Suttree(39)

Hell, I just stopped to say Hidy. I didnt mean nothin by it.

The old man closed his eyes.

Say listen. Is they anyone under the far end yonder?

The ragman looked. Across the river down the long aisle of arches lay the distant facing image of his own shelter. Why dont you go see? he said.

Danged if I wont, said Harrogate. If it aint spoke for we’ll be neighbors. He waved and started up around the side of the bridge. We’ll get along, he called back. I can get along with anybody.

It was midafternoon when he crossed into the city and descended the steep path at the end of the bridge, swinging down through a jungle of small locust trees filled with long spikes and blackened starlings that flew shrieking out over the river and circled and came back. He emerged onto the barren apron of clay beneath the bridge. Small black children playing there in the cool. Below them a black and narrow street. One of the children saw him and then they all looked up, three soft dark faces watching.

Hidy, he said.

They squatted immobile. Small wooden trucks and autos stalled in streets graded out with a broken shingle. Beyond them a brown clapboard house, foreyard a moonscape in clay and coaldust, a few sorry chickens crouched in the shade. A black man swung reposed and prone on a bench hung by chains from the porch ceiling and a line of faded wash steamed in the windless heat.

What are you all doin?

The oldest spoke. We aint done nothin.

You all live over yonder?

They admitted it with solemn nods.

Harrogate looked about. He reckoned he’d not be put to living next door to niggers leastways. He climbed down the bank and came out on the road and went on downriver past rows of shacks. The road was pocked and buckled and after a while it went to sand and dried mud and then nothing. A thin path wandered on through weeds hung with wastepaper. Harrogate followed after.

The path cut through heatstricken lots and fallow land and passed under a high trestle that crossed the river. A tramp’s midden among the old stone footings where gray bones lay by rusted tins and a talus of jarshards. A ring of blackened bricks and the remains of a fire. Harrogate wandered about, poking at things with a stick. Pieces of burnt foil sunburst in blue and yellow. Dredging charred relics from the ashy sleech. Melted glass that had reseized in the helical bowl of a bedspring like some vitreous chrysalis or chambered whelk from southern seas. He dusted it on his sleeve and carried it with him. Across a smoking alluvial strewn with refuse to the faint rise of the railtracks and the river beyond.

A row of black fishermen sat along the ties where the tracks crossed the creek, their legs dangling above the oozing sewage. They watched their corks tilt below them in the creek mouth and did not turn to see him teeter past along the rail, his head averted above the sulphurous fart reek that seeped up between the ties.

You all doin any good? he sang out.

A baleful face looked up and looked away again. He stood watching for a while and then went on, tottering in the heat. The sun like a bunghole to a greater hell beyond. On the hill above him he could see the brickwork of the university and a few fine homes among the trees. He came out at length onto a small riverside street. His sneakers lifting from the hot tar with smacking sounds. A sidelong dog receded at a half trot before him down the street toward the shade of some lilac bushes by one of the combustible looking shacks there. Harrogate studied the landscape beyond. A patch of gray corn by the riverside, rigid and brittle. A vision of bleak pastoral that at length turned him back toward the city again.

He wandered Knoxville’s sadder regions for the better part of the afternoon, poking in alleys, probing old cellars, the dusty lees or nether dank of public works. Him wide eyed in his juryrigged apparel not unlike some small apostate to the race itself, pausing here at a wall to read what he could of inscriptions in cloudy chalk, the agenda of anonymous societies, assignation dates, personal intelligence on the habits of local females. A row of bottles gone to the wall for stoning lay in brown and green and crystal ruin down a sunlit corridor and one upright severed cone of yellow glass rose from the paving like a flame. Past these gnarled ashcans at the alley’s mouth with their crusted rims and tilted gaping maws in and out of which soiled dogs go night and day. An iron stairwell railing shapeless with birdlime like something brought from the sea and small flowers along a wall reared from the fissured stone.

He paused at some trash in a corner where a warfarined rat writhed. Small beast so occupied with the bad news in his belly. It must have been something you ate. Harrogate crouched on his heels and watched with interest. He prodded it gently with a curtainrod he’d found. From a doorway a girl watched him motionless and thin and unkempt. A crude doll dressed in rags with huge eyes darkly dished and guttering in her bird’s skull. Harrogate looked up and caught her watching him and she went all squirmy with her hands pulling at the raveled hem of her dress for a moment before her head snapped back and he could see a ropeveined claw clutched in her hair and the girl jerked backward and disappeared through an open door. He looked down at the rat again. It was moving one rear leg in slow circles as if to music. It must have felt some cold pneuma pass for it suddenly shivered and then it let out its feet slowly until they came to rest. Harrogate poked it with the curtainrod but the rat only rolled loosely in its skin. Fleas were running out at the lean gray face.