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He had a small cardboard suitcase and he came out of the weeds and set it on the edge of the road and straightened up and began combing his hair. He looked about his appearance, propping one foot on the case and bending to scrape beggarlice from his trousers with his thumbnail. New trousers of tan chino. A new shirt open at the neck. His face and arms were suntanned and his hair crudely bartered and he wore cheap new brown leather shoes the toes of which he dusted, one, the other, against the back of his trouserlegs. He looked like someone just out of the army or jail. A car came down the highway and he gestured at it with his thumb and it went on. Traffic was slow along the road and he was there a long time. It was very hot. You could see his skin through the new shirt. Across the road a construction gang was at work and he watched them. A backhoe was dragging out a ditch and a caterpillar was going along the bank with mounds of pale clay shaling across its canted blade. Carpenters were hammering up forms and a cement truck waited on with its drum slowly clanking. He watched this industry accomplish itself in the hot afternoon. Downwind light ocher dust had sifted all along the greening roadside foliage and in the quiet midafternoon the call of a long sad trainhorn floated over the lonely countryside. A boy was going along the works with a pail and he leaned to each, ladling out water in a tin dipper. He saw hands come up from below the rim of the pit in parched supplication. When all these had been attended the boy came down along the edge of the ditch and handed up the dipper to the backhoe operator. Suttree saw him take it and tilt his head and drink and flick the last drops toward the earth and lean down and restore the dipper to the watercarrier. They nodded to each other and the boy turned and looked toward the road. Then he was coming down across the clay and over the ruts and laddered tracks of machinery. His dusty boots left prints across the black macadam and he came up to him where he stood by the roadside and swung the bucket around and brought the dipper up all bright and dripping and offered it. Suttree could see the water beading coldly on the tin and running in tiny rivulets and drops that steamed on the road where they fell. He could see the pale gold hair that lay along the sunburned arms of the waterbearer like new wheat and he beheld himself in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child’s eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea. He took the dipper and drank and gave it back. The boy dropped it into the bucket. Suttree wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Thanks, he said. The boy smiled and stepped back. A car had stopped for him, he’d not lifted a hand. Let’s go, said the driver. Hello, he’d said, climbing in, shutting the door, his suitcase between his knees. Then they were moving. Out across the land the lightwires and roadrails were going and the telephone lines with voices shuttling on like souls. Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood. Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.
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Jun 13, 2023 20:49
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:33 |
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Suttree is the best one and really who cares about the others
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Jun 13, 2023 20:55
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WILDTURKEY101 posted:Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery Uh Pynchon is still alive, probably
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Jun 13, 2023 21:02
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My Spirit Otter posted:op has punctuation what a slap in the face to cormac mccarthy the man really pioneered the use of run on sentences It’s a direct quote from Suttree
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Jun 13, 2023 21:08
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Pussy, said Suttree from a new place. Weet pussy. Sweet giggling ensued. His penis rose enormous from between his legs, a delicious spasm and there unfolded from the end of it a little colored flag on a wooden stem, who knows what country? Lightly tinctured, a flavor of sunlight lay in the room. Water dripped in a bowl. He could hear the flat detonation of tennis shoes along a pavement beyond a wall in a courtyard in another kind of kingdom. Late in the afternoon he rose and wobbled about the room on naked bony legs, a coarse cotton shift just covering his shanks, some strings dangling. He found a sink in the corner of the room and hung by the taps with his face in the bowl and cold water running over his smoking skull. Blood hammered through bearing bad news. He raised up dripping and urinated a few drops painfully into the sink. He looked about the room. Two other beds, both empty. A steel cart with enameled bedpans. He had lifted his nightie and was palming water over his shrunken gut when a nurse entered the room. He turned. They made their way toward each other, reeling across the floor with outstretched arms. I’ve got you, said Suttree. What were you doing? Bellycooling. Do I know you? Be careful. Listen, said Suttree. We were never promised that our flesh, that our flesh … Hush now. Come on. I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls lonely.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:23
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:33 |
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Wtf is man lit
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Jun 13, 2023 21:45
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