Suttree (17 page)

Harrogate went to the counter where a man in an eyeshade was counting money. You know Suttree? he said.

What? said the man.

Suttree.

Ask Jake. He tilted his head toward the rear of the hall and went on counting. Harrogate went wobbling down the aisle past the tables, the cues racked up on the walls like weapons in some ancient armory. Hey, said the blond youth.

What?

You want to play some nine ball?

I dont know how to play.

Rotation?

I aint never shot no pool.

The blond youth studied him a moment, chalking his cue with a little rotary motion. He bent to shoot.

You know Suttree?

He stroked. The one ball went down the table, circled the racked balls from rail to rail and returned to drop in the upper corner pocket. Harrogate waited for the shooter to answer but the shooter took the ball from the pocket and set it up and bent again with his cue and did not look up. Harrogate went on to the rear.

You Jake? he said.

Yep.

You know Suttree?

He turned and looked down at Harrogate. He spat into a steel cuspidor on the floor and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Yeah, he said. I know him.

You know where he's at?

What'll you take for them britches?

Harrogate looked down. Them's all the ones I got, he said.

Well. He aint here.

I was wonderin if you might know where he's at.

Home I reckon.

Well where's he live?

He lives down on the river. I believe in one of them houseboats.

Houseboat?

Yep. Jake bent, the change in his apronpocket swinging. He began to brush the dust toward the corner pocket. Harrogate had turned to go.

What about that shirt?

What about it?

How would you trade?

Hell fire, said Harrogate. Yourn'd do me for a overcoat.

Jake grinned. Come back, little buddy, he said.

At the bottom of Gay Street he stood leaning on the bridge rail looking down at the waterfront. There's the goddamned houseboats, he said.

Coming down the steep and angled path behind the tall frame houses he thought he heard a voice. He tilted back his head to see. Half out from a housewindow high up the laddered face of sootcaulked clapboards hung some creature. Sprawled against the hot and sunpeeled siding with arms outstretched like a broken puppet. Hah, he called down. Spawn of Cerberus, the devil's close kin.

Harrogate clutched his lower teeth.

A long finger pointed down. Child of darkness, of Clooty's brood, mind me.

Shit, said Harrogate.

The window figure had raised itself to address some other audience.

See him! Does he not offend thee? Does such iniquity not rise stinking to the very heavens?

This viperous evangelist reared up, his elbows cocked and goat's eyes smoking, and thrust a bony finger down. Die! he screamed. Perish a terrible death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye, God save your soul amen.

Shit fire, said Harrogate, scurrying down the path with one hand over his head. When he reached the street he looked back. The figure had wheeled to a new window the better to see the boy past his house and he leaned now with his face pressed to the glass, his dead jaundiced flesh splayed against the pane and one eye walled up in his head, a goggling visage misshapen with hatred. Harrogate went on. Great godamighty, he said.

He went down Front Street past a rickety store where blacks lolled and eyed his advent doubtfully and he took a dogpath across the gray fields toward the shantyboats, emerging onto the railway with his curious trousers striped with sootprints of the weeds he'd forded, the air hot and breathless with the smell of cinders and creosote and the fainter reaches of oil and fish standing off in a sort of haze along the river itself.

He climbed the mudstained cleated plank of the first houseboat and tapped at the door. A small eddy of garbage and empty bottles circled slowly in the water beneath him. When the door opened he was looking into the face of a coalcolored woman who wore an agate taw in one eyesocket. What you wants? she said.

I thought maybe old Suttree lived here but I dont reckon he does.

She didnt answer.

You dont know where he lives do ye?

Who you huntin?

Suttree.

What you wants with him.

He's a old buddy of mine.

She looked him up and down. He aint goin to mess with you, she said.

Shit, said Harrogate. We go way back, me and Suttree do.

Suttree was up at first light to run his lines. The gray shape of the city gathering out of the fog, upriver a gull, pale and alien bird in these midlands. On the bridge the lights of the cars crossed like candles in the mist.

Maggeson was already on the river when he set forth, standing like some latterday Charon skulling through the fog. With a long pole he hooked condoms aboard and into a pail of soapy water. Suttree paused to watch him but the old man drifted past without looking up, standing with prurient vigilance, in the cropped shore currents watchful and silent.

Suttree rowed in a sunless underregion of swirling mists, through bowls of cold and seething smoke. The bridgepier loomed and faded. Downriver a dredger. Two men at the rail smoking, stitched out of the fog and gone again, their voices faint above the puckered chug of the engine. The red of the wheelhouse light went watery pale and faded out. He oared slowly, waiting for the fog to lift.

When he ran his lines some of the fish were dead. He cut the droppers and watched them slide and sink. The rising sun dried and warmed him.

He was back by midmorning and sat on the rail and cleaned his catch. Ab's cat came and perched like an owl and watched him. He handed it a fish head and it bared a razorous yawn of teeth and took the head delicately and went back along the rail. Suttree skinned two catfish and wrapped them in newsprint and washed his knife and his hands in the river and rose.

Going up the river path he passed two boys fishing.

Hey boys, he said.

They turned huge eyes up at him.

Doin any good?

Naw.

Their bobbers lay quietly in the scum. Ringent pools of gas kept erupting in oily eyes on the surface. Mauves and yellows from the spectrum guttered and slewed in the dead current.

You boys like to fish?

We dont gots to.

Good for you, said Suttree.

At Ab's place he handed her the fish at the door and she motioned him past into the room. A thick funk of stale beer and smoke. She folded back the paper, old news repeated mirrorwise on the pale ribbed flesh. She poked a black finger in the meat.

Where's the old man? said Suttree.

He's in there. Go on.

In the far corner sat an enormous figure obscured in the gloom.

Come in Youngblood.

Hey.

Set down. Bring the man a beer old woman.

I dont want anything.

Bring him a Redtop.

She shuffled past in her ruptured mules through a curtain to the rear. A squalid sunlight fell briefly. Everywhere from cracks or knotholes small hieroglyphs of light lay about in the cabin, on table and floor and across the cardboard beer signs.

When she came back she leaned across Suttree and clicked a wet bottle down on the little stone table. He nodded to her and raised it and drank. The black man now coalesced out of the semidark seemed to fill half the room. Where you from in the world, Youngblood, he said.

Right here. Knoxville.

Knoxville, he said. Old Knoxville town.

She was clattering about in the back room. After a while she came from behind the curtain again and sat in her chair with her feet up. She was instantly asleep, the blind eye half open like a drowsing cat's, her mouth agape. Toes peered from the mules like little clusters of dark mice. On her broad face two intersecting circles, fairy ring or hagstrack, the crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand on some stone age matriarch. Annular treponema. Read here why he falls in the streets. Another Jena, another time.

Suttree sat in the hot little room with the tombstone tables and sipped his beer. Water dripped constantly from the bottle. In the corner the poker table had been swept and the lamp filled. Flies walked about everywhere.

Get you another beer, Youngblood.

Suttree tilted the bottle and drained it. I got to go, he said.

The black wiped his eyes with one huge hand. Stories of the days and nights writ there, the scars, the teeth, the ear betruncheoned in some old fray that clung in a toadlike node to the side of his shaven head. You come back, he said.

Early afternoon in the city with his fish sold he ate the beef stew at Granny and Hazel's. He walked in the streets, a lonely figure. On Jackson Avenue he saw Maggeson in a dingy white suit and straw boater. The rubber baron, small eyes distorted behind the dished glass lenses.

Someone called to him, he turned. Hoghead Henry's small and jaunty shape was coming from an alleyway heralded by pigeons flapping upward into the sad air with right alarm, immune to Hoghead's huckleberry insouciance. He swept his rumpled linen beneath the band of his trousers with a slice of his flattened hand and gave Suttree a crooked grin. When did you get out?

Tuesday. Brother and Junior got out with me.

Hoghead grinned. They started up the street. Old Junior, the cops brought him in one night and turned him over to Mrs Long, he was about three fourths drunk and been in some kind of trouble, I forget, and Mrs Long told the cops, said: I dont know what's wrong with him. My oldest boy Jimmy never causes me the least trouble. Next night here they come with Jim.

Suttree smiled. I hear that old woman shot at you the other night.

Old crazy nigger woman. She shot about four holes in the wall. Shot a picture down. I ducked behind the sofa and she shot a hole in that and John Clancy said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just a shittin and a gettin it. He was layin in the floor and he said it run right over the top of him.

What did you do down there anyway?

Aw, you dont have to do nothin to stir up a bunch of old crazy niggers.

You know what she called you?

What'd she call me?

Called you a white pointedheaded motherfucker.

Hoghead grinned. They had me in the paper one time, they're always callin anybody towheaded that's got lightcolored hair, they had me in there and I'd said somethin smart to this juvenile judge and they put: said the twoheaded youth.

Suttree grinned. Where you going?

Just up here with some punchboards. Come go with me.

I pass.

Well, I got to get on. Stay out of the jailhouse, you hear?

I hear, said Suttree.

When he crossed the porch of Howard Clevenger's store on Front Street there was an old woman rummaging through a basket of kale there as if she had lost something in it. Oceanfrog Frazer was standing at the screendoor. He patted Suttree on the ribs. What's shakin, baby.

Hey, said Suttree.

They pushed through the door together. Atop the drink cooler squatted a black and ageless androgyne in fool's silks. A purple shirt with bloused sleeves, striped fuchsia trousers and matching homedyed tennis shoes. A gold leather motorcycle belt about a vespine waist. A hat from the hand of a coked milliner. Hi sweetie, he said.

Hello John.

Trippin Through The Dew, said Oceanfrog.

Hey baby.

Hey Frog, called a black from the rear of the store.

What you want?

Come here baby. I got to talk to you.

I aint got time to mess with you.

Suttree poked among the loaves of bread.

Oceanfrog lifted a carton of milk from the cooler and opened it and drank.

Hey Gatemouth.

Yeah baby.

You hear about B L's old lady catchin him?

No man, what happened?

She come in over there Sunday caught him in bed with this old gal and started warpin him in the head with a shoe. This old gal raised straight up in the bed buck naked and hollered at her, said: Lay it to him honey, said: I was married to a son of a bitch just like him.

A high whinny escaped the painted gaud perched at Oceanfrog's elbow. The mascaraed eyes sidled, the black and languid hands made draping motions about the elbows. Oceanfrog you is a mess, she said.

Old B L's crazy, said Gatemouth.

Suttree smiled among the rusting canisters of food at the back wall. He passed behind the hoglike bulk of Gatemouth in his chair. Hey baby, said Gatemouth. What's the haps?

Hey, said Suttree, moving toward the meatcase.

A discussion on the mating habits of possums ensued. A young black named Jabbo entered the store.