by Pete Dexter
“I don’t blame you,” the attorney said. “I might do the same thing in your place.”
The line went quiet again, the lawyer began to wonder what Paris Trout was doing. “I can tell you got your mind on other things right now,” he said, “but I might just take a minute to explain our situation down here in Pete County.”
While the lawyer explained the situation, Trout took a blank piece of paper out of his desk and began to print the names and addresses of all the jurors. He knew them by heart. Beneath them he wrote Judge John Taylor, Ward Townes, Harry Seagraves, and Hanna Nile—his wife’s maiden name.
He thought for a moment and added Hubert Norland, Edward Fixx, and Jack Handley—the police chief, the sheriff, and the new district attorney.
The lawyer was going over the people in Petersboro County who had to be paid. “There are legal fees to the court, of course,” he said, “attorneys and the judge, but the real expense is the work farm itself. The man there is a hard man, and he can make it as steep as he wants.…”
“Tell me what it costs,” Trout said.
“Altogether I’d say twenty thousand.”
“Twenty thousand,” he said.
“Yessir,” the lawyer said. “Just give us a call when you’re coming, and we’ll be out to meet you.”
Trout hung up the phone. It rang again, a few minutes later, and he sat looking at it eight or nine rings before he picked it up. He put the receiver against his ear without speaking.
“Mr. Trout?”
The voice was different, he couldn’t place it at first. “Mr. Trout, this is Edward Fixx.”
It was quiet a moment. Then: “I just put you on my list.”
Sheriff Fixx took a moment too. “Yessir, thank you.… The reason I was calling is to ask you to come in.”
“Come in where?”
“The sheriff department. Judge Taylor got notice from Washington that your appeal run out, and he wanted me to pick you up. I thought it might be better you just come in on your own, save you riding up Main Street in a patrol car.”
Trout reached into his pocket and found the handle of the pistol. He brought it out and laid it on his desk.
“It don’t have to be today,” the sheriff said. “Judge Taylor indicated tomorrow would be all right, maybe a day more if you need it.”
“I’ll be over to see you,” he said, and hung up the phone again. Then he tore the cord out of the wall.
THAT EVENING, AS WAS her habit, Charlotte Hock tapped on the office door to let Mr. Trout know she was leaving. The way she would put it was “Is there anything else you need, sir?” It made her feel less guilty about stopping work.
She tapped, but there was no answer. She tapped again. It sounded like someone was moving furniture. “Mr. Trout? Are you all right?” When he didn’t answer again, she cracked the door and put her head inside and found herself looking right down the barrel of eternity itself.
The desk had been moved to the corner and set on its end, and lying right across the top, as flat as a snake, was Mr. Trout’s arm. She glimpsed his face behind the gun. “Send them in,” he said.
“There ain’t nobody to send in,” she said. “It’s just me.”
“Move out the way,” he said, and showed her the direction with the gun. She stepped in that direction, farther into the office and away from the door. He moved the gun off her, and she saw him better from that angle. His eyes were jittery, and he’d got himself dirty moving the desk.
“I was making to inquire if there was anything else you need before I left,” she said.
Without any reason she could see, he began to smile. Mr. Trout did not smile much, not even in the morning, and it would have made her uncomfortable even if he was not barricaded behind his desk, with his gun turned on the door.
“No,” he said, “I don’t need you anymore.”
“Then I’ll be going.”
“I would if I was you,” he said.
THE NEXT MORNING CHARLOTTE Hock pictured herself quitting her job. She stayed in bed until seven o’clock, thinking of getting up and locking the door to her house and then just lying back down and falling to sleep.
What she could not imagine doing was calling Mr. Trout and telling him that she wasn’t coming in. She was afraid how he would take it. She could not imagine herself acknowledging that what had happened the night before was out of the ordinary.
And in the end, lacking imagination, she got up, attached her leg, dressed, and brushed her hair. She tried not to think about the way he had looked holding the gun, she tried not to think about the way he had looked when he smiled.
In the end what she thought about was that a peg-legged woman was fortunate to have any job at all.
She walked into the store at eight-thirty, using her key to the back door. The office door was open, and looking in, she saw that the desk was returned to its place. Mr. Trout was behind it, wearing a suit. She thought perhaps he was going up to Mercer College for the day to study lawbooks.
“Are you leaving somewhere today, Mr. Trout?”
He looked at her in an ordinary way, then he stood up. She jumped. He walked around the desk and past her, out the door, to one of the safes. He lit a match and began to move the tumbler. “I got some bi’nis out of the county,” he said, “you be all right here alone today.”
“Yessir.” She was suddenly happy, the thought of working alone.
“I’ll be down to Morganville a day or two.”
“Yessir.”
He stood up, holding a handful of hundred-dollar bills. He spread them once, then straightened the money on the top of the safe and put it into an envelope.
“Any colored people come in, you tell them you don’t handle money,” he said, and then he put the envelope in his pocket.
Which were the same instructions he left her with when he went to Mercer College. “No sir, I’ll tell them to come back another time.” She saw he had put his gun in a holster inside his coat; she could not think of what sort of formal occasion it might be that he would carry his gun in a holster. She knew he had no connections to church.
He looked at her more carefully now, the way he had before he hired her. “If this don’t go right in Morganville,” he said, “I will send you instructions how to handle the niggers.”
The thought of handling the niggers terrified Charlotte Hock. Not that she was afraid of them—she felt like she was colored half the time herself—but that she would do it wrong. Keeping a store was one thing, running the bank was another. “I don’t know that I could do that, Mr. Trout,” she said.
He touched her then, it was the first time that she could remember. His hand was on her shoulder. “Of course you could,” he said. “They ain’t that different from you or me, that’s the secret.”
She watched him out the door that morning, wondering what had gotten into him now.
PARIS TROUT DROVE ONE of his cars—a three-year-old Ford with a cracked engine block—to the sheriff’s department and asked for Edward Fixx. Sheriff Fixx came out from the back, wearing his uniform. A bone-handled thirty-eight sat on his hip at an unnatural angle, like some knot that had grown off a tree.
He seemed surprised to see Paris Trout, or perhaps just timid. “I ’preciate your coming down, Mr. Trout,” he said.
Trout looked around the room. He had been in the place before, of course, but it looked different this morning. Smaller, for one thing. “You said to come in.”
Sheriff Fixx opened a swinging door—it didn’t reach a person’s waist—and Trout walked into the back. A woman there was operating a typewriter, using all her fingers. He thought of his wife.
They passed her into the sheriff’s office. It had his name on the door and was the size of a bedroom closet. There was no window. Just the desk and a file cabinet and a fan and two chairs. Edward Fixx sat down and opened the desk. He took out the papers on Trout and laid them on the desk.
“Here’s my orders,” he said.
Trout did not
look at them.
“I don’t have no choice in this,” Fixx said. “Judge Taylor issues the marching orders, I got to march.”
Trout sat still while the room got smaller every second.
Fixx picked the papers back up and began to read. “ ‘You’—meaning me—‘are hereby ordered, by the authority of the circuit court of the county of Ether, the state of Georgia, to transport one Paris Trout to the county of Petersboro, the state of Georgia, and there to transfer his custody to the warden of the state work farm.’ ”
The sheriff did not read well and followed the words with the index finger of the hand he wasn’t using to hold the order. Trout waited until he was finished and then stood up.
“Let’s go if we’re going,” he said.
They took the new squad car, embossed with a large white star on one side and the seal of the state of Georgia on the other. It was a Ford too, but was powered by a special police interceptor engine.
Sheriff Fixx used side streets to leave the business district and then drove through Bloodtown. He did not want white people seeing him driving Paris Trout off to prison. Trout sat quietly in the seat next to him, a sawed-off shotgun stuck in the rack between them, and watched the window. It occurred to the chief that Trout might be feeling homesick. “It ain’t that long to be gone,” he said. “Six months, nine at the outside.”
They crossed the river and started south. The sheriff stepped on the gas, and the interceptor engine pushed them back into their seats. The sheriff smiled, waiting for Trout to remark on the car.
Trout said nothing.
Sheriff Fixx took the Ford up to one hundred and then came back to seventy. One of the windows began to whistle. Trout stared at the countryside, the sheriff could not even tell if he was frightened. He rolled his window up and down, trying to get rid of the noise. Finally he left it cracked half an inch. “You can always tell a nigger worked on the assembly line in Detroit,” the sheriff said; “they always whistle.”
A little later the sheriff said, “I was a hot-rodding sumbitch when I was coming up. Like to end up in jail myself.”
Trout turned from the window, and the sheriff saw he was never a hot rodder himself. “I done a lot of things,” the sheriff said.
Trout blinked.
“That’s how I come to be a peace officer. I was afraid if I wasn’t, I was headed for trouble.”
Somehow it wasn’t working. Sheriff Fixx enjoyed transporting prisoners to the various work camps in the state, not only so he could get the car on the highway but to tell them his own story, how there was devilment inside even a police officer. It seemed to Edward Fixx that a man on the way to a work farm needed a good example. Paris Trout, however, did not appear to be making the connection between the story and himself.
“The way I look at it,” the sheriff said, “there ain’t nobody different. We all got to eat and sleep and hunt pussy. Time that’s left over, a man ought to have to hisself. All the fine houses, fine clothes don’t change that.”
He realized then that Trout owned one of those fine houses and was glad he’d added the part about clothes. “What I mean is, it don’t matter how much money you got …”
When Trout didn’t answer, the sheriff lapsed into silence, watching the countryside. They passed farms a hundred years old, torn shades in the windows, endless land. Overalls on clotheslines. Every few miles there was a family plot—eight or ten graves, fenced in barbed wire to keep the animals out.
“How is Mrs. Trout’s health?” the sheriff said suddenly. “I mean Mrs. Trout, your mother.…”
Trout had, in fact, seen her that morning before he went to work. She was sitting in the chair they put her in to eat, wrapped in a stained bathrobe, staring at something outside the window. A fat girl named Jane Penny fed her custard, catching it with the spoon under the corners of her mouth, the way you would for a baby, putting it back inside.
His mother had not spoken an intelligible word to him or anyone else in eight years. That was when the stroke had hit her, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. He could look at her, though, and see that she was still peeved. She saw him as clear as day and couldn’t say a word about it.
Sometimes when they were alone, he would sit in front of her on the windowsill, trying to see the order of things. Where he had come from, where she was going. He did not speak to her after the help left, he was not there to cheer her up.
He thought sometimes that all the things that had happened to him were already built in the day he passed into this world from her womb.
“Some days are better than others,” Trout said, which was the same thing the doctor told him whenever they met in her room. He did not know how the doctor told the better days from the worse, and he hadn’t asked.
The sheriff was relieved that Trout had begun to talk. It was two hours to Petersboro County. “It tears your heart to see them age,” he said. “I heard this once, that you are your parents’ babies, and then they turn into yours. And damn if that ain’t true.”
The sheriff looked across the seat as he said that. “Mine’s gone, of course,” he added.
Trout stuck his fingers into the pack of Camels in his pocket and came out with a cigarette. Doing that, he moved his coat, and the chief glimpsed the gun and holster. Trout lit the cigarette and blew the smoke out of his nose.
“You can’t take that there with you inside the camp,” the sheriff said. His own pistol, he noticed, was wedged halfway into the crack where the seat met. He wondered what had been going on in his head, to let Paris Trout in the police cruiser without checking if he had his gun. “In fact, I ought take it for you now.”
Trout studied the cigarette between his fingers. “I’ll turn it over when we get there,” he said. The sheriff reached into his pocket for a cigarette of his own.
“They get it from you at prison,” he said, “it won’t be there when you get out. Sure as hell, somebody will of misplaced it for their own.”
A little later the sheriff dropped his window another inch. “How old is your mother now?” he said.
“Ninety.”
He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, looked at it a moment, and then rolled it off his finger and out the crack in the window. “Time goes by, don’t it?”
Trout didn’t answer.
“Six months at the work farm,” the sheriff said, “that ain’t no worst than joining the army.”
He looked across the seat to ask Trout if he had ever been in the army, and at that moment a liver-colored mongrel dog appeared from some trees along the road, angling for the cruiser. It crossed in front of the car, and there was a banging noise and then a bump from underneath. Sheriff Fixx stood up on the brake, panicked at the prospect that he’d torn up the new cruiser.
Trout’s forehead hit the windshield, and the car came to a stop sideways in the middle of the road. Before they could get out, the front end was smoking. “Lord a mercy,” the sheriff said, “what now?”
Leaving his door wide open, he walked to the front. Trout stayed where he was. A knot was growing on his forehead, under his fingers, and there was a metallic taste on the end of his tongue. What kept him in his seat, though, was the feeling that he had crossed for a minute to the other side. In the second he’d hit the windshield, he was somewhere else. He’d ridden there behind a beam of black light and seen something he had already forgotten.
The sheriff was still in front of the car. He walked back and forth, keeping his eyes the same place. Trout watched him through smoke and cracked glass. A minute passed, and he sat down heavily in the driver’s seat, his feet still on the highway, and looked out over the trees.
“That sonofabitch must of come up out of the gully,” he said. “I never saw him.” He turned and looked at Trout. “You was right here,” he said, “there wasn’t a thing a body could of done.…” He noticed the knot in the middle of Trout’s forehead. “It look like somebody laid an egg on your head.”
Trout did not answer.
&nbs
p; “You feel poorly?”
He shrugged.
“If you are, get over into the gully to do it. We made enough mess of this Ford already.…” He got up again and walked back to the front of the car, as if he did not trust his memory. “You ought look at this,” he said. “He’s tore up the radiator, broke the headlight, pushed in the bumper.”
Trout got out and walked into the gully. When he returned, the sheriff pointed to a spot where the metal was crushed and said, “This is the exact spot he hit us.” The dog was fifty yards north, still lying in the road.
“Probably stray,” the sheriff said, looking around. “Could of belonged to somebody, but more than likely he was a stray. You wonder what gets into an animal’s brain to try something like that.…”
There was a pine tree lying on the ground across the highway, broken two feet off the ground and still hinged to the stump. Trout walked over and sat down. He closed his eyes, feeling dizzy, and in a minute the tree branch sank and the sheriff was sitting on it too. “They’ll be somebody by,” the sheriff said. “They always is.”
Ten minutes passed. The radiator ran out of steam, and in the building quiet Trout tried to remember what it was like when he hit the window and went away.
The sheriff stood up twice and walked back to the car, came back twice shaking his head. “Anybody can hit a dog,” he said.
Time passed, nothing came along the road. The sheriff moved off the trunk and sat on the ground, with his back against the stump. “Were you ever in the armed services?” he said.
Trout looked down at him a moment, as if he did not understand.
“The armed forces,” he said, “like the army or navy.”
“I was in the army,” he said.
“During war?”
“World War One,” he said.
“Did you like it?” the sheriff said. Trout nodded and lit a fresh cigarette. The sheriff said, “The best time in a man’s life, ain’t it?”
“I didn’t have no best time,” Trout said. “I was just there.”
“Tell me something,” the sheriff said a little later. “Did you ever shoot somebody?”
