Suttree(174)

The city mouse shook his head, deep in the fondness of these recollections like a strange little old man there in the blue winter twilight under the bridge. Remembering the sunlight on the buffed floor and the broomhandles laid out and the chalk marks. Lying like the children they were on the cool floor with their fragile reptiles, the small hearts hammering in the palms of their hands. Holding them by their tiny pumping waists and releasing them at a signal. The lizards rearing onto their hind legs as their feet slipped on the smooth waxed concrete, strange little saurians. Harrogate has tacked the hinder toes of his with syrup and it scampers through the barry light to soundless victory.

Old crazy Leithal King worked in the kitchen after that. I believe he was the biggest fuck-up in the workhouse. Shit. I got tired takin stuff off of him he was so dumb. I used to race lizards with him I’d let him take his pick, we’d have upwards of half a dozen in a kettle. I’d have me some chili pepper in my hand and when I got my lizard I’d rub a little of that in his ass. He’d go like he was on fire. Old Leithal’d get em and wouldnt know how to hold em or nothin, half the time he’d pull their tails off. He raced one one time that son of a bitch stood straight up and went right on over backards, feet just a churnin.

They sat in blackness. Lights were coming on across the cut, blooming among the barren vines like winter fireflies there.

Come on, said Suttree. You can stay at my place till you get sorted out what you’re going to do.

I dont want to put nobody out.

Hell with that. Let’s go.

He rose reluctantly.

What happened to your cat? said Suttree.

Shit if I know. Seems like when the shit hits the fan they all clear out. Even the goddamn cat.


Suttree never locked his door and the city mouse would come and go at hours convenient to his obscure purposes. He wandered through the wastes like a jackal in the dark, in the keep of old warehouse walls and the quiet of gutted buildings. He was enamored of the night and those quiet regions on the city’s inward edges too dismal for dwelling. Down alleyways of flueblack brick. Through a gate unhinged to a garden of gloom.

In the dawn when cold trucks cough and lumber over the cobbles and black men in frayed and partly eaten greatcoats of their country’s service stand about the fires in empty trashdrums and spit and speculate and nod there’d shoulder in among them a paler derelict who held his small hands to the flames without a word.

At night sometimes he’d sit by the right of way where the rails go so surgically in the slack gloss of the quartermoon. Curving away to some better land where strangers sit freely without being asked. Among alien shapes in the honeysuckles watching the train pass chuffing and clacking down the cut between the high banks, leaving in the smoke and leaf swirl such utter loneliness that he, who’d come from hiding to see it go, knelt sobbing on the crossties among the lightly whispered collisions of the leaves with a hot and salty sorrow in his throat, his hands dangling and his stained face wretched, watching the barnred hinder carriage shuttle gently from sight beyond the curve.

He was caught at his first robbery. White lights crossed like warring swords the little grocery store and back, his small figure tortured there cringing and blinking as if he were being burnt. He dove headlong through a plateglass window and fetched up stunned and bleeding at the feet of a policeman who stood with a cocked revolver at his head saying: I hope you run. I wish you would run.

He rode handcuffed through the winter landscape to Nashville. It is true that the world is wide. Out there the open ends of cornfield rows wheel past like a turnstile. Dark earth between the dead stalks. The rails at a junction veering in liquid collision and flaring again silently in long vees. His forehead to the cold glass, watching.

They went on through the long afternoon twilight with the old carriage rocking and clicking and a rain that blew down from the north cutting long tears in the dust on the windows. Barren fields falling away desolate and small flocks of nameless birds flaring over the land and against the darkening sky like seafans stamped from black sheet iron the shapes of winter trees against a winter sky.

They passed a house and a woman came from the door and tossed a dishpan of water into the yard and wiped her hand on her apron. He pressed his face to the window, watching her recede quietly in the dusk. The train hooted for a crossing and they passed a little store squatting in the coke and dust beyond the yard and they passed a row of empty coaches, the dead windows clocking by and dicing the scene beyond and the long wail of the engine hanging over the country like a thing damned of all deliverance. Harrogate eased the steel bracelet on his wrist and rested his head against the harsh nap of the seat and slept.