Suttree(35)

Say I got leaky roof. Caboose roof.

Suttree shook his head. He looked up at the old man. Well, he said. If I’ve got any left I’ll bring it over.

The old man straightened up. That’s neighborly of ye and I’d take it as a favor, he said. He was hauling out the watch again.

I’d best get on to town if I’m to get to the store fore it closes.

What time is it, Daddy?

Four nineteen.

Well. Stop again when you can stay longer.

I’ll do it, said the railroader. And dont forget to save me some of that there pitch if you’ve got it to spare.

Okay.

I allowed ye’d gone under when I didnt see ye on the river.

No.

Well.

Iie watched the old man go across the steaming fields, tottering stiffly in his overalls. When he reached the tracks he turned and lifted one hand farewell. Suttree lifted his chin and turned back to his work.

When he had the underside of the skiff daubed up he set the tar by and turned the skiff over and eased it along the mud into the river. He took the rope and walked out along the gallery of the houseboat and tethered it to the railing. He took the oars from where they stood against the side of the house and lowered them into the skiff. Slouched on the railing he watched the dried silt in the bottom of the skiff darken along the joints where the boards would swell shut in the water. As he stood there the five oclock freight ran out on the trestle downriver. Crossing the high span of black wickered steel like an enormous millipede, balls of smoke coughing from the blowhole in the engine’s head and the sootcolored cars clattering after and leaving the air curiously serene behind the racket of their passage.

He pulled a bottle of orange soda from the river by a long cord and uncapped it and sat with his feet propped on the rail taking cool sips. A black woman appeared on the deck of the houseboat upriver and slung two rattling bags of trash overboard and went in again. Suttree leaned his head against the hot boards and watched the river go past. The shadow of the bridge had begun to lie long oblique and sprawling upstream and pigeons ascending into its concrete understructure evoked upon the water before him shapes of skates rising batwinged from the river floor to feed in the creeping dusk. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Plovers along the shore jerking like wired birds in a shooting gallery. Down there a pipe piping gouts of soapcurd and blue sewage. Dusk deepened. Swifts vanished back over the pewter face of the river toward the city. On thin falcon wings nighthawks dipped and wheeled and a bat fluttered past, circled, returned.

Inside Suttree lit a lamp and adjusted the wick. With the same match he lit the burners of the little kerosene stove, two rosettes of pale blue teeth in the gloom. He set a saucepan of beans to warm and got down his skillet and sliced onions into it. He unwrapped a packet of hamburger. Small moths kept crossing the mouth of the lampchimney and spinning burntwinged into the hot grease. He picked them out on the tines of the brass fork with which he tended the cookery and flipped them against the wall. When all was ready he scraped the food from the pans onto a plate and took it together with the lamp to the small table by the window and laid everything out on the oilcloth and sat and ate leisurely. A barge passed upriver and he watched through the cracked glass the dip and flicker of her spotlight negotiating the narrows beneath the bridge, the long white taper shifting in quick sidelong sweeps, the shape of the beam breaking upriver over the trees with incredible speed and crossing the water like a comet. A white glare flooded the cabin and passed on. Suttree blinked. The dim shape of the barge came hoving. He watched the red lights slide in the dark. The houseboat rocked easy in the wake, the drums mumbling under the floor and the skiff sidling and bumping outside in the night. Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber’s mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey’s and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want?

When the River Queen passed he was in bed, drifting toward sleep. He heard the labored sludging sound of her wheel beyond his window. As if she bore through liquid mud. A party on deck in song. The voices carrying the water’s acoustic calm, the old sternwheeler plying upriver with hard liquor and ladies of quality, soft lights above the green baize blackjack tables and the barman polishing the glasses and the danceband musicians leaning on the rail between sets, until the voices waned with distance and the last echoes honed away to a faint murmur of wind.