Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  He was glaring at her again, the paper cup he had been holding was crushed in his fist. Leslie Bonner was meeting his look now, she had asked him for as much as she was going to.

  “Pull off the blanket,” she said.

  It stopped him. “Pull it off,” she said. He took a step back, looking uncertain. “Pull off the goddamn blanket, Carl, and see if his peter’s out of his pants.”

  Carl Bonner covered his eyes and sat heavily on the arm rest across the aisle. The squashed cup dropped from his hand. Harry Seagraves, who was about ten seconds behind the conversation, was suddenly sorry for the boy, before he’d even gotten mad.

  He stood up, the blanket dropping on the floor at his feet, and put his hand behind Carl Bonner’s neck. “When I was young,” he said, “I once accused Lucy of sleeping with my own brother.” It wasn’t true—he’d thought it, but he’d never said it out loud—but it was true enough for now. He stepped closer, so only Bonner could hear. “Said it out loud at a family picnic. The plain fact is, son, pussy makes you stupid.…” He considered that a moment and said, “That or picnics.”

  Carl Bonner sat still, the understanding of what he had done washing over him in slow, regular waves.

  Seagraves patted the back of his neck, his hand coming away wet with Bonner’s perspiration. Leslie Bonner was right where she had been before, holding the drink he’d given her. “I’ll be back directly to freshen that for you,” he said. “I’ll come back, and we’ll all have a toast.”

  THE PUBLIC STOCKS WENT up Monday morning, on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. A long table was carried out of the prosecutor’s office and set to one side, along with the chair that had been used by former Superior Court Judge Bear Lewis, the midget. Even out here on the sidewalk, the occupant of the chair would sit higher than those he judged.

  The Keepers of the Bush oversaw this construction and the theft of the chair. Harry Seagraves, Ward Townes, and Carl Bonner. They gave instructions to the carpenter, an elderly man named Lloyd Rose, as if they had been supervising the building of stocks all their lives. At one point Seagraves took the coping saw out of the carpenter’s hand to show him how to cut lumber and broke the blade.

  Seagraves, who had not slept or stopped drinking for more than two hours since Saturday morning, gave Mr. Rose a ten-dollar bill and warned him not to be caught without whiskers, or he would lose the money back to the court.

  “I been wearing whiskers in this town forty years,” the old man said.

  Ward Townes sat on the courthouse steps while this was going on, smiling into the morning sun.

  Carl Bonner made himself busy. He helped carry the table out of the prosecutor’s office, he tested the carpenter’s work, checking that the stocks lay flat against each other where they met. He told Mr. Rose the boards needed to be sanded.

  Mr. Rose gave him a look when he said that.

  For the most part, however, Bonner kept silent. And he stayed away from Seagraves and Townes. Townes judged him to be hung over. There were some, he thought, like Harry Seagraves, who could drink all night and hide it, and there were some who couldn’t.

  Except for the sanding, the stocks were finished by eleven o’clock. Ward Townes went into the courthouse to the Coke machine. It took a dime, and the lever was ice-cold. He bought four Cokes and then walked outside and passed them around to Seagraves and Bonner and the carpenter. Carl Bonner tried to repay him the ten cents.

  Harry Seagraves sat down on the prosecutor’s table and wiped at his forehead with a hankie. He looked at the Coke—there were little crystals of ice in the neck—and then drank it all in four noisy swallows, never taking his mouth off the bottle.

  “You’d think he’d done the work,” Ward Townes said to Bonner. Bonner looked off and did not reply.

  Seagraves set the bottle on the table and hiccuped. He put his hand against his chest and waited, and a moment later he hiccuped again.

  “Hold your breath,” the carpenter said.

  Seagraves held his breath. Ward Townes looked around at the courtyard. “You ever notice how peaceful this town seems,” he said to Carl Bonner, “when Harry there is holding his breath?”

  Bonner smiled in a sickly way, and the prosecutor wondered if he’d had words with Seagraves, perhaps last night at the Moose.

  In fact, Bonner had been at home, having words with his wife.

  Seagraves’s breath came out in a rush, and he sat still a moment, waiting.

  “See there? I told you,” the carpenter said.

  Seagraves hiccuped.

  The carpenter looked into the trees. “Didn’t hold it long enough,” he said.

  Seagraves took a deep breath and blew this one out. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “we got us an inquisition, let’s decide on some rules.”

  “Rules?” Ward Townes said.

  “You got to have penalties,” the carpenter explained. “If a man breaks the rules, he’s got to pay the price.”

  “What price?” Townes said.

  “Half-dollar,” the carpenter said.

  “That’s all right with me,” Townes said, “except we already spent the morning building a public stocks. We ought to use it.”

  Harry Seagraves said, “Are we gone throw somebody into the stocks because they don’t have a half-dollar on them?”

  “We could if we don’t like them,” Townes said.

  Seagraves thought it over. “That’s fair,” he said. “Half a dollar for a clean-shaven face, or an hour in the stocks if we don’t like you.”

  “Good,” Townes said, and looked at Bonner.

  Carl Bonner shrugged. “Son,” Seagraves said, talking to him directly for the first time that morning, “you going to sit in judgment on this court, you’ve got to be assertive. Think of Judge Taylor on his bench, the most ignorant man in the State of Georgia, handing down decisions like it was direct from the mouth of God. He isn’t afraid to make an ass of hisself, and when he does it, it’s written down in public records.”

  Ward Townes saw that Seagraves was talking to the young attorney in a private way and stood to excuse himself. He said he had work to finish back at his office.

  “Whoa, there, Mr. Prosecutor,” Seagraves said. Townes stopped. “We got to decide on a schedule. We can’t be bringing these miscreants by at all hours of the day and night. We need a regular time, every day, so the public can witness for itself the fair administration of justice.”

  “Five o’clock?” the carpenter said.

  “Mr. Rose,” Seagraves said to the carpenter, “you may well possess the finest legal mind in the State of Georgia.”

  A few minutes later Seagraves and Carl Bonner were alone. Seagraves was sitting on the courthouse steps, eyes closed, his head resting against one of the white pillars that rose half the height of the building. He was holding his third Coca-Cola of the morning between his legs.

  Carl Bonner was standing on the other side of the steps. He almost spoke once, and stopped. The words caught, and there was no place for them to go. “Thank you,” he said finally, “for not pressing your advantage on me.”

  Harry Seagraves opened his eyes.

  “On the train,” Bonner said. “I had no call.…”

  Seagraves took a drink from the bottle, then held it up in front of himself to judge how much was gone. He pointed at the spot behind Bonner where the men had left their coats. “If you would,” he said, and hiccuped.

  Carl Bonner handed him the coat, which felt weighted. Harry Seagraves found his flask in an inside pocket, removed the lid, and brought the Coke bottle back up to full. Then he covered the top with his thumb and turned the bottle upside down. “You and me don’t have any apologizing to do to each other,” he said.

  When the drink was mixed, he returned the flask to his coat pocket and offered the bottle to Carl Bonner. Bonner declined. “That’s what got me in trouble Saturday,” he said.

  Seagraves tasted the mixture, coughed, and tears came to his eyes. “Then you ought take a
bottle of Coke-Cola here every morning,” he said, meaning the kind he was holding, “and drink it to remind yourself what a good life you have, that what happened Saturday is your idea of trouble.”

  “I accused innocent people,” he said.

  “I can’t speak for your missus,” Seagraves said, “but I’ve put some distance between myself and innocent.”

  He tried the mixture again, but it tasted as bad as it had before. Carl Bonner began to say something else, but Seagraves stopped him. “You want to know the truth,” he said, pointing at the bottle, “it wasn’t this got you into anything on the train. It was impatience. If everybody in Georgia learned tomorrow to keep their mouth shut when they think they got something that can’t wait, there wouldn’t be work but for maybe eleven lawyers in the state.”

  THE SCHEDULE WAS POSTED on the pillars outside the courthouse and in the windows of most of the businesses in town. The Keepers of the Bush held court every evening from five to seven. The stocks were moved under a tree so that prisoners would not have to serve their sentences in the sun.

  The three judges—Seagraves, Townes, and Carl Bonner—sat two at a time behind the long table outside the courthouse, one of them in Judge Bear Lewis’s special chair and the other in a smaller chair to the side. The judge who was not sitting in Bear Lewis’s special chair acted as a bailiff.

  Two youngsters from the high school dressed in police uniforms from the 1890s stood by to operate the stocks.

  The defendants, for the most part, were ticketed by police during the day and ordered to appear that afternoon. One of the first was former Judge Bear Lewis himself, who was practicing law now in a fleabag office in Bloodtown. Harry Seagraves was sitting in Lewis’s old chair, Ward Townes was acting bailiff. Bear Lewis had shaved himself that morning and tried to pass off his sideburns as whiskers.

  “Your Honors,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from deeper pipes than he could have had, “as I read the town ordinance, I see no specific reference to how much facial hair a citizen is required to wear, only that he must not shave clean. I would put it to the court that my sideburns constitute facial hair and ask for a directed verdict.”

  Several hundred people had collected on the courthouse lawn that evening for the first session of court, mostly to watch Harry Seagraves.

  Seagraves looked down at Bear Lewis and cleared his throat. The courthouse lawn went quiet. “Do I understand you to say that you have found a loophole in the city ordinance?”

  “I believe I have,” the former judge said.

  “Do I understand you to say that the author of this ordinance is incompetent?”

  Bear Lewis scratched his oversize head. “That would depend,” he said, “on who the author of the ordinance is.”

  Harry Seagraves conferred with Ward Townes while the crowd laughed. There was some hooting and calls of “Sic ’em, Bear.”

  Bear Lewis had been a popular judge, and there was always talk of putting him back on the ballot for the next election. It had been his habit to begin court in the morning with the following words: “All you niggers with lawyers on that side of the room, and all you niggers without lawyers on t’other.”

  Judge Taylor, on the other hand, had presided at the trial of Paris Trout.

  “Mr. Lewis,” Seagraves said when he had finished talking with Ward Townes, “it is the opinion of this court that your claim is without merit. However, noting your respectful regard for the authors of this ordinance, it has been decided not to remit you to custody, but to fine you the prescribed fifty cents.”

  The truth was, Seagraves could not stand to see a midget in the stocks.

  Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, the fifth day of the official week of the sesquicentennial, Paris Trout stepped out the door of the Ether Hotel and was arrested on the spot by a twenty-two-year-old police officer named Bo Andrews.

  “Sir,” the officer said, “you are under arrest.”

  Trout noticed the man had not shaved. It seemed to be the fashion. The policeman touched Trout’s arm, not in an unfriendly way. Trout pulled away. He had been convicted Friday of attempting to bribe a federal officer and was scheduled for sentencing the following month.

  “Get the hell away from me,” he said. “It ain’t my time yet.”

  The young policeman reached for Trout’s arm again. “Yessir, it is,” he said. The policeman did not know who Paris Trout was, but he hoped the old man would try to escape. In four years on the Cotton Point Police Department Bo Andrews had been outrun only once, by a colored man who had jumped out a window of a house in the Bottoms and hidden someplace up the hill in Sleepy Heights.

  He tugged, and Trout tugged back. “I’ve got cuffs if I’ve got to use them,” the policeman said. The old man was stronger than he looked.

  Trout suddenly stopped his struggling and looked up and down the street. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, he was on his way to the rest home to see his mother. There was a nine-millimeter automatic in his coat pocket. The police officer moved slightly behind him and took out his ticket book.

  “I’ll need your name, sir,” he said.

  Trout did not answer.

  “Sir?”

  Trout reached into his pocket, felt the comfortable, cool weight of the handle. It occurred to him that he should write a note of explanation soon. He was not sure what the note ought to say or whom it was for.

  “If you won’t give your name,” the policeman said, “I’ll have to take you down myself.”

  And Trout, still thinking of the note, began to walk with him. When they had gone a block, the policeman began to talk. “You know, I thought you might run on me back there,” he said. “In a way, I wisht you had. Would of made the papers, I bet.”

  Trout stopped, and the policeman stopped with him. “You want to make the papers, is that it?”

  Bo Andrews blushed. “Not for me,” he said. “Just something for my parents, you know, to see their sonny boy in print.” They crossed a street and headed toward the courthouse. “I don’t want the glory,” he said. “It’s like a souvenir of the celebration.…”

  Trout did not know what celebration the policeman meant.

  THE PRESIDING JUDGE OF the court Wednesday night was Carl Bonner. Harry Seagraves sat at his side, acting as bailiff. As Carl Bonner was not as humorous as the older attorney in his questioning of the accused, Seagraves interjected remarks when he saw an appropriate opening. It was almost six o’clock, and the court was hearing its last case.

  It was Seagraves who saw Paris Trout first. The policeman—he didn’t look old enough to be out of high school—was walking a step behind him, proud as a colored boy in new tennis shoes.

  Trout himself was wearing a passive expression that was familiar to Seagraves from the days they had spent together in trial.

  Seagraves saw Trout had shaved himself pink-cheeked, he saw the weight in his coat pocket.

  The policeman had ears that stuck straight out under his hat. He stopped Trout at the edge of the circle of spectators and waited while Carl Bonner weighed the case against a science teacher at the officers’ academy. The science teacher pleaded a skin condition, which Carl Bonner disregarded for a lack of expert medical testimony.

  The spectators were laughing at the exchange between the science teacher and the court, and Seagraves was hoping Carl Bonner would let him off. Fifty cents might mean something to a teacher. Seagraves couldn’t say that, though, without embarrassing the man worse than he already was.

  “Fifty cents,” Bonner said, and pounded the table with the claw hammer they were using for a gavel. Then he sat up higher in Judge Lewis’s old chair and looked over the spectators. “Is that all?” he said.

  “One more, Your Honor.…” It was the young policeman. He stepped in front of Trout and bowed.

  “Well, bring him on,” Carl Bonner said.

  There was some hooting and whistles when the crowd saw who the officer had brought in, but more of the spectators went quiet. The antiq
ue policemen—seniors from the high school—led him the rest of the way. Carl Bonner looked down at Paris Trout and smiled. “What have we here?” he said.

  “An unidentified suspect,” the policeman said. “Arrested on North Main Street, cheeks as smooth as a baby’s behind. Suspect has refused to provide identification or proof of residency.”

  Carl Bonner was still smiling. “The court is able to identify this suspect,” he said.

  Harry Seagraves saw Bonner’s intention. He stood halfway up and whispered in his ear, “Don’t fool with this.”

  Bonner bent to listen, and then he straightened back up. “Paris Trout,” he said, “you have been charged by this court of violating city ordinance 404A in that you have appeared in public shaved during the week constituting the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of this city. How do you plead?”

  Trout stood beneath Bonner, with no intention of answering.

  “Mr. Trout?”

  Seagraves got up again and cupped his hand in front of Carl Bonner’s ear. “Let him the hell go,” he said. “I’m not clowning with you, let him out.” As he dropped back into his chair, Trout followed his movement. That familiar flat, murderous look on his face.

  Carl Bonner seemed to be thinking something over. Then he cleared his throat and spoke. “Mr. Trout,” he said, “seeing how it is a well-established fact in the city of Cotton Point that you still possess the first nickel you made, this court has little hope of recovering any fine it might impose. Mr. Trout?”

  Trout was still staring at Seagraves. He turned his head now and fastened his look on Bonner.

  Bonner returned the look, calm-faced. “It is the decision of this court that you be remanded to the stocks for a period of time not to exceed one hour and that your sentence begin immediately.”

  There was more whistling, but it was all from the youngsters. The old-timers, the courthouse secretaries, the businessmen celebrating on the way home—they all had gone quiet. Some of them began to walk away even before the antique policemen led Trout to the stocks.