He found him senseless and hanging half off the ragged army cot. The little shack smelled of grease and tarpaper and filth. Suttree took the junkman up by arm and elbow and eased him back onto the bed, solicitous yet somewhat loath to touch him in his leprous rags. Harvey rolled a whited eye and muttered and fell back. Suttree looked around the little cabin. Floor strewn with gears, axleshafts, batteries. Tottering columns of tires. A cupboard of hubcaps like curious silver, mangled and banged, painted or stamped with loutish new world crests.
He stood in the door and looked out over the junkman’s lot. Tall hollyhocks by the weighted gate and dockweed blooming and begonias down along the remnants of the fence. In the corner of the lot a stand of sunflowers like some floral enormity in a child’s garden. Suttree sat on the cinderblock steps. The flowers moved in the wind. He could not see the river but there was a barge going upstream through the trees like a great train of wares ferrying soundlessly by means unknown up the valley floor. On the far shore a riprap of broken marble. Rough shapes of iron rusting in the sun. In the gloom of the shack the junkman groaned and turned. One among a mass of twisted shapes discarded here by the river. Suttree turned and saw him fend with his arm some phantom, a gesture of dread such as the mad favor, his anguish no less real. Suttree rose and went out through the gate and the gate clanged gently shut behind him.
When Harrogate pulled the string on his homemade detonator he had one finger in his ear. The explosion blew him twenty feet up the tunnel and slammed him against a wall where he sat in the darkness with chunks of stone clattering everywhere about him and his eyes enormous against the unbelievable noise in which he found himself. Then he was sucked back down the tunnel in a howling rush of air, his clothes scrubbing away and peelings of hide until he found himself lying on his face in the passage with a shrieking in his ears. Before he could rise it returned and snatched him up again and scuttled him back along the floor in a cloud of dust and ash and debris and left him bleeding and halfnaked and choked and groping for something to hold to. Dont come no more, he cried aloud in the ringing vault, I done had enough. Far back through the broken wall he could hear the echoes of the blast shunting row on row down the cavern to ultimate nothingness.
He lay very quietly. He was bruised and bleeding and numb all over and he began to cry. His head was ringing and he was half deaf yet he could hear in the horrid darkness shapes emerge from the reeks and crannies, features stained with boneblack, jaws adrip. He could hear the blood running in his body and he could hear the organs working, the lungs filling and collapsing. Little girls in flowered frocks went tripping out through stiles of sunlight and their destination was darkness as is each soul’s. Coming toward him was a soft near soundless mass. Sucking over the stones. Seeking him out. He pulled himself up and listened. Coming down the tunnel. Something nearing in the night. A sluggish monster freed from what centuries of stony fastness under the city. Its breath washed over him in a putrid stench. He tried to crawl. He scrabbled blindly among the stones in the dark. He was engulfed feet first in a slowly moving wall of sewage, a lava neap of liquid shit and soapcurd and toiletpaper from a breached main.
When Suttree saw the piece in the paper that said: Earthquake? he read and knew. He folded the paper and rose and went out the door and down the steps.
At Harrogate’s there was no one home, not even the cat. He stirred the cold ashes in the firepit, he poked among the city rat’s belongings.
In the afternoon he went about where the rat was known but no one knew where he could be.
It was evening when he came upon Rufus down on Front Street. He was sat in a gutterful of lamplight before the store as if he were waiting for it to open. He raised up when he saw who it was. Hey Sut, he said. How you makin it?
Just slidin, said Suttree. What are you doing?
Aw just settin. He pushed back his cap with his thumb and rubbed his head and smiled.
Suttree sat beside him on the little stone curb.
You want a drink? He canted the bottle he held to one side for the light to follow the label. They looked at the bottle together in silence. Get ye a sup. Tastes pretty good.
Suttree took the bottle and twirled off the little fluted plastic cap and hooked a good shot of it back.
Smoke rose from his noseholes.
Agh gie gie, he said.
Oh yes, said Rufus, shaking his head profoundly. It’ll talk to ye.
Great God.
Rufus took the bottle from him gently and supped a good sup and stood it carefully in the road before them. Suttree wiped his eyes with the balls of his fingers. The vapors seemed to have risen to his brain. Even the smell of honeysuckle that had choked the air with its hot and winey perfume and memories of summer eve was burned away. He looked at Rufus with watery eyes. Have you seen Harrogate? he said.