Suttree (16 page)

Hidy, he said.

They squatted immobile. Small wooden trucks and autos stalled in streets graded out with a broken shingle. Beyond them a brown clapboard house, foreyard a moonscape in clay and coaldust, a few sorry chickens crouched in the shade. A black man swung reposed and prone on a bench hung by chains from the porch ceiling and a line of faded wash steamed in the windless heat.

What are you all doin?

The oldest spoke. We aint done nothin.

You all live over yonder?

They admitted it with solemn nods.

Harrogate looked about. He reckoned he'd not be put to living next door to niggers leastways. He climbed down the bank and came out on the road and went on downriver past rows of shacks. The road was pocked and buckled and after a while it went to sand and dried mud and then nothing. A thin path wandered on through weeds hung with wastepaper. Harrogate followed after.

The path cut through heatstricken lots and fallow land and passed under a high trestle that crossed the river. A tramp's midden among the old stone footings where gray bones lay by rusted tins and a talus of jarshards. A ring of blackened bricks and the remains of a fire. Harrogate wandered about, poking at things with a stick. Pieces of burnt foil sunburst in blue and yellow. Dredging charred relics from the ashy sleech. Melted glass that had reseized in the helical bowl of a bedspring like some vitreous chrysalis or chambered whelk from southern seas. He dusted it on his sleeve and carried it with him. Across a smoking alluvial strewn with refuse to the faint rise of the railtracks and the river beyond.

A row of black fishermen sat along the ties where the tracks crossed the creek, their legs dangling above the oozing sewage. They watched their corks tilt below them in the creek mouth and did not turn to see him teeter past along the rail, his head averted above the sulphurous fart reek that seeped up between the ties.

You all doin any good? he sang out.

A baleful face looked up and looked away again. He stood watching for a while and then went on, tottering in the heat. The sun like a bunghole to a greater hell beyond. On the hill above him he could see the brickwork of the university and a few fine homes among the trees. He came out at length onto a small riverside street. His sneakers lifting from the hot tar with smacking sounds. A sidelong dog receded at a half trot before him down the street toward the shade of some lilac bushes by one of the combustible looking shacks there. Harrogate studied the landscape beyond. A patch of gray corn by the riverside, rigid and brittle. A vision of bleak pastoral that at length turned him back toward the city again.

He wandered Knoxville's sadder regions for the better part of the afternoon, poking in alleys, probing old cellars, the dusty lees or nether dank of public works. Him wide eyed in his juryrigged apparel not unlike some small apostate to the race itself, pausing here at a wall to read what he could of inscriptions in cloudy chalk, the agenda of anonymous societies, assignation dates, personal intelligence on the habits of local females. A row of bottles gone to the wall for stoning lay in brown and green and crystal ruin down a sunlit corridor and one upright severed cone of yellow glass rose from the paving like a flame. Past these gnarled ashcans at the alley's mouth with their crusted rims and tilted gaping maws in and out of which soiled dogs go night and day. An iron stairwell railing shapeless with birdlime like something brought from the sea and small flowers along a wall reared from the fissured stone.

He paused at some trash in a corner where a warfarined rat writhed. Small beast so occupied with the bad news in his belly. It must have been something you ate. Harrogate crouched on his heels and watched with interest. He prodded it gently with a curtainrod he'd found. From a doorway a girl watched him motionless and thin and unkempt. A crude doll dressed in rags with huge eyes darkly dished and guttering in her bird's skull. Harrogate looked up and caught her watching him and she went all squirmy with her hands pulling at the raveled hem of her dress for a moment before her head snapped back and he could see a ropeveined claw clutched in her hair and the girl jerked backward and disappeared through an open door. He looked down at the rat again. It was moving one rear leg in slow circles as if to music. It must have felt some cold pneuma pass for it suddenly shivered and then it let out its feet slowly until they came to rest. Harrogate poked it with the curtainrod but the rat only rolled loosely in its skin. Fleas were running out at the lean gray face.

He rose and nudged the rat with his toe and then went on down the alley. He crossed a tarred street bedded with bottlecaps and bits of metal, scattered patterns in niello and one improbable serpent, the ribbed spine polished by traffic and partly coiled in a pale bone omen he could not read. Overhead the bowls of stoned out polelamps. A lank black slattern stood hipshot in a doorframe. Hey boydove, you gettin any gravel for yo goose? Whoopla laughter scuttling after him and a gold tooth winksome, bawdy dogstar in the ordurous jaws of fellatio major.

He went where torpid blacks crouched or drowsed in doorways, stoops, on corners almost in the traffic. Old men like effigies with fingers laced and capped upon the heads of canes between their knees. In suits thought long extinct, perforated two-tone shoes, socks rolled in obscene tubes about their thin black ankles. A hawkfaced ebon freak importuned him, sussurous, long underlip leaking a clear drool. Flies clove the air like comets. He passed on. Eyes averted. Dark matrons at the upper windows in hot and airless dishabille, chocolate breasts leaning, Dusklovers. Ancillary disciples to the rise of night. He'd come from the dwellingstreets of whites to those of blacks and no gray middle folk did he see.

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 benches to the front of the hall and watched the day start in the street below.