Suttree

  He woke later in the night alone in the bed. She was sitting at the dressing table engaged in alchemic rituals with creams and lotions, she was at brushing her hair. In the dark window and partly obscured by the old lace drapes a red pulse of watered light bloomed and faded and the sound of the rain and the traffic in the wet streets made him sprawl deliciously in the sheets. She was watching him in the glass. She winked. Hi lover, she said.

  Hello baby. What time is it?

  She bent to see her watch. It's quarter to one, she said. Did you have a good nap?

  Mmm.

  Would you like a drink?

  Yes. I can get it.

  No.

  She rose and came over to the bed. She was wearing a pale blue negligee that flowed lightly behind her. She came and bent and kissed him and he stroked her breasts and she propped him up with both pillows and fixed the drink and sat on the bed for a moment.

  What was all that racket a while ago?

  Goddamned Ralph came up here trying to get room rent. You wouldnt believe it. Said you were supposed to be in the date room.

  Did you get him straightened out?

  She smiled. I told him you were no goddamned date. I think I called him a nigger cocksucker.

  How did he go for that?

  He didnt say. That fucking James has got a big mouth too.

  Was that Margie in here?

  Yeah. She's jealous.

  What, of you or me?

  Silly. Her old man put her down I think. She's jealous of me, sure, but that chick is almost fifty years old for Christ sake.

  I dont see how she makes it.

  She's a hundred dollar a night girl.

  Her?

  Sure. All she has to do is turn fifty tricks. That's mean isnt it?

  What brought you down here?

  Money what else. Anyway I cant go back to Chicago for a while.

  You said you were under indictment. What for?

  Selling my pussy.

  Her impish grin. Watching him. He sipped the whiskey. Where's Og? he said.

  Oh, he's over here on the floor. I guess his nose is out of joint too. She tucked the covers about Suttree's naked chest and went back to her things at the dresser. He had finished the drink and almost drifted into sleep half sitting there in the sagging bed when she turned off the light and climbed in beside him, her warm soft scented body length to length against his own and her breath in his ear whispering obscene endearments.

  The hammering of steampipes woke him in the small hours of the night and he lay in the strange room with the red neon flicker of the hotel sign silent at the window. Silence in the streets. She sprawled like a child, one hand loosely clutched by the side of her sleeping face.

  In the morning it was still raining or raining again. Alone in the room, brailed in the soft and springshot bed he listened to the traffic below the window, the muted slicing of tires in the wet. Looking up at the ceiling, the petals of wallpaper hanging, the old and ornate gas fixture with brass cherubs. He eased himself up. Gray rain leaned past the window. There was some sort of horrendous foundrywork going on about the hotwater pipes and a little poppet valve on the radiator was hissing like a kettle. He crossed the cold buckled linoleum with puckered feet and stood naked by the window and watched the Monday morning traffic in the streets below. A different slant on life here. Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops. A glass skylight covered with chickenwire. The cold winter rain failing everywhere over the city.

  He put on his clothes and went down the hall to the bathroom. A door with MEN stenciled across it. A tall narrow hall of a room in domino tiles. A yellow tub on clawfeet, a sink and a toilet. Suttree pissed long and loud, peering out through the patterned glass of the window at the winter day.

  When he got back to the room it was still empty. He took a towel and a bar of soap and went back down the corridor and had a hot bath. When he returned to the room he tried shaving himself with her electric razor. He looked through her things, careful to leave each as it had been. An eclectic tale of gewgaws, the fine with the shoddy. He borrowed her toothpaste and brushed his teeth with his fingers.

  She came in smiling and bearing packages and smelling of perfume and rain. She took off the plastic babushka she wore and shook out her hair and came to him unbuttoning the belted raincoat and looking like a movie whore. She kissed him and said hello.

  You havent eaten? I brought you some coffee and the paper.

  What time is it?

  It's about eleven. Why dont we go over to Regas and have lunch.

  Okay.

  I'm starving, arent you?

  I'm about to faint. What time did you stir out this morning?

  I dont know. Nine. Here. Be careful, it's hot.

  Thanks.

  She took off the coat and shook it and laid it on the bed and went to the dressing table to repair her makeup. She seemed ladylike and efficient in her spikeheeled shoes and her tweed suit. Suttree sat on the bed and sipped the coffee and looked at the paper. She watched him in the mirror. She gave him a big sexy wink.

  They went down in the elevator with a young black who kept his eyes averted and she made obscene signals above the back of his small neat head. They crossed the lobby arm in arm like a honeymoon couple and she spoke cheerily to the lolling porter and turned up her collar and they crossed the wet street and ducked into Regas.

  The next day they got thrown out of the hotel. Suttree hadnt been back to his room in McAnally and they had bought him new clothes to wear and she had picked out a pigskin shavingbag for him and fitted it with all manner of things that he hardly knew the use of, the powders and colognes and lotions and little chrome tools for the care of the nails. They packed all their things down and into a cab and went to the other end of Gay Street where she talked and gestured by the desk with the black bellcaptain and he sat in the back of the cab half buried in dresses and boxes.

  She's wavin you on in, the driver said.

  Suttree got out of the cab and entered the little dingy lobby that he'd passed a hundred times or more. The cadaverous keeper of the place knew him from the Huddle across the street. Suttree nodded to him and went over to the bellcaptain.

  Bud, this is Jesse, she said.

  Hello Jesse.

  Jesse's head moved very slightly.

  Listen baby, do you want to stay here?

  What do you mean?

  I mean move out of that cellar and stay here. Look, Jesse is an old friend. He knows me and he knows I'm not interested in turning five dollar tricks with these brokendown whores he runs in here. He's got a room up on the top floor we can have if you want. I think I'm going to Athens tomorrow.

  Athens?

  Yeah. I talked to the guy down there this morning. He said I could come for two weeks at least. Baby, I could come away from there with a grand if I had someone to take care of it for me.

  Suttree, who wasnt all that sure what she was talking about, said that he would.

  She was very businesslike. She gave him five dollars and he went out and he and the cabdriver carried in their things and stacked them on chairs and on the desk and draped clothes over the banister rail. The driver fumbled around for change but she waved him off and they went up the stairs with armloads of varied finery.

  This place is a real rat trap, she said, wheezing back at him from the third landing. But they dont hassle you.

  Suttree muttered into a mound of perfumed garments. They were going past gaping fist holes in the stairwell walls and places in the balustrade ripped bare and mended back with raw twobyfours. Down a narrow ill lit hall to a door where she leaned and held the key for him to take.

  It looked like the room they'd left, somewhat smaller, a bit more shabby. They piled everything on the bed and went down to get the rest of it. They strung a piece of wire across a corner of the room to hang the clothes on, fastening one end to the doorhinge and the other to the curtainrod bracket above the window. Suttree looked
out on the street below.

  She woke him in the cold dark of morning among the pipeclang and the stridence of whores passing in the hallway drunk and she was whimpering with fright. He stroked her naked back while she breathed out a dream in the darkness. We were in a car and they dragged you out, they were taking you away it was awful.

  You dont have any little friends I should know about do you?

  She stroked his face. It was just a dream, baby.

  In the morning he put her on the bus, kissing her there at the steps where the driver stood with his tickets and his puncher and the diesel smoke swirled in the cold, Suttree smiling to himself at this emulation of some domestic trial or lovers parted by fate and will they meet again? She went along the aisle with her overnight bag and sat by the window and made elaborate gestures of enticement at him through the glass like a whore mute or in such outland port as christians reck no word of speech there. Until he blew her a kiss and hunched his shoulders to say that it was cold and went up the steps.

  Now at noon each day he wakes to the gray light leaking in past the gray rags of lace at the window and the sound of country music seeping through the waterstained and flowered walls. Walls decked with random flattened roaches in little corollas of oilstain, some framed with the print of a shoesole. In the rooms the few tenants huddle over the radiators, flogging them with mophandles, cooking ladles. They hiss sullenly. The cold licks at the window. In the bathrobe and slippers she has bought for him and carrying his pigskin shavingcase he goes along the corridor like a ghost through ruins, nodding at times to chance farmboys or old recluses with skittish eyes emerging from assignations in the rooms he passes. To the bathroom at the end of the hall that no one used save him, the yellow bowl spidered with cracks, the paintstained tub, the diamond panes in the window looking out on a ledge where pigeons crouched in their feathers lee of the wind. A gravel roof where a rubber ball lay rotting. The city a collage of grim cubes under a sky the color of wet steel in the winter noon.

  Down the half wrecked stairs to the lobby where he'd get the morning paper from a rack and nod to the dayclerk and with his coatcollar up step into the brisk street with the wind cool on his shaven cheek and down to the Tennessee Cafe where for thirty cents you could get a stack of hotcakes and coffee cup on cup.

  J-Bone was still in Cleveland. Others from McAnally gone north to the factories. Old friends dispersed, perhaps none coming back, or few, them changed. Tennessee wetbacks drifting north in bent and smoking autos in search of wages. The rumors sifted down from Detroit, Chicago. Jobs paying two twenty an hour.

  The neon rigging went up early, wan ornaments adorning the bleak afternoon. From the hotel window he watched the traffic and he could see through the shelled brickwork of the Cumberland Hotel half razed across the street the rain falling on the dim jungled shacks of the black settlement along First Creek. The sound of the factory whistles in the long dead afternoon seemed sad beyond all telling. Suttree a sitter at windows, a face untrue behind the cataracted glass, specked with the shadow of motes or sootflecks, eyes vacuous. Watching this obscure and prismatic city eaten by dark to a pale electric superstructure, the ways and viaducts and bridges remarked from gloom by sudden lamps their length and the headlights of traffic going through the plumb uncloven rain and the night.

  To come in half drunk at a late hour from the Huddle or what worse place and lie suspended in the bed in this house of derelict pleasures where half the night all through the cardboard chambers doors exchanged and brief ruts spent themselves in the joyless dark and the only sounds ever of desire the sometime cries of buckled tribades in the hours toward dawn when trade was done.

  In the middle of the week Dick gave him an envelope postmarked Athens with a loveletter from her and two naked hundred dollar bills inside. He took from behind the cashregister the section of broomhandle the key was tied to and went to the toilet and took out the money and looked at it, such exotic tender with the values printed bold and green. He folded them and put them in his pocket. Tuesday she sent three more. He would lay out the five bills on the bed and he and the stuffed ape would look at them without really understanding them at all.

  She arrived in the dark of early Sunday morning in a taxi she had taken from Athens and she was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas and a trenchcoat and she had the plastic overnight bag filled with money. She was slightly drunk. She pushed open the door and stood there framed against the orange and burntlooking hallway in a classic hooker's pose and said: Hey big boy. Suttree rolled over in the bed to see what was happening, and she said: How would you like to get fucked?

  Not tonight, honey. I'm expecting her back.

  She came across the room shedding her raincoat as she went. You son of a bitch, she said, laughing.

  Watch out, you'll bend the tentpole.

  You'll think tentpole when I get through with you.

  Young lady try to control yourself.

  Hello baby.

  Hi.

  They talked all morning. She told him everything. She was from Kentucky, which surprised him. She liked girls, which didnt. And all the towns and cheap hotels and a couple of lockups and a few sadistic pimps and tricks and the cops and the jails and the nigger bellhops while beyond the window dawn unlocked the city in paling increments of gray.

  They went out to breakfast before the day had even well begun, going up to the corner through the fog and the coalsmoke and the smell of roast coffee to hail a cab, Suttree scrubbed and aromatic and pleasantly tired and hungry and her holding his arm.

  What am I supposed to do with all this money? he said.

  Well. You can buy my breakfast.

  Seriously. I feel like every heist artist in town is watching me.

  How much do you have?

  The five bills you sent.

  I didnt mean for you not to spend any of it.

  I had some money.

  Well, put it in the bank. I've got another three something. I thought maybe, I dont know ... get an apartment. What do you think?

  It's up to you.

  No it's not.

  Well.

  They took a cab to Gatlinburg and stopped at a service station to have chains put on the tires. Suttree got two paper cups of ice and poured the ice from the cups into the glasses she had brought and poured the whiskey over the ice and they settled back with the blanket over their laps and drove into the winter mountains.

  The silent cabman carried them through a white silent forest by caves in the roadside cliffs all toothed with ice and the only sound the trudge of the shackled tires in the dry snow of the road. Suttree cozied up with his trollop and his toddy, she looking out with child's eyes at this wonderland. It's fucking beautiful, she said.

  They stopped for icicles to cool their drinks. Suttree clambered over a low stone wall and dropped into deep snow. Down the slope the firs stood black and brambly in their white shrouds and a fine mist of snow was blowing with a faint hiss like sand. He pissed a slushy yellow flower in the landscape, standing there with his drink in one hand, looking out on a wild white upland world as old as any thing that was and not unlike it might have looked a million years ago. Just when he would have said that nothing lived in these frozen altitudes two small gray birds flew. They came from a clump of snowbroken heather below and crossed the slope in a loping flight like carnival birds on wires and vanished in the forest.

  He walked up the road, his shoes crunching in the packed snow. Under an overhang of icebound rock where sheer palisades of opaque crystal walled up the black forests above and he could hear the wind suck and moan in the trees. He reached to pluck small icicles from the rocks until he'd filled his glass with them.

  Back in the cab she covered him with the blanket and rubbed his hands. You're icy cold, she said.

  At Newfound Gap there were skiers, a bright group bristling with their poles and skis about the parked cars. They pulled in to watch them, goggled madmen in clouds of powder dropping down through the fir forests at breakneck
speed. She clutched his arm, them standing there with their drinks and their breath swirling in the cold.

  They went back in the early blue twilight, ghosting down the mountain with frames of snowy woodland veering inverted across the glass. They made love under the blankets in the back seat like schoolchildren and later she sat up and talked into the silent cabman's ear and made him promise not to tell what they had done and he said that he would not.

  In the morning she took him shopping. Suttree in gray tweeds being fitted.

  I love this, she said.

  What, shopping?

  For men's things. It's sexy.

  They selected shirts and ties and cufflinks. They studied shoes in a glass case. A sleek attendant hovered.

  Wednesday noon he appeared at Comer's in a pair of alligator shoes and wearing a camelhair overcoat. A pair of beltless gabardine slacks with little zippers at the sides and a winecolored shirt with a crafty placket requiring no buttons.

  Fuckin Suttree's robbed Squiz Green's, said Jake.

  Stud grinned and wiped the countertop before him. What'll you have, Sut?

  I think I'll go for the steak and gravy.

  Ulysses leaned on the counter and studied him. He took Suttree's lapel between his thumb and forefinger and eased the coat open to read the label, nodding sagely, a toothpick in his mouth. Fishing business has picked up a bit, has it? he said.

  Fishy business, more likely, said Sexton, posed beneath his picture on the wall in flight gear, tapping his thigh with the wooden triangle and watching down the hall.

  Let me have a chocolate milk, said Suttree.

  She was gone to Asheville for ten days. He had a radio in the room now and a rug for the floor by the side of the bed for stepping out onto. In the afternoons he'd run down ads in the paper for apartments to let, stalking around in cold and barren corridors with half a heart and listening to the chatter of a graying landlord in houseshoes with his massive ring of keys like some latterday gaoler saying blah blah blah blah blah. When she came back he was still at the hotel.

  He showed her the bankbook. It was in her name and there was eleven hundred dollars in the account. She gave it back to him and smiled and pushed his nose.