Suttree

  The last job Callahan had was running a bootleg joint for a man named Cotton down off Ailor Avenue. Suttree saw him in Comer's and he looked subdued.

  I seen ye the other day and you didnt know me, he said.

  Bullshit, said Suttree. I never saw you. Where at?

  Callahan put his arm around Suttree's shoulder and patted him on the belly. These old summer rabbits, he said. You can set on em and they wont hardly even squeal.

  At the woodshed in McAnally they bought whiskey and rolled lightless out the far end of the alley passing the bottle about in the brown paper bag. They drove up Gay Street where Comer's was closing and the hustlers stood about the stairwell, Callahan leaning from the window of the car to hoot at them, and they drove past the little cafes and restaurants where dishwashers were cleaning up in the dim back light and they passed folks coming from the last movie who seemed almost unhinged by what they'd seen or were seeing.

  At the West Inn Callahan routed an outland troupe from the premises. And aint they got no beerjoints where you come from? And dont let the door hit ye in the ass goin out. Suttree in the washroom stood slightly drunk and read the legends on the weeping wall. Advised that he was pissing on his shoes. Untrue. Wanted to trade; two blind crabs for one with no teeth. He looked up at the clotted bulb overhead. He buttoned and pushed open the plywood door and went out.

  It ended on the Clinton Highway at the Moonlite Diner, Billy Ray smiling and going among the tables while the band played country music. He had his hands in his pockets when the barman confronted him. Small, vicious, quiet. He said: Red, you been stealin money out of them girls' purses.

  Callahan rocked back on his heels with his hooligan smile and looked down at his assassin. His pockets were full of the stolen change spoken, he'd drunk their drinks. You're a damned liar, he said goodnaturedly. In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen. When he was shot he had his hands in his pockets. The last word came out lie. The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous. Billy Ray was standing there with a small discolored hole alongside his ruined nose. A trickle of thin blood started down his face. The band had finished their set and the people going to the tables paused and looked toward the bar where a small cloud of pale smoke hovered above Billy Ray's shaggy head. They saw him lurch and topple.

  Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.

  He was lying on his back with one leg doubled under him. He was bleeding from the ears and from the nose and from the hole in his face and he was breathing deeply and regular and he was looking up at the ceiling. The murderer had put the gun back in his pocket and stood looking on like any other spectator. A number of people had already started for the door and when Suttree came up Gary was squatting down looking at Billy Ray as if he did not know what to make of his lying there like that.

  Oh my God, said Suttree. Callahan's eyes closed slowly. His whole face was blue and he closed his eyes so that you could not see death come up in them like a face at a window. Suttree pushed through the people and ran for the telephone at the back wall.

  They pulled a blanket over him but Suttree drew it back from his face.

  Cover him up, said the ambulance attendant.

  He's not dead.

  They gave Suttree a look much like a shrug and lifted the gurney into the rear of the ambulance and Suttree climbed in and sat on the little banquette at the side and the door closed after him.

  Shrieking through the streets of Knoxville, the red domelight sweeping the near walls in narrow places, the windows, faces in cars. Billy Ray turned his head once and arched his neck. The pad beneath him grew black with blood. All through the town tonight are folks lie dying. Sirens in the city like the shriek of jackal birds.

  They wheeled him through the emergency room door and into a small white room. There was a steel lamp in the ceiling and a steel table beneath it and there were steel cabinets along one wall. The orderlies lifted Callahan onto the table and wheeled the gurney out again. A nurse looked at him lying there, his chest rising and falling. Someone had put a patch of gauze over the hole in his head and the blood around his ears had blackened and dried. A great rugheaded lout lying there with his heavy hands composed alongside him. She shook her head and closed the door.

  Later an orderly came in and looked at him and went out again. He returned with a doctor. The doctor carried a clipboard under his arm and he entered the room and pulled the gauze away from Callahan's face and looked at the hole. He lifted the eyelids and looked in and he lifted the shaggy head and let it back again. The orderly was watching the doctor. The doctor pursed his lips and made a little casual gesture with one hand. He felt Billy Ray's pulse and looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. He said something to the orderly and then went out again, the orderly behind him, the orderly closing the door.

  Suttree and Callahan's older brother Charlie rose from their chairs.

  There's nothing we can do for that man, said the doctor.

  He's not dead, said Suttree.

  No, said the doctor. He's not dead.

  The last visitor was an old black orderly, a gentle man who washed the stricken and the dead. He pulled back the gauze and unscrewed the top from a bottle of alcohol and poured it slowly down the hole into Billy Ray's brain.

  He lived for another five hours and died sometime before daybreak unattended. They hadnt even taken off his shoes. Charlie had gone home and Suttree and the mother sat in the little waiting room. When the doctor came out and told them he was dead Billy Ray's mother began to cry very quietly. She sat there with her chin quivering and she shook her head slowly from side to side over her dead warrior. Suttree touched her shoulder but she waved him away and she did not look up.

  He walked out of the hospital and across the wet grass toward the road. Very slowly the lights of the city were going out, the billboards, the streetlamps. He crossed the river by the high iron bridge, past the orchards in the dark, lights in the water upstream and the sky paling and the night and its disciplines draining away leaving the barren trees as black as iron and a paper city rising in the dawn. A great stillness had fallen. He walked through the dead gray streets. A newspedlar was opening his bale of papers at the corner. The streetsweepers had passed and in the black gutterwater the lights from the polelamps lay like pietins among the darker neon bleedings.

  He leaned against the viaduct rail. Spat numbly at the tracks down there. At the dreams implicit in their endless steel Teachings. Section-hands were slouching toward work in the switchingyard. The Watkins man pushed his little trundlecart of nostrums across the bridge, humped between the cart tongues in the wan daybreak. Suttree went down the narrow back path at the end of the bridge. He passed beneath the house of the madman but he was not about at such an hour. Suttree stooped and scrabbled up a half a brickbat and slammed it off the curling clapboards high under the eaves. A crazed putty face slobbered up against the glass, a wild eye cocked there. Suttree turned and went on down the path toward the river.

  He spent his days in the poorer quarters of the town seeking out some place with steam heat where he could winter cheaply. The season had grown cold and sunless and a mean wind was in the streets. He found at last a room in the deeps of McAnally. A graylooking woman regarded him sourly through the screendoor.

  I came to see about the room, he said.

  She sorted a key from among clotted tissues in her apron pocket and unlatched the screendoor and handed it out.

  It's around the back, she said.

  How much is it?

  Five dollars a week.

  He thanked her and went around the house by a brick walkway past old gray bushes clogged with leaves an
d down steps into an unpaved alley. The door was open and he walked in and stood in a dim and musty cellar. A furnace with upflung ductwork like a fat and rusty medusa, a dead iron grin in the doorgrate. He crossed to a painted blue door and peered in. A small cubicle with a concrete floor, an iron cot. He looked back into the furnace room. Some stairs materialized out of the deeper gloom and he crossed to them and mounted upward to a door at the top. Long nailed to. A dead lightbulb hung from a flyspecked cord. He turned in the dark of the landing and came back. The frayed and rotting stair carpet wore blooms of pale blue mold.

  In a corner of the cellar was a zinc laundrytub. He tried the taps. A brown liquid spat into the sink and lay there. He went back into the room. There were two small windows let into wells high along one wall, the glass covered with rainspattered sand and hung with spiderwebs. Suttree looked out at the brambly undercarriage of a hedge, some whitestalked grass perhaps wild onions. In the wells dry leaves and papers. A weathered wooden firetruck.

  He sat on the cot and looked around but there wasnt much to look at and after a while he went back out and around the house to the front door again.

  She stood veiled behind the screen holding out her hand for the key.

  I'll take it, he said.

  Is it just yourself?

  Yes mam.

  That'll be five dollars.

  He had his money out. Crossing the serried palm with wilted green.

  Is that everything there is? I mean you dont have an extra rug or something do you?

  I'll see if I do. She folded the bill into her apron pocket and faded away down the lightless hall.

  He brought his blankets over and things for coffee. He lay in the little room in the dark a long time listening to the noises and he woke all night to the passing of cars in the street. In the gray dawn he felt alien and not unhappy and lay staring up at the pipes in their hangers on the ceiling, wrapped in burlap or canvas and leaking kapok or a white plasterlike substance. What woke him was a clanging of iron from the outer chamber and when he went to the door and looked out there was a small black hunchback with enormous orange teeth gleaming in the firelight at the furnace door.

  Hey, said Suttree.

  When the black saw him he turned and began to bow and smile and shuffle and make mows until Suttree thought he dealt here with a wandered idiot.

  Are you the furnaceman?

  Yazzuh yazzuh yazzuh, said the black, removing his coachman's hat with the lacquered black wickerwork vents.

  Shit, said Suttree.

  Yazzuh.

  What time is it? What's your name?

  The furnaceman was winching up a watch enormous from the pocket of his trousers. Ten oclock Nelson, he said, holding the face of the watch toward Suttree should there be any question.

  Okay Nelson, thanks.

  Yazzuh yazzuh, said Nelson.

  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 revol
ving 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.