Suttree (74 page)
He took the shortcut up the path behind the houses, avoiding any chance of other meetings in the street. Old broken Thersites would have called down from his high window but he was not well these latter days. Dried vitriol hung in glazen strings from a bush by the side of the house and Suttree even thought he heard muted sounds of grousing in an upper room. He cocked one eye up the high warped clapboard wall to the chamber kept by this old taperheaded troll but no one watched back. The eunuch was asleep in his chair and he stirred and mumbled fitfully as if the departing steps of the fisherman depleted his dreams but he did not wake.
The city ambulance swung down off Front Street and went bobbling over the ground and across the tracks and up the river path until it came to the houseboat. People were watching along the porches and there were people standing around in front of the store watching with grave faces. Two men went in with a canvas stretcher and a blanket and in a few minutes they came out with the body and slid it quickly into the rear of the ambulance. In backing around they got the ambulance stuck in the mud. One wheel shot reams of gouty mire out into the river. The men climbed down and looked. One pushed. The ambulance sank until it was resting on its differential carrier.
After a while three tall colored boys in track shoes came along and pushed the ambulance out.
Who sick? one said.
There was a man dead in there, the driver said.
They looked at each other. How long he been dead?
A couple of weeks.
Shoo, one said, wrinkling his wide nose. That's what that's been.
You dont know who it was do you?
No suh.
Dont know who lived here?
No suh.
Come on Ramsey, we got to go.
I heah you, man.
The driver closed the door and motioned with his hand and the ambulance pulled away. The boys watched them go. Shit, one said. Old Suttree aint dead.
He had a small cardboard suitcase and he came out of the weeds and set it on the edge of the road and straightened up and began combing his hair. He looked about his appearance, propping one foot on the case and bending to scrape beggarlice from his trousers with his thumbnail. New trousers of tan chino. A new shirt open at the neck. His face and arms were suntanned and his hair crudely bartered and he wore cheap new brown leather shoes the toes of which he dusted, one, the other, against the back of his trouserlegs. He looked like someone just out of the army or jail. A car came down the highway and he gestured at it with his thumb and it went on.
Traffic was slow along the road and he was there a long time. It was very hot. You could see his skin through the new shirt. Across the road a construction gang was at work and he watched them. A backhoe was dragging out a ditch and a caterpillar was going along the bank with mounds of pale clay shaling across its canted blade. Carpenters were hammering up forms and a cement truck waited on with its drum slowly clanking. Suttree watched this industry accomplish itself in the hot afternoon. Downwind light ocher dust had sifted all along the greening roadside foliage and in the quiet midafternoon the call of a long sad trainhorn floated over the lonely countryside.
A boy was going along the works with a pail and he leaned to each, ladling out water in a tin dipper. Suttree saw hands come up from below the rim of the pit in parched supplication. When all these had been attended the boy came down along the edge of the ditch and handed up the dipper to the backhoe operator. Suttree saw him take it and tilt his head and drink and flick the last drops toward the earth and lean down and restore the dipper to the watercarrier. They nodded to each other and the boy turned and looked toward the road. Then he was coming down across the clay and over the ruts and laddered tracks of machinery. His dusty boots left prints across the black macadam and he came up to Suttree where he stood by the roadside and swung the bucket around and brought the dipper up all bright and dripping and offered it. Suttree could see the water beading coldly on the tin and running in tiny rivulets and drops that steamed on the road where they fell. He could see the pale gold hair that lay along the sunburned arms of the waterbearer like new wheat and he beheld himself in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child's eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea. He took the dipper and drank and gave it back. The boy dropped it into the bucket. Suttree wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Thanks, he said.
The boy smiled and stepped back. A car had stopped for Suttree, he'd not lifted a hand.
Let's go, said the driver.
Hello, said Suttree, climbing in, shutting the door, his suitcase between his knees. Then they were moving. Out across the land the lightwires and roadrails were going and the telephone lines with voices shuttling on like souls. Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood.
Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.
Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Books by Cormac McCarthy
The Road The Sunset Limited (a novel in dramatic form) No Country for Old Men Cities of the Plain The Crossing All the Pretty Horses The Stonemason (a play) The Gardener's Son (a screenplay) Blood Meridian Suttree Child of God Outer Dark The Orchard Keeper
"McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame." --The New York Times Book Review
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Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72872-6 (trade) 978-0-307-76250-4 (eBook)
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy, whom he leaves in the woods and tells her the baby died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.
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Child of God is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee--is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72874-0 (trade) 978-0-307-76248-1 (eBook)
This is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73632-5 (trade) 978-0-307-76247-4 (eBook)
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Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76280-5
This is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
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All the Pretty Horses tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border, Mexico beckons--beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74439-9 (trade) 978-0-307-48130-6 (eBook)
In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. Instead of killing it, he takes it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and dreamlike journey into a country where men meet like ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76084-9 (trade) 978-0-307-76246-7 (eBook)
It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light, a life they value because they know it is about to change forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74719-2 (trade) 978-0-307-77752-2 (eBook)
McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. A good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead man. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.
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A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, "Black" and "White," as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world-views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men--though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27836-4 (trade) 978-0-307-49812-0 (eBook)
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-38789-9 (trade) 978-0-307-26745-0 (eBook)
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL Available at your local bookstore, or visit www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1992
Copyright (c) 1979 by Cormac McCarthy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1979.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-SuttreeReprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, 1979.(Vintage contemporaries)I. Title
[PS3563.A258S9 1986 813'.54 91-50743eISBN: 978-0-307-76247-4
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Lyndhurst Foundation.
Author photograph (c) Marion Ettlinger