Suttree(43)

Going up the river path he passed two boys fishing.

Hey boys, he said.

They turned huge eyes up at him.

Doin any good?

Naw.

Their bobbers lay quietly in the scum. Ringent pools of gas kept erupting in oily eyes on the surface. Mauves and yellows from the spectrum guttered and slewed in the dead current.

You boys like to fish?

We dont gots to.

Good for you, said Suttree.

At Ab’s place he handed her the fish at the door and she motioned him past into the room. A thick funk of stale beer and smoke. She folded back the paper, old news repeated mirrorwise on the pale ribbed flesh. She poked a black finger in the meat.

Where’s the old man? said Suttree.

He’s in there. Go on.

In the far corner sat an enormous figure obscured in the gloom.

Come in Youngblood.

Hey.

Set down. Bring the man a beer old woman.

I dont want anything.

Bring him a Redtop.

She shuffled past in her ruptured mules through a curtain to the rear. A squalid sunlight fell briefly. Everywhere from cracks or knotholes small hieroglyphs of light lay about in the cabin, on table and floor and across the cardboard beer signs.

When she came back she leaned across Suttree and clicked a wet bottle down on the little stone table. He nodded to her and raised it and drank. The black man now coalesced out of the semidark seemed to fill half the room. Where you from in the world, Youngblood, he said.

Right here. Knoxville.

Knoxville, he said. Old Knoxville town.

She was clattering about in the back room. After a while she came from behind the curtain again and sat in her chair with her feet up. She was instantly asleep, the blind eye half open like a drowsing cat’s, her mouth agape. Toes peered from the mules like little clusters of dark mice. On her broad face two intersecting circles, fairy ring or hagstrack, the crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand on some stone age matriarch. Annular treponema. Read here why he falls in the streets. Another Jena, another time.

Suttree sat in the hot little room with the tombstone tables and sipped his beer. Water dripped constantly from the bottle. In the corner the poker table had been swept and the lamp filled. Flies walked about everywhere.

Get you another beer, Youngblood.

Suttree tilted the bottle and drained it. I got to go, he said.

The black wiped his eyes with one huge hand. Stories of the days and nights writ there, the scars, the teeth, the ear betruncheoned in some old fray that clung in a toadlike node to the side of his shaven head. You come back, he said.

Early afternoon in the city with his fish sold he ate the beef stew at Granny and Hazel’s. He walked in the streets, a lonely figure. On Jackson Avenue he saw Maggeson in a dingy white suit and straw boater. The rubber baron, small eyes distorted behind the dished glass lenses.

Someone called to him, he turned. Hoghead Henry’s small and jaunty shape was coming from an alleyway heralded by pigeons flapping upward into the sad air with right alarm, immune to Hoghead’s huckleberry insouciance. He swept his rumpled linen beneath the band of his trousers with a slice of his flattened hand and gave Suttree a crooked grin. When did you get out?

Tuesday. Brother and Junior got out with me.

Hoghead grinned. They started up the street. Old Junior, the cops brought him in one night and turned him over to Mrs Long, he was about three fourths drunk and been in some kind of trouble, I forget, and Mrs Long told the cops, said: I dont know what’s wrong with him. My oldest boy Jimmy never causes me the least trouble. Next night here they come with Jim.

Suttree smiled. I hear that old woman shot at you the other night.

Old crazy nigger woman. She shot about four holes in the wall. Shot a picture down. I ducked behind the sofa and she shot a hole in that and John Clancy said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just a shittin and a gettin it. He was layin in the floor and he said it run right over the top of him.

What did you do down there anyway?

Aw, you dont have to do nothin to stir up a bunch of old crazy niggers.

You know what she called you?

What’d she call me?

Called you a white pointedheaded motherfucker.

Hoghead grinned. They had me in the paper one time, they’re always callin anybody towheaded that’s got lightcolored hair, they had me in there and I’d said somethin smart to this juvenile judge and they put: said the twoheaded youth.

Suttree grinned. Where you going?

Just up here with some punchboards. Come go with me.

I pass.

Well, I got to get on. Stay out of the jailhouse, you hear?

I hear, said Suttree.

When he crossed the porch of Howard Clevenger’s store on Front Street there was an old woman rummaging through a basket of kale there as if she had lost something in it. Oceanfrog Frazer was standing at the screendoor. He patted Suttree on the ribs. What’s shakin, baby.