Shit, said Harrogate.
It’s true, said Suttree.
Hell Suttree, I dont want to be no goddamned dishwarsher. I got to get up at four oclock in the mornin.
Yeah. We sleep in here till five thirty.
You get to fuck around in the afternoon, said Callahan.
Well we dont get done till seven at night.
Well if you dont want to work in the guard’s mess ask if they’ll put you back on the trucks.
What if they say no?
Say yes.
What happens then? I guess they beat the shit out of ye.
No they wont. Will they, Red?
Nah. Put ye in the hole. Less you get real shitty. Then you go in the box.
Well that’s where they’d put me. What is it?
Just a concrete box about four feet square.
You ever been in there Suttree?
No. You’re talking to a man that has though.
What did they put you in there for Mr Callahan?
Aw, slappin a little old guard.
He slapped a vertebra loose in his neck, said Suttree.
Goddamn, said Harrogate. When was this?
When was it Red? Two years ago?
Somethin like that.
They hell fire, how long you been in here Mr. Callahan?
That was another offense, said Suttree. He’s been in and out.
They dont give ye nothin to eat but bread and water, said Callahan. In the box they dont.
I believe you’ll like the guard’s mess better than the box.
I aint warshin no more goddamned dishes.
Well, said Suttree, that’s you.
That’s me, said Harrogate.
I think you’ve lost your rabbitassed mind, said Callahan.
Maybe. But I’ll tell ye one thing. I ever get out of here I sure to shit aint comin back again.
I think I even heard Bromo say that one time.
Who’s Bromo?
The old guy. He’s been in and out of here since nineteen thirty-six.
He was in fore that, said Callahan. He was in the other workhouse fore this one was built.
Well, said Harrogate. That’s him.
Suttree grinned. That’s him, he said.
The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will. Truth of his doings came in at the door and up the stairs in the dark. Come morning the prisoners were seeing this half fool in a new light. To his elbows in dishwater and wreathed in steam he watched them file across the kitchen with their plates of biscuits and gravy, nodding, gesturing. He smiled back. They saw him again that night, lost in his stained and shapeless suit. He appeared not to have moved the day long nor the stacked pans diminished. After supper he was returned to them clutching his blanket before him.
Well, said Suttree, you back?
Yep.
What happened.
I told em I was done fuckin with em. They want a dishwarsher they can hunt somebody else cause I aint it.
What did they say.
They asked me did I want to be hallboy. Said you make a few dollars sellin coffee.
A few dollars a year.
That’s just what I figured. I told em I didnt want no hallboy bullshit.
So what happened?
Nothin. They just sent me on up.
He stood there with his rat’s face in a kind of smug smirk. Suttree shook his head.
Yonder he is, called Callahan.
Watermelon man.
Punkins wasnt it?
Punkins? Godamighty.
Yeah, sang out Callahan, we get out we goin to open a combination fruitstand and whorehouse.
Harrogate smiled nervously.
Callahan was sketching for them a portrait of his brothel. Melons in black negligees.
Watch out the niggers dont hear of it.
The niggers is liable to lynch ye.
Other fruits discussed. A cantaloupe turned queer. Do you buy them a drink.
Worst of it is havin gnats swarm around the head of ye dick.
Fruitflies.
Stealing watermelons eh? said Suttree.
Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast … Bestiality?
Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch.
Oh boy, said Suttree.
In the morning he went with them on the trucks. Rising in the rank cold, faint odor of bathless sleepers all about. People stirring in the dull yellow bulblight, stumbling into clothes and shoes. The warmth of the kitchen and the smell of coffee. Cooks and potwashers aged or maimed all hovered by the stove with hot crockery mugs in their hands. Harrogate nodded to them distantly, holding his thumbs wide of his plate.
In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.
A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child’s eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want. In the afternoon the riggers came and set about taking down a spiderlike centrifuge and loading it on a float. As the prisoners shuffled over the grounds filling their crokersacks with bottles and trash the workers backhanded to them packs of cigarettes. Suttree was given a pack and passed it on to an old man with a goiter who took it without a word. The old man was a smoke-hound, a drinker of shaving lotion, stove fuel, cleaning fluid. Suttree watched him shuffle on. Scowling at the world from under his wild thatched brows. His thin and rimpled mouth working very faintly as he spoke with himself. He took up each paper, each bottle, with something like solicitude, looking about as if he would discover who had put it there. Suttree never heard him speak aloud, this elder child of sorrow. He crouched on the truck bench opposite going home, jostled and nodding. He saw Suttree watching him and lowered his eyes and fell to talking to himself with a kind of secretive viciousness.
Sundays a female evangelist from Knoxville would come out to hold service in the chapel downstairs. Concrete tabernacle, small wooden podium. The prisoners who went seemed stricken nigh insensate by this word of God strained distaff they were hearing. Lounging in the wooden folding chairs, heads lolling. She seemed unaware of their presence. She told old tales from bible days that might have come down orally, so altered were they from their origins. In the afternoon visitors arrived. Family scenes, mothers and fathers, wives, anonymous kinfolk gathered at the long tables in the dining hall. They’d call the names back down the hall and up the stairs and the guard would let them out. To return laden with candy, fruit, cigarettes. No one came for Suttree. None for Harrogate. Callahan’s friends from McAnally Flats brought brownlooking apples, sacks of halfspoiled oranges. Callahan would peel these and slice them into a lardpail and cover them with water, adding a little yeast from the kitchen, covering it over with a cloth and storing it under his bed. In a few days a yeasty orange wine would work up and he’d strain it off and invite friends to take a cup with him. They called it julep and it kicked and spewed in the stomach all night. Callahan would get slightly drunk and look about goodnaturedly to see was there thing or body worth destroying.
Byrd Slusser came back, clumping sullenly down the aisle with his blanket, a pick about his ankle. When the workers returned in the evening he was asleep nor did he rise for supper.
In these tranquil evening hours before lights out Harrogate would sit up in his bunk and work on his jailhouse ring. They were made from silver coins and Harrogate had gotten a guard to bore a hole in his and he sat for hours on end with a messhall spoon and beat the coin’s rim. The edges of the piece would flare out and come at last to a shape much like a wedding band. Now as he sat tapping Slusser turned in his bunk, raising his leg to clear the rear tine of the pick, and sought out the source of the noise. Harrogate squatted above him in the bunk opposite, bent over his coin, the spoon tapping steadily. Much like a little old cobbler crouched there half lost in his clothes.