Suttree (29 page)

I've brought it all inside with me. How have you been?

Mean as ever. How you makin it?

I'm about froze out. Thought I'd better check on you to see were you still living.

The old man chuckled to himself. Well lord, he said. A little cold wont kill me I dont reckon. Set down.

He raised himself up slightly and rocked to one side as if he would make room and then subsided in the same place. Suttree sat on the edge of the bunk. Strangely like his own. The rough army blanket. The old man had been reading a coverless book and he laid it down and removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. A small desk stood against the wall and in the pigeonholes were yellowed timetables, waybills and tare sheets. In the far corner a great stack of old newsprint and magazines. The old man's eyes must have followed his. I give up on the newspapers, he said.

Why's that?

I never read one but what somebody aint been murdered or shot or somethin such as that. I never knowed such a place for meanness.

Was it ever any different?

How's that?

I said was it ever any different.

No. I reckon not.

Well it's always been in the papers hasnt it?

Yes. I just give up on it is all. I get older I dont want to hear about it. People are funny. They dont want to hear about how nice everthing is. No no. They aint somebody murdered in the papers their day is a waste of time. I give it up myself. Seen it all. It's all the same. Train wrecks of course. Natural catastrophe. A train wreck'U make ye think about things.

Did you ever see a train wreck?

Oh yes.

What's the worst one you ever saw?

Seen or heard tell of?

Either one.

I dont know. I seen a boiler cut loose in Letohatchie Alabama blowed the whole locomotive cab and all up onto a overpass and just left the trucks settin on the track. They'd stopped to take on water but fore they could fill her the crown sheet went. I seen that. But they was one blew up in the roundhouse in San Antonio Texas in the year nineteen and twelve that blowed the whole roundhouse down and a lot of other buildins besides. They found one chunk of the boiler that weighed eight ton a quarter mile from the wreck. Another piece weighed almost a thousand pound tore a man's house down a half mile away. I was just a young man at the time but I remember readin it like it was yesterday. Had all the pitchers in the paper. I think they was twenty-eight killed and I dont know how many maimed for life.

Suttree looked at the old man. A thousand pound piece of iron went a half mile? he said.

Oh yes. Hadnt hit this feller's house it might still be goin.

Would you have liked to have seen it, Daddy?

The old man looked at Suttree in alarm. Seen it? he said. Where from?

I see, said Suttree.

Course they's been a lot worse wrecks than them. They was a Pennsy engine left the track in Philadelphia about ten year ago, hot box caused the axle to break, thowed some cars into a bridge and killed eighty people all told. Your worst wrecks was the telescopes. One car would run inside another and just gather everbody up out of their seats and make a big mud pie out of em at the end. Then of course they was bridges and trestles. I remember two trains run out on a doubletrack trestle up in Kentucky goin in opposite directions, about the time they got abreast of one another the whole thing just folded up and dropped into the river. Trestle, locomotives, tenders, cars, folks. All of it. Kaploosh. Back then most of ye trestles was just wood. The coaches was wood too and they had stoves in em about like thisn here and when they'd wreck they'd tip over and set the coaches afire and burn up everbody inside. I tell ye, ridin a train back in them days was a thing you give some thought to.

The old man rose heavily from the bed and opened the stove door and dumped in coal from the scuttle and sat back down again. He dabbed with the back of one knuckle at his nose. Outside it had grown almost dark and a cat appeared at the clerestory window and whined.

You caint get in that way, idjit, the old man called. You come to the door like everbody else.

When I was young I didnt care for nothin, he continued. I was always easy in the world. Saw a right smart of it. Never cared to go just wherever.

How did you happen to end up here?

I aint ended yet. Used to hobo a right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue lookin and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees goin by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

They nodded and shivered in the fogged car while the gray dawn hovered without. They groaned and stirred and slept. Sometime in the night Sharpe had come awake freezing, coatless, and climbed out to stir about in the alleyway, gathering pieces of cratewood and paper. J-Bone reared up in the front seat. What's that? he said.

What time is it Jim?

I dont have a watch. Where's that smoke coming from?

This fire here.

J-Bone raised himself and looked over the back of the seat. Sharpe had a small fire going in the floor of the car and he was holding his hands over it. J-Bone leaned over the seat and held his own hands out for warmth. Watch Cabbage's leg there, he said.

Sharpe jostled the bony knee.

Hey Cabbage, get your leg out of the fire.

Cabbage reared up wildly and subsided.

Better crack that window hadnt we? said J-Bone.

They grinned at each other across the smoke and the flames.

I'm about to freeze my ass off. What time do you reckon it is?

I dont know. What time's it get light?

Shit if I know. You sure they open at five?

Yeah. Have for years.

Sharpe was peering out across the blueblack night, the buildings stark and tall, the few streetlamps encoiled in fog.

It's gettin smoky in here, said J-Bone.

Does Suttree have a watch?

No. I dont think so. He bent to see. Suttree lay slumped under the wheel with his folded hands between his knees.

Sharpe cranked down the rear window. Smoke was rolling blackly through the car.

Cabbage raised up and looked at Sharpe with drunken sleepshot eyes. What's happening? he said.

We're waiting on that five oclock beer.

The fucking car's on fire.

We're tryin to get warm, Cabbage, said J-Bone.

Cabbage looked from one to the other of them. You sons of bitches are crazy, he said. He opened the door and lurched out into the alley.

J-Bone got out on the other side. Come on Sharpe. Let's walk around some fore we freeze.

See if you can see some more wood out there.

Suttree woke and looked out the window. A garbage truck had gone down the alley. He sat up. He was alone in the car. He opened the glovebox and reached around inside and shut it again. He felt under the seat and he looked in the back. The remains of the fire lay in a blackened crust of burnt rubber on the floor. He looked out down the alley. He was shaking with the cold.

He climbed stiffly from the car and shut the door. Traffic was commencing in the murk, headlamps boring past in pale shrouds. A dog crossed in the hobbled lights. Suttree stove his hands deep in his pockets and hunched his shoulders and went toward the street.

They were seated in a row on stools within the watered windows of the Signal Cafe and they were drinking beer. An old newspedlar sat at the front of the counter humped over his coffee. Suttree swung through the door blowing on his hands and took a stool.

This goddamn Suttree is a five oclock alarm clock, said Sharpe.

Wasnt no danger of sleepin over with Sut along.

Let me have a Redtop, said Suttree to the counterman.

You rest well Sut?

You sons of bitches would let a man lay out there and freeze to death.

I was goin to come out there and get you, Bud.

We run out of firewood.

How long you all been in here?

This is our first one. Hell, he just opened this minute.

Suttree seized the bottle before him and drank and hiked his shoulders up and drank again. Across the street a neon sign that once said Earle Hotel said le Ho. Two workers with their lunchboxes in their armpits stamped and smoked on the corner. Suttree looked at his companions. Their bottles rose and fell like counterweights. I thought five oclock never would get here, said J-Bone.

By nine oclock that night they were twelve or more, all good hearts from McAnally. An hour later they were at a roadhouse called the Indian Rock.

They threaded their way among the tables, Billy Ray Callahan stopping where girls had gone to dance and left purses among the drinks. Callahan draining the glasses and taking the money from the purses and moving on, smiling and nodding to friends and strangers, past a table where a big boy was sitting, Callahan smiling at him invitingly.

What say, big boy.

Big boy looked away.

They pulled tables together and ordered Cokes and set out pints of whiskey. Under the tilting smoke the dancers whirled and the music with its upbeat country tempo scored like an overture the gatherings of violence just beneath the surface, the subtle exchanges in the heated air. Suttree and J-Bone made their way toward the men's room. Cabbage on the floor already dancing mightily, the girl laughing. Kenneth Tipton at a nearby table holding out his hand.

We've got to get these cunts, said J-Bone.

Let's not get too drunk.

When they got back their table was gone. The drinks lay in a pile of glass and icecubes on the wet concrete floor and the table lay caved in a corner. Suttree saw one of the legs in someone's hand. The area was clearing fast, people moving along the walls. Suttree saw Hoghead move with stealth along the rear of a phalanx of battlers and draw back and hit a boy behind the ear and move on. Earl Solomon came pedaling backwards out of the line and slammed up against the wall. Paul McCulley was trading punches with three boys all by himself down by the ladies' room door and the door kept opening and closing and girls looking out by turns.

We better get some of them off of Hulley Babe, said J-Bone.

They started down the room but before they'd gone far someone fell into J-Bone. J-Bone shoved him and he turned around and took a swing and at it they went. Suttree made his way on to where Paul was and grabbed a boy by the wrist and whipsawed and flung him into a table full of half empty drinks. He screamed something at Suttree but it was lost in the melee. Paul hit one of the other boys and he went down and got up and walked off. The third one hit Suttree in the side of the head. Suttree squared off and ducked and the boy looked and saw McCulley coming for him and said: I aint fightin the two of ye.

Why you crawfishin son of a bitch, McCulley said. You didnt mind it the other way around. He shoved the boy back against the wall but the boy turned and ran.

Get that little fucker, Red, called McCulley.

Callahan was standing bloodyheaded in the middle of a pile of fallen bodies looking about. He reached and took the boy by the shoulder almost gently. Pow, he said. Suttree turned his head. McCulley had his arm around him hugging him and laughing and taking him directly into the thick of it.

Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree.

Who the fuck cares? If he aint from McAnally bust him.

And they are whelmed in dark riot, the smoking hall a no man's land filled with lethal looking drunks reeling about with bleeding eyes and reeking of homemade whiskey. A scuffling of feet, fists thudding. Long endless crash of glass and chairs and overhead the intermittent whoosh of whiskey bottles crossing the room like mortar shells to explode on the block walls. A wave of bodies swept over Suttree. He struggled up. In the midst of it all he found Kenneth Tipton seemingly encased in a nimbus of peace, holding his wrist and working his hand open and shut. I've fucked up my hand, he said. Then he was swept away.

The floor was slick with blood and whiskey. Someone hit him under the eye. He tried to see J-Bone but he could not. He saw Callahan go by, one eye blue shiny, smiling, his teeth in a grout of blood. His busy freckled fists ferrying folks to sleep. He saw a bottle in a fist rise above the melee, saw it powdered on an unknown skull.