I wouldnt take a war pension for this dog, said the old man.
The dog looked sideways across its shoulder and snarled at Suttree.
When I die he’s goin to come to sleep with me. We’re to be buried together. It’s done arranged.
It is.
I want him just like this. The old man held the dog up in his arms.
What if the dog dies first?
What?
I said what if the dog dies first?
The old man regarded him warily.
I mean if the dog dies first are they going to put you to sleep?
Why hell no that’s crazy.
I guess maybe you could just have him frozen. Keep him till the time came.
The old man hugged the crazy looking thing to him. Of course I could, he said.
The blind man at Suttree’s elbow in the seeping dusk kept close with his mincing blind man’s walk and his hands wove images in the air to prove the things he said. They went down by steep little streets and took a trodden path through the winter fields. The blind man to read his way through the thin soles of his old man’s kidskin boots, stepping like a heron among the gravelstrewn ties and down the slight embankment.
Inside Jones’s shanty he nodded and smiled in the soft archaic lamplight and the smoke. A scene from some old riverfront doggery where cutthroats’ eyes swang in the murk as if in appeal from their own depravity. Richard tottering woodenly in these strange surroundings, his hands outheld. Doll closed the door behind them and looked at the blind man and shuffled away. Suttree showed him to a chair and went to the cooler and raised the lid and dredged up two bottles from the water and opened them and went back to the table. The players’ eyes flicked, some nodded gravely. Oceanfrog dealt the last card and tightened the deck in his hand and laid it on the table and looked his way and winked. In the yellow pool of light from the lamp overhead the crumpled bills fell like leaves.
When the bottles clicked on the stained stone Richard looked up and smiled and reached and seized his beer with great accuracy. Suttree eased himself into the folding wooden chair, the varnish peened up in little black blisters along the back where it had been salvaged from a riverside revival tent burnt years ago. The sun lay on the water behind them and thin blades of light played through onto the far wall, dicing the smoke, casting the poker table behind frail and luminous bars. Richard felt the shack tilt on the river and said so. He tested the air with his nose like a rabbit. Smokehouse spoke his name passing to the rear with empty bottles clutched in his hands and Richard smiled and raised his bottle and drank.
See if you can cipher the names under the table, Richard.
Richard looked at Suttree or almost at him. Names? he said.
Under the table. He tapped with his knuckle.
Richard ran a yellow hand beneath the marble slab, up among the twobyfours in which it sat. It’s a gravestone, he said.
What does it say?
Richard smiled nervously, the paleblue clams in his eyesockets shifting under the useless lids, his ears tuned like a fox’s to the world as he hears it. He slid his palm beneath the table and fished a cigarette from his shirtpocket with the other hand. Eighteen and forty-eight, he said. Nineteen ought seven.
Two of the cardplayers raised their hooded eyes to regard the blind man but he minded them not. Williams, he said.
It doesnt say who Williams?
No Sut, it dont.
Is that all it says?
Richard felt along the underside of the table. That’s all, he said. He lit his cigarette and plumed two soundless streams of smoke from his nostrils.
Let’s move to another table.
They rose and fumbled their way to the next table and sat again, Suttree steering him by the elbow through the chairs.
Who are they? said Richard.
They’re just stones. They came off an island down the river before it was flooded.
Richard shook his head. Thisn dont say who.
It must say something.
He read the stone again, he shook his head. It’s wore, he said. Near naked. His face wrinkled.
What is it?
Danged old chewin gum.
Let’s try another one.
We ought not to be doin this. Drinkin off folks’s gravestones.
Why not?
I dont know.
Would you care?
If it was some of my kin I would.
What if it was you?
I aint dead.
If you were dead. And me and Callahan drank off it. Your stone.
I dont know. I’d be dead. I’d drink off Billy Ray’s.
I would too, said Suttree.
I’d drink off of it in a minute.
Suttree grinned.
Course maybe if you was dead you’d think different. I mean, if you’re dead and all why I expect you got to be pretty religious.
We’d drink you a toast. Have a good time.
Richard smiled wanly. Well, he said. I like a good time well as the next feller.
I’ll get us another beer.
But Richard was fumbling in his pockets and he stopped Suttree with his hand. Let me get em Bud, he said. What do they get for a beer down here?
Thirty-five.
Richard frowned. He’s high, aint he? I reckon it’s on account of the gamblin.
He doesnt have a license.
For gamblin?
For anything. For living.
I never see him uptown he dont say hidy, said Richard. They dont make em no whiter.
He doled the change into Suttree’s palm and Suttree went to the box and got two more beers and came back to a new table. He took the blind man by the hand and led him to it. Doll raised her one eye from where she slept in her shapeless chair, her heavy arms folded across her bosom. One of the poker players jacked his chair back and reached for the stove door and opened it and looked in and she rose heavily and made her way across the floor to the coalscuttle. When she came back from tending the stove she wiped the tables that they’d read and eyed them curiously. Richard had his eyes closed and the smoke from his cigarette rose alongside his thin nose. Something had passed out on the river and the shanty lifted and settled in the swells. Richard suddenly placed his hands flat on the table. Then he lifted them off again as if it were hot. He took up his beer in both hands and held it like that. I aint readin no more, he said.
What is it? said Suttree.
The blind man sucked on his cigarette and shook his head. The thin gray webs of flesh in his neck trembled.
What is it? said Suttree.
There was an oil lamp sconced in the wall above the table and the blind man beneath it sat clearly lit. Suttree looked at his dead eyes but there was no way of seeing in. What is it? he said again.
You knowed what it was, didnt ye?
No. I dont know.
You aint done it for meanness?
I swear I dont know what it says. He was running his own hand under the table but he could not read the stone.
Will you keep it to yourself? said Richard.
Yes. What does it say?
Tween you and me?
Yes.
It says William Callahan.
He woke early with the cold and sat in his cot crosslegged swaddled up in his blanket and looking out the small window. The sun kindled the haze into a salmoncolored drop against which the brittle trees stood like burnt lace. Charred looking sparrows japed and chittered on the rail. Suttree parted back the sackcloth curtains to better see downriver and the birds flew. He was still sitting there when someone came aboard and knocked at his door. He leaned and reached his shirt up from the floor. The knocking came again, someone called his name softly as if he ailed.
When he went to the door Reese was standing there. He carried a new cap in his hands and smiled thinly.