In the morning the old men were upright and drooling with the first light. Two nurses came down the ward with breakfast trays. The one named Miss Aldrich bent above him smiling and went away again. An enameled namepin. Her white starched frock crackled like sheetiron and her crepesoled shoes went silently as mice.
Suttree had been taken from his bloodied clothes and bathed and laid out in clean coarse linen. Miss Aldrich helped him down the long corridor, the old men watching furiously from their rows of beds on either side. Her soft breast against his elbow, crossing from band to latticed band of morning sunlight where it fell through the barred windows. He stood in a concrete room painted white and pissed painfully a few drops into an oldfashioned urinal and came out again. She was waiting for him. Did you do your business? she said, smiling.
Just a little.
Number one or number two?
Suttree couldnt remember what the numbers corresponded to. Wee wee, he said. He felt completely stupid.
She took his elbow to help him back to his bed.
I can make it all right, he said.
I know.
Oh.
Arent you ashamed?
Of what?
Getting into such a terrible fight. You havent seen yourself in a mirror, have you?
Suttree didnt answer. What’s wrong with my head? he said.
You broke it.
Broke it?
Yes.
Is it bad?
No. Well, it’s not good. It is fractured.
I keep seeing double.
It’ll go away. Here.
Suttree tried to get into the bed painlessly. Shit, he said. He sat with care. How many ribs?
Three.
Who else is here?
You mean your little friends?
Yes.
None. Most of them were treated and taken to jail. A few escaped I think. Are you ready for some breakfast?
I guess so. Am I?
Why not.
She brought him a tray with a bowl of oatmeal and milk and a cup of watered coffee.
Is that it? he said.
That’s it.
She fluffed his pillows, helped him to sit. Soap scent of her hair and her breast brushing across his eye.
I suppose this is Knoxville General? he said, sniffing the porridge.
She smiled. So you dont even know where you are.
Isnt it?
What makes you think you’re in Knoxville?
Come on.
Yes. At St Mary’s you get poached eggs. But you have to say your prayers first.
She put her hand to her mouth. Oh, she said. You’re not a Catholic are you?
I’ve been defrocked. This tastes like wet mattress stuffing.
But do you like it?
Just so so. Listen, what is this ward? It looks like where they lock up dangerous incurables.
It’s just a ward. Most of our patients are older people.
Older? There’s no one in here under ninety. What do they do, unload them here to die?
Yes.
I see.
They’re all indigents. Some of them they bring down here from the nursing home when they get too sick. It’s an experience.
I’ll bet.
You created quite a sensation.
What, among the inmates?
No, silly. Among the nurses.
She brought him the morning paper but he couldnt focus on the print. She cranked up the old metal bed, moving about, flirting with him and smelling good. She told him of her life in the nurses’ home, her wide face full of humor. She roomed in the old morgue along with the other nurses in training. Their beds all leveled under two legs with bricks where the concrete floor sloped toward the drain. At supper she brought her girlfriend, a short heavyset nurse, with instructions to take care of him.
Just remember I saw him first, she said. She winked at Suttree. I’ll see you tomorrow.
But he was afoot and gone with fall of dark. Hobbling down the corridor in his nightshirt past the snoring elders and through the door at the end. A little vestibule. Through the wired glass he could see out into the lobby where the night nurse sat at her desk. Suttree turned and went back through the ward to the doors at the other end. A further corridor, dimly lit. He came upon a washroom and a closet where white orderly coats and jackets hung from pegs above the mopbuckets and jugs of chemicals. He dressed quickly in the first clothes to hand and he looked at himself in the glass. A wounded peon.
He found a door that opened onto the main hall of the hospital and he walked toward the light at the entrance and out into the night. He went down the street toward Central Avenue and crossed to the Corner Grill. His toes were so folded in the old black shoes he’d found that he could hardly walk.
Strange apparition to enter the dim of the little tavern on a quiet Saturday night. Big Frig rose to help him to a booth with elaborate solicitousness and he and the brothers Clancy reckoned him sole survivor of a madhouse rising, an icecream rebellion, before leaning to hear of his trials.
He got a quart of milk from the store and with the bottle under his arm crossed through the winter twilight the littered benchland to the river and home. He had not been asleep long before someone tapped at his door.