Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  I would too, said Suttree.

  I'd drink off of it in a minute.

  Suttree grinned.

  Course maybe if you was dead you'd think different. I mean, if you're dead and all why I expect you got to be pretty religious.

  We'd drink you a toast. Have a good time.

  Richard smiled wanly. Well, he said. I like a good time well as the next feller.

  I'll get us another beer.

  But Richard was fumbling in his pockets and he stopped Suttree with his hand. Let me get em Bud, he said. What do they get for a beer down here?

  Thirty-five.

  Richard frowned. He's high, aint he? I reckon it's on account of the gamblin.

  He doesnt have a license.

  For gamblin?

  For anything. For living.

  I never see him uptown he dont say hidy, said Richard. They dont make em no whiter.

  He doled the change into Suttree's palm and Suttree went to the box and got two more beers and came back to a new table. He took the blind man by the hand and led him to it. Doll raised her one eye from where she slept in her shapeless chair, her heavy arms folded across her bosom. One of the poker players jacked his chair back and reached for the stove door and opened it and looked in and she rose heavily and made her way across the floor to the coalscuttle. When she came back from tending the stove she wiped the tables that they'd read and eyed them curiously. Richard had his eyes closed and the smoke from his cigarette rose alongside his thin nose. Something had passed out on the river and the shanty lifted and settled in the swells. Richard suddenly placed his hands flat on the table. Then he lifted them off again as if it were hot. He took up his beer in both hands and held it like that. I aint readin no more, he said.

  What is it? said Suttree.

  The blind man sucked on his cigarette and shook his head. The thin gray webs of flesh in his neck trembled.

  What is it? said Suttree.

  There was an oil lamp sconced in the wall above the table and the blind man beneath it sat clearly lit. Suttree looked at his dead eyes but there was no way of seeing in. What is it? he said again.

  You knowed what it was, didnt ye?

  No. I dont know.

  You aint done it for meanness?

  I swear I dont know what it says. He was running his own hand under the table but he could not read the stone.

  Will you keep it to yourself? said Richard.

  Yes. What does it say?

  Tween you and me?

  Yes.

  It says William Callahan.

  He woke early with the cold and sat in his cot crosslegged swaddled up in his blanket and looking out the small window. The sun kindled the haze into a salmoncolored drop against which the brittle trees stood like burnt lace. Charred looking sparrows japed and chittered on the rail. Suttree parted back the sackcloth curtains to better see downriver and the birds flew. He was still sitting there when someone came aboard and knocked at his door. He leaned and reached his shirt up from the floor. The knocking came again, someone called his name softly as if he ailed.

  When he went to the door Reese was standing there. He carried a new cap in his hands and smiled thinly.

  Come in, said Suttree.

  I aint got but a minute. I come to give ye your shares.

  Come in.

  He stood in the little room holding his cap, one foot wide to shore himself against the tilted floor. Suttree sought his shoes under the bed and stepped into them sockless and turned and sat on the couch. Sit down, Reese, he said. Sit down.

  Reese sat at the little table and took his pocketbook from the bib of his overalls and opened it. He lifted out a sheaf of bills tied with a dirty string and laid them on the table and folded the pocketbook and put it away again.

  What's that? said Suttree.

  That's your shares. We never got sold till last week. We had a awful lot of trouble.

  I dont want it, said Suttree. Put it back in your pocket.

  Reese set his lips and shook his head. It's yourn, he said.

  Well let me give it to you.

  No.

  Suttree looked at the money and shook his head. Where are you living now? he said.

  We're back up in Jefferson County. Willard run off.

  How are you?

  I'm okay. I never did understand that boy. I never would just get to where I could talk to him but what he'd up and do some hatefulness and it not a bit of use in the world in it.

  Suttree ran his hand through his hair. The old man seemed small and older yet sitting there.

  I never did blame ye for leavin out. Poor luck as we had I reckon ye'd of done better never to of took up with us to start. Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck?

  Suttree said he had. He said that things would get better.

  The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.

  But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

  In the afternoon he went uptown. He bought a thick army sweater at Bower's and he paid Stud twenty dollars on his lunch tab and he went to Regas and ate a steak dinner. When he got home he still had forty dollars left. As he let himself in at his door he thought he heard his name called somewhere like those sourceless voices that address our dreams. He went in and shut the door and lit the lamp and sat on the cot. As he was taking off his shoes he heard it again. Thin and far, somewhere in the night. He sat with a shoe in one hand listening.

  He put his shoe back on and went out. Blind Richard was hailing him from the bridge.

  What is it? the fisherman called.

  The blind man on the bridge raised his thin arm into the lamplight like a supplicant to the chalice of God's bright mercies. A ghost of a voice fell.

  Suttree couldnt hear what it said but he cupped his hand to his mouth. No, he called.

  His name drifted down from the steel span hung in the night.

  Go home Richard. It's late.

  The blind man called again but he could not find his way down to the river and Suttree turned his back on him and his cries and went in and shut the door.

  Billy Ray Callahan labored for a while as a tilesetter but was fired for drinking. The crewchief stopped him coming from his lunchbreak and confronted him.

  You cant drink on the job and put in a day's work. You want to drink you can get your time now.

  The crewchief's name was Hicks. Callahan grinned at him. Why Hicks, he said, if I was you I wouldnt be caught without a drink of whiskey on my breath.

  Hicks looked suspicious. What do you mean? he said.

  Why, so people would think I was drunk instead of just so damned ignorant.

  He went to Atlanta looking for work but he didnt find any. He fought two boys from Steubenville Ohio in the alley behind the bus station and left one senseless in the well of a cellar window and went into the men's room and washed his swollen fist with cold water and crossed the station to the gate and boarded the bus back to Knoxville.

  Where he worked what jobs he could find, tracking by night his isobar of violence through the streets and taverns. Suttree saw him whip a boy from Vestal named George Holmes, a tall boy who used to like to shoot people. All along the wall by the B&J folks from McAnally and Vestal stood dangerously together and Suttree saw pistols gripped in pockets and out. Callahan hit Holmes twice and Holmes went down. He'd have let it go at that but the crowd called out for more.

  Stomp him Red. Stomp his ass.

  He gave Holmes a few kicks but Holmes only doubled himself up on the sidewalk. When the police cruiser rounded the corner and came up the hill Callahan took off up Commerce and lay in the parking lot under Junior Long's car. The cruiser went back down the hill with Holmes in the back of it crying and cursing and the crowd had already begun to move away. Holmes had shot a dentist in Vestal not long before this and not long after he shot and killed a man across a cardtable
at Ab Franklin's and was sent to the penitentiary. Years later he got out and went back to Franklin's and was shot dead himself over the same table.

  The last job Callahan had was running a bootleg joint for a man named Cotton down off Ailor Avenue. Suttree saw him in Comer's and he looked subdued.

  I seen ye the other day and you didnt know me, he said.

  Bullshit, said Suttree. I never saw you. Where at?

  Callahan put his arm around Suttree's shoulder and patted him on the belly. These old summer rabbits, he said. You can set on em and they wont hardly even squeal.

  At the woodshed in McAnally they bought whiskey and rolled lightless out the far end of the alley passing the bottle about in the brown paper bag. They drove up Gay Street where Comer's was closing and the hustlers stood about the stairwell, Callahan leaning from the window of the car to hoot at them, and they drove past the little cafes and restaurants where dishwashers were cleaning up in the dim back light and they passed folks coming from the last movie who seemed almost unhinged by what they'd seen or were seeing.

  At the West Inn Callahan routed an outland troupe from the premises. And aint they got no beerjoints where you come from? And dont let the door hit ye in the ass goin out. Suttree in the washroom stood slightly drunk and read the legends on the weeping wall. Advised that he was pissing on his shoes. Untrue. Wanted to trade; two blind crabs for one with no teeth. He looked up at the clotted bulb overhead. He buttoned and pushed open the plywood door and went out.

  It ended on the Clinton Highway at the Moonlite Diner, Billy Ray smiling and going among the tables while the band played country music. He had his hands in his pockets when the barman confronted him. Small, vicious, quiet. He said: Red, you been stealin money out of them girls' purses.

  Callahan rocked back on his heels with his hooligan smile and looked down at his assassin. His pockets were full of the stolen change spoken, he'd drunk their drinks. You're a damned liar, he said goodnaturedly. In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen. When he was shot he had his hands in his pockets. The last word came out lie. The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous. Billy Ray was standing there with a small discolored hole alongside his ruined nose. A trickle of thin blood started down his face. The band had finished their set and the people going to the tables paused and looked toward the bar where a small cloud of pale smoke hovered above Billy Ray's shaggy head. They saw him lurch and topple.

  Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.

  He was lying on his back with one leg doubled under him. He was bleeding from the ears and from the nose and from the hole in his face and he was breathing deeply and regular and he was looking up at the ceiling. The murderer had put the gun back in his pocket and stood looking on like any other spectator. A number of people had already started for the door and when Suttree came up Gary was squatting down looking at Billy Ray as if he did not know what to make of his lying there like that.

  Oh my God, said Suttree. Callahan's eyes closed slowly. His whole face was blue and he closed his eyes so that you could not see death come up in them like a face at a window. Suttree pushed through the people and ran for the telephone at the back wall.

  They pulled a blanket over him but Suttree drew it back from his face.

  Cover him up, said the ambulance attendant.

  He's not dead.

  They gave Suttree a look much like a shrug and lifted the gurney into the rear of the ambulance and Suttree climbed in and sat on the little banquette at the side and the door closed after him.

  Shrieking through the streets of Knoxville, the red domelight sweeping the near walls in narrow places, the windows, faces in cars. Billy Ray turned his head once and arched his neck. The pad beneath him grew black with blood. All through the town tonight are folks lie dying. Sirens in the city like the shriek of jackal birds.

  They wheeled him through the emergency room door and into a small white room. There was a steel lamp in the ceiling and a steel table beneath it and there were steel cabinets along one wall. The orderlies lifted Callahan onto the table and wheeled the gurney out again. A nurse looked at him lying there, his chest rising and falling. Someone had put a patch of gauze over the hole in his head and the blood around his ears had blackened and dried. A great rugheaded lout lying there with his heavy hands composed alongside him. She shook her head and closed the door.

  Later an orderly came in and looked at him and went out again. He returned with a doctor. The doctor carried a clipboard under his arm and he entered the room and pulled the gauze away from Callahan's face and looked at the hole. He lifted the eyelids and looked in and he lifted the shaggy head and let it back again. The orderly was watching the doctor. The doctor pursed his lips and made a little casual gesture with one hand. He felt Billy Ray's pulse and looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. He said something to the orderly and then went out again, the orderly behind him, the orderly closing the door.

  Suttree and Callahan's older brother Charlie rose from their chairs.

  There's nothing we can do for that man, said the doctor.

  He's not dead, said Suttree.

  No, said the doctor. He's not dead.

  The last visitor was an old black orderly, a gentle man who washed the stricken and the dead. He pulled back the gauze and unscrewed the top from a bottle of alcohol and poured it slowly down the hole into Billy Ray's brain.

  He lived for another five hours and died sometime before daybreak unattended. They hadnt even taken off his shoes. Charlie had gone home and Suttree and the mother sat in the little waiting room. When the doctor came out and told them he was dead Billy Ray's mother began to cry very quietly. She sat there with her chin quivering and she shook her head slowly from side to side over her dead warrior. Suttree touched her shoulder but she waved him away and she did not look up.

  He walked out of the hospital and across the wet grass toward the road. Very slowly the lights of the city were going out, the billboards, the streetlamps. He crossed the river by the high iron bridge, past the orchards in the dark, lights in the water upstream and the sky paling and the night and its disciplines draining away leaving the barren trees as black as iron and a paper city rising in the dawn. A great stillness had fallen. He walked through the dead gray streets. A newspedlar was opening his bale of papers at the corner. The streetsweepers had passed and in the black gutterwater the lights from the polelamps lay like pietins among the darker neon bleedings.

  He leaned against the viaduct rail. Spat numbly at the tracks down there. At the dreams implicit in their endless steel Teachings. Section-hands were slouching toward work in the switchingyard. The Watkins man pushed his little trundlecart of nostrums across the bridge, humped between the cart tongues in the wan daybreak. Suttree went down the narrow back path at the end of the bridge. He passed beneath the house of the madman but he was not about at such an hour. Suttree stooped and scrabbled up a half a brickbat and slammed it off the curling clapboards high under the eaves. A crazed putty face slobbered up against the glass, a wild eye cocked there. Suttree turned and went on down the path toward the river.

  He spent his days in the poorer quarters of the town seeking out some place with steam heat where he could winter cheaply. The season had grown cold and sunless and a mean wind was in the streets. He found at last a room in the deeps of McAnally. A graylooking woman regarded him sourly through the screendoor.

  I came to see about the room, he said.

  She sorted a key from among clotted tissues in her apron pocket and unlatched the screendoor and handed it out.

  It's around the back, she said.

  How much is it?

&n
bsp; Five dollars a week.

  He thanked her and went around the house by a brick walkway past old gray bushes clogged with leaves and down steps into an unpaved alley. The door was open and he walked in and stood in a dim and musty cellar. A furnace with upflung ductwork like a fat and rusty medusa, a dead iron grin in the doorgrate. He crossed to a painted blue door and peered in. A small cubicle with a concrete floor, an iron cot. He looked back into the furnace room. Some stairs materialized out of the deeper gloom and he crossed to them and mounted upward to a door at the top. Long nailed to. A dead lightbulb hung from a flyspecked cord. He turned in the dark of the landing and came back. The frayed and rotting stair carpet wore blooms of pale blue mold.

  In a corner of the cellar was a zinc laundrytub. He tried the taps. A brown liquid spat into the sink and lay there. He went back into the room. There were two small windows let into wells high along one wall, the glass covered with rainspattered sand and hung with spiderwebs. Suttree looked out at the brambly undercarriage of a hedge, some whitestalked grass perhaps wild onions. In the wells dry leaves and papers. A weathered wooden firetruck.

  He sat on the cot and looked around but there wasnt much to look at and after a while he went back out and around the house to the front door again.

  She stood veiled behind the screen holding out her hand for the key.

  I'll take it, he said.

  Is it just yourself?

  Yes mam.

  That'll be five dollars.

  He had his money out. Crossing the serried palm with wilted green.

  Is that everything there is? I mean you dont have an extra rug or something do you?

  I'll see if I do. She folded the bill into her apron pocket and faded away down the lightless hall.

  He brought his blankets over and things for coffee. He lay in the little room in the dark a long time listening to the noises and he woke all night to the passing of cars in the street. In the gray dawn he felt alien and not unhappy and lay staring up at the pipes in their hangers on the ceiling, wrapped in burlap or canvas and leaking kapok or a white plasterlike substance. What woke him was a clanging of iron from the outer chamber and when he went to the door and looked out there was a small black hunchback with enormous orange teeth gleaming in the firelight at the furnace door.