by Pete Dexter
The laughing stopped the same way it had started, little bursts of bubbles on the surface. When it was over she wiped her eyes. “I don’t know why that hit me so funny,” she said.
Seagraves moved in front of the medicine cabinet, found a jar of 5 Day deodorant pads, and used one under each arm. “I swear I don’t know why, but I can’t get that picture out of my mind,” she said. He tossed the pads toward the wastebasket, missing them both.
“Harry?”
He turned to her and waited.
“Why is it things always stop being funny when I think they’re funny too?”
“I got Paris Trout on my mind,” he said, “and the man takes the edge off humor.”
She was still then, and he dressed.
He kissed her at the door before he left the house and saw that all the fun was gone out of her now. Her depression was insincere, but it still made him sad in a way because he knew what that was. The fun seemed to have gone out of him too, a long time ago.
She stalled him at the door. She said, “Harry, what am I supposed to tell the cleaner’s?”
He said, “Why don’t you get out of the house this afternoon? Call Miz Hodges and go shopping.”
“I got to tell the cleaner’s something,” she said.
He couldn’t say what it was, he didn’t know why. Somehow, little things had turned big, and it had come too far to be chicken blood.
“It’s blood, isn’t it?”
“Animal blood,” he said. “Something ran in front of the car.”
And as he walked out of the house, he heard her say, “Oh, the poor thing …”
SEAGRAVES RETRIEVED THE CADILLAC from the filling station and drove downtown. Bud Ramsey had vacuumed the feathers out and cleaned the pool of blood off the floor but hadn’t been able to do much with the seat covers.
He parked the car on the street, left the doors open to air out the smell of chicken, and walked into the courthouse. Ward Townes’s office was on the second floor, next to the desk where you got licensed. Any license you wanted in Ether County—fishing, dogs, marriage—you went to the same place.
Paris Trout was sitting on the bench outside, just beneath a sign that said GUN TOTER’S PERMITS. Seagraves saw that he had put on a dark blue suit, two inches short in the sleeves, and polished his shoes.
His hair was parted in the middle and slicked back. He legs were crossed, and he held a straw hat in his lap. He looked too big for the bench. When he saw Seagraves, he pulled the watch out of his pocket and checked the time.
“One o’clock sharp,” he said. “Here I am.”
“Is Ward Townes back from lunch?”
“He come in a little bit ago,” Trout said, “told me to wait here for you.”
Seagraves opened the door to Townes’s office and put his head inside. The prosecutor was sitting at his secretary’s desk with a phone against his ear. Seagraves held up a finger, getting his attention, and said, “Give me one minute, we’ll be right in.”
He shut the door without waiting for an answer and walked Trout to the end of the hall. There was a window there, overlooking the street. “I went to Cornell Clinic this morning,” Seagraves said. Trout moved a little to one side and looked out the window.
“Did you hear? I went to Cornell Clinic to see Rosie Sayers. She’s passed on.”
Seagraves was watching Trout to see how it affected him. He nodded slowly, keeping his eyes on the street. “She was fourteen years old,” Seagraves said.
Trout looked at him quickly and then back out the window. “I didn’t have nothing to do with her birthday,” he said. “I never put myself in her business, she put herself in mine.”
Seagraves moved closer and spoke just above a whisper. “You put yourself in her house,” he said. “You and Buster Devonne went into this child’s house with a gun and shot her and Miss Mary McNutt something like eight times. Neither one of them owed you a legal cent, and one of them’s dead and the other’s talking a mile a minute. You can depend on that.”
“I told Henry Ray Boxer before he took the car, I get what I’m owed. There is a natural order of things, and you and me and everybody down to the poorest nigger in the Bottoms is part of it, and there ain’t no laws can blame anybody for the way God created the earth.”
Seagraves backed away to get a different view of Trout.
“Lookit out there,” Trout said, “some fool went and left his car doors open.” Then he looked up at Seagraves, smiling with those yellow, gapped teeth. “People who let someone take their property is as guilty as the ones that took it.”
Seagraves saw that Trout had watched him park the car and get out. He said, “Don’t be sly with Ward Townes. He won’t appreciate it.”
Trout said, “There ain’t nothing to worry about, Mr. Counselor. You’ll of took care of all this by three o’clock.”
When Seagraves opened the door to Townes’s office again, the prosecutor was off the phone and standing at the far window with his nose in a lawbook. He did not acknowledge them at first, even when he heard the door close.
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.”
Tro
ut 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 front. 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.
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.