Paris Trout (39 page)

She was gone less than five minutes.

"
That was Carl Bonner," she said, sitting
back down on the bed.

He touched her shoulder.

"He was in Petersboro County."

"What for?"

"On Paris," she said. "He said he got
what we need."

Seagraves lay still. "Did he say what?"

"
The names of the people Paris paid to get out."

Seagraves sat up a few inches and sipped at the iced
tea. "Everybody in the state knows who he paid," he said.
He saw she was upset and reached out to touch her again. She did not
respond. There was a part of her he could not reach, and it was the
part he wanted. He thought it might still belong to Paris Trout.

She turned and looked at him. Her side was a straight
line under the slip all the way to her waist, and he followed it from
beneath her arm until he touched her hip. "Then why didn't
somebody put him back in?"

"
He won't come around here," he said.

"He is around here," she said.

And he understood what she meant and did not try to
answer. "Carl Bonner said he found eight others that had gotten
out the same way," she said a little later.

"
That sounds right."

She pulled away and stared out the window. "There
is an aspect of you that doesn't fit," she said.

He smiled. "What aspect is that?"

"
Your character," she said. "You are
fair with me, more than anybody else has been. You tell the truth.
But there is a whole other side that comes out sometimes and makes me
wonder what world you live in."

"
The same world as everybody else," he
said. "There's good and bad, and it's no sense getting upset
over it. You take things as you find them."

She pulled her feet up onto the bed and studied them,
her chin on her knees. If he moved now, he would catch her crying.

"What do you expect?" he said quietly.

"
Something else."

He waited a few minutes
and then touched her behind the ears, moving from there down her neck
to her shoulders. She sat very still. He moved his hands back to her
neck, then around, touching her cheeks and her eyes, pulling her
lower lip down and running the tip of his finger inside. She shook
under his fingers.

* * *

"
HE JUST BOUGHT way out," she said later.

He propped himself up, resting his head against the
flat part of his hand, and stared down at her face. He felt a
coolness in his lap and on his legs, everywhere he was up against her
she left him wet. "It doesn't matter now," he said. "It's
not our business."

"
Is that where it settles? He's nobody's
business?"
 
He dropped back
into the pillow and thought of what she had said before: that he was
fair with her and told her the truth. He tried to do that now.

"
There comes a time,"
he said, "when it's best just to leave something alone."

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER CARL Bonner walked into the store on
Main Street. The peg-legged woman frowned at him from behind the
counter. He pointed to a pack of Dentyne gum and gave the woman a
dollar bill. When she turned to make change, he asked if Trout was
in.

"
I believe he's back in his office with a
Negro," she said. "He's been very busy and don't have time
to see you." She counted the ninety-five cents out, putting the
coins in his palm one at a time. He started toward the back of the
store.

"'
Cuse me," she said, but he kept walking.
He heard her behind him, the steps alternating hard and soft as she
hurried to catch up. "Just hold on your britches there,"
she said.

She caught him at the office door, which was closed.
He heard a voice inside, she grabbed at the arm of his coat. She was
heavier than he would have thought and pulled him off-balance. "I
already told you," she said, "Mr. Trout don't have time for
you today."

He put his hands on her shoulders and moved her out
of the way a and then opened the door. He walked into the office.
Trout was perched, bare-chested, on a chair over the sink. The mirror
behind it had been broken, all except for a piece in an upper corner.
His suspenders hung loose to his knees, his cheeks and chin were
covered with shaving cream. There was a straight razor in his hand,
and he changed the way he held it as Bonner came in.

Bonner heard the woman behind him. "I told you,"
she said, but he put an arm out as she grabbed him, and she fell
across the floor. The peg clattered, the rest of her landed soft.
Bonner moved to help her up.

"
Are you hurt?" he said.

"
Some Boy Scout," she said. "You
knocked down a crippled lady."

Trout hadn't moved. Bonner tried to get her up. Half
of her seemed to take the help, the other half seemed to fight him
off. "You slipped," he said.

"I never slipped in my life," she said,
getting back upright. She brushed herself off and straightened her
clothes, and then, without any warning, she began to cry.

Bonner walked her to the door and closed it when she
was through. Then he turned and looked at Trout. "Mr. Trout,"
he said, "none of this would have been necessary — "

Trout stepped off the chair and moved a foot in his
direction, holding the razor. Carl Bonner picked an empty mineral
water bottle up off the floor and waited. Trout stopped, and Bonner
had the sudden thought that Trout didn't know who he was. "I am
Carl Bonner," he said. "I represent your wife in her suit
for dissolution of the marriage."

"
Lawyers," Trout said, and moved back to
the sink and began to shave. He did not climb back up the chair to
use the mirror, and in a moment he was bleeding.

Bonner watched, determined to wait him out. He
crossed his arms and spread his feet and looked around the room.
Bottles, empty cans, it was like someone lived there. Trout wiped the
soap off his face, leaving red stains on the towel. He put on his
shirt and replaced his suspenders, making popping noises as he let
them go. He left the towel on the floor.

"
Mr. Trout, I am here about your wife."

"
Don't have one," he said. He passed in
front of Bonner and sat down behind his desk.

"
Legally, sir, you do."

Trout pointed a crooked finger at him and said, "I've
took as much abuse as I'm going to, pretty boy. A woman throws you
out, she loses her claim .... "

"
The only thing she wants is deed to her house
and the money you took from her when you married," he said.
"That, and the attorney fees. There's nothing else, except to
rid herself of the name Trout." Trout did not answer.

"
l have general information on the state of your
finances. The bank you run and the holding company is worth half a
million dollars. There's eight hundred sixty-six acres of land in the
eastern part of the state with sawmill timber, worth a hundred
thousand, and you have deed to an apartment house which, along with
your store, is valued at thirty thousand dollars. Then there is
whatever you've got in the safes."

Bonner paused for a moment. "All Mrs. Trout
wants," he repeated, "is her four thousand dollars, the
house, and my fees."

Trout laughed out loud.

"This goes to court, it will cost you more than
that," Bonner said. "There's judgments where the wife gets
a third of the property .... "

"Find it," Trout said. "Collect all
the niggers together in court and ask what they owe me. Show me the
lumber deed. Show me where the store makes a profit .... "
Without any warning, he began to laugh again. Bonner waited him out.

"
There's always a way," he said when the
older man was quiet. "You step in mud, you leave a footprint."

"
I don't keep things where just anybody can find
them." He tapped the side of his head and then settled back into
his chair. It occurred to Bonner that the man was having fun with
him. He felt his face go numb with anger.

"
I expect that's true," he said, "but
there is another matter." Trout put his hands flat on the
desktop and stared. "The matter of Petersboro County."

"There ain't no matter of Petersboro County.
That's over."

Bonner turned the chair and sat down. "Judge
Raymond Mims,"  he said. The man did not seem to hear him.
"You paid Judge Raymond Mims to get you out on a writ of habeas
corpus, a move unheard of before in any court in this state."

 
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.