Suttree (13 page)

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.

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.

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.