Suttree(187)

I was in the hospital. Typhoid fever.

Lord honey I thought you looked peaky. Let me see you. He turned Suttree toward the streetlamp and peered into his eyes with genuine solicitude.

I’m okay, Suttree said.

Sweetie you have just fell off to skin and bones.

I lost about twenty pounds. I’ve gotten some of it back.

You want to rest and take care of yourself. You hear?

Suttree held out his hand. Tell me goodbye, he said.

Where you goin?

I dont know. I’m leaving Knoxville.

Shoot. He slapped at Suttree’s outstretched hand. You aint goin noplace. When? When you goin?

Right now. I’m gone.

The black reached out sadly, his face pinched. They stood there holding hands in the middle of the little street. When you comin back?

I dont guess I’ll be back.

Dont tell me that.

Well. Sometime maybe. Take care.

Honey you write and let me know how you gettin on.

Well.

Just a postcard.

Okay.

You need any money?

No. I’ve got some.

You sure?

I’m okay.

Trippin Through The Dew squeezed his hand and stepped back and gave a sort of crazy little salute. Best luck in the world baby, he said.

Thanks John. You too.

He lifted a hand and turned and went on. He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he’d taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. Walking down the little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left of him to shed. It was all gone. No trail, no track. The spoor petered out down there on Front Street where things he’d been lay like paper shadows, a few here, they thin out. After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind. Old news years in traveling that you could not put stock in.

He took the shortcut up the path behind the houses, avoiding any chance of other meetings in the street. Old broken Thersites would have called down from his high window but he was not well these latter days. Dried vitriol hung in glazen strings from a bush by the side of the house and Suttree even thought he heard muted sounds of grousing in an upper room. He cocked one eye up the high warped clapboard wall to the chamber kept by this old taperheaded troll but no one watched back. The eunuch was asleep in his chair and he stirred and mumbled fitfully as if the departing steps of the fisherman depleted his dreams but he did not wake.


The city ambulance swung down off Front Street and went bobbling over the ground and across the tracks and up the river path until it came to the houseboat. People were watching along the porches and there were people standing around in front of the store watching with grave faces. Two men went in with a canvas stretcher and a blanket and in a few minutes they came out with the body and slid it quickly into the rear of the ambulance. In backing around they got the ambulance stuck in the mud. One wheel shot reams of gouty mire out into the river. The men climbed down and looked. One pushed. The ambulance sank until it was resting on its differential carrier.

After a while three tall colored boys in track shoes came along and pushed the ambulance out.

Who sick? one said.

There was a man dead in there, the driver said.

They looked at each other. How long he been dead?

A couple of weeks.

Shoo, one said, wrinkling his wide nose. That’s what that’s been.

You dont know who it was do you?

No suh.

Dont know who lived here?

No suh.

Come on Ramsey, we got to go.

I heah you, man.

The driver closed the door and motioned with his hand and the ambulance pulled away. The boys watched them go. Shit, one said. Old Suttree aint dead.


He had a small cardboard suitcase and he came out of the weeds and set it on the edge of the road and straightened up and began combing his hair. He looked about his appearance, propping one foot on the case and bending to scrape beggarlice from his trousers with his thumbnail. New trousers of tan chino. A new shirt open at the neck. His face and arms were suntanned and his hair crudely bartered and he wore cheap new brown leather shoes the toes of which he dusted, one, the other, against the back of his trouserlegs. He looked like someone just out of the army or jail. A car came down the highway and he gestured at it with his thumb and it went on.

Traffic was slow along the road and he was there a long time. It was very hot. You could see his skin through the new shirt. Across the road a construction gang was at work and he watched them. A backhoe was dragging out a ditch and a caterpillar was going along the bank with mounds of pale clay shaling across its canted blade. Carpenters were hammering up forms and a cement truck waited on with its drum slowly clanking. Suttree watched this industry accomplish itself in the hot afternoon. Downwind light ocher dust had sifted all along the greening roadside foliage and in the quiet midafternoon the call of a long sad trainhorn floated over the lonely countryside.