Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  “I appreciate it,” Paris said, “to have a doctor drop by so late.” He lifted his eyes and stared at her.

  “I was on the street,” Hatfield said again. “It’s no trouble. I expect Mrs. Hatfield can keep dinner another five minutes.”

  Paris walked out of the room and into the kitchen. He reappeared a moment later, carrying his toolbox, and climbed the stairs. The doctor tightened his face against distractions. She watched his hands as he wrapped the tape. The hair on them lay in one direction, as if it had been combed. There were noises from upstairs, tapping, things falling onto the floor.

  “Is Mr. Trout handy?” the doctor said. He spoke in a manner that denied what had been said between them before.

  “He has been fortifying his room,” she said. “He has covered the floor with glass and set the legs of his bed into overshoes.” The doctor nodded, as if that were something he was thinking of doing himself.

  “He sleeps with a sheet of lead under his mattress,” she said.

  He patted her foot, first on one side and then on the other. “How does that feel?”

  She did not reply, and he said, “Is it too tight? Let me see you wiggle your toes.”

  She moved her toes, and a pain went all the way through her foot.

  “That’s good,” he said. “You don’t feel your pulse in there, do you?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “Good. That’s excellent.”

  The doctor moved to stand up at the same time Paris started back down the stairs. He had been up there no more than five minutes. The doctor said, “Call me, that gives you any trouble,” and then he shut his bag and stood up.

  Paris met him in the entranceway and steered him out the door. “Her foot appears to be healing,” the doctor told him. “If you can, keep her off it.”

  “She’s lost her appetite,” he said, and then they were out of the house, and she could not hear what they were saying.

  She stood up slowly, getting used to the new wrapping, and walked up the stairs. On the way she saw them through the window, stopped halfway to the gate. Paris was speaking, the doctor seemed to be watching his shoes. She was unconcerned with anything Paris could say, her worry was Dr. Hatfield.

  She walked into her room, listening for Paris. It was quiet. She did not think Dr. Hatfield could stand on the walk very long with Paris without telling him what she had said. The silence downstairs frightened her, and she moved into the bath and began to draw a tub of water. Wanting the noise.

  And then she froze, realizing she had not locked the door to her room. She left the water and stepped back into the bedroom, expecting to see him waiting for her.

  He was still outside with the doctor.

  She crossed the room and shut the door. And even as it closed, she knew something was wrong—something different in the swing—and then she saw that he had taken the lock.

  SHE FOUND HERSELF CRYING, without knowing when it had started. She was sitting in the tub again, the water was an inch from the top and still running. Underwater, a line of pink smoke rose from her bandaged foot. She had not bothered to rest it on the edge.

  Behind her the bathroom door was shut and locked, but the lock was only a hook, with enough play so it could be opened from the outside with a pencil. It was a lock to keep the door shut, not to keep anyone out.

  She heard him moving, she couldn’t say where. She pressed her toes into the end of the tub, and the line of smoke darkened and billowed.

  He came through the door just as the water began to spill over. He turned off the faucets and sat heavily on the commode. She covered her breasts and slid farther down, sending more water over the side.

  “Dr. Hatfield said you might need a rest,” he said.

  She turned her head away and looked at the wall.

  “He asked if there was a relative you could visit.” He stood up and moved closer to the tub. He stared down into the pink water. “Did you tell the doctor you was tired?”

  She did not answer because she was crying and did not trust her voice.

  “Tell me what you said.”

  “I am tired,” she said.

  “That’s what he said. I told him you didn’t have nothing to be tired about.”

  She felt his hand then, on the back of her head. It moved down, gently, and rested against her neck and shoulder. She tried to sit up, but he held her where she was.

  Then, slowly, the points of his fingers pressed into her and forced her down into the water. She didn’t intend to fight him. He held her under until the panic took over, though, and she did fight. Clawing at his arm, trying to find his face.

  His expression was unchanged when he brought her up, although his face was dripping bath water. “Is that what you told him?” he said. “That you was tired?”

  He pushed her under again, with both hands this time, and held her there longer than he had before. She fought him again, raking his cheek until suddenly there was less reason to fight and then none at all. A calm took over, and she opened herself to it, without realizing what it was.

  She would have stayed there forever, but something changed—a direction—and she was suddenly moving, and then her face was out of the water. Her eyes blurred, and she looked up into his face.

  “Is that what you told him?” he said again.

  In one moment of clarity she saw his thoughts again and understood that he was afraid. Not of the doctor—Paris had no interest in his opinion, good or bad—but of her. He believed he owned her the way he owned his own hands, and she was out of control now, working against his interests. She thought of the food spilled across the kitchen floor.

  She wiped water out of her eyes and noticed that the whole tub was pink now. She lifted her foot out of the water, and fresh blood ran down the bandages. “Get out of the house, Paris,” she said calmly. “You know that I’m poisoning you.”

  The movers were in the next day and cleared everything out of his room.

  On a morning in August, two weeks and three days before the murder case against Paris Trout was scheduled for hearing in Ether County Circuit Court, Harry Seagraves woke up with the way to defend him. Seagraves was hung over, but that was when he did some of his best thinking.

  Lucy was lying next to him, her features changed by the blindfold she wore to bed until she could have been someone else. They had been to a lawyer’s picnic in Macon the day before, celebrating the state legislature’s summer break, and he’d barely kept the car on the road getting home.

  Seagraves sat up slowly, not wanting to wake her, not wanting to hear her voice until he’d had a chance to examine the idea that was lying like some perfect blue egg dead in the middle of the nest that sleep and alcohol had made of his brain.

  He had been dreaming of the photographs of Rosie Sayers’s dead body. Earlier that week Ward Townes had invited him to his office and laid them across the table. There were six altogether, showing the girl from every angle. His thoughts at the time had centered on how they would look to a jury. The girl appeared younger in the pictures than she had in the flesh, and her wounds had been enlarged by the instruments used to remove the bullets.

  Ward Townes was almost apologetic. “I don’t have a choice in this, Harry,” he said.

  Seagraves hadn’t answered for a long time. Finally he looked up, away from the girl, and said, “You going to use these?”

  “What would you do?”

  Seagraves put his feet on the floor now and stood up. He was dizzy a moment, and when it passed he walked to the bathroom and drank cold water from the spigot. He brushed his teeth, shaved, and brushed his teeth again. There was a taste in his mouth that would not wash out.

  He stayed in the shower a long time, starting warm and finishing cool, letting the water run over his head and into his lips. Then he shut the taps and waited, watching the water drip off the points of his body, until the idea came back to him, the way to defend Paris Trout.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Lucy was sit
ting up in bed. Her face was white and puffed, there were red lines from the corners of her eyes back into her hair where the elastic that held the blindfold had cut into her skin. She held her head in her hands and did not acknowledge Seagraves as he walked back into the room.

  “You under the weather?” he said, and sat down on a corner of the bed to dress.

  “I may die,” she said.

  She smelled stale to him now that he was clean. He said, “Get you a cold shower, it’ll put the color back in your cheeks.”

  “Harry …”

  “What?”

  “Get me a glass of water, honey.”

  He stood up in his socks and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and his robe, then he went into the kitchen and opened the icebox. The maid was sitting at the table, drinking Coca-Cola. “Good morning, Betty,” he said.

  The maid said good morning.

  “Mrs. Seagraves isn’t feeling well,” he said, “so she won’t be down for a while.”

  “That’s fine,” the maid said. “Me and the broom get along just fine all by ourself.”

  He took the water upstairs. Lucy was settled back into her pillow. He handed her the glass and returned to his dressing. “Are you going out?” she said.

  “I’ve got some work.”

  “It’s Sunday. You can’t do anything for Paris Trout on a Sunday.”

  He stood in front of the closet mirror to put a knot in his tie. He could see her in the corner of the mirror, soft and white and stale. “How do you know it’s Paris Trout?” he said. Seagraves had the largest law practice in Ether County, there were hundreds of clients.

  She covered her eyes and spoke through her hands. “It’s him all right,” she said.

  He kissed the top of her head before he left, looking down the fold in her nightgown and noticing the pale blue veins beneath the skin of her breasts. It was a continuing mystery of his life that he was always most interested in what was underneath her nightgown when he had been drunk the night before and the odds were the steepest against him. Lucy was either hung over too—as she was this morning—or resentful to have been left behind.

  “I won’t be long,” he said, and allowed his hand to fall off her shoulder, following the line of her body behind her arm until he felt the junction where her bottom met the bed. She moved a few inches, making room for his hand to slide underneath, until he felt the place things more or less came together.

  “Harry,” she said, “don’t.” Then, in a different voice, “Get me some more ice water, honey.”

  HE WAS OUT THE door a few minutes later and walking in the direction of Hanna Trout’s house. He would see Trout himself later; first he wanted to ask her in a personal way to attend the trial. The alcohol visited him in waves, and once he stopped to sit on a brick fence until it passed.

  Seagraves did not drink often, but when he did he made it count.

  It was Sunday morning, and there were people on the sidewalks. Some of them he knew by name, some of them only to nod. The ones he knew by name tended to be Methodists, on the way to church. He spoke and smiled, and the women, fresh and red-lipped and perfumed, left him pounding. He thought of them in bathing suits.

  And between these thoughts—or beneath them, like an undertow—he thought of Paris Trout. In the months since the girl had died, his feelings regarding his client had changed. This was partly from his closer acquaintance and partly from a growing premonition that he would lose.

  Seagraves had lost before, but never a case as noticeable as Paris Trout’s would be. He had gone into the matter assuming he would win, gone in with certain advantages, but as the weeks passed, Seagraves had come to see that those first advantages were all he had.

  He had found some things on the colored family—Henry Ray, for instance, had driven a truck over a white man the previous year—but Trout himself belonged in the asylum—“gone to Cotton Point” was the expression—and could not be trusted to testify for himself at a trial.

  A pistol had been found under a mattress in the house where the girl was killed. It was the wrong side of the house, and it hadn’t been fired—or if it had, there was no evidence of it—but the pistol itself seemed to lend weight to the story Trout and Buster Devonne had told Chief Norland on the day of the shooting.

  And ordinarily, those things would have been enough. But there was something resilient in the nature of what had happened—perhaps in the nature of the girl herself—that returned again and again as Seagraves prepared his case and informed him that something was headed wrong.

  He had found himself avoiding Trout, seeing him once or twice a week, never for more than an hour. During the last visit Trout had threatened him. Not just the words—“I paid you to look after this, and you took the money”—but a feeling. He was always half a second from turning loose the dogs.

  Seagraves had turned over all his other work to his clerks and partners and spent most of his time studying statements of the witnesses. The worst of the trouble was in the account of Mary McNutt, who had been shot four times. A jury would listen to her because of the bullets still in her body. She had refused to have the operations to take them out. She was the worst of the trouble, but in a way she was the answer, too.

  Seagraves opened the gate and walked to the house. He pushed the doorbell and waited, and in a moment the door opened wide, and Hanna Trout was standing in front of him, dressed for church and holding her purse.

  “Mrs. Trout.”

  “I thought you were my ride,” she said.

  He noticed both her feet were in shoes. “I see you’ve recovered the use of your foot,” he said.

  She did not answer, she did not invite him in. “That was some cut,” he said. She stood motionless, looking into his face. He stared for a moment at the line of her leg inside her skirt, at her hip. He stretched to distract them both from the moment. “I saw toes caught in a lawn mower weren’t as bad.…”

  She looked at the watch on her wrist, and then checked the street behind him. She wore a shiny black belt that pressed into her waist and a silk blouse that she had buttoned all the way to her chin.

  “You waiting on a ride to church?”

  “Reverend Clay was supposed to pick me up,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Reverend Matthew Clay,” she said.

  Seagraves stepped inside the house, uninvited. He stood close to her and looked into her face. “Of the Bright Hope Baptist Church?”

  She held herself erect and calm. “He may have been held up,” she said. “He teaches Sunday school too.…” He smelled her soap and her shampoo.

  He said, “I came by to ask you personally to attend your husband’s trial.”

  “Mr. Seagraves,” she said, “I have spent the last three months separating myself from what he has done.”

  Seagraves felt the alcohol wash over him again and sat down on the steps leading upstairs. “Excuse me,” he said.

  She considered him a long moment. “Can I get you something?”

  His face was suddenly wet with perspiration, his shirt stuck to his sides. He shook his head. “I apologize for this,” he said. “It passes in a moment.…”

  “Do you need a drink?” she said.

  He put his arms across his knees and rested his forehead against them. He considered going to sleep. “If it wouldn’t be a bother,” he said.

  He did not watch her go into the kitchen, but in a moment he heard her open the refrigerator and then crack an ice tray. When he finally lifted his head, she was standing in front of him, holding what looked like a glass of tomato juice. He accepted it, thanked her, and felt the ice against his lips. He took a long drink and did not notice the alcohol until it was swallowed.

  “You keep liquor in your home?” he said. He could not picture her breaking the law, even that one.

  Immediately he felt himself improving. He took another drink. The front door was still open, and she checked the street. “What in the world are you doing with Reverend Clay?” he
said.

  “Going to church.”

  He took another drink, slower this time.

  “I hope you will pardon my manners,” he said. “I do not normally put myself in the middle of a family matter. But this … separation presents legal problems for Paris that I am sure you do not mean to inflict.”

  He drank again, finishing what she had brought him. It left an acid taste in his mouth, and presently he realized he was half drunk.

  He looked at Hanna Trout again, staring at her belt. “I’m afraid I’ve come here dehydrated,” he said.

  “It would appear so,” she said.

  “Your husband …” Seagraves shook his head and concentrated, but he could not take his eyes off Mrs. Trout’s belt. It was something about the way it led to her hips. “I know you don’t mean to harm him,” he said.

  He looked up into her face and saw that she wasn’t following his thought, so he began to explain. “In a situation like this the appearance of things is often as consequential as the facts. I’m speaking legally—”

  “Do you need another?” she said.

  He looked at the glass, then at Mrs. Trout. “That might do nicely,” he said, and she took it back into the kitchen. A minute later, when she put it into his hand, he noticed his fingers were shaking.

  She invited him into the living room, and he followed her there, sipping at the drink as he moved to keep it from spilling. She bent over the davenport, straightening a pillow, and he was poleaxed at the shape of her bottom. She straightened up, he found a chair and sat down.

  He looked around the room and saw that it had changed. He did not know if she had painted or set the furniture in new places, but the room was lighter. She sat on the couch and crossed her legs. Her ankle moved, up and down, and he followed it until he felt sick again and closed his eyes.

  “You were speaking of appearances,” she said.

  He rubbed his face and sipped at the drink. “A marriage is a thing,” he said, “that people understand in the way they’re married themselves. In the case of a dissolution they picture themselves in that too. They assume hurtful things about the parties, to assure themselves their own marriage is safe.”