Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  An enormous set of teeth appeared and a strong black hand gripped his forearm. Hey fish man. Naw you wrong. Black man taught it to the mule.

  You think I could learn it?

  You might if they wouldnt let you set down nowheres.

  Suttree smiled. I'll see you later.

  The blind man pocketed the bill. I hope you catches the river out, he said.

  Suttree crossed the street to Watson's. There in the basement he found his size in a rack of sportcoats and selected a pale camelhair and tried it. Faint lines of dirt along the shoulder seams where it had hung. He looked at himself in the mirror. He took a comb from his pocket and combed his hair.

  He found a pair of black mohair trousers that had a small tricornered tear at the rear pocket. Couldnt see it with the jacket on. The slacks and the jacket came to thirteen dollars and ninety cents and he paid and went upstairs and bought a yellow gabardine shirt with handstitched collar and pockets.

  In a window above Market Street the old tailor stood peering out through the lettered glass, the dusty ells and bolts of cloth spooled out in the window easing the repose of dead flies and roaches. Suttree came up the dark and musty wooden stairwell and swung through the door with his package.

  Nice trousers them, said the old man as he measured the inseam with a tattered yellow tape. He gripped the waistband and tugged at them. He put his arms around Suttree's waist and brought the tape together at his navel. The old man barely came to Suttree's shoulder.

  You want some out of the seat too.

  I think they'll be all right, Mr Brannam. I've lost some weight.

  The tailor tugged at the seat of Suttree's new trousers and looked dubious. You going to carry your lunch here? he said.

  Suttree smiled. They're really my size, he said. I'll fill back out.

  How much you going to fill?

  About twenty pounds.

  The tailor pulled again at Suttree's waist and shook his head.

  They're okay. Let's just do the cuffs.

  When you dont get fat you bring em back, okay?

  Okay. There's a little tear there in the back too.

  I see him, said the tailor, marking with his chalk.

  Suttree waited in a wooden folding chair while the trousers were cuffed and he paid the old man and thanked him and went down the stairs again.

  He bought a pair of shoes at Thorn McAn's that had zippers up the side and were the color of blood. With his packages he climbed the stairs to Comer's and at the rear of the premises he stripped and washed and put on his new clothes. His old ones he wrapped in the paper and he left them with Stud at the lunchcounter. Stud took the package and looked back again and whistled and Jake took hold of him by the shoulder and turned him around and looked him over and sniffed at his cheek and tried to kiss him.

  Get away you ass, Suttree said.

  Ulysees came over to view him with his quiet cynic's smile. Well, he said. Looking rather affluent there, Bud. He kneaded Suttree's sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. Oy, he said. Iss qvality.

  Suttree crossed Gay Street to the Farragut and went downstairs to the barbershop. He passed Tarzan Quinn coming up, freshly powdered, swinging his billyclub by its thong to and fro into and out of his enormous hand.

  An aged black took his new coat and he climbed into a chair.

  Yessir, said the barber, flinging the apron ticking over him.

  Shave, haircut, shine ... You do manicures?

  No, said the barber. We dont have a manicurist.

  Okay. Shave, haircut, shine. And dont spare the smellgood.

  The barber brought a steaming towel and wrapped his face and tilted him back in the chair. Suttree lay in deep euphoria, his legs crossed at the ankles, his new shoes easy on the nickleplated grating of the footrest. He listened dreamily to the pop of the razor on the strop.

  He half dozed in the chair while the barber pulled his face about, the razor slicing off the hot lavendar foam. Peace seeped through to Suttree's bones. The barber raised him up and began to trim his hair with scissors. The black had settled at his feet with his wooden box of polishes and begun to work over the shoes. The second barber read the newspaper. No one spoke. Suttree's dark locks dropped soundlessly to the tiles. Gentle barber. He drifted.

  The barber talced the back of his neck and whipped away the apron and stood back. Suttree opened his eyes. He raised the shoes up one and then the other and looked at them. He climbed down from the chair and looked at himself in the mirror.

  The old black held his coat while he paid and then helped him on with it and dusted his shoulders with a little broom. Suttree dropped a half dollar into his palm and the old man made a sort of bow and said thank you sir and the barber said come back.

  In the streets a colder wind on his shaven nape. Bobbyjohn stood on the corner with Bucket and Hoghead and two boys he did not know. They seized upon him with great joy. Bobbyjohn was offering him two dollars for the coat, waving the money about.

  Where's your stick? said Hoghead. You caint go around lookin like that and no stick to beat the women off with.

  Old Suttree's caught himself a hell of a fish somewheres.

  He and J-Bone ate dinner at Regas. Bobby smiled when she brought them the menu.

  What are you goin for, Bud?

  I think I'll go for the large fillet steak.

  Believe I'll go for the veal cutlet.

  Hell, get the steak.

  The cutlet's good, Bud.

  Get the biggest fucking steak they own.

  The steaks arrived on iron platters sizzling in their own juice and there were steaming baked potatoes with pithy cores to melt the butter over and there was sour cream with chives and hot rolls and coffee. Suttree popped a chunk of steak into his mouth and sat back in the chair and closed his eyes, chewing.

  Good aint it Bud?

  J-Bone dipped a roll into his platter and raised it dripping with dark gravy and loaded it into his jaw. Lordy, he said.

  Where we going tonight?

  Anywhere suits me. What about the Carnival Club?

  Is this Thursday?

  Sure is, said J-Bone. The place will be crawling with lovely young cuntlets.

  I'm for that, said Suttree.

  He woke in Woodlawn among the menhirs of the dead. He raised himself onto one elbow and looked out across the ordered landscape of polished stones, the pale winter's grass and black trees. He brushed the chaff from his sleeve. An oxblood stain was seeping up his white socks from the new shoes. He staggered to his feet, brushing at himself. His trousers were caked with great patches of mud at the knees and he was damp and cold. Suddenly he crammed both fists in his pocket. His eyes wandered in his head as he grappled with the murky history of the prior night. Dim memories. A maudlin madman stumbling among the stones in search of a friend long dead who lies here. He pulled from his watchpocket a small wet folded paper. It was one of the hundred dollar bills somehow put by. Suttree crossed the spiderfrosted grass of the cemetery toward the fence and the road.

  The sun was not so high he could not take his bearings by it and he set off in what he figured to be the direction of the town. A bus passed in a blue stink of diesel smoke, the windows filled with faces. He brushed his hair back and grimaced at the riders. He shaped a curse in the air after them with a leanboned hand.

  A half mile down stood a roadside store. Suttree at the drinkbox lifted out an orange bottle and opened it and drank. The woman who kept the store watched him from under her wrinkled eyelids.

  I'm not loose from the circus, he said.

  What?

  I said do you have any aspirins.

  She turned and reached a small tin box of them from a shelf behind the counter. Suttree opened the box and emptied the contents into his hand and dropped them into his mouth like peanuts and washed them down with a swig of the drink.

  What do I owe you?

  Fifteen cents, she said. Old nervous eyes.

  Gravegrass clung to his trousers. He pulled
the hundred dollar bill from his pocket and spread it out on the counter. She looked at it and she looked at him. She said: I caint change that.

  That's all I have.

  Well I dont have change for nothin like that.

  Well I'll have to owe you then.

  He took the bill up and put it back in his pocket.

  You'll have to pay, she said. I dont know ye.

  I'll write you a check.

  She just stood there.

  Do you have a counter check?

  I dont have no checks.

  Do you have a paper bag?

  Have what?

  A poke.

  How big of a one did you want? She was rummaging under the counter.

  Any size, said Suttree.

  She raised up with a bag. Thisn here's the biggest I got.

  That's fine. Do you have a pen?

  She had a pen.

  Suttree wrote out an enormous I O U across the face of the bag and signed his name and turned the bag around so she could read it. She took small rimless eyeglasses from her apron and bent over the bag. Suttree laid the pen down and left.

  He kept off the high roads, going by dogpaths through the hobo jungles down along the railroad tracks. A yardman watched him from the baywindow of a caboose, a bitten sandwich upheld in one hand, his jaws moving slowly. He came out by the L&N depot and went up a brickpaved street past the House Hasson warehouse and over a little concrete bridge with plumbingpipe handrails cold and gritty in his palms. Small waters coiling far below about the feet of the viaduct's diamondshaped stanchions. Along a wall of concrete grown with bright green fur. Suttree climbing toward a watered sun.

  He crossed under the Western Avenue viaduct and went up Grand Avenue. A dog went before him at its cambered winking trot. He took off his coat and shook it and put it on again. Ionic order much in evidence in these old streets. Weathercracked columns, plaster capitals clogged shapeless with paint. A dead lot strewn with brickbats and blackened timbers. Walkways of weathered marble, of herringbone brick. The walkway at 1504 where each brick read Knoxville Brick Company, long defunct. Suttree passed under the gray magnolia tree and up the steps to the porch of the tall gray house and in.

  At night he leaned in the octagonal windowbay and looked out over the switching yards and the warehouses like a child in a pulpit in the dark of an empty church. He could hear singing from the Grand Avenue Mission down the street where revelers caroled perhaps perverse and secret deities behind their plywood windowpanes.

  Next evening he took the bus out Magnolia Avenue and stood before the old brick house where he'd gone to school, the untrue glass with black stars stoned through the panes and the wind cutting along in a razory whistle intermittent with the gnashing of weeds in the dark of the lot. He went in by the back door where the cafeteria once had been. The floorboards creaked underfoot, small life scrabbled away. He placed his hand on the newel post and went up the stairs.

  Through old classrooms, the dusty clutter of desks. On the blackboards scrawled obscenities. A derelict school for lechers. Suttree had been sitting at his old desk for some time before he noticed the figure standing in the door.

  This old bedroom in this old house where he'd been taught a sort of christian witchcraft had two doors and Suttree rose and went out the other one. He descended the front steps and went to the fireplace where he lifted back the iron mask and on one knee reached up the chimney throat and took down a small billikin carved from some soft wood and detailed with a child's crayon.

  When he came past the stairway the priest was mounted on the first landing like a piece of statuary. A catatonic shaman who spoke no word at all. Suttree went out the way that he'd come in, crossing the grass toward the lights of the street. When he looked back he could see the shape of the priest in the baywindow watching like a paper priest in a pulpit or a prophet sealed in glass.

  In the spring of his third year on the river there were heavy rains. It rained all through the latter part of March and into April and he had set but one line in the rising river and followed it each day with a cold loathing while the rain fell small and gray for miles upon him. It was cold and damp in the shanty and he kept a fire in the little stove through the bleak afternoons and sat at the table by the window with the lamp lit, gazing out at the swollen river coming down from the gutted upcountry and sliding past with a slaverous mutter and seethe.

  Bearing along garbage and rafted trash, bottles of suncured glass wherein corollas of mauve and gold lie exploded, orangepeels ambered with age. A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily.

  One day a dead baby. Bloated, pulpy rotted eyes in a bulbous skull and little rags of flesh trailing in the water like tissuepaper.

  Oaring his way lightly through the rain among these curiosa he felt little more than yet another artifact leached out of the earth and washed along, draining down out of the city, that cold and grainy shape beyond the rain that no rain could make clean again. Suttree among the leavings like a mote in the floor of a beaker, come summer a bit of matter stunned and drying in the curing mud, the terra damnata of the city's dead alchemy. The fish he raised up from the flood in this season themselves looked stunned.

  He stood hard into the oars to come back against the current. Past the bridge risers where small ugly rips broke on the concrete and the boatshaped upstream face rode in a bone of curling froth. Along this clay shoulder where the river gnawed and pulled with her leathery brown waters.

  In the fluted gullies where the river backed or eddied spoondrift lay in a coffeecolored foam, a curd that draped the varied flotsam locked and turning there, the driftwood and bottles and floats and the white bellies of dead fish, all wheeling slowly in the river's suck and the river spooling past unpawled with a muted seething freighting seaward her silt and her chattel and her dead.

  One morning while he stood on the gallery in the dim early light watching the river he saw an empty skiff go by. Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear, going downriver to founder cumbrously against a pier, list and halt, sidle and grope past with the next wall of the shack coming about and along it like plaster caryatids hung there in a stunned frieze above the licking river the figures of four women and two men, pale, rigid, deathless, wheeling slowly away below the bridge and gone in the mist.

  Suttree watched the transit of this foggy apparition with no surprise. Two days later when he went downriver he saw the shantyboat pulled up under some willows on the south bank below the sand and gravel company. There was a line of wash hung out and a small skiff swung at tether below the mooring. Some coon hides were tacked flat to the wall, bleached a pale cream color. You'd have thought them to be wares but the hides were dry and all but hairless and seemed forgotten.

  Suttree oared past while a group of wide faces watched from a window. When he came back in the afternoon there was a chair on the roof of the shanty and in it a man sleeping. The wash had been taken down and smoke was rising from a stovepipe elbowed through one wall. The skiff was gone.

  As Suttree passed beneath the bridge he saw the skiff coming down. A thin young boy was rowing it. Suttree let one oar trail and lifted a hand in greeting. The boy nodded at him, one eye blueblack and swollen closed, and went on.

  In the morning he went down early and as he passed the houseboat he saw a young girl come out along the little veranda and turn and squat, her skirts gathered in the crooks of her elbows. Through the fog Suttree was presented with a bony pointed rump. She pissed loudly into the river and rose and went in again.

  He was back before noon with his catch. He came up close by the bank and swung around the houseboat. A woman was peering down at him, a stonejawed and apparently gravid slattern resting her belly on
the rim of the washtub and regarding him through clotted rags of hair.

  Howdy, he said.

  She nodded.

  I saw you all come down the other mornin. I live cross the river. He rested an oar under his elbow and pointed.

  She said uh-hunh.

  Suttree smiled. He said: I figured since we were kind of neighbors I ought to stop and say hidy anyway.

  She reached down into the tub and brought something up from the bottom of it. He's asleep, she said.

  The mister is?

  Yep.

  He dipped the oars to stay against the current. You've got a goodsized family, dont you?

  She watched down into the tub. How her face must look back from the dead well of blue washwater, rocking and licking in what shapes. We got four, she said. Three girls. She paused and pushed her nose against her arm and snuffled. And a boy, she said.

  I believe I saw him the other day.

  You aint the one hit him in the eye are ye?

  No mam.

  Somebody hit him in the eye, she said. With a beadle of soapsoftened wood she subdued the grayish rags that stewed in the pot. She lifted something out and wrung it and laid it on a bench.

  Where are you all from?

  We was from up around Mascot.

  I see, he said.

  She glanced down at him and went back to her washing. After a minute she said: Looks like you got you some fish there.

  Yes mam. You all like catfish?

  We eat it some.

  I've got plenty here, if you'd like one for your supper.

  She looked down into the bottom of the skiff. What would you have to have for one? she said.

  He began to sort among the fish. I'll just give you one, he told her.

  Well. I'd rather just to pay ye.

  Here. He stood in the skiff and handed up a sleek fourpounder.

  She took it expertly behind the gills and looked it over. What do I owe ye? she said.

  Not anything.

  Well, let me pay ye.

  I dont want nothin for it.

  Well, she said.

  I run a trotline on down a ways.

  Well.

  I got plenty.

  Well, I better put him in here.