Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  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 b
lah 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.

  He watched her while she sat at the mirror and dried and set her hair, himself consumed in womby lassitude there in the sagging bed, watching her scoop great daubs of cream from a pot and slab it onto her arms and her breasts, her eyes turned to his in the mirror where he lay sipping his drink. She had smeared her face with a sizelike caulking that set up in a clown's alabaster mask, crumbling gently in the lines of her smile, a white powder sifting from the cracks. In this theatrical cosmetic she came to the bed and sat lotuslike clad only in her panties and dressed her heels with a stone, her full thigh arched, she bent intently.

  He bathed and dressed in his new suit and shoes and the neatly folded silk tie and Suttree and his soiled dove descended the shabby stairwell and stepped into a cab at the curbside to take them to dinner. Later they went out to the American Legion and she won over a hundred dollars at the craptable and put it in the top of her stocking, giving him a big whore's wink while the patrons goggled at that outrageous expanse of flesh. She got a little drunk and they danced and she told him she wanted to make love right there on the floor, whispering in his ear and rubbing her cunt on his thigh until he had to take her home.

  In the morning she came up with the papers, still in her nightwear under the raincoat, a jug of cold orange juice and a bottle of aspirin. They sat up in bed together and read the paper and went through the rentals with a pencil. They moved that afternoon.

  Lugging stuff out of the taxi and up the cold high stairwell to the apartment on the second floor, Suttree poking around in the kitchen, looking in the empty refrigerator, the cupboards. Sitting in the airy front room above Laurel Avenue and staring into space, detached, a displaced soul musing on the hiatus between himself and the Suttree moving through these strange quarters.

  The cabman stood fingering the brass snap on the leather change-pouch at his belt. Suttree looked up.

  That's it aint it?

  I hope so.

  Well.

  What do I owe you?

  Two forty.

  Suttree gave him three dollars and sent him down the stairs. She was hanging stuff in the closet. He stood in the doorway and watched her.

  Imagine a closet, she said.

  Imagine.

  He got ice from the refrigerator and fixed them drinks and came into the bedroom with them.

  Is it five oclock yet? she said.

  Of course, said Suttree, clicking the glasses.

  She went in to the bathroom and he stood at the window looking out, the drink in his hand. He could see an old man washing at a sink, pale arms and a small paunch hung in his undershirt. Suttree toasted him a mute toast, a shrug of the glass, a gesture indifferent and almost cynical that as he made it caused him something close to shame.

  Toward the middle of February it grew bitter cold. She went to Chicago and he didnt hear from her for ten days, he thought she'd gone back to her girlfriend. The plumbing froze. He spent long hours in bed, his head hanging over the edge of the covers watching how the purfling of scorpions on the raw and napworn carpet went head and tail. Blue and dusky rose, dirtdulled, a center pattern esoteric and obscure. After a chemical dream, or the dried hand of some eastern adept.

  One morning at Ellis and Ernest, sadly miscast among the scrubbed college children, sitting at the long pink marble counter he ordered coffee and flipped open the paper. There was Hoghead's picture. He was dead. Hoghead was dead in the paper.

  Suttree laid the paper down and stared out at the traffic on Cumberland Avenue this cold bleak forenoon. After a while he read the piece. His name was James Henry. In the old school photo he appeared childlike and puckish, a composition of spots in black and white and gray. How very like the man. He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever.

  It snowed that night. Flakes softly blown in the cold blue lamplight. Snow lay in pale boas along the black treelimbs down Forest Avenue and the snow in the street bore bands of branch and twig, dark fissures that would not snow full. He trudged home in a light fog of alcohol. A thin and distant bell was sounding and he stopped to listen. Something flew. Nameless bird. Suttree turned his face up to the night. The snowflakes came dodging out of the blackness beyond the lamps to settle on his lashes. Snow falling on Knoxville, sifting down over McAnally, hiding the rents in the roofing, draping the sashwork, frosting the coalpiles in the crabbed dooryards. It has covered up the blood and dirt and claggy sleech in gutterways and laid white lattice on the sewer grates. And snow has made cool bowers in the blackened honeysuckle and it has hid the packingcrates in the hobo jungles and wrought enormous pastry rings of trucktires there. Where the creek addles along gorged with offal. Upon whose surface the flakes impinge softly and are gone, Suttree turning up his collar. In the yards a switchengine is working and the white light of the headlamp bores down the rows of iron gray warehouses in a livid phosphorous tunnel through which the snow falls innocently and unburnt.

  The Indian's used shoes creaked in the dry snow like chalk. Over his shoulders he wore a greasy tarpaulin stolen from a donkeyengine at a worksite and his skin was gray with the cold. The snow he stopped to knock from his shoes fell in two broken casts on the hallway floor with the print of the heels and the holes in the shoesoles intact. Leached lines of salt rimed the uppers like creeping frost. He shrugged up the tarp and mounted the dim stairs, a shadow batlike on the flowered wall, a muted creak and cry of tread, a thin clatter of teeth. At the door he breathed on his knuckles and tapped and bent to hear. He tapped again.

  Suttree? he said.

  But his voice was timid and the sleeper within slept deeply and after a while he descended the stairs and went away in the winter night.

  Spring that year came early. There were sunny mornings sitting in the little kitchen drinking coffee and reading the papers. There were flowers in the dooryard, yellow jonquils tottering up through the cinders and loam. She was arrested in New Orleans in early May and he had to wire her five hundred dollars. She came back fat and unchastened. She said that if she ever started to work anywhere bigger than Knoxville would he please kick her ass and little as he liked to promise things he said he would.

  He woke in the light of various hours to find her gone, or going, just returned. Sprawled in the heat with her heavy thighs agawp and sweat lightly beaded on her forehead like the dew of fevered dreams. Light tracery of old razor scars on her inner wrists. Her scarred paunch and peltlet of coiled black kid's hair. He tried the weight of her softly coppled rosebud teat in his palm and she shifted languorously, one foot trapped in a tourniquet of bedsheet.

  Lying on his back he watched the day's shadows lengthen in the room, the blinds drawn, the muted perplex of traffic in the street below fading slowly. He'd rise from the bed and sit by the window like a fugitive and watch through the dusty slats the deepening eve and the wandlike colored lights come up. He'd shave and dress and go down for the paper, a walk in the streets. To come back and lie on the bed because this room was cooler. Reading the paper mindlessly and listening to the radio with its inane announcements. She seemed always bearing her douchebag about with the hose bobbling obscenely and the bag flapping like a great bladder. Her ablutions were endless. In her bright metal haircurlers she looked like the subject of bizarre experiments upon the human brain. And she was growing fatter. She said: How'd you like to live in a whorehouse? You'd eat too.

  He'd go for walks, be gone for hours, come back to eyes huge and tearful or speckled with rage.

  Follow now days of drunkenness and small drama, of cheap tears and recrimination and half-so testaments of love renewed.

  In the secondbest restaurants of the small metropolis and beer taverns dim and rank with musk as brewery cellars. Where others kept their own counsel and nothing short of mayhem raised
an eyebrow ever.

  He surveyed the face in the mirror, letting the jaw go slack, eyes vacant. How would he look in death? For there were days this man so wanted for some end to things that he'd have taken up his membership among the dead, all souls that ever were, eyes bound with night.

  Climbing again these stairs with their tacked runners of worn carpet, dark varnished wainscot panels finely veined like old paintings, the flowered paper, the light in the ceiling thirty feet above like some dim nebula viewed from the pit. An inexplicable picture in a gilt frame, two birds composed of actual feathers dyed bizarrely like hats and defying forever the orders of taxonomy. Down the hallway to the door with no name where he lived.

  He passed the car almost every day going to and from town. It sat in the front row of Ben Clark's lot and it looked vicious and barbaric and feline crouched there among the family sedans. These warm days they had the top down and leaning on the wooden sill you could hang your head over the cockpit and drink in a heady smell of rich leather and admire the cluster of black dial faces in the dashboard like an aircraft and the fine red carpeting to match the hide of the seats and the polished burl walnut and the silver jaguar's head snarling from the center of the steering wheel.

  Let me fix you up with that today, said the smiling salesman.

  Suttree stood up and stepped back and ran his eye along the sleek cream lacquer flank of the thing. What year is it? he said.

  Nineteen fifty. Just got twenty-two thousand on her. Spare's never been on the ground.

  Suttree felt himself being slowly anesthetized. The silver wire wheels gleamed in the good spring sun.

  Look here, said the salesman, lifting the decklid.

  Inside the pristine tire so told. And little tools in a fitted case.