Suttree (65 page)

It was still early morning when he made his way down the steep path by the ruins of an old wall. Some ancient city overgrown here. In a sere field worn clothes the wind has tattered hung from a hatted cross. Down there the littoral of siltstained rocks, old plates of paving and chunks of concrete sprouting growths of rusted iron rod. He'd even seen old slabs of masonry screed with musselshells here in the weeds. Coming down the concrete steps with the mangled iron handrail and past old brick cisterns filled with rubble. Past the stone abutment of an earlier bridge on the river and the last ramshackle house and the brown curbstones that had once lined the main street and the old cobblestones and pavingbricks and blackened beams with their axed flats and their mortices, all this detritus slid from the city on the hill.

He had passed the madman's house without regard and the old man must have slacked his vigil for he'd almost reached the street before he heard him cry.

Ah he's back, God spare his blackened soul, another hero home from the whores. Come to cool his heels in the river with the rest of the sewage. Sunday means nothing to him. Infidel. Back for the fishing are ye? God himself dont look too close at what lies on that river bottom. Fit enough for the likes of you. Ay. He knows it's Sunday for he's drunker than normal. It'll take more than helping old blind men cross the street to save you from the hell you'll soon inhabit. Suttree went on toward the street with his fingers in his ears.

Howard Clevinger raised one eyebrow at his appearance in the store. Thought you'd left town, he said.

I'm back.

A thin and fragrant arm descended on Suttree's shoulder in a taffeta whisper, a cufflink coined from a bicycle reflector. An African mask in meretricious harlequinade and ivory teeth beset with gold. Hey baby, where you been so long?

Hello John. Just around.

I been out of town myself.

Where've you been?

I's in Lexington. I seen James Herndon. Sweet Evenin Breeze. She just beautiful, for her age.

Who's the oldest?

Oldest what?

You or her. Him. It.

Hush. That thing is sixty.

How old are you, John?

Trippin Through The Dew ignored the question. He said: You know what they goin to put in the paper when she die? Big headlines.

What's that.

They done got it all ready. Sweet Evenin Breeze Blows No More.

Suttree grinned. The invert was bent double holding himself, his face squinched. He whinnied like a she horse.

What are they going to say about you John?

Sheeit. I aint goin to die.

Maybe not, said Suttree.

The houseboat lay half sunken by one corner and the windows were stoned out and the front door was gone altogether. He entered a scene of old memories and new desolations. Torn playing cards and halfpint whiskey bottles broken in the floor, the stove crammed tight to the maw with trash. He crossed the tilted floor and righted the foodlocker from where it lay on its face among broken glass and rags.

By afternoon he had the place swept out and the mattress on the roof for airing, he sat on the veranda in the sun with a glasscutter and shaped old panes purloined from an empty warehouse and with them glazed the naked sashes of his house. In the days that followed he tarred the seams in the roof and carried on his back a door from a razing beyond First Creek and sawed it down to fit and hung it.

Lastly standing off in the skiff on a warm October morning he fended off from the sheer wall of the dredger's hull and reached down the fireaxe handed him. The drums when he stove them filled and wheezed and sputtered and went slowly from sight in the river. He jostled the new ones into place and called up to the pilothouse. The winch creaked and the houseboat corner settled. Suttree unhooked the cables as soon as there was play enough and they went swinging up toward the deck.

What do I owe you? he called, passing up the axe.

The deckman jerked his thumb toward the pilothouse where the captain watched from his high window.

What do I owe you?

The captain spat. I dont know, he said. What's it worth?

I dont know. I dont want to make you mad.

Would you say five dollars?

I'd say that was fair enough.

He handed up the money to the deckhand. The dredger began to back. Great boils of muddy water churned and broke. Suttree raised a hand and the old pilot rang a small bell. Rafts of straw rose and fell and the ratholes in the bank sucked and popped and the dredger moved out, the deckhand leaning on the rail smoking a cigarette and watching toward the shore.

He bought three five hundred yard spools of nylon trotline and spent two days piecing them with their droppers and leads and hooks. The third day he put out his lines and that night in his shanty with the oil lamp lit and his supper eaten he sat in the chair listening to the river, the newspaper open across his lap, and an uneasy peace came over him, a strange kind of contentment. Small graylooking moths orbited the hot cone of glass before him. He set back the plate with the dimestore silver and folded his hands on the table. A beetle kept crashing into the windowscreen and dropping to the deck below to whirr and rise and crash again.

A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him:

Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?

They'd listen to my death.

No final word?

Last words are only words.

You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.

I'd say I was not unhappy.

You have nothing.

It may be the last shall be first.

Do you believe that?

No.

What do you believe?

I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.

Equally?

It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.

Of what would you repent?

Nothing.

Nothing?

One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

Suttree's cameo visage in the black glass watched him across his lamplit shoulder. He leaned and blew away the flame, his double, the image overhead. The river spooled past dark and silent. A truck droned on the bridge.

All that season on the river he had warrant to remember in the toils of his trade old days of rain on the window and warmth in the bed with her body and how her eyes rolled back in her head like a turkish beggar's with just the bluish whites shining under the slotted lids and her tongue protruding while she seized her knees and cried out and fell back. Lying there on the drenched sheets like a suicide. Till she could flutter back to life and slur sweet lies into his ear or tell the spinebones in his back with such cool fingers.

In the toils of orgasm--she said, she said--she'd be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. Envy's color is the color of her pleasuring, and what is the color of grief? Is it black as they say? And anger always red? The color of that sad shade of ennui called blue is blue but blue unlike the sky or sea, a bitter blue, rue-tinged, discolored at the edges. The color of a blind man's noon is white, and is his nighttime too? And does he feel it with his skin like a fish? Does he have blues, are they bridal and serene, or yellows, sunlike or urinous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water.

In the morning he set off down the river to run his lines. A cool morning with mist still rising. Crossriver the cries of hogs in the slaughterhouse chutes like the cries of lepers without the gates. He sat in back of the skiff and sculled it slowly down beneath the bridge. As he passed under he raised his head and howled at the high black nave and pigeons unfolded fanwise from the arches and clattered toward the sun.

A season of death and epidemic violence. Clarence Raby was shot to death by police on the courthouse lawn and Lonas Ray Caughorn lay three days and nights on the roof of the county jail among the gravels and tar and old nests of nighthawks until the search reckoned him escaped from the city. What dreams did he have of the lady Katherine? Suttree saw her one evening in the Huddle with Worm Hazelwood. She had no need to travel about the country robbing people. And news in the papers. A young girl's body buried under trash down by First Creek. Sprout Young, the Rattlesnake Daddy, indicted for the murder.

Suttree found people out of doors that would as soon stayed in. A family of aged black folk sitting in the dark among their furnishings in total silence. Their figures swaddled up in old quilts against the cold and the old man's cigarette rising and falling in slow red arcs. When he passed there in the morning they were all gone to seek help save an old woman who sat in a chair on the sidewalk among the piled and grimy household goods. She watched the passers in the street but none watched back. A starling landed on the old yellow icebox and she struggled up to shoo it away.

The junkman lay among sleeping sots in the jungle nor did he stir when the thief who dropped from the dark of a boxcar door went among them. A hominid composed of smoke sucking out the pockets socklike and boarding loose change and half empty packets of cigarettes. Through dark bowerpaths in the honeysuckle where newsprint crouched like ghosts and smokehounds lay so drunk the flies had shat eggs in their earholes. Pausing here to take some shoes. Emerging from the jungle and disappearing into the dark of the car again and the train shunting into motion again as if it had been waiting him. A dog crossed the tracks and paused to sniff at the old man's feet and moved on.

And in the dawn a female simpleton is waking naked from a gang-fuck in the back seat of an abandoned car by the river. She stirs, sweet day has broken. Reeking of stale beer and dried sperm, eyes clogged, used rubbers dangling senselessly from the dashboard knobs. Her clothes lie trampled in the floor. They bear bootprints of mud and dogshit and her cunt looks like a hairclot fished from a draintrap. She sees on rising two black boys crouched on the car fenders like gibbons purloined from the architraves of an old world cathedral. She folds her hands across her breasts and they leap to the ground and scamper hooting through the weeds. In the distance cars are rifling along a highway. She bends moaning to sort among her clothes.

Uptown one evening in the Huddle Suttree found Leonard fresh from the workhouse. Leonard had a job as dishwasher and he had gonorrhea of the colon and was otherwise covered with carbuncles. He hobbled over to Suttree's table and sat uneasily. He told how he had seen the lies run down the lawyer's tongue. Vague but of a substance, they came down like mice and looked about a moment before scuttling off. Leaning over Leonard and wagging a long finger, and is it not true that you sought to conceal the death of your father for the purpose of extorting monies unlawfully from the state? Wild in the eye, thrusting his sweating face into Leonard's smaller one and fixing him with a lidless look of triumph until Leonard half rising from his chair seized the lawyer's cold skull in his two hands and pulled his face down and parted those thin lips with a smoking kiss.

He come up, Sut. Draggin all them chains with him.

Fathers will do that, said Suttree.

I hunted you everwheres.

Suttree didnt ask what for.

The catamite tucked his chair closer and leaned in confidence. I need to ast ye somethin Sut.

Okay.

If you buy somethin and dont pay for it can they take it back?

Sure. Of course they can.

I mean no matter what it is?

Well. I dont know. I guess there are some things it would be hard to repossess. What is it?

Well this guy's been comin to the house ...

Okay.

Well. You know after they found the old man and we had all that trouble with the law.

Okay.

Well, the old lady went and bought this plot out in Woodlawn so they wouldnt bury him down here in the whatever thing it is here and she bought this whole deal, this guy come out to the house, and he sold her this deal, this plot with anothern alongside of it for her and it had this pet, pet ...

Perpetual care.

Petual care and got her to sign for it all and she didnt have to pay nothin down nor for the first sixty days I think it was and now she's three months behind on her payments and she owes em sixty-two fifty ...

Leonard.

Yeah.

Are you trying to tell me they're going to repossess your old man's grave plot?

Can they Sut?

I dont know.

Well I know a guy one time they come and got his teeth he never made the payments.