He sat very still, then he turned and spat the coffee on the ground. Good God, he said.
What is it? said Reese.
What’s happened to this coffee?
I aint drunk none of it.
Suttree swung his nose across the rim of the cup and then pitched the coffee out on the ground and went on eating.
Reese wiped his mouth on his knee and rose. He came back with a cup of the coffee and stood over Suttree blowing at it and then he took a sip.
What is this shit? he said.
Damned if I know. Slim Jim, that’s the name of it.
Reese took another sip and then tipped it out on the ground. I dont know what it is, he said. But it aint coffee.
The girl was sitting on the far side of the fire. She flung her black hair. What’d you do to the coffee, Mama? she called.
Reese had gone back to the fire. They had the package up trying to read it. Reese poured the coffee out on the ground. A squabble ensued.
Suttree what is this shit?
I dont know. I bought it for coffee.
It dont even smell like coffee.
They done emptied the coffee out and filled the sack back with old leaves or somethin, said the woman, nodding her head and looking about.
Bring me a cup of it, Willard, the girl called.
Reese cut his eyes about. It might be poison, he said.
Put eggshells in it, Mama, the girl called. That’ll rectify it.
Where’s she goin to get eggshells at, dumb-ass? They aint no eggs.
The woman reached and swatted the boy in the top of the head with her hand.
Ow, he said.
You mind how you talk to your sister.
Something woke him in the small hours of the morning. Things moving in the dark. He took his flashlight and trained it out along the trees until it ghosted away in the dark fields downriver. He swept it toward the woods and back again. A dozen hot eyes watched, paired and random in the night. He held the light above his head to try and see the shapes beyond but nothing showed save eyes. Blinking on and off, or eclipsing and reappearing as heads were turned. They were none the same height and he tried his memory for anything that came in such random sizes. Then a pair of eyes ascended vertically some five feet and another pair sank slowly to the ground. Weird dwarfs with amaurotic eyeballs out there in the dark on a seesaw sidesaddle. Others began to raise and lower.
Cows. He agreed with himself: It is cows. He switched off the flashlight and lay back. He could smell them now on the cool upriver wind, sweet odor of grass and milk. The damp air was weighted with all manner of fragrance. You can see it in a dog’s eyes that he is sorting such things as he tests the wind and Suttree could smell the water in the river and the dew in the grass and the wet shale of the bluff. It was overcast and there were no stars to plague him with their mysteries of space and time. He closed his eyes.
In the morning they took the womenfolk downriver to shuck the mussels there, the girls giggling, the old woman clutching the sides of the boat nervously and staring with her hooded eyes toward the passing shore. That evening after supper he went down to the river with a bar of soap and sat naked in the water off the gravel bar. He washed his clothes and he washed himself and he hung his clothes from a tree and got his towel and dried himself and sat among his blankets. After a while Reese came down through the woods on tiptoe, calling out softly.
Over here, said Suttree.
He crouched in front of Suttree. He looked back over his shoulder toward the camp.
What is it? said Suttree.
We got to go to town.
Okay.
I figure we ought to just go on in the mornin and get done with it.
Suttree nodded.
I started to let Mama and Wanda go, but you caint depend on no women to do business. What do you think?
It suits the hell out of me.
Reese looked toward the fire and looked back. It suits the hell out of me too, he hissed. If I dont get shitfaced drunk they aint a cow in Texas. You ever been to Newport?
Not lately.
Lord they got the wildest little old things runnin around up there. It’s a sight in the world.
They have?
You daggone right. The old man checked the camp again and leaned to Suttree’s ear. We go up there, Sut, we’ll run a pair or two down and put the dick to em. He winked hugely and set one finger to his lips.
They left in the early morning two days later. It had rained all night and the cars came down the long black road like motorboats and passed and diminished in shrouds of vapor. After a while an old man stopped in a model A and they rode on into Dandridge. The old man did not speak. The three of them hunched up like puppets on the front seat watched the summer morning break over the rolling countryside.
They got a ride from Dandridge to Newport on a truck. There was a tractor on the truckbed and it kept shifting in its chains so that the travelers stood back against the stakesides with their hair blowing in the wind lest the thing break loose. They reached Newport around noon and descended blinking and disheveled into the hot street.