Paris Trout - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  There was a story that she and Harry Seagraves were lovers, but that one died early, out of respect for his wife.

  Hanna Trout had gone to the funerals — Harry Seagraves and Carl Bonner were buried the same day — and no one had offered her an arm or a kind word. Of course, there had been no offers in that direction before, when Paris Trout was only an embarrassment.

  Before what he was and what he did had changed the place he lived.

  * * *

  HARRY SEAGRAVES WAS BURIED in the family plot in the oldest and

  shadiest part of Ether County Memorial Park. His stone read:

  HARRY SAGRAVES

  HE WAS OUR BEST AND OUR KINDEST

  Carl Bonner lay in a newer Part of the cemetery, near the street. His marker was flat on the ground and carried only his name and the dates of his birth and death. You would never guess, looking at it, that he had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of Georgia or that a generation of Cotton Point children had suffered in the comparison with his example. . You would never guess that a perception of the future died with him.

  Paris Trout and his mother were buried a day later, in separate parts of the cemetery.

  There had been no church funeral for him, and only Hanna and a few of his blood relations came to the graveside. He went into the ground in a section of the cemetery where no one visiting the graves of Harry Seagraves or Carl Bonner or his mother would accidentally stumble over his name on the way in or out. The ground there was hard, and there were spots where grass would not grow.

  The place looked poisoned.

  There were no trees, and there was no shade, although in some seasons the late-afternoon sun dropped behind the Monument to the Unknown Confederate Dead in such a way as to cast a shadow across his grave.

  * * *

  A LOCKSMITH WAS BROUGHT in from Macon at county expense. He spent two days in the hallway of the store, going from one safe to another, and was unable to open any of them. By the second afternoon his curses were audible on the street.

  At the end of the second day he told Sheriff Fixx, "Those ain't ordinary," and returned to Macon.

  Edward Fixx informed all interested parties — including agents of the Internal Revenue Service — that the safes were not ordinary and the locksmith from Macon had left. A week later two federal agents stepped off the train from Atlanta, escorting one Ralph Guthrie, of Leavenworth, Kansas.

  Mr. Guthrie was in handcuffs and was taken to the Ether Hotel and given the best room available.

  In the morning he ate steak and eggs at Richard Dickey's drugstore and then walked between the agents from the restaurant to Paris Trout's store, smiling in a boyish way at the women — it did not matter if they were young or old — and did not seem even slightly embarrassed by the circumstances or the handcuffs.

  Once inside, Ralph Guthrie looked at the safes and began to laugh.

  Edward Fixx did not appreciate a man in handcuffs laughing at his situation. "Can he do it or not?" he said.

  One of the agents considered Fixx in a Yankee sort of way and said, "Let him finish laughing, and we'll find out. It's a professional courtesy."

  When Ralph Guthrie had finished laughing, he spoke directly to the sheriff; "Edward," he said, "you got yourself a problem. These here safes are Belgian."

  The sheriff also did not appreciate being called Edward by somebody in handcuffs.

  Ralph Guthrie looked around at the walls and said, "You wonder, don't you, how safes like that end up someplace like this."

  "Can you do it?" one of the agents said.

  Ralph Guthrie shrugged. "I can get in. There ain't no safe you can't get inside, but I got to blow it."

  "Here?" Edward Fixx said. "Downtown Cotton Point?"

  The safecracker shrugged. "You can move these somewhere else, I'll be glad to wait. They might weigh a thousand pounds .... "

  Edward Fixx did not like the idea of a safecracker setting off an explosion in Cotton Point, but the federal agents assured him that Mr. Guthrie was as careful as a surgeon, and if it were not for his weakness to brag and spend money, he could never have been caught. The sheriff had one of the agents write that down and then agreed to the plan, and the safe blowing was set for Sunday afternoon. The police blocked off Main Street for two blocks on either side of the store and pushed the crowd back that gathered along the edge of Georgia Officers' Academy's campus to watch until none of them could see anything.

  Ralph Guthrie and the federal agents were in the store most of the afternoon, setting the charges. Edward Fixx sat in his cruiser on a side street a block and a half from the store. The cruiser was fresh out of the body shop — he'd smashed it one way or another four times in the last year — and had that new-car feeling again, and Edward Fixx wasn't about to expose it to a brick shower because some Leavenworth safecracker used too much nitroglycerin.

  A few minutes after six o'clock Ralph Guthrie and the federal agents walked out of the front of the store, in no hurry at all, crossed the empty street, and sat down on the curb. A minute or two later there was a muffled explosion, followed by a cloud of smoke that rose from behind the store.

  The explosion shook the ground but did not as much as crack the front windows of the store. The men waited a few minutes more and walked back inside. Edward Fixx drove his cruiser to the corner and got out, leaving the door open. He did not like a professional safecracker inside with no one local to watch him. He found them in the back, coughing in the dust and smoke. The five safes sat exactly where they had been, but the doors were ajar, a few inches each.

  "Sheriff Fixx," one of the agents said, "if you would get a pencil and paper, we can itemize the contents as we take them out."

  It took them half an hour, but Edward Fixx stopped writing a long time before that. There were more than ninety bottles, each one filled approximately a third of the way to the top with urine. Each bottle was labeled, date and time. "Urine passed from the body of Paris Trout, eleven o'clock A.M., this eleventh day of March 1954. To be used in the event of my death for evidence I have been poisoned."

  Edward Fixx was not about to write them down one at a time.

  There was also a sealed white envelope which held several hundred pieces of clipped fingernails and another envelope — this one light brown and containing a single sheet of paper full of columns of numbers that seemed to be a code or a map.

  After several months in the hands of U.S. Army decoding experts, however, the numbers were discovered to be the combinations to the five safes themselves.

  * * *

  THAT WAS AS CLOSE as anyone came to Paris Trout's money, it was as much of an explanation as he ever gave.

  Hanna Trout sold the house and moved to Savannah, where she taught school as long as she lived. Sometimes, looking out over the playground from her office window, a child would catch her eye, someone awkward and dark with legs as thin as bones, and she would think of Rosie Sayers.

  The child was never in her dreams, though. She had no claim on Hanna Trout.

  In her dreams everything was dark. She could never see the walls or the floor or her own hands. She would stumble, catching herself a moment before she fell, and then stumble again. Always moving toward a voice that called for help.

  The tripping frightened her — she remembered there was glass on the floor — but in the dark, at the bottom of things, she always kept on. In her dreams she knew the voice.

  And when she woke from that other place, grabbing at the roll of the mattress for some purchase to break her fall, she would hold herself still for as long as the dream was fresh, trying to hear the voice again, but the fear would pass before she could bring it back.

  And then it was gone.

  And she would lie in the dark until morning sometimes, wondering which one of them it was.

  August 16, 1987

  Sacramento, California

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