Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

What? said Clifford.

He raised his head. Clifford hung in the white web of the broken windshield. I want Dubyedee, he said.

He aint here.

Where’s he at?

He aint here. He dont live here now.

It’s just old drunk Uncle Harvey aint it?

You said it, I never.

No, you never. You smug sack of shit.

What?

I said you’re a smug sack of shit.

Clifford’s head turned in silhouette in the doorframe as if he’d turned to spit. He aint here, Harvey. Go on home.

He aint here Harvey. Go home Harvey. Where’s he live at now?

You caint get out there. It’s too far.

I’ll be the judge of that. Where’s he live at?

Why dont you come up and I’ll give ye a cup of coffee.

Harvey shook his head. Aint you somethin, he said.

What?

I said you sure are somethin. Clifford old buddy. You sure are. Get some coffee in him. Clifford you favor your old man more than a little, did you know that?

You want some coffee I’ll fix ye some. Otherwise I’m goin to bed.

Lord God, Clifford, dont let me keep ye from your sleep. I’d not do it for the world.

The figure shored up in the doorway shifted. You can sleep in the shed if you want. I’ll give you the key.

You aint got a drink in there have ye?

No.

Then you aint got nothin in there I want.

The light withdrew up the path. Then it vanished from the small paned window in the door. Harvey smiled and leaned back in the truck.

Clifford!

Dogs hereto sleeping woke with howls all down the creek.

Clifford!

The light snapped on again. The door opened.

What now, goddamnit?

You wasnt asleep was ye?

I got to work tomorrow Harvey. Some of us is got to work for a livin yet.

Is he payin ye now Clifford? Or you still just gettin your keep.

He pays me.

Big boy like you.

If you dont want nothin I’m goin to bed.

I’ll tell you what I’m makin if you’ll tell me what you are.

You aint makin nothin is what you’re makin. Cause you dont do nothin but lay drunk.

What you are, what you are, said Harvey aimlessly.

You dont need to know.

Dont need to know, dont need to know. You sure you aint got a little drink in yonder?

I told you I’d fix you some coffee if you want it.

Let me tell you about your coffee, Clifford. You want to hear about your coffee?

Clifford didnt want to hear. He shut the door again and the lights went out.

What about your daddy, called Harvey. Want to hear about that thievin son of a bitch? Want to hear how he robbed his own brother blind? Clifford?

Lying in his cot in the early hours Suttree half asleep heard a dull concussion somewhere in the city. He opened his eyes and looked out through his small window at the paling stars, the sparse electric jewelry of the bridgelights hung above the river. Perhaps an earthquake, seams shifting deep in the earth, sand sifting for miles down blind faults in eternal dark. It did not come again and after a while he slept.

Coming back upriver in the hot noon he kept to the south shore and passed under the bridge and passed the lumber company and the packinghouse and moored the skiff at the foot of the path that led to the junkman’s lot and the road beyond. A brief spate of summer rain had fallen in the morning and the smell of it in the shoreland woods rose rank and steamy like the air in a hothouse. On the narrow path he met a cluster of deferential blacks who passed sidling, their eyes cutting to and back like horses. A light clank of baitbuckets and a bristling of canes. The cars in Harvey’s lot lay humped and black in the sun with visible heat rising from them in the wrinkled air. Suttree passed through a reek of milkweed and oil and hot tin toward the little bedstead gate.

He found him senseless and hanging half off the ragged army cot. The little shack smelled of grease and tarpaper and filth. Suttree took the junkman up by arm and elbow and eased him back onto the bed, solicitous yet somewhat loath to touch him in his leprous rags. Harvey rolled a whited eye and muttered and fell back. Suttree looked around the little cabin. Floor strewn with gears, axleshafts, batteries. Tottering columns of tires. A cupboard of hubcaps like curious silver, mangled and banged, painted or stamped with loutish new world crests.

He stood in the door and looked out over the junkman’s lot. Tall hollyhocks by the weighted gate and dockweed blooming and begonias down along the remnants of the fence. In the corner of the lot a stand of sunflowers like some floral enormity in a child’s garden. Suttree sat on the cinderblock steps. The flowers moved in the wind. He could not see the river but there was a barge going upstream through the trees like a great train of wares ferrying soundlessly by means unknown up the valley floor. On the far shore a riprap of broken marble. Rough shapes of iron rusting in the sun. In the gloom of the shack the junkman groaned and turned. One among a mass of twisted shapes discarded here by the river. Suttree turned and saw him fend with his arm some phantom, a gesture of dread such as the mad favor, his anguish no less real. Suttree rose and went out through the gate and the gate clanged gently shut behind him.

When Harrogate pulled the string on his homemade detonator he had one finger in his ear. The explosion blew him twenty feet up the tunnel and slammed him against a wall where he sat in the darkness with chunks of stone clattering everywhere about him and his eyes enormous against the unbelievable noise in which he found himself. Then he was sucked back down the tunnel in a howling rush of air, his clothes scrubbing away and peelings of hide until he found himself lying on his face in the passage with a shrieking in his ears. Before he could rise it returned and snatched him up again and scuttled him back along the floor in a cloud of dust and ash and debris and left him bleeding and halfnaked and choked and groping for something to hold to. Dont come no more, he cried aloud in the ringing vault, I done had enough. Far back through the broken wall he could hear the echoes of the blast shunting row on row down the cavern to ultimate nothingness.

He lay very quietly. He was bruised and bleeding and numb all over and he began to cry. His head was ringing and he was half deaf yet he could hear in the horrid darkness shapes emerge from the reeks and crannies, features stained with boneblack, jaws adrip. He could hear the blood running in his body and he could hear the organs working, the lungs filling and collapsing. Little girls in flowered frocks went tripping out through stiles of sunlight and their destination was darkness as is each soul’s. Coming toward him was a soft near soundless mass. Sucking over the stones. Seeking him out. He pulled himself up and listened. Coming down the tunnel. Something nearing in the night. A sluggish monster freed from what centuries of stony fastness under the city. Its breath washed over him in a putrid stench. He tried to crawl. He scrabbled blindly among the stones in the dark. He was engulfed feet first in a slowly moving wall of sewage, a lava neap of liquid shit and soapcurd and toiletpaper from a breached main.

When Suttree saw the piece in the paper that said: Earthquake? he read and knew. He folded the paper and rose and went out the door and down the steps.

At Harrogate’s there was no one home, not even the cat. He stirred the cold ashes in the firepit, he poked among the city rat’s belongings.

In the afternoon he went about where the rat was known but no one knew where he could be.

It was evening when he came upon Rufus down on Front Street. He was sat in a gutterful of lamplight before the store as if he were waiting for it to open. He raised up when he saw who it was. Hey Sut, he said. How you makin it?