Suttree (7 page)

Here.

Harrogate lit the cigarette and sucked deeply and blew out the match and put it in his cuff.

Keep em.

He put the matches in his pocket.

How old are you?

Eighteen.

Eighteen?

Yessir.

You just made it didnt you?

That's what they keep tellin me.

What's your name?

Gene Harrogate.

Harrogate, the man said. He had one elbow on the upper bunk and was holding his chin in his fingers, studying the new prisoner with a rather detached air. Well, he said. My name's Suttree.

Howdy Mr Suttree.

Just Suttree. What are you in for?

Stealin watermelons.

That's bullshit. What are you in for.

I got caught in a watermelon patch.

What with, a tractor and trailer? They dont send people to the workhouse for stealing a few watermelons. What else did you do?

Harrogate sucked on his cigarette and looked at the green walls. Well, he said. I got shot.

Got shot?

Yeah.

Whereabouts? Yeah, I know. In the watermelon patch. Where did you get hit.

Pret near all over.

What with, a shotgun?

Yeah.

For stealing watermelons.

Yeah.

Suttree sat down on the lower bunk and put one foot up and began to rub his ankle. After a while he looked up. Harrogate was lying on his stomach looking down over the edge of his bunk.

Let's see where you got shot, said Suttree.

Harrogate knelt up in the bed and lifted his jumper. Little mauve tucks in his pale flesh all down the side of him like pox scars.

I got em all down my leg too. I still caint walk good.

Suttree looked up at the boy's eyes. Bright with a kind of animal cognizance, with incipient good will. Well, he said. It's getting rough out there, isnt it?

Boy I thought I was dead.

I guess you're lucky you're not.

That's what they said at the hospital.

Suttree leaned back in his bunk. What kind of son of a bitch would shoot somebody for stealing a few watermelons? he said.

I dont know. He come out to the hospital and brung me a ice cream. I didnt much blame him. He said hisself he wished he'd not done it.

Didnt keep him from pressing charges though, did it?

Well, I guess seein as he'd done shot me he couldnt back out.

Suttree looked at the boy again with this remark but the boy's face was bland and without device. He wanted to know when supper was served.

Five oclock. Should be in a few minutes.

Do they feed good?

You'll have time to get used to it. What did you draw anyway?

Eleven twenty-nine.

Old eleven twenty-nine.

Boy they feed good in that hospital. Best you ever ate.

Couldnt you have run off from there?

I never had no clothes. I thought about it but I didnt have stitch one nor no way to come by any. I'd rather to be in the workhouse than get caught out wearin one of them old crazy nightshirts they make ye wear. Wouldnt you?

No.

Well. That's you.

That's me.

Harrogate looked down at him but he had his eyes closed. He rolled back over and stared at the ceiling. Someone had written a few sentiments there but they were lost in the glare of the lightbulbs. After a while he heard a bell clang somewhere. A guard came to the door and opened it and when Harrogate sat up he saw that the prisoners were shaping up ready to leave and he hopped from the bunk and shaped up with them.

They marched down the concrete stairs and turned through a door and filed through a messhall where picnic tables ran the length of the room. They were cobbled up out of oak flooring and had the benches bolted to them. At the end of the messhall the prisoners turned into the kitchen where each man got a tin plate and a large spoon. They filed past a steamtable where the kitchen help likewise in stripes ladled up smoking pinto beans, cabbage, potatoes, hot rounds of cornbread. Harrogate had his thumb in his plate and got hot cabbage spooned over it by a smiling black man. He said: Yeeow. Swapped hands and stuck the thumb in his mouth. A guard came over and looked down at him. Was that you? he said.

Yessir.

One more holler out of you and you get no supper.

Yessir.

Nearby prisoners wore pinched faces, apparently in pain, eyes half shut with joy constrained. Harrogate followed on into a messhall like the one they'd come through. The benches and tables were filling up with prisoners. He sought out Suttree and sat next to him and fell to with his spoon. A great clanking and scraping throughout the hall and no word spoke. The table across from them was taken by black prisoners and Harrogate eyed them narrowly from under his brows, his head bent over his plate and the spoon he gripped like a trowel rising and falling woodenly.

When his group had all done eating the guard walked along behind them to the head of the table and rapped and they rose and filed back through the kitchen, scraping their plates into a slopcan and stacking them on a table, dropping their spoons into a bucket. Then they filed out through the other messhall, now partly filled with prisoners eating, and into the hall and up the stairs to their cell again.

They wasnt no meat, said Harrogate.

That's right, said Suttree.

Do they ever have meat?

I dont know.

Have you ever eat any meat here?

You mean other than breakfast bacon?

Yeah. Other than breakfast bacon.

No.

Harrogate leaned against the bunk. After a while he said: How long you been here?

About five months.

They hell fire, said Harrogate.

It was dark when they rose in the morning and dark when they filed into the kitchen to get their plates and spoons and still dark when they turned out in the dewfall and grainy mist of the yard. He stood there with his sleeves and cuffs rolled two turns each and watched the men climb into the trucks. He looked for Suttree but by the time he saw him he was already in a truck and the door was shut. Some of the trucks started to pull away. A guard came over and looked down at him. He stooped with his hands on knees to see into his face. Who the hell are you? he said.

Harrogate.

The guard nodded his head as if this was the right answer.

Did you get your breakfast?

Sure did.

Feel like you're ready for a day's work do you?

I reckon.

Well we have a truck over here for you to ride in if that's all right with you.

Thisn here?

Yeah. You dont care do you?

Harrogate grinned. Shoot, he said. I reckon that's what all I'm here for. I'll do just whatever.

Well we're mighty pleased about that. We like for everbody to be happy.

Shoot, said Harrogate over his shoulder as he slouched toward the waiting truck. I aint hard to get along with.

As he reached the rear of the truck and put up one hand to help himself the guard fetched him a kick from behind that lifted him through the door and dropped him among the boots and shoes of the other prisoners. They looked down at him with crazed grins and someone jerked him forward by the collar in time to keep the door from slamming on his foot. A redheaded man leaned down and said: Get in here, idjit. You make that son of a bitch mad this early of the mornin and I'll kick your ass myself.

I didnt know which truck I was supposed to go to.

Well no truck was the wrong one. Set over here. This son of a bitch drives like a drunk indian goin after more whiskey.

The truck coughed up gouts of white smoke and they lurched off into the fog down the hill and down the winding workhouse road to the highway where the taillights of the other trucks went by twos like eyes before them in the cool October dawn. The prisoners sat in rows facing each other, jiggling and rolling, some trying to sleep. Harrogate crouched on the bench with his hands beneath his thin legs and watched the floor. There was no conversation. The truck gained speed and the tires sang on the black road.

At the first stoplight a young girl was waiting for a bus at the edge of the road. The prisoners shoved and crowded at the wiremesh door of the truck. She turned to stare out over the barren lots toward houses swimming in the mist. A cold light was leaking across the landscape from the east. Harrogate watched two birds come out of the colorless heavens and alight upon a wire and look down into the truck and fly again. They went on, the driver's eyes in a car come up behind them somewhat uneasy at the sight of these striped miscreants.

By good daylight they had crossed the north end of the county and were pulled up at a roadside where sewerpipe lay unjointed along a selvedge of red mud and where riders from the first truck had already descended into ditches and begun to swing picks. The sun rose and warmed them where they stood waiting tools and orders. A man handed Harrogate a pick, stepped back and studied him with it and took it away again. A few cars eased past, faces at the glass. Men bound for work in the city looking out with no expression at all. The prisoners shuffled and milled about until all had tools and Harrogate stood alone. He had started down into the ditch with naked hands when a guard called to him.

Wait here a minute, he said.

The guard went away and returned with another man who looked down at Harrogate suspiciously.

How old are you son?

I'm still eighteen, said Harrogate. He had one black tooth in the front of his mouth and he sucked at it nervously.

The two men looked at each other. The younger one shrugged. I dont know, he said.

Well hell. Take him on back and let Coatney have him. You. You go on back with Mr Williams. You hear?

Yessir.

Get in that pickup over yonder and wait, the other man said.

Harrogate nodded and hobbled up the road to the truck and climbed up into the bed and sat there in his outsized togs watching the men in the ditch. He saw Suttree shoveling dirt up over the rim of the excavation and Suttree looked his way once sitting there alone in the truck but he did not nod or gesture. After a while the guard came up. He motioned to him and opened the door of the truck. Get up front, he said.

Harrogate climbed over the side of the truck and opened the door and got in. There was a speaker hanging by a cord from the dashboard and there was a pumpaction shotgun hung in a rack over the rear window. The guard started the truck, glanced down at Harrogate and pulled away shaking his head.

When Suttree came in that night the smallest prisoner was not in the cell. He saw him at supper. Half obscured behind tottering tiers of pans smoking a homerolled cigarette and firing thin pipes of smoke from his nostrils in disgust. He was moved that night to the kitchen cell. When he came to get his blanket Suttree was lying stretched on his cot with his shoes off. His socks were streaked with red clay.

Guess what, said Harrogate.

What.

They got me warshin fuckin dishes.

I know. I saw you.

Shit, said Harrogate.

Hell, that's no bad shake. It beats swinging a pick all day.

It dont to me. I'd rather to do anything as to warsh dishes.

You'll appreciate it more when the weather turns colder.

Shit.

Harrogate gathered up his blanket in his arms. Someone down the cell called up to Suttree was he through with the newspaper.

Yeah, said Suttree. Come and get it.

Fold it and pitch it here.

Suttree folded the paper and tried to remember how you tucked them in for throwing.

Goddamn Suttree, was you not ever a paperboy?

No.

I guess you was on a allowance.

The man had turned out of his cot and come up the hall.

I used to know how to roll them but I've forgotten.

Here. Let me have it. Fuckin educated pisswillies. He goes to college but he cant roll a newspaper. What do you think of that, little buddy?

The man was standing alongside the bunk. Redheaded, freckled, pumpkintoothed. The nose he talked through spread all over his face.

Howdy Mr Callahan, said Harrogate.

Suttree poked his head out from under the bunk. Mr Callahan? he said.

You heard him.

Oh boy, said Suttree, lying back down.

Callahan grinned his gaptooth grin.

Mr. Callahan's got a lot of pull around here, said Suttree. Ask him if he can do something for you.

Do what?

He wants to get out of the kitchen. He thinks washing dishes is beneath his dignity.

Hell fire little buddy. You got the best job in the joint.

I dont like it, said Harrogate sullenly. They got me workin with a bunch of old crippled fuckers and I dont know what all.