Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.
He was lying on his back with one leg doubled under him. He was bleeding from the ears and from the nose and from the hole in his face and he was breathing deeply and regular and he was looking up at the ceiling. The murderer had put the gun back in his pocket and stood looking on like any other spectator. A number of people had already started for the door and when Suttree came up Gary was squatting down looking at Billy Ray as if he did not know what to make of his lying there like that.
Oh my God, said Suttree. Callahan’s eyes closed slowly. His whole face was blue and he closed his eyes so that you could not see death come up in them like a face at a window. Suttree pushed through the people and ran for the telephone at the back wall.
They pulled a blanket over him but Suttree drew it back from his face.
Cover him up, said the ambulance attendant.
He’s not dead.
They gave Suttree a look much like a shrug and lifted the gurney into the rear of the ambulance and Suttree climbed in and sat on the little banquette at the side and the door closed after him.
Shrieking through the streets of Knoxville, the red domelight sweeping the near walls in narrow places, the windows, faces in cars. Billy Ray turned his head once and arched his neck. The pad beneath him grew black with blood. All through the town tonight are folks lie dying. Sirens in the city like the shriek of jackal birds.
They wheeled him through the emergency room door and into a small white room. There was a steel lamp in the ceiling and a steel table beneath it and there were steel cabinets along one wall. The orderlies lifted Callahan onto the table and wheeled the gurney out again. A nurse looked at him lying there, his chest rising and falling. Someone had put a patch of gauze over the hole in his head and the blood around his ears had blackened and dried. A great rugheaded lout lying there with his heavy hands composed alongside him. She shook her head and closed the door.
Later an orderly came in and looked at him and went out again. He returned with a doctor. The doctor carried a clipboard under his arm and he entered the room and pulled the gauze away from Callahan’s face and looked at the hole. He lifted the eyelids and looked in and he lifted the shaggy head and let it back again. The orderly was watching the doctor. The doctor pursed his lips and made a little casual gesture with one hand. He felt Billy Ray’s pulse and looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. He said something to the orderly and then went out again, the orderly behind him, the orderly closing the door.
Suttree and Callahan’s older brother Charlie rose from their chairs.
There’s nothing we can do for that man, said the doctor.
He’s not dead, said Suttree.
No, said the doctor. He’s not dead.
The last visitor was an old black orderly, a gentle man who washed the stricken and the dead. He pulled back the gauze and unscrewed the top from a bottle of alcohol and poured it slowly down the hole into Billy Ray’s brain.
He lived for another five hours and died sometime before daybreak unattended. They hadnt even taken off his shoes. Charlie had gone home and Suttree and the mother sat in the little waiting room. When the doctor came out and told them he was dead Billy Ray’s mother began to cry very quietly. She sat there with her chin quivering and she shook her head slowly from side to side over her dead warrior. Suttree touched her shoulder but she waved him away and she did not look up.
He walked out of the hospital and across the wet grass toward the road. Very slowly the lights of the city were going out, the billboards, the streetlamps. He crossed the river by the high iron bridge, past the orchards in the dark, lights in the water upstream and the sky paling and the night and its disciplines draining away leaving the barren trees as black as iron and a paper city rising in the dawn. A great stillness had fallen. He walked through the dead gray streets. A newspedlar was opening his bale of papers at the corner. The streetsweepers had passed and in the black gutterwater the lights from the polelamps lay like pietins among the darker neon bleedings.
He leaned against the viaduct rail. Spat numbly at the tracks down there. At the dreams implicit in their endless steel Teachings. Section-hands were slouching toward work in the switchingyard. The Watkins man pushed his little trundlecart of nostrums across the bridge, humped between the cart tongues in the wan daybreak. Suttree went down the narrow back path at the end of the bridge. He passed beneath the house of the madman but he was not about at such an hour. Suttree stooped and scrabbled up a half a brickbat and slammed it off the curling clapboards high under the eaves. A crazed putty face slobbered up against the glass, a wild eye cocked there. Suttree turned and went on down the path toward the river.