Mr. James’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

The chemist tore off a piece of paper from a pad and poised with his pen. Just let me have the name of the person or persons you intend to poison, he said. We're required to keep records. -- C.M.

You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats. -- C.M.

He stood in a concrete room painted white and pissed painfully a few drops into an oldfashioned urinal and came out again. She was waiting for him. Did you do your business? she said, smiling. Just a little. Number one or number two? Suttree couldnt remember what the numbers corresponded to. Wee wee, he said. He felt completely stupid. -- C.M.

A cold sweat broke out upon him. He felt his head. Terminal brain damage under the towels? He tried to recite the multiplication tables and this filled him with sexual memories and caused him to lie back smiling. -- C.M.

Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree. Who the fuck cares? If he aint from McAnally bust him. And they are whelmed in dark riot, the smoking hall a no man's land filled with lethal looking drunks reeling about with bleeding eyes and reeking of homemade whiskey. -- C.M.

That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don't think I've seen anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lighting up the snow and the trees and the night. -- C.M.

The building dropped away. They were going by a frozen mudflat, lunar, naked, spoored with fossil dogtracks. Under the billboard lights small sprawling mica constellations. The lightwires slung past in shallow convections pole to pole and the loneliness rode in his stomach like an egg. -- C.M.

Suttree just shook his head. The stripling on the stool beside him with his heron's legs dangling smelled like a smoked jockstrap. Even the waitress's eyes went a little funny when she passed and she herself no rosegarde. -- C.M.

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in a perpetual storm. Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hand cupped over his ears. -- C.M.

Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it. -- C.M.