Suttree (30 page)

The fight washed up against the ladies' room wall and the structure groaned and slewed. Suttree saw a head snap back and cave a cracked dish shape in the wallboard. Somebody had an old boy in the corner with handkerchiefs trying to stop his ear from bleeding and the old boy was ready to whip his nurse to get back into it. Slapping away the hand attending him, his ear hanging half off. The bouncer was working his way like a reaper through the crowd by the wall, flattening people with a slapstick. When he came upon McCulley, McCulley hit him solidly in the jaw. The bouncer reeled back and shook his head and came on again and swung with the slapstick. It made an ugly sound on the side of McCulley's head. McCulley swung again and caught the bouncer in the face. Blood flew. The bouncer fell back and recovered. Both were preparing to swing together when McCulley's knees gave way and he knelt in the glass and the blood. The bouncer moved on, making his way toward Callahan. Behind him came a man lugging a floorbuffer.

A heavy machine, he could just by main strength raise it. When he hit the bouncer with it the bouncer disappeared.

Suttree tried to work his way toward the wall but a heavy arm came athwart his eyes. He spun. Surrounded now by strangers. The man with the floorbuffer washed up nearby. The buffer rose trembling above the crowd. It came down on no head but Suttree's.

He felt the vertebrae in his neck crack. The room and all in it turned white as noon. His eyes rolled up in his head and his bowels gave way. He distinctly heard his mother say his name.

He was standing with his knees locked and his hands dangling and the blood pouring down into his eyes. He could not see. He said: Do not go down.

He swayed. He took a small step, stiffly fending. What waited was not the black of nothing but a foul hag with naked gums smiling and there was no madonna of desire or mother of eternal attendance beyond the dark rain with lamps against the night, the softly cloven powdered breasts and the fragile claviclebones alabastrine above the rich velvet of her gown. The old crone swayed as if to mock him. What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?

He dropped like a zombie among the din and the flailing, his face drained, his eyes platelike with the enormity of the pain behind them. Someone stepped on his hand as he was crawling across the floor. He tried to rise again but the room had composed itself into a tunnel down which he kept falling. He did not know what had happened to him and his eyes kept filling up with blood. He thought he'd been shot and he kept telling himself that the damage could be repaired if nothing else befell him dear God to be out of this place forever.

He pulled himself up a swaying wall and tried to see. All that frantic bedlam before him seemed to have slowed and each whirling face swam off in perfect parallax like warriors and their mentors twinned, a roomful of hostile and manic Siamese. Ahhh, said Suttree. Making his way toward the door he realized with a faint surge of that fairyland feeling from childhood wonders that the face he passed wide eyed by the side of an upturned table was a dead man. Someone going with him saw him see. That's fucking awful, he said. Suttree was bleeding from the ears and couldnt hear well but he thought so too. They stumbled on like the damned in off the plains of Gomorrah. Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle.

He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing. He tried to move but the jagged ends of bone in his chest were like scissors. His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. He raised his eyes and felt the dried blood crack across his forehead. Lights kept rising one by one and after a while he realized that they were bulbs in a corridor ceiling and that the periodic squeaking sound was a caster on the cart that was wheeling him. The emergency room was filled with people bleeding. Grumous battlers with misshapen heads. All watched over by hordes of police. They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.

Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who'd spoke of disorders of the soul and news of night. When you asked for the shop of the heart's apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon's keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb hobbled after.

The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a nightbeast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorous on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curbside cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.

Suttree heard people discussing his skull. Could he but see himself. His head half shaved and gray and numb with novocaine. An old doctor with a mosquitoclamp and a needle stitched his scalp. Suttree still in his street clothes, one sleeve cut away, stained and stinking with blood and beer and shit. A nurse sat with his elbow in her lap, picking out pieces of glass with a pair of forceps and placing them in a steel tray.

He woke in a small white room. Late evening. Bird shadows oblique upon the wall. He raised his head and looked about. Two pigeons on the windowsill ruffled their feathers. A westerly view, cold winter sunlight. Constant beyond the sounds of traffic in the streets there boomed a slow roll of surf. His head was swathed in bandages and his hand hurt. He held it up. One finger wrapped and resting in an aluminum holder. His hand separated into two hands side by side both injured. He blinked his eyes and they rejoined. Callahan, you bastard, he said. He lay back and slept.

When he woke again he saw that he was not in a room but in a ward. The screen had been pushed away from his bed and he could see down a long hall many men in beds like his. Night time, yellow bulbs burning in the ceiling. A nurse was going down the ward with a cart collecting the dinner trays. He had to keep blinking his eyes to keep things ordered and discrete. He seemed to be in an old folks' home. Iron beds filled with gray octogenarians propped upright in nightshirts, humped and hawking and leering beadily at one another like paranoids.

Suttree tried to raise himself onto one elbow but his chest hurt. He was wrapped in tape to his armpits and he had an image of burial windings here in this room among the dying. He tried to focus his eyes. To see one person in the ward who looked as if he might have more than days to live. A cold sweat broke out upon him. He felt his head. Terminal brain damage under the towels? He tried to recite the multiplication tables and this filled him with sexual memories and caused him to lie back smiling. He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back.

In the morning the old men were upright and drooling with the first light. Two nurses came down the ward with breakfast trays. The one named Miss Aldrich bent above him smiling and went away again. An enameled namepin. Her white starched frock crackled like sheetiron and her crepesoled shoes went silently as mice.

Suttree had been taken from his bloodied clothes and bathed and laid out in clean coarse linen. Miss Aldrich helped him down the long corridor, the old men watching furiously from their rows of beds on either side. Her soft breast against his elbow, crossing from band to latticed band of morning sunlight where it fell through the barred windows. He stood in a concrete room painted white and pissed painfully a few drops into an oldfashioned urinal and came out again. She was waiting for him. Did you do your business? she said, smiling.

Just a little.

Number one or number two?

Suttree couldnt remember what the numbers corresponded to. Wee wee, he said. He felt completely stupid.

She took his elbow to help him back to his bed.

I can make it all right, he said.

I know.

Oh.

Arent you ashamed?

Of what?

Getting into such a terrible fight. You havent seen yourself in a mirror, have you?

Suttree didnt answer. What's wrong with my head? he said.

You broke it.

Broke it?

Yes.

Is it bad?

No. Well, it's not good. It is fractured.

I keep seeing double.

It'll go away. Here.

Suttree tried to get into the bed painlessly. Shit, he said. He sat with care. How many ribs?

Three.

Who else is here?

You mean your little friends?

Yes.

None. Most of them were treated and taken to jail. A few escaped I think. Are you ready for some breakfast?

I guess so. Am I?

Why not.

She brought him a tray with a bowl of oatmeal and milk and a cup of watered coffee.

Is that it? he said.

That's it.

She fluffed his pillows, helped him to sit. Soap scent of her hair and her breast brushing across his eye.

I suppose this is Knoxville General? he said, sniffing the porridge.

She smiled. So you dont even know where you are.

Isnt it?

What makes you think you're in Knoxville?

Come on.

Yes. At St Mary's you get poached eggs. But you have to say your prayers first.

She put her hand to her mouth. Oh, she said. You're not a Catholic are you?

I've been defrocked. This tastes like wet mattress stuffing.

But do you like it?

Just so so. Listen, what is this ward? It looks like where they lock up dangerous incurables.

It's just a ward. Most of our patients are older people.

Older? There's no one in here under ninety. What do they do, unload them here to die?

Yes.

I see.

They're all indigents. Some of them they bring down here from the nursing home when they get too sick. It's an experience.

I'll bet.

You created quite a sensation.

What, among the inmates?

No, silly. Among the nurses.

She brought him the morning paper but he couldnt focus on the print. She cranked up the old metal bed, moving about, flirting with him and smelling good. She told him of her life in the nurses' home, her wide face full of humor. She roomed in the old morgue along with the other nurses in training. Their beds all leveled under two legs with bricks where the concrete floor sloped toward the drain. At supper she brought her girlfriend, a short heavyset nurse, with instructions to take care of him.

Just remember I saw him first, she said. She winked at Suttree. I'll see you tomorrow.

But he was afoot and gone with fall of dark. Hobbling down the corridor in his nightshirt past the snoring elders and through the door at the end. A little vestibule. Through the wired glass he could see out into the lobby where the night nurse sat at her desk. Suttree turned and went back through the ward to the doors at the other end. A further corridor, dimly lit. He came upon a washroom and a closet where white orderly coats and jackets hung from pegs above the mopbuckets and jugs of chemicals. He dressed quickly in the first clothes to hand and he looked at himself in the glass. A wounded peon.

He found a door that opened onto the main hall of the hospital and he walked toward the light at the entrance and out into the night. He went down the street toward Central Avenue and crossed to the Corner Grill. His toes were so folded in the old black shoes he'd found that he could hardly walk.

Strange apparition to enter the dim of the little tavern on a quiet Saturday night. Big Frig rose to help him to a booth with elaborate solicitousness and he and the brothers Clancy reckoned him sole survivor of a madhouse rising, an icecream rebellion, before leaning to hear of his trials.