The old man looked at Suttree in alarm. Seen it? he said. Where from?
I see, said Suttree.
Course they's been a lot worse wrecks than them. They was a Pennsy engine left the track in Philadelphia about ten year ago, hot box caused the axle to break, thowed some cars into a bridge and killed eighty people all told. Your worst wrecks was the telescopes. One car would run inside another and just gather everbody up out of their seats and make a big mud pie out of em at the end. Then of course they was bridges and trestles. I remember two trains run out on a doubletrack trestle up in Kentucky goin in opposite directions, about the time they got abreast of one another the whole thing just folded up and dropped into the river. Trestle, locomotives, tenders, cars, folks. All of it. Kaploosh. Back then most of ye trestles was just wood. The coaches was wood too and they had stoves in em about like thisn here and when they'd wreck they'd tip over and set the coaches afire and burn up everbody inside. I tell ye, ridin a train back in them days was a thing you give some thought to.
The old man rose heavily from the bed and opened the stove door and dumped in coal from the scuttle and sat back down again. He dabbed with the back of one knuckle at his nose. Outside it had grown almost dark and a cat appeared at the clerestory window and whined.
You caint get in that way, idjit, the old man called. You come to the door like everbody else.
When I was young I didnt care for nothin, he continued. I was always easy in the world. Saw a right smart of it. Never cared to go just wherever.
How did you happen to end up here?
I aint ended yet. Used to hobo a right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue lookin and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees goin by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.
They nodded and shivered in the fogged car while the gray dawn hovered without. They groaned and stirred and slept. Sometime in the night Sharpe had come awake freezing, coatless, and climbed out to stir about in the alleyway, gathering pieces of cratewood and paper. J-Bone reared up in the front seat. What's that? he said.
What time is it Jim?
I dont have a watch. Where's that smoke coming from?
This fire here.
J-Bone raised himself and looked over the back of the seat. Sharpe had a small fire going in the floor of the car and he was holding his hands over it. J-Bone leaned over the seat and held his own hands out for warmth. Watch Cabbage's leg there, he said.
Sharpe jostled the bony knee.
Hey Cabbage, get your leg out of the fire.
Cabbage reared up wildly and subsided.
Better crack that window hadnt we? said J-Bone.
They grinned at each other across the smoke and the flames.
I'm about to freeze my ass off. What time do you reckon it is?
I dont know. What time's it get light?
Shit if I know. You sure they open at five?
Yeah. Have for years.
Sharpe was peering out across the blueblack night, the buildings stark and tall, the few streetlamps encoiled in fog.
It's gettin smoky in here, said J-Bone.
Does Suttree have a watch?
No. I dont think so. He bent to see. Suttree lay slumped under the wheel with his folded hands between his knees.
Sharpe cranked down the rear window. Smoke was rolling blackly through the car.
Cabbage raised up and looked at Sharpe with drunken sleepshot eyes. What's happening? he said.
We're waiting on that five oclock beer.
The fucking car's on fire.
We're tryin to get warm, Cabbage, said J-Bone.
Cabbage looked from one to the other of them. You sons of bitches are crazy, he said. He opened the door and lurched out into the alley.
J-Bone got out on the other side. Come on Sharpe. Let's walk around some fore we freeze.
See if you can see some more wood out there.
Suttree woke and looked out the window. A garbage truck had gone down the alley. He sat up. He was alone in the car. He opened the glovebox and reached around inside and shut it again. He felt under the seat and he looked in the back. The remains of the fire lay in a blackened crust of burnt rubber on the floor. He looked out down the alley. He was shaking with the cold.
He climbed stiffly from the car and shut the door. Traffic was commencing in the murk, headlamps boring past in pale shrouds. A dog crossed in the hobbled lights. Suttree stove his hands deep in his pockets and hunched his shoulders and went toward the street.
They were seated in a row on stools within the watered windows of the Signal Cafe and they were drinking beer. An old newspedlar sat at the front of the counter humped over his coffee. Suttree swung through the door blowing on his hands and took a stool.
This goddamn Suttree is a five oclock alarm clock, said Sharpe.
Wasnt no danger of sleepin over with Sut along.
Let me have a Redtop, said Suttree to the counterman.
You rest well Sut?
You sons of bitches would let a man lay out there and freeze to death.
I was goin to come out there and get you, Bud.
We run out of firewood.
How long you all been in here?
This is our first one. Hell, he just opened this minute.
Suttree seized the bottle before him and drank and hiked his shoulders up and drank again. Across the street a neon sign that once said Earle Hotel said le Ho. Two workers with their lunchboxes in their armpits stamped and smoked on the corner. Suttree looked at his companions. Their bottles rose and fell like counterweights. I thought five oclock never would get here, said J-Bone.
By nine oclock that night they were twelve or more, all good hearts from McAnally. An hour later they were at a roadhouse called the Indian Rock.
They threaded their way among the tables, Billy Ray Callahan stopping where girls had gone to dance and left purses among the drinks. Callahan draining the glasses and taking the money from the purses and moving on, smiling and nodding to friends and strangers, past a table where a big boy was sitting, Callahan smiling at him invitingly.
What say, big boy.
Big boy looked away.
They pulled tables together and ordered Cokes and set out pints of whiskey. Under the tilting smoke the dancers whirled and the music with its upbeat country tempo scored like an overture the gatherings of violence just beneath the surface, the subtle exchanges in the heated air. Suttree and J-Bone made their way toward the men's room. Cabbage on the floor already dancing mightily, the girl laughing. Kenneth Tipton at a nearby table holding out his hand.
We've got to get these cunts, said J-Bone.
Let's not get too drunk.
When they got back their table was gone. The drinks lay in a pile of glass and icecubes on the wet concrete floor and the table lay caved in a corner. Suttree saw one of the legs in someone's hand. The area was clearing fast, people moving along the walls. Suttree saw Hoghead move with stealth along the rear of a phalanx of battlers and draw back and hit a boy b
ehind the ear and move on. Earl Solomon came pedaling backwards out of the line and slammed up against the wall. Paul McCulley was trading punches with three boys all by himself down by the ladies' room door and the door kept opening and closing and girls looking out by turns.
We better get some of them off of Hulley Babe, said J-Bone.
They started down the room but before they'd gone far someone fell into J-Bone. J-Bone shoved him and he turned around and took a swing and at it they went. Suttree made his way on to where Paul was and grabbed a boy by the wrist and whipsawed and flung him into a table full of half empty drinks. He screamed something at Suttree but it was lost in the melee. Paul hit one of the other boys and he went down and got up and walked off. The third one hit Suttree in the side of the head. Suttree squared off and ducked and the boy looked and saw McCulley coming for him and said: I aint fightin the two of ye.
Why you crawfishin son of a bitch, McCulley said. You didnt mind it the other way around. He shoved the boy back against the wall but the boy turned and ran.
Get that little fucker, Red, called McCulley.
Callahan was standing bloodyheaded in the middle of a pile of fallen bodies looking about. He reached and took the boy by the shoulder almost gently. Pow, he said. Suttree turned his head. McCulley had his arm around him hugging him and laughing and taking him directly into the thick of it.
Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree.
Who the fuck cares? If he aint from McAnally bust him.
And they are whelmed in dark riot, the smoking hall a no man's land filled with lethal looking drunks reeling about with bleeding eyes and reeking of homemade whiskey. A scuffling of feet, fists thudding. Long endless crash of glass and chairs and overhead the intermittent whoosh of whiskey bottles crossing the room like mortar shells to explode on the block walls. A wave of bodies swept over Suttree. He struggled up. In the midst of it all he found Kenneth Tipton seemingly encased in a nimbus of peace, holding his wrist and working his hand open and shut. I've fucked up my hand, he said. Then he was swept away.
The floor was slick with blood and whiskey. Someone hit him under the eye. He tried to see J-Bone but he could not. He saw Callahan go by, one eye blue shiny, smiling, his teeth in a grout of blood. His busy freckled fists ferrying folks to sleep. He saw a bottle in a fist rise above the melee, saw it powdered on an unknown skull.
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 dis
cussing 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.