At least I exist, said the wanderer. He wafted up the hem of his blanket and gestured at the hunter with it. Begone, he said.
The hunter recoiled and brought his crossbow up again.
Begone I say, said Suttree, shucking the tattered blanket at him.
Why you dipshit idjit if anybody begones anywhere it’ll be you with a arrowbolt up your skinny ass.
Suttree batted his eyes. Are you real? he said.
Damned if you aint beyond the bend in a queer road. Where’d you up from anyways?
From over the mountain.
What are you, a yankee or somethin?
I’ll tell you what I’m not.
What’s that?
A figment. I’m not a figment.
A what?
A figment. A frigging figment. He crooned a weird laugh. The hunter stared at him.
What have you there? said Suttree.
A little sense for one thing.
Is that a crossbow?
I’ve heard it called that.
How many crosses have you killed with it?
It’s killed more meat than you could bear.
Shoot it.
What for?
I want to see. You shoot it.
I think I’ll just keep it strung and handy.
Suttree rose from where he’d squatted. Pale liver spots listed across his vision. The woods had grown dim.
It’s snowing, he said.
A delicate host expired on his filthy cuff. He pulled the blanket closer. He looked down at himself, at the rags of crokersack, the spats of knitting that had been his socks, at the twill trousers black with woodash, the bulbed green knees of them hanging. He had a beard an inch long and his hair was wild and matted with leaves and the eyes the hunter watched were black and crazed and smoking.
How do I get out of here? he said.
Where is it you’re headed?
Out of these mountains.
Well, you’re about nine mile from Cherokee.
Which way?
Right yon way. You’ll come to the road about two mile.
Thank you.
You run crazy in these woods regular do ye?
No, said Suttree. This is my first time.
He did not come to the road. Coming down a stony draw through green and well nigh lightless grottoes where lay stones and windfall trees alike anonymous beneath the mantled moss he saw cross through a bosky glen two equine phantoms pale with purpose: one, the next, and gone in the dark of the forest. Suttree stumbled out of the woods onto a bridlepath. Faint smell of stables. Broken green horseturds steamed in the cold of the humus earth. He followed the path until it began to veer back toward the mountains and then he entered the woods again.
Nor was he out of them that evening. The snow had not stopped falling and he sat in the feathered darkness and heard it sifting through the woods with just the faintest whisper. He drowsed and woke and nodded off again. He wondered would he freeze, sitting there under a balsam tree watching the snow encroach toward his toes. The rich smell of the branches and the needles in which he sat carried him back to old Christmases, those sad seasons. He dreamed sad dreams and woke bitter and rueful. The snow had stopped and the trees stood stark against a paler sky. With first light he rose and went on.
All day this halfmad outcast staggered through the snow and what a baleful heart he harbored and how dear to him. In midafternoon he came upon a freshet and he turned downstream, his breath pluming. He could smell the water. Going down through the snow where ice tines hung from boughs above their replicas in graygreen pools like jaws from fierce Jurassic carnivores. Until late in the day he came out of the snow and crossed through a broad bottomland where the ground gave wet and spongy underneath. In his darker heart a nether self hulked above cruets of ratsbane, a crumbling old grimoire to hand, androleptic vengeances afoot for the wrongs of the world. Suttree muttering along half mindless, an aberrant journeyman to the trade of wonder.
He was wandering in a swampy wood, a landscape of cane and alder where gray reeks swirled. Cognate shapes among the vapors urged him on and in this sad glen under a pale sun he felt he’d grown improbable of succor and he began to run. Headlong through the bracken and briers in whose crushed wake he left small tattered stars of the rags he wore. Until at last he washed up in a little glade and fell to his knees gasping. Clouds lay remote and motionless across the evening sky like milt awash in some backwater of the planet’s seas and a white woodcock rose from the ferns before him and dissolved in smoke.
A curling bit of down cradled in this green light for the sake of my sanity. Unreal and silent bird albified between the sun and my broken mind godspeed.
He woke in full daylight by the side of a road. A truck had passed. Leaves stirred about him. He struggled up. His blanket lay in the ditch. His head was curiously clear.
The town that he came to was Bryson City North Carolina. He passed a shabby tourist court and went down the sidewalk in his blanket peering about at the sudden tawdry garishness in which he found himself. At the maze of small town mercenary legend, the dusty shopwindows, the glass bulb of a gaspump. Cars slowed in passing him. He entered the first cafe he came to and sat slowly in a booth. Some stark and darker bearded visage peered him back from the shiny black formica of the tabletop. Some alien Suttree there among the carven names and rings and smears of other men’s meals.
What for ye? said a leery matron.
The menu. I dont have a menu.
The old bird’s eyes honed by past injustices to a glint just between suspicion and outrage swept over him and to the wall.
Yonder it is.
He looked. Chalk script on a slate. Country steak, he said. Mashed potatoes and beans. Cornbread. And bring me a cup of coffee.
You get three vegetables.
He looked again. Let me have the apples, he said.
She finished writing and padded off on her white wedgeheeled shoes to the rear of the place. In the cameral shutting of the kitchen door he saw a black hand picking at the seat of a pair of greasy jeans. A dark wood clock above the door told a time of two twenty. Suttree seized the water tumbler she’d left and drank. A long cold drink laced with chlorine. His head swam, A pall of fried grease hung in the room. He rose from the booth and went to the counter and got a newspaper and came back. He looked in the upper corner for the date but there was none.
Whoever heard of a newspaper with no date, he said aloud, tearing open the sheets. Here. December third. How long is that?
He stared blankly across the empty dining hall. A huge and blackened trout hung bowed on a board above the counter and knew not. Nor the naked leather squirrel with the vitreous eyebulbs. A dull wooden clicking he’d thought some long coiled component of his forelobe together with the fading colored pictures and the receding attendance of horribles segued into a shrunken indian passing across the glass of the cafe front and the dull tocking of applewood clockworks from above the door. He turned to the paper. A rash of incomprehensible events. He could put no part of it together.
The kitchen door swung out and she came bearing coffee. A thick rimmed cup of sepia crockery. Beads of grease veered on the dishing meniscus of inky fluid it held. He poured cream copiously from a tin pitcher and laced in sugar and stirred. The smell of it flooded his brain and when he sipped it it seemed like an odd thing to drink. He sipped again. The waitress reared above the rim of the cup. He leaned back. A plate of corn muffins fell before him, A small oblong platter with thick flour gravy wherein lay a slab of waffled beef and the vegetables. Suttree could hardly lift his fork. He buttered one of the muffins and bit into it. His mouth was filled with a soft dry sawdust. He tried to chew. His jaws worked the mass slowly. He tried to spit it out and could not. He reached in his mouth and fished it forth with his fingers in thick clogs of paste which he raked off on the side of the platter. He cut away a section of the steak with his fork and eased it past his teeth. His eyes closed. He could taste nothing. His throatpipe seemed grown shut.