Suttree(90)

What can I get you?

Ah Youngblood. I dont need nothin.

Somebody told me you tried to whip everybody at city jail.

You caint do nothin with them crackers. They needs they wigs tightened ever little bit.

I remember the last time they picked up Byrd and Sam Slusser you saw cops for weeks all over Knoxville with bandages and black eyes limping around.

Jones chuckled.

I guess far as that goes we might look for some this week.

Ah, said Jones. Aint but one of em I wants.

Who’s that, Quinn?

Jones didnt answer. How’s you little buddy? he said. He aint drownded hisself in that boat yet is he?

Not yet.

He come by here other day tryin to sell the old woman what he call scobs.

Scobs?

What he call em. Look like old pigeons to me. He had em all dressed and everthing. He some kind of a mess, aint he?

He’s crazy as a mouse in a milkcan.

Jones chuckled.

I’m going uptown. You want me to bring you anything?

Naw.

You sure you okay?

He turned his battered face. Do somethin for me, Youngblood.

Name it.

Go see Miss Mother for me. Tell her I needs to see her.

Wouldnt Doll go for you?

Doll dont want me to have no truck with her. She wont run her off if she comes down here. You tell her.

What else?

That’s all. I’d be much obliged.

Okay. Take care and I’ll see you later.

Yeah, said the black.


He crossed the fields and went up Front Avenue and turned down a steep cinderpath past a run of chickens, a sleeping dog. The path went through a locust wood and the huge beanpods hung everywhere in a sunlight stained and made obscure by windblown papers staked out among the blackened upper branches, tents of newsprint and trash and the ruins of kites all tattered and rainleached and impaled upon the locust spikes. He crossed an iron sewer main half out of the ground and he descended into an old limestone sink that had been filled back as a city dump and graded over years ago. Now it was a small glade and there was a raw board shack in the center of it. Suttree came down the path and out from the last of the trees. The ninekiller flew. A few garish outland birds leaned from the limbs to watch him, gaudy longtailed fowl, he didnt know what kind. Their moult feathers lay about in the dust of the yard. He crossed to the door and tapped with his knuckles.

It opened on a female dwarf coalblack in widow’s weeds who wore little goldwire spectacles on a chain about her neck. Scarce four feet tall she was, her hand on the doorknob at her ear like a child or a trained house ape. She looked up at Suttree and she said: Well, you aint come for yourself I dont reckon.

No mam, he said. She turned her head and cocked it slightly. He said: I came for Ab Jones. He wanted to know if you could come over to his place.

Come in here, she said, stepping back.

He entered with a peculiar feeling of deference. When she shut the door behind them they were in almost total dark. She led the way along a hall and through a curtained doorway. Black drapes were tacked to the window sashes. He could make out a table and some chairs and a small cot.

Set down, she said.

He sat at the table and looked about. She had left the room. Strange effects began to accrue out of the semidark like figures in a dream. On the table was an assortment of silver vases and candlesticks and porringers and bowls all covered over with sheets of yellow cellophane. There was a fireplace that held a broken coalgrate propped on bricks and there was a beveled lookinglass above the mantel. On the mantel a lamp, a vase, a marble clock. What appeared to be a stuffed bird. Smaller objects harbored in the gloom. An electric fan on the table kept turning from side to side and washing him with periodic gusts of fetid air. Flowered wallpaper had been glued over the shack’s naked boards and the joints had laddered and split the paper. Everywhere hung portraits of blacks, strange family groups where the faces watched gravely from out of their paper past. Hanging in the dark like galleries of condemned. Their homemade clothes.

He heard the creak of a cellar door. On the hearth cut flowers in a blue coalscuttle stirred and trembled.

He could hear her coming from outside, doorlatch and the scuffle of her soft shoes. She entered and closed the door behind her. In the light of its closing he saw a coatrack hung with little fairground birds that swung or turned on their wires in the wind. She came to him and took his head in her hand and held up something small and oddly shaped and wrapped in an old socktoe. Suttree fended it off. Wait a minute, he said. What is that?

Hold still, she said.

He reared back. In his hand her forearm felt like a thin piece of kindling.

Aint a fool a wonderful thing? she said. It’s ice, boy. Now set still.

He subsided into the chair and she laid the cold wet rag against the knot on his forehead and took his hand in her own, a thin little thing you’d remember from touching hands with a monkey through the bars or having a pet coon. She guided his hand to the ice and he held it there. A small rill of water ran down his nose. His head began to feel nicely numb.