How is he? said Suttree. Is he here?
She shook her head.
Is he not out of the hospital?
Yes. He’s out. The Lord taken him out. She began to cry, standing there in her housecoat and slippers, holding her shoulders. The tears that ran on her pitted cheek looked like ink. She had her eye closed but the lid that covered the naked socket did not work so well anymore and it sagged in the cavity and struggled up and that raw hole seemed to watch him with some ghastly equanimity, an eye for another kind of seeing like the pineal eye in atavistic reptiles watching through time, through conjugations of space and matter to that still center where the living and the dead are one.
34
That spring he did not go to the river. The shadows of the buildings still harbored a gray chill and the sun sulked smoked and baleful somewhere above the city and in the sparsely weeded clay barrens wasting on the city’s perimeter first flowers erupted drunkenly through glass and cinder and came slowly to bloom. The days grew warm and grackles returned, hordes of blue tin birds that weighed the shrieking trees. Small bodies that the cold has kept went soft with rot, a cat’s balding hide that tautened and dried cloven to the meatless ribs, an upturned eyesocket filled with rainwater and for all weathers this lipless grin, these bleaching teeth.
He went out seldomer, his money dribbled away. The days grew long and he lay hourlong on his cot. The clerk came and tapped at the door and went away again. One day came an eviction notice.
Then he fell sick. First his nose began to bleed nor could he stop it. The floor lay strewn with wads of wet toiletpaper stained with watered blood. The clerk came and rapped again. Shadow of his shoes in the threshold light. And went away. Things had begun to go peculiar. Grainy underwater singing sounds in his head. He lay on his cot and watched the barren vinework of cracks in the ceiling. Old rags of lace lifted at the window. Cries of children at noon on the Bell House School grounds. Suttree lay naked in fever. Even his eyes were hot. He slept some of the afternoon, waking out of a dream fraught with the odor of a long forgotten blanket whose satin selvedge bore blue ducks. His father’s weight tilting the bed, how do you feel son, I dont feel so pretty good. Under the slant ceiling, close by the eaves.
He opened his eyes. The room had a warped look to it. He watched arcana uncoil from out of the rough plaster. Something unseen possessed the troweler’s hand. Shapes grimacing in a calcimine moonscape. Record of an old mason long dead it may be. He closed his eyes again. A huge and pulsing thumbwhorl hovered above his swollen lids. He steadied himself with one hand to the wall like a drunk.
The day expired in rose and ashen light. Blue dusk cooled in the room.
He lay in darkness.
After a long time he staggered to the wall and threw the switch. Under the stark bulblight he groped for a towel to wrap his loins and reeled out and down the corridor to the bathroom. There he knelt on the cold white tiles and vomited blood into the toilet. When he came back to his room he sat on the bed and looked at his toes.
Well, he said. You’re sick.
A shoe salesman named Thomas E Warren found him shortly after midnight. He thought him drunk. Kneeling, he stirred him by the shoulder. Hey Bud, he said.
Suttree was lying naked on the bathroom floor where he’d come for the cool. Warren got him to his feet and Suttree stared back without comprehension, not having expected anyone from the world of the quick. Down a far wall of his smoking brain withdrew a ghastly company. He disengaged himself from the grip of the living Thomas and tottered to the toilet and sat.
You okay, man?
Yes, said Suttree.
He was alone in the narrow room. Water sluiced down a black pipe past his ear. His head had sagged forward and he was clutching his stomach. He shat a loose and bloody stool.
At the sink he laved cold water over his head. Ahh, he told the drainhole.
I know you’re in there, said the clerk from beyond the door.
Suttree opened his eyes. He was lying on his cot and it was day. The door rapping faded. Footsteps in a corridor. He looked toward the window. Are there parades in the street? What is this roaring? Who is this otherbody? I am no otherbody.
He sat. The room reeled. He fell back and laughed briefly into the musty bedding.
All day he lay in a quaintly fevered world, nothing in the room but the sun and himself, making what construction he could of the sounds that carried to him, the hammering of a roofer, the long farting of airbrakes from a truck in the streets, screendoors banging, children called. A blank wall against which to elaborate his pantomimes. A less virulent cast of the grim had come to occupy his mind and there was a time in the early noon when he had hope of his own recovery. But the sounds he heard began to coalesce and rush and he no longer knew if he dreamt or woke.
In the long afternoon he fell prey to strange cravings of the flesh. Out of a pinwheel of brown taffy his medusa beckoned. A gross dancer with a sallow puckered belly, hands cupping a pudendum grown with mossgreen hair, a virid merkin out of which her wet mauve petals smiled and bared from hiding little rows of rubber teeth like the serried jaws of conchshells.
Suttree groaned in his sleep. He lay in a sexual nightmare, an enormous wattled fundament lowering slowly over his head, in the center a withered brown pig’s eye crusted shut and hung with puffy blue and swollen lobes. A white gruel welled. He pressed his face against the cool wall. And who is this Mr Bones rising wreathed in pale and bluegreen gas? He comes about tottering and wooden like a dummy on a track and goes past with a slight smile and a bow. Lights run over his wetlooking bones and the feet of small rodents grip from within the chamfers of his eyesockets and in his pale blue teeth are cores of blackened silver packed. In a rattle and clang of wheels and pulleys Father Bones tilts out through saloon doors and is gone, old varnished funhouse skeleton. Suttree in his sleep smiled at such child’s fancies. A gray crust broke at his mouthcorners. His eyes snapped open. He sat and reached for the towel. It fell from him and he went out and down the hall naked.
Clotted gouts of gore stained the water in the toiletbowl. Pink, magenta, burgundy.
He stretched himself on the tiles. A faint tang of urine there. Bird shadows on the whited windowglass. Water dripped in the sink. I saw her in an older dream, an older time, moving in an aura of musk, a breath of stale roses, her languid hands swaying like pale birds and her face chalk and lips pink and her nigh-blue hair upbuckled in combs of tortoise, coming down out of her chamber in my unhealed memory clothed in smoke.
Hey Bud. Hey.
It is my old J-Bone and no other.
What the fuck are you doing?
Sicky sick, James.
What the hell have you done to yourself? Can you get up?
I’m all fucked up, James.
I can see that. What is it?
Dear friend, it’s checkout time.
J-Bone patted his shoulder. Hang on a minute. I’ll be right back.
Suttree opened his eyes. In a minute I am going to have a drink of water. He licked his lips.
J-Bone arrived with a fat cabbie. They pulled Suttree up by the arms and began to work a shirt onto him.
I’d just let him sleep it off, said the cabdriver.
I cant leave him layin in here.
Suttree’s arm dropped, his knuckles banged on the floor.
He aint sick is he?
Hold him here a minute while I button these. He just needs to get dried out.
Desist officer. I’ll come peaceably.
He better not be sick. You hear?
I’ve seen him worse than this. Let him back down now.