by Pete Dexter
∗
THERE WAS A SERVICE for the child on Tuesday. She called the coroner, a man named Cliff Collins, and caught him drinking. He gave her the time and place.
The following morning he called back, sober, and said, “Miz Trout, I can’t have it coming back that this office was the one gave you information.”
She dressed in a dark suit and walked south and east, through the college campus and into Bloodtown. The service was held in a small white chapel across the street from Horn Cemetery.
She took a seat in back—there were only four rows—sweating from the walk over, and listened to a Baptist preacher say a few words over the open coffin. There were six other people in the room, two young black men, an older black man, two children—two little girls.
The smallest child sucked her thumb, staring at Hanna over her small, wet fist all through the service. The preacher read from the Bible and then put his hand inside the box to touch Rosie Sayers. “Come down with me now,” he said. “Come down and join hands with me and say good-bye to this child.”
Then he leaned into the coffin and kissed her lips.
Hanna Trout stood up with the others and walked to the front of the chapel. She carried her purse under her arm. The preacher took one of her hands, the older man took the other. Her purse fell to the floor. The littlest child swayed between the two younger men, her eyes fastened on Hanna’s white skin.
Hanna watched the child and then looked into the casket. There was another child inside, the one she had taken to Cornell Clinic for rabies treatment. They had laid her head on a pink satin pillow.
The preacher closed his eyes and spoke. “Jesus, thank you for sending us this little girl,” he said. “We return her to You now for safekeeping and pray for You to forgive us that we didn’t take better care of her here.”
They all said “A-men,” even the children.
The preacher closed the lid to the coffin, and he and the three men carried it across the street to a mound of freshly dug dirt. They set the box down, took off their coats, and then lowered it into the ground.
∗
AN HOUR LATER HANNA walked in the door of her house and found her husband sitting in the front room with his attorney. The attorney stood up to greet her. “Mrs. Trout,” he said.
“Mr. Seagraves.”
Her husband had not shaved that morning and was wearing the same pants and shirt he had worn the day before. She knew he had slept—even with her door locked shut, she had heard his snoring from down the hall—but he looked as tired as she had ever seen him.
The attorney stepped closer and offered his hand. She took it for only a moment and then let go. His eyes hung on to her a long time. “I hope I am not an inconvenience on you,” he said.
“Convenience is no longer among my considerations,” she said.
He looked at her as if her husband were not in the room at all. “You are a forthcoming woman, Mrs. Trout,” he said.
Her husband moved then, shifted himself on the davenport to look out the window. The movement caught her eyes, and when she returned her attention to the attorney, he was leaning closer, as if to take her into his confidence.
“The problem here, as I was telling your husband, is partly psychological,” he said.
She stared at him, not understanding what he meant, not caring to have it explained.
“In that vein,” he went on, “there are two considerations. One is the age of the deceased. She was fourteen, which as you may know is legal age of consent, and it could be argued that makes her an adult.”
“Consent to what?”
He did not answer the question. “The other consideration,” he said, “is the fact that your husband is perceived as a rich and powerful man, and in some ways that could be used against him now, the circumstances making the girl look more defenseless by comparison.”
“Mr. Seagraves,” she said, “I have just come from the child’s funeral, and I have no interest in the legal problems her death has presented you or my husband, nor in the way you overcome them.”
Seagraves turned to Trout, who was still staring out the window. “A service?” he said.
She looked at the davenport too. She thought of what he had done to her with the bottle, wondering how long it had been there, waiting in his mind, before the act.
“You went to the service?” the attorney said. She was pleased to note the cordiality had gone out of his voice.
She did not answer.
“Mrs. Trout,” Seagraves said, “I know that you wouldn’t intentionally hurt your husband’s case—”
“I have no interest, Mr. Seagraves,” she said. “No interest in this subject at all.”
He put his fingertips against his temples, as if she had built him a headache. “I don’t mean to exhaust your patience,” he said a moment later. “I appreciate your abhorrence at what has happened. But please understand that whatever you do now reflects on your husband.”
“Mr. Seagraves,” she said, looking at Paris, “you cannot begin to appreciate my abhorrence.”
And she turned away from them, pleased with the way that had sounded, and walked up the stairs and locked herself in her bedroom. She undressed, drew a bath, and sat in the tub a long time. They were downstairs another hour. She heard the drone of voices, and then, as she became accustomed to the quiet, she began to make out the words.
Much of it concerned the physical location of her husband and Buster Devonne during the firing of the shots. The attorney wanted to know their exact stations, her husband did not seem to know. She heard him say, “It was smoked all through that house.…” again and again.
Her husband was not a good liar, and the words came out sounding unnatural and practiced. She touched the lips of her vulva, softly, and it hurt her. She was discolored and cut.
The lawyer was asking about her. If there was a “disharmony” between them, it was better to know it now than later.
Her husband raised his voice. “She don’t matter in this,” he said. “She ain’t a consideration.”
She could not hear the lawyer’s reply, but then her husband’s voice was back again, louder, as clear as if he were standing there in the bathroom. “She can’t accomplish nothing against me,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
They were moving toward the front door. She heard it open and close, and then her husband’s footsteps were on the stairs again and then in the hall. She sat still, looking at her fingers. Wrinkled and white from the water.
He stopped at the door to her bedroom, and she noticed that the water she had been sitting in had chilled, and she shivered.
He knocked on the door.
She reached for the hot-water tap with her toe and turned it on. Her foot was as white and wrinkled as her fingers. He knocked again, then tried the door. Even with the water running, she heard the handle rattle. It went on a long time, as if he were a child who had never encountered locked doors before and did not understand what they were.
She heard his voice suddenly, and the sound startled her. “You can’t pretend I ain’t here,” he said.
She slid farther down, until the water covered her ears and raised almost level with the lip of the tub. Rather than turn off the faucet, she found the plug with her toe and pulled it.
His voice came to her through the water. It seemed to come from a long ways off. “Cut off the goddamn water,” he said.
There was a book on the floor, one of Raymond Chandler’s novels she had borrowed from the library, and she picked it up now, opened it to the bookmark, and started to read. The water drained slowly out of the tub. He kicked the door, but it was an inch thick, and it held. The noise was solid and in some way comforting.
He kicked it again, harder, and she began to whisper the words in the book out loud. When Paris spoke again he was out of breath. Even with the water running, the tub had almost drained, and the inch or two left was scalding hot on her bottom. “You got obligations to me,” he said. “You best keep that in
mind.”
She put her toes on the faucet and turned it off. His voice filled the room. “They ain’t nobody gets in trouble if they live up to their obligations, not with me. That’s the cause of this whole mess now.”
She put the book back on the floor, stood up in the tub, and then stepped out. She dried herself in front of the mirror, noticing the discoloration where she had been pinned against the edge of his desk.
“Hanna Nile,” he said. “You can’t pretend I ain’t here.”
She wrapped herself in a robe and crossed the bedroom to the door. She opened it and found him leaning against the far wall, his forehead pressed into his arm. She stood in the doorway and waited. He walked past her into the room.
The smell of urine came in with him.
He sat on her bed, she stayed in the doorway. She saw that he didn’t know what to say. He looked at the ceiling and then covered his eyes. “Mr. Seagraves has said you made it worst than it was,” he said. “He believes it was accidental.”
She squared herself but did not answer.
“He don’t want you near this,” he said.
“I’ve done all I’m going to,” she said, and the sound of her voice was stronger than she felt. Stronger than his. “I paid my respects.”
“You flew in my face, is what. You didn’t know who they was.”
She thought of the girl she had taken to Cornell Clinic and saw part of what he said was true.
“Mr. Seagraves has cautioned us to present a front,” he said, “for the sake of appearances. That it would be harmful if we were perceived to be different than we were.”
“How were we perceived?” she said.
He shrugged. “Married.”
He looked at her in a way that had appealed to her once. Plainspoken and out of words. There was a time when he would find himself at the end of the things he knew and then suddenly stop, in awkward places, because he could not say the things he felt.
It had appealed to her, but that was before she had glimpsed the things he felt. And the things he didn’t. His dark side had fastened itself to her sexually in the abstract, and then she had seen it uncovered, and it was nothing like what she had imagined. It was only ugly.
“I will not associate myself with what you have done,” she said.
“Nobody said to. You don’t have to admit nothing except we’re married. This is the wrong time for you to disappear.”
“The store? You want me back in the store?”
“For appearances.”
She felt a drop of water moving down her back, the only movement in the room. “I want you out of the house,” she said.
He looked at her as if this were an old, tired argument.
She said, “I will not stay here under the same roof.”
“It’s my roof.”
“Then I’ll move,” she said. “I’ll sue for divorce and for the money you took. I will testify in court what you did with your bottle of mineral water.”
She saw she had gone too far. He rose up and came for her across the room. She would not let herself run. There was a flat look to his face; decisions had been made over on the bed, and he was now the messenger.
He slapped her in the same place he had slapped her before. She was standing this time, offering him more leverage. It was more painful, because she understood right away what it was, but the thing she noticed most was the weight. All the things she had read in Raymond Chandler’s books about being hit, he’d never mentioned how heavy it felt.
She fell backwards into the wall, and it was not over. He came at her from the same side, and she held up her hands and turned away. His hand crossed the plane of her arms and found her again, but something in the turning away took the weight off the blow. Her eyes watered and her hands dropped to her sides, and she said it again. “I want you out.”
He grabbed the front of her robe and pulled her into his face. She looked into the gaps between his teeth. She thought of the places she had meant to go in her life. Los Angeles. For some reason, it felt as if it were too late to see Los Angeles now.
Without meaning to, she began to cry.
He held the front of her robe a moment longer and then pushed her a few inches away and studied her face. She tried to turn her head, but the collar of her robe was tight under her chin and ears now and prevented it.
The words came from behind the teeth, someplace in the dark. “That’s better,” he said.
She did not answer; she was no longer sure she could talk.
“There ain’t nobody moving out of this house now,” the words said, “least of all me. When this other is solved, then you’re free to go where you want.”
He dropped his hand and her robe fell open all the way to her knees. “Until then,” he said, “what goes on in this house stays in this house.” Something in that nudged her. She covered herself, thinking that for as long as she had known him, Paris Trout had never cared for anyone’s good opinion.
“I will not have this,” she said. Her voice was watered and uneven.
And he suddenly turned reasonable.
“You should of thought of that before,” he said.
HE LEFT THE HOUSE an hour later; she watched him from her window.
Four hours later she saw him return. He arrived in a truck with the words “Mims’s Hardware” written across the door. He and the Negro who drove it over got out together and opened the back end.
The driver put on gloves and then climbed in. Paris stood on the street, waiting to receive what was inside. He was wearing gloves too, although she had not seen him put them on.
In a moment he reached into the truck and then backed up slowly, pausing between his steps. He appeared to be carrying something heavy, but then he cleared the doors of the truck, and there was nothing in his hands.
He took another step back and then another. She saw the Negro’s boots then beneath the truck doors, carefully finding the street. He cleared the truck, and she saw he was carrying the other end. There was nothing between them.
The thought came to her that Paris had gone to the state hospital and found himself a companion.
The men turned, keeping exactly the same distance apart. She saw it was glass a moment before it caught the reflection of the late-afternoon sun. They maneuvered themselves through he gate—the Negro opened it with his foot—and then up the walk to the porch.
The Negro backed the whole way, losing his balance once but correcting himself in time to save the window. Paris stood behind, red-faced, with his cheek pressed into the glass, grunting with each step.
The Negro arrived at the top of the stairs and stopped. “It’s left open, sir?”
Paris grunted. The driver set his end of the glass on the porch floor and turned to try the door. “It ain’t open,” he said.
“The key’s in my pocket,” Paris said.
She watched the Negro step off the porch and put his hands in Paris’s front pocket. He came out with a key ring, it could have weighed five pounds. She thought Paris must have saved every key he ever had. “Where does a man start?” the Negro said.
“Two square ones, right together,” he said.
“These here?”
“No, square ones. One’s old, one’s shiny.”
The Negro went through the keys slowly and finally found the ones to the front door. “Which?” he said.
“The shiny one opens the top.”
He went back up the porch stairs, out of her sight. Then she heard the door open downstairs and the sounds of them coming in. “Two locks on the door,” the Negro was saying. “They ain’t two locks on the bank.… You must of got somethin’ in here, all right.”
At the bottom of the stairs they set the glass down again. “Heavy, ain’t it?” the Negro said.
“It goes upstairs,” Paris said.
The Negro came halfway up and stopped on the landing between floors. “Whoever come up first,” he said, “they got to lean way over to here, let the other one to past this ban
ister.”
He came the rest of the way up and opened Paris’s bedroom door, which was directly across the hall from the top step of the stairs. He returned to the glass, descending the stairs more slowly than he’d come up.
“There ain’t no broke glass in that room, sir,” he said.
“It ain’t for now, it’s for later.”
Hanna sat in the chair near the window and listened to them negotiate the glass up the stairs. They set it down inside Paris’s room, and when they came out, they were breathing hard and blowing. “The other seven goes up here too?” the driver said.
She did not hear Paris answer.
The driver said, “I ain’t said there’s nothing wrong with it, no sir. You know how much glass you need better than me.”
They went back out to the truck and got the next piece of glass. And then the next. She watched for most of an hour, and when she saw none of the glass was going to be dropped, she left the window, opened a novel called The Big Sleep, and began to read.
Except for the grunting and their feet on the stairs, the men worked in silence. The Negro did all the backing up, Paris followed him into the house and up the stairs. When they had finished, it was almost dark.
“That be the last one,” the Negro said.
Paris did not answer.
“Lawdy, look at the time,” the Negro said. “I been on the job two hours plus my regular duty.”
Paris did not answer.
“Mr. Mims don’t pay me over the time.”
“How much does he pay you, regular duty?” she heard Paris ask.
“Forty dollars.”
“That’s a good dollar,” Paris said. “More money than that, it just get you in trouble.”
It was quiet a moment, and then the Negro said, “No sir, that’s spendin’ money, that don’t get peoples in trouble. What done that is money they saved. That’s the kind make them evil.”
“I’ll call Mr. Mims tomorrow, tell him to divest his savings,” Paris said.
