Paris Trout (41 page)

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.

He was glaring at her again, the paper cup he had
been holding was crushed in his fist. Leslie Bonner was meeting his
look now, she had asked him for as much as she was going to.

"
Pull off the blanket," she said.

It stopped him. "Pull it off," she said; He
took a step back, looking uncertain. "Pull off the goddamn
blanket, Carl, and see if his peter's out of his pants."

Carl Bonner covered his eyes and sat heavily on the
arm rest across the aisle. The squashed cup dropped from his hand.
Harry Seagraves, who was about ten seconds behind the conversation,
was suddenly sorry for the boy, before he'd even gotten mad.

He stood up, the blanket dropping on the floor at his
feet, and put his hand behind Carl Bonners neck. "When I was
young," he said, "I once accused Lucy of sleeping with my
own brother." It wasn't true — he'd thought it, but he'd never
said it out loud — but it was true enough for now. He stepped
closer, so only Bonner could hear. "Said it out loud at a family
picnic. The plain fact is, son, pussy makes you stupid .... " He
considered that a moment and said, "That or picnics."

Carl Bonner sat still, the understanding of what he
had done washing over him in slow, regular waves.

Seagraves patted the back
of his neck, his hand coming away wet with Bonner's perspiration.
Leslie Bonner was right where she had been before, holding the drink
he'd given her. "I'l1 be back directly to freshen that for you,"
he said. "I'll come back, and we'll all have a toast."

* * *

THE PUBLIC STOCKS WENT up Monday morning, on the
sidewalk in front of the courthouse. A long table was carried out of
the prosecutor's office and set to one side, along with the chair
that had been used by former Superior Court Judge Bear Lewis, the
midget. Even out here on the sidewalk, the occupant of the chair
would sit higher than those he judged.

The Keepers of the Bush oversaw this construction and
the theft of the chair. Harry Seagraves, Ward Townes, and Carl
Bonner. They gave instructions to the carpenter, an elderly man named
Lloyd Rose, as if they had been supervising the building of stocks
all their lives.

At one point Seagraves took the coping saw out of the
carpenter's hand to show him how to cut lumber and broke the blade.

Seagraves, who had not slept or stopped drinking for
more than two hours since Saturday morning, gave Mr. Rose a
ten-dollar bill and warned him not to be caught without whiskers, or
he would lose the money back to the court.

"
I been wearing whiskers in this town forty
years," the old man said. Ward Townes sat on the courthouse
steps while this was going on, smiling into the morning sun.

Carl Bonner made himself busy. He helped carry the
table out of the prosecutor's office, he tested the carpenter's work,
checking that the stocks lay flat against each other where they met.
He told Mr. Rose the boards needed to be sanded.

Mr. Rose gave him a look when he said that.

For the most part, however, Bonner kept silent. And
he stayed away from Seagraves and Townes. Townes judged him to be
hung over. There were some, he thought, like Harry Seagraves, who
could drink all night and hide it, and there were some who couldn't.

Except for the sanding, the stocks were finished by
eleven o'clock. Ward Townes went into the courthouse to the Coke
machine. It took a dime, and the lever was ice-cold. He bought four
Cokes and then walked outside and passed them around to Seagraves and
Bonner and the carpenter. Carl Bonner tried to repay him the ten
cents.

Harry Seagraves sat down on the prosecutor's table
and wiped at his forehead with a hankie. He looked at the Coke —
there were little crystals of ice in the neck — and then drank it
all in four noisy swallows, never taking his mouth off the bottle.

"
You'd think he'd done the work," Ward
Townes said to Bonner.

Bonner looked off and did not reply. Seagraves set
the bottle on the table and hiccuped. He put his hand against his
chest and waited, and a moment later he hiccuped again.

"
Hold your breath," the carpenter said.

Seagraves held his breath. Ward Townes looked around
at the courtyard. "You ever notice how peaceful this town
seems," he said to Carl Bonner, "when Harry there is
holding his breath?"

Bonner smiled in a sickly way, and the prosecutor
wondered if he'd had words with Seagraves, perhaps last night at the
Moose. In fact, Bonner had been at home, having words with his wife.

Seagraves's breath came out in a rush, and he sat
still a moment, waiting.

"
See there? I told you," the carpenter
said.

Seagraves hiccuped. The carpenter looked into the
trees. "Didn't hold it long enough," he said.

Seagraves took a deep breath and blew this one out.
"All right, gentlemen," he said, "we got us an
inquisition, let's decide on some rules."

"
Rules?" Ward Townes said.

"
You got to have penalties," the carpenter
explained. "If a man breaks the rules, he's got to pay the
price."

"What price?" Townes said.

"Half-dol1ar," the carpenter said.

"
That's all right with me," Townes said,
"except we already spent the morning building a public stocks.
We ought to use it."

Harry Seagraves said, "Are we gone throw
somebody into the stocks because they don't have a half-dollar on
them?"

"
We could if we don't like them," Townes
said.

Seagraves thought it over. "That's fair,"
he said. "Half a dollar for a clean-shaven face, or an hour in
the stocks if we don't like you."

"Good," Townes said, and looked at Bonner.

Carl Bonner shrugged. "Son," Seagraves
said, talking to him directly for the first time that morning, "you
going to sit in judgment on this court, you've got to be assertive.
Think of Judge Taylor on his bench, the most ignorant man in the
State of Georgia, handing down decisions like it was direct from the
mouth of God. He isn't afraid to make an ass of hisself, and when he
does it, it's written down in public records."

Ward Townes saw that Seagraves was talking to the
young attorney in a private way and stood to excuse himself. He said
he had work to finish back at his office.

"Whoa, there, Mr. Prosecutor," Seagraves
said. Townes stopped.

"We got to decide on a schedule. We can't be
bringing these miscreants by at all hours of the day and night. We
need a regular time, every day, so the public can witness for itself
the fair administration of justice."

"
Five o'clock?" the carpenter said.

"
Mr. Rose," Seagraves said to the
carpenter, "you may well possess the finest legal mind in the
State of Georgia."

A few minutes later Seagraves and Carl Bonner were
alone. Seagraves was sitting on the courthouse steps, eyes closed,
his head resting against one of the white pillars that rose half the
height of the building. He was holding his third Coca-Cola of the
morning between his legs.

Carl Bonner was standing on the other side of the
steps. He almost spoke once, and stopped. The words caught, and there
was no place for them to go. "Thank you," he said finally,
"for not pressing your advantage on me."

Harry Seagraves opened his eyes.

"
On the train," Bonner said. "I had no
call .... "

Seagraves took a drink from the bottle, then held it
up in front of himself to judge how much was gone. He pointed at the
spot behind Bonner where the men had left their coats. "If you
would," he said, and hiccuped.

Carl Bonner handed him the coat, which felt weighted.
Harry Seagraves found his flask in an inside pocket, removed the lid,
and brought the Coke bottle back up to full. Then he covered the top
with his thumb and turned the bottle upside down. "You and me
don't have any apologizing to do to each other," he said.

When the drink was mixed, he returned the flask to
his coat pocket and offered the bottle to Carl Bonner. Bonner
declined. "That's what got me in trouble Saturday," he
said.

Seagraves tasted the mixture, coughed, and tears came
to his eyes. "Then you ought take a bottle of Coke-Cola here
every morning," he said, meaning the kind he was holding, "and
drink it to remind yourself what a good life you have, that what
happened Saturday is your idea of trouble."

"
I accused innocent people," he said.

"I can't speak for your missus," Seagraves
said, "but I've put some distance between myself and innocent."

He tried the mixture
again, but it tasted as bad as it had before. Carl Bonner began to
say something else, but Seagraves stopped him. "You want to know
the truth," he said, pointing at the bottle, "it wasn't
this got you into anything on the train. It was impatience. If
everybody in Georgia learned tomorrow to keep their mouth shut when
they think they got something that can't wait, there wouldn't be work
but for maybe eleven lawyers in the state."

* * *

THE SCHEDULE WAS POSTED on the pillars outside the
courthouse and in the windows of most of the businesses in town. The
Keepers of the Bush held court every evening from five to seven. The
stocks were moved under a tree so that prisoners would not have to
serve their
sentences in the sun.

The three judges — Seagraves, Townes, and Carl
Bonner — sat two at a time behind the long table outside the
courthouse, one of them in Judge Bear Lewis's special chair and the
other in a smaller chair to the side. The judge who was not sitting
in Bear Lewis's special chair acted as a bailiff.

Two youngsters from the high school dressed in police
uniforms from the 1890s stood by to operate the stocks.

The defendants, for the most part, were ticketed by
police during the day and ordered to appear that afternoon. One of
the first was former Judge Bear Lewis himself; who was practicing law
now in a  fleabag office in Bloodtown. Harry Seagraves was
sitting in Lewis's old chair, Ward Townes was acting bailiff. Bear
Lewis had shaved himself that morning and tried to pass off his
sideburns as whiskers.
 

"
Your Honors," he said, in a voice that
seemed to come from deeper pipes than he could have had, "as I
read the town ordinance, I see no specific reference to how much
facial hair a citizen is required to wear, only that he must not
shave clean. I would put it to the court that my sideburns constitute
facial hair and ask for a directed verdict."

Several hundred people had collected on the
courthouse lawn that evening for the first session of court, mostly
to watch Harry Seagraves. Seagraves looked down at Bear Lewis and
cleared his throat. The courthouse lawn went quiet. "Do I
understand you to say that you have found a loophole in the city
ordinance?"

"I believe I have," the former judge said.

"
Do I understand you to say that the author of
this ordinance is incompetent?"

Bear Lewis scratched his oversize head. "That
would depend," he said, "on who the author of the ordinance
is."

Harry Seagraves conferred with Ward Townes while the
crowd laughed. There was some hooting and calls of "Sic 'em,
Bear."

Bear Lewis had been a popular judge, and there was
always talk of putting him back on the ballot for the next election.
It had been his habit to begin court in the morning with the
following words: "All you niggers with lawyers on that side of
the room, and all you niggers without lawyers on t'other."

Judge Taylor, on the other hand, had presided at the
trial of Paris Trout.

"
Mr. Lewis," Seagraves said when he had
finished talking with Ward Townes, "it is the opinion of this
court that your claim is without merit. However, noting your
respectful regard for the authors of this ordinance, it has been
decided not to remit you to custody, but to fine you the prescribed
fifty cents."

The truth was, Seagraves could not stand to see a
midget in the stocks.