by Pete Dexter
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 dollars—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 lipstick 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.
His voice seemed to shake the cans on the shelves. “What in hell is it you want from me?”
It was quiet a moment, she waited. Then Paris again: “I will not be abused like this. No sir, not over a Negro debt.…”
She thought it must be Harry Seagraves in the office with him because her husband did not use the word “Negro” except in legal matters. She could not hear the attorney’s reply, however, and then Paris was speaking again.
“I warn you,” he said. “More blood will spilt than it already has.” He was shouting now, and it frightened her. He kept guns in his office. He kept guns everywhere. The reply, if there was a reply, was so soft she could not even hear the tone of the voice. It seemed to infuriate her husband, though.
“By God, I’ll finish this now!”
And she knew in that instant that Paris would shoot him, and she ran to stop it. Her skirt caught her knees, and she stumbled. She heard him again, a wordless scream, just as she got to the office. She turned the knob, expecting to find the door locked. It moved with her hand, though, and the door opened.
Her husband was sitting at his desk, pointing a heavy-looking square pistol at the ceiling. There was no one else in the room. Slowly he brought the muzzle of the gun down until it rested, together with his one open eye, in the middle of her chest. He was unshaved, and there was dried food in a corner of his mouth.
The other eye opened, blood red.
“Dear Jesus,” she said. She was faint and leaned against a folding chair near the wall.
He stood up, holding the gun at his side now, and crossed the room. She thought he meant to explain himself, but he walked past, smelling of urine, and looked out the door, one way and then the other.
“There’s no one in the store,” she said. “I haven’t opened.”
He turned back into the room and looked at her like six crates of melons that showed up unordered. His pants were spotted and his zipper was open. She smoothed her skirt and brushed a piece of lint off her blouse, hoping in some way that normal motions would make things normal.
He watched her, without a hint of movement in his face. It came to her that things were changing now, right in the room, and would never be retrieved.
“Sometime ago,” she said, “you borrowed a sum of money from me. In light of the circumstances, it might be prudent to return it now.”
She had no idea how those words came to her or how
they were received.
He walked back to his desk and sat down. “You’re my wife,” he said.
“I had that money before.”
He shook his head. “This mess with the Negroes,” he said—there was the word again—“it don’t have the first thing to do with you.”
She began to speak, but he interrupted her. “It don’t have nothing to do with the law either. I make my deals and live by them, and Jesus save those that don’t do the same.”
“I don’t want what’s yours,” she said. “I want my loan repaid.”
He slammed the side of the gun against the desktop, upsetting the bottle of mineral water. Mineral water was always somewhere around, here and at home. Paris Trout would not drink from the tap. The bottle rolled across the tabletop, leaving a trail of small puddles.
He made no move to stop it.
The room was quiet except for the sound of the bottle rolling across the wood and then dropping onto the floor. She met his stare, then looked away. In that moment she saw he was afflicted.
“I am sorry for you,” she said, looking at the floor.
He made a noise she understood to be a laugh. “That’s a lie,” he said. “You’re sorry for every child ever come out of its mother’s pussy barefoot, and people that’s old, and all the sumbitches play with their own toes up to the asylum, but you ain’t sorry for me.”
She looked up again and saw he was laughing at her. “I caught you fibbing,” he said.
“I want my money returned,” she said.
“You know what else?” he said. “I know why you said that. You want me pitiful, so you can feel the way you’re supposed to. Because if somebody ain’t pitiful or sick, you don’t know how to act nice.”
She blushed at the words and stepped backwards toward the door. The smell of his urine was fresh in her nose again.
“Well?” he said. “Is that a fact or not?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You lied again.”
She began to back out of the room. He came up off the desk, and the pistol came up with him. She stopped dead. “You lied,” he said.
She said, “What do you want?” She could not anticipate him at all now.
He looked at the empty bottle on the floor. He said, “Get me a drink from the store, then clean up what’s spilled.”
The mineral water was sitting on a shelf at the front of the store, near the door. Her intention was just to walk out. When she got to the door, though, there was a woman waiting on the other side. A small child hung from her arm, lifting his feet to swing or tip her over, it was hard to say which.
Hanna recognized the woman—she was married to one of the deans at the college—but could not remember her name. Hanna let her in. She waited until the woman was past and then kicked the wedged stop under the door. Open for business.
“Can I help you find something?”
“Thank you,” the woman said, “but I’ll manage.” The woman’s accent was southern, but not local. She carried herself in a dignified way, even with the child swinging from her arm. Hanna straightened herself, thinking of her own dignity.
She picked a bottle of mineral water off the shelf and headed back toward the office. She did not want this woman to see Paris, she did not want to be thought of in a piteous way. Something hung on the woman’s opinion.
“I’ll be back directly,” she said.
Paris was in the spot where she’d left him. Precisely the spot. The bottle was still on the floor near his feet, a trail of spilled water formed half an ellipse across the desk. The gun, thankfully, was back on the desktop and out of his hand. She crossed the room and handed him the mineral water.
There was a metal sink in the corner, and she found a dry sponge there, wet it and wrung it out, and wiped the desk. He opened the bottle, following every move. Neither of them spoke.
She stepped around him, bending to wipe the spilled bottle up off the floor, and then there was a slamming noise in her ear, and she was suddenly out of focus. She fell against the desk, beginning to understand that he had hit her, and then his hand was around her neck, his weight pinning her to the desktop. There was a heat in her ear and numbness somewhere inside.
Still, neither of them spoke. The only sounds she heard were his breathing and hers and the rush of blood in her head. Her cheek lay flat against the desk, and her eyes were open, but he was working from the other side, where she could not see him.
It was connected somehow to the girl he had shot.
A movement then, above her, and he set the bottle of mineral water on the desk a few inches from her nose. She wondered if she’d closed the door to the office, afraid that the woman would come back to find her when she was ready to pay for her things.
She pulled suddenly, with all her strength, but he only fastened down harder, until she cried out. Not words, only a sound. He lifted her skirt, and she felt a coolness on the back of her legs.
“Paris, please …” The voice did not sound like her own, it was squeezed and comic.
He brought the skirt all the way up. It bunched in front and caught against the edge of the desk. He jerked at it, lifting her off her feet. And then it was loose, and a moment later she felt the soft weight of it on her back.
“I will not tolerate this,” she said.
There was no answer, and in a moment her sight blurred, and she wondered, in a dreamed sort of way, if he had somehow left. Then she felt his hand on her, running over the cheeks of her bottom. He slapped her once there, the force of it moving her head, rubbing her cheek into the wood.
Then his hand found the elastic at the top of her underpants and pulled them down her legs until they fell of their own accord around her feet. She fought him, rising an inch off the desk, but he pushed her back where she had been. She thought again of the woman outside, picking a few things up on the way home.
No one came in for more than a few things, people did their heavy shopping at the A&P.
She saw his hand. It closed around the bottle of mineral water, taking it at the bottom. There was a moment of calm then; she thought she could talk to him while was drinking.
“Paris, look at yourself.…”
She felt him move, she thought he meant to let her go. Then she felt him between her legs, pushing to get inside. The thought came to her in that same dreamed way that he had planned this, it was why he hadn’t zipped his pants.
He pressed harder, pinching her legs against the edge of the desk, and she cried out. She heard him at the same time, the sound he’d made earlier, almost a laugh. There was something wrong with the location, though; the noise seemed to come from the side. He pressed into her and pushed a little ways inside. She kicked out behind, as high as she could, but there was nothing there.
He pushed deeper, and there was a different pain, this one tearing her and lifting her up onto her toes, and she realized then that it was not Paris inside her.
He used the bottle like a lever. One end was seated deep in her vagina, the opening to her body became the fulcrum, and he lifted her in that way until she felt the warm water running into her and out, running down her legs into her shoes.
He held her there until the bottle was empty.
He pulled it out, almost gently, and then took his hand off her neck. He had yet to speak an intelligible word. He stood over her, holding the bottle, and watched as she slowly straightened up.
She was dizzy, and as moments passed, she noticed a burning sensation growing through her neck. She touched her face, and her cheek was swollen and unfamiliar. She steadied herself against the desk and pulled her underpants up. They were soaked through.
Then she pulled her skirt down, and she was finally away from him.
She felt the wet underpants against her skin, though, and she felt what he had done to her. “Look at yourself,” she said again, and when he did not answer she left the room, her shoes making wet noises as she walked.
The woman was standing at the counter. There
was a box of saltine crackers and some chicken noodle soup in front of her, the child was holding a pack of Dentyne gum. She looked up when she heard Hanna coming.
Hanna stepped behind the cash register and rang the order. She accepted the woman’s money, made the correct change. She put the crackers and the soup in a brown bag and thanked the woman for coming in. The woman looked at her face and then glanced back toward the office.
She leaned forward, so that the child could not hear, and said, “Are you all right, honey?”
And Hanna felt the cold underpants underneath her skirt, and her legs had turned sticky. She said, “Yes, thank you. My husband and I had a small emergency, but it’s taken care of now.”
The woman left, and a moment later Hanna left too. She did not close the door behind her, and as she walked along the campus of the college a few minutes later, she had the impression again that things were, at that moment, changing forever.
That Paris was gone someplace and was lost for good.
SHE DID NOT MOVE out. She stayed, because that is what you did.
The house, in some way, was hers.
By the time Paris Trout returned from work that night, however, she had taken several chairs, a lamp, a table, and the rug from the front room and carried them upstairs to her own quarters. She watched him from the window, opening the gate and walking up the sidewalk. She watched until the line of the house cut him off from her, and then she crossed the room and locked her bedroom door.
He did not force his way in. She heard him on the stairs and then in the hallway. He stopped outside, a long minute, and then she heard his steps moving back in the direction he had come, and somehow a bargain had been struck.
They did not speak, not a word, for three days. Each evening she locked herself in her bedroom, and each morning, after he left, she reclaimed her house. She read books in her room, Raymond Chandler novels she borrowed from the public library. She bought a radio. She took long baths and began a diary.
She did not clean anything but herself and her own room, she did no dishes and no cooking and took her laundry out, charging it to her husband’s account. She saw him, coming and going, and was careful that he did not see her.