Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

He emerged from the creek mouth past the curious dark fishermen, oaring slowly and studying the sky. He stroked his way upstream, past the last of the shacks and as far as the marble company. Coming about on the placid evening calm and easing back the oars alongside and taking up his sling. Pinching up the leather in his fingers. Pouring the pellets. One flew. And there. A goatsucker wheeled and croaked. He hove back on the sling bands nearly to the floor and let go. And again. Random among the summer trees houselights came on along the southern shore. The neon nightshapes of the city bloomed, their replicas in the water like discolored sores. Across the watered sky the bats crossed and checked and flared. Dark fell but that was all. He was drifting beneath the bridge. He laid down the sling and took up the oars and came back.

It was a hot night for heavy thinking. He lay with his hands composed upon his chest. Beyond the bridge’s arching brow drifting fireflies guttered against the night and the wind bore a heady jscent of honeysuckle.

It was a grayhaired and avuncular apothecary who leaned not unkindly down from his high pulpit. Enormous fans stirred overhead, shifting the reek of nostrums and purgatives. Beyond the counter ranged carboys and galleypots and stainedglass jars of chemic and cottonmouthed bottles cold and replete with their particolored pills. Harrogate’s chin rested just at the cool stone trestle and his eyes took in this alchemical scene with a twinge of old familiarity for which he could not account.

May I help you? said the scientist, his hands holding each other.

I need me some strychnine, said Harrogate.

You need some what?

Strychnine. You know what it is dont ye?

Yes, said the chemist.

I need me about a good cupful I reckon.

Are you going to drink it here or take it with you?

Shit fire I aint goin to drink it. It’s poisoner’n hell.

It’s for your grandmother.

No, said Harrogate, craning his neck suspectly. She’s done dead.

The chemist tore off a piece of paper from a pad and poised with his pen. Just let me have the name of the person or persons you intend to poison, he said. We’re required to keep records.

Suspecting japery, Harrogate grinned an uneasy grin. Listen, he said. You know about these here bats?

Oh yes indeed.

Well, that’s what it’s for. I dont care to tell you because they aint nobody else but me could figure out the rest of it.

I’m sure that’s true, the chemist said.

I didnt bring nothin to fetch it in. You got a jar of some kind?

How old are you? said the chemist.

I’m twenty-one.

No you’re not.

What’d you ast me for then?

The chemist removed his glasses and closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He donned the spectacles again and looked down at Harrogate. He was still there. I can’t sell strychnine to minors, he said. Nor to folk of other than right mind. It’s against the law.

Well, said Harrogate. That’s up to you.

Yes, said the chemist.

Harrogate backed sidling down the pale medicinal corridor, past ordered rows of canisters and jars. The rotors overhead sliced through the antiseptic air slow and constant. He pushed back the door with one hand. Bell ching. A slender rod came sucking out of a little piston. The chemist had not moved.

You’re just a old fart, called Harrogate, and ran.

Suttree just shook his head. He was sitting with his trousers rolled and his bare feet hanging in the river.

Come on, Sut.

Gene.

Yeah.

I am not going in no goddamned drugstore and buy strychnine. Not for you. Not for anybody.

Hell Sut, they’d sell it to you. If I tell you what I want with it will you?

No.

They sat there watching Suttree’s toes resting on the river.

Listen, Sut …

Suttree put his forefingers in his ears.

Harrogate leaned more closely. Listen, he said.

He waited down on Stinky Point, one eye for measuring the sun’s decline, the other weathered out for his friend’s coming. He had a pieplate with a piece of high and wormy hog’s liver in it and he was cutting this up in small gobbets with his pocketknife. Suttree came through the weeds hot and perspiring and squatted on the bank and drew a small package from the hippocket of his jeans. Here, you crazy son of a bitch, he said.

Harrogate’s black rat’s eyes glazed over with joy. He untied the string and lifted a glass vial from the paper and examined it. A pale label with a green skull and bones. Shithouse mouse, he said. Thanks Sut. I sure as shit appreciate it.

You owe me two dollars.

Old buddy, that kind of money aint nothin now. You’ll have it in the mornin.

Suttree watched him go on through the weeds to the river where his boat rode tethered to a cinderblock by a length of wire. He turned and smiled back and stepped neatly into the boat, holding the bottle in one hand, the tin of liver in the other. He sat carefully and laid his things out before him and leaned slightly forward and unpocketed the small catapult he’d fashioned from a treefork. Unwiring himself from the land he took up his makeshift oars and feathered gently into the current and away.

From the deck of his houseboat Suttree watched the antics of this half daft adolescent with a mild disgust. Standing amidships in his cocklecraft Harrogate tacked here and there. In the quiet evening the face of the river grew glassy. Suttree muttered to himself. He’d not muttered long before a bat came boring crazily askew out of the sky and fell with a plop onto the surface of the river and fluttered briefly and was still. Suttree sat up in his folding chair. Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens. Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river. Harrogate oaring among them. One dropped with a mild and vesperal bong on the tin of Suttree’s roof. Another close by in the water. Lying there on the dark current it seemed surprised and pitiful.

Harrogate in his tin coracle was hefting them aboard with a dipnet of his own devising. A bullbat fell bandywinged. A swift, a swallow. Along the dimming shore of broken fence and rubble and over the sparse colonies of jakelike dwellings a new curse falling, a plague of bats, small basilisks pugnosed with epicanthic eyes and upreared dogs’ ears filled with hair and bellies filled with agony. In the smoke and burgundy dusk they dimpled the face of the river like lemmings. Two small black boys had packed a halfgallon picklejar with ones they found and screwed down the lid to keep them until needed. In the floor of Harrogate’s boat the brown and hairy mound grew, strange cargo, such small replicas of the diabolic with their razorous teeth bared in fiends’ grins. By dark he had a half a boatload and by the warehouse lights he struck a landfall just below the creek and tied up. He sat on the bank and drank in the evening calm and the winey honeysuckle air and waited for the last of the crawling pile of bats to die. When they had done so he loaded them in his sack and staggered up the bank and home.

In the morning he set out with them. A light heart and deep rejoicing for the fortune of it made the load less heavy yet he still must rest here and there by the streetside. By such stages he labored out Central Avenue small and bowed and wildlooking.

What you got in the sack son?

He peered from under the load at his inquisitor lounging in the open window of the halted cruiser. He shifted the weight a little higher on his shoulder. Bats, he said.

Bats.

Yessir.

What, ballbats?

No, them little’ns. Flittermouses.

The policeman’s face bore a constant look of tolerant interest. Set the sack down son and let’s see what all you got there.

Harrogate rolled the sack from his shoulder and lowered it to the paving and spread the drawstrung mouth with his thumbs. A musky smell rose. He tilted it slightly policeward. The officer thumbed his cap back on his head and bent to see. A prefiguration of the pit. Vouchsafed a crokersack vision of hell’s floor deep with the hairy damned screaming mute and toothy toward the far and heedless city of God. He raised his head and looked at the waiting Harrogate and he looked at the bright sky above Knoxville and he turned to the driver.