Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  A hand jostled his elbow. Suttree jerked upright.

  What's the matter here? said a man in cook's whites. The waitress hovered behind.

  What do you mean what's the matter?

  Did you cuss her?

  No.

  He's a damned liar. He did too do it.

  I asked her to bring me some soup.

  He cussed me and his dinner and everthing else.

  We dont allow no cussin in here and we dont allow no trouble. Now let's go.

  He had stood back for Suttree to rise, to pass. He did. He and his blanket. He was shaking with rage and frustration.

  He aint paid, said the waitress.

  Suttree glared at her.

  Just get on out, the man said. I dont need your money.

  He stood in the street. He could hear doors closing all back through his head like enormous dominoes toppling in a corridor. He shouldered the blanket and went on. A black man he passed looked him over and called back to him. Suttree turned.

  They'll vag you here, said the black.

  Suttree didnt answer.

  I'm just tellin you. You do what you want.

  He was gone. Somewhat jaunty, coatless in the cold. Suttree eyed the sun, cold worn and bonecolored above the chill overcast. He shuffled on. His knees kept grasshoppering out sideways and this way. He passed a storewindow and backed up. The glass was printed with the first three letters of the alphabet and in the hall beyond was a long counter and behind that were shelves ranked with bottles.

  He wheeled in through the door, adjusting the blanket as he went. Two men at the counter watched him come. One turned and found something to do and the other rose up from his elbows and stood in charge.

  I cant serve you, he said.

  Suttree still had his mouth open. He closed it and opened it again. He looked at the bottles. He looked at the counterman.

  You better go on, said the counterman.

  Where's the bus station, said Suttree.

  Where you left it, I reckon.

  Suttree suddenly began to cry. He didn't know that he was going to and he was ashamed. The counterman looked away. Suttree turned and went out. In the street the cold wind on his wet face brought back such old winter griefs that he began to cry still harder. Walking along the mean little streets in his rags convulsed with sobs, half blind with a sorrow for which there was neither name nor help.

  At the bus station he bought his ticket, smoothing out the crumpled bill on the counter, the grave face of the emancipator looking back from the currency. With the change he bought a candy bar and he sat alone on a bench in the empty waiting room in his blanket eating the candy in micesized bites and reading from a black leatherette copy of the Book of Mormon he found in a pamphlet rack. The candy he managed to get down but the words of the book swam off the page eerily and he thought he'd never read a stranger tale.

  The hands on the bald white clockface above the ticket office went by fits and starts. At ten till four he rose and went out, the book in his hand and his hand at his breast and the blanket about him like an itinerant simonist. The baggageman watched warily the shuffling exit of this latterday crazyman.

  A driver in a shiny blue suit looked him up and down.

  Is this the bus to Knoxville? Suttree said.

  He said that it was. Suttree offered his ticket and the driver drew a punch from its holster and punched the ticket and handed it back and Suttree mounted the steps into the bus.

  All the faces that he passed were watching out the windows but as he went by they turned and followed him with their eyes. A parcel of old ladies. A young man in pressed twill. At the rear of the bus Suttree swung around and the faces all turned back. He lay down on the rear seat.

  When he woke they were swinging through the mountains and he was being shifted up and back on the seat as the rear of the bus followed. He sat up. His blanket had fallen to the floor and he got it and tucked it around him. The coach was filled with stale cigarette smoke and the windows were weeping. A few small domelights shone on magazines up the aisle. Beyond the windshield a pair of red taillights slid away and reappeared and swung back across the front of the bus again. Suttree slept, tottering upright on the seat.

  It was after nine oclock when they reached Knoxville. He clambered down on queasy legs and climbed the steps to the terminal. In the men's room he studied himself. An unshorn ghost in a black beard peered back from the glass with eyes like old furnace flues. He pulled the blanket from his shoulders and rolled it and tucked it beneath his arm. His jacket hung in ribbons. He touched the sharpened bones of his face. He raked back his hair with his hands. When he glanced down at his shoes the tiles of the floor seemed to be undulating like the scales of some cold enormous fish. An eye watched from a partly open toilet door. He staggered out. His feet made no sound in the empty arcade and he seemed to go for miles toward the lights of the street.

  At night in the bed high in the old frame house on Grand he listened to the engines switching in the yard, the long iron collision of couplings running out in the dark by the warehouse walls until the lamplit night echoed with their hammerings like some great forge where arms for a giants' tournament were being beaten out against the sun's rising and in the light of passing locomotives the shadows of trees and powerpoles raced within the cocked sash of the window across the peeling walls to blackness. He slept and slept. All day the house was empty. She'd come at noon and fix him soup and a sandwich until he felt like a child in some winter illness. Recurrences of dreams he'd had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone. A dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast and a cold wind circled in the hollow there. He sat up. Even the community of the dead had disbanded into ashes, those shapes wheeling in the earth's crust through a nameless ether no more men than were the ruins of any other thing once living. Suttree felt the terror coming through the walls. He was seized with a thing he'd never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainty of death. He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?

  He got up and went to the window and looked out. The houses stood above the railyard with a kind of doomed austerity, locked in a sad frieze against the gray midwinter sky. From each chimney like a tattered rag a tongue of coalsmoke swirled. Beyond the tracks lay the market warehouses and beyond these the shapeless warrens of McAnally with its complement of pariahs and endless poverty.

  He woke in the paler gray of noon to find Blind Richard groping toward him from the door.

  Bud? he said, standing there on the boards in the barren room like a medicineshow clown, casting about in the dead air with his frozen grin.

  Hello Richard.

  The blind man sat on the bed and lit a cigarette and toyed at the ash with the tip of his little finger. Well, he said. I heard you was sick.

  I'm all right.

  What was it you had?

  Suttree eased himself among the sooty sheets. I dont know, he said. Something or other.

  Mrs Long look after ye good?

  Oh yeah. She's good.

  Good a woman as ever walked. Ast anybody. Dont take my word for it.

  How are you getting along?

  I wisht McAnally was full of em like her. Me? I aint braggin much.

  Well.

  The blind man looked about. Dark sockets clogged with bluish jissom. Smoke drawing upward alongside his thin nose. He knit his yellowed fingers in a mime of anxiety and leaned toward Suttree. You dont have a little drink hid away do ye? he said.

  No I dont.

  Didnt much allow ye did.

  Suttree watched him. How long have you been blind, Richard?

  What?

  I said how long have you been blind. Were you always blind?

  The blind man grinned sheepishly and fingered his chin. Oh, he said. No. I dont remember. I've forgot. />
  Where did you get that lump?

  He touched a faint yellow swelling above his eye. Red done that, he said.

  Red did?

  Yeah. He comes over you know. Comes over to the house. He sets all the doors about halfway shut. I got in a hurry or I never would of run into it. I know him.

  How's everything down at the Huddle?

  It's about like you left it.

  They sat there in silence on the bed. Beyond the baywindow lay a deadly and leaden sky. Dimpled by the motewenned glass. A small gray rain had begun.

  Well, said Richard. I better get on.

  Dont rush off.

  I've got to get on home.

  Come back.

  You get well now, said the blind man. You do what Mrs Long tells ye.

  I will.

  He went down the stairwell holding to the wall. Suttree heard the door close. A few sad birds along the wires watched the rain fall. One had a crooked leg. Gray water was leaking from a rotted length of gutterpipe. As he lay there the water grew more pale and the rain fell and the water grew quite clear and the water beaded on the lacquered leaves of the old magnolia tree in the yard looked bright and clean.

  Late Saturday and all day Sunday drunks would come and sit on the bed and talk and sneak him whiskey. None asked if what he had were catching. Mrs Long on her duckshaped shoes came to the top of the landing to complain in her shrill voice and groggy sots clung halfway up the spindleshorn balustrade while ribald laughter rocked in the barren upper rooms of the rotting house.

  He came down to dinner, good plain food served in the shambles of patched and tacked furniture destroyed in drunken rages over the years. Another week and he was on the streets again.

  His first day uptown he weighed himself on the free scales in front of Woodruffs. He looked at the face in the glass.

  He went to Miller's Annex and called on J-Bone.

  Up and about eh? Did they run you off at the house?

  No. I slipped off after your mama went back to work.

  How do you feel?

  I feel okay. I feel pretty good.

  Where will you be later on?

  I dont know. I'm going up to Comer's.

  You think you feel well enough to drink a beer?

  I might get well.

  J-Bone grinned. Old Suttree, he said. He's hell when he's well.

  What time you get off? Five thirty?

  Yeah.

  I'll see you then.

  Okay Bud.

  When he came through the door at Comer's Dick winked at him and raised his hand. Hey Buddy, he said. Got a letter for you.

  Suttree leaned on the counter.

  You've lost a little weight havent you?

  Some.

  Where you been?

  I was over in North Carolina for a while.

  Dick turned the letter in his hand and looked at it and handed it over. It's been here about two weeks, he said.

  Suttree tapped the letter on the counter. Thanks Dick, he said.

  He sat among the watchers by the wall and crossed his legs the way the old men do and opened the envelope. It was postmarked Knoxville and there was a letter from his mother and a check from his Uncle Ben newly dead. He looked at the check. It was for three hundred dollars. He tapped it in his hand and got up and went to the watercooler for a drink and came back. He wadded the letter and dropped it into the spittoon.

  Where you been Buddy boy? called Harry the Horse.

  Hey Harry, said Suttree.

  Harry stood shapeless in his shirt and changeapron by the cashregister. Bill Tilson made a few slow judo feints and laid the edge of his hand athwart Harry's ear. Ah, said Harry. That was on the bone.

  On the bone, called Tilson dementedly, passing on along the tables.

  Suttree looked up from the check to the racked cues along the wall, the old photos of ballplayers. A quiet figure there in the bedlam of ballclack and calling and telephones, the tickertape unspooling the sportsnews. Fuck it, he said. He rose and went to the front counter.

  Can you cash a check for me, Dick?

  Sure Bud. He laid the check on the sill of the cashregister and rang open the drawer. He read the check. Fat city, he said. How do you want it?

  A couple of hundreds and some twenties.

  With the money folded in his front pocket he went down the stairs to the street again.

  He went to Miller's and bought underwear and socks and went out through the Annex and crossed through the markethouse. Old Lippner akimbo in his abbatoir. By the side door blind Walter stood sleeping with his dobro and Suttree touched his sleeve. The blind eyes opened and rolled up. Suttree pressed a folded bill into his palm.

  You the only man I ever saw could sleep standing up.

  An enormous set of teeth appeared and a strong black hand gripped his forearm. Hey fish man. Naw you wrong. Black man taught it to the mule.

  You think I could learn it?

  You might if they wouldnt let you set down nowheres.

  Suttree smiled. I'll see you later.

  The blind man pocketed the bill. I hope you catches the river out, he said.

  Suttree crossed the street to Watson's. There in the basement he found his size in a rack of sportcoats and selected a pale camelhair and tried it. Faint lines of dirt along the shoulder seams where it had hung. He looked at himself in the mirror. He took a comb from his pocket and combed his hair.

  He found a pair of black mohair trousers that had a small tricornered tear at the rear pocket. Couldnt see it with the jacket on. The slacks and the jacket came to thirteen dollars and ninety cents and he paid and went upstairs and bought a yellow gabardine shirt with handstitched collar and pockets.

  In a window above Market Street the old tailor stood peering out through the lettered glass, the dusty ells and bolts of cloth spooled out in the window easing the repose of dead flies and roaches. Suttree came up the dark and musty wooden stairwell and swung through the door with his package.

  Nice trousers them, said the old man as he measured the inseam with a tattered yellow tape. He gripped the waistband and tugged at them. He put his arms around Suttree's waist and brought the tape together at his navel. The old man barely came to Suttree's shoulder.

  You want some out of the seat too.

  I think they'll be all right, Mr Brannam. I've lost some weight.

  The tailor tugged at the seat of Suttree's new trousers and looked dubious. You going to carry your lunch here? he said.

  Suttree smiled. They're really my size, he said. I'll fill back out.

  How much you going to fill?

  About twenty pounds.

  The tailor pulled again at Suttree's waist and shook his head.

  They're okay. Let's just do the cuffs.

  When you dont get fat you bring em back, okay?

  Okay. There's a little tear there in the back too.

  I see him, said the tailor, marking with his chalk.

  Suttree waited in a wooden folding chair while the trousers were cuffed and he paid the old man and thanked him and went down the stairs again.

  He bought a pair of shoes at Thorn McAn's that had zippers up the side and were the color of blood. With his packages he climbed the stairs to Comer's and at the rear of the premises he stripped and washed and put on his new clothes. His old ones he wrapped in the paper and he left them with Stud at the lunchcounter. Stud took the package and looked back again and whistled and Jake took hold of him by the shoulder and turned him around and looked him over and sniffed at his cheek and tried to kiss him.

  Get away you ass, Suttree said.

  Ulysees came over to view him with his quiet cynic's smile. Well, he said. Looking rather affluent there, Bud. He kneaded Suttree's sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. Oy, he said. Iss qvality.

  Suttree crossed Gay Street to the Farragut and went downstairs to the barbershop. He passed Tarzan Quinn coming up, freshly powdered, swinging his billyclub by its thong to and fro into and out of his enormous h
and.

  An aged black took his new coat and he climbed into a chair.

  Yessir, said the barber, flinging the apron ticking over him.

  Shave, haircut, shine ... You do manicures?

  No, said the barber. We dont have a manicurist.

  Okay. Shave, haircut, shine. And dont spare the smellgood.

  The barber brought a steaming towel and wrapped his face and tilted him back in the chair. Suttree lay in deep euphoria, his legs crossed at the ankles, his new shoes easy on the nickleplated grating of the footrest. He listened dreamily to the pop of the razor on the strop.

  He half dozed in the chair while the barber pulled his face about, the razor slicing off the hot lavendar foam. Peace seeped through to Suttree's bones. The barber raised him up and began to trim his hair with scissors. The black had settled at his feet with his wooden box of polishes and begun to work over the shoes. The second barber read the newspaper. No one spoke. Suttree's dark locks dropped soundlessly to the tiles. Gentle barber. He drifted.

  The barber talced the back of his neck and whipped away the apron and stood back. Suttree opened his eyes. He raised the shoes up one and then the other and looked at them. He climbed down from the chair and looked at himself in the mirror.

  The old black held his coat while he paid and then helped him on with it and dusted his shoulders with a little broom. Suttree dropped a half dollar into his palm and the old man made a sort of bow and said thank you sir and the barber said come back.

  In the streets a colder wind on his shaven nape. Bobbyjohn stood on the corner with Bucket and Hoghead and two boys he did not know. They seized upon him with great joy. Bobbyjohn was offering him two dollars for the coat, waving the money about.

  Where's your stick? said Hoghead. You caint go around lookin like that and no stick to beat the women off with.

  Old Suttree's caught himself a hell of a fish somewheres.

  He and J-Bone ate dinner at Regas. Bobby smiled when she brought them the menu.

  What are you goin for, Bud?

  I think I'll go for the large fillet steak.

  Believe I'll go for the veal cutlet.

  Hell, get the steak.

  The cutlet's good, Bud.

  Get the biggest fucking steak they own.

  The steaks arrived on iron platters sizzling in their own juice and there were steaming baked potatoes with pithy cores to melt the butter over and there was sour cream with chives and hot rolls and coffee. Suttree popped a chunk of steak into his mouth and sat back in the chair and closed his eyes, chewing.