Paris Trout (18 page)

She sat up a few inches until she could see the foot.

"You understand what I said?"

"
Thank you for
coming," she said.

* * *

AFTER THE DOCTOR LEFT, she heard them talking again
in the front room. It occurred to her that the construction of the
place was peculiar, that conversations in certain rooms downstairs
carried into all the other rooms in the house, but that the sounds
from the other rooms could not be heard downstairs. It occurred to
her that it was somehow intentional.

They were talking about Judge Taylor. Paris said he'd
heard the judge secretly loved niggers.

The attorney said, "It's no consequence to you,
one way or the other. You want to help, keep yourself low."

"I pay my bills. I do my work."

The men moved, and she could not make out the words.
When she heard them again, her husband was saying, "She gets a
temper sometimes, messes up the kitchen .... "

"It isn't the kitchen I'm worried about."

"
Doctors can't say nothing about it anyway. It's
their oath."

"What about the trial?" Seagraves said.
"What if she gets a temper there?"

"She don't do it in public," her husband
said.

It was quiet a moment, and then she heard her husband
again. "What if we kept her away?"

"
From court? Your own wife? Think how it would
look."

"Maybe her foot got infected. Or she hurt
herself in the fall."

She sensed his thinking then, saw it for one long,
clear moment.

"
No," the attorney said. "It's a bad
time to be claiming accidents happen."

Hanna sat up in bed and carefully put her feet down,
one at a time. She used a straight-back chair as a crutch and limped
into the bathroom and began to refill the tub. She slid herself back
into it, resting her injured foot on the lip. With the noise of the
running water, she couldn't hear them talking anymore and could no
longer picture her husband's thoughts.

He came to her door later, carrying a tray. He
knocked and walked without waiting for her to answer. He set the tray
on the table next her bed, wax beans, candied potatoes, some kind of
pork, iced tea. Everything he brought was canned except the tea.

He had cleaned himself up, shaved and changed clothes
and parted his hair, and after he'd set the tray down, he turned the
chair she had used for a crutch and sat down backwards, resting his
chin on his arms.

He began to speak, then stopped himself and smiled.
It was his nicest smile, the one that hid his teeth. She didn't move,
not an inch.

"Have you ate?"

She looked at the tray and felt a sweet nausea
balance itself in her oat. She looked away, and it moved away from
the edge.

"
Have you?"

"You got to eat. Doctor said so."

"
He said no such thing."

He picked the fork up off the tray and cut a piece
off one of the orange potatoes. A small piece. He moved it across the
bed until it sat under her nose. She stared at him, seeing the fork
and his hand in double vision. She moved away. "No."

He put the fork on the plate, still holding the piece
of food, and closed his eyes. For a moment she could see his thoughts
again, and then he spoke, and she knew she was right.

"
I got to feed you then?" he said.

She shook her head and moved to the far edge of the
bed.

"
You think it's tainted?"

"
I can't eat."

"You ain't tried."

"I took medication,'", she said. Which
wasn't true.

"It don't matter," he said. He brought the
fork back to her mouth and waited for her to accept it. She turned
away, pressing herself against the wall. The chair moved. Then the
bed dipped under his weight, and she felt his hand on her shoulder.

A moment passed, and the grip tightened. He turned
her by the shoulder, flattened it against the bed, bringing her back
toward him. Then he let go and found another hold, just under the ear
that was pressed into her pillow, and brought her face around to meet
him. She opened her eyes and saw he was still holding the fork. Saw
that there was something in the forcing he wanted.

"Nothing is changed," he said. "I'm
still here."

"Everything is changed," she said. He had
tightened down on her jaw, and it affected her speech. A line of spit
hung from the comer of her mouth. He shook his head, and the smile
came back. His nice one, without the teeth.

"Whatever you think changed wasn't never me."

She began to speak, but his fingers pressed into her
jaw on both sides, opening her mouth, and then he Put the fork inside
— so far inside it gagged her — and pulled it out against her
upper lip. She felt the cold candied potato drop onto her tongue. She
tried to spit it out, but he had her jaws.

"Swallow it," he said. He forced her mouth
closed. "Swallow."

He watched her throat, and when she had swallowed he
said, "See? It ain't tainted. It's good food."

He turned back to the tray, sticking the fork into
the pile of wax beans, and she tried to run. He caught her by the
hair and pulled her head backwards until it rested on his fist
against the bed. He had dropped the fork, and with his fingers he
reached into the plate and picked up a piece of the canned pork. He
held it over her face. She clenched her teeth.

He laid the pork across her lips. Then he pushed it
inside. His fingers were thick and hard and slid with the piece of
meat into her cheek. She had not opened her teeth. He pulled his
finger out and looked at her. "Swallow," he said.

She did not move.

He studied her a moment. He said, "Does it need
salt?" and she spit the meat out of her mouth. It rested on her
own chest. She felt it there but could not see it. His purchase did
not offer her head an inch of movement in any direction.

  "
Stop it," she said. "My hair .
. ."

  "
Hair?" he said.

 
He reached down, out of her line of sight, and
then she felt his hand up underneath her nightgown. It followed her
legs, which were tight together, to her underpants. He went in
through one of the legs, his whole hand, and then, for a moment, she
thought he had torn her open.

His hand came out, holding a little patch of her
pubic hair between his thumb and first finger. Tiny pieces of flesh
were still attached where they had been uprooted. He held it over her
face, in the same way he had held the pork. "Did you want hair?"

He dropped the hair in her face and picked the pork
up off her chest and put it in her mouth. She chewed it and swallowed
it. He filled her mouth with a whole candied potato, choking her, and
then the beans, and then the rest of the meat. She lay with her head
pinned to his fist and swallowed.

"Nothing is different," he said. "You
just misunderstood the way things was."

She swallowed until there was nothing left to eat. He
let go of her hair, watching her, and then, gently, he leaned closer
and whispered, "You understood it now, don't you?"

A numbing sensation spread across the back of her
head, her injured toes pounded against the wrapping. It seemed to her
he was asking if she knew he would kill her.

"
I'm different now," she said.

She saw that puzzled him,
and in the moment before he got off the bed, she glimpsed his
apprehension.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING EVENING he arrived home from work and
stood at the gate for nearly an hour. She watched from the bedroom
window. She had planned to leave that morning, take the train to
Savannah, but as she packed her things into suitcases, hobbling from
her bed to the dresser, she lost her resolve.

She imagined Paris intercepting her on the way to the
depot, she imagined herself in Savannah, in her sister's house. The
questions. She imagined herself without a house of her own. She sat
on the bed and realized that Paris had somehow stolen her direction
too.

She was still on the bed, hours later, when he took
his station by the gate. He looked down the street, toward the center
of town, and checked his pocket watch frequently. People passed in
front of him, some of them as close as the gate itself; but he did
not speak to any of them. He did not look at the children.

She remembered the day — they had been
married less than a week — he had forbidden her to associate with
the Godseys, who were their neighbors. He said it was a business
matter. And then, one by one, he found business reasons or grudges —
one meant the other — against everyone she spoke to and isolated
her in the same way he had isolated himself.

* * *

THE TRUCK WAS a flatbed, similar to the ones that
hauled lumber, and it arrived just after seven o'clock. It was empty
and seemed to come from the wrong way — at least it was not the
direction Paris had been watching — but as soon as it stopped,
Paris opened the passenger door and climbed in. She could not be sure
from the window, but it appeared to be Buster Devonne behind the
wheel.

It seemed to her that
Paris might intend to take him into the country and shoot him, except
she did not know why he would need a truck for that.

* * *

HE WAS GONE A long time. She slept in a bothered way,
dropping in and out, listening, even in her sleep, for the sound of
the truck. It came deep in the night and stopped in front.

Paris got out one side, Buster Devonne got out the
other. They unloaded what looked like a door, sliding it off the bed
onto a two-wheel dolly. They wheeled the dolly through the gate and
up the sidewalk. She heard Buster Devonne's voice as he came in the
door.

"
This damn thing heavier than a lead pussy,
Paris."

His reputation for offensive language, even as an
officer of the law, was admired all over Ether County. He would say
whatever came into his head without regard to where he happened to be
at the time. Those who did not admire Buster Devonne's language
frequently made the observation that the man obviously had a small
vocabulary.

Hanna did not know Buster Devonne at all, but she did
not believe the limits of his vocabulary explained his manners.

They came up the stairs, pausing between each step,
pulling the dolly. They went into Paris's room, and Buster Devonne
said, "Maybe we could lie this sumbitch sideways and slide it
over."

Paris did not answer, and in a moment there was a
crash and the floor shook. It was quiet, and then Buster Devonne
said, "Son of a bitch, Paris" — enunciating each word —
"now we got to pick this fucker up."

 
She heard them moving around the room, and then
she heard Paris counting. "One, two, three . . ." The word
"three" seemed to choke and die, and then she heard Buster
Devonne trying to talk, and it sounded like somebody was squeezing
him lifeless.

There was another crash — softer than the first
one, with more of a metal sound — and then hard breathing. "The
bastard must of gone four hundret pounds," Buster Devonne said.

"It was two fifty in Macon."

"
No sir, I know two fifty, and that ain't it.
That there is at least three fifty. Rely on that."

It was quiet a long minute. "Are you reliable,
Buster?" he said.

"They ain't nothing going to happen to us."

"
It might," her
husband said.

* * *

SHE PUT A SOCK over her good foot and went back into
his room the next morning. He'd left his door open again. The glare
of the sun off the floor caught her again, and she stopped in the
doorway a moment, dizzy, and then moved to the windows and looked
back. She had found a way to walk that didn't hurt her as much,
keeping her weight on the outside of her foot. She had been walking
on her heel, but in compensating that way, she pulled at the nerves
below the cuts. You could not walk on your heels to avoid hurting
your toes.

His bed was a mess, the mattress slightly off center.
It took her a moment to see it, underneath. A sheet of lead, a
quarter inch thick, ran the length of the mattress and lacked only
half a foot of being as wide. She knew what it was. He was afraid of
being shot from underneath. She pictured herself doing it: three
muffled shots and then his hand dropping off the bed into view.

She went out of the room, not touching the door, and
walked down the stairs. She sat down beside the phone and tried to
call Harry Seagraves. First his office, then his home.

His wife picked up the phone at home. Hanna could not
remember her name. "This is Hanna Trout," she said. "I
wonder if I might speak with your husband."

"I'm sorry," she said, "Mr. Seagraves
isn't in presently. May I take a message?"

She tried to think of a message. She said, "Would
you tell him, please, that I need to speak to him, in confidence?"

"
In regards to what matter?"