Suttree(179)

At the sink he laved cold water over his head. Ahh, he told the drainhole.

I know you’re in there, said the clerk from beyond the door.

Suttree opened his eyes. He was lying on his cot and it was day. The door rapping faded. Footsteps in a corridor. He looked toward the window. Are there parades in the street? What is this roaring? Who is this otherbody? I am no otherbody.

He sat. The room reeled. He fell back and laughed briefly into the musty bedding.

All day he lay in a quaintly fevered world, nothing in the room but the sun and himself, making what construction he could of the sounds that carried to him, the hammering of a roofer, the long farting of airbrakes from a truck in the streets, screendoors banging, children called. A blank wall against which to elaborate his pantomimes. A less virulent cast of the grim had come to occupy his mind and there was a time in the early noon when he had hope of his own recovery. But the sounds he heard began to coalesce and rush and he no longer knew if he dreamt or woke.

In the long afternoon he fell prey to strange cravings of the flesh. Out of a pinwheel of brown taffy his medusa beckoned. A gross dancer with a sallow puckered belly, hands cupping a pudendum grown with mossgreen hair, a virid merkin out of which her wet mauve petals smiled and bared from hiding little rows of rubber teeth like the serried jaws of conchshells.

Suttree groaned in his sleep. He lay in a sexual nightmare, an enormous wattled fundament lowering slowly over his head, in the center a withered brown pig’s eye crusted shut and hung with puffy blue and swollen lobes. A white gruel welled. He pressed his face against the cool wall. And who is this Mr Bones rising wreathed in pale and bluegreen gas? He comes about tottering and wooden like a dummy on a track and goes past with a slight smile and a bow. Lights run over his wetlooking bones and the feet of small rodents grip from within the chamfers of his eyesockets and in his pale blue teeth are cores of blackened silver packed. In a rattle and clang of wheels and pulleys Father Bones tilts out through saloon doors and is gone, old varnished funhouse skeleton. Suttree in his sleep smiled at such child’s fancies. A gray crust broke at his mouthcorners. His eyes snapped open. He sat and reached for the towel. It fell from him and he went out and down the hall naked.

Clotted gouts of gore stained the water in the toiletbowl. Pink, magenta, burgundy.

He stretched himself on the tiles. A faint tang of urine there. Bird shadows on the whited windowglass. Water dripped in the sink. I saw her in an older dream, an older time, moving in an aura of musk, a breath of stale roses, her languid hands swaying like pale birds and her face chalk and lips pink and her nigh-blue hair upbuckled in combs of tortoise, coming down out of her chamber in my unhealed memory clothed in smoke.

Hey Bud. Hey.

It is my old J-Bone and no other.

What the fuck are you doing?

Sicky sick, James.

What the hell have you done to yourself? Can you get up?

I’m all fucked up, James.

I can see that. What is it?

Dear friend, it’s checkout time.

J-Bone patted his shoulder. Hang on a minute. I’ll be right back.

Suttree opened his eyes. In a minute I am going to have a drink of water. He licked his lips.

J-Bone arrived with a fat cabbie. They pulled Suttree up by the arms and began to work a shirt onto him.

I’d just let him sleep it off, said the cabdriver.

I cant leave him layin in here.

Suttree’s arm dropped, his knuckles banged on the floor.

He aint sick is he?

Hold him here a minute while I button these. He just needs to get dried out.

Desist officer. I’ll come peaceably.

He better not be sick. You hear?

I’ve seen him worse than this. Let him back down now.

Has he got any shoes?

I’ll find him some. Help me lift him here.

What’s this?

What?

Hell, he’s bleedin out of his ass.

Maybe he’s got piles.

Piles hell. Look at it.

A crimson stain was spreading about Suttree’s pale and naked haunches. He lay buttoned up in a shirt with a pair of trousers bunched about his knees. The cabdriver backed toward the door. J-Bone looked like an assassin kneeling there. The cabbie turned and fled down the hall.

Go on then, you son of a bitch, J-Bone called.

Son of a bitch, said Suttree from the floor.

J-Bone pulled him sideways out of the blood and began to wrestle the trousers up around him. He fetched his shoes and got them on. He got him up under the armpits and dragged him out and down the hall and stood in Suttree’s bed and pulled him up onto it.

Water Jim. A little old drink.

J-Bone was back in ten minutes with another cabdriver.

Can he walk?

No. Give me a hand with him.

Damn if he aint about as fucked up as anybody I ever saw.

He gets this way.

Suttree’s toes left a faint wake in the scurfy warp of the hall carpet. His shoes fell down the stairs like toys. He watched the hard sunlight ascend the stairwell. His head banged something.