Suttree (58 page)

I'm a fisherman.

Into it commercially, is that it?

Yessir.

Now that is interesting. Yes indeed. I'd say a lad with your head on his shoulders should be able to put a wrinkle into it that would make it pay.

It does all right, said Suttree. He was swinging subtly about to recover the wind of the reeking figure he confronted. Studying the patterns of gravy and food on the old lawyer's shirt and tie, his belt of balingtwine. Which had broken one day in the line at the S&W cafeteria leaving him standing there with his tray in his hands, his feet hobbled in his old trousers, his thin old man's shanks the same dirty white as his shirt and as wrinkled.

Always had a warm heart for the outdoor life myself, he said. All sedentaries I suppose. Often wished I'd gone to sea. Have a brother in the navy, lives in the Philippines. He scratched at his unshaven cheek and looked up at Suttree. You stick to your guns, he said. Follow the trade that you favor and you'll have no regrets in your old age.

Suttree wondered what regrets the old lawyer had but he didnt ask.

He took a turn down through the trainyard. He'd a mind to see the station with the fireplaces and the inscriptions from Burns on the mantels, remembering his grandfather stepping down to the platform among the wheeltrucks and the steam and the smiling black porter with the red cap. The old man's cheeks new shaven and the fine red veins like the lines in banknote paper. His hat. His stogie. But when Suttree reached the station it was closed, had long been so. In the fine waiting rooms boxes and cartons piled, great crates in storage. A few abandoned coaches and one pullman stood on a siding and old handbills hung bleached and all but wordless on the notice board. The yard beyond was rafted up with reefers and flatcars, tared hoppers, the romantic stencils broken over the slatted sides of cattlecars, Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, Baltimore and Ohio, the Route of the Chiefs. He turned on down the tracks toward McAnally.

Where he spoke one day with an old man in a rocking chair. Old man watching out over Grand Avenue from his collapsing porch, taking the sun, a small dog in his lap. Save that he was thin and the dog fat they looked a lot alike. The dog was a drab brown the color of shit and it seemed to have been inflated with a tirepump. Its eyes bulged and it bared its teeth. The old man held the dog and rocked. He claimed that it had saved him from terminal asthma. Suttree regarded the bloated dog doubtfully.

I wouldnt take a war pension for this dog, said the old man.

The dog looked sideways across its shoulder and snarled at Suttree.

When I die he's goin to come to sleep with me. We're to be buried together. It's done arranged.

It is.

I want him just like this. The old man held the dog up in his arms.

What if the dog dies first?

What?

I said what if the dog dies first?

The old man regarded him warily.

I mean if the dog dies first are they going to put you to sleep?

Why hell no that's crazy.

I guess maybe you could just have him frozen. Keep him till the time came.

The old man hugged the crazy looking thing to him. Of course I could, he said.

The blind man at Suttree's elbow in the seeping dusk kept close with his mincing blind man's walk and his hands wove images in the air to prove the things he said. They went down by steep little streets and took a trodden path through the winter fields. The blind man to read his way through the thin soles of his old man's kidskin boots, stepping like a heron among the gravelstrewn ties and down the slight embankment.

Inside Jones's shanty he nodded and smiled in the soft archaic lamplight and the smoke. A scene from some old riverfront doggery where cutthroats' eyes swang in the murk as if in appeal from their own depravity. Richard tottering woodenly in these strange surroundings, his hands outheld. Doll closed the door behind them and looked at the blind man and shuffled away. Suttree showed him to a chair and went to the cooler and raised the lid and dredged up two bottles from the water and opened them and went back to the table. The players' eyes flicked, some nodded gravely. Oceanfrog dealt the last card and tightened the deck in his hand and laid it on the table and looked his way and winked. In the yellow pool of light from the lamp overhead the crumpled bills fell like leaves.

When the bottles clicked on the stained stone Richard looked up and smiled and reached and seized his beer with great accuracy. Suttree eased himself into the folding wooden chair, the varnish peened up in little black blisters along the back where it had been salvaged from a riverside revival tent burnt years ago. The sun lay on the water behind them and thin blades of light played through onto the far wall, dicing the smoke, casting the poker table behind frail and luminous bars. Richard felt the shack tilt on the river and said so. He tested the air with his nose like a rabbit. Smokehouse spoke his name passing to the rear with empty bottles clutched in his hands and Richard smiled and raised his bottle and drank.

See if you can cipher the names under the table, Richard.

Richard looked at Suttree or almost at him. Names? he said.

Under the table. He tapped with his knuckle.

Richard ran a yellow hand beneath the marble slab, up among the twobyfours in which it sat. It's a gravestone, he said.

What does it say?

Richard smiled nervously, the paleblue clams in his eyesockets shifting under the useless lids, his ears tuned like a fox's to the world as he hears it. He slid his palm beneath the table and fished a cigarette from his shirtpocket with the other hand. Eighteen and forty-eight, he said. Nineteen ought seven.

Two of the cardplayers raised their hooded eyes to regard the blind man but he minded them not. Williams, he said.

It doesnt say who Williams?

No Sut, it dont.

Is that all it says?

Richard felt along the underside of the table. That's all, he said. He lit his cigarette and plumed two soundless streams of smoke from his nostrils.

Let's move to another table.

They rose and fumbled their way to the next table and sat again, Suttree steering him by the elbow through the chairs.

Who are they? said Richard.

They're just stones. They came off an island down the river before it was flooded.

Richard shook his head. Thisn dont say who.

It must say something.

He read the stone again, he shook his head. It's wore, he said. Near naked. His face wrinkled.

What is it?

Danged old chewin gum.

Let's try another one.

We ought not to be doin this. Drinkin off folks's gravestones.

Why not?

I dont know.

Would you care?

If it was some of my kin I would.

What if it was you?

I aint dead.

If you were dead. And me and Callahan drank off it. Your stone.

I dont know. I'd be dead. I'd drink off Billy Ray's.

I would too, said Suttree.

I'd drink off of it in a minute.

Suttree grinned.

Course maybe if you was dead you'd think different. I mean, if you're dead and all why I expect you got to be pretty religious.

We'd drink you a toast. Have a good time.

Richard smiled wanly. Well, he said. I like a good time well as the next feller.

I'll get us another beer.

But Richard was fumbling in his pockets and he stopped Suttree with his hand. Let me get em Bud, he said. What do they get for a beer down here?

Thirty-five.

Richard frowned. He's high, aint he? I reckon it's on account of the gamblin.

He doesnt have a license.

For gamblin?

For anything. For living.

I never see him uptown he dont say hidy, said Richard. They dont make em no whiter.

He doled the change into Suttree's palm and Suttree went to the box and got two more beers and came back to a new table. He took the blind man by the hand and led him to it. Doll raised her one eye from where she slept in her shapeless chair, her heavy arms folded across her bosom. One of the poker players jacked his chair back and reached for the stove door and opened it and looked in and she rose heavily and made her way across the floor to the coalscuttle. When she came back from tending the stove she wiped the tables that they'd read and eyed them curiously. Richard had his eyes closed and the smoke from his cigarette rose alongside his thin nose. Something had passed out on the river and the shanty lifted and settled in the swells. Richard suddenly placed his hands flat on the table. Then he lifted them off again as if it were hot. He took up his beer in both hands and held it like that. I aint readin no more, he said.

What is it? said Suttree.

The blind man sucked on his cigarette and shook his head. The thin gray webs of flesh in his neck trembled.

What is it? said Suttree.

There was an oil lamp sconced in the wall above the table and the blind man beneath it sat clearly lit. Suttree looked at his dead eyes but there was no way of seeing in. What is it? he said again.

You knowed what it was, didnt ye?

No. I dont know.

You aint done it for meanness?

I swear I dont know what it says. He was running his own hand under the table but he could not read the stone.

Will you keep it to yourself? said Richard.

Yes. What does it say?

Tween you and me?

Yes.

It says William Callahan.

He woke early with the cold and sat in his cot crosslegged swaddled up in his blanket and looking out the small window. The sun kindled the haze into a salmoncolored drop against which the brittle trees stood like burnt lace. Charred looking sparrows japed and chittered on the rail. Suttree parted back the sackcloth curtains to better see downriver and the birds flew. He was still sitting there when someone came aboard and knocked at his door. He leaned and reached his shirt up from the floor. The knocking came again, someone called his name softly as if he ailed.

When he went to the door Reese was standing there. He carried a new cap in his hands and smiled thinly.

Come in, said Suttree.

I aint got but a minute. I come to give ye your shares.

Come in.

He stood in the little room holding his cap, one foot wide to shore himself against the tilted floor. Suttree sought his shoes under the bed and stepped into them sockless and turned and sat on the couch. Sit down, Reese, he said. Sit down.

Reese sat at the little table and took his pocketbook from the bib of his overalls and opened it. He lifted out a sheaf of bills tied with a dirty string and laid them on the table and folded the pocketbook and put it away again.

What's that? said Suttree.

That's your shares. We never got sold till last week. We had a awful lot of trouble.

I dont want it, said Suttree. Put it back in your pocket.

Reese set his lips and shook his head. It's yourn, he said.

Well let me give it to you.

No.

Suttree looked at the money and shook his head. Where are you living now? he said.

We're back up in Jefferson County. Willard run off.

How are you?

I'm okay. I never did understand that boy. I never would just get to where I could talk to him but what he'd up and do some hatefulness and it not a bit of use in the world in it.

Suttree ran his hand through his hair. The old man seemed small and older yet sitting there.

I never did blame ye for leavin out. Poor luck as we had I reckon ye'd of done better never to of took up with us to start. Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck?

Suttree said he had. He said that things would get better.

The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

In the afternoon he went uptown. He bought a thick army sweater at Bower's and he paid Stud twenty dollars on his lunch tab and he went to Regas and ate a steak dinner. When he got home he still had forty dollars left. As he let himself in at his door he thought he heard his name called somewhere like those sourceless voices that address our dreams. He went in and shut the door and lit the lamp and sat on the cot. As he was taking off his shoes he heard it again. Thin and far, somewhere in the night. He sat with a shoe in one hand listening.

He put his shoe back on and went out. Blind Richard was hailing him from the bridge.

What is it? the fisherman called.

The blind man on the bridge raised his thin arm into the lamplight like a supplicant to the chalice of God's bright mercies. A ghost of a voice fell.

Suttree couldnt hear what it said but he cupped his hand to his mouth. No, he called.