Suttree(160)

One morning at Ellis and Ernest, sadly miscast among the scrubbed college children, sitting at the long pink marble counter he ordered coffee and flipped open the paper. There was Hoghead’s picture. He was dead. Hoghead was dead in the paper.

Suttree laid the paper down and stared out at the traffic on Cumberland Avenue this cold bleak forenoon. After a while he read the piece. His name was James Henry. In the old school photo he appeared childlike and puckish, a composition of spots in black and white and gray. How very like the man. He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever.


It snowed that night. Flakes softly blown in the cold blue lamplight. Snow lay in pale boas along the black treelimbs down Forest Avenue and the snow in the street bore bands of branch and twig, dark fissures that would not snow full. He trudged home in a light fog of alcohol. A thin and distant bell was sounding and he stopped to listen. Something flew. Nameless bird. Suttree turned his face up to the night. The snowflakes came dodging out of the blackness beyond the lamps to settle on his lashes. Snow falling on Knoxville, sifting down over McAnally, hiding the rents in the roofing, draping the sashwork, frosting the coalpiles in the crabbed dooryards. It has covered up the blood and dirt and claggy sleech in gutterways and laid white lattice on the sewer grates. And snow has made cool bowers in the blackened honeysuckle and it has hid the packingcrates in the hobo jungles and wrought enormous pastry rings of trucktires there. Where the creek addles along gorged with offal. Upon whose surface the flakes impinge softly and are gone, Suttree turning up his collar. In the yards a switchengine is working and the white light of the headlamp bores down the rows of iron gray warehouses in a livid phosphorous tunnel through which the snow falls innocently and unburnt.


The Indian’s used shoes creaked in the dry snow like chalk. Over his shoulders he wore a greasy tarpaulin stolen from a donkeyengine at a worksite and his skin was gray with the cold. The snow he stopped to knock from his shoes fell in two broken casts on the hallway floor with the print of the heels and the holes in the shoesoles intact. Leached lines of salt rimed the uppers like creeping frost. He shrugged up the tarp and mounted the dim stairs, a shadow batlike on the flowered wall, a muted creak and cry of tread, a thin clatter of teeth. At the door he breathed on his knuckles and tapped and bent to hear. He tapped again.

Suttree? he said.

But his voice was timid and the sleeper within slept deeply and after a while he descended the stairs and went away in the winter night.


Spring that year came early. There were sunny mornings sitting in the little kitchen drinking coffee and reading the papers. There were flowers in the dooryard, yellow jonquils tottering up through the cinders and loam. She was arrested in New Orleans in early May and he had to wire her five hundred dollars. She came back fat and unchastened. She said that if she ever started to work anywhere bigger than Knoxville would he please kick her ass and little as he liked to promise things he said he would.

He woke in the light of various hours to find her gone, or going, just returned. Sprawled in the heat with her heavy thighs agawp and sweat lightly beaded on her forehead like the dew of fevered dreams. Light tracery of old razor scars on her inner wrists. Her scarred paunch and peltlet of coiled black kid’s hair. He tried the weight of her softly coppled rosebud teat in his palm and she shifted languorously, one foot trapped in a tourniquet of bedsheet.

Lying on his back he watched the day’s shadows lengthen in the room, the blinds drawn, the muted perplex of traffic in the street below fading slowly. He’d rise from the bed and sit by the window like a fugitive and watch through the dusty slats the deepening eve and the wandlike colored lights come up. He’d shave and dress and go down for the paper, a walk in the streets. To come back and lie on the bed because this room was cooler. Reading the paper mindlessly and listening to the radio with its inane announcements. She seemed always bearing her douchebag about with the hose bobbling obscenely and the bag flapping like a great bladder. Her ablutions were endless. In her bright metal haircurlers she looked like the subject of bizarre experiments upon the human brain. And she was growing fatter. She said: How’d you like to live in a whorehouse? You’d eat too.

He’d go for walks, be gone for hours, come back to eyes huge and tearful or speckled with rage.

Follow now days of drunkenness and small drama, of cheap tears and recrimination and half-so testaments of love renewed.

In the secondbest restaurants of the small metropolis and beer taverns dim and rank with musk as brewery cellars. Where others kept their own counsel and nothing short of mayhem raised an eyebrow ever.