Come in, said Suttree.
I aint got but a minute. I come to give ye your shares.
Come in.
He stood in the little room holding his cap, one foot wide to shore himself against the tilted floor. Suttree sought his shoes under the bed and stepped into them sockless and turned and sat on the couch. Sit down, Reese, he said. Sit down.
Reese sat at the little table and took his pocketbook from the bib of his overalls and opened it. He lifted out a sheaf of bills tied with a dirty string and laid them on the table and folded the pocketbook and put it away again.
What’s that? said Suttree.
That’s your shares. We never got sold till last week. We had a awful lot of trouble.
I dont want it, said Suttree. Put it back in your pocket.
Reese set his lips and shook his head. It’s yourn, he said.
Well let me give it to you.
No.
Suttree looked at the money and shook his head. Where are you living now? he said.
We’re back up in Jefferson County. Willard run off.
How are you?
I’m okay. I never did understand that boy. I never would just get to where I could talk to him but what he’d up and do some hatefulness and it not a bit of use in the world in it.
Suttree ran his hand through his hair. The old man seemed small and older yet sitting there.
I never did blame ye for leavin out. Poor luck as we had I reckon ye’d of done better never to of took up with us to start. Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck?
Suttree said he had. He said that things would get better.
The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I’m satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.
But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.
In the afternoon he went uptown. He bought a thick army sweater at Bower’s and he paid Stud twenty dollars on his lunch tab and he went to Regas and ate a steak dinner. When he got home he still had forty dollars left. As he let himself in at his door he thought he heard his name called somewhere like those sourceless voices that address our dreams. He went in and shut the door and lit the lamp and sat on the cot. As he was taking off his shoes he heard it again. Thin and far, somewhere in the night. He sat with a shoe in one hand listening.
He put his shoe back on and went out. Blind Richard was hailing him from the bridge.
What is it? the fisherman called.
The blind man on the bridge raised his thin arm into the lamplight like a supplicant to the chalice of God’s bright mercies. A ghost of a voice fell.
Suttree couldnt hear what it said but he cupped his hand to his mouth. No, he called.
His name drifted down from the steel span hung in the night.
Go home Richard. It’s late.
The blind man called again but he could not find his way down to the river and Suttree turned his back on him and his cries and went in and shut the door.
26
Billy Ray Callahan labored for a while as a tilesetter but was fired for drinking. The crewchief stopped him coming from his lunchbreak and confronted him.
You cant drink on the job and put in a day’s work. You want to drink you can get your time now.
The crewchief’s name was Hicks. Callahan grinned at him. Why Hicks, he said, if I was you I wouldnt be caught without a drink of whiskey on my breath.
Hicks looked suspicious. What do you mean? he said.
Why, so people would think I was drunk instead of just so damned ignorant.
He went to Atlanta looking for work but he didnt find any. He fought two boys from Steubenville Ohio in the alley behind the bus station and left one senseless in the well of a cellar window and went into the men’s room and washed his swollen fist with cold water and crossed the station to the gate and boarded the bus back to Knoxville.
Where he worked what jobs he could find, tracking by night his isobar of violence through the streets and taverns. Suttree saw him whip a boy from Vestal named George Holmes, a tall boy who used to like to shoot people. All along the wall by the B&J folks from McAnally and Vestal stood dangerously together and Suttree saw pistols gripped in pockets and out. Callahan hit Holmes twice and Holmes went down. He’d have let it go at that but the crowd called out for more.
Stomp him Red. Stomp his ass.
He gave Holmes a few kicks but Holmes only doubled himself up on the sidewalk. When the police cruiser rounded the corner and came up the hill Callahan took off up Commerce and lay in the parking lot under Junior Long’s car. The cruiser went back down the hill with Holmes in the back of it crying and cursing and the crowd had already begun to move away. Holmes had shot a dentist in Vestal not long before this and not long after he shot and killed a man across a cardtable at Ab Franklin’s and was sent to the penitentiary. Years later he got out and went back to Franklin’s and was shot dead himself over the same table.
The last job Callahan had was running a bootleg joint for a man named Cotton down off Ailor Avenue. Suttree saw him in Comer’s and he looked subdued.
I seen ye the other day and you didnt know me, he said.
Bullshit, said Suttree. I never saw you. Where at?
Callahan put his arm around Suttree’s shoulder and patted him on the belly. These old summer rabbits, he said. You can set on em and they wont hardly even squeal.
At the woodshed in McAnally they bought whiskey and rolled lightless out the far end of the alley passing the bottle about in the brown paper bag. They drove up Gay Street where Comer’s was closing and the hustlers stood about the stairwell, Callahan leaning from the window of the car to hoot at them, and they drove past the little cafes and restaurants where dishwashers were cleaning up in the dim back light and they passed folks coming from the last movie who seemed almost unhinged by what they’d seen or were seeing.
At the West Inn Callahan routed an outland troupe from the premises. And aint they got no beerjoints where you come from? And dont let the door hit ye in the ass goin out. Suttree in the washroom stood slightly drunk and read the legends on the weeping wall. Advised that he was pissing on his shoes. Untrue. Wanted to trade; two blind crabs for one with no teeth. He looked up at the clotted bulb overhead. He buttoned and pushed open the plywood door and went out.
It ended on the Clinton Highway at the Moonlite Diner, Billy Ray smiling and going among the tables while the band played country music. He had his hands in his pockets when the barman confronted him. Small, vicious, quiet. He said: Red, you been stealin money out of them girls’ purses.
Callahan rocked back on his heels with his hooligan smile and looked down at his assassin. His pockets were full of the stolen change spoken, he’d drunk their drinks. You’re a damned liar, he said goodnaturedly. In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen. When he was shot he had his hands in his pockets. The last word came out lie. The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous. Billy Ray was standing there with a small discolored hole alongside his ruined nose. A trickle of thin blood started down his face. The band had finished their set and the people going to the tables paused and looked toward the bar where a small cloud of pale smoke hovered above Billy Ray’s shaggy head. They saw him lurch and topple.
Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.