Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

There was a little path going up the island through the weeds. They went with caution. Redwings circled and cried.

They entered a clearing where charred sticks and blackened stones marked a fire. A few empty bean tins. They walked around the glade.

Looks like they skedaddled, Suttree said.

Yeah.

They cant be far.

Let em go, the Indian said.

Yeah?

Sure.

Okay.

They turned and defiled out of the glade, Suttree behind the Indian. Dragonflies kept lifting from the tops of the reeds like little chinese kites.

What’s your name? said Suttree.

The Indian turned and looked back. Michael, he said.

Is that what they call you?

He turned again. No, he said. They call me Tonto or Wahoo or Chief. But my name is Michael.

My name’s Suttree.

The Indian smiled. Suttree thought maybe he was going to stop and shake hands but he didnt.

They got the boat bailed and afloat and Suttree shoved it out onto the pale brown waters. The Indian took up the oars and brought it about headed upriver. What do I owe you? he said.

Not anything.

Well. Come see me and I’ll fix you that turtle.

Suttree raised his hand. Okay, he said. Watch out for the cops.

The Indian dipped the oars into the river and pulled away.

Suttree stepped into his skiff and walked to the rear of it and shoved off from the flats with one oar. The Indian’s patchwork boat was soon far upriver, light winking off the sweeps where they’d been broken and pieced back with tacked and flattened foodtins. He eased his own oars into the water and started up the inside of the island. He watched for sign of the thieves along the shore and he saw a muskrat nose among the willows and he saw a clutch of heronshaws gawping from their down nest in the reeds, spikelet bills and stringy gullets, pink flesh and pinfeathers and boneless legs spindled about. He tacked more shoreward to see. So curious narrow beasties. As he pulled abreast of them a rock sang past his ears. He ducked and looked toward the shore bracken but before he could collect himself another rock came whistling out of the willows and caught him in the forehead and he fell back in the boat. The sky was red and soaring and whorled like the ball of an enormous thumb and a numb gritty feeling came up against the back of his teeth. One oar slid from its lock and floated off.

The skiff drifted down past the landing and down past the end of the island. Suttree lay sprawled in the floor with blood running in his eyes. A tree branch turned against the sky. He pulled himself up, gripping the side of the skiff. He could taste a tincture of iron in his throat and he spat a bloody mucus into the water. He knelt over the side and palmed water at his face and his face was slippery with blood and blood lay in the water in coagulate strings. He touched gently an eggshaped swelling. His whole skull was throbbing and even his eyes hurt. He looked upriver toward the island and swore murderously. The other oar was floating a few yards downriver and he sculled after it. Light kept winking up on the riffles and blood was dripping from his forehead and he felt half nauseous. He recovered the drift oar and rowed back upriver in the main channel. He watched along the shoreline of the island but he saw nothing. After a while his head quit bleeding.

Doll came to the door at Ab’s and looked him up and down. Hunh, she said. What happen to you?

Some son of a bitch hit me with a rock.

Mm-mmm, she said, shaking her head. Come in.

How’s Ab?

She shut the door behind him.

Suttree turned in the stale and darkened room. Why didnt you tell me he was all screwed up?

I caint do nothin with him.

Where is he, in the back?

She gestured him on with one hand and he pushed back the curtain. At first he could not see him well but gradually the black’s half closed and swollen eyes appeared, his glistening misshapen face. His broken mouth moved painfully. He said: Hey Youngblood.

Suttree heard his breath suck in the quiet. Hey Ab, he said. How are you.

I’m okay. I’s just slippin me a nap. What you up to in the heat of the day? You catchin any fish?

Not to amount to anything. Have you had a doctor?

A throaty laugh shook the sagging bedsprings. He moved his head on the pillows as if he’d seek a darker place to rest it. What I needs with a doctor?

I think you need some help.

That may be. But I aint in need of bein patched up and prayed over.

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.