Suttree (48 page)

He crossed under the Western Avenue viaduct and went up Grand Avenue. A dog went before him at its cambered winking trot. He took off his coat and shook it and put it on again. Ionic order much in evidence in these old streets. Weathercracked columns, plaster capitals clogged shapeless with paint. A dead lot strewn with brickbats and blackened timbers. Walkways of weathered marble, of herringbone brick. The walkway at 1504 where each brick read Knoxville Brick Company, long defunct. Suttree passed under the gray magnolia tree and up the steps to the porch of the tall gray house and in.

At night he leaned in the octagonal windowbay and looked out over the switching yards and the warehouses like a child in a pulpit in the dark of an empty church. He could hear singing from the Grand Avenue Mission down the street where revelers caroled perhaps perverse and secret deities behind their plywood windowpanes.

Next evening he took the bus out Magnolia Avenue and stood before the old brick house where he'd gone to school, the untrue glass with black stars stoned through the panes and the wind cutting along in a razory whistle intermittent with the gnashing of weeds in the dark of the lot. He went in by the back door where the cafeteria once had been. The floorboards creaked underfoot, small life scrabbled away. He placed his hand on the newel post and went up the stairs.

Through old classrooms, the dusty clutter of desks. On the blackboards scrawled obscenities. A derelict school for lechers. Suttree had been sitting at his old desk for some time before he noticed the figure standing in the door.

This old bedroom in this old house where he'd been taught a sort of christian witchcraft had two doors and Suttree rose and went out the other one. He descended the front steps and went to the fireplace where he lifted back the iron mask and on one knee reached up the chimney throat and took down a small billikin carved from some soft wood and detailed with a child's crayon.

When he came past the stairway the priest was mounted on the first landing like a piece of statuary. A catatonic shaman who spoke no word at all. Suttree went out the way that he'd come in, crossing the grass toward the lights of the street. When he looked back he could see the shape of the priest in the baywindow watching like a paper priest in a pulpit or a prophet sealed in glass.

In the spring of his third year on the river there were heavy rains. It rained all through the latter part of March and into April and he had set but one line in the rising river and followed it each day with a cold loathing while the rain fell small and gray for miles upon him. It was cold and damp in the shanty and he kept a fire in the little stove through the bleak afternoons and sat at the table by the window with the lamp lit, gazing out at the swollen river coming down from the gutted upcountry and sliding past with a slaverous mutter and seethe.

Bearing along garbage and rafted trash, bottles of suncured glass wherein corollas of mauve and gold lie exploded, orangepeels ambered with age. A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily.

One day a dead baby. Bloated, pulpy rotted eyes in a bulbous skull and little rags of flesh trailing in the water like tissuepaper.

Oaring his way lightly through the rain among these curiosa he felt little more than yet another artifact leached out of the earth and washed along, draining down out of the city, that cold and grainy shape beyond the rain that no rain could make clean again. Suttree among the leavings like a mote in the floor of a beaker, come summer a bit of matter stunned and drying in the curing mud, the terra damnata of the city's dead alchemy. The fish he raised up from the flood in this season themselves looked stunned.

He stood hard into the oars to come back against the current. Past the bridge risers where small ugly rips broke on the concrete and the boatshaped upstream face rode in a bone of curling froth. Along this clay shoulder where the river gnawed and pulled with her leathery brown waters.

In the fluted gullies where the river backed or eddied spoondrift lay in a coffeecolored foam, a curd that draped the varied flotsam locked and turning there, the driftwood and bottles and floats and the white bellies of dead fish, all wheeling slowly in the river's suck and the river spooling past unpawled with a muted seething freighting seaward her silt and her chattel and her dead.

One morning while he stood on the gallery in the dim early light watching the river he saw an empty skiff go by. Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear, going downriver to founder cumbrously against a pier, list and halt, sidle and grope past with the next wall of the shack coming about and along it like plaster caryatids hung there in a stunned frieze above the licking river the figures of four women and two men, pale, rigid, deathless, wheeling slowly away below the bridge and gone in the mist.

Suttree watched the transit of this foggy apparition with no surprise. Two days later when he went downriver he saw the shantyboat pulled up under some willows on the south bank below the sand and gravel company. There was a line of wash hung out and a small skiff swung at tether below the mooring. Some coon hides were tacked flat to the wall, bleached a pale cream color. You'd have thought them to be wares but the hides were dry and all but hairless and seemed forgotten.

Suttree oared past while a group of wide faces watched from a window. When he came back in the afternoon there was a chair on the roof of the shanty and in it a man sleeping. The wash had been taken down and smoke was rising from a stovepipe elbowed through one wall. The skiff was gone.

As Suttree passed beneath the bridge he saw the skiff coming down. A thin young boy was rowing it. Suttree let one oar trail and lifted a hand in greeting. The boy nodded at him, one eye blueblack and swollen closed, and went on.

In the morning he went down early and as he passed the houseboat he saw a young girl come out along the little veranda and turn and squat, her skirts gathered in the crooks of her elbows. Through the fog Suttree was presented with a bony pointed rump. She pissed loudly into the river and rose and went in again.

He was back before noon with his catch. He came up close by the bank and swung around the houseboat. A woman was peering down at him, a stonejawed and apparently gravid slattern resting her belly on the rim of the washtub and regarding him through clotted rags of hair.

Howdy, he said.

She nodded.

I saw you all come down the other mornin. I live cross the river. He rested an oar under his elbow and pointed.

She said uh-hunh.

Suttree smiled. He said: I figured since we were kind of neighbors I ought to stop and say hidy anyway.

She reached down into the tub and brought something up from the bottom of it. He's asleep, she said.

The mister is?

Yep.

He dipped the oars to stay against the current. You've got a goodsized family, dont you?

She watched down into the tub. How her face must look back from the dead well of blue washwater, rocking and licking in what shapes. We got four, she said. Three girls. She paused and pushed her nose against her arm and snuffled. And a boy, she said.

I believe I saw him the other day.

You aint the one hit him in the eye are ye?

No mam.

Somebody hit him in the eye, she said. With a beadle of soapsoftened wood she subdued the grayish rags that stewed in the pot. She lifted something out and wrung it and laid it on a bench.

Where are you all from?

We was from up around Mascot.

I see, he said.

She glanced down at him and went back to her washing. After a minute she said: Looks like you got you some fish there.

Yes mam. You all like catfish?

We eat it some.

I've got plenty here, if you'd like one for your supper.

She looked down into the bottom of the skiff. What would you have to have for one? she said.

He began to sort among the fish. I'll just give you one, he told her.

Well. I'd rather just to pay ye.

Here. He stood in the skiff and handed up a sleek fourpounder.

She took it expertly behind the gills and looked it over. What do I owe ye? she said.

Not anything.

Well, let me pay ye.

I dont want nothin for it.

Well, she said.

I run a trotline on down a ways.

Well.

I got plenty.

Well, I better put him in here.

He sat down and leaned into the oars, watching her go in with the catfish. Before he had pulled more than a few yards upstream she was out again. He thought she had come back to her washing but she called to him across the water. Hey, she said.

Yes mam.

He's awake now if you wanted to see him.

Well, I dont want to bother him.

He said to thank ye for the catfish.

You welcome. Tell him I'll come by in a day or two.

Well, she said. Come back when you can.

The next day there was no one about but the day following the man was in his chair again reading a newspaper. Suttree hailed him as he came alongside and the man folded the paper and squinted down at him.

Hey, he said.

How you getting along?

Right tolerable. You the feller sent that catfish by the other day?

I just had more than I needed.

Well I wanted to thank ye. My old lady fried it up and we et it for supper and sure enjoyed it.

Good, said Suttree.

He turned his head and spoke down a ventilator pipe rising from the roof. Hey old woman, he said.

A muffled snarl came back.

You got any coffee fixed?

He started to turn back to Suttree and his face flickered a small annoyance. He leaned to speak into the pipe again. Fix some, he said. Then he looked down to where Suttree sat in his skiff. Come up, he said, and take some coffee with us.

I dont want to put you out.

Aint no bother. She's got some ready. Just tie up there. Watch them lines. I got me some thowlines out. Just pull in down there on the lower end. Here, thow the rope.

He had climbed down off the roof and was going along the walkway talking and waving the folded paper about. Suttree pulled the skiff in and tossed his rope.

Come on in, said the man as Suttree climbed aboard. He pushed aside a curtain of knotted twine and ushered him in with a grand expansiveness.

As Suttree entered three girls flew to the far wall of the room whinnying like goats and subsided in a simpering heap together on a bed there. Suttree nodded to the woman and she said him a quiet howdy and pointed out a chair. He looked around. There were beds all along the wall and a table in the center of the room with a faded piece of oilcloth and miscellaneous white crockery draped with breakfast remnants.

Set down, the man said. Get ye a chair. Boy wait till you hear what all happened to us.

Suttree could imagine. He glanced again toward the bed and glimpsed a flash of young thighs and dingy drawers. The three of them together were looking at a magazine and stealing crazed looks at him past the edges of it. He sat in one of the low cane chairs and tilted it backward against the bunk behind him and smiled at the man.

Do you know Doren Lockhart?

No.

Well, he's the one I beat out of forty dollars in this here tong game Sunday afternoon. He's supposed to be a big gambler up there. I knowed he was mad. I busted him plumb out. He tried to get up some money to get back in the game but time he done that me and Gene Edmonds had all the money and was gone. Old Gene was with us. Where's that coffee at, woman?

I caint perk it no faster than what it's perkin.

Anyway we'd drunk some whiskey and everthing and I went to bed. What time was it I went to bed?

He waited a minute and then went on.

About ten oclock. Course I always was a sound sleeper.

A flurry of girls' laughter rose and died.

And time I woke up it was getting on towards daylight and we was comin past Island Home. I looked out the winder and seen trees goin by and I said: Lord God, we're plumb adrift. Neighbor, we was. I come up from there and went on out and about that time they was a airplane took off over on the island and I looked downriver and seen Knoxville comin up and knowed where we was at. That son of a bitch had crep up in the night and sawed us loose.

He leaned forward with his hands on his knees and looked at Suttree with a hard eyed squint as if to see which way lay his sympathies. What about that? he said.

Well, said Suttree.

The woman set a cup of coffee in front of him. You use milk and sugar?

No mam, that's fine like it is.

Bring him some of them cakes.

Have you got any way to get back up there? Suttree asked.

Why hell no. It costes to get a tow if you can get somebody to do it even. What do you think about a son of a bitch would do that?