Who’s dead, Jim?
He didnt look up. Your little boy, he said.
Suttree set his cup down and looked out the window. There was a small pool of spilled cream on the marble countertop at his elbow and flies were crouched about it lapping like cats. He got up and went out.
It was dark when the train left the station. He tried to sleep, his head rolling about on the musty headrest. There was no longer a club car or dining car. No service anymore. An old black came through with his zinc sandwichtray and drink cooler. He passed down the corridor of the semidarkened car crying his wares softly and disappeared through the door at the far end. A racket of wheels from the roadway and a slip of cool air. The sleepers slept. The sad and dimly lit back side of a town went down the windows. Fencerails, weedlots, barren autumn fields sliding blackly off under the stars. They went across the flatland toward the Cumberlands, the old car rocking down the rails and the polewires sewing tirelessly the night beyond the cold windowglass.
He woke in various small mountain towns through the early hours of the morning, old people with baskets laboring up the aisle, black families with sleepy children clumping past, whispering, the rusty coaches wheezing and steaming and then the slow accumulate creaking and grating of iron as they pulled out again. It had grown cold in the night but he was numb with other weathers. An equinox in the heart, ill change, unluck. Suttree held his face in his hands. Child of darkness and familiar of small dooms. He himself used to wake in terror to find whole congregations of the uninvited attending his bed, protean figures slouched among the room’s dark corners in all multiplicity of shapes, gibbons and gargoyles, arachnoids of outrageous size, a batshaped creature hung by some cunning in a high corner from whence clicked and winked like bone chimes its incandescent teeth.
In the cold autumn dawn that crept the fields he woke and watched the passing countryside through the glass. Light rain or mist, small beads of water racing on the pane. They crossed a creek by an old trestle, black creosoted timbers flicking past. On the gray water two boys in a skiff, motionless, watching the faces pass like a filmstrip above them. One raised a hand, a solemn gesture. In the distance smoking millstacks arranged upon a gray and barren plain. Somewhere beyond them the cold rain falling in a new dug grave.
The train lurched and rumbled. Went pounding down a long levee with marsh and swampland smoking in the bluish light, a white egret onelegged and livid in the water quartered to a darker antipode and rigid as a plaster lawnbird. Stark woods beyond, a few leaves falling. Suttree wiped his eyes with his shoulders and rose and went down the aisle past the stale and empty seats.
He stood between cars, the upper half of the door latched back and the cool morning wind blowing in. Leaning with his elbows propped, the car rocking and swaying as they came into the yards. Staccato lights tracking in the gray frieze out there. In an upper window a man in his undershirt with his braces hanging. Across the narrow space he and Suttree looked at each other for just a moment before he was snapped away. The gray steel trusses of a bridge went past, went past, went past. In the sidelong morning light he saw the shadowed half-shapes of auto shells crouched in dying ivy down a long and barren gut.
In the station Suttree stood bending to deal with a small man in a cage. Polished blue suit, a lapel badge. Ten oclock, the man said.
He nodded. There’s no other transportation out there I dont guess.
The little man was stamping long rolls of ticket. He pouched his lower lip and shook his head.
Thanks.
Less you wanted to take a cab. Costs right smart.
Thanks, Suttree said.
He found a Krystal near the bus station and had scrambled eggs and toast and he looked through the newspaper but could see no news for him. At ten oclock he boarded the bus and leaned back and closed his eyes. Remorse lodged in his gorge like a great salt cinder.
What will she say?
What will her mother say?
Her father.
Suttree got up and swung down toward the door but the bus had already started. He hung by one hand swaying. All night he’d tried to see the child’s face in his mind but he could not. All he could remember was the tiny hand in his as they went to the carnival fair and a fleeting image of elf’s eyes wonderstruck at the wide world in its wheeling. Where a ferriswheel swung in the night and painted girls were dancing and skyrockets went aloft and broke to shed a harlequin light above the fairgrounds and the upturned faces.
They watched him from the porch, gathered there like a sitting for some old sepia tintype, the mother’s hand on the seated patriarch’s shoulder. Watched him coming up the walk with his empty hands and burntlooking eyes. Suttree’s abandoned wife.