Here comes a car, Sut.
Thumb it.
Well get up. He wont stop with somebody setting down.
They watched the driver’s eyes. He looked like a skittish horse the way he rolled them and the car swerved out as if he’d keep from being leapt upon by these roadside predators who possibly fared on the flesh of motorists in lonely places.
An hour later they were still standing there. Three cars and one truck had passed. They looked at each other and at themselves. The old man fell to combing his hair with his hands.
We better start walking, Suttree said.
How far from home you reckon we are?
I dont know. Twenty miles. Thirty maybe. Suttree’s eyes looked burnt and a crusty paste had formed over his lips.
What time do you reckon it is?
Suttree looked at the sky. Gently quaking like a vat of molten cobalt. Past noon. Maybe two oclock. Let’s walk on down around this next curve. Maybe there’s a store or something.
The old man shaded his eyes and looked down the hot and smoking road to where it dissolved in a distant haze. The landscape subsequent seemed to shift and veer so that he batted his eyes and made little gestures with his hands as if to shape things right again. I reckon we can try for it, he said.
They set off, stumbling along the roadway with their eyes down. If you keep from looking up for a long time you can surprise yourself with how far you’ve come. Suttree fell to counting the bottlecaps in the dusty roadside gravel. Then he began to divide them into the rightside ups and the upside downs. Before they reached the curve he called for them to stop.
Reese when he looked at him seemed almost in tears. We nearly to the curve, Sut, he said.
I know. I just want to get rested a minute so that when we look down that next stretch of road and there’s nothing there I wont faint.
How long you reckon a feller can sweat like this and nothin to drink without dryin up?
Suttree didnt answer. He was looking back up the road, the accrued flat of the surface making mirages of standing water on the heat-bleared black macadam. A truck was coming down. A phantom truck that augmented itself out of the boiling heat by segments and planes, an old black truck that rode down out of a funhouse mirror, coalesced slowly in the middle distance and pulled to a stop alongside them.
Shithouse mouse, cried Reese, staggering toward the truck.
Suttree thought that if he reached for the vehicle it would resolve itself back into the cooking lobes of his skull from whence it came. But the old man was climbing up, jabbering mindlessly to the driver. Suttree followed. He pulled the door shut after them and it bounced open again.
Raise up on it, said the driver.
He raised up on it and it shut and they pulled away. As bad as they looked, bad as they smelled, this saint seemed not to notice.
How far are you going? Suttree asked.
Sevierville. How far you all?
He was a young boy, hair almost white, a light down at his chin and side jaws. We’ll ride on in with you if you dont mind, Suttree said.
You more’n welcome.
Whew, said Reese. We was about give out.
Around the bend of the road was a store. An orange gaspump standing atilt. Suttree almost croaked out for a brief halt and Reese watched the building go past with sadder eyes yet.
Where you all from? the boy said.
Down around Knoxville. You from up here?
Naw, the boy said. I’m from down around Sevierville. He looked them over. I just come up here to mess around some last night, he said.
They watched the road in silence. Reese looked at the boy. He was wearing clean overall pants and he was leaning up over the wheel and he was chewing tobacco. You ever been to that there Green Room? said Reese.
The boy looked at him sidelong slyly. Shit, he said. Aint that the dangdest place?
You wasnt in there last night was you?
We come in there about three oclock this mornin.
Reese looked at him again. He shook his head. Well, he said. Be proud you wasnt there no earlier. That first shift is pure hell. Aint it Sut?
When they stumbled back into the camp on the river the four women and the boy were waiting for them with grim set mouths.
Boy if you aint a couple of good’ns, she said. Where’s them groceries you was goin to bring?
I can explain everthing, Reese said.
Where they at? Hey? Boy if you aint a couple of good’ns.
Reese turned to Suttree. I told you she’d say that. What’d I tell ye?
Standing there with her hands on her hips and that stringy hair and her face a mask of bitterness she looked fearful and Suttree turned away. Reese tried to detain him to verify various lies but he went on toward the lean-to and got his bedding and slouched off toward the river with it. He could hear the debate rising behind him. Suttree’ll tell ye. Ast him if you wont believe me.
He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass.
The girl woke him, shaking him by the shoulder. He’d heard his name called and he rose up wondering. The boy was coming up out of the darkness downriver with a load of pale and misshapen driftwood like scoured bones from a saint’s barrow. At the fire the woman bent and stooped and placed the blackened pots about and the old man squatted on his haunches and rolled one of his limp wet cigarettes and lit it deftly with a coal and watched. All this with a quality of dark ceremony. Suttree walked with the girl to the fire. One of the younger girls came up from the river with the coffeepot dripping riverwater and set it on the stones. She gave him a slow look sideways and arranged the pot with a studied domesticity which in this outlandish setting caused Suttree to smile.
They ate almost in silence, a light smacking of chops, eyes furtive in the light of the lantern. The meal consisted of the whitebeans and cornbread and the boiled chicory coffee. There was about them something subdued beyond their normal reticence. As if order had been forced upon them from without. From time to time the woman awarded to the round dark a look of grim apprehension like a fugitive. When Suttree had finished he thanked her and rose from the table and she nodded and he went off toward the river.
He woke once in the night to the sound of voices, a faint lamentation that might have been hounds beyond the wind but which to him as he lay watching the slow procession of lights on a highway far across the river like the candles of acolytes seemed more the thin clamor of some company transgressed from a dream or children who had died going along a road in the dark with lanterns and crying on their way from the world.
It was the boy came down with poison ivy. First between his fingers, then up his arms and on his face. He’d rub himself with mud, with anything. I seen dogs like that, said the old man. Couldnt get no relief.
His eyes is swoll shut, the woman said at breakfast next morning. The boy came to the fire like a sleepwalker. His arms puffed like adders. He tilted his head a bit to one side to favor the eye he could still see from. The skin of his upper arms had cracked in little fissures from which a clear yellow liquid seeped.
The old man shook his head in disgust. I aint never seen a feller swell up thataway with poison ivy. What all do you reckon’s the matter with him?
Just keep him away from me, said Suttree.
I thought you didnt take it, Sut.
I think he’s found a new kind.