Suttree (23 page)

I dont know, said Harrogate in a quick nervous voice.

Well you better think of somethin.

I'd take it if you didnt want it.

Take it?

Yessir.

Is you prepared to compensate me for that there hog?

Do what?

Pay me.

Pay ye.

Now you got it right.

Harrogate was still standing astraddle the deceased animal and now he unstood himself from over it and wiped his bloody hands down the side of his trouserlegs and looked up at the owner. How much? he said.

Ten dollar.

Ten dollar?

It'd of brung ever cent of it.

I aint got no ten dollars.

Then I reckon you'll have to work it out.

Work it out?

Work. It's how most folks gets they livin. Them what aint prowlin other folks' hogpens.

What if I dont?

I'll law ye.

Oh.

You can start in the mornin.

What you want me to do with this?

The owner had already started out through the weeds. He turned and looked back at Harrogate and at the hog. You can do whatever you want with it, he said. It's yourn.

How do I find you up yonder?

You ast for Rufus Wiley. You'll find me.

How much a hour do I get? To work it out at? Harrogate was fairly shouting across the space between them there under the viaduct although Rufus was not yet thirty feet away.

Fifty cents a hour.

I'll take seventy-five, called Harrogate.

But Rufus didnt even answer this.

All that night cats moaned in the dark like cats in rut and circled and spat. Lean dogs came from the weeds highhackled and tailtucked with their lips crimpt and teeth bright red in the light of the roadlanterns. Beyond in the dark where the guts lay they circled and snapped and glided in like sharks.

He lay by a dying fire in the creeping damp and listened to the snarling and rending out there until some hour toward dawn when these windfall innards had been divided and consumed and even the most brazen cur had decided not to risk the red hell of lanterns surrounding Harrogate's hog where it hung. The spoilers all slunk away to silence one by one and only a thin cat squall came back, far, now farther, from the hill beyond the creek.

When Harrogate went down the little path toward the hoglot lugging the pail of slops before him in two hands all the small pigs had been returned to the pen and they greeted him with squeals and snorts, jostling along the fence, their pale hammershaped snouts working in the mesh. He looked back over his shoulder toward the house and then fetched the nearest a good kick in the head.

He poured the curdled stinking mess down a rough board chute and stepped back. The pigs grunted and shoved and slurped at the swill and Harrogate shook his head. In the adjoining pen the sow lay sleeping in mud. He moved along the fence and bent to study her. Striped lice the size of lizards traversed the pink nigh hairless swine's hide. He picked up a piece of coal and threw it and it made a dull thump against the fat barrel of her bulk. Her ears twitched and she raised up and snuffed about. The chunk of coal lay just behind her foreleg and she found it and set to eating it, grinding it up with great crunching sounds, a black drool swinging from her jowls. When it was gone she looked up at Harrogate to see if there were more. Harrogate pursed his lips and spat between her eyes but she seemed not to notice. You're crazier'n shit, he said. The hog tested the air with her snout and Harrogate turned and went back to the house.

Dont set that bucket in here, she said. This aint no hogpen.

Harrogate gave her a malignant look and went back out again.

When's dinner? he said, his face at the screendoor.

When it's done.

Shit, he said.

What you say?

Nothin.

I hear him say for you to cut some wood?

Harrogate spat and made his way across the small scrabbled lot to the woodpile. Pullets trotted off before him, a patchy band of birds in moult, small leprous fowl that scudded across the mud with bald pinshaft rumps. He picked up a handaxe used for splitting kindling and set about chopping ants in two as they crossed a pine log. Niggers, he said. Shit.

On the other hand he was eating pretty good. Long after he'd worked out the price of the shoat he was still around to fetch and carry or lie these last warm days in a den in the honeysuckle and read comicbooks he'd stolen, risible picturetales of walking green cadavers and drooling ghouls.

Next door but one lived a pair of nubile young black girls and he used to hang from a treelimb outside their window at night in hopes of seeing them undress. Mostly they just stepped out of their cotton dresses and went to bed in their undershifts. He tried to lure the younger one to his bower in the honeysuckle with promises of comicbooks. She said: Me and Marfa come down there directly she gets in.

They came sidling and giggling after supper and carried off his whole supply. Visions of plump young midnight tits, long dusky legs. It was September now, a season of rains. The gray sky above the city washed with darker scud like ink curling in a squid's wake. The blacks can see the boy's fire at night and glimpses of his veering silhouette slotted in the high nave, outsized among the arches. All night a ruby glow suffuses the underbridge from his garish chancel lamps. The city's bridges all betrolled now what with old ventriloquists and young melonfanciers. The smoke from their fires issues up unseen among the soot and dust of the city's right commerce.

Sometimes in the evening Suttree would bring beers and they'd sit there under the viaduct and drink them. Harrogate with questions of city life.

You ever get so drunk you kissed a nigger?

Suttree looked at him. Harrogate with one eye narrowed on him to tell the truth. I've been a whole lot drunker than that, he said.

Worst thing I ever done was to burn down old lady Arwood's house.

You burned down an old lady's house?

Like to of burnt her down in it. I was put up to it. I wasnt but ten year old.

Not old enough to know what you were doing.

Yeah.--Hell no that's a lie. I knowed it and done it anyways.

Did it burn completely down?

Plumb to the ground. Left the chimbley standin was all. It burnt for a long time fore she come out.

Did you not know she was in there?

I disremember. I dont know what I was thinkin. She come out and run to the well and drawed a bucket of water and thowed it at the side of the house and then just walked on off towards the road. I never got such a whippin in my life. The old man like to of killed me.

Your daddy?

Yeah. He was alive then. My sister told them deputies when they come out to the house, they come out there to tell her I was in the hospital over them watermelons, she told em I didnt have no daddy was how come I got in trouble. But shit fire I was mean when I did have one. It didnt make no difference.

Were you sorry about it? The old lady's house I mean.

Sorry I got caught.

Suttree nodded and tilted his beer. It occurred to him that other than the melon caper he'd never heard the city rat tell anything but naked truth.

In the long windy days of fail Harrogate joined the blacks to fish for carp at the point, smiling and incompetent. A pale arm among darker waving from the shore to Suttree as he set forth in the cool mornings.

Suttree busy caulking up the batboards of his shanty with old newsprint. The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.

Trippin Through The Dew has a muskrat coat bought in a junk-shop on Central Avenue which he has dyed purple.

Mother She has come from upcountry with sacks and jars of the season's herbs. Her little yard lies deep with sere brown locust pods. In the trees small victims struggle, toad or shrewlet among the thorns where they have been impaled and the shrike who put them there trills from a nearby lightwire and it has begun to rain again.

And from his fleerglass window the shut-in watches for idle travelers on the path below, gripping the worn oak arms of his wheelchair, wishing all on to a worse hell yet.

The ragman hurried home with dark hard at his heels. When he reached the end of the bridge the lights went up behind him and he turned to look back for a moment before he ducked past the railing and down the red clay path to his home. Crouched before his fire he could see the stars come out in the darkening river. He kneaded his bony hands and watched the shapes flame took among the sticks of wood as if some portent might be read there. He smacked his gums and spat and gestured with his hands. He'd stood off a family of trashpickers in the alley that morning. There under the deepwalled shadows where the windows were barred and iron firestairs hung in chains overhead. Setting the dark brick corridor full of voices, aged but spoken with authority. Run them off like rats. And out of there you. And dont come back. Suttree rose from the rock where he'd been sitting and shook the stiffness from one knee. The old man looked up at him. From under the whites of his eyeballs peeked a rim of the red flame that raged in his head. You come back and find me dead, he began. Find me layin here dead, you just thow some coaloil on me and set me alight. You hear?

Suttree looked off toward the river and the lights and then he looked at the ragman again. You'll outlive me, he said.

No I wont neither. Will ye do it?

Suttree wiped his mouth.

I'll pay ye.

Pay me?

What will ye take? I'll give ye a dollar.

Good God, I dont want a dollar.

What would you have to have?

You wouldnt burn. He gestured with his hands. You wouldnt burn up with just coaloil thrown on you. It'd just make a big stink.

I'll get some by god gasoline then. I'll get five gallon and have it settin here at all times.

They'd send out the firetrucks when they saw that.

I dont give a good shit what they send. Will ye?

All right.

You wont take no dollar?

No.

I hold ye to your word now.

Whatever's right, said Suttree.

I aint no infidel. Dont pay no mind to what they say.

No.

I always figured they was a God.

Yes.

I just never did like him.

As he was going up Gay Street J-Bone stepped from a door and took his arm. Hey Bud, he said.

How you doin?

I was just started down to see you. Come in and have a cup of coffee.

They sat at the counter at Helm's. J-Bone kept tapping his spoon. When the coffee was set before them he turned to Suttree. Your old man called me, he said. He wanted you to call home.

People in hell want ice water.

Hell Bud, it might be something important.

Suttree tested the cup rim against his lower lip and blew. Like what? he said.

Well. Something in the family. You know. I think you ought to call.

He put the cup down. All right, he said. What was it?

Why dont you call him.

Why dont you tell me.

Will you not call?

No.

J-Bone was looking at the spoon in his hand. He blew on it and shook his head, the distort image of him upside down in the spoon's bowl misting away and returning. Weil, he said.

Who's dead, Jim?

He didnt look up. Your little boy, he said.

Suttree set his cup down and looked out the window. There was a small pool of spilled cream on the marble countertop at his elbow and flies were crouched about it lapping like cats. He got up and went out.

It was dark when the train left the station. He tried to sleep, his head rolling about on the musty headrest. There was no longer a club car or dining car. No service anymore. An old black came through with his zinc sandwichtray and drink cooler. He passed down the corridor of the semidarkened car crying his wares softly and disappeared through the door at the far end. A racket of wheels from the roadway and a slip of cool air. The sleepers slept. The sad and dimly lit back side of a town went down the windows. Fencerails, weedlots, barren autumn fields sliding blackly off under the stars. They went across the flatland toward the Cumberlands, the old car rocking down the rails and the polewires sewing tirelessly the night beyond the cold windowglass.

He woke in various small mountain towns through the early hours of the morning, old people with baskets laboring up the aisle, black families with sleepy children clumping past, whispering, the rusty coaches wheezing and steaming and then the slow accumulate creaking and grating of iron as they pulled out again. It had grown cold in the night but he was numb with other weathers. An equinox in the heart, ill change, unluck. Suttree held his face in his hands. Child of darkness and familiar of small dooms. He himself used to wake in terror to find whole congregations of the uninvited attending his bed, protean figures slouched among the room's dark corners in all multiplicity of shapes, gibbons and gargoyles, arachnoids of outrageous size, a batshaped creature hung by some cunning in a high corner from whence clicked and winked like bone chimes its incandescent teeth.