Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Or cold mornings in the Market Lunch after serving early Mass with J-Bone. Coffee at the counter. Rich smell of brains and eggs frying. Old men in smoky coats and broken boots hunkered over plates. A dead roach beneath a plastic cakebell. Lives proscribed and doom in store, doom's adumbration in the smoky censer, the faint creak of the tabernacle door, the tasteless bread and draining the last of the wine from the cruet in a corner and counting the money in the box. This venture into the world of men rich with vitality, these unwilling churched ladling cream into their cups and watching the dawn in the city, enjoying the respite from their black clad keepers with their neat little boots, their spectacles, the deathreek of the dark and half scorched muslin that they wore. Grim and tireless in their orthopedic moralizing. Filled with tales of sin and unrepentant deaths and visions of hell and stories of levitation and possession and dogmas of Semitic damnation for the tacking up of the paraclete. After eight years a few of their charges could read and write in primitive fashion and that was all.

  Suttree looked up at the ceiling where a patriarchal deity in robes and beard lurched across the cracking plaster. Attended by thunder, by fat infants with dovewings grown from their shoulderbones. He lowered his head to his chest. He slept.

  A priest shook him gently. He looked up into a bland scented face.

  Were you waiting for confession?

  No.

  The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said.

  Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman was going along the altar rail with a dusting rag. He struggled to his feet. No, he said. You dont know me.

  The priest stepped back, inspecting his clothes, his fishstained shoes.

  I just fell asleep a minute. I was resting.

  The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God's house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said.

  It's not God's house.

  I beg your pardon?

  It's not God's house.

  Oh?

  Suttree waved his hand vaguely and stepped past the priest and went down the aisle. The priest watched him. He smiled sadly, but a smile for that.

  The ragman laboring up beneath the mound of ripe bedding in which he had entombed himself for sleep looked like a melted candle. He sat cowled and scowling out upon the new day. A draft of dank air went among his silken chinwhiskers and a faint miasma rose off of him like heat from a summer road.

  Now he hobbled about in his ragged underwear with his withered and rickety shanks trembling, gathering his clothes in one hand and poking among the mounds of paper for dry ones with which to start his fire. The sound of morning traffic upon the bridge beat with the dull echo of a dream in his cavern and the ragman would have wanted a sager soul than his to read in their endless advent auguries of things to come, the specter of mechanical proliferation and universal blight. Two fishermen passed along the river path, misty figures going silently save for the fragile rattling of their canes, lifting hands toward him where he stood with his palms spread above a thin and heatless spire of smoke, the rank earthy smell of the barren mud beneath the bridge rife with the morning damp, the river passing smoky and silent and overhead in the arches of the bridge the inane and sporadic clapping of pigeons setting forth into the day.

  He mumbled and massaged his hands above the fire. He took his kettle to the river and dipped it full of water and came back. The mist was running off the river in little tongues and lapping eddyplaces and there was hope of sunlight somewhere beyond the eastern murk.

  He went with his despair through the warrens of the city towing his kindlingwood cart with a sound in those lightless corridors like guts rumbling.

  In the belly of an iron trashbin big enough to hold a pokergame he sorted out mementos all the morning long. Indemnified bottles cast off by the idle rich. Redeemable at two cents per. Newsprint for baling. Useless bones. A dead rat, a broken broom, part of an inkpen. A side of gangrenous bacon filled with skippers. The wreck of a fruitcrate which his eyes saw as kindling, salvageable, saleable. A passing truck muted out the footsteps of the kitchen boy from the Sanitary Lunch. The old man felt the door above him darken and looked up with eyes terrible to see the round mouth of a swillcan tipping. He leaped back flailing and was upended by a turtling box. A lapful of lettuce and old bread, nothing worse. The can rattled and clanged. In the distance a trolley answered. The old man appeared in the door of the bin like some queer revenant rising in smokeless athanasia from the refuse to croak a slew of bitter curses out upon the world but the kitchen boy didnt even look back.

  I went down this river in the fall of ought one with a carnival dont ast me why. I followed it two year. I seen street preachers come off the circuit in the early summer and bark and shill with the best of em and go back to preachin in the fall. We went to Tallahassee Florida. They was a bunch of loggers come off the river at Chattanooga with us went into town and got drunk we had to wait the train on em. They'd done chained the locomotive to the rails with logchains. We never left out of there till five in the mornin. Had two boxcars loaded with old carny gear. We seen a feller hung in Rome Georgia stood up there on the back of a springwagon and told em all to go to hell he never done it. They drove that wagon out from under him he turned black in the face as a nigger.

  Suttree smiled. Is that where you learned ventriloquism?

  Where's that?

  In the carnival.

  No.

  I see, said Suttree.

  I seen strange things in my time. I seen that cyclome come through here where it went down in the river it dipped it dry you could see the mud and stones in the bottom of it naked and fishes layin there. It picked up folks' houses and set em down again in places where they'd never meant to live. They was mail addressed to Knoxville fell in the streets of Ringgold Georgia. I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death.

  He might hear you, Suttree said.

  I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter.

  No one wants to die.

  Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of livin.

  Would you give all you own?

  The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It wont be long, he said. An old man's days are hours.

  And what happens then?

  When?

  After you're dead.

  Dont nothin happen. You're dead.

  You told me once you believed in God.

  The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.

  What would you say to him?

  Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.

  Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?

  The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.

  In the summer of his second year in the city Harrogate began to tunnel toward the vaults underground where the city's wealth was kept. By day in the dark of dripping caverns, stone bowels whereon was founded the city itself, holding his lantern before him, a bloodcolored troglodyte stooped and muttering down foul corridors, assaying vectors by a stolen scout compass that spun inanely in this nether region so gravid with seam and lode. Coming from his day's labors slavered over with a gray paste that on contact with the outer air began to cure up and flake away leaving on his skin and on his clothing a dull cast of claydust so that he looked like something that had been smoked, his eyes collared up in cups of grime, the red rims raw as wounds.

  Summer was full on and the nights hot. It
was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs. Coming up Henley Street one morning he was amazed to see a truck fallen through the paving. Settled on an enormous cracked asphalt plate some five feet below grade with a ring of spectators gathered about it and the driver climbing from the hole swearing and laughing.

  I reckon once a feller got in under there he could go anywheres he took a notion right in under the ground there couldnt he?

  I dont know, Gene. There's lots of cave under there. Suttree was pulling a wire minnowbucket from the bottom of the river by a long cord. He swung it dripping to the rail and opened the top and lifted out two beers and let the cage back down. He opened the beers and handed one to Harrogate and leaned back against the houseboat wall.

  That goddamned truck like to of fell plumb out of sight.

  I saw it.

  What if a whole goddamned building was to just up and sink?

  What about two or three buildings?

  What about a whole block? Harrogate was waving his bottle about. Goddamn, he said. What if the whole fuckin city was to cave in?

  That's the spirit, said Suttree.

  He'd sit by night in the light of his red roadlanterns while honeysuckle bloomed in the creek gut. Poring over obsolete city maps, tracing out a course on paper scrawled with incomprehensible runes, strange symbols, squatting, a cherrycolored troll or demon cartographer in the hellish light charting the progress of souls in the darkness below. When Suttree came up the little path through the weeds the city mouse's cat rose and stretched and went out the other side. Harrogate looked up from his work.

  How's it going? said Suttree.

  Hey Sut. Come on in.

  He approached, not without a certain wariness here where enormities proliferated. Harrogate was dragging an old chair over the clay and dusting it off for Suttree to sit in. Suttree bent over the charts laid out on the applebox.

  How's it look? said Harrogate.

  How's what look?

  My deal there. He gestured with one hand at the maps.

  Suttree looked down at the thin pink face, teeth pink and black in the red light. He shook his head and sat in the chair and crossed his legs. Harrogate had taken up one of the charts from the table and was looking at it. I aint got no way of knowin how deep I am, he said.

  You've got no way of knowing how crazy you are.

  I'm goin to have to have some help.

  You sure are.

  I need somebody to tap or somethin. Where they think I'm at.

  Where they think you're at.

  Yeah.

  Suttree closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head slowly. Harrogate had bent himself once more to the work. Wielding a plastic protractor, his tongue out at the corner of his mouth, reinventing plane geometry. Suttree soon enough found himself watching over the city mouse's shoulder. By the time the cat came back he was sitting at the little crate himself, describing angles, formulas, the small face of the apprentice felon nodding at his elbow.

  In the damp and alveolar deeps beneath the city he probed with a torch he'd stolen, sighting courses from stone to stone to reckon by and charting with his crazed compass a fix of compounded errors. Down old caverns where carboncolored water leaked from overhead or treacly sipes of sewage. Through a region of ruptured ducting and old clay drains and into a dark stone gullet skewered by a jointed cesspipe. Everywhere a liquid dripping, something gone awry in the earth's organs to which this measured bleeding clocked a constantly eluded doom.

  One afternoon he entered a large vault in which stood from floor to dome and slightly tilted a slender flue of cold white light. Harrogate drew back. There was a scrabbling sound overhead, dirt sifted down. A shadow stained the little figure of light on the stone floor and was snatched away. He advanced cautiously. With the beam of his flashlight he severed the shaft and watched it knit back again. It was only light, a cool bore of it standing moteless in the dark like a phosphorescent rope taut in the black of the sea's deeps. He balanced it on his palm. Through a small hole in the roof he could see the sky.

  Harrogate rose by faults and ledges, the torch in his teeth. He hung by his nails from a seam in the rock, he peered out with a cautious eye. A spray of pine needles stirred against the depthless blue. A lizard scuttled, a bird. He listened. Beyond the drone of insects and the sound of the wind he thought he heard distant traffic but he was not sure. He made his way back down to the floor of the vault and squatted there tapping his fingers against his knee, the shaft of light terminating in the top of his head without apparent pain or power of inspiration.

  He unfolded from his pocket the damp and thumblacked map of the city whereon he'd traced with grocer's crayon deadreckoned reaches, corrected tangents, notes on distance. He held the light above his head and fastened down a mark with his finger.

  Shit if I know where I'm at, he said to the silence.

  Am at, said a soft stone echo.

  He folded his chart and rose. He studied the pale thin probe from the outer world and he finally climbed up and stopped the hole with his rolled map.

  He never found it from the outside. After wandering about for days he came back and took the map down again. He'd brought some oily rags filched from a can at the gas station on Henley Street and he lit these in the chamber and went out. All day he looked along the edge of the city and down by the river and anywhere he could see or hope to see a pine tree. He began to suspect some dimensional displacement in these descents to the underworld, some disparity unaccountable between the above and the below. He destroyed his charts and began again.

  That year there were locusts. They howled in the green trees like panthers, struggled in their fallen hundreds on the river's face.

  He fell listless and enervated from histoplasmosis.

  He feared in the lightless depths great rats, beveltoothed and bare of tail, spiders hairy or naked or lightly downed or partly bald, rope-shaped reptiles, their fangs, their tuningfork tongues. Their memberless economy of design. Bats hung in clusters like bunches of dark and furry fruit and the incessant drip of water echoed everywhere through the spelaean dark like dull chimes. In the pools lay salamanders cold and prone and motionless as terracotta figurines.

  The matches that he struck periodically to test the air burned with an acetylene blue and he'd watch the flame draw down the matchstem and wink out and the darkness would hood him almost audibly. Sitting there with his thumb on the button of the flashlight and listening until the terror rose up in his throat and then pushing the button and creating again the filthy basilica in which he sat, the batclotted arches, the high amorphous convolutions of limestone from which scum dripped. Gray sewage percolating down through faults and bedding planes. Dark leachings from the city's undersides and speleothems accresced out of some grim slime quietly oozing in the dark.

  Harrogate stepping from pool to pool of blue sludge in a tunnel where the light of his torch found trace of human work. A few old timbers black with rot, a bucket, a bone. He turned the bone in his hand, inspecting the minute chamfering of miceteeth, vermiculate scrimshaw, the brown and corallike fluting of the marrowed bore. Wherein lay a slick millipede. He dropped it clattering on the rock. The millipede ran like a train. He retrieved the bone and looked it over, holding it for size against various parts of his anatomy. Bet me, he said softly. They's somebody down here murdered.

  He loaded it into a hindpocket and set forth again, his light in one hand and a clawhammer in the other, the channel narrowing, turning. A region of old timbers crossed with chalk, boards laid over the wet red clay of the cave's floor.

  He was brought up by a wooden wall against which the corridor terminated neat and flush. Harrogate studied this barricade with his flashlight and he studied the wet stone ceiling and the walls. With the hammer he prized away a chunk of pulpy wood until he got the board levered up. He took it in both hands, dropping the hammer, the flashlight in his armpit illuminating odd points
above his head. The board gave with a gradual springy feeling and fell at his feet. He trained the flashlight on the place. Behind the boards was a wall of solid concrete. Knotty grain and the marks of a circlesaw in the masonry. He set the claws of the hammer under the next board and pried it up and ripped it away. With the hammer he went tapping across the face of the barricade listening. The tapping went down the chamber and returned. He sat in a pile of slag and studied what to do. And were they walling in or walling out? He tapped at the empty rubber toecap of his outsize sneaker with the hammer. After a while he raised his head. Dynamite, he said.

  The times that Suttree called on him now he found him deeper yet in his plottings, frowning over his charts, composing campaigns to entrap the phantoms with which he was beset.

  How are you doin? he said.

  Okay.

  You breached the bank vaults yet?

  Nope. But come here and look.

  Harrogate rose from his table and went back toward the darker arches to the little concrete bunker. He beckoned with one finger.

  What is it?

  Come see.

  Suttree approached and looked in.

  Looky here, said the city mouse.

  What is it?

  Suttree was kneeling. He reached into the dark and felt a wooden box where cold waxed shapes like candles lay. He lifted one out and turned it to the light.