I goin to slap his head sideways he dont get off of me.
He hollers at everbody.
I aint everbody.
He’s a cripple.
He’ll be crippled.
They has to carry out his slops and everthing.
He trimmed hisself, said Trippin Through The Dew.
Done what?
Trimmed hisself. With a razor. Just sliced em on off honey, what they tell me.
That wouldnt cripple you.
It would smart some, said Oceanfrog.
He was done crippled fore he done it.
I goin to trim his fuckin wig he dont quit that hollerin at me, said Jabbo.
Suttree ducked the yardlong coil of dead flies that hung from the ceiling and came to the counter with his purchases.
What else? said Howard.
That’s it.
He totted with pencil on a scrap of paper.
Forty-two cents.
Suttree dredged up coins from his jeans.
Where you goin, Sut?
Home.
Sure you is. Tell me. Slip off up here somewheres and dip your wick in somethin.
Suttree grinned.
Old Suttree, said Oceanfrog. He caint fade nothin.
Why dont you put me on something?
Shit. You got it all locked now.
He aint interested in them nigger gals. Is you Suttree?
Suttree looked at Jabbo but he didnt answer.
Howard dropped the last of the groceries into the sack and slid it toward Suttree, He took it under his arm and nodded toward the dark idlers. See you, he said.
Hang loose, said Oceanfrog.
The screendoor clapped shut.
Ooh that’s a pretty thing, said Trippin Through The Dew.
After he’d eaten his supper he snuffed the lamp and sat in the dark and watched the lights on the far shore standing long and wandlike in the trembling river. Down from Ab Jones’s sounds of laughter carried over the black water like ghost voices, old dead revelers reminiscing in the night. After a while he rose and went out and up the river path to the door.
He sat in the corner and sipped a beer. Oceanfrog was sitting in for the house in a light poker game and Ab lay sleeping in the back room. Suttree heard him breathing in the dark when he went past his bedroom, going on to the cubicle behind the torn and stained plastic showercurtain, standing there half holding his breath, the boards in the reeking gloom splotched with a greenish phosphorescence, a sinister mold that glowed faintly. A section of galvanized gutterpipe sluiced the urine down to a rathole in the corner and out into the passing river. There was a small lizard of some kind wet and pale that clung to a naked stud and Suttree pissed on it and it wriggled out through a crack in the wall. He buttoned his trousers and spat into the trough. Reassessing the agility of germs in a sequence of them climbing falling water like salmon he wiped his mouth and selected a clean place on the wall and spat again.
He sat with the back of his head against the board wall and his mind drifted. Moths crossed the mouth of the lamp in its scroll iron sconce above his head, the shape of the flame steadfast in the pietin reflector. On the ceiling black curds. Where insect shadows war. The reflection of the lamp’s glass chimney like a quaking egg, the zygote dividing. Giant spores addorsed and severing. Yawing toward separate destinies in their blind molecular schism. If a cell can be lefthanded may it not have a will? And a gauche will?
In another part of the room Fred Cash was reciting poetry. Suttree heard the last of the Signifyin Monkey and then the ballad of Jack-Off Jake the poolroom snake who fucked his way north to Duluth. He rose and got another beer. Doll in her slippers collected bottles and shuffled off mutely through the smoke and the gloom. Suttree traced with one hand dim names beneath the table stone. Salvaged from the weathers. Whole families evicted from their graves downriver by the damming of the waters. Hegiras to high ground, carts piled with battered cookware, mattresses, small children. The father drives the cart, the dog runs after. Strapped to the tailboard the rotting boxes stained with earth that hold the bones of the elders. Their names and dates in chalk on the wormscored wood. A dry dust sifts from the seams in the boards as they jostle up the road …
The cards whispered along the table, the bottles clinked. Under the floor the muffled bong of a barrel shifting. Doll rocked and snored in her chair with the cat in her lap and beyond the little window the houseboat shadowed by the city lights ran darkly in the river among the tarnished stars.
His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams. He saw his brother in swaddling, hands outheld, a scent of myrrh and lilies. But it was the voice of Gene Harrogate that called to him where he tossed on his bunk in the murmurous noon. Harrogate’s hand in supplication from the tailgate of a truck, face waffled in the wire mesh, calling.
Suttree sat up groggily. His hair lay matted on his skull and beads of sweat trickled on his face.
Hey Sut.
Just a minute.
He pulled on his trousers and lurched toward the door and flung it open. Harrogate stood there amuck in his clothes, bright thin face, a frail apparition trembling and conceivably unreal in the heat of the day.
How you doin, Sut?
He leaned against the jamb, one hand over his eyes. God, he said.
Was you asleep?
Suttree retreated a step into shadow. He did not take his hand from his face. When did you get out?
Harrogate entered with his country deference, looking about. I been out, he said.
How did you find me?
I ast around. I went to that yan’n first. They’s niggers lives there. She told me where you was at. He looked about the little cabin. They was in bed up yonder too, he said. Boy.
Wait a minute, said Suttree.
What?
He turned him about in the light from the window. What are you wearing? he said.
Harrogate shuffled and flapped his arms. Aw, he said. Just some old clothes.
Did they rig you out in these at the workhouse?
Yeah. They lost my clothes what they give me at the hospital. I dont look funny do I?
No. You look crazy. He pulled at Harrogate. What is this?
Harrogate held his arms aloft. I dont know, he said.
Suttree was turning him around. Good God, he said.
The shirt was fashioned from an enormous pair of striped drawers, his neck stuck through the ripped seam of the crotch, his arms hanging from the capacious legholes like sticks.
What size do you wear?
What size what?
Anything. Shirt to start with.
I take a small.
A small.
Yeah.
Take that damn thing off.
He peeled out of the shirt and stood in a pair of outsize pastrycook’s trousers with cuffs that reverted back nearly to his knees.
Why the hell didnt you cut the legs off those?
He spread his feet and looked down. I might not be done growin, he said.
Take them off.
He dropped them to the floor and stood naked save for his shoes. Suttree collected the trousers and hacked a foot or more from the legs with his fishknife and rummaged through his bureau until he found a shirt.
The shoes is mine, Harrogate said.
Suttree looked down at the enormous sneakers. I guess your feet might grow another four or five inches, he said.
I caint stand a tight shoe, said Harrogate.
Here, try this shirt. And turn these trousers up on the inside where it wont show.
Okay.
When he had dressed again he looked less like a clown and more like a refugee. Suttree shook his head.
I got shot in the bottom of my shoe, Harrogate said. He held up one foot.
Gene, said Suttree, what are your plans?
I dont know. Find me a place here in town I reckon.
Why dont you go back home?