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?