by Pete Dexter
She sat still, watching him. He thought she might be fascinated.
“What I am saying is, there is a certain amount of lying that goes on between people that live with each other. Polite lying, that makes cohabitation possible. And at the time of a loss of affection there is a tendency of both parties to unburden themselves of those lies and tell things that indirectly threaten those who are still married. That threaten the institution itself—”
She squared herself and said, “My husband never afforded me the polite lying, Mr. Seagraves. He did not strike poses for me, he is not good at that.”
He sipped at the drink. A piece of lemon was floating among the ice cubes, he hadn’t noticed it before. “Little lies,” he said, “flirtations.”
She shook her head. “In the week that followed the killing of that child,” she said, “Mr. Trout assaulted me three times. He forced me to eat rancid food, he attempted to drown me in my own bath, he abused me in an unmentionable way with a bottle.…”
Except for the shaking in his hands, Seagraves did not move. He stared into her face, trying to imagine it. He cleared his throat.
Mrs. Trout held his eyes for a moment and then looked out the window. “I expect Reverend Clay was delayed,” she said. “Did you drive?”
“No,” he said, and his voice seemed to belong to someone else. “I thought the exercise would …”
She wasn’t listening. He thought of her receiving the bottle and wondered what it had been. Coca-Cola? Where had it happened? In this room? He cleared his throat again, warm-faced with liquor. “I will not break this confidence,” he said.
When she looked at him again, she was smiling. “It hardly matters, does it?”
“Yes, to the appearance of things it does. To yourself and to your husband.”
“What sort of appearances do you favor, Mr. Seagraves?” she said.
He thought she was teasing him now, he thought that she knew what he was thinking. He put the glass on the floor next to the chair. “The appearance of normalcy,” he said.
She laughed out loud and leaned into her own lap. It crossed his mind that she herself had been drinking before he arrived.
“Mr. Seagraves,” she said finally, straightening up, “that appearance is the very thing that allowed this to happen. My husband is an aberration. It is not normal to shoot children. Whatever effort is made to lend that appearance, it does not change the perversion itself but only asks that the perversion be shared. I will not be party to the shooting of children.”
He said, “What if I proved that your husband was defending his life by discharging those shots?”
Her expression turned unfriendly. “You can’t prove what didn’t happen,” she said.
“It’s for a court of law to determine.”
She shook her head. “There is no story you can tell in your court that will change what happened in that house.” She looked around the room. “Or in this one.”
“That is a misperception,” he said, “that an act is, of itself, a crime or a perversion. It becomes such only after it is judged.” He had no idea why he was explaining this to her.
He saw that she had begun to smile again, as if she were judging him. “The misperception,” she said, “is that the law, and lawyers, decide what already happened.”
Seagraves sat back into the chair. She stood up, checking the window again, and then crossed the room and took the glass out of his hand. “Another?”
He held his head, deciding.
“Mr. Seagraves?”
“One more,” he said, and when she went into the kitchen, he followed her. She held her shoulders in one place as she walked, setting off all the movements below her belt. He passed through the room with the daybed and thought of her on the afternoon she had been cut. She had seemed less substantial then. He remembered Trout’s mischief, and his thoughts came back to the bottle.
He had never heard any woman outside of a courtroom acknowledge such an act before, and now Hanna Trout, whose life was as circumspect as anyone’s in Ether County, had said it without so much as clearing her throat.
He realized he had stopped at the daybed, and she had stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, waiting for him. “I was remembering the afternoon you lacerated your foot,” he said. She waited. “The mess on the floor … I never saw a worse cut. It’s a miracle they saved all your toes.”
It hit him then that he had no idea if they had saved her toes or not.
“There’s no feeling in the ends,” she said.
And that struck him as intimate too. He moved toward her, and she went the rest of the way into the kitchen.
She kept the jar in plain sight, on the cabinet beneath the glasses. The liquor inside was caramel-colored, and he saw a peach at the bottom. He recognized it as coming from Elbert Street’s still. Elbert was an idiot with a gift for aging liquor.
Seagraves had been told that he stored it in kegs. He used charcoal, which purified it and gave it color. The kegs were buried in a cave somewhere on his property north of Gray for close to a year, and when it was time, he poured it into fruit jars, usually over a fresh peach.
Seagraves had measured one of the jars once and found that the liquor brought Elbert close to fifty dollars a gallon. It was commonly acknowledged as the best liquor in the state, but to Seagraves’s knowledge it was sold in only one place, the Ether Hotel. You gave the boy there ten dollars and then reached into the pocket of an overcoat hung on the rack near the emergency exit and took the jar.
He could not picture Hanna Trout giving the boy ten dollars and wondered if the liquor was something her husband had left behind when he moved.
“The last time I was in this room,” he said, “it looked like somebody’d blew up the icebox.”
She unscrewed the lid of the jar, and he sat down at the table and stared at her while she fixed his drink. The tablecloth was plastic and stuck to his hands. She brought the glass to the table and set it in front of his nose. He was still staring at her, but she did not seem to notice. He saw her chest was not as heavy as Lucy’s but seemed to be attached to her at a more favorable angle.
She sat down in the chair across the table, and for just a moment he felt the brush of her leg against his, and then he was dizzy. He recovered himself and said, “Where was I?”
“You were reminiscing over the kitchen,” she said. “It looked like the icebox had blown up.”
“Before that.”
“The law. My misperception that a crime can happen without a lawyer there to verify it …”
It reminded him again of what Paris had done with the bottle.
“I’ll give you the case,” he said, and leaned heavily on the table. He noticed she did not move away, not even an inch. “What if a woman was to suggest, as you have, that her husband had in some way abused her with a bottle?”
He saw that she wouldn’t stop him.
He said, “And that is a crime in the state of Georgia—”
“Sodomy,” she said, and he felt himself humming beneath the table. The word sounded different coming from Hanna Trout in her own kitchen than it did in court. There was a sort of connection, both of them knowing what it meant.
“Sodomy,” he said. “But what if it went to a court of law—which it wouldn’t, because there were no witnesses—but what if it did, and all the details were revealed, where it occurred, what sort of bottle, everything that was said, and it became evident, in the course of this discovery, that the woman … had agreed to the act?”
She cocked her head, as if she had not understood the words.
He said, “If the woman had agreed. Or perhaps she didn’t agree, not directly, but she enjoyed it. What does that say for her complaint? The act still occurred, a crime has been committed, but now we see it different. It’s shaded by the woman’s agreement.…”
He was reckless now, he had taken it too far and delivered himself into her hands. But part of being reckless was knowing you were reckless, and he was. He re
ached across the table and laid his hand on her arm. She did not seem to notice.
“A conspiracy,” she said.
“It could be,” he said. He was suddenly aware of his breathing, the feel of air over his lips and teeth. “A thing that could happen spontaneous. Who can say then that what occurred was even a crime? Law without compassion is not law at all.”
She sat still a moment longer and then drew her arm from underneath his hand. He did not try to hold her. She said, “Do you believe I asked my husband to abuse me with a bottle, Mr. Seagraves?”
He did not answer at first. “It was only intended as a case for argument,” he said finally. “I never meant it in a personal way. It came to mind because you had just spoken of your problem.…”
He was suddenly panicked.
“Do you believe the child asked to be shot?” she said. “Or the woman? Do you believe they agreed to it?”
He pulled himself back off the table and reached for his drink. He lifted it to his mouth and smiled just before it touched his lip. The smile was wrong in some way he could not identify or correct.
“I will tell you this,” he said. “There wasn’t anybody in that house completely innocent. Not the way you think of it. It didn’t happen by itself.”
It was quiet a moment, and he sipped again at the drink. He wished she had used less tomato juice.
“Do you know my husband well, Mr. Seagraves?” she said.
“As well as I need to,” he said. Then: “As well as I care to.”
“Can you predict what he would do if he walked in now and found us here talking on him?”
Seagraves pictured Trout coming in.
“I believe he’d bust up the kitchen.”
“Would he speak?”
“You can’t tell with him. He might and he might not.”
“And when you left, what would he do then?”
Seagraves shook his head. “I never saw that side of him.”
“You would leave.…”
He did not follow her now. He thought she might be asking him to stay. He thought she might be offering him something in return.
“I couldn’t move in to watch him. I got a house of my own.”
“Then who will watch him?”
“That’s not my end of things.…”
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, and he moved to touch her arm again. He said, “Perhaps you misunderstood my meaning, Mrs. Trout.…”
She pulled her arm away, and when she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “Who will watch him?”
He took another drink, but the tomato juice was at cross purposes with the liquor now, thick and hard to swallow.
“It’s a simple question,” she said. “When you and the law have decided that the child and the woman conspired to be shot, or enjoyed it, and have set my husband free, who will keep him from conspiring with another child to shoot her?”
“If he goes free, he is free,” Seagraves said.
“And what then?”
He shook his head, wanting to leave now, wanting to get away from her misunderstandings and her warnings. “It’s not my end,” he said again.
She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. He tried to stand, but he was dizzy and felt himself begin to pitch onto the floor. She was speaking to him of the appearance of normalcy, he could not follow the words. She was warning him. He moved and fell into the sink.
SEAGRAVES WOKE UP ON the floor. There was a pillow beneath his head, a light blanket tucked under his chin that covered him to his knees. He sat up, exactly as sick as he had been in the morning. His tie had been loosened, and his belt. The room was darker than it had been, and he had the sudden feeling that people might be looking for him.
He found the edge of the sink with his hand and used that to pull himself to his feet. He stood still a moment, feeling the blood wash through his body. His foot was asleep, and there was a numbness in the left side of his buttocks. He waited, and those feelings passed.
The house was quiet.
He turned the faucet on and let cold water run over his face. He saw a box of baking soda on the counter and used that and his finger to wash his teeth. He combed his hair without a mirror and then pushed his shirt into his pants all the way around. He fastened his belt.
He walked carefully, not wanting to see Mrs. Trout again, and headed in the direction of the front door. He thought of putting off the visit with her husband until the morning, but if he did that, the expectation of it would be bothering him all night.
The sun had moved to the west side of the house, leaving the side he was on in a kind of dusk. He did not see her resting on the daybed until she spoke.
“I hope you’re not injured,” she said.
It startled him, and in the aftermath he felt his blood again, returning to places it had left. He nodded, and to calm himself, he began to speak. “It’s the hours I been putting in,” he said, “they catch up to you. It happened once before. I’d just got out of the courthouse, and the next thing I knew I was looking at the squirrels in the trees.”
“I didn’t think you’d want me to call a doctor,” she said.
“No,” he said, “no need. I must have cut out just as I was leaving.” He looked at his watch then, but in the poor light he couldn’t make out the hands.
“Have I been here long?”
“Yes.”
“It’s still Sunday, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled, and then felt the weight of her stare, and stopped.
It was quiet.
“Are you going to get him off?”
“I can’t say what will happen.” He put his hand on the doorknob, telling himself to turn it, walk through and then out the front door.…
“If you turn my husband loose, you open the door for everything that follows.”
Seagraves opened the door and paused in the threshold. “I wish you’d reconsider,” he said. “Come to the trial.”
SEAGRAVES CLOSED THE GATE outside the house and looked at his watch. It was nearly four o’clock. He began to walk south, into town. He straightened himself as he went, lining up the buttons of his shirt with his belt buckle, smoothing the wrinkles out of the sleeves of his coat.
A block from the house he turned east, in the direction of the college. It was one place in Cotton Point he was not likely to be recognized, and there were professors walking around the school who looked as wrinkled as he did now every day of their lives.
He crossed the street, stepped over a parking chain, and was on the campus. Feeling safer, he began to reconstruct his defense of Paris Trout. It was not as pure now as it had been in the morning; Hanna Trout was still with him, staring across the dark room, using his own words to warn him. It felt like a curse.
He wondered if she were part Gypsy.
He walked the length of the campus and came out behind the courthouse. The street beyond that was Browne, and then Main, where he turned left. The Ether Hotel stood in the middle of the block, a shade of green, it seemed to him, that nobody drunk or hung over or anywhere in between ought to have to confront.
He walked inside. The lobby was empty except for a clerk sitting behind the desk, playing solitaire. Seagraves noticed the coat hanging on the rack near the emergency exit, the side pocket heavy with a jar of liquor, and he thought for a moment he was going to be sick.
“Is Mr. Trout in?” he said.
The clerk looked up, saw who it was, and hurried to his feet. He turned and checked the mailbox. “Yessir,” he said, “must be, on account his key’s gone.”
“What room is that?” Seagraves said.
The boy hesitated.
“I am Mr. Trout’s attorney, and I am here on a matter of business.”
The boy said, “Mr. Trout don’t take visitors. It’s in his instructions.”
“Instructions …”
“Yessir, he wrote them down when he first moved in. Like, he takes the paper in his mailbox just so, and if it ain’t there, he won’t pick one up off the c
ounter. He’ll go to his room and call down to have somebody bring it.”
Seagraves saw the boy was as afraid of him as he was of Trout. “What room?” he said.
“Three-ten. The honeymoon suite.”
Seagraves looked up and down and could not imagine it. “Paris Trout’s got the honeymoon suite?”
“Yessir,” the boy said, and Seagraves thought he sounded sad. “He flat took it over.”
Seagraves climbed the stairs, holding on to the rail. When he got to the third floor he stopped, right on the edge again, and waited until his stomach settled.
He walked up the hallway to the end and found the door. It was dark wood, the numbers 310 nailed in gold right at eye level.
He knocked and heard the bedsprings. “Who is it?” Right on the other side of the door.
“Harry Seagraves,” he said.
The door cracked open, a few inches. He saw one of Trout’s eyes.
“We got to talk.”
Trout offered no sign that he recognized Seagraves or even heard him. He kept his eye in the crack of the door, waiting for something else.
“Are you dressed?”
Trout looked him up and down then, as if he were comparing their clothes. Then the door opened another half foot, and Seagraves saw the gun. Trout was wearing a long-sleeve white shirt, buttoned at the neck and wrists, and in the hand Seagraves could see was a heavy foreign-looking automatic.
“Who are you fixing to shoot?” Seagraves said.
Trout still didn’t answer, and the thought settled for just a moment in Seagraves’s head that this man knew where he—Seagraves—had spent the day. Trout walked away from the door, leaving it open, and came back a moment later wearing his coat. He put as much of the gun as would fit into the side pocket and came out of his room.
As he opened the door, Seagraves caught a quick, blinding reflection of the sun off the floor. “We could talk here,” Seagraves said, but Trout had already started toward the stairs.
At the front desk Seagraves stopped him. “Leave your gun with the boy,” he said.
Trout took a step back. “It’s legal. I got a right.”