Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Next he had the long bonnet raised and they walked around it looking in at the polished aluminum camshaft covers and the neat little pots that housed the carburetor dampers.

  Crank it up, called the salesman, holding open the little door.

  Suttree deep in the leather cockpit turned the key, the fuelpump ticked. He put the gearstick in neutral and pulled the starter. It sounded like a motorboat.

  He looked up. What do you want for it?

  The little car will go for two bills, said the salesman, leaning confidentially on the door.

  Suttree blipped the throttle a couple of times and shut it down. The salesman stood up. Take it for a ride if you like, he said. But Suttree was climbing out. He shut the door and turned and looked down into the car again.

  The top's perfect, the salesman was saying, unbuttoning the canvas boot that covered it.

  It's all right. Dont bother. I'm going to bring my old lady down to look at it.

  It wont be here long my friend.

  You may be right, said Suttree.

  When she came back from Huntsville she had six hundred dollars. He put her in a cab and they went downtown. I've got something I want to show you, he said.

  She walked around it and looked at it and she looked up at Suttree. Well, she said. It's beautiful.

  We've got enough money to buy it.

  Bullshit.

  I'm serious.

  She looked at him and at the car and at him again. Well, she said. Let's buy the fucking thing then.

  He sought out the salesman while she looked it over. He found him in the little wooden box of an office where a fan stirred the humid air about. He was shuffling through papers and talking on the telephone. He nodded to Suttree and held up a finger. Suttree leaned in the door.

  Right, said the salesman, hanging up the telephone. Okay. You ready to take the little car today?

  Suttree eased himself into a chair. Look, he said, I've got a little over eighteen hundred dollars. Can we do business?

  How much over?

  Maybe eighteen and a half.

  Eighteen and a half.

  Yes.

  You want the car?

  Yes.

  My friend, the little car is yours.

  They drove to Asheville North Carolina and spent four days at the Grove Park Inn, a cool room high in the old rough pile of rocks and lunch each noon on the sunny tiled terrace overlooking the golf course and the mountains beyond in range on range of hazy blue. They went about the premises leisurely, these apprentice imposters, or sat by the pool while she told outrageous lies to the other guests. In the cool evenings they cruised through the mountains in the roadster and came back to have drinks in the lounge where a small orchestra played music from another era and older couples twostepped quietly over the dimlit dancefloor.

  The summer passed in monotone, days run on days. The apartment was hot and unventilated. Lying in the damp sheets with sweat trickling coldly in the folds of his sated skin he fell victim to a vast inertia. She came naked through the room bearing glasses of iced tea and they sat in the barred and tepid gloom behind drawn blinds and sipped and held the cold glass to their faces. She lay there pale and streaked with sweat, wearing a dreamy cat's look, one leg cocked obscenely, the dark foiled hair below her belly matted, dewbeads nesting there. She placed a cool hand across the nape of his neck. A car started up in the street below and pulled away. In the distance a radio. They lay like fallen statuary. Suttree held a piece of ice against his tongue till it was numb with cold, then leaned and licked her nipple.

  You son of a bitch, she said, smiling down at him.

  Sunday they drove down to Concord, walked by the lake, scaled slates over the brown water. They came upon a fisherman who showed them his small catch of sauger. The water before him floated with amorphic patches of ambergris where he'd spat. They spoke of fish and weather and the old man looked them over and slyly brought forth a whiskeyjar and offered it. Suttree wiped the rim with his sleevecuff and drank. The fisherman looked at her and gestured slightly with the jar but she smiled no. He nodded gravely, spat and shifted his chaw and drank and hid the jar back beneath his raincoat.

  I like a drink, he said, I aint no drunkard.

  Suttree nodded.

  I's married to one would suck the bottom out of the jar. Looky here.

  He showed them a limp photograph of a bureau in a cheap room where five empty fifth bottles stood. I carry it daily, he said. Whenever I get to wishin her back I take it out and look at it. You'd be amazed at what you can learn to yearn for.

  He turned to his lines and spoke no more. The floats rode serenely in their half shadows. An osprey was going down the lake. They wished the old man luck.

  He showed her cores of flint jutting from the mud and he found an arrowhead knapped from the same black stone and gave it to her. Out there on a mudspit white gulls. Mute little treestumps on twisted legs where the shore had washed from their roots, darkly fluted, water-hewn, bulbed with gross knots. Their grotesque shadows fell long upon the silty water of the bay and down the beach each rock and pebble lay in its own dark lick of shadow so that the strand looked spattered with thrown ink.

  I've never seen one before, she said, turning the arrowhead in her hand.

  They're everywhere. In the winter when the water is down you can find them.

  In the last of the day they walked out on the sandspit, their shoes sinking in the dry loam. He fetched up from among bonewhite driftwood and beachwrack a huge blue musselshell wasted paper thin. She carried it carefully, cradling inside the arrowhead and a strangely veined pebble she'd found that looked back like an eye. The gulls rose by ones, by pairs, all flew, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun white on their cupped underwings and their feathers riffling in the breeze they rode. They went down the lake, balanced on dipping wings, necks craned.

  Suttree knelt in the sand and skipped a stone. A curving track of ringshapes. The far shore lay deeply shadowed. The siltbars delicately sutured with the tracks of wharfrats. She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear. Her soft breast against his arm. Why then this loneliness?

  On Simm's hill they stood looking down at the lights of the city. While the stars scudded and the sedge writhed all about them in the dark. A niggard beacon winked above the black and sleeping hills. In the distance the lights of the fairground and the ferriswheel turning like a tiny clockgear. Suttree wondered if she were ever a child at a fair dazed by the constellations of light and the hurdygurdy music of the merrygoround and the raucous calls of the barkers. Who saw in all that shoddy world a vision that child's grace knows and never the sweat and the bad teeth and the nameless stains in the sawdust, the flies and the stale delirium and the vacant look of solitaries who go among these garish holdings seeking a thing they could not name.

  At midnight the fireworks went up. Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths. When it was over he asked her if she was ready to leave. He could feel her breathing under the sweater she wore and he thought she was cold. She turned and put her face against his chest and he held her. She was crying, he didnt know why. Down there the city seemed frozen in a blue void. Senseless patterns like the tracks of animalcules on a slide. After a while she said yes and took his hand and they started down into Knoxville again.

  Before cold weather came this all was ended. She had not been out of town for two months, then three. The figures in the savings account book began to unreel backwards. She spoke of getting a job. She drank. They argued.

  One drunken Sunday morning at Floyd Fox's, a bootleg shack on a deserted stretch of Redbud Drive, she was taken with what seemed a kind of fit. She screamed at him half coherently and made weird gestures in the air, some threatening, some absurd. He tried to get her into the car. It had rained and they slid about and feinted in the slick red clay while drinkers from McAnally or Vestal sat on crates or rusty metal chairs and w
atched.

  I didnt know they had dancin out here at the Redbud Room, called out a wit from the crowd.

  He got her into the car, feet globed with mud. They swerved out of the driveway through deep ribbons of mud and onto the mudstained blacktop road. She sat silent and sullen, an occasional eerie smile crossing her lips.

  They were driving up Island Home Pike toward town when she grabbed the gearstick and tried to force it into reverse. The motor whined, gears ratcheted unmeshed with a thin squawk. Suttree grabbed her wrist and held it and she raised one foot and kicked the knobs off the radio.

  You crazy bitch, he said.

  But now she slumped in the seat for leverage and kicked out with both feet. The righthand windshield went blind white. She kicked again and it fell out onto the hood and slid off into the street.

  He wheeled in to the curb. She was screaming at him something senseless.

  You dizzy cunt, he said.

  She looked at him almost soberly. It's just a car, she said. It can be fixed.

  Across the street old faces at windows watching. Suttree stared at the windshield wiper hanging inside across the dashboard. The twisted stumps of the radio knobs. He looked at her. You're a pain in the ass, he said.

  She raised her foot, a huge petulant child, and kicked the rearview mirror askew.

  He grabbed her ankle. Quit it, he said.

  She was sobbing drunkeniy. You son of a bitch, she said. You couldnt say: It's okay honey, or say, or say ... I guess you're so fucking perfect goddamn you anyway.

  A police car pulled up without a sound. Two officers got out, one from either side.

  What's the trouble here, said Suttree to himself as they approached, wishing a fissure to open beneath them and swallow all.

  The officers looked down at Suttree and his whore.

  What's the trouble here?

  Suttree gestured helplessly. She got mad and kicked out the windshield, he said.

  One of the officers was leaning on the roof, Suttree could see the shape of the elbow in the canvas inches above his head. The other was standing with his arms folded. They didnt say anything. Nor Suttree. All seemed to be waiting for another party to arrive.

  Finally the officer leaning on the roof said: You got papers on this car?

  Suttree leaned and opened the little wooden glovebox door. He shuffled through papers and handed the title to the policeman. The policeman said: Let me see your license.

  He got out his billfold and offered the little card up. The officer inspected these documents and handed them back and straightened up. Is that the windshield back there?

  Suttree stuck his head out of the window. Yessir, he said.

  Well get it out of the street. Then you'd better get off the street yourself.

  Yessir. I will.

  They glanced at the car again and shook their heads and got into the cruiser and pulled away. Suttree went up the street and fetched the glass from where it lay limp and shattered in the gutter and brought it back and put it in the trunk and got in and started the motor and pulled away. They were going out Cumberland when she began to tear up the money. He heard a handful of it rip and looked in time to see a green confetti swirl away in the slipstream.

  Shit, he said. He cut the wheel and went gliding into a fillingstation. There in the Sunday morning boredom old men were watching out through the plateglass window for something to occur. Here came an exotic automobile coasting in with tattered greenbacks blowing from the window and fluttering in the street, whole handfuls of it, who knows what denominations.

  She was sitting there ripping it up and crying and saying that this money would never do anybody any good. The old faces were pressed against the glass, flat bloodless noses. Two small boys were coming across the street at a dead run. Suttree was out and gathering up pieces of tens and twenties from the paving. She had climbed from the car and stood with her hair disarranged, swaying slightly, smiling. The boys were scrabbling in the gutter and watching him like cats. Suttree went around and took the keys out of the car and started to close the door and then he stopped and put the keys back in the car and walked on out across the tarmac to the street. She was shouting at him some half drunken imprecations, all he could make out was his name. He seemed to have heard it all before and he kept on going.

  It was still early morning when he made his way down the steep path by the ruins of an old wall. Some ancient city overgrown here. In a sere field worn clothes the wind has tattered hung from a hatted cross. Down there the littoral of siltstained rocks, old plates of paving and chunks of concrete sprouting growths of rusted iron rod. He'd even seen old slabs of masonry screed with musselshells here in the weeds. Coming down the concrete steps with the mangled iron handrail and past old brick cisterns filled with rubble. Past the stone abutment of an earlier bridge on the river and the last ramshackle house and the brown curbstones that had once lined the main street and the old cobblestones and pavingbricks and blackened beams with their axed flats and their mortices, all this detritus slid from the city on the hill.

  He had passed the madman's house without regard and the old man must have slacked his vigil for he'd almost reached the street before he heard him cry.

  Ah he's back, God spare his blackened soul, another hero home from the whores. Come to cool his heels in the river with the rest of the sewage. Sunday means nothing to him. Infidel. Back for the fishing are ye? God himself dont look too close at what lies on that river bottom. Fit enough for the likes of you. Ay. He knows it's Sunday for he's drunker than normal. It'll take more than helping old blind men cross the street to save you from the hell you'll soon inhabit. Suttree went on toward the street with his fingers in his ears.

  Howard Clevinger raised one eyebrow at his appearance in the store. Thought you'd left town, he said.

  I'm back.

  A thin and fragrant arm descended on Suttree's shoulder in a taffeta whisper, a cufflink coined from a bicycle reflector. An African mask in meretricious harlequinade and ivory teeth beset with gold. Hey baby, where you been so long?

  Hello John. Just around.

  I been out of town myself.

  Where've you been?

  I's in Lexington. I seen James Herndon. Sweet Evenin Breeze. She just beautiful, for her age.

  Who's the oldest?

  Oldest what?

  You or her. Him. It.

  Hush. That thing is sixty.

  How old are you, John?

  Trippin Through The Dew ignored the question. He said: You know what they goin to put in the paper when she die? Big headlines.

  What's that.

  They done got it all ready. Sweet Evenin Breeze Blows No More.

  Suttree grinned. The invert was bent double holding himself, his face squinched. He whinnied like a she horse.

  What are they going to say about you John?

  Sheeit. I aint goin to die.

  Maybe not, said Suttree.

  The houseboat lay half sunken by one corner and the windows were stoned out and the front door was gone altogether. He entered a scene of old memories and new desolations. Torn playing cards and halfpint whiskey bottles broken in the floor, the stove crammed tight to the maw with trash. He crossed the tilted floor and righted the foodlocker from where it lay on its face among broken glass and rags.

  By afternoon he had the place swept out and the mattress on the roof for airing, he sat on the veranda in the sun with a glasscutter and shaped old panes purloined from an empty warehouse and with them glazed the naked sashes of his house. In the days that followed he tarred the seams in the roof and carried on his back a door from a razing beyond First Creek and sawed it down to fit and hung it.

  Lastly standing off in the skiff on a warm October morning he fended off from the sheer wall of the dredger's hull and reached down the fireaxe handed him. The drums when he stove them filled and wheezed and sputtered and went slowly from sight in the river. He jostled the new ones into place and called up to the pilothouse. The winch creaked
and the houseboat corner settled. Suttree unhooked the cables as soon as there was play enough and they went swinging up toward the deck.

  What do I owe you? he called, passing up the axe.

  The deckman jerked his thumb toward the pilothouse where the captain watched from his high window.

  What do I owe you?

  The captain spat. I dont know, he said. What's it worth?

  I dont know. I dont want to make you mad.

  Would you say five dollars?

  I'd say that was fair enough.

  He handed up the money to the deckhand. The dredger began to back. Great boils of muddy water churned and broke. Suttree raised a hand and the old pilot rang a small bell. Rafts of straw rose and fell and the ratholes in the bank sucked and popped and the dredger moved out, the deckhand leaning on the rail smoking a cigarette and watching toward the shore.

  He bought three five hundred yard spools of nylon trotline and spent two days piecing them with their droppers and leads and hooks. The third day he put out his lines and that night in his shanty with the oil lamp lit and his supper eaten he sat in the chair listening to the river, the newspaper open across his lap, and an uneasy peace came over him, a strange kind of contentment. Small graylooking moths orbited the hot cone of glass before him. He set back the plate with the dimestore silver and folded his hands on the table. A beetle kept crashing into the windowscreen and dropping to the deck below to whirr and rise and crash again.

  A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him:

  Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?

  They'd listen to my death.

  No final word?

  Last words are only words.

  You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.

  I'd say I was not unhappy.

  You have nothing.

  It may be the last shall be first.

  Do you believe that?

  No.

  What do you believe?