Paris Trout - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  Seagraves took a seat, Trout stood near the door, holding his hat. Townes rubbed the back of his neck. He was the same age as Seagraves — they had graduated from high school together at the officer academy, anyway — but on Townes the years had worn more away. His hair was thin and gray, he was heavy on his feet, and there were collections of flesh under his chin and his belt.

  He was tired today, and it showed in his movements. A sick secretary put a mortal strain on anybody. "I heard you were over to the clinic," he said to Seagraves, ignoring Trout, who was standing between them.

  Seagraves nodded. "It's a shame," he said. "Little bitty thing like that, and a whole clinic can't do a thing to help her."

  The phone began to ring. Townes sighed, walked to his secretary's desk and sat in her chair, and stared at it until it quit. "That's better," he said, and then he had a long look at Paris Trout, who was still in the middle of` the room, holding his hat.

  "Mr. Trout," Townes said, "I asked your attorney to bring you into my office as a courtesy. Technically, I should of had you arrested yesterday afternoon."

  Trout did not speak.

  "The reason I did you this courtesy," Townes said, "was twofold. One, out of` respect for your family, and two, I wanted to see which way this went."

  Trout nodded, as if those had been his thoughts too.

  "Miss Rosie Sayers, however, as your attorney may have informed you, died at ten-thirty this morning at the clinic." He was speaking almost in a monotone, now, which Seagraves took for a bad sign. "And that leaves this office with no choice but to charge you and Buster Devonne with her death."

  Trout looked quickly at Seagraves, then back at Townes. Somewhere in the look was another bad sign, and Seagraves realized if he didn't say something now, Trout was going to.

  "If I might offer two points," Seagraves said, and he saw Trout beginning to nod his head now. "There is no argument that Paris and Buster Devonne were in the house, but there is, I think, some argument that they hold equal responsibility."

  Townes nodded and made a note of that on the pad of paper in front of him. "Separate trials," he said.

  "Certainly, if it comes to that. But my second point is that the circumstances of the death are not uncommon in the area of the community where they occurred, in fact occur there and in the Bottoms and even in Bloodtown with a degree of frequency, and the fact that they occurred there on the afternoon Mr. Trout, who has never been involved in such circumstances, happened to arrive to settle a business matter may speak more to the environs than to Mr. Trout himself."

  Ward Townes looked at Seagraves and smiled. "You mean, like a hunting accident?"

  Seagraves held up his hands and shrugged. "It's short notice," he said. "Mr. Trout and I have not had an opportunity yet to thoroughly review the events that preceded the shooting."

  Trout looked at him again and then back at Townes. "I did what was right," he said.

  The words startled Seagraves. "Mr. Townes," he said, "as I mentioned, I have not had an opportunity to thoroughly review the circumstances, and I wonder if my client and I might have some time to do that before he issues you a statement."

  "I did what was right as rain," Trout said.

  Townes looked up from the desk and said, "Did you want to review this with your attorney, Mr. Trout?"

  Trout shook his head. "No sir," he said. "I ain't guilty of a thing. I was there to collect for a car. You know my business, you live here too. I treat everybody the same, just like they do in New York. If somebody got shot, they shot themself."

  Townes consulted the notes in front of him, Seagraves closed his eyes. "Miss Mary McNutt, in that case, shot herself . . . let's see, three times in the back?" Townes said.

  "Yessir," Trout said. "If they got shot, they did it themself just like if she jumped in front of a train, you don't fix the blame on the engineer. There is a set of rules that was here before any of us, and there's no man can hold another to account for the consequences when somebody breaks them. If it wasn't dangerous to break rules, there wouldn't be no reason to have them."

  Townes put his hands behind his head and leaned back against the wall. "I have a rule for you, Mr. Trout," he said. "The State of Georgia wrote it down in the penal code. It says that you cannot enter a person's house and shoot them dead. And that's a dangerous rule to break too, sir. An eye for an eye."

  Seagraves saw Trout begin to smile. Paris Trout didn't smile four times every ten years, and today he couldn't stop. "Those ain't the same kind of eyes," Trout said, "and they ain't the same kind of rules."

  "The murder statutes of this state do not differentiate between races," Townes said. "To the law, one kind of eyes is as good as another. That's the way the rules are written down, and those are the rules we follow."

  Trout moved then, closer to Townes, and bent until his hands were resting on the front of the desk. "Those ain't the real rules, and you know it," he said.

  Seagraves saw Townes's good nature change then, and he hadn't moved a muscle. "Mr. Seagraves," he said, keeping his eyes on Trout, "if I were this man's attorney, I would come over here and collect him off this desk and instruct him to shut his mouth for the rest of eternity."

  At the sound of the words Trout straightened and backed away. He was smiling again.

  Seagraves said, °'With the informal nature of the meeting, my client spoke more frankly than he would in a legal proceeding. It was our understanding that the nature of this meeting was informational — "

  "See there?" Trout said. "That's what I mean. You got two sets of rules right here in this office. You got your lawbook rules and you got your common sense."

  Townes stayed against the wall, his hands behind his head. Trout said, "Now, if you got some goddamn fine I got to pay, I wisht you'd set it and leave me go back to my store and do what I'm supposed to do."

  Townes brought his chair back to the desk. He looked at the notes lying on top of it, made a calculation. He picked up the telephone and dialed a four-digit number. "Hubert?" he said, "this is Ward Townes. I've got Mr. Paris Trout here in my office to surrender in the shootings of Rosie Sayers and Miz Mary McNutt, and I wonder if you would come collect him now .... Yessir, thank you. We'll be here.

  "Mr. Trout," Townes said, putting down the phone, "you are now under arrest for the murder of Rosie Sayers and the attempted murder of Mary McNutt. In view of your position in the community and my high regard for your sister, I am sure reasonable bail can be set, under the conditions that you remain in Ether County and that you and your attorney, Mr. Seagraves here, turn over any physical evidence relating to this matter. Any firearms, clothing, or notes of debt."

  Trout turned away from Townes and looked at Seagraves. He had, at least, stopped smiling. Behind him Townes was saying, "Do we have an understanding, Mr. Seagraves? Mr. Trout? It is not my desire to send Hubert Norland to disrupt your home and your wife with a search party."

  "Is tomorrow morning all right?" Seagraves said. "Mr. Trout surrendered the weapon to me earlier, and we will pick up the rest after he posts bail."

  "You have the weapon now?"

  "At home," Seagraves said.

  "Tomorrow morning would be fine," he said. `He checked his watch, then stood up and walked back to the window. "You're welcome to a seat, Mr. Trout," he said, looking outside. "Chief Norland said he would be by directly, but I expect he's on the phone right now, trying to reach Mr. Seagraves to ask him if it's all right to arrest you. He may be awhile."

  Trout did not move. "That man's got more common sense than anybody in this room," he said.

  Townes looked back over his shoulder then, and he was smiling. He said, "That is a profound observation, Mr. Trout."

  ** *

  CHIEF NORLAND SHOWED UP a few minutes later and was clearly startled to see Seagraves in the room. He led Trout out without touching him and took him that way the length of the hall and down the stairs. They could have been friends out for a walk, except the chief kept himself half a step in fr
ont. He did not want to give Trout a chance to begin a conversation.

  Seagraves shook hands with the prosecutor and followed the police chief and Trout out of the building. He half expected Trout to run. It was as bad a day as Seagraves could remember, and it wasn't through with him yet.

  The problem with the day, though, was not Paris Trout, it was the girl.

  When Seagraves got back to the Cadillac, there was a skinny black dog with eyes the color of sleet inside, licking chicken blood off the seat.

  The dog froze when it saw him. For two seconds the only movement was the rise and fall of his ribs, and then he bolted and ran.

  HANNA

  Part Three

  The story of the shootings in Indian Heights appeared Thursday morning in the lower left-hand corner of the front page of the Ether County Plain Talk — "The Conscience of the South" — beneath a short announcement of the birth of Estes Singletary"s first grandchild. Estes Singletary owned the paper.

  The Plain Talk account of the shooting fixed no blame. It was not until the last line, in fact — "Miss Sayers was taken to Thomas Cornell Clinic and later died of her wounds" — that a reader understood someone had been wounded at all.

  Until the last line it might have been something innocent.

  That was Hanna Nile Trout's thought, anyway, sitting on a counter stool at Dickey's Drug, reading the story again and again, until she could have closed the paper and recited it. There was a cup of coffee in front of her, and beside that a plate of bacon and grits, untouched. It might have been something innocent.

  She couldn't think what and began the story again. Paris and Buster Devonne were in it, but neither of them were identified beyond their names. Mary McNutt, it said, was a maid. And Rosie Sayers, fourteen, had died of her wounds.

  She closed her eyes and imagined her husband inside a house, shooting colored women. It came to her right away and frightened her. She knew it was true.

  She folded the paper and laid it on the counter next to her plate. She stared at the plate and finally tasted the grits. They were cold and heavy in her mouth, and she was sorry to have ordered them. She ate anyway — she believed it was sinful to waste — trying to remember if she had heard of any Negroes named Sayers,.

  Hanna Nile had taught public school in Ether County for almost fifteen years before she'd gone with the state. She had substituted in the Negro schools, she had been appointed by Mayor Bob Horn to head a committee on truancy. She had taken her duties seriously and wondered now if she'd had this dead girl in class or if she had gone into her house one day and asked her mother to send her to school. She wondered if she had been inside the same house where Paris had gone with Buster Devonne.

  The phrase came to her again, almost like a song. It could have been something innocent. She finished the grits and ate the bacon with her fingers, looking at the story's place in the paper and wondering if it was somehow connected to the weight of the event. The name Sayers was familiar, but detached from her professional life.

  Something she had heard, it didn't seem to matter where. She saw it clearer now, the size of her mistake, marrying Paris. It was the same mistake she'd made when she left Cotton Point for the job with the state: wanting what she did not have.

  A principal's position had come open, but the Ether County school board had turned her application down — there were no women principals in Ether County — and she had gone to work in Atlanta. In five years she was the highest-placed woman in the state department of schools, making more money than some of the men, but what she gave up for that was the teaching itself. That was an empty place inside her now.

  She accepted it as a punishment for her ambitions.

  There were other empty places: her mother and father, both gone; her only brother, who had died in the Philippines, fighting the war. She had been alone so long, and she had seen so many other women alone. Her profession was where they went.

  And then she'd come across Paris — she'd known him before, but only to nod to on the street — and he appealed to her after the bureaucracy in Atlanta. There was a shape to his life, she was sure of that. He was direct and willful and honest, and there was a sureness about him that was missing in her own life. He did not lie.

  And yes, at the bottom of it she sensed a darker side, and it had excited her. She never loved him, she knew that, but she gave up her job in the department of schools to spend her life with him, not to end up alone, without a life at all.

  But there was less love in Paris Trout than the state government. He had never said he loved her, of course, she had never expected it. She'd thought the distance between them would narrow, though. She'd thought he needed her beyond the violent jerking inside her — in a way as urgent, but on another level.

  But she had mistaken his nature, and her own. And the spasms would shake her as hard as he shook himself but the empty place only grew.

  He'd put her to work in the store, twelve and thirteen hours a day; he would not hire a maid to clean the house.

  He was hard-boiled and cold-blooded and had not brought her a present since the engagement. He had fornicated with her almost nightly for two years, pulling her legs up over his shoulders to push himself deeper or bending her over a table or the arm of the couch. He had never spent a night in her bed, though, or her room. And she stayed, because that is what you did.

  Weeks would go by with hardly a word, and then he would suddenly emerge from his office in back of the store and abuse her with the worst language, sometimes in front of people she knew from her days as a schoolteacher.

  The marriage cut off her friendships.

  A month into it she lent him half her money — more than four thousand dol1ars — for a lumber transaction, and he never repaid it. The other half was in a bank in Atlanta, and she kept it secret. She had been careful all her life until she met Paris Trout, and marrying him — she saw it now — was reckless, and she was punished for that, too.

  The countergirl appeared in front of her, freshening her coffee. Hanna did not know the girl — there was a whole generation of Ether County children she did not recognize, it was part of the punishment — and the girl did not know her. The child wore a perfume Hanna could taste in her grits and a beauty parlor hairdo that did not move even when the fan turned and blew the collar of her uniform into her earrings. Hanna guessed she was sixteen years old.

  "Did you see this here?" the girl said. She Put a pink fingernail dead in the middle of the story from Indian Heights.

  "I was just on it."

  "It's worst than the Civil War," she said.

  Hanna looked at the child, trying to decipher what she meant.

  "It's what my daddy said, that it's worst than the Civil War."

  "I don't understand."

  "All I know," she said, "it's got something to do with politics."

  There were three other people sitting at the counter, and two of them turned to see who had spoken. The girl blushed under the attention and began to speak louder. She said, "They ought make him governor of Georgia."

  "Who?"

  Her finger went back to the story. "Whatshisname in the paper. My daddy said they ought run him for governor, and he would collect every vote in Ether County."

  Hanna opened her purse and found a dollar bill. "Trout," the girl said, reading the paper upside down. "Mr. Paris Trout. The other one is Buster Devonne, but everybody knows him. You can't get elected when you're too familiar."

  She put the dollar on the counter and waited while the girl made out the check. She was slow with her addition and labored to print the numbers. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips. Hanna turned on the stool and began to tremble. There was a fluttering in her throat and on her lips. She stood up, trying to stop it, trying to get out before someone noticed.

  The girl looked up, her pencil still on the pad. There was lipstick on her front teeth. "Was everything good?" she said. Hanna smiled at her. She thought for a moment there might be

  lipsti
ck on her own teeth. She did not trust herself to speak now, because she knew the fluttering would be in the words too.

  They ought to make him governor.

  She saw how it would be then, that it would be public and that she would be part of it — part of the story and part of the legend afterward. In that moment she thought of leaving Paris Trout, but she was afraid.

  Not so much of him — although that was part of it too — but of asking again for a different life. She imagined herself poor, without work or a place to stay. Without the look in his eyes the moment before he pushed himself inside her.

  The girl took the check and the dollar bill to the cash register. She searched the keys as if she had never seen the machine before. The fluttering spread to Hanna's cheeks, just beneath her eyes, and she knew she was going to cry.

  She nodded at the people sitting at the counter and started out the door. The girl called to her from the cash register. "Ma'am? You forgot your change."

  "That's all right, dear," she said. "I left it for you."

  The girl checked the money in her hand. "It's sixty cent," she said. Hanna Trout walked into the sunshine. She paused on the sidewalk for a moment, and then, without meaning to, she looked through the glass back into the pharmacy. The girl was still watching her. The was a little flash of pink nails as she waved good-bye.

  It was three blocks from the pharmacy to the store. Hanna walked with her head down, afraid she would see someone she knew. The fluttering had taken her over.

  The store was locked in front, in two places. Paris Trout was the only man in Cotton Point who put two locks on his doors. She found the keys in her purse and went in and then closed and relocked the door and sat in the dark on a box of tomatoes. She needed to calm herself before she saw customers. She took deep breaths until the air went in and out of her chest without catching.

  A few minutes later she stood up to open the store and suddenly heard his voice. She jumped at the noise, not expecting him here now, with the story all over town. She stood in the aisle that ran the length of the store. The office door was closed, but there was a light in the space between it and the floor.