

  They aint goin to catch me.

  Where will you go?

  Go to Knoxville.

  Knoxville.

  Hell yes.

  What makes you think they wont find you in Knoxville?

  Hell fire Sut. Big a place as Knoxville is? They never would find ye there. Why you wouldnt even know where to start huntin somebody.

  Suttree looked at Harrogate and shook his head.

  How far you reckon it is to town? said Harrogate.

  It's six or eight miles. Listen. If you've got to run off why dont you wait and slip off from the county garage some evening?

  What for?

  Hell, you're practically in town. Besides it would be dark or damn near it.

  Harrogate paused from his chewing, his eyes fixed on his shoe. Then he commenced chewing again. You might be right, he said.

  Suttree was unwrapping his other sandwich. It dont make all that much difference actually, he said.

  Why's that?

  Cause they'll catch your skinny ass anyway.

  They aint no way.

  What do you aim to do about clothes? What do you think people are going to say when they see you wandering around in that outfit?

  I'll get me some clothes first thing.

  Suttree shook his head.

  Hell Sut. I can slip around.

  Gene.

  Yeah.

  You look wrong. You will always look wrong.

  Harrogate looked at the floor. He had stopped chewing. No I wont, he said.

  The weather turned colder and they did not go out. Wilson put Harrogate to work painting the black borders along the lower hallway walls that served for baseboards. The workhouse smelled of paint and so did the country mouse when he came up in the evening with the smears of black on his face like a guerrilla fighter.

  One night Suttree said to him: Dont you have any family?

  The lights were out. A few bodies shifted in the dark. Dont you? said the small voice overhead.

  Christmas came and some of the married prisoners were furloughed home to holiday with their families. A few were released. Slusser came from solitary, the pick still on his leg. He entered with his blanket and went down the aisle without speaking to anyone.

  There was a lighted tree in the recreation room downstairs and on Christmas day they had turkey with all the trimmings. Callahan in the kitchen drunk making pumpkin pies out of old sweet potatoes and carrots. Sots loose from the drunk tank wandering about crazed with thirst. An air of wary joy, like Christmas in some arctic outpost.

  The following day was Sunday. Suttree was playing poker when his name was called. He played on.

  That's you, Suttree.

  He folded his cards. He glanced toward the door and rose heavily, handing the cards down to Harrogate. Dont lose all my money, he said.

  The hall guard opened the door and he went out and down the stairs.

  The messhall was filled with families. Enormous baskets of fruit. Country people, some bewildered, some in tears. Old men who had been here themselves perhaps.

  Over yonder, said Blackburn.

  She was sitting at the table at the far end of the hall. Quietly in her good clothes. He turned to go back but Blackburn gripped him by his sleeve and pulled him around. You get your ass over there, he said.

  He made his way along the edge of the table. She had her purse in her lap and she was looking down. She was still wearing her hat from church. He sat down on the bench across the table from her and she looked up at him. She looked old, he could not remember her looking so. Her slack and pleated throat, the flesh beneath her jaws. Her eyes paler.

  Hello Mother, he said.

  Her lower chin began to dimple and quiver. Buddy, she said. Buddy ...

  But the son she addressed was hardly there at all. Numbly he watched himself fold his hands on the table. He heard his voice, remote, adrift. Please dont start crying, he said.

  See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.

  Suttree began to cry nor could he stop it. People were looking. He rose. The room swam.

  Buddy, she said. Buddy.

  I cant, he said. Hot salt strangled him. He wheeled away. Blackburn would have stopped him at the door but when he saw his face he let him go. Suttree jerked his arm away and went through the gate and up the stairs.

  He was released a few days later on order from Judge Kelly. The country mouse had run off from a work detail the morning before and as Suttree came from the supply room dressed in the clothes he'd worn through the slam seven months earlier Harrogate was being led clumping along the hall with a pick on his leg. They exchanged glances as they passed but you couldnt say it in words. Suttree was taken back to town in the same car that had brought him out. It was snowing but the roads were clear.

  He woke in the logy heat of full summer noon with the sun beating on the tin roof above him and raising a sour smell out of the old wood of the cabin. He could hear the howl of the saws in the lumbermill across the river and he could hear the intermittent scream of swine come under the knacker's hand at the packing company. He turned his face to the wall and opened one eye. Watched through a split in the sunriven boards the slow brown neap of the passing river. After a while he struggled up, blinking in the dusty slats of sunlight that sliced through the hot murk. He tottered erect onto the floor in the trousers he'd slept in and made his way to the door and stepped out, scratching his naked belly, watching the boards for stray fish hooks as he went barefoot toward the rail. He leaned on his elbows and looked out over the river. The skiff had sunk to the gunwales and lay quietly awash in the current. He propped up one foot and studied his toes. He could hear everywhere in the hot summer air the drone of machinery, the lonely industry of the city. He blinked and stretched. A graveldredger was moving upriver, her pipes and tackle slung up in the trucks. He watched it pass. A figure on the pilot deck waved and he waved back.

  Suttree took the rope loose from the rail and began to haul the skiff along the side of the houseboat. It yawed and wallowed in the river. He threw the rope ashore and went down the plank and retrieved it from the mud and miring to his anklebones he eased the skiff in. He got hold of the ring in the prow and braced himself and lifted. Mud spurted between his toes. He hoisted the front of the skiff and watched the water sluice heavily over the transom into the river. Tails flared and subsided. He hauled the skiff partly up the bank and lifted it sideways. The trapped fish milled and surged. He tilted with care, their shapes riding up along the overflow and dropping back again. When he lowered the skiff they lay gaping on the boards under a sun that withered them visibly.

  Suttree gripped his forepockets, searching. He rose and went to the shanty and returned with a large claspknife. He reached into the bottom of the boat and brought up a catfish by the lower jaw. It quivered slightly and curled its tail. Suttree turned it and sank the point of his knife into its throat and opened its wet and pale blue belly with a clean slicing motion that dumped forth the living viscera down his forearm in a welter of dark blood. He seized these entrails and hauled them from the fish and slung them, a wet anneloid mass writhing brightly in the sun and dropping through the placid face of the river with a light splash that sucked away almost at once. He laid the cleaned fish by and seized the next. They were seven in all and he had them dressed in minutes and aligned in the shade u
nder the skiff's seat. He cut the leaders from the hooks he'd salvaged and he rinsed the blood and mucus from his hands and cleaned the knife and folded the blade away and returned to the shanty.

  When he came out again he wore a shirt loosely unbuttoned and he had a towel over one shoulder and he carried a small porcelained basin and a leather shavingbag. He came down the plank walk and went across the field toward the warehouse still barefoot and stepping carefully, emerging onto the railbed and walking three tentative steps on the hot steel before hopping off again. He did a little hotfoot dance and went on among the cinders and rough ties. Passing through a landscape of old tires and castoff watertanks rusting in the weeds and bottomless buckets and broken slabs of concrete. When he left the roadbed he turned up along the side of the warehouse, the new tin brightly galvanized and reeling in the enormous heat and his shadow wincing blackly across the corrugated glare of it like a crepepaper player in a shadowshow. At the far end of the warehouse was a brass spigot. Beneath it the cracked red clay lay shaped in a basin centered by a dark ocherous eye where the water dripped. Suttree knelt and laid out his things, hung his small mirror from a nail, set his washbasin under the tap and turned on the water. Squinting, he inspected his beard, testing the water idly with one finger. It came hot from the tap in this weather and he laved a palmful over his cheeks and wet his brush and lathered carefully. Then he opened his razor and stropped it briefly on the side of his shavingbag and commenced to shave, pulling the skin taut with his fingers.

  When he was finished he flung away the water in a beaded explosion of vapor under the scorching wall of the warehouse, a brief rainbow. He filled the basin again and took off his shirt and splashed himself wet and soaped and rinsed and dried himself with the towel. He put away the razor and brushed his teeth, squatting on his heels there in the raw clay, looking about. A hot silence hung over the riverfront. Over the stained and leaning clapboard shacks, over the barren rubble lots and the fields of wirecolored sedge, over the cratered wastes of hardpan and the railway road. And silence among these broiling colossi of tin and down by the stones and bracken and mud that marked the river shore. Something that looked like a mouse save it had no tail came out of the weeds below him and crossed the open like a windup toy and scuttled from sight beneath the warehouse wall. Suttree spat and rinsed his mouth. A black witch known as Mother She was going along Front Street toward the store, a frail bent shape in black partlet with cane laboring brokenly through the heat. He rose and collected his things and went back down the dry clay gutter by the edge of the warehouse and along the tracks and across the fields.