Paris Trout (36 page)

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'1l 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
at 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.

"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?"

In a minute Trout looked
up the road and saw a truck.

* * *

THE DRIVER TOOK THEM back to Cotton Point, where
Sheriff Fixx separated a deputy from his car, and ordered him to call
the garage to pick up the one on the highway. The deputy saw the
sheriff was mad, and said "Yessir" every time he paused
long enough for him to get it in.

Trout and the sheriff were in sight of the wreck
before either of them spoke. "That bastard's a monster, ain't
he?" the sheriff said, "looking at the dog."

Trout had no interest in the animal. An unfocused
anger was settling over him, and dead in the middle of it was a
headache. He took the watch out of his pants pocket and checked the
time. Eleven-thirty. The older car smelled of cigars and urine. "Mr.
Trout," the sheriff said, "you the first man I ever took to
jail that worried he was gone be late."

The sheriff laughed out loud, and a moment later he
reached into his pocket for a tin of Copenhagen, opened it
one-handed, and then put a pinch underneath his upper lip. A little
later he felt around under the seat and came out with a wide-necked
bottle, which he set between his legs, lifting it to his mouth every
few minutes to spit.

He was beyond the wreck now and enjoying himself. He
felt suddenly charitable toward Paris Trout. "You want, I could
look in on your momma until you get back .... "

Trout opened his coat and brought out the gun.

"Whoa, there, Mr. Trout," the sheriff said.
"Don't take that thing out its holster in here .... "

Trout heard the fear inside the sheriff; and an anger
blew through him like a scream. He put the muzzle underneath Edward
Fixx's chin. He heard the right-side tires leave the pavement, then
come back. The bottle between the sheriff s legs tipped, and tobacco
spit spilled over
his pants.

"Mr. Trout," he said, "what the world
you doing?"

Trout pushed the gun up, elevating the sheriff s
chin. The car began to slow. "Is it an excape?" The gun
barrel inhibited the movement of the sheriff s jaw and affected his
speech. Trout cocked the hammer, all ready to do it now. It was loose
in his head.

"
You want to excape, it's all right with me,"
the sheriff said. "I 'ain't got a thing in the world against
you, Mr. Trout. Didn't I call you up on the phone? I told you I got
this order from the judge to take you down to Pete County. That's
all. I'll pull over right here. You can do what you want .... "