Suttree(36)

Right along here anywheres is okay, said Harrogate, pointing languidly out the open truck window.

The driver glanced sidelong and bored. You got to have a address, peckerhead.

What about the Smoky Mountain Market?

That aint a address. It’s got to be where people lives.

He looked about, sitting up in the front of the cab like a child. What about the church yonder? he said.

Church?

Yeah.

Well, I dont know.

Do they not hold with goin to church?

The driver cut the wheel and swung left and pulled up in front of the church. All right, he said. Get your ass out.

He hopped down and reached and banged the door shut. Thanks, he called, waving one hand up to the driver. The driver didnt look. He pulled away and the truck disappeared down the street in the noon traffic.

Harrogate came batting his way through the jungle of kudzu that overhung the bluffs above the river until he found a red clay gully of a path going down the slope. He followed along through lush growths of poison ivy and past enormous mummy shapes of vinestrangled trees, banks of honeysuckle dusted in ocher, into a brief cindery wood where grew black sumacs, pokeweeds gorged with sooty drainage whose clustered fruit gleamed small baubles of a poisonous ebon blue.

The path switchbacked and ran out on a cutbank above an abandoned railsiding. He descended into the roadbed and went on. The old right of way lay dim among the weeds, the rails rusted, curving away over rotted ties and dark slag. He trudged along happily in his outland garb, his thin shoes cupping the rails. The river ran below him surly and opaque and shaping itself on the curious forms of limestone that jutted from the bank. By and by he came upon two fishbutchers slick with blood by an old retaining wall, holding a goodsized carp between them. He greeted them with a smile, a curiously attired person emerging from the shrubbery. They stayed their gorestained hands a moment to study him while the fish bowed and shuddered.

Hidy, he said.

These two regarded each other a moment and then looked down at him. Blood dripped from the fish. Blood lay among the leaves in little jagged grails of bright vermilion. One beckoned with a dripping claw. Hey boy. Come here.

What do you want?

Come here a minute.

I got to get on. He was going along sideways over the ties.

Just come here a minute.

He sidled away and broke into a run. They watched him without expression until he had gone from sight in the weeds and then turned back to their fish.

A half mile down the track he came upon rolling stock on a siding, an old black iron locomotive with inscriptions of faded gilt and wooden cars quietly rotting in the sun. Creepers threaded the wrecked windows of the coaches, ancient and chalky brown with their riveted seams and welted coamings like something proofed for descents into the sea. He walked the aisle between the dusty green and gnawn brocaded seats. A bird flew. He came down the iron steps to the ground. A voice said: All right, young feller, off of them there cars.

Harrogate turned and beheld an overalled railroader coming down the tracks toward him, an oldtimer in a striped cap with a heavy brass watchchain hanging from him.

The country mouse turned to see which way to run but the man had paused to stoop above a rusted truck with his longspouted oilcan. He was shaking his head and muttering. Old black engine oil dripped from a seized journal. He raised himself erect and checked the time by the clocksized watch he wore in his bibpocket. Where’s your buddies at today? he said.

Harrogate looked about to see if it was he that was addressed. A cat regarded him dreamily from the domed roof of the coach, belly weighed with pigeon eggs against the warm tar.

It’s just me, said Harrogate.

The old man squinted at him. Your daddy aint a railroad man is he?

No.

I allowed maybe I knowed ye.

I’m new around here.

I dont know ye then.

My name’s Gene Harrogate, said Harrogate coming forward. But the old man shook his head and waved him away and climbed laboriously over the couplings between the cars. I know all the people I want to know, he said.

You dont know old Suttree do ye? Harrogate called after him, but the old man didnt answer.

Harrogate went on down the line, under the old steel bridge and out from the shadow of the bluff past a lumberyard and a slaughterhouse. Rich odors of pinepitch and manure. The siding switched off among the yards and he crossed a field with a ragged camp of shacks sketched into the distance and a weedy sea of auto wrecks washed up on the flank of a hill. He came out upon a narrow road and after a while he came to a gate construed from an old iron bedframe all overgrown with dusty morninglories and hung about with hummingbirds like windtoys on strings. In the yard lay a man in greasy overalls with his head resting on a tire.

Hey, said Harrogate

The man reared up wildly and looked about.