Two bulletskulled black boys watched him come along the path toward the street, lurching out of the jungle with his head in his hands. Through splayed fingers a wild eye fell upon them.
Hey boys.
They regarded each other.
Which way is town?
They fled on bare soundless feet, spinning a lilac dust. He wiped his eyes and looked after them. In that shimmering heat their figures dissolved crazily until all he saw of them were two small twisted gymnasts hung by wires in a quaking haze. Suttree stood there. He turned slowly. To select a landmark. Some known in this garden of sorrow. He wheeled away down the narrow sandy street like the veriest derelict.
These quarters he soon found to be peopled with the blind and deaf. Dark figures in yard chairs. Propped and rocking in the shade of porches. Old black ladies in flowered gowns who watched impassively the farther shapes of the firmament as he went by. Only a few waifs wide eyed and ebonfaced studied at all the passage of this pale victim of turpitude among them.
At the end of the street the earth fell away into a long gut clogged with a maze of shacks and coops, nameless constructions of tarpaper and tin, dwellings composed of actual cardboard and wapsy tilted batboard jakes that reeled with flies. Whole blocks of hovels cut through by no street but goatpaths and little narrow ways paved with black sand where children and graylooking dogs wandered. He turned and started back, staggering under the heat, his stomach curdling. He wandered into a narrow alleyway and fell to his hands and knees and began to vomit. Nothing would come but a thin green bile and then nothing at all, his stomach contracting in dry and vicious spasms that racked him and left him sweaty and shivering and weak when they ceased. He looked up. Tears warped his sight. A small black child with brightly ribboned wool watched him from a bower in a hedge. With the snuffling of her breath she teased in and out of one nostril a creamy gout of yellow snot. Suttree nodded to her and rose and lurched into the street again.
He chanced a slotted eye through his fingers at the boiling sun. It hung directly overhead. He started across the open lots, going carefully with his thin shoes among jagged rings of jarglass and nailstudded slats. From time to time he would pause to rest, leaning forward with his hands on his knees or squatting on one heel and holding his head. He had sweated through his shirt and it stank horrendously. After a while he came out on another street and he went along until he saw in the distance a cutbank that might be a railroad right of way. He set off across the lots again and down alleys and over fences, trying to keep a fix on his destination. He crossed through a row of back yards by battered cans of swill where clouds of fruitflies droned and swung on the wind and dogs slouched away. A fat negress stepped from an outhouse door hauling up her bloomers. He looked away. She bawled out some name. He went on. A man called out behind him but he didnt look back.
He cut down an alley and went past a row of warehouses and at the end he could see the Dale Avenue market sheds and beyond them the gang tracks of the L&N merging toward the yards. He crossed the tracks and climbed the bank on the far side to Grand Avenue. Two boys were throwing rocks at a row of bottles down in the railway cut. Smoke on the water, one called.
Fuck you, said Suttree.
A wave of nausea washed through him and he paused to rest on an old retaining wall. Looking under his hand he saw dimly the prints of trilobites, lime cameos of vanished bivalves and delicate seaferns. In these serried clefts stone armatures on which once hung the flesh of living fish. He lurched on.
He stopped in the middle of the street before the tall frame house on Grand. Paintless boards smoked a bluish color. He called to a woman sitting on the porch. She leaned forward peering.
Is Jimmy there?
No. He’s not come in from last night. Who is that?
Cornelius Suttree.
Lord have mercy I didnt know who that was. No, he’s not here, Cornelius. I dont know where he’s at.
Well. Thank you mam.
You come see us.
I will. He waved a hand. A police car was turning the corner.
They drove past. Before he got to the end of the street they had circled and pulled up alongside him from behind.
Where you goin, boy?
Home, he said.
Where you live?
Down off Front Avenue.
Beefy face, small eyes looking him over. The face turned away. They said something between them. The one turned back. What’s happened to you?
Nothing, he said. I’m all right.
I believe you a little drunk aint ye?
No sir.
Where you been?
He looked at his crusted shoes and took a breath. I was visiting some people over here. I’m just on my way home.
What you got all over the front of you there?
He looked down. When he raised his head again he fixed his eyes across the cruiser’s roof upon the bleak row of old houses with their cloven hanging clapboards and their cardboard windowpanes. A few blackened trees stood withering in the heat and in this obscure purgatory a thrush was singing. Mavis. Turdus Musicus. The lyrical shit-bird.
I spilled something on me, he said.
You smell like you been dipped in shit.
Two boys were coming along the broken walk. When they saw the cruiser they turned and went back.
The door opened and beefy got out.
Maybe you better get in here, he said.
Dont put that stinkin son of a bitch in here. Call the wagon.
Well. You just stand right there.
I’m not going anywhere.
I’ll tell you that, you aint.
He listened dreamily to the crackling of the intercom.
The paddy wagon came down off Western and Forest avenues and pulled up in front of the cruiser and two policemen got out. They opened the door and Suttree walked toward it.
Boy if he aint a sweet blossom, one said.
There was a drunk inside sitting on the bench that ran the length of the wagon. Suttree sat opposite. The door banged shut. The drunk leaned forward. Hey old buddy, he said. You got a cigarette? Suttree shut his eyes and rested his head against the side of the van.
At the jail he stood before a little window and was asked to empty his pockets. He managed a faint smile.
The officer at his side nudged him with a nightstick. Empty them pockets, boy.
Suttree lifted his caked shirt. His pockets hung like socks.
You got any identification on you.
No sir.
How come you aint.
I’ve been robbed.
What’s your name.
Jerome Johnson.
The officer was writing. We’ve had trouble with you before aint we Johnson?
No sir.
He looked up. I bet we aint. Get his belt and his shoelaces there.
They took him along the corridor toward the cells.
They opened the door to a large cage and he went in and they shut the door behind him. Someone slept in one corner, his head in a pool of clabbered void. There were no benches, no place to sit. A concrete scupper ran the perimeter of the cage. Suttree shuddered in a seizure of skullpangs. He sat on the floor. It was cool. After a while he knelt and pressed his head against it.
He must have slept. He heard the turnkey rapping along the bars, calling a name. When he came past Suttree spoke to him.
Can you call me a bondsman back here?
What’s your name?
Johnson.
How long you been in?
I dont know. I was asleep.
You got to stay in six hours anyway.
I know. I was wondering if you’d check for me.
The turnkey didnt say he would or wouldnt.