Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  Trout leaned closer. “You think I wrote him a check, son?”

  “You bribed him, all right. Him and the warden.”

  “The judge here had one opinion, the judge down there had another. With judges, it’s seeing the one you agree with last. Just stay loose until you found the right one.”

  Bonner spoke as if he hadn’t heard him. “A man as tight as yourself, Mr. Trout, somebody willing to shoot children and women over a busted car, he doesn’t throw real money away on a lark.” He looked around the room again. “You afraid to be closed in? Eat at the same table with Negroes, sleep at night in the same room with them? You afraid to breathe the same air?”

  He stopped a moment and looked around the office. “It sure as hell isn’t creature comforts you’re scared to lose, so it must be something else.…”

  Trout had changed expressions, something new coming over his face. He opened one of the drawers in his desk. Bonner thought he was going to show him the writ from Petersboro County, but what he put on his desk was a gun. He laid it there, the muzzle pointing in Bonner’s direction, his palm resting on the handle.

  “You don’t need that, Mr. Trout. All you need is to give your wife her four thousand dollars and sign the papers.”

  On reflection, Bonner realized that the older man had meant to shoot him. The thought was there, and then it passed. “If you come back in here, Mr. Lawyer, I’ll use it,” Trout said.

  Carl Bonner stood at the door. “You can’t shoot the thing you’re scared of,” he said. He walked out then, right into the peg-legged woman standing on the other side.

  She stared up at him, her mouth half open, the dimmest light at work behind her eyes. “You’re an educated man,” she said. “You ought know better than that.”

  THERE WAS ONE OTHER warning.

  On an evening a month later, following the second meeting of the Sesquicentennial Planning Committee, Carl Bonner found himself sitting in a cloud of after-dinner smoke at the home of Harry Seagraves when Trout’s name came into the conversation again.

  And it was Estes Singletary who again brought it up. Trout had been indicted that week by a federal grand jury in Atlanta on charges that he had attempted to bribe two Internal Revenue Service agents.

  “It looks like our friend Mr. Trout tried to buy the federal government this time,” Singletary said.

  For a moment no one spoke. The newspaperman took this for a sign of encouragement and said, “The federal boys must come higher than the crowd in Petersboro County.”

  Someone said, “They probably charge the same and then arrest you anyway.”

  Walker Hargrove, the banker, excused himself and left the meeting. “Don’t pay no attention to Walker,” Singletary said when he was gone. “He’s had dealings this year with Internal Revenue himself and can’t be in the same room with anybody mentions the name.”

  But a minute or two later the president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce also left, remembering some Junior Chamber of Commerce business, and he was accompanied by the president of the Rotary, and then Mayor Bob Horn, and then Estes Singletary, and then almost everybody else.

  In ten minutes all that was left in Harry Seagraves’s living room was Seagraves, Carl Bonner, and Ward Townes. The Keepers of the Bush. Bonner stretched and looked around the room. “Paris Trout isn’t much in the way of a topic of conversation, is he?” he said.

  Seagraves stirred his coffee with his index finger. “The problem is working to a conclusion,” he said. “What he is has about caught up with him now. The thing now is not to push, just to let things take their natural course. Enjoy the celebration, ride the train to Atlanta, put a little distance between all of us and Mr. Trout.”

  He pulled his finger out and frowned into the coffee. “We’re never going to get nothing planned for this celebration if we keep inviting Estes Singletary to the meetings.”

  Carl Bonner let that sit for a moment, gradually realizing what Seagraves said was somehow intended for him too. “I been trying to get Paris Trout into court for two years,” he said, keeping the anger out of his voice. “Sometimes you don’t push, nothing moves.”

  Seagraves looked across a table full of dirty plates at Ward Townes. “The trick is knowing when that is,” he said.

  It seemed to Carl Bonner that Townes and Seagraves were in some sort of secret accord on this, as if they had talked about it before. It was Townes who spoke. “Don’t push too hard, Mr. Bonner,” he said quietly.

  “I’ve yet to push him at all.”

  “The man is out of balance,” Townes said.

  “Because he carries a shooter? I can accommodate him if that’s what he wants. I can take this matter any direction he’d like to go.”

  It was quiet a moment, and then Seagraves said, “No, you can’t.” He saw that he’d insulted the younger man, it couldn’t be helped.

  He said, “Paris Trout knows directions you never imagined were there.”

  THE CELEBRATION BEGAN OFFICIALLY at nine o’clock the following Saturday morning.

  The Georgia Pacific left the Cotton Point depot at its regular hour, headed north for Atlanta, pulling a specially decorated railroad car loaded with one hundred members of the town’s proudest families. The Cotton Point One Hundred.

  Many of the lawyers had firecrackers.

  Mayor Bob Horn carried a whip and had dressed himself in a costume recalling Alex McHandy, the slave trader who had founded the town, and looked, to Seagraves at least, like a New Orleans pimp. Every man on the car wore whiskers of some kind, most of them having started their beards weeks before the celebration began, in order to set a good example.

  Very few of the men came without hard liquor, although it was their wives, for the most part, who carried it in their picnic baskets. The plan was to hold the party on the lawn of the State Capitol, under a town banner: COTTON POINT—GEORGIA’S ANTEBELLUM TOWN.

  The car was busy in a quiet way, there were as many people in the aisle as were in the seats, and the smell of coffee and cigarettes hung in the air.

  Carl Bonner was sitting next to a window, leaning from time to time across his wife to speak to someone in the aisle. Leslie would pull back, giving him room. She had not wanted to come on the train. He put his hand on her leg once, squeezing a moment, getting no response at all.

  Forty minutes out of Cotton Point, a few miles from Montclair on a long bend of track, the train passed through a tunnel. The car went black, and before it was returned to the sunshine, the engineer braked hard and half the people in the aisle were suddenly on the floor.

  There was screaming—the brakes and the ladies—and laughing. A woman smelling of lilacs fell across Bonner’s head from behind, hugging him for a moment before pushing herself off. Leslie stared straight ahead.

  The car left the tunnel, still braking.

  Bonner leaned across his wife again and saw Harry Seagraves sitting in the aisle, holding a cigar between his teeth, smiling at the confusion. A woman leaned over Seagraves, kissing him squarely in the middle of the head. He offered her his cigar, which she took.

  It was nine forty-two in the morning, Carl Bonner checked his watch. The train bucked to a stop, blowing steam.

  Minutes passed, and then a conductor came through the car from behind, stepping around passengers who were still helping each other up and swatting the dirt off their bottoms and sleeves. “Ain’t nothing to alarm yourself, folks,” he said. “Just some hillbilly decided to park himself in front of a train.”

  A few minutes later Bonner saw him, walking back along the tracks.

  Somewhere toward the front a woman shouted, “God as my witness, it’s Paris Trout!” And one whole side of the car got up and moved to the other side to see him.

  Trout stopped at mid-car and stood still, in a gray, wrinkled suit, arms crossed, staring up at the windows. Someone opened a window and said, “You gone come along with us, Paris?”

  Trout stayed where he was. A conductor appeared from behind, shouting at
him. “You get that piece of rusted shit out of the way, mister, or we’ll sure as hell do it for you.”

  Trout paid no attention at all and a moment later the train shuddered and began to move. A cheer went up from the Cotton Point One Hundred, to be moving again.

  Bonner watched Trout slowly disappear to the back. A moment later he saw Trout’s Henry J—the driver’s door was wide open, and the whole side was dented where the train had pushed it out of the way—and then it was gone from sight too.

  On some signal, drinking began in the aisle, and the hushed, busy feeling was gone.

  Bonner stood up and squeezed past Leslie into the aisle, leaving her there in the seat. The aisle filled with the celebration. The woman who had kissed Harry Seagraves’s head kissed his nose and then his cheeks. Before long, other ladies were kissing him, and perfect red imprints of lips lay like blisters over as much of Harry Seagraves’s face as wasn’t covered by whiskers.

  Leslie watched her husband. He accepted a paper cup of liquor, he accepted kisses from Cotton Point ladies who could not reach Seagraves, he put his hands on everyone he saw.

  She slid to the seat next to the window and closed her eyes.

  The party moved up and down the aisle. Someone threw a roll of toilet paper the length of the car. Someone else had a banjo. Men and women were crawling over seats, wearing each other’s hats. A roll of toilet paper landed in the seat behind Leslie Bonner. Her husband came out of a tangle of people a moment later and sat down heavily in the next seat.

  “You want some coffee?” he said.

  She shook her head. She would have liked some of the liquor, but Carl did not allow her to drink now outside the house. He was afraid of the things she would do.

  “I can get you a coffee,” he said. “Find you a Coke-Cola.”

  “No,” she said.

  He said, “If you change your mind …”

  He stood up and headed back into the aisle. Someone at the front of the car was blowing a bugle; the noise confused her. She covered herself with a Georgia Pacific Railroad blanket that she found in the compartment overhead and put her fingers in her ears. The sound of the party faded, and she heard the noises of the train coming up out of the floor.

  Time passed, she could not say how much. She felt someone in the next seat. She moved half her face over the blanket and found herself blinking into the eyes of Harry Seagraves. Seagraves sipped at his drink but did not speak. There were lipstick smudges on his silk collar and his neck, his hair was mussed, and his tie had been turned backwards and hung down his back.

  She realized her fingers were still in her ears and took them out. “Mr. Seagraves,” she said.

  Seagraves squinted, studying her. It seemed sexual, but it was not impolite. She came farther up in her seat. She straightened her blouse and touched her hair. It was less uncomfortable than she would have thought, to have him stare at her.

  The car shook and leaned, it felt like the party itself was tipping it one way and then another. “Mr. Trout’s appearance seemed to have made an impression,” she said.

  “It often does,” he said. Then: “It isn’t often that easy to put him behind you.”

  He finished what was in the cup and refilled it from his flask. Without a word, he handed the cup to Leslie Bonner, and she took it.

  The liquor ran a spasm through her, top to bottom. She held on to the cup, looking over it at Harry Seagraves’s hair. And then she put it against her lips again. “My husband does not approve of my imbibing in public,” she said.

  He took the cup from her hand and hid it between her leg and the seat cushion under the blanket. His movements were clumsy in a thick-fingered way. “There,” he said.

  She smiled at him, affected by his kindness. She felt like kissing him too. “He believes I change personalities,” she said.

  Harry Seagraves took the flask from his pocket, touched it to his lower lip, then seemed to change his mind. “Your husband is very young,” he said.

  She waited, but that was all. She found the cup under the blanket and sipped from it again. The liquor was strong, and she felt warm from her throat to her stomach. While the cup was still in her hand, he refilled it. She looked quickly at the crowd in the aisle but did not see her husband.

  The bugle was blowing again, and someone threw another roll of toilet paper. The noise was not as confusing now, with half a cup of Harry Seagraves’s liquor in her stomach. “Do you believe it’s possible to change personalities, Mr. Seagraves?” she said.

  He thought for a moment. “You can change moods,” he said, “but you knock on the door, it’s never somebody brand-new that answers … not in my experience.”

  He thought of Paris Trout. “I think there’s some people that keep themselves private to cover up who they are, however.”

  “That’s it exactly,” she said, the liquor oiling all the gates. “There are some who seem to have a talent to hold back what they are, like it isn’t good enough.”

  She took the cup out from under the blanket and drank half of what was inside. “Or,” she said, “they try to hide their wife. They get ashamed of the people they love.”

  He saw that the conversation had turned and that they were talking about Carl Bonner. “It’s a hard thing to build a law practice,” he said. “Your husband wants things done before they are ready.” He paused then and seemed to forget his thread. Then he said, “You can’t be the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of Georgia all your life.”

  “He hates how that follows him around,” she said.

  “Then he oughtn’t to aspire to it.”

  She stared at the cup in her hands, and he began to regret his words. “I didn’t mean that as harsh as it sounded,” he said. “Your husband is a fine young attorney, knows as much about the law as anybody. And in time he’ll mellow. Everybody’s got to give a little here and there, or they burn up.”

  “It’s partly this business with Paris Trout,” she said, and it startled him to hear the name out loud—he had just thought of the man again himself. “He’s frustrated that Mr. Trout won’t give his wife a divorce.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Seagraves said. “Mr. Trout is a frustrating man to deal with.”

  “You referred him.”

  He looked past her, out the window. A road ran parallel to the tracks, an old woman and her mule and wagon were the only things that moved. He picked up the blanket where it was bunched next to his leg and draped it over his own lap.

  “It didn’t seem like a three-year job,” he said. “Mrs. Trout is a friend of mine, and I knew your husband would pay attention to her case.… I never knew it would turn into a test of endurance.”

  Up in front they had begun singing. “Happy Birthday to Cotton Point.” A glass broke, people laughed. The mayor cracked his whip. Leslie Bonner finished what was in her cup.

  “If I could do it over,” Seagraves said, “I’d send Mrs. Trout to Walter Huff. He isn’t as sharp as Carl, and he won’t work as long into the night, but he’s got more common sense. He don’t push when something won’t move.”

  He refilled her cup, shaking the last few drops out of the flask. “I hope I haven’t left you empty,” she said.

  He nodded his head in the direction of the party in the aisle. “Somewhere in that crowd of patriots,” he said, “my wife is holding on to a thirty-pound picnic basket like it was her firstborn.”

  “Your wife is so beautiful,” she said.

  “Miss Ether County, 1934. They crowned her in the middle of the Great Depression.” He looked at Leslie closely. “As far as I know,” he said, “it didn’t help at all.”

  She looked up in time to see her husband making his way back. His beard was red and uneven, and his eyes were glazed. She put the cup back under the blanket.

  Carl Bonner stood in the aisle, swaying, looking down at her. “I see you found company,” he said.

  Harry Seagraves began to smile, but Leslie Bonner’s expression stopped him. She stared up at he
r husband without answering.

  “What are you doing back here?” Bonner said to his wife.

  “I’m afraid she was minding her own business until I sat down,” Seagraves said. “She never encouraged me a bit.”

  A smile passed over Bonner’s face, but he never took his eyes off his wife. “What are you doing?” he said again. A slight trembling shook him, and his cheeks paled.

  “Are you feeling poorly?” Seagraves said, but Bonner did not answer.

  “I asked you a question,” he said to her. “I want an answer.”

  Seagraves saw the girl was stupefied. “I asked her to toast with me,” he said, keeping his voice reasonable. “It’s not every day a town celebrates its hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and I asked her to join the celebration.”

  Bonner looked away from his wife for half a second, checking the blanket. She moved, perhaps two inches, but his stare returned and pinned her to the spot. “Here I am in the same car.” he said.

  “Wait a minute here,” Seagraves said.

  Carl Bonner checked his watch. “Thirty-five minutes I been up in the front end of the railroad car,” he said. “That’s how long I turned my back.”

  She slowly began to shake her head. “You don’t mean to do this,” she said. “You’re drinking.”

  “I’m not blind,” he said. “I can still see.”

  “You don’t see anything,” she said.

  Carl Bonner looked again at the blanket. Seagraves’s hands were lying on top of it, one of hers was underneath holding the glass. “Then let’s pull off the blanket,” he said.

  “Stop this,” she said.

  Harry Seagraves was just focusing on the nature of the quarrel. “Son,” he said, “Mayor Horn has put some work in this—dressed up in ridiculous clothing, carrying a whip and calling people niggers. It took thought and effort to ensure that he would make a bigger ass of himself than anyone else on this train, and in two minutes you have eclipsed a whole morning’s work.”

  “I’m tired of talk,” he said to Seagraves. The words were clear and loud, but they went unnoticed in the sound of breaking glass and laughter. Someone had thrown his shoes out the window, and now everybody was throwing shoes out the window.