Suttree(40)

He rose and nudged the rat with his toe and then went on down the alley. He crossed a tarred street bedded with bottlecaps and bits of metal, scattered patterns in niello and one improbable serpent, the ribbed spine polished by traffic and partly coiled in a pale bone omen he could not read. Overhead the bowls of stoned out polelamps. A lank black slattern stood hipshot in a doorframe. Hey boydove, you gettin any gravel for yo goose? Whoopla laughter scuttling after him and a gold tooth winksome, bawdy dogstar in the ordurous jaws of fellatio major.

He went where torpid blacks crouched or drowsed in doorways, stoops, on corners almost in the traffic. Old men like effigies with fingers laced and capped upon the heads of canes between their knees. In suits thought long extinct, perforated two-tone shoes, socks rolled in obscene tubes about their thin black ankles. A hawkfaced ebon freak importuned him, sussurous, long underlip leaking a clear drool. Flies clove the air like comets. He passed on. Eyes averted. Dark matrons at the upper windows in hot and airless dishabille, chocolate breasts leaning, Dusklovers. Ancillary disciples to the rise of night. He’d come from the dwellingstreets of whites to those of blacks and no gray middle folk did he see.

Summer dusk had crept long and blue and shadows risen high upon the western building faces when he came up Gay Street. He went along the shopfronts like a misplaced poacher, his eyes squirreling about and his broken clown’s sneakers flapping. At Lockett’s he paused to admire dusty charlatan’s props in the window, small boxes of sneeze powder, cigars laced with cordite, a stamped tin inkstain. Stapled to display cards from which the sun had bleached all message. A china dog bowbacked and grunting. Harrogate filled with admiration at such things. He stepped slightly back to note the merchant’s name and then went on. Passing under the Comer’s Sport Center sign, a steep stairwell and the muted clack of balls overhead. There it is, he said. Bigger’n life.

He turned up union   Avenue, past the Roxie Theatre, Webfoot Watts and Skinny Green on the bill with all-girl revue. Harrogate stepping around to see the tariffs. The girl looked down from her glass cage like a cat. He smiled and drew back. He went down Walnut Street past hardware stores and beer taverns and ramshackle poultry shops. He swung up Wall Avenue and into Market Square. His small face peering through the windows of the Gold Sun Cafe where supper plates were being sopped clean and rawlooking girls went up and back in their soiled white uniforms.

Down Market Street countrymen sat beneath canopies in canebottomed chairs or on upended peachcrates or perched on the leadcolored fenders of old Fords fitted out with crude truckbeds nailed up out of boards. Folks putting up their stuffs for this day, shops being closed. A few sunfaded awnings winched shut. Two roustabouts collected a beggar from the walkway and set him in a truck. Harrogate went on. An old man seated before a basket of turnips hissed him and gestured with his chin, seeking a buyer, Harrogate to his worn eyes no worse a prospect than others coming along. Harrogate watching the gutters for anything edible fallen from the trucks. By the time he reached the end of the street he had a small bouquet of frazzled greenstuffs and a bruised tomato. He went into the markethouse and washed these things at the drinking fountain marked White and ate them while he wandered down the vast hall with its rich reek of meat and produce and woodchaff. A few vendors squatted yet in their stalls, old women with tawed faces and farmers with their quilted napes. A honeyseller sitting quietly in immaculate blue chambray, his jars on the low table before him arranged faultlessly, the labels marshaled aislewise. Harrogate went by, chewing his lettuce. Past a long glass coffin where a few lean fish leered up with cold and golden eyes from their beds of salted ice. Windchimes tinkled overhead in the slow fanwash. He pushed open the heavy doors at the end of the hall with their hundred years’ accretion of navalgray paint and stepped out into the summer night. Standing there wiping his hands on the front of him, his eyes drawn by the cryptic piping of hot neon across the night and by the chittering of goatsuckers aloft in the upflung penumbra of the city’s lights. A streetsweeper puttered past with his cart. Harrogate crossed the street and went up the alley. A family of trashpickers were packing flat cartons onto a child’s wagon, the children scurrying among the rancid cans like rats and as graylooking. None spoke. They had tied the folded boxes down with twine, a parlous and tottering load that the man steadied with one hand while the woman drew the cart along and the children made forays into trashbins and cellar doors, watching Harrogate the while.

He made his way by alleys and small dark streets to the lights at Henley Street where he’d earlier spied a church lawn. Here he found himself a nest among the curried clumps of phlox and boxwood and curled up like a dog. He had a few things he’d collected in his pocket and he took these out and set them alongside in the edging of mulch and lay back again in the grass. He could feel under his back the rumble of trucks passing in the street. He shifted his hips. He folded his hands behind his head. He must prop his upturned toes together to ease the weight of the enormous shoes from his bird’s ankles. After a while he slipped them off and lay back again. Yellow lamplight clung in his lashes. He watched insects rise and wheel there. A hunting bat cut through the cone of light and sucked them scattering. They re-formed slowly. Soon two bats. Veering and rending the placid life that homed to ash in the columnar light. Harrogate awonder at how they did not collide.