Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  Harkee stranger, cried the man. A turtle for your soup.

  Stranger let me pass for I am weary.

  Fifty cents and your choice of the best, ye'll not buy cheaper.

  Outbound I am, beyond all wares.

  It's hard else could bring you here.

  This is no path of my choosing.

  Nor mine.

  Leeway and ease, the night is coming.

  The turtlemonger held forth his sack. Fine turkles, fat turkles. Turkles for the stew.

  The dreamer would pass but he has let fall the long dark lilac iron of his riflebarrel to bar the way. An outlaw tollsman reeking of woodsmoke and swamp rot and seeking some chiminage dearer than a path so dark could warrant. Or any path at all.

  These be special turkles. Dont pass on without you've give em your consideration.

  To this the traveler did consent. The vendor's face grew crafty. The wet sack collapsing aclatter on the ground. He turns back the mouth.

  Those are not turtles. Oh God they're not turtles.

  Suttree had half reared up in the bed, his swollen tongue gagging his cries. He fell back. Voices spoke beyond a wall. He saw with icy prescience the deathcart before the door, menials entering with a pallet to haul away his puling body and surely the stink of the unshriven dead is a dire stench rising to affront the nostrils of God. Impenitents snatched from the midst of their leprous revels, hard justice. Suttree saw the General pass atop his coalwagon, a paler horse in the traces. He lifted a hand. No fingers to the glove he wore, his cart made no sound. They receded into the vapors till there was just the orange light from the lantern where it swung by its bail from the tailboard.

  Down Front Street streetlamps marked the way with measured rings of chromeblue light. The sleepfast shacks lay rotting, dusky sleepers lay within. The dooryard flowers half awake in the lamplight and the city's neon constellations emerging on the night, a pastel alpenglow in which the dust of demolition rose from the jagged ruins of the Cumberland Hotel, the Lyric Theatre.

  At the door of the Huddle folk from the looms of McAnally are convened. First among these is a beardless Celt with spattled skin and rebate teeth. Three eyes in his head he has and he is covered over all with orange hair like unto a Cathay ape. At his elbow a stripling with a small and foxy face let into the lower part of a bulbous skull. His towcolored hair is cropped and stands wispily erect and seen from behind he most resembles an enormous dandelion. Suttree smiles to see such friends. The murdered are first to embrace him. Callahan's heavy arm about his shoulder, grinding the scapulae. He speaks through the flarey airholes of his boneless nose to the silverhaired and senatoriallooking barman.

  Hey Hatmaker. Tell Hoghead and Donald and Byrd and Bobby and Hugh and Conrad and all of em that they aint barred.

  They're dead.

  Whoops of laughter among the watchers at the door.

  Well you wouldnt bar a dead man would ye?

  The tavernkeeper folded his towel and wiped the long mahogony bar. He said that he would not. Suttree among the rabble entered in. Outside the junkman stood alone.

  Coin of the realm, coin of the realm, muttered Mr Hatmaker, unmaddened by mercurial bloodliens.

  Coin, called Big Frig. Are you holding, fendervendor?

  Harvey shuffles forward tugging at his changepurse. A few pieces of Denver silver. Avowing blind faith in deaf deities. He takes a stool at the bar. A fishbowl. He orders.

  Big Frig nudges the junkman and leans with a huge horsewink. And make it light on the fish.

  Blind Richard at the bar, his eyes batting in the beerlight and the clabbered matter in his sockets shining with a bluish cast leans forward and and takes hold of his mug in both hands. His ears remark the voices in his shoreless void. Alice is eyeing the room with contempt. When the moon shines down upon my Wabash then you'll recognize your Indiana home. The whores at the oval table raise their steins. Names of a thousand malefactors and melancholies incised in the black formica there. Faye wears in her garter a glass syringe. I'd give a hog a rimjob to get high, she says. And have, says Shirley. On film, says Rosie.

  The queers in the corner booth turn one to the other in shocked amusement. Their spectacles wink small semaphores. Above them in the gutted cage of an electric fan and trapped in a bias of smokegorged light the execrator crouches and drools and turns to and back.

  I didnt do it they only said I did. Twas a little jewdoctor come in the night with tailor's shears.

  Oh do hush, says a languorous faggot glancing upward.

  Foul perverts one and sundry. Silkbedizen pizzlelickers. Roaming the world. Slaking their hideous gorges with jissom. Oh I shall not be loath to tell. I'll bewray the tribe of them to the high almighty God who ledgers up our deeds in a leatherbound daybook. With marbled endpapers, I'm told.

  Harrogate in morningcoat stands easily upon the decked and buntinged bar. He wears a small flag in his lapel. Friends, he says. I come from humble circumstance and rose up in the world by my own efforts. And if I'm to leave my footprints in the sands of time let it be with a pair of workshoes.

  Someone was tugging at Suttree's sleeve. A small nun with a bitten face, a smell of scorched black muslin and her dead breasts brailed up in the knitted vest she wore. She tugged with little soricine claws at the bones in his elbow.

  Cornelius you come away from here this minute.

  Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.

  I was drunk, cried Suttree. Seized in a vision of the archetypal patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion.

  An orderly was going along the outer hall with mop and bucket. He paused for feet to pass. Clicking down the corridor. Voices. And beyond these sounds like the natter and babble of the damned a muted bedlam of voices that were no right voices. Suttree's hands clutched the stenciled sheets.

  Did you hear him a while ago?

  Shoo. I never heard such stuff.

  He's out of his head.

  Your head, said Suttree from the depths.

  Lord is he awake?

  No. Help me turn him, we got to take his temperature.

  A sepia crone darted out from under the lower corner of his right eye and cackled and ducked back. Suttree smiled. Dont pack me, ladies. I'm not gone yet.

  Hairy aint it?

  Oh hush, Wanita. I'd be ashamed.

  Pussy, said Suttree from a new place. Weet pussy. Sweet giggling ensued. His penis rose enormous from between his legs, a delicious spasm and there unfolded from the end of it a little colored flag on a wooden stem, who knows what country?

  Lightly tinctured, a flavor of sunlight lay in the room. Water dripped in a bowl. He could hear the flat detonation of tennis shoes along a pavement beyond a wall in a courtyard in another kind of kingdom.

  Late in the afternoon he rose and wobbled about the room on naked bony legs, a coarse cotton shift just covering his shanks, some strings dangling. He found a sink in the corner of the room and hung by the taps with his face in the bowl and cold water running over his smoking skull. Blood hammered through bearing bad news. He raised up drip
ping and urinated a few drops painfully into the sink. He looked about the room. Two other beds, both empty. A steel cart with enameled bedpans. He had lifted his nightie and was palming water over his shrunken gut when a nurse entered the room. He turned. They made their way toward each other, reeling across the floor with outstretched arms.

  I've got you, said Suttree.

  What were you doing?

  Bellycooling. Do I know you?

  Be careful.

  Listen, said Suttree. We were never promised that our flesh, that our flesh ...

  Hush now. Come on.

  I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls lonely.

  Here we go.

  He paused with one knee in the iron bed. He looked up into an uncertain face. It crumbled away grayly, a dusty hag's mask. He lay back. Sheets clammy with salt damp. They clove to him like windings. She tightened the bed while he fanned his belly with the skirt of his gown.

  Quit that, she said.

  I will not, he said.

  She covered him and went away. He lay half waking in the heat, floating like a vast medusa in tropic seas while at his ear he heard sometimes the curious invocations attendant to his case, two hundred milligrams, good deal of fluid in the pleura....

  His dreams were of houses, their cellars and attics. Ultimately of this city in the sea.

  Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn. There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted maid all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all is changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. And some said that the girl who bathed her swollen belly in the stone pool in the garden last evening was the author of this wonder they attended. And a maid bearing water in a marble jar came down from the living frieze toward the dreamer with eyes restored black of core and iris brightly painted attic blue and she moved toward him with a smile.

  Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids.

  Miserere mei, Deus ...

  His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad.

  The priest's lamptanned and angular face leaned over him. The room was candlelit and spiced with smoke. He closed his eyes. A cool thumb crossed his soles with unction. He lay aneled. Like a rapevictim.

  I am familiar with the burial rites of the nameless and the unclaimed.

  What is it? said the priest.

  Well may he wonder, praetor to a pederastie deity.

  The priest wiped his fingers with bits of bread and rose. By candlelight he put away his effects in a little fitted case and left bearing the candle and followed by a nun and Suttree alone in the dark with his death and who will come to weep the grave of an alias? Or lay one flower down.

  He dreamed of a race at the poles who rode on sleds of walrus hide and rucked up horn and ivory all drawn by dogs and bristling with lances and harpoon spears, the hunters shrouded in fur, slow caravans against the late noon winter sunset, against the rim of the world, whispering over the blue snow with their sledloads of piled meat and skins and viscera. Small bloodstained hunters drifting like spores above the frozen chlorine void, from flower to flower of bright vermilion gore across the vast boreal plain.

  Down the night world of his starved mind cool scarves of fishes went veering, winnowing the salt shot that rose columnar toward rifts in the ice overhead. Sinking in a cold jade sea where bubbles shuttled toward the polar sun. Shoals of char ribboned off brightly and the ocean swell heaved with the world's turning and he could see the sun go bleared and fade beyond the windswept panes of ice. Under a waste more mute than the moon's face, where alabaster seabears cruise the salt and icegreen deeps.

  When he woke there were footsteps in the room. Shapes crossed between the light and his thin eyelids. He was going again in a corridor through rooms that never ceased, by formless walls unordered unadorned and slightly moist and warm and through soft doors with valved and dripping architraves and regions wet and bluish like the inward parts of some enormous living thing. A small soul's going. By floodlight through the universe's renal regions. Pale phagocytes drifting over, shadows and shapes through the tubes like the miscellany in a waterdrop. The eye at the end of the glass would be God's.

  Suttree saw the faces of the living bend. He closed his eyes. Gray geometric saurians lay snapping in a pit. Far away stood a gold pagoda with a little flutterblade that spun in the wind. He knew that he was not going there. He was awake for days. No one knew. He touched a hand attending him and smiled at its withdrawing. The freaks and phantoms skulked away beyond the cold white plaster of the ceiling. A tantric cat that loped forever in a funhouse corridor. He'd see them again on the day of his death.

  One morning the priest came. The bed tilted. Suttree's body ran on it saclike and invertebrate, his drained members cooling on the sheets.

  Would you like to confess? said the priest.

  I did it, said Suttree.

  A quick smile.

  I'd like some wine.

  Oh you cant have any wine, said a nursevoice.

  The priest bent and opened his little leather case and took out a cruet. You had a close call, he said.

  All my life. I did.

  He tipped winedrops from the birdtongue spout down Suttree's throat. Suttree closed his eyes to savor it.

  Do you have any more?

  Just a drop. Not too much, I dont think.

  That works, Suttree said.

  Are you feeling better?

  Yes.

  God must have been watching over you. You very nearly died.

  You would not believe what watches.

  Oh?

  He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.

  Is that what you learned?

  I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.

  I see, said the priest.

  Suttree shook his head. No, he said. You dont.

  The days were long and lonely, no one came.

  He watched birds come and go in the tree beyond the window, like a memory from some childhood scene, dim its purpose.

  He was given no food. A strange sour potion to drink. A nurse who came to catheterize him. He'd lain for hours with his cock hanging down the cool throat of a battered tin pitcher.

  Catheterina, he said.

  My name is Kathy.

  We've got to stop meeting like this.

  Hush now. Can you lift up some? Lift up some.

  Try to control yourself. Damn.

  You dont even have a temperature so I know this is all put on.

  I hear water running.

  Hush.

  I never saw a lovelier ass.

  I never knew anybody to get sexy being catheterized.

  Will you marry me?

  Sure.

  One night as he lay there he felt suddenly strong enough to rise. He thought he'd dreamed of doing so. He eased his feet over the edge of the bed and stood. He tottered across the room and
rested against the wall and came back. And again. He felt giddy.

  The next night he went down the corridor. I feel like an angel, he told an old lady with a bucket whom he passed. There was no one about. A porter nodded at the desk. Suttree went out the door.

  Down the street in his nightshirt till he came to a phone booth. No coins blocked away in there. He had a tag with the name Johnson on it pinned to the front of him and he took it off and laid it on the little metal shelf beneath the phone and he straightened out the pin and lifted the receiver from the hook. He worked the pin through the insulation of the cord and grounded the end of it against the metal of the coinslot. After a few tries he got a dial tone and he dialed 21505.

  Carlights washed across this figure in nightwear crouched in his glass outhouse. He dropped to the floor of the booth. A reek of stale piss. The number was ringing. Suttree wondered what time it might be. It rang for some time.

  Hello.

  J-Bone.

  Bud? That you?

  Can you come and get me?

  As they descended into McAnally Suttree let his head fall back on the musty plush of the old car seat.

  You want some whiskey, Bud? We can get some.

  No thanks.

  You okay?

  Yeah. I'd just like maybe a drink of water.

  Mr Johnson like to left us didnt you Mr Johnson?

  So they say. Who put the priest on me?

  They said you was dyin. I came up last week and you didnt know nothin. I had a little drink hid away too.

  Suttree patted J-Bone's knee, his eyes shut. Old J-Bone, he said.

  I think you're a lowlife son of a bitch for not bringin us one of them, said Junior.

  He opened one eye. One of what?

  Them slick little nighties.

  Piss on you.

  Old Suttree's thinner than Boneyard, said J-Bone.

  Old Suttree's all right, said Suttree.

  They seemed a long time going. Down over the pocked and gutted streets under random pools of lamplight, blue jagged bowls moth-blown that reeled along the upper window rim by dim strung lightwires. Pale concrete piers veered off, naked columns of some fourth order capped with a red steel frieze. New roads being laid over McAnally, over the ruins, the shelled facades and walls standing in crazed shapes, the mangled iron firestairs dangling, the houses halved, broke open for the world to see. This naked spandrel clinging someway to sheer wallpaper and mounting upward to terminate in nothingness and night like the works at Babel.