Suttree(185)
They said you was dyin. I came up last week and you didnt know nothin. I had a little drink hid away too.
Suttree patted J-Bone’s knee, his eyes shut. Old J-Bone, he said.
I think you’re a lowlife son of a bitch for not bringin us one of them, said Junior.
He opened one eye. One of what?
Them slick little nighties.
Piss on you.
Old Suttree’s thinner than Boneyard, said J-Bone.
Old Suttree’s all right, said Suttree.
They seemed a long time going. Down over the pocked and gutted streets under random pools of lamplight, blue jagged bowls moth-blown that reeled along the upper window rim by dim strung lightwires. Pale concrete piers veered off, naked columns of some fourth order capped with a red steel frieze. New roads being laid over McAnally, over the ruins, the shelled facades and walls standing in crazed shapes, the mangled iron firestairs dangling, the houses halved, broke open for the world to see. This naked spandrel clinging someway to sheer wallpaper and mounting upward to terminate in nothingness and night like the works at Babel.
They’re tearing everything down, Suttree said.
Yeah. Expressway.
Sad chattel stood on the cinder lawns, in the dim lilac lamplight. Old sofas bloated in the rain exploding quietly, shriveled tables sloughing off their papery veneers. A backdrop of iron earthmovers reared against the cokeblown sky.
New roads through McAnally, said J-Bone.
Suttree nodded, his eyes shut. He knew another McAnally, good to last a thousand years. There’d be no new roads there.
At night in the iron bed high in the old house on Grand he’d lie awake and hear the sirens, lonely sound in the city, in the empty streets. He lay in his chrysalis of gloom and made no sound, share by share sharing his pain with those who lay in their blood by the highwayside or in the floors of glass strewn taverns or manacled in jail. He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he’d guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining.
The destruction of McAnally Flats found him interested. A thin, a wasted figure, he eased himself along past scenes of wholesale razing, whole blocks row on row flattened to dust and rubble. Yellow machines groaned over the landscape, the earth buckling, the few old coalchoked trees upturned and heaps of slag and cellarholes with vatshaped furnaces squat beneath their hydra works of rusted ducting and ashy fields shorn up and leveled and the dead turned out of their graves.
He watched the bland workman in the pilothouse of the crane shifting levers. The long tethered wreckingball swung through the side of a wall and small boys applauded. Brickwork of dried blood-cakes in flemish bond crumbling in a cloud of dust and mortar. Walls grim with scurf, a nameless crud. Pale spongoid growths that kept in clusters along the damper reaches came to light and all day grime-caked salvagers with hatchets spalled dead mortar from the piled black brick. Gnostic workmen who would have down this shabby shapeshow that masks the higher world of form. And left at eventide these cutaway elevations, little cubicles giving onto space, an iron bedstead, a freestanding stairwell to nowhere. Old gothic soffits hung with tar and lapsing paintflakes. Ragged cats picked their way over the glass and nigger dogs in the dooryards beyond the railsiding twitched in their sleep. Until nothing stood save rows of doors, some bearing numbers, all nailed to. Beyond lay fields of rubble, twisted steel and pipes and old conduits reared out of the ground in clusters of agonized ganglia among the broken slabs of masonry. Where small black hominoids scurried over the waste and sheets of newsprint rose in the wind and died again.
When he went one morning to the river he found the houseboat door ajar and someone sleeping in his bed. He entered in a fog of putrefaction. A hot and heady reek under the quaking tin. So warm a forenoon. He screened his nostrils with his sleeve.
Suttree nudged the sleeper with his toe but the sleeper slept. Two rats came from the bed like great hairy beetles and went rapidly without pause or effort up the wall and through a missing pane of glass as soundlessly as smoke.
He went back out and sat on the rail. He watched the river and he watched the fishing canes wink in the sunlight at the point. Wands dipping and rising, an old piscean ceremony he’d known himself. Pigeons came and went beneath the arches of the bridge and he could hear the rattling whine of a bandsaw at Rose’s across the river. Upstream at Ab Jones’s no sign of life, he looked. After a while he sucked in a breath and entered the cabin again. He kicked away the covers. A snarling clot of flies rose. Suttree stepped back. Caved cheek and yellow grin. A foul deathshead bald with rot, flyblown and eyeless.