by Pete Dexter
“What about the trial?” Seagraves said. “What if she gets a temper there?”
“She don’t do it in public,” her husband said.
It was quiet a moment, and then she heard her husband again. “What if we kept her away?”
“From court? Your own wife? Think how it would look.”
“Maybe her foot got infected. Or she hurt herself in the fall.”
She sensed his thinking then, saw it for one long, clear moment.
“No,” the attorney said. “It’s a bad time to be claiming accidents to happen.”
Hanna sat up in bed and carefully put her feet down, one at a time. She used a straight-back chair as a crutch and limped into the bathroom and began to refill the tub. She slid herself back into it, resting her injured foot on the lip. With the noise of the running water, she could not hear them talking anymore and could no longer picture her husband’s thoughts.
He came to her door later, carrying a tray. He knocked and walked in without waiting for her to answer. He set the tray on the table next to her bed, wax beans, candied potatoes, some kind of pork, iced tea. Everything he brought was canned except the tea.
He had cleaned himself up, shaved and changed clothes and parted his hair, and after he’d set the tray down, he turned the chair she had used for a crutch and sat down backwards, resting his chin on his arms.
He began to speak, then stopped himself and smiled. It was his nicest smile, the one that hid his teeth. She didn’t move, not an inch.
“Have you ate?”
She looked at the tray and felt a sweet nausea balance itself in her throat. She looked away, and it moved away from the edge.
“Have you?”
“No.”
“You got to eat. Doctor said so.”
“He said no such thing.”
He picked the fork up off the tray and cut a piece off one of the orange potatoes. A small piece. He moved it across the bed until it sat under her nose. She stared at him, seeing the fork and his hand in double vision. She moved away. “No.”
He put the fork on the plate, still holding the piece of food, and closed his eyes. For a moment she could see his thoughts again, and then he spoke, and she knew she was right.
“I got to feed you then?” he said.
She shook her head and moved to the far edge of the bed.
“You think it’s tainted?”
“I can’t eat.”
“You ain’t tried.”
“I took medication,” she said. Which wasn’t true.
“It don’t matter,” he said. He brought the fork back to her mouth and waited for her to accept it. She turned away, pressing herself against the wall. The chair moved. Then the bed dipped under his weight, and she felt his hand on her shoulder.
A moment passed, and the grip tightened. He turned her by the shoulder, flattened it against the bed, bringing her back toward him. Then he let go and found another hold, just under the ear that was pressed into her pillow, and brought her face around to meet him. She opened her eyes and saw he was still holding the fork. Saw that there was something in the forcing he wanted.
“Nothing is changed,” he said. “I’m still here.”
“Everything is changed,” she said. He had tightened down on her jaw, and it affected her speech. A line of spit hung from the corner of her mouth. He shook his head, and the smile came back. His nice one, without the teeth.
“Whatever you think changed wasn’t never me.”
She began to speak, but his fingers pressed into her jaw on both sides, opening her mouth, and then he put the fork inside—so far inside it gagged her—and pulled it out against her upper lip. She felt the cold candied potato drop onto her tongue. She tried to spit it out, but he had her jaws.
“Swallow it,” he said. He forced her mouth closed. “Swallow.”
He watched her throat, and when she had swallowed he said, “See? It ain’t tainted. It’s good food.”
He turned back to the tray, sticking the fork into the pile of wax beans, and she tried to run. He caught her by the hair and pulled her head backwards until it rested on his fist against the bed. He had dropped the fork, and with his fingers he reached into the plate and picked up a piece of the canned pork. He held it over her face. She clenched her teeth.
He laid the pork across her lips. Then he pushed it inside. His fingers were thick and hard and slid with the piece of meat into her cheek. She had not opened her teeth. He pulled his finger out and looked at her. “Swallow,” he said.
She did not move.
He studied her a moment. He said, “Does it need salt?” and she spit the meat out of her mouth. It rested on her own chest. She felt it there but could not see it. His purchase did not offer her head an inch of movement in any direction.
“Stop it,” she said. “My hair …”
“Hair?” he said.
He reached down, out of her line of sight, and then she felt his hand up underneath her nightgown. It followed her legs, which were tight together, to her underpants. He went in through one of the legs, his whole hand, and then, for a moment, she thought he had torn her open.
His hand came out, holding a little patch of her pubic hair between his thumb and first finger. Tiny pieces of flesh were still attached where they had been uprooted. He held it over her face, in the same way he had held the pork. “Did you want hair?”
He dropped the hair in her face and picked the pork up off her chest and put it in her mouth. She chewed it and swallowed it. He filled her mouth with a whole candied potato, choking her, and then the beans, and then the rest of the meat. She lay with her head pinned to his fist and swallowed.
“Nothing is different,” he said. “You just misunderstood the way things was.”
She swallowed until there was nothing left to eat. He let go of her hair, watching her, and then, gently, he leaned closer and whispered, “You understood it now, don’t you?”
A numbing sensation spread across the back of her head, her injured toes pounded against the wrapping. It seemed to her he was asking if she knew he would kill her.
“I’m different now,” she said.
She saw that puzzled him, and in the moment before he got off the bed, she glimpsed his apprehension.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, HE arrived home from work and stood at the gate for nearly an hour. She watched from the bedroom window. She had planned to leave that morning, take the train to Savannah, but as she packed her things into suitcases, hobbling from her bed to the dresser, she lost her resolve.
She imagined Paris intercepting her on the way to the depot, she imagined herself in Savannah, in her sister’s house. The questions. She imagined herself without a house of her own. She sat on the bed and realized that Paris had somehow stolen her direction too.
She was still on the bed, hours later, when he took his station by the gate. He looked down the street, toward the center of town, and checked his pocket watch frequently. People passed in front of him, some of them as close as the gate itself, but he did not speak to any of them. He did not look at the children.
She remembered the day—they had been married less than a week—he had forbidden her to associate with the Godseys, who were their neighbors. He said it was a business matter. And then, one by one, he found business reasons or grudges—one meant the other—against everyone she spoke to and isolated her in the same way he had isolated himself.
THE TRUCK WAS A flatbed, similar to the ones that hauled lumber, and it arrived just after seven o’clock. It was empty and seemed to come from the wrong way—at least it was not the direction Paris had been watching—but as soon as it stopped, Paris opened the passenger door and climbed in. She could not be sure from the window, but it appeared to be Buster Devonne behind the wheel.
It seemed to her that Paris might intend to take him into the country and shoot him, except she did not know why he would need a truck for that.
HE WAS GONE A long time. She slept in a bothered way, dropping in an
d out, listening, even in her sleep, for the sound of the truck. It came deep in the night and stopped in front.
Paris got out one side, Buster Devonne got out the other. They unloaded what looked like a door, sliding it off the bed onto a two-wheel dolly. They wheeled the dolly through the gate and up the sidewalk. She heard Buster Devonne’s voice as he came in the door.
“This damn thing heavier than a lead pussy, Paris.”
His reputation for offensive language, even as an officer of the law, was admired all over Ether County. He would say whatever came into his head without regard to where he happened to be at the time. Those who did not admire Buster Devonne’s language frequently made the observation that the man obviously had a small vocabulary.
Hanna did not know Buster Devonne at all, but she did not believe the limits of his vocabulary explained his manners.
They came up the stairs, pausing between each step, pulling the dolly. They went into Paris’s room, and Buster Devonne said, “Maybe we could lie this sumbitch sideways and slide it over.”
Paris did not answer, and in a moment there was a crash and the floor shook. It was quiet, and then Buster Devonne said, “Son of a bitch, Paris”—enunciating each word—“now we got to pick this fucker up.”
She heard them moving around the room, and then she heard Paris counting. “One, two, three …” The word “three” seemed to choke and die, and then she heard Buster Devonne trying to talk, and it sounded like somebody was squeezing him lifeless.
There was another crash—softer than the first one, with more of a metal sound—and then hard breathing. “The bastard must of gone four hundret pounds,” Buster Devonne said.
“It was two fifty in Macon.”
“No sir, I know two fifty, and that ain’t it. That there is at least three fifty. Rely on that.”
It was quiet a long minute. “Are you reliable, Buster?” he said.
“They ain’t nothing going to happen to us.”
“It might,” her husband said.
SHE PUT A SOCK over her good foot and went back into his room the next morning. He’d left his door open again. The glare of the sun off the floor caught her again, and she stopped in the doorway a moment, dizzy, and then moved to the windows and looked back. She had found a way to walk that didn’t hurt her as much, keeping her weight on the outside of her foot. She had been walking on her heel, but in compensating that way, she pulled at the nerves below the cuts.
You could not walk on your heels to avoid hurting your toes.
His bed was a mess, the mattress slightly off center. It took her a moment to see it, underneath. A sheet of lead, a quarter inch thick, ran the length of the mattress and lacked only half a foot of being as wide.
She knew what it was. He was afraid of being shot from underneath. She pictured herself doing it: three muffled shots and then his hand dropping off the bed into view.
She went out of the room, not touching the door, and walked down the stairs. She sat down beside the phone and tried to call Harry Seagraves. First his office, then his home.
His wife picked up the phone at home. Hanna could not remember her name. “This is Hanna Trout,” she said. “I wonder if I might speak with your husband.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “Mr. Seagraves isn’t in presently. May I take a message?”
She tried to think of a message. She said, “Would you tell him, please, that I need to speak to him, in confidence?”
“In regards to what matter?”
“This is Hanna Trout,” she said, slowly. “My husband—”
“Oh, Mrs. Trout. Goodness, I misunderstood your name. Yes, what was the message?”
“That I need to speak to him,” she said.
“Has something happened?”
Hanna found herself staring at the mantel. There was an ancient picture of Paris’s family there, Paris sitting in short pants and a cap, cross-legged in front of his mother. One of her hands rested on his shoulder, some secret connection, and his father, off to the side, staring straight toward the camera.
She wondered what thoughts he’d had as a boy.
“Mrs. Trout? Should I try to locate him for you? Has something … further occurred?”
She heard the interest in the woman’s voice, and she understood its pleasurable nature. Hanna fought her own interest in other people’s trouble, but she knew the attraction.
She imagined telling her that she had been violated in the office with a bottle of mineral water. What would Harry Seagraves’s wife tell her in return?
That she understood?
Hanna said, “No, don’t trouble yourself to find him.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I told Mr. Seagraves back when this started, ‘Consider the poor woman at home.…’ ” It was quiet for a moment, each of them hearing how that sounded. “I don’t mean to offend you,” the lawyer’s wife said.
“I am not offended.”
“It’s just that the men don’t take into account what it’s like to be the woman.”
Hanna could not think of a single word to say.
“I know how you feel, dear,” the lawyer’s wife said. “If you want to talk, here I am.”
THE LAWYER DID NOT call.
She waited downstairs until five o’clock and then went back to her room. She locked the door and lay in bed and was suddenly weak. She had not eaten at all since Paris forced her. Remembering what he had done, she could suddenly smell canned pork, and she gagged.
The doorbell rang while she was in the bathroom. She stood still, the toothbrush in her mouth, listening. The bell rang again. The sound grabbed her, in the chest and throat. For a moment she seemed to forget how to breathe. She looked at herself in the mirror, afraid of her own house.
She brushed at her hair and wiped the toothpaste out of the corners of her mouth. The bell rang again as she was coming down the stairs. She saw a man’s shadow through one of the windows that led to the porch.
She hurried to the door before he rang again—it seemed to matter—and a moment before she arrived, the door began to open from the other side, and then Dr. Hatfield’s head poked inside, waist-high. He called, “Miz Trout?” before he saw she was there.
“Dr. Hatfield,” she said, and he started at the sound of her voice.
He smiled, recovering and straightening, opening the door farther to step inside. “I hoped to save you the trip downstairs,” he said.
She did not understand.
“Your foot,” he said. “I was passing the house, and thought I might change your dressing and look at the stitches.”
“It seems to be healing,” she said.
“May I look?”
“Of course,” she said, and led him into the front room. She sat on the davenport, he moved a straight-back chair and sat in front of her and took her foot into his lap. He found a pair of scissors in his bag and began to cut the tape. The scissors were cold where they touched her skin and tickled her feet as they moved.
He stopped for a moment and searched her face. “Is this causing you pain?”
“No,” she said, “it’s a tickling.”
Without smiling, he returned to her foot. He made a single cut from her heel to her toes and then opened the dressing the way she would open a box of canned goods at the store, pulling at one side and then the other. There was a noise like opening a box too, and then her foot felt cool.
He removed the gauze he had packed into her toes more carefully, squinting to see the work he’d done. She could not tell if he was pleased or disappointed. He went into the bag again and found cotton and a bottle of disinfectant.
“Have you been on this today?”
“Not much,” she said.
He began to dab at the underside of her toes with the wet cotton. It was freezing cold. Her leg jerked reflexively, but his other hand had encircled her ankle and held her there.
“You need to stay off it a few days,” he said. “You don’t want to end up in the clinic over a c
ut foot.” He picked up her second toe, wincing as he looked underneath. She fixed on his collar, the hair growing all around his neck, down into his chest and back. He was round-shouldered and warm-looking, she thought again of a bear.
“Dr. Hatfield,” she said, “may I speak with you on another matter?”
He looked up, over her toes, waiting.
“I have reason to believe I may indeed find myself in your clinic,” she said. He waited, she framed her words. She looked out the front window, checking the walk. “My husband has become irrational.”
His expression did not soften or change.
“There have been incidents which I would prefer not to discuss,” she said, “which now put me in jeopardy, and perhaps my husband as well.”
“It’s a normal thing, missus, to feel threatened. It’s threatening times,” Dr. Hatfield said.
“No,” she said. “His behavior may appear normal, but it is not. Events have occurred of a highly bizarre nature.”
“Are you physically injured?” he said.
“I have been assaulted,” she said in a quiet voice.
He did not seem to understand. “In what way?” he said.
“In ways of a private nature,” she said.
He leaned back to look at her again. “I don’t see marks,” he said. “Not even a bruise, which is common enough even in the best households.”
“He has assaulted me.”
The doctor rubbed his chin. “If they went to commit everybody that assaulted his wife into the asylum, they’d be more in than out.”
She saw that the doctor, for all his kindness, was no help. And it didn’t feel like kindness then.
He picked a roll of gauze out of his bag and began to repack her toes.
“Dr. Hatfield,” she said, but then the front door opened, and Paris was in the house.
He stood in the entranceway, looking upstairs and then noticed them sitting in the front room. He came in without a word and stopped a yard in back of the doctor, following his work. “I was on the street,” the doctor said, turning to acknowledge him. “I thought I might have a look in on your wife’s foot.”
The doctor was afraid of him too, she heard it in his voice. His taping went faster now, and she could see it bothered his nerves to have Paris standing behind him.