Suttree (10 page)

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 under 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.

As he neared the shanty he saw a long gray cat struggling toward the weeds towing its own length of fish. He shouted and waved at it. He scooped and shied a rock. Hobbling along gingerfooted through the stubble. When he came up the cat squared off at him, a starved and snarling thing with the hackles reared along its razorous spine. It did not let go the fish. Suttree threw a rock at it. The cat's ears lay flat along its head and its tail kept jerking. He threw another rock that caromed off its stark ribs. It dropped the fish and yowled at him, still crouched there cocked on its bony elbows.

Why goddamn you, said Suttree. He cast about until he found a huge clod of dried mud and going close he broke it over the animal. It squalled and scrabbled away, shaking its head. Suttree retrieved the fish and looked it over. He rinsed it in the river and gathered up the other fish and piled them in his washbasin, a tottery load, and went on to the shanty. The cat was already back in the skiff, searching.

With the day's sun full on the tin roof the heat in the houseboat was unendurable. He put away his things and got a clean shirt and trousers from his cardboard bureau and dressed and took his shoes and socks and towel and went out onto the deck. There he sat looking out through the rails with his feet hanging in the river. Down near the bridge an old man poled a skiff by the shore. Standing precarious and daring. Wielding a longhandled hook. A fellow worker in these cloacal reaches, plying the trade he has devised for himself. The old man's name was Maggeson and Suttree smiled to see him at his work, going slow, shaded by the fronds of a huge and raveled fiber hatbrim.

He dried his feet and put on his socks and shoes and combed his hair. Inside the shanty he wrapped the fish in a newspaper and tied them with a string and took the coaloil can from its corner. At the door he looked to see had he forgotten anything and then he left.

When he reached the street he walked along until he found a flat place at the paving's edge and under the weeds and here he stopped and poured the kerosene over the warm tar. Then he set the can from sight in the weeds and went on.

Gravely, gravely, small chocolate children nodded or lifted pale brown palms. Hello. Hidy. He climbed up from the river and went toward the city with his fish.

Early in his living by the river Suttree had found a shortcut through old gardens on the river bluff, a winding path with cinder paving that angled up behind old homes of blackened boarding and old porches where rusted skeins of screening fell down the rotting facades. But passing under one high window always he heard a dull mutter of invective and sullen oaths and he no longer took the near path but went the longer way round by the streets. The invector however had moved to a new window so large was the house that he shared with his soul and he could still watch for the fisherman to pass. In these later years he had become confined altogether and this was hard for one accustomed to tottering daily abroad and dripping vitriol on passing strangers. He keeps his watch with fidelity. An old man dimly seen in upper windowcorners.

Market Street on Monday morning, Knoxville Tennessee. In this year nineteen fifty-one. Suttree with his parcel of fish going past the rows of derelict trucks piled with produce and flowers, an atmosphere rank with country commerce, a reek of farmgoods in the air tending off into a light surmise of putrefaction and decay. Pariahs adorned the walk and blind singers and organists and psalmists with mouth harps wandered up and down. Past hardware stores and meatmarkets and little tobacco shops. A strong smell of feed in the hot noon like working mash. Mute and roosting pedlars watching from their wagonbeds and flower ladies in their bonnets like cowled gnomes, driftwood hands composed in their apron laps and their underlips swollen with snuff.