Suttree (71 page)

Hey Bud. Hey.

It is my old J-Bone and no other.

What the fuck are you doing?

Sicky sick, James.

What the hell have you done to yourself? Can you get up?

I'm all fucked up, James.

I can see that. What is it?

Dear friend, it's checkout time.

J-Bone patted his shoulder. Hang on a minute. I'll be right back.

Suttree opened his eyes. In a minute I am going to have a drink of water. He licked his lips.

J-Bone arrived with a fat cabbie. They pulled Suttree up by the arms and began to work a shirt onto him.

I'd just let him sleep it off, said the cabdriver.

I cant leave him layin in here.

Suttree's arm dropped, his knuckles banged on the floor.

He aint sick is he?

Hold him here a minute while I button these. He just needs to get dried out.

Desist officer. I'll come peaceably.

He better not be sick. You hear?

I've seen him worse than this. Let him back down now.

Has he got any shoes?

I'll find him some. Help me lift him here.

What's this?

What?

Hell, he's bleedin out of his ass.

Maybe he's got piles.

Piles hell. Look at it.

A crimson stain was spreading about Suttree's pale and naked haunches. He lay buttoned up in a shirt with a pair of trousers bunched about his knees. The cabdriver backed toward the door. J-Bone looked like an assassin kneeling there. The cabbie turned and fled down the hall.

Go on then, you son of a bitch, J-Bone called.

Son of a bitch, said Suttree from the floor.

J-Bone pulled him sideways out of the blood and began to wrestle the trousers up around him. He fetched his shoes and got them on. He got him up under the armpits and dragged him out and down the hall and stood in Suttree's bed and pulled him up onto it.

Water Jim. A little old drink.

J-Bone was back in ten minutes with another cabdriver.

Can he walk?

No. Give me a hand with him.

Damn if he aint about as fucked up as anybody I ever saw.

He gets this way.

Suttree's toes left a faint wake in the scurfy warp of the hall carpet. His shoes fell down the stairs like toys. He watched the hard sunlight ascend the stairwell. His head banged something.

You goin with him aint ye?

Yes. I'll ride back here. Go ahead.

That's the drunkest human ever I witnessed, said the driver.

Whose house is this? said Suttree.

Take it easy Bud.

Why I'm all right.

They struggled with him. I was all right, he said.

Rank odor of caustic and drugs. Standing in a white room. He leaned in confidence toward an ear. I'm all right now, he lied. Someone has stole the pins from his kneehinges. He leaned heavily on a steel table. A wall placard listed regulations. In the center of the room the taut white linen of the emergency table. An orderly opened the door and looked at him.

To wish to lie down here is to entertain the illusion that kings may worship, said Suttree.

The orderly closed the door.

Another door closed, door closed, door closed softly in his skull. Light bloomed rose, lime green. He was going out by a long tunnel attended by fading voices and a grainy humming sound and going faster and past gray images that clicked apart in jagged puzzle pieces. Down a corridor that opened constantly before him and dissolved after in iron dark. While the dead wheeled past in floats of sere and faded flower wreaths with little cards on which the ink of the names had run in the rain. Callahan and Hoghead leering with their crazy teeth and little plugs stoppering the holes in their skulls and Bobby Davis on a slab with his torso peppered like a pox victim and Jimmy Smith with broken neck and Aunt Beatrice composed and sedate in grayblack gingham with candlewhite hands enfolding a rose and passing in a glass casket. She cracked one powdered eye, winked hugely and was gone. Suttree said I am going out of the world, a long silent scream on rails down the dark nether slope of the hemisphere that is death's prelude. Attended by ponderous and mercurial figures composed of colored gas and wrenching themselves slowly apart, pale green cerise and bottleblue butyljawed fools that galloped softly and cried out Powww and Boyyy, exulting into the breach with boneless cartoon mouths puckered and wapsy galligaskins, lumbering eternally toward the edge of all.

A quartermoon the color of a broken file lay far down the void. Likecolored figures crossed it. He no longer cared that he was dying. He was being voided by an enormous livercolored cunt with prehensile lips that pumped softly like some levantine bivalve. Into a cold dimension without time without space and where all was motion.

A nurse took Suttree's temperature.

Thank you nurse. Yes, that's fine.

You men can come around to the other side here. Yes. Clear the door there. Thank you.

Suttree opened his eyes. Solemn young men in scrubsuits stood about his bedside watching. He fell back laughing and was gone again. Down a cycloid in a sidecar, a streamlined dreamride through the eye of a poisoned kaleidoscope, cutting a helical course and yawing up the wall at speeds that drained his face and rifling through a hot drift of ether where his ears sang. Attending members appeared over and over, face and figure, a harridan with brown flame for hair reeling past, coming again, a cyclic procession shot through with fleering gas mosaics, and again, slightly mutant, slowly altered, until phased out to abstractions of color and form that severed in elastic parallax like colorplate ghosts in a printing and parted forever. Whereon new forms arose and wheeled all and along, good carousel of crazies. Suttree observed these phenomena with mild interest from his galactic drainsuck. An enormous white doctor crossed his vision and drew away, shrinking rapidly down the small end of a spyglass. Suttree realized his eyes were open. From his incredible heights he watched these bald bipedal mutants struggling down there on the raw and livid rim of consciousness with a sad amusement. His astronomical bias placed him beyond the red shift and he wondered at the geography of these spaces or how does the world mesh with the world beyond the world? A door closed. He eddied up in a backwash, wheeled, drew breath and was gone again.

A black cyclocephalic levered him up and withdrew a bowl of his bowels' blood and carried it out covered with a linen.

A medical cart wheeled in on rubber tires, a stench of sulphur and alcohol. A needle sank in his buttock. He rolled back. He thought he'd seen treebranches in a yard beyond the window. Filled with small figures waiting for he. Wizened and crouching, barbate and cateyed dwarfs with little codpieces of scarlet puce. Who could make them out? An old man lay in the bed next, a gray man sucking air feebly through a slack gray naked mouth. Like me like me. Have they trestled up my bones on a cold stone slab and are they honing small blades against my dismembrance?

Wheezing rubberoid oafs with pendulous girths kept lumbering down a slope one by one in a drifting vapor. Everyone was going on.

When they began packing Suttree in ice he felt an enormous sadness touched with rue. He heard someone say the time but he could not understand. He drifted in a morphine sleep.

Along a wet street, a freshened wind with spits of rain in it. Raw musky smell of the walks. He was in some kind of trouble. Clockshop. A fourlegged clock in a glass bell, a pending treblehook baited with gold balls revolving slowly. Coming to rest. The clock hands too. He looked at his face in the glass. On the wall beyond other clocks are stopping. Me? The shop is closed. A thought to ask. He will not ask, however. Clocks need winding and people to wind them. Someone should be told.

Will the accused please stand.

You have heard the charges against you.

Yes.

Yessir. I come in about eight like I usually do. Seen this feller lookin in the winder and never thought nothin about it. Well, I got in there and I looked at the clock and I seen it wasnt right and I went up to set it and it wasnt runnin. It was wound but it wouldnt run. Then I begun to look around and they was all kinds of peculiarness afoot.

And could you describe these things for us briefly.

Yessir. Well, I kindly hate to ...

You may speak freely. The accused is securely fettered. Is the accused fettered? Aye, fettered.

Yessir. Well, I commenced lookin about and I seen straightaway they wasnt nary clock in the place knowed what time of day it was. And then I seen Tweetiepie's dead.

You seen Tweetiepie was dead. Were dead.

Yessir.

Let the record show that Tweetiepie is dead.

At the hand of person or persons unknown.

It was him done it settin over there feathered.

Will you identify these remains.

O lordy no I caint bear it I'm so tore up with grief.

Your bird sir?

The same.

Let the record show that the bird is the same bird.

Of course the bird is the same bird, called Suttree, lying thin, white, soft, in a tray of ice, curious tetrapod cooling.

Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away?

It was in 1884.

Did he die by natural causes?

No sir.

And what were the circumstances surrounding his death.

He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.

Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.

Yessir.

Are you aware of the penalty fixed upon conviction of lycanthropy?

Suttree moaned in the ice. It was never me, he called.

Who segued lithe as an eel from chancery to forest path, abroad by dark tarns in a deep wood where no sun shone and the reeds grew black and fish blind. Until he was stopped by a turtlepedlar bearing a sack of turtles and a rifle gun. Clad in burlap and unshaven he was and in brogans out at the toes and it cold weather.

Harkee stranger, cried the man. A turtle for your soup.

Stranger let me pass for I am weary.

Fifty cents and your choice of the best, ye'll not buy cheaper.

Outbound I am, beyond all wares.

It's hard else could bring you here.

This is no path of my choosing.

Nor mine.

Leeway and ease, the night is coming.

The turtlemonger held forth his sack. Fine turkles, fat turkles. Turkles for the stew.

The dreamer would pass but he has let fall the long dark lilac iron of his riflebarrel to bar the way. An outlaw tollsman reeking of woodsmoke and swamp rot and seeking some chiminage dearer than a path so dark could warrant. Or any path at all.

These be special turkles. Dont pass on without you've give em your consideration.

To this the traveler did consent. The vendor's face grew crafty. The wet sack collapsing aclatter on the ground. He turns back the mouth.

Those are not turtles. Oh God they're not turtles.

Suttree had half reared up in the bed, his swollen tongue gagging his cries. He fell back. Voices spoke beyond a wall. He saw with icy prescience the deathcart before the door, menials entering with a pallet to haul away his puling body and surely the stink of the unshriven dead is a dire stench rising to affront the nostrils of God. Impenitents snatched from the midst of their leprous revels, hard justice. Suttree saw the General pass atop his coalwagon, a paler horse in the traces. He lifted a hand. No fingers to the glove he wore, his cart made no sound. They receded into the vapors till there was just the orange light from the lantern where it swung by its bail from the tailboard.

Down Front Street streetlamps marked the way with measured rings of chromeblue light. The sleepfast shacks lay rotting, dusky sleepers lay within. The dooryard flowers half awake in the lamplight and the city's neon constellations emerging on the night, a pastel alpenglow in which the dust of demolition rose from the jagged ruins of the Cumberland Hotel, the Lyric Theatre.

At the door of the Huddle folk from the looms of McAnally are convened. First among these is a beardless Celt with spattled skin and rebate teeth. Three eyes in his head he has and he is covered over all with orange hair like unto a Cathay ape. At his elbow a stripling with a small and foxy face let into the lower part of a bulbous skull. His towcolored hair is cropped and stands wispily erect and seen from behind he most resembles an enormous dandelion. Suttree smiles to see such friends. The murdered are first to embrace him. Callahan's heavy arm about his shoulder, grinding the scapulae. He speaks through the flarey airholes of his boneless nose to the silverhaired and senatoriallooking barman.

Hey Hatmaker. Tell Hoghead and Donald and Byrd and Bobby and Hugh and Conrad and all of em that they aint barred.

They're dead.

Whoops of laughter among the watchers at the door.

Well you wouldnt bar a dead man would ye?