Your bird sir?
The same.
Let the record show that the bird is the same bird.
Of course the bird is the same bird, called Suttree, lying thin, white, soft, in a tray of ice, curious tetrapod cooling.
Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away?
It was in 1884.
Did he die by natural causes?
No sir.
And what were the circumstances surrounding his death.
He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.
Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.
Yessir.
Are you aware of the penalty fixed upon conviction of lycanthropy?
Suttree moaned in the ice. It was never me, he called.
Who segued lithe as an eel from chancery to forest path, abroad by dark tarns in a deep wood where no sun shone and the reeds grew black and fish blind. Until he was stopped by a turtlepedlar bearing a sack of turtles and a rifle gun. Clad in burlap and unshaven he was and in brogans out at the toes and it cold weather.
Harkee stranger, cried the man. A turtle for your soup.
Stranger let me pass for I am weary.
Fifty cents and your choice of the best, ye’ll not buy cheaper.
Outbound I am, beyond all wares.
It’s hard else could bring you here.
This is no path of my choosing.
Nor mine.
Leeway and ease, the night is coming.
The turtlemonger held forth his sack. Fine turkles, fat turkles. Turkles for the stew.
The dreamer would pass but he has let fall the long dark lilac iron of his riflebarrel to bar the way. An outlaw tollsman reeking of woodsmoke and swamp rot and seeking some chiminage dearer than a path so dark could warrant. Or any path at all.
These be special turkles. Dont pass on without you’ve give em your consideration.
To this the traveler did consent. The vendor’s face grew crafty. The wet sack collapsing aclatter on the ground. He turns back the mouth.
Those are not turtles. Oh God they’re not turtles.
Suttree had half reared up in the bed, his swollen tongue gagging his cries. He fell back. Voices spoke beyond a wall. He saw with icy prescience the deathcart before the door, menials entering with a pallet to haul away his puling body and surely the stink of the unshriven dead is a dire stench rising to affront the nostrils of God. Impenitents snatched from the midst of their leprous revels, hard justice. Suttree saw the General pass atop his coalwagon, a paler horse in the traces. He lifted a hand. No fingers to the glove he wore, his cart made no sound. They receded into the vapors till there was just the orange light from the lantern where it swung by its bail from the tailboard.
Down Front Street streetlamps marked the way with measured rings of chromeblue light. The sleepfast shacks lay rotting, dusky sleepers lay within. The dooryard flowers half awake in the lamplight and the city’s neon constellations emerging on the night, a pastel alpenglow in which the dust of demolition rose from the jagged ruins of the Cumberland Hotel, the Lyric Theatre.
At the door of the Huddle folk from the looms of McAnally are convened. First among these is a beardless Celt with spattled skin and rebate teeth. Three eyes in his head he has and he is covered over all with orange hair like unto a Cathay ape. At his elbow a stripling with a small and foxy face let into the lower part of a bulbous skull. His towcolored hair is cropped and stands wispily erect and seen from behind he most resembles an enormous dandelion. Suttree smiles to see such friends. The murdered are first to embrace him. Callahan’s heavy arm about his shoulder, grinding the scapulae. He speaks through the flarey airholes of his boneless nose to the silverhaired and senatoriallooking barman.
Hey Hatmaker. Tell Hoghead and Donald and Byrd and Bobby and Hugh and Conrad and all of em that they aint barred.
They’re dead.
Whoops of laughter among the watchers at the door.
Well you wouldnt bar a dead man would ye?
The tavernkeeper folded his towel and wiped the long mahogony bar. He said that he would not. Suttree among the rabble entered in. Outside the junkman stood alone.
Coin of the realm, coin of the realm, muttered Mr Hatmaker, unmaddened by mercurial bloodliens.
Coin, called Big Frig. Are you holding, fendervendor?
Harvey shuffles forward tugging at his changepurse. A few pieces of Denver silver. Avowing blind faith in deaf deities. He takes a stool at the bar. A fishbowl. He orders.
Big Frig nudges the junkman and leans with a huge horsewink. And make it light on the fish.
Blind Richard at the bar, his eyes batting in the beerlight and the clabbered matter in his sockets shining with a bluish cast leans forward and and takes hold of his mug in both hands. His ears remark the voices in his shoreless void. Alice is eyeing the room with contempt. When the moon shines down upon my Wabash then you’ll recognize your Indiana home. The whores at the oval table raise their steins. Names of a thousand malefactors and melancholies incised in the black formica there. Faye wears in her garter a glass syringe. I’d give a hog a rimjob to get high, she says. And have, says Shirley. On film, says Rosie.
The queers in the corner booth turn one to the other in shocked amusement. Their spectacles wink small semaphores. Above them in the gutted cage of an electric fan and trapped in a bias of smokegorged light the execrator crouches and drools and turns to and back.
I didnt do it they only said I did. Twas a little jewdoctor come in the night with tailor’s shears.
Oh do hush, says a languorous faggot glancing upward.
Foul perverts one and sundry. Silkbedizen pizzlelickers. Roaming the world. Slaking their hideous gorges with jissom. Oh I shall not be loath to tell. I’ll bewray the tribe of them to the high almighty God who ledgers up our deeds in a leatherbound daybook. With marbled endpapers, I’m told.
Harrogate in morningcoat stands easily upon the decked and buntinged bar. He wears a small flag in his lapel. Friends, he says. I come from humble circumstance and rose up in the world by my own efforts. And if I’m to leave my footprints in the sands of time let it be with a pair of workshoes.
Someone was tugging at Suttree’s sleeve. A small nun with a bitten face, a smell of scorched black muslin and her dead breasts brailed up in the knitted vest she wore. She tugged with little soricine claws at the bones in his elbow.
Cornelius you come away from here this minute.
Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
I was drunk, cried Suttree. Seized in a vision of the archetypal patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion.
An orderly was going along the outer hall with mop and bucket. He paused for feet to pass. Clicking down the corridor. Voices. And beyond these sounds like the natter and babble of the damned a muted bedlam of voices that were no right voices. Suttree’s hands clutched the stenciled sheets.