Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

You ready? he said.

Suttree looked at him. He was sitting in the bow of the skiff with his hands on his knees.

How about casting off for us.

Do what?

How about untying us.

He climbed out and got the rope loose from the stump and threw it into the skiff and knelt in the bow and shoved them off. Suttree let the oars into the river.

The skiff nosed downstream through pales of vapor. A small heron rose clacking from the reeds. The boy swung on it with an imaginary gun. Blam, he said.

I saw ducks on the river coming up, Suttree said.

Boy I bet if I had me a gun I’d kill everthing up here.

He was watching downriver, picking absently at one of the yellow pustules with which his chin was afflicted. After a while he said: What was you in the workhouse for?

Suttree leaned on the oars and looked behind him. They were in faster water and there were little weedy islands in the middle of the river. I was with some guys got caught breaking into a drugstore.

What did you break in for?

They were trying to get some drugs. Pills. They got some cigarettes and stuff. I was outside in the car.

I guess you was keepin the motor runnin and lookout and all.

I was drunk.

The boy looked at him but Suttree had turned to study the water. Across the river a tractor was plowing in the black and fallow bottoms and over the plowed land rim to rim lay a serpentine of mist the course and shape of the river itself like a ghost river there. The sun was a long time coming. In the graygreen light the midsummer corn moved with the first wind and the countryside had a sad and desolate look to it.

Did you go to college? the boy said.

Why?

I just wondered. Gene says you’re real smart.

Who, Harrogate?

Yeah.

Well. Some people are smarter than others.

You mean Gene aint real smart?

No. He’s plenty smart. You have to be smart to know who’s smart and who’s not.

I never figured you to be just extra smart.

There you are, said Suttree.

He looked puzzled. Old Gene used to come sniffin around after Wanda, he said. Mama run him off. You got a girl?

No. I used to have one but I forgot where I laid her.

The boy looked at him dully for a minute and then slapped his knee and guffawed. Boy, he said, that’s a good’n.

How far down do we go?

We’ll run the Gallops first and then go on down to the Wild Bull Shoals.

The Gallops?

That’s the next shoals down. Taint far. You say you aint never musseled afore?

No.

Taint nothin to it. Yonder goes a mushrat.

Suttree turned. A dark little shape forded the dawn, a black nose in a wedge of riverwater.

Quick as furs primes I’m goin to be back up here with me some traps.

Suttree nodded, pulling along easily, the oarlocks creaking and the lines of the brail swinging behind the boy’s head like a bead curtain. The sun came up. It bored up out of the trees in a greengold light and Suttree’s silhouette lay long and narrow down the river among the brail line shadows like a rowing marionette.

He swung the skiff more shoreward. The boy was bent peering down into the water. In the clear shallows suckers trailed by their whiterimmed mouths from the rocks like soft pennants fluttering.

The boy took an empty rubber flashlight from his hippocket and dipping the lens in the river looked down through the gutted barrel at the piscean world below.

Do you see any mussels? Suttree said.

We aint into em yet, the boy said. They godamighty what a catfish.

How deep is it?

Yonder goes a old mudturkle.

Suttree leaned on the oars. How about letting me look, he said.

The boy lifted his head.

I said how about letting me look.

Well. Sure.

Suttree shipped the oars and took the tube from the boy and bent over the side with it. A high sheer rock veered past wrapped in bubbles. Moted panels spun down deeps of dusky jade where dim shoals of fish willowed and flared and drifted back over the cold slate floor of the river. A braided cable among the rocks trailed rags of soft green slime in the current.

I dont see any mussels, he said.

The boy looked out downriver. Keep a lookin, he said. They’ll be some directly.

He bent again. A whole tree lay on the bottom of the river, deep in a pool, a murky bole with filaments of moss swaying and a heavy black bass that waited on below. A sandy floor sloped away. Fat suckers sculled. A cloud of bubbles rolled up in the glass and cleared and a green cold slick faired over paler rocks, round river stones and ledges of slate gently sculpted. A seam of black shellfish lay beneath.

Here come some.

He heard the splash of the brail going overboard. The boat rocked and recovered with the boy’s standing and Suttree’s face dipped in the water. He raised his head and shook the water from the glass and bent to look again. Long greenbrown weeds swung in the current and dimly through the moving water he could see the mussel beds, a slender colony of them dark and quaking among the rocks with their pale clefts breathing, closing, folding slowly fanwise, valved clots of flesh in their keeps of cotyloid nacre. The shadow of the skiff like a nightshade passing swept them shut.

Is they lots?

A few.

The bottom fell away into an opaque green murk. The boat spun slowly.

Suttree raised up and took the oars and straightened the skiff out.

It deeps off here, the boy said.

Yeah.

We’ll just go on down.

Okay.

How about lettin me have my looker?

Okay.

They ran downstream a quarter mile, the boy watching the bottom, Suttree at the oars. They swung into a long ropy glide and went rocking down a chute into fast water. The boy raised his head, his forelock dripping. We’ll get em now, he called.

Suttree steadied the boat with the oars.

When they drifted out into the slow water at the foot of their run amid flotsam and tranquil spume the boy stood at the transom and hauled the brail aboard and hung it dripping in the uprights with a couple dozen black mussels clamped to the lines. They swung and turned and clacked and the boy took out an enormous brass cook-spoon and began to pry them loose. Within minutes they lay like stones in the floor of the skiff and the boy had cast the brail overboard again. He turned to Suttree who was backoaring to stand in the current. His face was flushed and his breath short. That’s how we do it, he wheezed.

Is that a pretty good batch for a run?

It aint no more’n average. I’ve seen em to come up solid with em. Me and Daddy has dredged messes we couldnt lift.

What’s the other brail for?

You swap off. You hang up the full brail and thow out the othern.

Well why didnt you throw out the other one?

The boy was watching the river bottom again. He waved one hand in the air to dismiss the subject. I just wanted to show you how to strip the lines, he said.

Suttree edged the boat away from a dimpled suck in the river and they went rocking down the shoals, the sun well up now, the day warming. His hands were like claws on the oars.

They washed out in a slackwater where a gravel bar ran almost to midriver and the boy raised up the brail again and hung it dripping and clicking with mussels in the trees. He and Suttree looked at each other.

These is some jimdandy’ns, the boy said.

Suttree nodded. There were some big as your hand.

Let’s swing up and run that bed one more time.

Suttree looked upriver dubiously.

You wont find em much better’n these here.

He swung the skiff and braced his feet and dug into the river. They went up along the inside shore. When they had gained the head of the glide he stood the boat in the current and swung back obliquely across the run while the boy cast over the empty brail.