Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  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.

  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 watched.

  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.