Suttree (8 page)

Specially in the guard's mess, said Callahan.

Guard's mess? Goddamn, said Suttree.

That's what they promised him, said Callahan. I guess he dont like steak and gravy. Ham. Eggs ever mornin.

Shit, said Harrogate.

It's true, said Suttree.

Hell Suttree, I dont want to be no goddamned dishwarsher. I got to get up at four oclock in the mornin.

Yeah. We sleep in here till five thirty.

You get to fuck around in the afternoon, said Callahan.

Well we dont get done till seven at night.

Well if you dont want to work in the guard's mess ask if they'll put you back on the trucks.

What if they say no?

Say yes.

What happens then? I guess they beat the shit out of ye.

No they wont. Will they, Red?

Nah. Put ye in the hole. Less you get real shitty. Then you go in the box.

Well that's where they'd put me. What is it?

Just a concrete box about four feet square.

You ever been in there Suttree?

No. You're talking to a man that has though.

What did they put you in there for Mr Callahan?

Aw, slappin a little old guard.

He slapped a vertebra loose in his neck, said Suttree.

Goddamn, said Harrogate. When was this?

When was it Red? Two years ago?

Somethin like that.

They hell fire, how long you been in here Mr. Callahan?

That was another offense, said Suttree. He's been in and out.

They dont give ye nothin to eat but bread and water, said Callahan. In the box they dont.

I believe you'll like the guard's mess better than the box.

I aint warshin no more goddamned dishes.

Well, said Suttree, that's you.

That's me, said Harrogate.

I think you've lost your rabbitassed mind, said Callahan.

Maybe. But I'll tell ye one thing. I ever get out of here I sure to shit aint comin back again.

I think I even heard Bromo say that one time.

Who's Bromo?

The old guy. He's been in and out of here since nineteen thirty-six.

He was in fore that, said Callahan. He was in the other workhouse fore this one was built.

Well, said Harrogate. That's him.

Suttree grinned. That's him, he said.

The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will. Truth of his doings came in at the door and up the stairs in the dark. Come morning the prisoners were seeing this half fool in a new light. To his elbows in dishwater and wreathed in steam he watched them file across the kitchen with their plates of biscuits and gravy, nodding, gesturing. He smiled back. They saw him again that night, lost in his stained and shapeless suit. He appeared not to have moved the day long nor the stacked pans diminished. After supper he was returned to them clutching his blanket before him.

Well, said Suttree, you back?

Yep.

What happened.

I told em I was done fuckin with em. They want a dishwarsher they can hunt somebody else cause I aint it.

What did they say.

They asked me did I want to be hallboy. Said you make a few dollars sellin coffee.

A few dollars a year.

That's just what I figured. I told em I didnt want no hallboy bullshit.

So what happened?

Nothin. They just sent me on up.

He stood there with his rat's face in a kind of smug smirk. Suttree shook his head.

Yonder he is, called Callahan.

Watermelon man.

Punkins wasnt it?

Punkins? Godamighty.

Yeah, sang out Callahan, we get out we goin to open a combination fruitstand and whorehouse.

Harrogate smiled nervously.

Callahan was sketching for them a portrait of his brothel. Melons in black negligees.

Watch out the niggers dont hear of it.

The niggers is liable to lynch ye.

Other fruits discussed. A cantaloupe turned queer. Do you buy them a drink.

Worst of it is havin gnats swarm around the head of ye dick.

Fruitflies.

Stealing watermelons eh? said Suttree.

Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast ... Bestiality?

Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch.

Oh boy, said Suttree.

In the morning he went with them on the trucks. Rising in the rank cold, faint odor of bathless sleepers all about. People stirring in the dull yellow bulblight, stumbling into clothes and shoes. The warmth of the kitchen and the smell of coffee. Cooks and potwashers aged or maimed all hovered by the stove with hot crockery mugs in their hands. Harrogate nodded to them distantly, holding his thumbs wide of his plate.

In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.

A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child's eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want. In the afternoon the riggers came and set about taking down a spiderlike centrifuge and loading it on a float. As the prisoners shuffled over the grounds filling their crokersacks with bottles and trash the workers backhanded to them packs of cigarettes. Suttree was given a pack and passed it on to an old man with a goiter who took it without a word. The old man was a smoke-hound, a drinker of shaving lotion, stove fuel, cleaning fluid. Suttree watched him shuffle on. Scowling at the world from under his wild thatched brows. His thin and rimpled mouth working very faintly as he spoke with himself. He took up each paper, each bottle, with something like solicitude, looking about as if he would discover who had put it there. Suttree never heard him speak aloud, this elder child of sorrow. He crouched on the truck bench opposite going home, jostled and nodding. He saw Suttree watching him and lowered his eyes and fell to talking to himself with a kind of secretive viciousness.

Sundays a female evangelist from Knoxville would come out to hold service in the chapel downstairs. Concrete tabernacle, small wooden podium. The prisoners who went seemed stricken nigh insensate by this word of God strained distaff they were hearing. Lounging in the wooden folding chairs, heads lolling. She seemed unaware of their presence. She told old tales from bible days that might have come down orally, so altered were they from their origins. In the afternoon visitors arrived. Family scenes, mothers and fathers, wives, anonymous kinfolk gathered at the long tables in the dining hall. They'd call the names back down the hall and up the stairs and the guard would let them out. To return laden with candy, fruit, cigarettes. No one came for Suttree. None for Harrogate. Callahan's friends from McAnally Flats brought brownlooking apples, sacks of halfspoiled oranges. Callahan would peel these and slice them into a lardpail and cover them with water, adding a little yeast from the kitchen, covering it over with a cloth and storing it under his bed. In a few days a yeasty orange wine would work up and he'd strain it off and invite friends to take a cup with him. They called it julep and it kicked and spewed in the stomach all night. Callahan would get slightly drunk and look about goodnaturedly to see was there thing or body worth destroying.

Byrd Slusser came back, clumping sullenly down the aisle with his blanket, a pick about his ankle. When the workers returned in the evening he was asleep nor did he rise for supper.

In these tranquil evening hours before lights out Harrogate would sit up in his bunk and work on his jailhouse ring. They were made from silver coins and Harrogate had gotten a guard to bore a hole in his and he sat for hours on end with a messhall spoon and beat the coin's rim. The edges of the piece would flare out and come at last to a shape much like a wedding band. Now as he sat tapping Slusser turned in his bunk, raising his leg to clear the rear tine of the pick, and sought out the source of the noise. Harrogate squatted above him in the bunk opposite, bent over his coin, the spoon tapping steadily. Much like a little old cobbler crouched there half lost in his clothes.

Hey, said Slusser.

Harrogate looked down benignly. Hidy, he said.

Knock off that fuckin tappin.

He fixed Harrogate with a fearful look and rolled back over.

Harrogate sat with the coin in one hand and the spoon in the other. He looked down at the man. He took a tentative click at the coinrim. Click. He pulled up the blanket from the edge of the bunk and folded it over his hands, muffling the work between his knees. Click click click. He looked down at the man. The man lay as before. Click click click.

Slusser rose from the bunk slowly like a man bored. He came around the end of the bunk and reached his hand up to Harrogate. Give me that, he said.

Harrogate clutched the blanket to his chest.

You little fistfucker you better hand me that goddamned spoon before I jerk you out of there.

Suttree who'd been half asleep below had a failing sensation in the pit of his stomach. He said: Leave him alone, Byrd.

The boy's tormentor lost interest in him instantly and his eyes swung toward Suttree with a schizoid's alacrity. Well now, he said. I didnt know he was yours.

He's not anybody's.

He's a punk.

I dont believe he is.

Maybe you're one yourself.

Maybe--said Suttree, on whose forehead small beads of sweat had begun to glisten--you've been pulling your pud too much.

Slusser reached and seized him by the front of his jumper and dragged him upright. Suttree gripped his arm, coming out onto the floor. Turn loose of my shirt, Byrd, he said.

Byrd twisted the cloth in his fist. There was no sound in the cell. Suttree could see himself twinned in the cool brown eyes and he didnt like what he saw. He swung at Slusser's face. Immediately a fist crashed against the side of his head. He heard the sea roll. He swung again. His shirt came loose with a loud rip but he did not hear it. He pushed himself forward, his head ducked, and caromed off the side of the bunk. When he looked up he could not see Slusser. Some prisoners were standing between him and the hall and he heard grunts and the meaty sound of fists. Callahan's face went past smiling, beyond the shoulders of the watching men.

Suttree elbowed his way through the spectators. The fight crashed into the bunks and went to the wall and back down the cell, Slusser standing flatfooted because of the pick on his ankle, cursing. Callahan smiling. He was backing Slusser down along the wall in the narrow space behind the bunks. In turning between the bunks Slusser's pick got hung. Callahan stepped forward and slammed him broadside in the head. Slusser lashed out blindly, then kicked out with the pick. It stung a starshaped pock in the concrete and Slusser's eyes rolled with pain. He was still trying to kick Callahan with the pick when the iron door swung and two guards rushed in with slapsticks.

The first person to get clobbered was a country boy from Brown's Mountain named Leithal King. He sat down in the floor holding his head with both hands. Goddamn, he said.

Callahan had leaped back, holding up his hands. He's gone crazy, he said.

Slusser turned. He looked crazy. Eyes wild, a blue swelling at his temple giving his face an asymmetrical twist. The prisoners had fallen away. Slusser turned toward the guards in a half crouch and they fell upon him with slapsticks flailing. Callahan lowered his hands and leaned forward to see better. The slapsticks were going whop whop whop, Slusser on the floor with just the pick sticking out, the guards hammering away from kneeling positions like carpenters on a roof.

When they raised him up he was limp and bleeding from the mouth and ears and his face was his face seen through bad glass. Leithal had risen from the floor and Blackburn pointed his cudgel at him and said: You. Get this man. Callahan you son of a bitch. You get his other side.

I aint done nothin, said Leithal, coming forward uncertainly.

Callahan already had Slusser's arm draped around his neck and was bearing him up. He wiped a thin trickle of blood from his own mouth with a freckled fist and turned and gave the prisoners a pinched grimace of idiotic triumph which sent such a plague of grins among them that the other guard turned at the door. What the hell are you doing, Callahan?

Just holdin this man up. Where you want him?

They followed the guards out the door and Blackburn slammed the gate and locked it and they followed them down the hall and down the stairs, Slusser's pick dragging along behind until the other guard fell back and raised it up and they went on like that, bearing Slusser on toward the box with his hindleg aloft like a wounded iceskater.