Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

Braver blinked at the lawyer. “To what specific purpose?” he said.

  “I represent an interested party,” he said.

  “What party would that be?”

  “Paris Trout,” he said.

  Dr. Braver scratched the side of his ear and then studied the end of his finger. “Prognosis,” he said.

  Seagraves nodded.

  “Tell you what,” Dr. Braver said, “I’ll leave you make your own.” He walked back out of the office and then up two flights of stairs. He seemed in more of a hurry now, and Seagraves’s feet began to hurt, keeping up.

  At the top of the second flight of stairs the doctor opened the door, and Seagraves walked through it, pleased to hear the doctor breathing hard, and found himself at the end of a long, narrow hall. The hall was dark, lit only by the sunlight from the rooms. All the way down, the doorways seemed to glow.

  Dr. Braver walked ahead again, first to the nurse’s station, where a woman as white-haired and serious as the doctor himself was sitting, reading the Saturday Evening Post. There was a painting of a doctor’s office on the cover, a red-headed boy with freckles in a sling. It reminded Seagraves of Carl Bonner. He thought it must be a sign, to think of the boy twice in the same day.

  The woman looked up from the magazine, saw it was Braver, and straightened herself to look alert. “You’re early for your rounds, Doctor?” she said.

  Braver nodded at Seagraves. “This is the famous attorney Harry Seagraves,” he said. “He wants to look in on Miss Rosie Sayers on a legal matter.”

  If the woman knew the name Harry Seagraves, she did not show it. “Well,” she said, without ever looking at Seagraves, “she’s right where you left her.”

  Braver walked past the nurse and almost to the end of the hall. He went slower now, as if the reason to hurry were gone. The last door on the left was closed to the hall, and that was the one. Seagraves could read the number, 313. Braver turned the handle and stepped aside.

  There were eight beds in the room, all but one occupied. An orderly sat at the far end, his chair against the window, his feet resting on one of the beds. His chin was tucked into his shoulder, and his arms were laid across his stomach.

  “That there is Miss Sayers,” the doctor said. His voice seemed too loud for the room, and at the sound of it the orderly stirred and then scrambled.

  Seagraves looked in the direction Braver had indicated and saw the girl. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth protruded and lay across her bottom lip. The pillow rose up around her face and softened it, she looked like some dark-centered flower.

  Somebody in another bed coughed and then moaned. The orderly was on his feet now, smoothing his hair. Braver paid him no attention. He walked to the girl’s bed and looked at the chart hung at the foot. Seagraves stayed where he was.

  “You want to see the girl, Mr. Seagraves, here she is.”

  Seagraves walked as quietly as he could across the floor. He kept his eyes in front of him, not wanting to look into any of the beds he didn’t have to. Seagraves had an aversion to illness. Braver handed him the girl’s chart and moved closer. He held her eyelids open, each side, he checked the needle going into her arm. He seemed rough with the girl, but it was less in the way he touched her than the way he let go.

  “That line acrost the top of the chart is the times,” Braver said, laying his fingers along the girl’s neck for a pulse. “All the patients in this room are in jeopardy. We keep an orderly in here day and night, and he carefully checks each patient’s life signs on the hour, and that way we know when they have passed on.”

  He looked at the orderly over the word “carefully.”

  Then he let go of the orderly, in a way that was related to the way he let go of the girl, and returned to Seagraves. “You can see from the blood pressure notations on Miss Sayers’s chart that at seven o’clock this morning she was nearly expired.” Seagraves looked at the chart but could not read it. “By eight,” Braver said, “she rallied back, and by nine she regained consciousness and complained of pain.”

  The doctor pulled the sheet back and Seagraves realized the girl was naked. It took a moment because of the bandages. They had wrapped her arms and covered her whole stomach, from the little tuft of pubic hair to her chest.

  It was the undamaged parts that touched Seagraves, though. Her shoulders and legs were no bigger than the bones underneath them. He could have wrapped his hand all the way around her neck.

  The doctor looked at the orderly and said, “Scissors.”

  The orderly produced a pair of scissors. They had long handles and took a small bite. Braver accepted them and began to cut the wrapping off the girl’s stomach, starting at the bottom and working up. The orderly stood by, waiting to be of use.

  Braver finished the cut and opened the dressing. The hole was almost perfect, crusted around the edge, smaller than Seagraves had imagined. “This right here is the approximate angle of penetration,” Braver said. He moved farther up the bed and pointed slightly down. “It perforated her stomach and liver and ended up in her right buttocks.”

  Braver removed his finger and stepped away. “You want a closer look, Mr. Seagraves?” he said.

  “The bullet’s still in her?” he said.

  “One of them is,” he said. “The others passed through her appendages. Her arm’s broke in two places. Come get a good look if you want, it ain’t catching.”

  Seagraves said, “I never asked to see this.”

  Braver took off his glasses again and cleaned them against the corner of his coat. He put them back on and then pulled the sheet back over the girl. It fell half across her still, narrow face, covering half her mouth, part of her cheek. It fell like the first shovel of dirt. Seagraves felt a panic loose somewhere inside himself.

  “All I asked for was a prognosis, Dr. Braver,” he said, and the sound of his own voice quieted the feeling.

  Braver looked at the orderly, who still hadn’t washed himself of sleep. “The orderly here excepted, Mr. Seagraves, I believe that you will find an agreement among the medical community that Miss Rosie Sayers is dead.” He picked up an edge of the sheet and dropped it over the rest of her face, covering everything but the fuzz on top of her head.

  Someone moaned, someone coughed. Braver was fastened on the orderly again, the orderly was looking at his watch. “It must of only happened,” the orderly said.

  Braver held him a minute longer and then said, “Have it cleaned up,” and walked out the door.

  Seagraves followed him, making no effort to keep up, picturing the small, perfect hole in the girl’s stomach. He felt the gun then, a secret in his pocket. And the secret settled on him with a weight, distinct from the gun.

  SEAGRAVES LEFT THE CLINIC without speaking another word to Dr. Braver. He crossed the street to the campus of the officers’ academy, stepped into a cluster of trees, and got sick.

  He collected himself there and then returned to his office. He borrowed a car from Dick Spudd and drove out to Indian Heights. He did not tell Spudd, the junior partner in the firm, where he was going. The car was a new Cadillac, and he was fussy where it went.

  Seagraves found the house almost without trying. He stopped the car when he saw it at the end of the road. There were youngsters in the yard, a man sitting on a chair in the porch. The house had two front doors, both of them were open. A pair of chickens picked their way through a ditch, eating gravel, and there were car tracks in the clay alongside the house.

  The man on the porch was watching him. Seagraves found himself out of the car, walking toward him. He stopped at the foot of the porch and looked up. The sun was behind the roof of the house, and Seagraves had to squint to see him. “Mr. Boxer?”

  The man shook his head. “No sir.”

  “Are you Thomas Boxer?”

  “No sir. You must of have the wrong house.”

  Seagraves looked up and down the street. “Is this where Mary McNutt lives?”

  “No sir, I tol’ you this ain’t the right ho
use for you.”

  Seagraves held out his hands. “I don’t mean nobody harm,” he said.

  “What that in your pocket?” the man said.

  Seagraves felt the weight there and shook his head. “I’m an attorney of the law,” he said. “I don’t shoot nobody.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He took the first step to the porch, the man sat up. “I wonder if I might look inside,” he said.

  “Fo’ how long?”

  “Only a minute,” Seagraves said. “I just want to see where it happened.”

  The man nodded at the entrance on the right. “In there is where it happened,” he said.

  “May I go in?”

  “He’p yourself,” the man said. “People been through it already, I don’t see how it make no difference one more.”

  Seagraves stepped onto the porch and then, nodding at the man, into the house. It was cooler inside than out, the smell of gunpowder was still in the room.

  He went through quickly. There were stuffed chairs in the first room, and a cot. Beds in the second and third, and a kitchen at the back of the house. A wood stove, a table, an old trunk sitting in the corner.

  In the kitchen he stopped, knowing this was the place. It was the smallest room of the house, and the ceiling back here slanted down for reasons he could not discern. He imagined Trout, stooping to fit himself into this place where he did not belong.

  The pots and pans were hung from nails over the stove, a line of canning jars sat empty against the far wall. The door from the kitchen outside hung half off its hinges.

  Paris Trout had come into this room, where there wasn’t anything, and taken a child’s life.

  Seagraves had accustomed himself to the gunpowder now and could not smell it, but there was something in its place, bitter and metallic. More of a taste than an odor.

  He turned back toward the front of the house, meaning to leave the way he had come, but the taste got stronger, and he could hear the words the man on the porch said when he came in: “This ain’t the right house for you.”

  Seagraves looked back through the rooms, and the taste filled his mouth. He saw that something had been stirred as he came through and was waiting for him now to come back.

  He pushed open the back door and stepped outside. He was dizzy in the sudden light and steadied himself against the side of the house. He closed his eyes, feeling the shaking in his hands and legs. He remembered he had been sick earlier, he thought he needed something to eat.

  When he looked again, there was a child not five yards away, barefoot in a dirty pink dress, sucking her thumb. It seemed to Seagraves he had seen the girl before. He smiled but the taste was still in his mouth, and then he was sick again, without warning, without anything in his stomach to come up. His eyes watered, and he bent in half.

  And beyond the noises coming out of his body, he heard the child screaming as she ran. She was screaming that the devil was back.

  He straightened himself and walked back to the Cadillac. The man on the porch sat in his chair, watching him, and people on other porches watched him too. The only sound was the child—the same child—standing in the road now, screaming it over and over, the devil was back. No one moved to hush her.

  Seagraves opened the car door and sat heavily behind the steering wheel. The taste was still in his mouth. He fit the key into the starter, and then the passenger door opened—he never saw even a shadow of movement—and then a freshly decapitated chicken was spraying blood and feathers all over the front seat, pounding the air and the seat with its wings, propelled a different direction each time its feet found a hold.

  Seagraves covered his face with one arm and found the door handle with the other. He spilled out of the car backwards and fell into the road. He got to his feet, opening the car door wider, and waited for the chicken to spill out too. But the chicken had lost its range now and lay on the floor between the brake and the clutch, its movements reduced to spasms.

  Seagraves waited, keeping his eyes inside the car but feeling the dark faces on the porches and in the windows. The chicken stopped moving. The windows and seats were sprayed with its blood, and tiny spotted feathers hung everywhere. There were larger feathers too, one of them floated in a puddle near the chicken.

  He waited, and then he reached in for the bird, and as he touched it, it jumped, as if it had been hit by a current of electricity, and Seagraves jumped too, and yelled. And then, ashamed of himself, he took the chicken by the feet and dropped it in the road.

  The chicken had turned the rearview mirror almost straight down, and as Seagraves adjusted it, driving slowly up the road and beginning to talk out loud to settle himself, he saw one of them walk into the road and retrieve it.

  Dinner.

  SEAGRAVES DROVE THE CADILLAC to Bud Ramsey’s Sinclair filling station on Samuel Street and left it to be cleaned. He walked from there to his home and found Lucy sitting in curlers and lipstick in the kitchen while the maid vacuumed the living room.

  She made a face when she saw him and closed the top of her robe. She said, “What on earth?”

  He sat down heavily across the table. “Would you get me a Coke-Cola?” he said.

  She reached across and picked a feather off his lapel and looked at it carefully. “Your suit’s spotted,” she said.

  “Would you get me a Coke-Cola?” he said again.

  She got him the Coke. It was a six-ounce bottle, and he took all of it at once, drinking as fast as the suction of the thing would allow, and then set the empty bottle on the table. Lucy picked it up and put it in a wooden case she kept just inside the basement steps.

  “Let me take those clothes,” she said. “I’ll get them to the cleaner’s.”

  Seagraves stood up and allowed himself to be helped out of his coat and then his shirt and pants. He stood in the kitchen in long socks and his underwear, and she held his clothes in her fingers and studied the spots in the material. “Are you bleeding?” she said.

  “No,” he said, “it’s not human.”

  The pants hung suddenly by less fingers. “I don’t think the cleaner’s can get this out,” she said.

  He walked upstairs, she came up behind him. He washed his face in the bathroom sink and then drew a bath. She stood at the bathroom door. He would have told her what had happened—he wanted to tell what had happened—but it wasn’t like a story, with a natural order and reason to the events. Lucy needed things lined up in front of her before she could see them.

  She took the curlers out of her hair, and it gave her a softer appearance. She picked up a brush and began to stroke her hair.

  He took a breath, there was a pain deep in his throat from the vomiting. “Did you say something, Harry?” she said.

  He did not answer. The bathroom felt distinctly empty. She stood on her toes in front of him, putting her face close to his, and kissed the air near his cheek. “Momma kiss,” she said.

  “I saw the girl Paris Trout shot,” he said.

  She pulled away from him, wide-eyed, as he knew she would be. She always went wide-eyed at news. “What did she say?”

  He stepped out of his shorts, then his T-shirt. He climbed into the tub and turned the water off with his toes. She stood in the doorway, looking down. “Was it an affair of the heart?” she said.

  Seagraves eased himself in until the water covered his shoulders. “No,” he said, “it was business.”

  “He did business with a colored girl?”

  “That would seem to be a problem,” he said. He saw that his wife was disappointed that it was not an affair of the heart.

  She said, “I could understand if it was love … I mean, you’ve seen his wife. She would not appear to have … affectionate inclinations.…”

  “You can’t tell without being in the bed,” he said. “It might be the opposite, that it’s Paris who isn’t interested.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s old, but he looks vital.”

  Lucy only speculated on
the “affectionate inclinations” of women who were attractive in a different way than she was herself. Mostly the ones who wore less makeup. Neither of them ever mentioned her own inclinations, which were scarce. She sat down on the edge of the tub, and he pictured Hanna Trout climbing the stairs, Nurse Thompson with her wet hair lying against his shoulder, the girls he’d seen at the college on the way to work.

  But the other face came with them, with the sheet dropped half across its mouth, calm and persistent. He would look away when he saw it, but in a moment he would see it again. It was there like his own reflection, glimpsed in unexpected moments.

  He sat up in the tub, trying to clear himself of her. “What is it?” she said.

  He picked up the soap and washed his arms and his chest. “I don’t know myself,” he said. “I got to sit down with Ward Townes and Trout this afternoon, and I expect it will sort out.”

  “I wish you would tell me what in hell is up,” she said.

  She didn’t swear much, and even “hell” came out of her awkward. He smiled at that and stood up. His skin had turned pink in the water. It had been sensitive like that as long as he could remember.

  She said, “At least tell me what’s on your clothes. That’s the suit I bought for you in Macon, and if they don’t know what the stains are at the cleaner’s, I might have to throw it away.”

  Harry Seagraves looked down at himself and said, “Don’t do that. If I got to argue the law without clothes, I’m finished. I was still getting boners going to the blackboard in law school. It’s the fear that brings it on.”

  That thought hit her as funny, and he saw her smile. It was against her will, and when it passed she would be angry. He reached for a towel and fastened it around his waist, and she covered her mouth and began to laugh. It came out in little bubbles, like water starting to boil.

  “I can’t get that picture out of my head,” she said finally. “What if everybody came to court naked? Can you imagine, ‘All rise for the judge’ and in walks Bear Lewis?”

  Bear Lewis was the previous district judge, and he was a midget. He’d turned political after he’d taken the job—some could handle it and some couldn’t—and Seagraves had brought in three thousand voters from Homewood and defeated him in the last election, replacing him with John Taylor.