Suttree (60 page)

Suttree pushed the door shut. He held his hand to the ventilator overhead. A faint breath there. He lit his little kerosene stove and took his kettle out to the sink. Nelson was loading scoops of coal through the iron door into the furnace where a sulphurous smoke swirled. He turned and offered up his ape's grimace all teeth and eyes wedged shut and Suttree nodded at him and turned the tap. The water coughed and spattered clots of iron scale into the sink and finally cleared to a silty dun color not unlike the river's and Suttree filled his kettle and clopped in sockless shoes back across the gritty concrete floor to his room again.

The only piece of furniture other than the cot was a small table with threadspool pulls to the one drawer. It was painted blue and in the drawer lay last year's someday news already foxed and yellow. A few silverfish scuttled away. Suttree had set his little burner on the table and he sat on the bed and read the lacy scrap of newsprint while the water boiled. It was dark enough to want a light of some kind but there was no bulb in the ceiling. He heard the fireman clank shut the door and leave and he poured the coffee and stirred in milk from a can and sipped and blew and read of wildness and violence across the cup's rim. As it was then, is now and ever shall. He was dressed and out by eleven oclock feeling very much a resident of the city, which made him smile to himself as might Harrogate. On whom his thoughts ran this brisk November morn.

He carried off scouring powder and soap and brushes from the men's rooms of restaurants. A broom and a mop from a backporch. Get the bucket too. He swept and scrubbed and in the afternoon went into town and bought cheap muslin for curtains and a wall lamp from the dimestore.

That evening he carried up everything from the shanty, toting his boxes aboard the Euclid Avenue bus and kicking them into the empty space behind the driver's seat while he rummaged his pockets for a dime. And went a figure among the figures through the chill and broken lamplight over the old streets, down Ailor Avenue to the Live and Let Live Grocery where he bought eggs and sausage and bread for a latenight breakfast.

Anybody seeing him all that forewinter long going about the sadder verges of the city might have rightly wondered what his trade was, this refugee reprieved from the river and its fishes. Haunting the streets in a castoff peacoat. Among old men in cubbyhole lunchrooms where life's vagaries were discussed, where things would never be as they had been. In Market Street the flowers were gone and the bells chimed cold and lonely and the old vendors nodded and agreed that joy seemed gone from these days none knew where. In their faces signature of the soul's remoteness. Suttree felt their looming doom, the humming in the wires, no news is good.

Old friends in the street that he met, some just from jail, some taken to trades. Earl Solomon studying to be a steamfitter so he said. They look through his books and manuals there in the cold wind and Earl seems uncertain, smiling sadly at it all.

He'd sit on the front bench at Comer's and watch through the window the commerce in the street below, the couples moving toward the boxoffice of the theatre in the rainy evening, the lights of the marquee slurred and burning in the wet street.

There was a letter for him, the stamp canceled by a vicious slash of dried birdlime. He read a few lines backward candled against the light at the window and wadded it and put it in the trash.

One day coming up Market he caught sight of a crowd among which the maddest man of God yet seen had appeared electrically out of the carbonic fog. He was some two thirds of a man tall and heavily set and red all over, this preacher. He had red curly hair on the back of his balding and boiled looking head and his skin was pale red and splotched with huge bloodcolored freckles and he was delivering the word in such fashion as even the oldest codgers on this street long jaded to the crop with crazed gospelarity could scarcely credit. Hucksters left their carts and vans untended. The pencil vendor crouched in his corner came crawling and growling through the crowd. The red reverend had hardly begun. He tore out of his coat and rolled his sleeves.

This aint goin to get it, he said. No. He made a sweeping gesture down Market and toward the markethouse. No. This just aint goin to get it. Friends, this aint where it's at.

The watertruck had passed on Union and a creek came curling down the gutter black and choked with refuse. The preacher scooped a bobbing turnip from the flood and held it aloft. He provideth, he said. He knelt, oblivious to all, offering up the turnip, the water boiling about his thighs and sucking down the storm sewer. He washed the turnip like a raccoon and took a great bite. Here's where it's at, he said, spewing chewed turnip. On your knees in the streets. That's where it's at.

An old man mad as he knelt beside. The preacher passed him the turnip. He give out the loaves and the fishes, he howled. Therefore ast not what shall I put on.

The turnip was going from hand to hand in search of communicants. The old man had crawled into the flooded gutter among the sewage and was demanding baptism. But the preacher had risen with his red hands joined in a demented mudra above his glowing skull and begun a dance of exorcism. In the marketplace, he screamed. But not this buyin and sellin. He had begun to rotate with arms outspread and his small feet mincing like a revolving parody of the crucifixion. His eyes had swiveled back in his head and his lips worked feverishly. He went faster. The old man had arisen dripping and he tried to emulate this new and rufous prophet but he tilted and fell and the preacher had begun to rotate with such speed that the crowd dropped back and some just stayed their hands from clapping.

Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from the cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.

In the evening he would cross Vine Avenue hill on his way homeward, past the old school he'd attended in his infancy, morguelike with its archives of bitterness, past the church with her pawnshop globes of milkglass lightly decked each with a doily of coalsoot and past old brick apartments where in upper windowcorners a white hand might wipe the glass and glazed in the sash a painted face appear, some wizened whoreclown, will you come up, do you dare? He never. Maybe once. Crossing the Western Avenue viaduct he'd stop and lean upon the concrete balustrade where polished riverstones lay in the cracks and gaze down at the broad sprawl of tracks in the yard and the tarred roofs of railcars, a lonely figure framed against the gray pales of the city's edges where the smokestacks reared against the squalid winter sky like gothic organpipes and black and tuneless flags of soot stood down the wind.

One night he came upon a house aflame and took a seat beyond harm's way to watch. People coming to the front door like ants out of a burning log. Carrying their effects. One struggled with an old man in a nightcap who seemed bent upon incineration, tottering about and mouthing gummed curses backward at the fates so long familiar.

Lights appeared up and down the street. Neighbors in their flannel robes came out to watch. An upper window sagged and buckled and collapsed. Sheets of flame ran up the clapboards and they blistered and curled in the heat. A hot blue light crackled through the orange smoke.

How'd it start?

Suttree looked down. A little man was leaning to him with the question.

I dont know, said Suttree. How all things start.

He rose and went on.

A police cruiser must ask his name, where is he going. Suttree proper and wellspoke, bridling the malice in his heart. Pass on. Down alleyways where cats couple, rows of ashcans and dark low doors. This pane of dusty light.

Suttree stood in a kitchen among fugitives and mistried felons. A stout woman doled beers from a cooler and made change out of an apron pocket in which hung the shape of a small automatic pistol An emaciated whore eyed him as he entered, a stringy sloe-eyed cunt with false teeth and a razorous pelvis beneath the thin dress she wore. Wallace Humphrey stood in one corner with his eyes half closed and his hands dangling. In his oldfashioned suit he looked like one of those western badmen photographed hanging from barndoors or propped up in shopwindows shot full of holes.

Let me have a Redtop, Suttree said.

She handed him a bottle and held out her wet red hand. Suttree placed a halfdollar in it and got his change and went past the whore toward the living room.

Hey sweetie, she said.

Hey, said Suttree.

Through the smoke he saw friends among the drinkers and he made his way toward them.

Here's old Suttree, called Hoghead.

Welcome to the Buffalo Room, said Bucket.

Where's old J-Bone, Sut?

He's still up in Cleveland.

When's he comin back?

I dont know. I had a letter from him said he was working as an assembler. He said every morning he assembles his ass in a corner and watches the proceedings for eight hours.

Old Richard Harper is back from Chicago, him and Junior. Harper was supposed to get em staked up there and Junior said he like to got em burned at the stake.

Junior said the windy city wasnt ready for Harper. He said they had enough wind as it was.

Get ye a drink here, Sut.

Bucket pulled a pint bottle from behind him and handed it to Suttree and he unscrewed the cap and drank.

Bobbyjohn's old crazy uncle was in here a while ago, Bud, he was goin on about haulin whiskey back in the prohibition. Said they come into Knoxville early one mornin with a load, wasnt daylight yet. Old Tip said he was asleep in the front seat and they was a car backfired and he raised up and shot a woman waitin on the bus. Said he seen her feet stickin out of a hedge.

Suttree grinned and drank from his beer. Figures slouched through the smoke like ghosts and there was about the room that eerie reverence felt in places where great crimes have been done. He stayed till the last cup was drained. Leaning in a doorway in the small hours watching a fat whore humping on a bed that bore the black shoetracks of many a traveler. Drifting with the last customers down the alley toward the street. Giggles and catcalls. The plastic purses of the whores cutting garish curves in the milkblue light of the streetlamps. Plates of white ice broken in the chuckholes. A small coalcolored owl trilled from a lightpole and Suttree looked and saw him fluff against the sky. He called again, called softly. Suttree sat on an old stone curb with his back to the pole, a silent dweller in a singing wood. Newsboys were putting forth with wagons through the murk, old feral fathers wading in the surf of older dawns to launch their tarred boats on some dark and ropy shoal.

An empty beercan rolled in a light tin clank down the street before the dawn wind. Wind cold in his nostrils. He watched the graying in the east, a soiled aurora. The city's fabled salients rising through the mist.

Sunday morning Suttree shuffled down a dim stairwell in the clothes in which he'd slept. Across the street the markethouse stood gaunt and dark in the easy rain. Hunched in front of the hotel in an uncanny silence he sucked his coated teeth. Old awnings covered the barren truckbeds and barrows. You could hear the small heeltaps of an idle whore receding in the streets. Claustral landscape of building faces even to the sky. The heelclicks sing with a stinging sound. Suttree looked upward. The baroque hotel front flaking a peagreen paint. A church clock tolling. Pigeons reel and flap in the bellpeal. In the gutted rooms sad quaking sots are waking to the problem of the Sunday morning drink.

It seemed to rain all that winter. The few snowfalls turned soon to a gray slush, but the brief white quietude among the Christmas buntings and softlit shopwindows seemed a childhood dream of the season and the snow in its soft falling sifting down evoked in the city a surcease nigh to silence. Silent the few strays that entered the Huddle dusting their shoulders and brushing from their hair this winter night's benediction, Suttree by the window watched through the frosted glass. How the snow fell cherry red in the soft neon flush of the beersign like the slow dropping of blood. The clerks and the curious are absent tonight. Blind Richard sits with his wife. The junkman drunk, his mouth working mutely and his neck awry like a hanged man's. A young homosexual alone in the corner crying. Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there.

He spent a lot of time in the library reading magazines. An assortment of wildeyed freaks used to frequent the upstairs reading room, glancing furtively about, their cocks hanging out of their trousers beneath the tables, eyeing the schoolboys. One evening coming out of May's cafe and heading toward the B&J he passed two women sailing along in the other direction. He turned around and followed them back in. They spoke with yankee accents a jivy kind of talk he thought he'd listen to and he took the booth behind them and ordered a beer. Before he'd taken a sip of it one of them turned and fixed him with an up and down look of brazen appraisal. What's happening in this town? she said.

Suttree hung his arm over the back of the booth and looked at them. Not much, he said. Where you all from?

Chicago.

How long you been here?

Off and on for a couple of months.