Suttree Read online

  Suttree was standing against the bar watching all this with something like amusement. When Callahan saw him he gathered his head into the crook of his arm. Goddamned old Suttree, he said.

  How's it feel to be on the street again?

  Feels thirsty. You holdin anything?

  Give us another fishbowl, Mr Hatmaker.

  Callahan reached past Suttree and gave Blind Richard a great whack on the shoulders. Richard's cigarette hopped from his mouth and expired in his beer. What say Richard old buddy! screamed Callahan.

  The blind man raised up coughing. He put one finger to his ear. Goddamn, Red. I aint deaf. He was groping about on the bar with long yellow fingers.

  Where'd my cigarette get to, Jim?

  Red got it, Richard.

  Give me my cigarette, Red.

  Suttree passed the mug of beer from the bar and Callahan sucked down about half of it and belched and looked about. Someone had put a coin in the jukebox and pastel lights exchanged within the plastic fascia. Bearhunter and Cabbage composed a light impromptu dance. Boneyard watched, his anthracite eyes shining.

  Tell him to give me my cigarette, Jim.

  An enormous whore had come to the bar with empty mugs for filling. She stood against Suttree and gave him a sidelong look of porcine lechery.

  Watch out, Suttree, called Cabbage.

  Your buddy was supposed to of got out with us, said Red.

  Harrogate?

  Yeah. They couldnt find him no clothes. He says he's comin to the big city to make his fortune.

  He's as crazy as a shithouse rat.

  That old big gal's after you, called Cabbage, punching buttons at the jukebox.

  The whore grinned and took the filled mugs to the table.

  J-Bone turned to the room with outspread hands. All right now. Who got Richard's cigarette?

  Richard tugged at his sleeve. Here, Jim. Let it go.

  Hell no. Nobody leaves the room.

  Callahan leaned and called to a thin woman among the whores. Hey Ethel. How's that rabbit hole?

  Somebody told me you were a fisherman now, said Bearhunter.

  Damn right he is, said Cabbage. Catches them big ones.

  Piss on you, Cabbage.

  Cabbage put one hand to his mouth. That old Suttree, he called. He knows where the good holes is at.

  Listen at old Cabbage hammer, said J-Bone.

  Old Cabbage, said Red, he beat that morals charge they had him on. They caught him and this girl parked in a car buck naked but old Cabbage, he ate the evidence.

  Aw shit, said Richard. Who put a danged old cigarette out in my danged beer?

  Who done that? called J-Bone.

  A small owlfaced man was trying to get up a game on the bowling machine. Here's my horse, said Boneyard, raising J-Bone's arm aloft.

  I'm too drunk. Who was it put a duck out in Richard's beer when he wasnt lookin?

  Bill, you and me partners, said Worm.

  Here's my horse, said Red, hugging Richard's thin shoulders.

  Where's Ethel? She'll play. Get her.

  Ethel was at the end of the bar with her empty mug. She snapped her fingers and pointed at her crotch with her thumb. Get this, she said.

  Suttree studied her. Her bony sootstreaked arms were bare to the shoulder and one bore a slaverous and blueblack panther. He could see part of a peacock, a wreath with the name Wanda and the words Rest In Peace 1942. He had his head tilted studying the blue runes on her legs when she turned with her beer. She hiked her skirt up around her waist with one hand and cocked her leg forward. A hound was chasing a rabbit down her belly toward her crotch. She said: When you get your eyes full, open your mouth.

  Whoops from the drinkers. Hoghead leaning to see. Wait a minute, he said.

  But she had flipped her skirt down with an air of contempt and swaggered past with her beer.

  I told you about that Suttree, called Cabbage. He's a hole findin fool.

  Let's see that rabbit hole Ethel.

  Let's see one of you loudmouthed fuckers buy a beer.

  Buy her a beer Worm.

  Fuck her. She's got a beer.

  Give us a fishbowl Mr Hatmaker.

  Ever who's playin get your dime up.

  What are we playin for?

  Make it light on yourself.

  Who got my beer. Hey, Red?

  Late summer darkness fell and lights came on within the tavern, the beerlamps and plastic clocks with country scenes. Suttree fell in among the winners from the bowling game and they set forth in a huge old Buick.

  Idling in an alleyway under a yellow lightbulb by a clapboard wall where a man naked to the waist palmed to them a pint bottle in a paper bag. On to other taverns where in the smoke and the din and the music the night grew heady. At the B & J Suttree became enamored of a ripe young thing with black hair who wrought on the dancefloor an obscene poem, her full pale thighs shining in the dim light where she whirled.

  He stood to dance, took two steps sideways and sat again.

  He began to grow queasy.

  He was looking down into a tin trough filled with wet and colorful gobbets of sick. Scalloped moss wept from a copper pipe. A man sat sleeping on the toilet, his hands hanging between his knees. There was no seat to the toilet and the sleeper was half swallowed up in its stained porcelain maw.

  Hey, said Suttree. He shook the man by the shoulder.

  The man shook his head in annoyance. A foul odor seeped up between his lardcolored thighs.

  Hey there.

  The man opened one wet red eye and looked out.

  Sick, Suttree said.

  They glared at each other.

  Yeah, said the man. Sick.

  Suttree stood spraddlelegged before him, swaying slightly, one hand on the man's shoulder. The man squinted at him. Do I know you?

  Suttree turned away. Two other men come in were standing at the trough. He tottered into the corner and vomited. The men at the trough watched him.

  They rolled through the dim shires of McAnally singing rude songs and passing a bottle about in the musty old car.

  Wake up, Sut, and take ye a drink.

  What's wrong with old Suttree.

  Suttree's all right, said J-Bone.

  He waved them away, his wheeling skull pressed for coolness against the glass of the quarterwindow.

  I believe he's been taken drunk.

  Get ye a drink here to sober up on. Hey Bud.

  Suttree groaned and fended away with one hand.

  At the door of the West Inn they were halted by a shaking head. Suttree hung between friends.

  Dont bring him in here.

  Callahan pushed past them through the door.

  I didnt know that was you, Red. Just bring him on in and set him in the booth yonder.

  A group of musicians played with fiddle and guitar a rustic reel and a drunk had taken the floor and begun to waltz like a mummer's bear. One shoesole was pared from its welt and gave to his shuffle a little offbeat slap. In a daring pirouette, vacanteyed and face agrin, he overlisted and careered sideways and crashed among a table of drinkers. They flushed like quail from under the spilled bottles and mugs, wiping at their laps. One had the drunk up by the collar but he saw Callahan smiling at him and grew uncertain and let him go.

  Suttree, roused by the commotion, looked up. His friends were drinking at the bar. He reared from the booth and staggered into the center of the floor, looking about wildly.

  Where you goin Sut?

  He turned. To see who'd spoke. The seeping roachstained walls spun past in a wretched carousel. Two thieves at a table watched him like cats.

  J-Bone had him under one arm. Where you goin, Bud?

  Sick. Sicky sick.

  They staggered toward the washrooms, a shed at the rear of the building and barren save for a toilet bowl. An opaque smoketarred lightbulb that looked like an eggplant screwed into the ceiling. A maze of corroding pipes and conduits.

  The walls were papered in old cigare
tte signs and castoff cardboard up which piss rose wicklike from the floor in dark and flameshaped stains. Suttree stood looking down into the bowl. A beard of dried black shit hung from the porcelain and a clot of stained papers rose and fell with a kind of obscene breathing. J-Bone was holding him by waist and forehead. Hot clotted bile flooded his nostrils.

  Walk him around.

  Come on Sut.

  He looked. They were going toward a dimlit shack. Somewhere beneath him his feet were wandering about. Fuck it, he said.

  Old Sut's all right.

  I'm an asshole, he told a wall. He turned, seeking a face. I'm an asshole, J-Bone. A photograph of a family of blacks in some sort of ceremonial robes went past. He raised a hand and fondled the wallpaper's yellowed sleavings.

  He was entering a room. Most stately. Nothing to be alarmed. Dark faces watched him through the smoke. Must nods to each. Appear plausible.

  He heard voices rising louder. Hoghead's high cackling laugh.

  Here Sut.

  He looked down. He was holding a jellyjar of white whiskey. He raised it and sipped.

  I like the hell out of old Suttree, John Clancy said.

  He was sitting on the lumpy arm of a stuffed chair. Something was under discussion. A slatshaped negress bent to look at him. He too drunk, she said.

  Suttree lifted his glass in mute agreement but she had gone.

  Someone rose from the chair. He must have been leaning against them because now he fell into the depths they had vacated, spilling the whiskey on himself. His face lay wedged in a rank corner of the upholstery.

  He muttered into the musty springs.

  Someone was helping him. He rose from a dream, a ragestrangled face screaming at him. He reeled toward the door. In the corridor he turned and made his way along to the rear of the house, caroming from wall to wall. A black woman stepped from out of the woodwork and came toward him. They feinted. She passed. He clattered into a bureau and fell back and went on. At the rear of the hallway he floundered through a curtain and stood in a small room. Somewhere before him in the dark people were breeding with rhythmic grunts. He backed out. He pulled at a doorknob. His gorge gave way and the foul liquors in his stomach welled and spewed. He tried to catch it in his hands.

  God, he said. He was wiping himself on a curtain. He found a door and entered and collapsed in the cool dark. There was a bed there and he tried to crawl under it. It was important that he not be found until he'd had time to rest.

  In his stupor he dreamed riots. A window full of glass somewhere collapsed in a crash. He thought he'd heard pistolshots. He struggled to wake but could not. He let his cheek go to a fresh spot on the floor where it was cooler and he slept again.

  A dream of shriving came to him. He knelt on the cold stone flags at a chancel gate where the winey light of votive candles cast his querulous shadow behind him. He bent in tears until his forehead touched the stone.

  When he woke his head was encoiled by some rank stench. A dull plaque of vomit furred his tongue. Dark faces bent between himself and the dusty bulb burning in the ceiling. Hey boy, hey boy, a voice was saying. He felt himself being jostled from side to side. He closed his eyes. Must ride out this hard weather.

  I caint have it. Get him out of here.

  He was hauled abruptly erect by his armpits. He looked down. Black hands cupped his chest. Ab? he said. Ab?

  She bent to see into his face. Dull moteblown eyeballs webbed with blood. Wheah you buddies at? Hah?

  You caint get no sense out of him.

  He watched his heels dragging over the linoleum's faded garden.

  I see that little white pointedheaded motherfucker he come in with I goin to salivate his ass with a motherfuckin shotgun.

  Where are we going?

  What he say?

  Can you walk? Hey boy.

  He caint shit. Get him on out of here.

  White motherfucker done puked everwhere.

  His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.

  A warm splatter broke across his face, his chest. He twisted his head away, waving one hand. He was wet and he stank. He opened his eyes. A black hand was putting away a limber hosepipe, buttoning, turning. An enormous figure toppled away down the sky toward the mauve and glaucous dawn of the streetlamps.

  Sot's skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me.

  I'd like these shoes soled I dreamt I dreamt. An old bent cobbler looked up from his lasts and lapstone with eyes dim and windowed. Not these, my boy, they are far too far gone, these soles. But I've no others. The old man shook his head. You must forget these and find others now.

  Suttree groaned. A switchengine shunted cars in a distant yard, telescoping them in crescendo coupling by coupling to an iron thunder that rattled sashwork all down McAnally Flats. By this clangorous fanfare dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth congealed with menace out of the dark of the hemisphere. A curtain fell, unspooling in a shock of dust and beetlehusks and dried mousedirt. Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarfs or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. Not dread but only homologues of dread. They bore a dead child in a glass bier. Sinister abscission, did I see with my seed eyes his thin blue shape lifeless in the world before me? Who comes in dreams, mansized at times and how so? Do shades nurture? As I have seen my image twinned and blown in the smoked glass of a blind man's spectacles I am, I am.

  Trades commenced in the hot summer dawn. He rolled his swollen head, drew up his knees. A breeze stirred a child's sedge house nearby.

  I am a mouse in a grassbole crouching. But I can hear come whicket and swish the clocklike blade of the cradle.

  He woke with the undersides of his eyelids inflamed by the high sun's hammering, looked up to a bland and chinablue sky traversed by lightwires, A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound. Suttree lay with his hands palm up at his sides in an attitude of frailty beheld and the stink that fouled the air was he himself. He closed his eyes and moaned. A hot breeze was coming across the barren waste of burnt weeds and rubble like a whiff of battlesmoke. Some starlings had alighted on a wire overhead in perfect progression like a piece of knotted string fallen slantwise. Crooning, hooked wings. Foul yellow mutes came squeezing from under their fanned tails. He sat up slowly, putting a hand over his eyes. The birds flew. His clothes cracked with a thin dry sound and shreds of baked vomit fell from him.

  He struggled to his knees, staring down at the packed black earth between his palms with its bedded cinders and bits of crockery. Sweat rolled down his skull and dripped from his jaw. Oh God, he said. He lifted his swollen eyes to the desolation in which he knelt, the ironcolored nettles and sedge in the reeking fields like mock weeds made from wire, a raw landscape where half familiar shapes reared from the slagheaps of trash. Where backlots choked with weeds and glass and the old chalky turds of passing dogs tended away toward a dim shore of stonegray shacks and gutted auto hulks. He looked down at himself, caked in filth, his pockets turned out. He tried to swallow but his throat constricted in agony. Tottering to his feet he stood reeling in that apocalyptic waste like some biblical relict in a world no one would have.

&nbs
p; Two bulletskulled black boys watched him come along the path toward the street, lurching out of the jungle with his head in his hands. Through splayed fingers a wild eye fell upon them.

  Hey boys.

  They regarded each other.

  Which way is town?

  They fled on bare soundless feet, spinning a lilac dust. He wiped his eyes and looked after them. In that shimmering heat their figures dissolved crazily until all he saw of them were two small twisted gymnasts hung by wires in a quaking haze. Suttree stood there. He turned slowly. To select a landmark. Some known in this garden of sorrow. He wheeled away down the narrow sandy street like the veriest derelict.

  These quarters he soon found to be peopled with the blind and deaf. Dark figures in yard chairs. Propped and rocking in the shade of porches. Old black ladies in flowered gowns who watched impassively the farther shapes of the firmament as he went by. Only a few waifs wide eyed and ebonfaced studied at all the passage of this pale victim of turpitude among them.

  At the end of the street the earth fell away into a long gut clogged with a maze of shacks and coops, nameless constructions of tarpaper and tin, dwellings composed of actual cardboard and wapsy tilted batboard jakes that reeled with flies. Whole blocks of hovels cut through by no street but goatpaths and little narrow ways paved with black sand where children and graylooking dogs wandered. He turned and started back, staggering under the heat, his stomach curdling. He wandered into a narrow alleyway and fell to his hands and knees and began to vomit. Nothing would come but a thin green bile and then nothing at all, his stomach contracting in dry and vicious spasms that racked him and left him sweaty and shivering and weak when they ceased. He looked up. Tears warped his sight. A small black child with brightly ribboned wool watched him from a bower in a hedge. With the snuffling of her breath she teased in and out of one nostril a creamy gout of yellow snot. Suttree nodded to her and rose and lurched into the street again.

  He chanced a slotted eye through his fingers at the boiling sun. It hung directly overhead. He started across the open lots, going carefully with his thin shoes among jagged rings of jarglass and nailstudded slats. From time to time he would pause to rest, leaning forward with his hands on his knees or squatting on one heel and holding his head. He had sweated through his shirt and it stank horrendously. After a while he came out on another street and he went along until he saw in the distance a cutbank that might be a railroad right of way. He set off across the lots again and down alleys and over fences, trying to keep a fix on his destination. He crossed through a row of back yards by battered cans of swill where clouds of fruitflies droned and swung on the wind and dogs slouched away. A fat negress stepped from an outhouse door hauling up her bloomers. He looked away. She bawled out some name. He went on. A man called out behind him but he didnt look back.