Suttree(3)

Passing the creek mouth he raised one hand and waved slowly, the old blacks all flowered and bonneted coming about like a windtilted garden with their canes bobbing and their arms lifting dark and random into the air and their gaudy and barbaric costumes billowing with the movement. Beyond them the shape of the city rising wore a wrought, a jaded look, hammered out dark and smoking against a china sky. The grimy river littoral lay warped and shimmering in the heat and there was no sound in all this lonely summer forenoon.

Below the railway trestle he set to running his other line. The water was warm to the touch and had a granular lubricity like graphite. It was full noon when he finished and he stood in the skiff for a moment looking over the catch. He came back upriver rowing slowly, the fish struggling in a thin gray bilge in the floor of the boat, their soft barbels fingering with dull wonder the slimed boards and their backs where they bowed into the sunlight already bleached a bloodless pale. The brass oarlocks creaked in their blocks and the riverwater curled from the bowplanks with a viscid quality and lay behind the skiff in a wake like plowed mire.

He rowed up from under the shadow of the bluffs and past the sand and gravel company and then along by barren and dusty lots where rails ran on cinder beds and boxcars oxidized on blind sidings, past warehouses of galvanized and corrugated tin set in flats gouged from the brickcolored earth where rhomboid and volute shapes of limestone jutted all brindled with mud like great bones washed out. He had already started across the river when he saw the rescue boats against the bank. They were trolling in the channel while a small crowd watched from the shore. Two white boats lightly veiled in the heat and the slow blue smoke of their exhaust, a faint chug of motors carrying the calm of the river. He crossed and rowed up the edge of the channel. The boats had come alongside each other and one of them had cut the engine. The rescue workers wore yachting caps and moved gravely at their task. As the fisherman passed they were taking aboard a dead man. He was very stiff and he looked like a window-dummy save for his face. The face seemed soft and bloated and wore a grappling hook in the side of it and a crazed grin. They raised him so, gambreled up by the bones of his cheek. A pale incruent wound. He seemed to protest woodenly, his head awry. They lifted him onto the deck where he lay in his wet seersucker suit and his lemoncolored socks, leering walleyed up at the workers with the hook in his face like some gross water homunculus taken in trolling that the light of God’s day had stricken dead instanter.

The fisherman went past and pulled the skiff into the bank upriver from the crowd. He rolled a stone over the rope and walked down to watch. The rescue boat was coming in and one of the workers was kneeling over the corpse trying to pry the grapnel loose. The crowd was watching him and he was sweating and working at the hook. Finally he set his shoe against the dead man’s skull and wrenched the hook with both hands until it came away trailing a stringy piece of blanched flesh.

They brought him ashore on a canvas litter and laid him in the grass where he stared at the sun with his drained eyes and his smile. A snarling clot of flies had already accrued out of the vapid air. The workers covered the dead man with a coarse gray blanket. His feet stuck out.

The fisherman had made to go when someone in the crowd took his elbow. Hey Suttree.

He turned. Hey Joe, he said. Did you see it?

No. They say he jumped last night. They found his shoes on the bridge.

They stood looking at the dead man. The squad workers were coiling their ropes and seeing to their tackle. The crowd had come to press about like mourners and the fisherman and his friend found themselves going past the dead man as if they’d pay respects. He lay there in his yellow socks with the flies crawling on the blanket and one hand stretched out on the grass. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist as some folks do or used to and as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man’s watch was still running.

That’s a bad way to check out, said Joe.

Let’s go.

They walked along the cinders by the edge of the railroad. Suttree rubbed the gently pulsing muscle in his speculative jaw.

Which way do you go? said Joe.

Right here. I’ve got my boat.

Are you still fishin?

Yeah.

What made you take that up?

I dont know, Suttree said. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

You ever get uptown?

Sometimes.

Why dont you come out to the Corner some evenin and we’ll drink a beer.

I’ll get out there one of these days.

You fishin today?

Yeah. A little.

Joe was watching him. Listen, he said. You could get on up at Miller’s. Brother said they needed somebody in men’s shoes.