Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  He went down every night but there was no one home. By day he kept off the streets. There was nothing in the papers. He asked for her at Howard Clevinger's but no one knew where she was. As he turned to leave he saw Oceanfrog going along the street.

  Hey baby, the frog said.

  What's happening, said Suttree. Where's Ab.

  The man's in the hospital.

  Is he bad?

  I dont know. I aint been out there.

  Where's Doll?

  She out there with him. Frazer turned up his collar and looked off down the street. He turned back to Suttree. You goin out there? he said.

  I dont know.

  They got a cop on the door.

  Ah, said Suttree.

  Oceanfrog squinted at him and smiled. He tugged at his collar again and took a step backward preparatory to going on up the street. Thought you ought to know, he said.

  Have they been down to my place?

  They been there, baby. Hang loose.

  He went up the street in his jaunty stride and Suttree looked toward the river and tested the air with his nose in a gesture of some simpler antecedent but the wind and the landscape alike remained cool and without movement.

  He'd walk out at night to the end of the bridge and lean on the ironwork and watch the river and the squalor of the life below. He could hear the music from upstairs in the old frame house that Carroll King ran as a nightclub, Paul Jones at the piano full of gin and old offcolor songs. A black girl named Priscilla who worked by day in a laundry.

  A few nights later he saw the faintest fall of light on the river from the rear of Jones's place and he descended the little path in the dark.

  For a while he thought she wouldnt come to the door. He was almost ready to leave when it swung open.

  Her hair lay about her head in greasy black clots as if she were besieged with leeches and her eye was bright and inflamed and swiveled up silently to see him. She crossed her arms and held her shoulders and her breath smoked in the cold.

  How is he? said Suttree. Is he here?

  She shook her head.

  Is he not out of the hospital?

  Yes. He's out. The Lord taken him out. She began to cry, standing there in her housecoat and slippers, holding her shoulders. The tears that ran on her pitted cheek looked like ink. She had her eye closed but the lid that covered the naked socket did not work so well anymore and it sagged in the cavity and struggled up and that raw hole seemed to watch him with some ghastly equanimity, an eye for another kind of seeing like the pineal eye in atavistic reptiles watching through time, through conjugations of space and matter to that still center where the living and the dead are one.

  That spring he did not go to the river. The shadows of the buildings still harbored a gray chill and the sun sulked smoked and baleful somewhere above the city and in the sparsely weeded clay barrens wasting on the city's perimeter first flowers erupted drunkenly through glass and cinder and came slowly to bloom. The days grew warm and grackles returned, hordes of blue tin birds that weighed the shrieking trees. Small bodies that the cold has kept went soft with rot, a cat's balding hide that tautened and dried cloven to the meatless ribs, an upturned eyesocket filled with rainwater and for all weathers this lipless grin, these bleaching teeth.

  He went out seldomer, his money dribbled away. The days grew long and he lay hourlong on his cot. The clerk came and tapped at the door and went away again. One day came an eviction notice.

  Then he fell sick. First his nose began to bleed nor could he stop it. The floor lay strewn with wads of wet toiletpaper stained with watered blood. The clerk came and rapped again. Shadow of his shoes in the threshold light. And went away. Things had begun to go peculiar. Grainy underwater singing sounds in his head. He lay on his cot and watched the barren vinework of cracks in the ceiling. Old rags of lace lifted at the window. Cries of children at noon on the Bell House School grounds. Suttree lay naked in fever. Even his eyes were hot. He slept some of the afternoon, waking out of a dream fraught with the odor of a long forgotten blanket whose satin selvedge bore blue ducks. His father's weight tilting the bed, how do you feel son, I dont feel so pretty good. Under the slant ceiling, close by the eaves.

  He opened his eyes. The room had a warped look to it. He watched arcana uncoil from out of the rough plaster. Something unseen possessed the troweler's hand. Shapes grimacing in a calcimine moonscape. Record of an old mason long dead it may be. He closed his eyes again. A huge and pulsing thumbwhorl hovered above his swollen lids. He steadied himself with one hand to the wall like a drunk.

  The day expired in rose and ashen light. Blue dusk cooled in the room.

  He lay in darkness.

  After a long time he staggered to the wall and threw the switch. Under the stark bulblight he groped for a towel to wrap his loins and reeled out and down the corridor to the bathroom. There he knelt on the cold white tiles and vomited blood into the toilet. When he came back to his room he sat on the bed and looked at his toes.

  Well, he said. You're sick.

  A shoe salesman named Thomas E Warren found him shortly after midnight. He thought him drunk. Kneeling, he stirred him by the shoulder. Hey Bud, he said.

  Suttree was lying naked on the bathroom floor where he'd come for the cool. Warren got him to his feet and Suttree stared back without comprehension, not having expected anyone from the world of the quick. Down a far wall of his smoking brain withdrew a ghastly company. He disengaged himself from the grip of the living Thomas and tottered to the toilet and sat.

  You okay, man?

  Yes, said Suttree.

  He was alone in the narrow room. Water sluiced down a black pipe past his ear. His head had sagged forward and he was clutching his stomach. He shat a loose and bloody stool.

  At the sink he laved cold water over his head. Ahh, he told the drainhole.

  I know you're in there, said the clerk from beyond the door.

  Suttree opened his eyes. He was lying on his cot and it was day. The door rapping faded. Footsteps in a corridor. He looked toward the window. Are there parades in the street? What is this roaring? Who is this otherbody? I am no otherbody.

  He sat. The room reeled. He fell back and laughed briefly into the musty bedding.

  All day he lay in a quaintly fevered world, nothing in the room but the sun and himself, making what construction he could of the sounds that carried to him, the hammering of a roofer, the long farting of airbrakes from a truck in the streets, screendoors banging, children called. A blank wall against which to elaborate his pantomimes. A less virulent cast of the grim had come to occupy his mind and there was a time in the early noon when he had hope of his own recovery. But the sounds he heard began to coalesce and rush and he no longer knew if he dreamt or woke.

  In the long afternoon he fell prey to strange cravings of the flesh. Out of a pinwheel of brown taffy his medusa beckoned. A gross dancer with a sallow puckered belly, hands cupping a pudendum grown with mossgreen hair, a virid merkin out of which her wet mauve petals smiled and bared from hiding little rows of rubber teeth like the serried jaws of conchshells.

  Suttree groaned in his sleep. He lay in a sexual nightmare, an enormous wattled fundament lowering slowly over his head, in the center a withered brown pig's eye crusted shut and hung with puffy blue and swollen lobes. A white gruel welled. He pressed his face against the cool wall. And who is this Mr Bones rising wreathed in pale and bluegreen gas? He comes about tottering and wooden like a dummy on a track and goes past with a slight smile and a bow. Lights run over his wetlooking bones and the feet of small rodents grip from within the chamfers of his eyesockets and in his pale blue teeth are cores of blackened silver packed. In a rattle and clang of wheels and pulleys Father Bones tilts out through saloon doors and is gone, old varnished funhouse skeleton. Suttree in his sleep smiled at such child's fancies. A gray crust broke at his mouthcorners. His eyes snapped open. He sat and reached for the towel. It fell from him and he went out and down the hall naked.r />
  Clotted gouts of gore stained the water in the toiletbowl. Pink, magenta, burgundy.

  He stretched himself on the tiles. A faint tang of urine there. Bird shadows on the whited windowglass. Water dripped in the sink. I saw her in an older dream, an older time, moving in an aura of musk, a breath of stale roses, her languid hands swaying like pale birds and her face chalk and lips pink and her nigh-blue hair upbuckled in combs of tortoise, coming down out of her chamber in my unhealed memory clothed in smoke.

  Hey Bud. Hey.

  It is my old J-Bone and no other.

  What the fuck are you doing?

  Sicky sick, James.

  What the hell have you done to yourself? Can you get up?

  I'm all fucked up, James.

  I can see that. What is it?

  Dear friend, it's checkout time.

  J-Bone patted his shoulder. Hang on a minute. I'll be right back.

  Suttree opened his eyes. In a minute I am going to have a drink of water. He licked his lips.

  J-Bone arrived with a fat cabbie. They pulled Suttree up by the arms and began to work a shirt onto him.

  I'd just let him sleep it off, said the cabdriver.

  I cant leave him layin in here.

  Suttree's arm dropped, his knuckles banged on the floor.

  He aint sick is he?

  Hold him here a minute while I button these. He just needs to get dried out.

  Desist officer. I'll come peaceably.

  He better not be sick. You hear?

  I've seen him worse than this. Let him back down now.

  Has he got any shoes?

  I'll find him some. Help me lift him here.

  What's this?

  What?

  Hell, he's bleedin out of his ass.

  Maybe he's got piles.

  Piles hell. Look at it.

  A crimson stain was spreading about Suttree's pale and naked haunches. He lay buttoned up in a shirt with a pair of trousers bunched about his knees. The cabdriver backed toward the door. J-Bone looked like an assassin kneeling there. The cabbie turned and fled down the hall.

  Go on then, you son of a bitch, J-Bone called.

  Son of a bitch, said Suttree from the floor.

  J-Bone pulled him sideways out of the blood and began to wrestle the trousers up around him. He fetched his shoes and got them on. He got him up under the armpits and dragged him out and down the hall and stood in Suttree's bed and pulled him up onto it.

  Water Jim. A little old drink.

  J-Bone was back in ten minutes with another cabdriver.

  Can he walk?

  No. Give me a hand with him.

  Damn if he aint about as fucked up as anybody I ever saw.

  He gets this way.

  Suttree's toes left a faint wake in the scurfy warp of the hall carpet. His shoes fell down the stairs like toys. He watched the hard sunlight ascend the stairwell. His head banged something.

  You goin with him aint ye?

  Yes. I'll ride back here. Go ahead.

  That's the drunkest human ever I witnessed, said the driver.

  Whose house is this? said Suttree.

  Take it easy Bud.

  Why I'm all right.

  They struggled with him. I was all right, he said.

  Rank odor of caustic and drugs. Standing in a white room. He leaned in confidence toward an ear. I'm all right now, he lied. Someone has stole the pins from his kneehinges. He leaned heavily on a steel table. A wall placard listed regulations. In the center of the room the taut white linen of the emergency table. An orderly opened the door and looked at him.

  To wish to lie down here is to entertain the illusion that kings may worship, said Suttree.

  The orderly closed the door.

  Another door closed, door closed, door closed softly in his skull. Light bloomed rose, lime green. He was going out by a long tunnel attended by fading voices and a grainy humming sound and going faster and past gray images that clicked apart in jagged puzzle pieces. Down a corridor that opened constantly before him and dissolved after in iron dark. While the dead wheeled past in floats of sere and faded flower wreaths with little cards on which the ink of the names had run in the rain. Callahan and Hoghead leering with their crazy teeth and little plugs stoppering the holes in their skulls and Bobby Davis on a slab with his torso peppered like a pox victim and Jimmy Smith with broken neck and Aunt Beatrice composed and sedate in grayblack gingham with candlewhite hands enfolding a rose and passing in a glass casket. She cracked one powdered eye, winked hugely and was gone. Suttree said I am going out of the world, a long silent scream on rails down the dark nether slope of the hemisphere that is death's prelude. Attended by ponderous and mercurial figures composed of colored gas and wrenching themselves slowly apart, pale green cerise and bottleblue butyljawed fools that galloped softly and cried out Powww and Boyyy, exulting into the breach with boneless cartoon mouths puckered and wapsy galligaskins, lumbering eternally toward the edge of all.

  A quartermoon the color of a broken file lay far down the void. Likecolored figures crossed it. He no longer cared that he was dying. He was being voided by an enormous livercolored cunt with prehensile lips that pumped softly like some levantine bivalve. Into a cold dimension without time without space and where all was motion.

  A nurse took Suttree's temperature.

  Thank you nurse. Yes, that's fine.

  You men can come around to the other side here. Yes. Clear the door there. Thank you.

  Suttree opened his eyes. Solemn young men in scrubsuits stood about his bedside watching. He fell back laughing and was gone again. Down a cycloid in a sidecar, a streamlined dreamride through the eye of a poisoned kaleidoscope, cutting a helical course and yawing up the wall at speeds that drained his face and rifling through a hot drift of ether where his ears sang. Attending members appeared over and over, face and figure, a harridan with brown flame for hair reeling past, coming again, a cyclic procession shot through with fleering gas mosaics, and again, slightly mutant, slowly altered, until phased out to abstractions of color and form that severed in elastic parallax like colorplate ghosts in a printing and parted forever. Whereon new forms arose and wheeled all and along, good carousel of crazies. Suttree observed these phenomena with mild interest from his galactic drainsuck. An enormous white doctor crossed his vision and drew away, shrinking rapidly down the small end of a spyglass. Suttree realized his eyes were open. From his incredible heights he watched these bald bipedal mutants struggling down there on the raw and livid rim of consciousness with a sad amusement. His astronomical bias placed him beyond the red shift and he wondered at the geography of these spaces or how does the world mesh with the world beyond the world? A door closed. He eddied up in a backwash, wheeled, drew breath and was gone again.

  A black cyclocephalic levered him up and withdrew a bowl of his bowels' blood and carried it out covered with a linen.

  A medical cart wheeled in on rubber tires, a stench of sulphur and alcohol. A needle sank in his buttock. He rolled back. He thought he'd seen treebranches in a yard beyond the window. Filled with small figures waiting for he. Wizened and crouching, barbate and cateyed dwarfs with little codpieces of scarlet puce. Who could make them out? An old man lay in the bed next, a gray man sucking air feebly through a slack gray naked mouth. Like me like me. Have they trestled up my bones on a cold stone slab and are they honing small blades against my dismembrance?

  Wheezing rubberoid oafs with pendulous girths kept lumbering down a slope one by one in a drifting vapor. Everyone was going on.

  When they began packing Suttree in ice he felt an enormous sadness touched with rue. He heard someone say the time but he could not understand. He drifted in a morphine sleep.

  Along a wet street, a freshened wind with spits of rain in it. Raw musky smell of the walks. He was in some kind of trouble. Clockshop. A fourlegged clock in a glass bell, a pending treblehook baited with gold balls revolving slowly. Coming to rest. The clock hands too. He looke
d at his face in the glass. On the wall beyond other clocks are stopping. Me? The shop is closed. A thought to ask. He will not ask, however. Clocks need winding and people to wind them. Someone should be told.

  Will the accused please stand.

  You have heard the charges against you.

  Yes.

  Yessir. I come in about eight like I usually do. Seen this feller lookin in the winder and never thought nothin about it. Well, I got in there and I looked at the clock and I seen it wasnt right and I went up to set it and it wasnt runnin. It was wound but it wouldnt run. Then I begun to look around and they was all kinds of peculiarness afoot.

  And could you describe these things for us briefly.

  Yessir. Well, I kindly hate to ...

  You may speak freely. The accused is securely fettered. Is the accused fettered? Aye, fettered.

  Yessir. Well, I commenced lookin about and I seen straightaway they wasnt nary clock in the place knowed what time of day it was. And then I seen Tweetiepie's dead.

  You seen Tweetiepie was dead. Were dead.

  Yessir.

  Let the record show that Tweetiepie is dead.

  At the hand of person or persons unknown.

  It was him done it settin over there feathered.

  Will you identify these remains.

  O lordy no I caint bear it I'm so tore up with grief.

  Your bird sir?

  The same.

  Let the record show that the bird is the same bird.

  Of course the bird is the same bird, called Suttree, lying thin, white, soft, in a tray of ice, curious tetrapod cooling.

  Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away?

  It was in 1884.

  Did he die by natural causes?

  No sir.

  And what were the circumstances surrounding his death.

  He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.

  Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.

  Yessir.

  Are you aware of the penalty fixed upon conviction of lycanthropy?

  Suttree moaned in the ice. It was never me, he called.

  Who segued lithe as an eel from chancery to forest path, abroad by dark tarns in a deep wood where no sun shone and the reeds grew black and fish blind. Until he was stopped by a turtlepedlar bearing a sack of turtles and a rifle gun. Clad in burlap and unshaven he was and in brogans out at the toes and it cold weather.