Paris Trout
Pete Dexter
1988

This book is for
James Maurice Quinlan
And Mickey Rosati
two of a kind.

I
ROSIE
Part One

IN THE SPRING of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia. The disease was carried principally by foxes and was reported first by farmers, who, in the months of April and May, shot more than seventy of the animals and turned them in to the county health officer in Cotton Point.

The heads were removed, wrapped in plastic, and sent to the state health department in Atlanta, where eleven were found to be rabid. There is no record of human beings contracting the disease — the victims for the most part were cattle — although two residents of an outlying area of Cotton Point called Damp Bottoms were reportedly bitten.

One of them, an old man known only as Woodrow, was found lying under his house a day later, dead. He was buried by the city in a bare, sun-baked corner of Horn Cemetery without medical tests and without a funeral.

The other was a fourteen-year-old girl named Rosie Sayers, who was bothered by nightmares.

Rosie Sayers was tall and delicately boned, and her front teeth lay cross her lips like sleeping white babies. She was afraid of things she could not see and would not leave the house unless she was forced.

The house was flat-roofed and warped. It had five rooms, and the wallboards that defined them were uneven, so you could see through the walls from any of the rooms into the next.

She lived in this house with her mother and her brothers and sisters. There were fourteen of them in all, but Rosie had never counted the number. She had never thought to.

The brothers and sisters slept through Rosie's screams in the night — it was a part of things, like the whistling in her youngest brother's breathing — but her mother's visitors, unaccustomed to the girl's affliction, would sometimes bolt up in bed at the noise, and sometimes they would stumble into their pants in the dark and leave.

Her mother called the dreams "spells" and from time to time stuck needles in the child's back as an exorcism. Usually after one of her visitors had left in the night. Rosie would stand in front of her, bare-backed, allowing it.

On the day she was bitten by the fox, Rosie Sayers had been sent into town to buy a box of .22 caliber shells from Mr. Trout. Her mother had a visitor that week who was a sportsman.

Mr. Trout kept a store on North Main Street. There was a string on the door that tripped a bell when anyone walked in. Colored people stopped just inside the door and waited for him. White people picked out what they wanted for themselves. There was one light inside, a bare bulb, hanging from a cord in the back. He came out of the dark, it reminded her of a ghost. He glowed tall and white. "What is it?" he said.

"Bullets," she said. The word lost itself in the darkness, the sound of the bell was still in the room.

"Speak up, girl."

"Twenty-two bullets," she said.

He turned and ran a long white finger along the shelf behind, and when he came back to her, he was holding a small box. "That's seventy cent," he said, and she reached into the tuck of her shirt and found the dollar her mother had given her. It was balled-up and damp, and she smoothed it out before she handed it over.

He took the money and made change from his own pocket. Mr. Trout didn't use a cash register. He put the box of shells in her hand, he didn't use bags much either. She had never held a box of shells before and was surprised at the weight. He crossed his arms and waited.

"I ain't got forever," he said.

* * *

SHE WALKED to the north end of town and then followed the Georgia Pacific Railroad tracks, east and north, back to the sawmill. Damp Bottom sat behind the mill, built on rose-colored dirt, not a tree to be seen. It made sense to her that trees wouldn't dare to grow near a sawmill.

There was a storage shed between the mill and the houses, padlocked in front and back, with small, dirty windows on the side. Her brothers said there were dead men inside, but she never looked for herself. Rosie's grandmother had died in bed, her mouth open and contorted, as if that were the route her life took leaving her, and that was all the dead people she ever meant to see.

She passed the windows wide, averting her eyes, and when she was safely by and looked in front of herself again, she saw the fox. He was dull red and tired and seemed in some way to recognize her.

She stopped cold in her tracks, the fox picked up his head. She took a slow step backwards, and he followed her, keeping the same distance. Then he moved again, closer, and seemed to sway. She heard her own breathing as she backed away.

The movement only seemed to draw him; something drew him. "Please, Mr. Fox," she said, "don't poison me. I be out of your way, quick as you seen me, I be gone."

She knew foxes had turned poisonous from her brothers. Worse an a snake. She stopped again, and he stopped with her. Her brothers 'd when the poison fox bit you, you were poison too.

The fox cocked his head, and she began to run. She didn't know where. Her legs were strong; but before she had gone ten steps, they seemed to tangle in each other, and she was surprised, looking down just before she fell, to see the fox between them. Then she closed her eyes and hit the ground.

She never felt the bites. The fox growled — the sound was higher-pitched than a dog, and busier — and then she kicked out with her heels and felt his coat and the bones beneath it. He cried out, and when she kicked again nothing was there.

She opened her eyes, and as fast as he had come he was gone. She stood up slowly, collecting her breath, and dusted herself off. She was thorough about it, she didn't like to be dirty, and it was only when her hand touched the inside of her calf and felt blood that she knew that he had opened her up.

She saw the bites then, two small openings on the same leg, closer to her ankle than her knee. The blood wasn't much and had already dried everywhere except near the tears in the skin. She sat back down on the ground and began to cry. The clay was scorched, but she didn't feel that either.

She cried because she was poisoned.

In a few minutes the crying began to hurt her head, and she stood up again, shaky-legged now, afraid her mother would know what had happened. Afraid of what her mother would do.

She spit in the palm of her hand and wiped at the blood on her leg, over and over, until her mouth was too dry to spit. Then she rubbed both her hands on the ground, picking up orange-colored dust, and covered her legs and her knees, not to draw attention to the one that was injured.

She put dust on her elbows and some on her cheeks and neck. Her mother would be angry, to have her walk into the house dirty when she had a visitor, but she wouldn't know about the fox.

She remembered the visitor.

She turned a circle, looking for the box of shells. It was a present for him because he was a sportsman. Her mother said he might shoot them rabbits for supper.

The box was gone. She looked all around her and then back toward the shed. She traced her steps past the shed to the spot she had been when she looked up and saw the fox. She searched the ground and the weeds growing around the shed, looking up every few seconds because she was afraid the fox would be there again.

The fox was gone, though, and so were the bullets.

She stood still and waited, she didn't know for what. The sun moved in the sky. She stopped crying; the scared feeling passed and left her calm. She wondered if her mother would allow the visitor to whip her.

She had done that before.

Her thoughts turned again to the bullets and then from the bullets to the place she had gotten them. Mr. Trout wasn't as frightening now; it felt like he might be glad to see her again. And when she finally moved away, feeling a tightness at first in the leg where the fox had bitten her, it was back in the direction of the store.

* * *

ROSIE SAYERS could not tell time, and her sense of it was that it belonged to some people and not to others. All the white people had it, and all the colored people who owned cars. Her mother's visitors had it, they would mention it when they left. "Lordy, look at the time .... "

She worried now that the time had run out for the stores to be open. She hurried her walk, following the railroad tracks. The tracks curved and then fed themselves into a bridge on the edge of town. A train was stopped there, car after car of lumber as far as she could see. The smell of fresh-cut pine.

She climbed the embankment to the bridge, using her hands, and when she came to the top the whistle blew, and the cars banged against each other as the slack in their couplings was pulled from the front, and then, together, they began to move slowly up the track.

And she watched the train from the top of the hill, standing on the bridge that led to town, and she thought of jumping, down into the dark places between the cars, and being taken in that way to the end of the tracks. And for a moment there seemed to be another person inside her too, someone who wanted to jump.

She remembered time then, and the stores and walked away from the train and back into town. She wondered if other people had another person inside them too.

* * *

SHE THOUGHT she was too late. The stores on the lower part of Main Street were half dark inside, and still. White people had gone home. She thought of her mother again and hurried. It felt like her mother was watching.

Mr. Trout's store was as dark as the others, but it had been dark earlier too. She tried the door. The handle turned, she pushed it open. She heard the bell ring and stepped inside and waited. The air was heavy and hard to breathe. She felt herself suspended in it, with the smell of everything there for sale.

There was a fussing in the back, someone was angry. She reached for the door, afraid now that it had somehow locked and that she was trapped inside. Then there was a voice, closer.

"May I help you, miss?"

Rosie turned and saw a lady, as ghostlike as Mr. Trout himself but pretty. The lady straightened and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, getting herself right.

Rosie had never seen a white person cry before — none except the little ones — and it surprised her that they had those feelings too, and that the lady would allow herself to be seen in that condition.

'°What is it, child?" the lady said. She had a sweet voice, as if in the darkness of the store she couldn't see who it was she was talking to.

"Twenty-two bullets," she said.

The lady turned and looked on the shelves behind her. The girl knew where Mr. Trout found the bullets before, but she was reluctant to speak. The lady's finger moved along the goods stacked into the shelves and passed right over them.

"That's them," Rosie said, and the lady jumped at the sound of the voice behind her and something fell off the shelf. The child backed away from the counter, covering her mouth. The lady turned around, though, and smiled. "I'm afraid I'm not used to finding bullets," she said.

"No, ma'am, me neither."

And it was like they were in the same mess, and for a moment it was like the fox had never bitten her.

The lady knelt to pick up the things on the floor. Rosie would have helped; but there was a counter between them, and she knew without being told to stay on her own side. Even if they were in the same mess, white people would think she was stealing.

The lady came back up slowly, flushed and serious. Rosie heard her bones pop. "Now," she said, "where were we?"

"I ain't moved," Rosie said, and showed the lady her hands.

The lady did not look at her hands. She smiled, so small it might have been something that hurt. "That's an expression," she said. "It means, What were we doing?"

"We was huntin' .22 bullets," she said.

Before the lady could return to the shelves, Mr. Trout appeared from the back of the store. just like before, he was suddenly there. He stood behind the lady, staring at the girl.

"What is it now?" he said.

The girl looked at the floor, and when she tried to speak, everything was real again. The fox and the bullets and her mother.

"She wants some bullets, Paris," the lady said.

"More bullets?" he said, to her, not the lady. Rosie nodded, without looking up.

"You have another dollar?"

She reached into the pocket of her shorts and came out with the three dimes he had given her in change when she paid before.

"That ain't enough for a box of shells," he said.

She stood still.

"It ain't enough money," he said, louder, as if she couldn't hear.

She felt herself turn weak inside and knew the fox had poisoned her.

"What happened to them shells you got before?" he asked.

She shook her head. "The fox got them," she said. Without knowting why, she reached down and touched the torn places in her skin.

The lady saw the bites from behind the counter and came around for a closer look. Mr. Trout didn't move. The lady said, "She's been bitten."

"A fox?" he said. "You sure it was a fox?"

"She's been bitten for certain," the lady said.

"It might be a dog," Mr. Trout said. "You know the difference tween a fox and a dog, miss?"

It took the girl a moment to realize he was talking to her. "Yessir," said. "I know dogs."

"You need to go home, tell your mammy what happened," he said.

The lady spoke up again. "She needs to see a doctor," she said.

"Her people got doctors," he said.

The lady put her hands on the girl's shoulders and looked into her eyes. The girl could smell the lady's soap and the shampoo she used to wash her hair. It was sweet, but not as sweet as the toilet water her mother used. "Does your momma take you to the doctor when you're sick?" she said.

"My momma don't know when I'm sick."

And the lady turned and looked at Mr. Trout, her hands still on the girl's shoulders. "I'm going to take her to a doctor," she said.

"In hell," he said.

"She's bitten."

"Probably a damn dog," he said.

"I won't listen to that language in front of a child," the lady said.

"You listen to any goddamn thing I say."

The lady received that as if he'd boxed her ears. She took Rosie by the hand and led her out of the store. Mr. Trout stood where he was and watched them leave. Rosie heard the bell ring as the door closed.

They walked across the street and then to the end of the block. The lady still held on to her hand, but she walked ahead, pulling her now as they turned the corner toward Thomas Cornell Clinic.

The clinic sat across the street from the campus of Georgia Officer Academy, and the girl saw soldier boys in their uniforms over there, some of them younger than herself hurrying in cross directions into the gray buildings. It seemed to her that soldier boys were always hurrying — that the same time that belonged to white people crawled all over them.

She thought she would rather not know anything about time than to have it crawling all over her.

They crossed another street, and the girl noticed the faces in the windows of cars. She guessed it was not every day that a white lady walked up the street toting somebody°s colored girl that wasn't her own.

The lady suddenly turned left, pulling her along. They climbed four steps and then walked through a glass door. A nurse was sitting at a desk at the far end of the room, and the lady left Rosie just inside the door while she told the nurse what happened. The nurse listened and wrote things on a paper.

Every few seconds she looked around the lady to see Rosie for herself. She did it so often that the thought came to the child that the nurse was drawing her picture.

When they had finished talking and writing, the nurse stood up and came across the room after her. The girl backed away. "It's all right," the lady said. "Dr. Braver just wants to take a look."

And the girl looked at the lady and believed her and allowed herself to be taken down a hallway and then into a small room in the back.

"Doctor be with you directly," the nurse said. She put the papers she had been writing on a glass cabinet, and then she frowned, and then she shut the door.

The room was white and bare. There was a narrow bed against one wall, a wood chair against the other. Between them were the cabinet and a sink. The girl could see inside, cotton and little jars of pills. She could not read what was written about her on the paper.

She sat down in the chair and waited. There was a picture on the wall, a white boy and his granddaddy fishing in a river. She studied the picture a minute and saw neither one of them knew how to fish.

She was still thinking about fishing when the door opened and the doctor came in, frowning the same way as the nurse, white hair and white shoes, wearing some loose doctor's instrument around his neck like he didn't even know it was there.

  He did not speak to her at first. He went to the cabinet and looked at the paper the nurse left. He was still looking at it when he spoke.

"You been bit?"

She did not know if he was talking to her or the paper.

He turned around and stared into her face. "You hear what I asked you?"

"Yessir," she said.

"Well? Did you get bit or was it a story?"

"No sir, I don't tell no stories."

"So you been bit."

She pointed to the place on her leg. He looked at it, without trying to get closer. "How long since you had a bath?" he said a minute later.

"Saturday," she said.

He frowned; he looked as unhappy as she was. "You got this dirty since Saturday?"

She looked down at her legs too. "I must of did," she said.

Without another word he left the room, and in a moment the nurse was back. She washed the spot where the fox had bitten her with water and soap from the sink. She was rough and did not touch the skin except with the rag. Rosie could see from her expression that she did not enjoy to wash a colored girl's leg.

When she finished, there was a circle cleaned around the bites, and streaks of dirty water ran down the girl's calf and over her ankles. The nurse threw the washrag into a pail and then scrubbed her hands. It took her longer to scrub her hands than it had to clean the bites.

When the doctor came back into the room, he was carrying a needle. The needle was long enough to go in one side of her and out the other. "What that for?" she said.

The doctor looked tired. "Rabies shots," he said. She shook her head no and edged farther back into the chair. "If you got bit by a fox," he said, "you got to have shots." He held the needle up for her to see.

"They go in your stomach."

"I don't want nothin' like that inside my stomach less I swallow it," she said.

"Now, you're sure it wasn't some dog," he said. "If it was a dog, the police just take you home, maybe ask what it looked like. As simple as pie, if it was a dog." She saw him looking at her; she couldn't see what he wanted.

"The police doesn't know where I live," she said.

"They take you where I tell them," he said.

"I never heard of that," she said.

"It's for when you get bit," he said. "Once somebody brought you here, the police got to take you home."

The girl sat still a moment, looking at the needle. "I believe I take the ride home," she said.

The doctor laid the needle down on the glass counter. "Then it wasn't no fox," he said. He looked at her as he said that and shook his head no.

"No sir," she said.

"A lot of them dogs," he said, "they look like a fox, don't they?"

And then he was gone from the room again, and a minute later the nurse led her out the back of the clinic and waited there with her until a police came to pick her up.

He put her in the back seat and then got in himself behind the wheel.

"Where to, miss?" he said.

She did not answer at first.

He turned in his seat. "Where's your house at?"

"The Bottoms," she said.

He put the car into gear and started out of the alley. "I heard that's a nice neighborhood," he said. She saw him smile.

He turned left at the end of the alley, and they drove back through town. The girl pressed her face into the window, and as they passed Main Street she saw the lady again, heading back in the direction of the store. The lady had lost the purpose in her walk, though, as if she hadn't made up her mind where to go.

THE POLICE FOLLOWED the road that followed the railroad. The ride was smooth until they were out of town, and then the car slowed and began to bounce. The window bumped against the girl's forehead and her teeth until she moved away, leaving wet marks on the glass.

The road passed through brush and then separated two large pine trees. The back seat of the car was suddenly darker, and she heard the branches scrape the sides. Then they were back in the open, and she saw the railroad tracks again, and then the sawmill, and beyond that Damp Bottom.

She was excited, as if she had been away a long time, and she wondered what the neighbors would think to see her coming home in a police car.

"The car stopped, and the police turned again in his seat. "Home sweet home," he said.

"Yessir," she said.

"This is it?"

She looked out the window. Half the Bottoms were standing out on their porches, to see what the police was up to now. It was an out-of-the-way thing, to see a single police car in the Bottoms. When they came, they brought everybody but Baby Jesus.

The police got out, the car dipped and rose, and then he opened her door.

"Which is your house?" he said.

She nodded to the tar-roof shack just ahead of the car. Most of her brothers and sisters were outside; there was no sign of her mother. No sign of the visitor. The police began to walk in that direction, and suddenly she did not want him near the house. She didn't know why.

He was smiling, enjoying something she did not understand. He was a big man, not old at all, and where his neck came out of his collar, it looked swollen up. He walked ahead of her all the way to the porch steps.

"I be home now," she said quietly.

He smiled and shook his head. "I got to deliver you to your mammy," he said. "It's a city law."

Rosie felt it again, that the police should not be near the house. She felt it and stopped. He walked ahead, forgetting her, up two steps to the porch and through her brothers and sisters to the door. When he was there, he turned to her and winked.

He knocked, and she saw the visitor in the side window.

He was standing against the wall, a shadow in a shadow, his chest rising and falling as if something had chased him a long ways. The police knocked again, and the girl's mother answered the door. At the same time the visitor climbed into the window frame, squatting, and the girl saw he was holding a knife in his teeth.

It resembled a smile.

"Miz Sayers," the police was saying, "I am Officer Andrews, and I brung you something home."

The girl's mother looked around the police until she saw her.

'°What's she did?"

The police's head moved back until a roll of skin formed over his collar. "Nothin'," he said. "But a white lady fetched her to the clinic on account she said she been bit by something."

The visitor's eyes were scared and crazy. He perched on the ledge of the window without moving, not even a finger, but the girl could see everything inside him was jumping one side to the other.

"I ain't got no money for foolishlessness," her mother said to the police. "That girl got no bi'nis in no clinic."

The police said, "I don't know nothin, about that. I just brung her home." He looked around the porch as he said that, smiling, and then he looked into the house. The visitor jumped from the ledge and hit the ground running. The knife was still in his teeth.

A changing number of children had collected along the side of the house to watch the police talk to Rosie Sayers's mother, and when the visitor jumped, one of them shouted, and then all of them shouted, and the police took two quick steps to the side of the porch and saw the visitor for himself

"Sonofabitch," he said, and he took off his hat and his shoes and socks and set out after him.

When he was gone some of the children moved in for a closer look at the police's shoes. Rosie Sayers stood where she was and her mother went to the side of the porch, her hands on her rump, and shouted after the police. "You ain't got no call to chase that man," she said. "That man ain't did nothin'."

But even the children knew that was a story. If you run away, the police was supposed to chase you.

The visitor disappeared into the sawmill, and a minute later he came out the other side and started up a long, grassy pasture that led to a place called Sleepy Heights. Some of the girls who lived in the Bottoms were maids in Sleepy Heights, and it was a bad-luck place for an out-of-town nigger to be running away from a police.

The police stayed on the visitor's trail, running about the same speed, and then seemed to make up ground going uphill through the pasture.

The girl's mother watched until the visitor had disappeared and the police had disappeared after him, and then she turned and laid her eyes on Rosie. The girl stepped backwards, stumbling. And a second later, before she knew she was talking, she heard words coming out of her mouth.

And the words said that she was bit by a poisonous fox.

Her mother's look changed then. She seemed to forget the visitor and the police and all the pickaninnies in the yard. She seemed to forget the child herself. "The devil got you for his own, don't he?" she said finally.

"No, ma'am," the girl said.

Her mother closed her eyes, listening to God. She always closed her eyes to listen to God, and she nodded as He gave her the words. She opened her eyes again and spoke what He had told her. "You wasn't born of love," she said. "You was the child of Satan."

"It might been a dog," she said, but it was too late.

Her mother was scowling at the sky. "The Lord told me all along," she said, "and now I listened."

The girl looked down at herself to see if anything had changed, but she was the same, except for the bandage covering the places where the fox had torn her skin. Two shots went off: somewhere in the distance.

Her mother had just spoken to the Lord and was not concerned with the affairs of humans in Sleepy Heights. "l will not have Satan's child under my roof," she said, sounding something like the Lord herself.

The girl could not find an answer. She waited to see if her mother would change her mind.

* * *

AN HOUR PASSED, and the police came out of Sleepy Heights. Rosie watched him, walking downhill through the pasture, barefoot. He crossed the creek and then the railroad tracks. He passed wide around the sawmill yard.

By the time he reached the Bottoms, the children had scattered back into their houses, or under their houses. Rosie stood by herself, with no place to go when the police came to collect his shoes and hat, no place to hide if he was mad.

The police's hair was cut so close she could see his head through it, and when he got into the yard she noticed the beads of sweat there, and running every direction down his face and neck into his uniform. The dust had collected in the sweat and streaked. His shoes lay together on the ground where he had left them, untouched. His hat was a few feet away.

She stood still, hoping he wouldn't see her. He picked up his things and opened the door to his car. He sat half in and half out to put on his socks and shoes, and then he stood up to check that it was comfortable. And when he had done all that, he suddenly looked up, right at her, and winked again.

"That rascal was tricky," he said.

"Yessir."

He slapped some of the dust off his pants and shirt sleeves. "What's the boy's name?"

"He ain't nobody I know," she said.

The police smiled at her. "He ain't your brother, is he?"

"No sir, he ain't nobody."

"Well," the police said, "he can run, I'll say that."

"Yessir," she said, and looked at her feet.

"I don't know what he was running for, but I expect he had his reasons." Then he laughed out loud, but it wasn't much of a laugh. If it was funny to him, he wouldn' have walked out of his way around the sawmill, where the men would think it was funny too.

He said, "That boy about led me into a yard had a police dog that don't like police." The police looked her over, and she stood still as the air. "Your mammy ain't going to tell me who it was either, is she?"

"No sir."

And he laughed again, but it didn't mean it was funny. She believed he was going to take somebody into town and crack open his head. But then he said, "Well, if he comes back, you tell him for me that him and me will have another time. You tell him that, hear?"

"Yessir," she said.

And he looked around once, not another soul in sight, and then got into his car and drove out to the end of the Bottoms. He stopped there a minute, still looking, and then the car moved again, back in the direction of town, leaving a cloud of orange dust to settle after he was
gone.

* * *

THE VISITOR'S NAME was Alvin Crooms, and he came back at dusk. He climbed in the same window he had jumped out of that afternoon, and Rosie heard him later inside with her mother, telling the story. The story was like liquor, and she heard them go back to it again and again, until it had made them drunk.

She sat outside, her back against a neighbor's bricks, where she could watch the house. The night turned cold; she didn't move. She waited for her mother to change her mind.

Once, when they were all asleep inside, a nightmare started while she was still awake. She bit her hand and stopped it.

A rooster woke her in the morning. She jumped at the sound, not knowing where she was. The sky was pink over Sleepy Heights, the rooster crowed again, and she was wide-awake.

It was a long time before there were stirring noises inside the house. Her mother liked to stay in bed when she had visitors, she liked people to see the good-looking ones when they left her house.

The girl ached and changed her position on the ground.

* * *

THE SUN BROKE THE line of the sky, and she heard them inside, talking. One of her sisters looked out a window at her, then disappeared. The next person in the window was the visitor himself, and he noticed her in a certain way that caused her to press herself into the bricks.

There was the smell of fires in the air, people cooking breakfast. She heard voices she knew, but in some way they were unfamiliar. Her bottom ached, and there was a throbbing in the place where the fox had bitten her leg. She looked down at the bandage and saw that she had swollen all around it.

The sun gathered itself in the sky, smaller and hotter, and presently the girl's mother and the visitor came out onto the porch. Her mother did not look in her direction. The visitor leaned into her mother's shoulder and told her a secret. She laughed out loud, putting her hand on the visitor's arm as if to hold herself up.

Her mother wanted the neighbors to notice that her visitor had come back. He patted her bottom and then left the porch, taking the two steps down with one stride. He pointed his finger at the girl and motioned for her to get up.

She stayed where she was.

"Come on, girl," he said.

"No sir," she said.

He took a step toward her and she scooted that far away. "Your momma said for me to tote you along," he said.

The girl shook her head. The visitor looked back toward the porch, and the girl looked there too. Her mother would not meet her eyes. "I get you the strap," she said to him. "She do what you said then."

Her mother disappeared into the house and came out a moment later with a thick black belt. The girl didn't move until she handed it to the visitor. It looked different in his hand, and she got to her feet, pushing off the ground from behind, suddenly dizzy to be standing up.

"You keep that as long as you need," her mother said.

The visitor fixed on how fast the strap had gotten the girl off the ground. "The girl surely don't like this here," he said. He seemed to test the weight of it in his hand. Then he moved behind her, keeping a certain distance, and she backed out of the yard.

"That's right," he said. "Now you walk up that road where we goin'."

"I ain't never been nowhere," she said. She recalled he was from Macon, and she knew she would never get back from there after her mother changed her mind.

"Whatever I tell you," he said, "that's where you go."
* * *

IT TURNED OUT THE visitor wasn't from Macon.

He was from Indian Heights, near the river and the asylum. He walked her through the middle of town, past the college and the bank, then turned out toward the cemetery. The girl was afraid he would take off her clothes, but whatever interest he had in that, her mother had used it up. He wanted to lay the strap across her back, she could tell that, but once they got into Cotton Point, there were people everywhere on the street, and the chance was gone.

It took most of the morning to get from the Bottoms to Indian Heights. The visitor talked some; the girl did not answer. She had never been to Indian Heights before, but she had heard of the place and knew where she was when she saw the river.

The houses in the Heights were nicer than in the Bottoms, and there were more of them. There were no weeds in the road, and there were babies everywhere. She wondered how many of them belonged to the visitor. They walked to the end of the road and then turned left, away from the river, to another road.

The people in the porches spoke to the man, asked him what did he have with him now. She heard his name when they called him. It was Alvin. "I got me a maid," he said back. "Her momma give her to me for my sweetness."

The visitor moved ahead of her once they were in the Heights, and she followed him. She did not know anything else to do.

His house was hidden behind a larger house, about twenty feet off the road. It sat on stacked bricks. There was a rocker on the porch, and the front door was laid from there to the ground, in place of steps.

She followed him up onto the porch and then inside the house. There were two rooms. One of them had a wood stove, the other one had a narrow bed. There was a rope hung from one wall to the other, crossing both rooms, and the visitor had hung his clothes from it on hangers. He had more clothes than all her brothers put together. He moved behind her while she looked at his clothes, and when he spoke, it was close to her ear. "This here is what you 'posed to maid," he said.

She looked around the room, wondering what was in his head.

"You got to keep it right," he said.

She nodded her head, more afraid of him inside than outside. He seemed bigger here in the room. "I ain't brought no broom," she said.

"My, my," he said, "then what good is you to me?"

The girl looked at the ceiling. The slats had warped, and she could see pieces of blue sky where the tar paper had torn. She did not think the man had lived here long. She took a step farther in, and the floor creaked and seemed to move.

"You like it here?" he said. He was still behind her, and he was still holding the strap.

"No sir."

She saw that she'd given him the wrong answer. "Your momma said you was a smarty," he said. He took her arm then — the first time he'd touched her — just above the elbow. He twisted it, and she bent the way he twisted. He slapped at her legs with the strap, and she yelled.

She turned her head to the side and saw him looking at her. She was afraid he would take her clothes off now, but it wasn't what he wanted. He brought the strap across her legs again, and then her bottom.

And she yelled for real, to be with someone who liked to hurt her. He stopped, still holding her arm. The blood buzzed in her head and her vision blurred. The back of her legs felt burned. She tried to be good to him. "Oh, please," she said.

He seemed to like that, but he came down with the strap again anyway. She held the yell inside this time, hoping it would make him stop. Her eyes began to tear. And he hit her again, lower, across the back of the knees. Her legs buckled, and she cried out without meaning to.

She looked at him one more time and saw no mercy. "Yell all you care to," he said, "ain't nobody gone come in this house 'less I tell them they invited."

He held the strap where she could see it. "This is my house," he said. "I bought it."

And those words were still as real as the strap when a figure appeared in the door. A woman twice as big as Rosie Sayers's mother walked into Alvin Crooms's house. He heard the noise behind him and spun to see who it was.

The girl lost her balance and fell. The woman stepped across the room, and the floorboards sagged under her feet. Alvin Crooms's posture changed, but he stood his ground. "A person might get cut comin' into a man's house," he said.

The woman was next to him now, breathing hard, sweating. She folded her arms and he gave her room. "I heard you was in here with a child," she said.

"Her mother give her to me," he said, stepping back now. The girl noticed that when Alvin Crooms moved backwards, the woman took the space for herself. She was a head taller than he was, and her arms were huge and shook when she moved them. He said, "She been took over by the devil, her momma don't want her under the roof."

The woman looked at her carefully, but only for a second. "They ain't no such thing, a child took by the devil," the woman said.

"And she been bit by a fox," he said. "Poisoned her, lookit yourself."

The woman looked again. The girl drew her knees up under her chin and averted her eyes. The woman stepped nearer, until the girl could feel the heat of her body. "Let Miss Mary see, baby," she said.

The girl moved herself in a way that exposed the bandage. The woman touched her. Her fingers were thick and white-tipped, and she pushed gently into the swollen skin around the bites. It set off a deep ache in the girl's leg. Alvin Crooms watched, over the woman's shoulder."See there?" he said.

"The child been bit," she said, straightening up. "It don't make her poisoned."

"It was a fox," he said.

The woman looked into Rosie's eyes and saw it was so. "It don't make her poisoned", she said again. "Now git out the way, 'less I take that strap to your neck."

* * *

THE WOMAN TOOK THE girl into her care.

Mary McNutt worked as a maid in the homes of two white families and needed someone to help clean her own. Her house stood in the far corner of Indian Heights, at the bottom of Spine Road, where it curved and crossed the other road, which had no name.

The house had two front doors and a center wall running front to back, dividing it into two apartments. The woman lived on one side with her husband — a grounds keeper at the asylum named Lyle McNutt, Jr. — and her two daughters, Linda and Jane Ray.

Linda was eleven and Jane Ray was nine.

The sons had the other side of the house. Thomas was nineteen, Henry Ray was twenty-one and had just started work at the asylum. Henry Ray didn't cut grass like his stepfather, though. He worked inside.

Mary McNutt's previous husband, Mr. James Boxer, had left them five years before, on Easter Sunday. The children all kept the last name.

Mary McNutt walked the girl through both sides of the house, showing her where to clean. "Mr. Boxer was a Christian man," she said, "but he had boilin' blood in him, could not let go of an unkindness done him by nobody." She was standing in the boys' side of the house then. She said the oldest boy, Henry Ray, was just like him.

"His daddy cut a man owned a farm up in Gray," she said.

"A white man?"

Mary McNutt nodded. "Done him in his own house over a two-dollar ham."

Rosie tried to imagine that, but it wouldn't come. The things that frightened her worst never came to her in a way she could see them.

"Lord have mercy," she said.

The woman put her hand on the girl's shoulder; it was as heavy and shapeless as the dead man in the story. "Don't worry 'bout that now," she said. "That's all past times." The woman was still thinking of it, though.

"Mr. McNutt ain't nothing like Mr. Boxer," she said a little later.

"Mr. McNutt don't take offense at nothin'."

And the girl could not see if that made her happy or sad.

ALTHOUGH THE TOWN OF Cotton Point, Georgia, claimed more than six thousand residents, not counting the asylum — which they didn't — there was only one person there that a twenty-one-year-old colored man could see to borrow enough money to buy a car. Paris Trout.

Trout ran a bank for colored people out of his store on North Main Street, and Henry Ray went to see him Friday morning, over his mother's objections. She saw the boy's father in him and did not like him doing business with whites.

He had started work at the asylum on the second Tuesday in June, though — cleaning crazy people's shit off the walls and ceiling and sometimes out of their own hair — and by Wednesday he knew he needed a car to keep his dignity.

"I got to work at the state," he said to his mother. "Ain't got no time now to be foolin' around walking."

And a day later he walked into town, and into the front door of the half-lit store on Main Street, and waited there until Paris Trout appeared from the back.

Trout looked at him, cold and tired. "You need twenty dollars, Henry Ray?" he said. That was what he usually borrowed.

"I need a car."

"You can't pay for no car."

"I got took on at the state," he said. "Begun this Tuesday."

"What doing?" Trout didn't believe him, and in one way it made Henry Ray angry, and in another way it scared him.

"Work," he said. "I do general work."

Trout nodded, looking him over. "All right," he said.

They walked through the store, past some canned vegetables and then a row of work gloves and then five safes sitting in a line against the wall. Henry Ray expected the money for the car was in the safes and moved slower, thinking Trout would stop and open one of them up.

He didn't, though. He went past them and then out the back. There was an alley there, and three cars were parked against the side of the building.

"Which one you like?" he said.

Henry Ray stood still, staring at them. He hadn't expected Mr. Trout to have cars for sale. Trout walked ahead of him and looked in the window of an old Plymouth. "Come on," he said. "You can't buy no car from the steps."

Henry Ray walked around the cars once. Two of them were banged up one way or another — cracked glass and missing lights. He pictured  himself driving them and it made him ashamed.

The third one was a black two-door 1949 Chevrolet, he saw his face in the shine. "That one there is more than the others," Trout said.

"On account it's in showroom shape."

Henry Ray touched the door handle, stopping himself before he got in. "Go on ahead," Mr. Trout said. "See how it feels."

Henry Ray sat down behind the wheel. The dashboard was as shiny as the paint outside, and he saw his face in the glass that covered the speedometer. A hundred miles an hour, it said. He pictured himself riding a hundred miles an hour in a car, smiling at his own face in the speedometer.

When he looked up, Mr. Trout was leaning against the window near him, looking in too. "Now that look at this here," he said, "I ain't sure I can sell it after all."

Henry Ray looked up, panicked.

Mr. Trout shook his head. "Might be too nice to let it go," he said.

"I ought keep it for myself." Henry Ray let his hand touch the steering wheel. "Besides," Trout said, "I ain't sure you make enough money to afford it. A car like this ain't cheap."

"I got a job," he said.

"How much you make?"

Henry Ray stared at the dashboard. "Thirty dollars," he said. He hadn't been paid yet, but that was what his stepfather got. Mr. Trout hit the roof of the car with his hand, right over Henry Ray's head. It caused him to jump and shamed him.

"I didn't know you made that," Mr. Trout said. He paused, as if he were figuring something out. "Yessir," he said a moment later, "you make enough, and you seen it first out here. I guess it's rightfully yours .... "

They walked back into the store, and Mr. Trout held the office door open while Henry Ray walked in. They signed the papers. The car was $800. Mr. Trout charged $227 more for insurance. Then he added some and subtracted some, and when he came out with the real number, it was $17.50 a week.

"You sure you want to do this, boy?" Trout said. "Onct you made a deal with me, I get my money."

Henry Ray was standing up over the desk, and from there he could see the car out the open door. He pictured himself again, his face in the speedometer.

"Onct you made a deal with me, you get your money too," he said.

* * *

ROSIE SAYERS HAD BEEN living with Mary McNutt three days when Henry Ray came home with the car. She had not spoken to him yet, waiting to be spoken to first. It was in the morning, and she had just made the beds in Miss Mary's side of the house. All the beds but Mr. McNutt's. Miss Mary made that herself.

Rosie's own bed was in that part of the house, against the wall in the first room. She was fourteen years old, and it was the first bed she'd ever had — at least the first one that sleeping in it didn't depend on getting to it before her brothers and sisters.

She made her own bed last, tearing it up twice to get the sheets to lie even, the way Miss Mary had shown her, and then walked out on the porch to rest before she began on the floors. Miss Mary told her to rest whenever she wanted. She'd said, "Take your time, child. The faster you go, the less you gain."

Rosie did everything Miss Mary told her, the way Miss Mary said to do it. She had just settled into a porch chair when she saw the car. It was black and shiny, and a trail of dust followed it as it came up the road. It reminded her of a snake. She sat up and watched it come, and before long it was close enough that she could hear the engine.

She saw Henry Ray behind the wheel then. There and leaning half out of the window. Henry Ray was coal black and evil-looking even sitting still. She wished it was Thomas coming home instead. Thomas was lighter-colored and quieter, like herself. Henry Ray pulled the Chevrolet into the yard and chased off the neighbor children before they could touch it. Then he walked around to the back, wiping at little spots of dirt with the leg of his pants. Once or twice he glanced in the direction of the porch. Rosie sat still and watched, and when he looked up again, he smiled.

"You like young Henry Ray better now, doesn't you?"

She folded her hands in her lap and studied her knuckles. "I like everybody the same," she said.

She heard him laugh; she did not look up. "You can't like nobody you ain't spoke to yet," he said.

"I like ]esus," she said quietly.

"What's that?"

She couldn't think with him watching her. She felt him looking and was afraid to look back.

"You want a ride, Rosie Sayers?" he said. She shook her head no.

"Ain't got time for no rides," she said.

He said, "I see you busy."

"I be busy soon as I stand up."

He left the car and climbed the steps to the porch. He sat on the railing and stared at her, up and down. "I ain't gone to hurt you," he said in a minute.

She looked at her knuckles.

"You think young Henry means to hurt your pretty self?" She shook her head again. "What then?"

"They is some people that gets hurt by accident," she said.

He seemed to think that over. "I bet you ain't never been in no car," he said. "That°s what you scared of."

She brought her eyes up then and looked at the automobile. Henry Ray squatted next to her and put his hand on her leg. It looked like a spider. She saw herself connected to the car in that spider web way too. Every time she pushed away, she was caught that much tighter. He moved his hand up until it could touch both her legs at once, and she felt the heat of it through her dress. "You ain't never been with no man either," he said. "I see that for myself."

She looked at the car, looking for a way out. "How long you going to ride me?" she said.

That made him laugh out loud, and he moved his hand off her and stood up. She felt her lap cool and crossed her legs, so he couldn't get back to that place even if he changed his mind.  "I bring you right back, as soon as you want," he said.

She followed him down the steps to the car. He opened the door for her and held it, smiling. She ducked under his arm, moving between Henry Ray and the door without touching either one, and then sat down in the seat. It was softer than the seat in the police car. He slammed the door hard, as if he were mad, but when he walked around the front he smiled at her through the windshield, and then he was next to her in the seat.

He turned the key and touched the starter button. The engine took, and the car began to shake in a regular way.

He pushed the clutch to the floor and studied the gearshift and finally pulled it toward himself and then up. Two different movements, two different thoughts. He turned in his seat to back out into the road.

They drove slowly out of Indian Heights. Henry Ray winced as he steered the car through the place in the road where the trees from either side grew almost together, as if he could feel the branches on his own skin. It already seemed to the girl that a car was more worry than it was worth.

In a few minutes, though, Henry Ray turned out onto Route 27, going south, and she saw his troubles were all behind. They crossed the bridge over the Indian River and then headed away from town.

Henry Ray's expression relaxed when they were on the highway, relaxed until he looked like he'd gone simple. His foot pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and she counted the telephone poles as they went past, it seemed like there was hardly enough time to count one before the next was there.

"Lookit here," he said a little later. "Spring is sprung . . . Grass is riz . . .

I It took her a moment to realize he was reading the words off the signs along the road.

"Where last year's . . . Careless drivers is . . . Burma Shave."

He laughed out loud, she stared at him. "How come you know how to read?" she said.

And that made him laugh too. "All Momma's children got to read," he said. "She wouldn't let none of us out the house unless we could. You see them little babies, Linda and Jane Ray? They already learnt too." He was shouting over the wind and the engine. "Sometimes I think that woman's crazy."

Saying that seemed to change Henry Ray's driving. He slowed down, and she watched the needle of the speedometer drop back into the middle of the numbers. "She ain't crazy," he said suddenly.

"I never said she was."

"Well," he said, "I never said it neither."

She looked out the window. The prettiest thing she saw was a mare in foal, which wasn't anything special. "How far you going to drive us?" she said. `

"Where you want to go?"

"Home."

He slowed down, looking for a place. The more they slowed, the more she realized how fast they'd been going. He pulled into a field, following some tire tracks through the weeds until they ended. He turned off the engine, and in the absence of its sound she heard the noises of the field. It felt peaceful to be stopped, and she wished she was alone.

He slid across the car seat for her. She sat still. He put his hands on her legs and then on her chest; she did not move. He lay back in the seat, pulling her after him. She didn't fight him, she didn't help him.

He touched the waist of her dress and then followed the line of her legs on both sides until he got to the hem. Then he came back up, and the dress came up with him. Her underpants were fastened with a safety pin.

"Well, well," he said.

She did not move or answer. He unfastened his own trousers then, and she saw what he intended to put inside her. °°I never done nothing before," she said.

"That's all right," he said.

She said, "Nobody told me so."

He put himself between her legs and took her safety pin. She felt herself exposed. "Please," she said, "I gone bleed all over your new car. I bleed bad when it comes."

It stopped him, that fast. "You ain't bled nowhere yet?" he said.

"No."

He lifted himself off her, carefully, as if he were afraid to wake her up. He opened the door behind him and slipped outside backwards. She thought he would pull her after him, but he left her there and buttoned his trousers. She found the safety pin in the crack between the cushions of the seats and put herself back together.

Henry Ray did not speak when he got back in the car. He turned in a slow, careful circle, sticking his head out the window to see where the wheels were going. He drove that same slow speed back over the tire tracks. She did not know if he was mad or not; she wished she were there with Thomas. Thomas didn't take a temper.

Henry Ray stopped the car at the highway and pulled on the hand brake. "They ain't nothing to tell about this," he said. She didn't answer. "I let you go, so you ain't got nothing to tell."

She looked down at herself and wondered what it would have been like, to have that inside her. She wondered if there would be a baby there now. She wondered if it would be as black as Henry Ray. "If you tell, Miss Mary prob'ly send you out of the house," he said.

"I ain't said nothing."

"She don't like stories on her boys."

Rosie wished he would turn the engine off so she could hear the sounds of the country. She wanted to feel peaceful. "I don't tell no stories," she said.

He made no reply. He pushed the clutch to the floor and put the car into gear and then killed the engine. When he saw that he'd forgotten to take off the hand brake, he cussed her. Then he said, "Ain't nothing gone right in this world since I seen you and tried to be nice."

And she sat still, thinking of things she could say back.

He drove back to Cotton Point slower than he had come out. Twice she felt him begin to talk and then quit before the first word. She looked out the window for the mare in foal, but she didn't see it again.

Nothing looked the same on the way back.

* * *

THEY CAME OVER the bridge and stopped at the crossroad. Indian Heights was left; the town itself was straight on. Henry Ray spoke to her then. "You want a Popsicle?" he said. He wasn't in a temper now.

"You ain't got no Popsicle," she said.

"I got money. What color you like?"

"Purple," she said. She'd had only one Popsicle in her life, and it was purple.

He seemed to be deciding something again. "You ain't gone tell stories to Miss Mary?" he said.

"I already said I don't tell no stories."

He drove across the road that led to the Heights and into town. He turned right on Main Street, and Rosie studied the people on the sidewalk, thinking she might see the lady who had taken her to Thomas Cornell Clinic. She thought she might wave. The woman wasn't there, though; none of the white people she saw were pretty. Rosie guessed Mr. Trout kept her inside.

Henry Ray continued east, crossed into Bloodtown, and pulled into a gas station. The man who pumped the gas smiled at Rosie as he washed the windshield. He had a uniform with letters over the pocket. ROY. He was skinny and light-skinned, and she liked his looks better than Henry Ray's, maybe better than Thomas's.

She did not acknowledge his smile, even when he waved at her with his pinkie finger right up against the windshield. She thought about it later, though.

The man stopped the pump at one dollar. Henry Ray came out of the station, carrying a Popsicle, and held it in his teeth while he opened his wallet to find his dollar bill. Once he was inside the car he broke the Popsicle in half, and then slid one side out of the paper and handed it to her.

It was purple, just like he promised.

She put it in her mouth carefully, not wanting it to break, and held it there a moment, tasting just the cold at first and then the flavor beneath it. She slid it out as carefully as she'd put it in, wishing there was some way to make it last.

Henry Ray was chewing his, taking it in bites. He started the car and began to back out. She put the Popsicle back in her mouth, feeling the edges turn smooth, and suddenly there was a bump, and it was broken in half.

She did not realize until Henry Ray screamed that they had been hit. Then he was sitting up off his seat, looking through the rearview mirror. He screamed again and got out of the car. She turned to watch him, half the Popsicle still in her mouth, and saw the truck. It was a lumber truck, just like the ones that carried cut boards out of the sawmill near Damp Bottom. The back end was up against the back end of the car, and a few of the boards had slid off onto the trunk.

Henry Ray was a crazy man.

He held his head and flapped his arms and jumped up and down and screamed. The driver of the truck got out slower; he looked half as heavy as his truck. He watched Henry Ray a few minutes, then he walked over to the car and had a look. He said, "Be quiet, nigger, so I  can see what's did."

Henry Ray said, "Who you callin' nigger, nigger?"

Rosie had heard this before, it meant they were fixing to fight. She looked at the man who had climbed out of the truck and did not think Henry Ray ought to fight him. She had seen enough fighting now to know who would win.

The man in the uniform came out of the station and stood with his hands on his hips while Henry Ray and the man from the truck cussed. He studied the back end of the car, and then he studied the back end of the truck. He pushed the lumber that had slid off back onto the truck.

Henry Ray and the truck driver stood one on each side, watching. Rosie opened her door, and when nobody yelled at her to mind her business, she walked around to the back and had a look for hersel.

The truck had knocked one shiny piece of the car off — it was lying on the ground — and tore a hole in another piece, about big enough that Henry Ray could have fit through it.

That thought came to her because of what the driver said to him. "I stick your skinny ass through there and back up some more, you don't shut up."

The driver said that, and then he bent down and touched the edge of the tear. His finger crumbled the metal there, and then he moved it a couple of inches farther away, and pushed straight through.

Rosie was sure Henry Ray oughtn't to tight him.

"Ain't nothing but paint and rust anyways," the truck driver said. He stood up, looking at his finger. Henry Ray was staring at the hole he'd poked in the car. He bent himself almost in half and looked underneath.

"Ooo — e," the man from the station said.

Henry Ray stayed underneath the car a long time, longer than it took to see the other side of a hole. The truck driver said time was money and he didn't have any more to spend looking at this skinny nigger's ass, and he left.

Henry Ray came out from under just as the truck driver shut his door. He started the engine, blowing smoke over the accident scene, and ground his gears. Rosie heard something familiar in the noise, the sound things made when they were forced. She looked on the ground and saw Henry Ray's Popsicle lying beside the fender, half melted, showing the ice underneath the purple.

She wished she could pick it up.

The gas man spoke then, startling her. "You ain't got no insurest, do you?"

Henry Ray looked at him. "Insurest," the man said. "You got that, they got to fix your car for you."

Henry Ray began to nod. "I got that."

"Then all you need do is to call them up," the gas man said, "and they fix it up like new."

"That do that, for sure?"

"I swear."

Henry Ray laughed. He picked the fender up off the ground and tossed it onto the back seat.  "Get in, girl," he said to her. He waited until she had pulled the door shut to start the engine. The tail pipe scraped the ground when they moved, but he didn't seem to care. She took a chance that it was all right to talk. "Where you drivin' now, Henry Ray?"

In a way she couldn't quite understand, the question decided the answer. "Takin' this here right back to Mr. Trout," he said. She sat dead still.

He began to nod. "I paid the man his insurest, he got to fix the car."

"You gone tell Mr. Trout that?"

And then she was sorry that she'd asked, because that question decided the answer too. He drove up Main Street, dragging his tail pipe. White people stopped in their tracks to see what kind of racket it was. Henry Ray looked straight ahead.

He drove past Mr. Trout's store, around the block, and back up the alley. He left the car there and pulled her after him up the steps to the store.

"They ain't nothing in here for us," she said, holding back. "I been in here before."

"You just tell him what you seen," he said.

"He don't care what I seen."

Henry Ray paid no attention. He was holding her by the wrist. He touched the handle of the door, then had a different thought and knocked. Soft at first, then harder.

Mr. Trout came to the back of the store the same way he came to the front, which was he didn't come at all, he was just suddenly there. He stood behind the screen door, looking down at them, and didn't speak a word.

Henry Ray's hold on her wrist went soft. He dropped his head. For a long time nobody spoke.

"Sir," he said finally.

Henry Ray changed and went soft one part at a time.

Mr. Trout got his face closer to the screen. "What the hell you doin' that for, beatin' on a man's door like that?"

Rosie turned and started down the stairs, but Henry Ray's grip on her wrist tightened and hurt her. "I didn't intended to cause you no disturbance," he said, "but I got to talk to you about fixin' my car."

Mr. Trout said, "You got to talk to me about paying for it, is all."

Her knees began to shake like they had after the fox bit her, and she swooned in the sun.

"I brung the car back on account of a lumber truck run into it and tore it all up."

"That ain't my obligation, to teach you to drive."

"I can drive," Henry Ray said, but so soft Mr. Trout couldn't hear.

"Did you say something?"

Rosie could feel it building to something bad.

"I can drive," he said, louder. Still looking at the ground.

"Then how come you busted up your Chevrolet? You gone three hours and come back here with your property all busted up."

"I never tore it up," Henry Ray said. "A lumber truck run into it."

"Then the lumber company got to fix it."

"No sir."

Rosie pulled herself as far away from the screen as she could get.

"No sir," Henry Ray said again. "I bought insurest from you, cost me two hundred some dollars, so you got to fix it right."

Behind the screen Mr. Trout seemed to grow taller. "You ain't paid a cent," he said. "All you done was sign a note and drove off with my car."

"Then it's your car still," Henry Ray said. His words were so soft now it took Rosie a moment to understand what he had said. Mr. Trout never moved, but when he spoke again, he was half out of breath.

"Listen to me," he said. "You signed the note, and that makes it yours. It don't matter to me if lightning tore it up, you still got to pay. I told you before, I get my money."

But Henry Ray had something in his head now, and the more Mr. Trout said one thing, the harder he believed the other. "I got insurest," he said.

"Not for that," Mr. Trout said. "It ain't that kind of insurance."

Henry Ray turned away from the screen, meaning to leave. "It ain't so bad anyway," Mr. Trout said, looking past him at the car. "It don't hurt nothing to drive around in a car that ain't perfect. Help a person to remember to be more careful next time."

Henry Ray walked down the steps and then up the alley, away from the car. Rosie was at his side, sometimes a step in front. She heard the screen door open and Mr. Trout coming down the steps.

"Hey, there," he said.

Henry Ray did not stop or turn around. "You forgot your car, mister. You don't want to leave it in the alley, something else come along and bust it up worst."

Henry turned around, still walking away. "It ain't none of my affair," he said.

"It's your own car," Mr. Trout said. He was yelling now. "You and me done business. Now come get this and take it with you." Mr. Trout pointed down the alley at them with his finger, but Henry Ray had turned back around and was walking away. Rosie saw him point, though, and a few seconds later, at the end of the alley, she looked again and he was still at it.

"I think he's gone get a police after us," she said.

"Don't make no nevermind to me," he said.

They walked to the comer — Henry Ray had let go of her wrist now — and suddenly Mr. Trout was there again; she saw that he must have gone out the front of the store to head them off He was breathing hard and had screaming eyeballs, and he stepped right in front of Henry Ray. "Seventeen dollars and fifty cent a week," he said. "You leave the car or drive it into the river, it's still the same payment."

Henry Ray stepped around Mr. Trout and crossed the street. Rosie followed him, and when they'd got to the sidewalk, Mr. Trout began to yell. Called them niggers. "You and me got bi'nis," he yelled. "It ain't over till that car's paid for, one hundred percent."

Henry Ray turned and shouted back, "You and me ain't got no bi'nis." Rosie saw some of the white people on the street begin to laugh.

"You just ask your people about that," Mr. Trout yelled. "You ask what happens if you don't pay Mr. Trout."

 Henry Ray held his ground a long time and then turned without another word and began the long walk back to Indian Heights. The girl followed him. The cement was hot on her feet, and where there was grass she walked in it. "I wished we'd took the car horn," she said, somewhere near the highway.

"Henry Ray Boxer don't drive no tore-up car," he said.

"Mr. Trout gone want his money," she said, a few hundred yards later.

"It don't matter to me what a white man want."

"What if he come to get it himself?" she said.

"What if he do?"

They had just turned and were coming back into the Heights again. She didn't think he would of said that anywhere else.

* * *

THE CAR STAYED IN the alley behind Mr. Trout's store. Rosie saw it there a month later, on the day Miss Mary walked her to town to get her a dress for church. Rosie had picked the first one she touched, it was white with little blue sashes all over, from a shop in Bloodtown. On the way back Miss Mary bought her a Coca-Cola. She would not let the girl thank her.

"Hush, now," she said, "you make Miss Mary feel ashamed."

They walked back through town, drinking Cokes and looking in the windows of the stores, and suddenly they were in the alley behind Mr. Trout's store. Rosie recognized the car and realized where she was.

It was sitting right where Henry Ray had left it, still tore up from the lumber truck. It looked just like it had, except it was dirty. She stopped in her tracks, afraid Mr. Trout would come out and find her. Miss Mary walked ahead, through the alley. The girl caught  up. She didn't think Miss Mary had noticed her stop.

At the end of the alley, though, without ever looking back, Miss Mary said, "That's Henry Ray's car, ain't it?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said. Henry Ray had warned her not to tell, but she never thought of lying to Miss Mary.

"That boy remindful of his father," she said.

Rosie didn't reply, but when she sipped at the Coke-Cola again, it had lost its taste. They walked past the officer academy and beyond. Rosie wondered if Miss Mary knew Henry Ray had rode her out of town in the car. If she knew what they had done. She began to feel ashamed herself.

"What I heard," Miss Mary said, "was Henry Ray had Paris Trout yellin' in the street, shaming himself in front of white people."

"Yes, ma'am."

Miss Mary closed her eyes as she walked. "He told you not to tell," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

Miss Mary stopped under a shade tree and sat down. The girl sat clown with her. For a long time Miss Mary seemed to forget Rosie was there. "The problem with Henry Ray is partly in his blood," she said finally, "and partly that he believe he got to be more than he is."
 

The girl did not understand and was not even sure the woman was speaking to her at all.

"They's some people walk around all the time taller than they is," Miss Mary said. "They fool you and me, and sometime they fooled themself; and then one day a thing can happen and they try and catch up all at once to what they pretend to be. They go off blind to the world .... " She closed her eyes and grabbed at things that wasn't there.

"Henry Ray don't know how to look at nobody else and understand them," she said, "because he don't know what he look like himself."

Rosie did not interrupt — it seemed to her that Miss Mary was thinking something out — but if Henry Ray didn't know what he looked like, she didn't know who did. He spent more time in front of mirrors than anybody alive.

Miss Mary took it a different direction. "Paris Trout is a weak man," she said.

"Mr. Trout?"

"Inside," she said, and tapped herself on the chest. "Inside, he's as weak as Henry Ray."

"He scart me," the girl said.

Miss Mary nodded and looked over at her in a slow, tired way. "That's your common sense talkin'," she said. "That man scare anybody got common sense."

Miss Mary closed her eyes and rested against the trunk of the tree. She did not seem afraid of Mr. Trout or anything else.

"You stronger than Mr. Trout," the girl said after a while.

The woman smiled without opening her eyes. "Yes I am," she said.

"You ain't scart of him."

"Oh, yes," she said, "I am that too."

Time passed, and the woman opened her eyes. She put her hands underneath her bottom and began to push herself up off the ground. The girl did not want to leave yet.

"I'll tell you what I'm scart of if you want," she said.

Miss Mary settled back into the tree, but she was awake now, and in some way she was pleased. "I brung you into my house," she said, "and now you allow me into yours."

Rosie said, "I'm scart my momma will come get me back."

"You don't have them dreams with me, do you?"

"No, ma'am."

The woman bit the corner of her lip. "I tell you what," she said, "whenever you get scart, you come to me."

"You keep me away from my momma?"

"I don't know," she said, "but I will be there with you when she come."

* * *

TWO WEEKS LATER ROSIE Sayers was sitting on the porch in her new dress when she saw the car coming up Spine Road. She'd worn the dress every day since Miss Mary bought it for her. It had rained that morning, and the car threw a steady curtain of water and mud into the air as it came.

Some of the mud landed on the car itself and blistered there in the sun. The windows were open — it had turned steamy that afternoon — and she could see Mr. Trout behind the wheel. He had pulled his hat down over most of his face, but she recognized him. From the store and from somewhere else.

Thomas was sitting on the porch too, in the chair, with his feet crossed on the railing. Thomas was sweeter than Henry Ray, but he was lazy.

The children, Jane Ray and Linda, were playing inside. Rosie Sayers stood still and watched the car come.

"Who would that be now?" Thomas said.

"Mr. Trout," she said. "Send the children after Miss Mary." They minded Thomas and wouldn't listen to her. She wouldn't hit them. Thomas sat up straight without taking his feet off the rail. "Who he comin' to see?" he said.

"Us," she said.

He called into the house for Linda. "Go fetch your momma," he said, but she never answered. There was another man in the car with Mr. Trout, and they looked at each other and spoke before they got out.

"Look out, Jesus," Thomas said.

"Who is that with him?"

"Mr. Buster Devonne," he said. "Used to be a police, but he treated folks too mean, had to let him go."

The men got out of the car. Mr. Trout was wearing rimless glasses and had pulled his hat down almost to cover them. The other one, Buster Devonne, was bigger than anyone the girl knew except Miss Mary. She saw he was bothered.

The men walked up the steps to the porch without a word. Rosie stood still, and they passed her by like she wasn't at home. Thomas did not get up or move. Mr. Trout found a place directly in back of him and waited. Buster Devonne stood to one side.

Thomas began to talk. He said, "The little money I owe you, sir, I pay it on the tenth. just to the agreement we made." His voice was quicker than she remembered it.

"I ain't here about no twenty dollars," Mr. Trout said. "Your family bought a car off me, ain't paid me a cent. I come out here to find out what you mean to do about it."

Thomas shook his head. "I don't mean to do nothing, sir," he said.

"It ain't my business, it's my brother's."

"Where is he?"

"He over to work at the state. Ain't that right, Rosie?"

She stood frozen. The man named Buster Devonne watched her close.

"Buster Devonne's got a blank here for you to sign," Mr. Trout said to Thomas.

Buster Devonne pulled a piece of folded white paper out of his back pocket and handed it to Mr. Trout, who reached over Thomas's shoulder and dropped it into his lap.

"I ain't gone to sign no blank," Thomas said.

He opened the paper and began to read it. Mr. Trout grabbed him then, by the collar, and lifted him out of his seat. Rosie heard a little cry come out of herself, and she saw Buster Devonne's hand go into his jacket pocket.

Mr. Trout went to his pocket too. He was holding Thomas with one hand, shaking him now, and the other hand came out sparkling in the sun.

Rosie heard herself again. "Lord have mercy," she said, "He's got brass knucks." She had seen the uses of brass knucks back in the Bottoms, they were as bad as a knife. And then Miss Mary was there, on the first step to the porch, looking up at Mr. Trout. "There's no call to hurt nobody here," she said.

"Lord a mercy," Rosie said again, and her voice distracted Mr. Trout. He stared at her a minute, and then she saw that screaming look in his eyes.

"What the hell you got to do with it?" he said suddenly. He let go of Thomas and came after her, and she ran into the house. She heard him behind her, tearing up the furniture. The shades were drawn over the windows in the first room, and coming in out of the sunlight, she was suddenly blind. She cried out for Miss Mary.

Mr. Trout stumbled behind her, he broke a piece of glass. She heard him curse as she passed into the second room. It was lighter in there, and she could see the details of the walls and floor, she could see her own feet. It seemed to her that things had slowed down.

And then she heard him behind her again. It surprised her in some way that he was still there.

"What the goddamn hell does it got to do with you?" he said again. And she saw his face without turning to see it, and then his arm had gone around her throat, and he was shaking her from behind.

She reached in back of herself to slap him away, and then there was a cracking noise on the side of her head, and he let her go. And in that moment things went dark and she felt the beginnings of a nightmare.

And she bit her hand, to make it stop, and then she heard another noise, louder and farther away, and something hit her in the side and spun her down. Then she smelled the smoke in the air and knew that she'd been shot.

"Miss Mary . . ."

She heard the woman somewhere behind. "Coming," she said, "I'm coming now." And then there was another shot and then another. She heard the breath go out of Miss Mary, and then she heard the words again. "I'm coming now."

Rosie lay on the floor and looked up, and Miss Mary walked past without seeing her. She was bleeding from her shoulder and her back.

"Where you goin'?" the child asked.

Miss Mary stood still to speak. "I got to go into the stove room," she said. "I got to lie on the table."

Miss Mary walked slowly through the second room and into the third. She dropped to her knees just before she reached the last room of the house, the kitchen.

Rosie watched her from the floor, feeling sick and dizzy. When the dizziness passed, she pulled herself up and walked into the kitchen too. She was wrong in the side, she couldn't say exactly how. She heard the men talking, she could not make out the words. The smell of gunpowder was thicker when she stood than it had been on the floor, and the voices seemed to come out of it.

She touched the wall for her balance and got into the kitchen. Miss Mary was on her hands and knees. The child wanted to help her, but she turned sick again and sat down on the trunk against the wall.

Miss Mary climbed off the floor then and laid herself across the table. For a moment it was still, and then Mr. Trout appeared in the doorway, holding his gun. He took a step in, raising his arm, and Rosie raised her eyes to meet it. The first shot hit her in the arm, a little above the elbow. The second shot took her breath.

"Lord have mercy," she said to Miss Mary, "the man has shot me in the stomach."

Miss Mary twisted up off the table at that and turned to stare at Paris Trout. He shot her in the breast. She pushed off the table.

"Come on, child," she said, and held out her hand.

Rosie Sayers took the hand and got to her feet, and she and Miss Mary walked together out the back door into the yard. They sat together on the back steps and then lay together on the ground. They heard the car engine race as Buster Devonne and Mr. Trout left.

Rosie closed her eyes. She opened them once and saw the children, and Ray and Linda, standing over her as still as pictures. Thomas Boxer had left to call the police.

She called out to Miss Mary.

"I'm right here next to you," Miss Mary said.

"It's so cold," she said.

"You ain't afraid, child, you been saved."

"Yes I am."

"You been saved," Miss Mary said. "And I am here with you now wait for Jesus."

"I'm so cold," the child said.

She said, "Jesus will be here soon, cover you with a blanket."
 

SEAGRAVES
PART TWO

The news that Paris Trout had shot two colored females in Indian Heights came to Harry Seagraves from the police chief Hubert Norland. Seagraves kept Chief Norland on a small retainer for just that sort of information.

The call came at supper. The maid brought the telephone to the table, but when Seagraves heard the chief s voice, he excused himself and used the phone in his study. He did not like to discuss matters of blood or violence in front of his wife, who had an interest in other people's troubles which he tried not to feed.

"Mr. Seagraves," the chief said, "I'm over to Comell Clinic, and there's a couple of negras here got shot up by Paris Trout."

Harry Seagraves had taken the call standing up. Now he sat down. The police chief did not add to what he'd said or explain it. Seagraves liked to find things out in his own order.

"Who are they?" he said.

"Females," said the chief

 Seagraves tried to picture it, Paris Trout with colored women, but it would not come. He didn't think Paris Trout had an appetite for women, colored or white. He was one of those people who did not like to be touched.

"One of them's named Mary McNutt," the chief said, reading now from the report. "Thirty-eight years old Negress, employed by the Markham family as a maid . . . shot three, four times. The other would Rosie Sayers, and that one ain't going to live."

Harry Seagraves sat still and tried to think of a way of removing himself from this before it began. His law firm, Seagraves, DuBois, Clatterfield & Spudd, represented most of the old and the rich families in Cotton Point, the families that lived in the houses on Draft Street, families like his own. He was part of their safety. Paris Trout was not of that group socially — he had no social affiliations — but he owned property and lumber interests and the store and was known to have money. His sister was a court clerk. His mother, until her stroke, had run the family store and been the most visible and outspoken woman in Cotton Point.

Seagraves had represented him before, in half a dozen civil suits, and did not see how he could turn him away now. The obligation was not so much to Trout as to the families on Draft Street, who counted his protection as a constant.

"The one that ain't going to live isn't but a child," the chief said.

"How old?"

"It ain't written down," the chief said, "but she could be thirteen, fourteen years old."

"You have the name?" He opened the drawer of his desk and found a piece of paper. He dipped his desk pen in the inkwell. The chief spelled out Sayers. It was not a name Seagraves had heard before.

"Is she native?"

"Not to me," the chief said. "They ain't related, but the girl lived with the woman. Sometime they take each other in like that."

"What was Paris Trout doing in Indian Heights?" Seagraves said.

"Collecting for a car, he says."

Without realizing he was doing it, Harry Seagraves drew a cross on the paper, above Rosie Sayers's name. When he saw what it was, he changed it to a dollar sign. "Paris Trout doesn't make loans to women," he said.

"Well, that's what he told me," the chief said. "Him and Buster Devonne was out there to collect for a Chevrolet."

"Buster Devonne was there?"

"Yessir," the chief said. "He done some of it too. I don't know how much. Their story is that the negras had guns."

The line was quiet while Harry Seagraves thought. Buster Devonne had been a policeman, and he'd hurt a number of colored people without reason. "Are you sure the girl's going to die?" he said finally.

"That's what Doc Braver said."

The line was quiet again, and it was the chief who finally spoke.

"Mr. Seagraves?" he said. "What do you want me to do about this?"

"Have you talked to Ward Townes?"

"No sir, I called you first thing after I'd finished with Mr. Trout."

"And he told you he'd shot the girl."

"Yessir, him and Buster Devonne."

Seagraves leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, picturing the conversation. "Did you take it down?"

"No sir, it was on the phone. I bring them in to my girl to take it down."

Paris Trout would refuse to see it, that it was wrong to shoot a girl and a woman. There was a contract he'd made with himself a long time ago that overrode the law, and being the only interested party, he lived by it. He was principled in the truest way. His right and wrong were completely private.

Harry Seagraves had been around the law long enough to hold a certain affection for those who did not respect it, but his affection, as a rule, was in proportion to the distance they kept from his practice.

A man like Paris Trout could rub his right and wrong up against the written law for ten minutes and occupy half a year of Harry Seagraves's time straightening it out. And a man as important as Paris Trout, it was difficult to pass the case to a junior partner. Draft Street would watch what happened to him and fear for itself.

"Mr. Seagraves?" The chief sounded worried now.

"Yessir," Seagraves said. "I appreciate your courtesy, Chief. My advice to you now would be to call Ward Townes and inform him of the situation. He may want to wait, see if the girl dies. Sometimes young folks are resilient beyond medical expectations, and if that is the case with Miss Sayers, then we may be interrupting supper for no cause."

"I hate to bothered you at supper," he said, "but I thought you'd want a head start on this."

"It's no bother .... Listen, you come by soon and sit at the table with us. Lucy was asking on you and your family just recently."

'°Thank you, sir. Y'all have to come over to see us too."

The line went quiet again, both of them out of manners. "There's one other thing," Seagraves said.

"Yessir?"

"As long as it's not taken down anywhere, I'd just as soon Paris never talked to you at all. That way me and Mr. Townes start fresh and fair." Seagraves waited while the police chief thought it over. Then he said, "Of course, if that compromises you in some way . . ."

"No sir, that'd be all right."

"Good."

"Yessir, I can do that .... "

"Is there something else?"

"If the girl dies," the chief said, "I'd likely have to come get Mr. Trout." Seagraves heard the worry in his voice.

"You just give me a call at the office, I'll bring him to you."

"Thank you, Mr. Seagraves. And I'd likely have to come for Buster Devonne too."

"That would be up to you," Seagraves said, "Mr. Devonne is no concern of mine." And then he hung up. Paris Trout was principled, in his way, but Buster Devonne was a dog off his leash.

The door to the study opened a few inches and his wife looked in. "Harry?" she said. He looked up without answering. He did not like her in this room, her or anyone else.

"Is something wrong?" she said.

He rubbed the front of his face with his hands, feeling tired. "I'll be out directly," he said. She did not move, though. She wanted him to apologize for leaving supper. He said, "I've got to make a call."

"Now?"

He nodded and picked up the telephone, waiting for her to close the door. She stood where she was. '°What is it?" she said.

"Paris Trout gone took a damn gun and shot two colored women."

Her pretty white face turned soft, opening to the news. "Did they work for anybody we know?" she said.

"Charley Markham's maid is one of them," he said, "but that doesn't make it our business."

Her face, suddenly hurt, stayed in the opening a minute longer and then disappeared. The room took a peaceful feeling the minute she was gone.

He decided to visit Trout instead of calling. It wasn't that the man was less remote in person — he was one of the few clients Harry Seagraves had who were actually easier to talk to on the telephone — but that the news of what he had done was disquieting in a way that made him want to get out of his own house.

Lucy watched him come into the dining room and saw he was carrying the keys to the car. She was angry and did not speak. He saw she had put her glasses on, and they were fogged from the steam of the boiled potatoes on her plate.

* * *

PARIS TROUT LIVED IN a hundred-year-old white house at the corner of Draft Street and Samuel. There were eight bedrooms and four baths, servants' quarters, long hallways, and high ceilings. Seagraves had been told he kept the whole house dark.

His wife answered the doorbell. She did not seem to recognize him and stood in the door waiting for him to explain what he wanted.

"Mrs. Trout?" he said. "I am Harry Seagraves."

Her look did not change. "I know you, Mr. Seagraves," she said. "What may I do for you this evening?"

He had seen more of Hanna Trout before she married than since. She had grown up in Cotton Point, taught third and fourth grades at Fuller Laboratory School, and then worked herself into a position with the state department of schools in Atlanta.

She had been plainspoken all her life, a trait which, in spite of her good looks, had scared off all the men who noticed her until Paris Trout. The town psychologists said that he'd married her to replace  his mother, who had not spoken a word since her stroke. Hanna was forty-six years old and had been married two years.

"I was wondering if I might see Paris," he said.

She stood where she was, looking into his eyes. He hadn't told her.

"It's a matter of some urgency," he said, "or I would not inconvenience you like this at home."

She held herself a moment longer at the door and then stepped to one side. "Come in," she said. "I'll tell him you're here."

Seagraves stood in the hallway, and Hanna Trout went upstairs. He noticed the curve of her bottom as she climbed the steps, the movement pulled her dress against her skin first on one side, then the other. From behind she looked younger than his own wife.

The hallway itself was bare. The paint over the staircase was spotted and beginning to peel. The windows were dirty. The house felt empty, as if no one lived there, and hadn't for a long time.

In a few moments Hanna Trout was back on the stairs. She held herself straight coming down, her fingers barely touching the banister. There was a calmness about her that struck  Seagraves as practiced.

"Paris will be down when he dresses," she said.

Seagraves looked at his watch; it was seven-thirty.

He followed her into the living room and sat on a davenport with frayed cushions. The wallpaper was a pattcm of green, blistered here and there, and torn. There were spider webs in the corners of the ceiling. Hanna Trout took a seat in a straight-back chair across the room and crossed her legs. He thought of his own wife and her legs — no better than the ones in front of him now — and the house she kept. Lucy would reburn Georgia before she let someone see her house like this.

There was a noise on the stairs, slow and heavy, and then Paris Trout came through the threshold of the door in his robe and slippers. His hair was slicked straight back and emphasized the angles of his head. He nodded at Seagraves and then looked at his wife in an unfriendly way.

Seagraves watched her change under that look. "Would you like some coffee?" she said.

Trout did not answer. "You read my mind," Seagraves said, and she stood up, walking within a foot of her husband on the way to the kitchen. He did not look at her again.

"Hubert Norland called me a little bit ago," Seagraves said when she was gone.

Trout sat down in the chair his wife had left. His arms were long and thin, and his pale hands spilled over the ends of the armrests and hung in the air. "Hubert Norland knows me," he said. "I answered him what he asked, and that's all there is to it."

Seagraves felt tired. "You told him you shot two colored people," he said. "That doesn't mean it ends."

Trout shrugged, his hands kept still. "What they gone do, arrest me for collecting legal debts? I told that boy when he took the car, I get my money. You ask any people I lent to, I told them all the same thing."

Seagraves held up his hand for Trout to stop. "You told too many people too much already today," he said.

Trout stared at him, deciding something. "You worried about this, ain't you?"

"There wasn't anybody owed you money that was shot this afternoon," Seagraves said.

"The same family."

Seagraves shook his head. "The one that's going to die," he said, "her name's different, and she isn't but thirteen, fourteen years old."

Paris Trout squinted, looking at things from a new angle. "I recognized that girl from before," he said. "She was with Henry Ray Boxer on the day he tore up the car."

Seagraves shook his head. "Her name's Sayers," he said.

"Ain't a jury in the state that could expect a white man to keep track of family lines amongst the dark aspect," Trout said. He was sitting up in the chair now, paying attention. Seagraves took it for a positive sign that he had the man's interest.

He said, "There's all kinds of juries, and now days you don't know what they expect." And he saw that Paris Trout had paid attention to that too.

Trout shrugged again, but the problem had settled on him now. He said, "Well, Mr. Seagraves, God's will be done."

Seagraves closed his eyes and let his head fall back into the cushion. "There°s more men than you can count gone to prison in this state, leaving things in God's hands," he said.

His eyes were still closed when Hanna Trout came into the living room, carrying a silver tray. He heard her and sat up, smiling, and accepted a cup of coffee. She poured it without returning his smile and then turned to her husband. He ignored her.

When she had gone back to the kitchen, Trout said, "I had a legal debt to collect. I am within my rights to make the collection."

"That was two women in their own house," Seagraves said. "One of them was a child, and if she dies, Ward Townes is legally bound to come after the person that shot her."

Trout considered Ward Townes. "He got to live here just like anybody else," he said finally.

Seagraves did not answer that, he had been weighing the same thought. You could never be sure what Ward Townes would do. He had gone to the war, for instance, the only lawyer in Cotton Point except Seagraves himself who had. Seagraves knew the prosecutor could have got an exemption like anybody else with money. He knew he had forgiven legal fees when he was in private practice.

On the other hand, Seagraves had seen the deals he cut to get what he wanted.

Seagraves thought the source of the contradiction was that Ward Townes did not come from the substantial side of the Townes family and could not be depended on to side with anybody. There had been a split in the family a long time before anybody alive now could remember, and one branch established the manufacture of bricks in central Georgia and got rich, and the other side laid the bricks and waited their turn.

The substantial Towneses lived on Draft Street with Seagraves. Ward Townes's side of the family had settled in town later, on Park Street with the car dealers and dentists.

"I wouldn't count on anything from Ward Townes," he said finally. "There's some people you can't predict."

"He's got to live here," Trout said again.

"I do not want to leave your house tonight," Seagraves said, "without an agreement between us on the serious nature of the events that have occurred. Ward Townes can't be taken for granted."

"What would he go and make trouble for himself for?"

"Principle," Seagraves said. "He might do it on principle."

"The principle in this is on my side," Trout said. "You're a businessman, I ain't got to explain it to you."

Hanna Trout came back into the room again, and this time she sat down. "I would like to know what this is about," she said. Seagraves waited for Trout to answer, but he gave no sign that he'd even noticed her.

When he spoke again, it was to Seagraves. "Besides, Buster Devonne was there too. He did as much as me, and that makes two witnesses on our side."

"I think you ought to stay away from Buster Devonne awhile," Seagraves said. "You aren't in this together now, and if that girl dies, you don't want to be in it together then."

°'What girl?" Hanna Trout said quietly.

Seagraves turned to her, acknowledging her. She looked clean and strong, he could not imagine her neglecting her house in the way it had been neglected. Seagraves waited for Trout to tell her what had happened, but it was as if she were not in the room.

Trout drew a long breath. "Buster Devonne is in my employment," he said, "and he will say any damn thing I tell him."

"You pay him enough to spend the next five years killing snakes for the state?"

Trout thought it over. "He would if I told him."

Seagraves caught another look at Mrs. Trout. He wished she would go back into the kitchen, it was hard to watch her husband insult her in this way. He wondered what kept her in the chair. He thought again about the condition of the house and was curious if it was connected to her stubbornness.

"People don't go to prison for other people," Seagraves said, returning to Trout. "Things look different to him than they do to you, and they look different sitting in the living room than they will in front of Judge Taylor."

"Things look different ways when they ain't clear," Trout said.

Seagraves put the cup on the table beside the davenport and stood up to leave. Trout stood up with him, and the sudden movement startled his wife. She recovered herself and smoothed her skirt.

"You be at the store tomorrow?" Seagraves said.

"Business as usual," Trout said. "All day."

"I expect you'll hear from Ward Townes in the morning," Seagraves said. "He'll likely send Hubert Norland over to pick you up, to interrogate you on what happened."

Trout considered that.

"If that in fact occurs," Seagraves said, "you have somebody call me, and I'll meet you at the courthouse. I don't want you telling Ward Townes the time of day without me there in the room."

He started for the door and then stopped. "Don't count on Buster Devonne to get you off" he said. "Or Ward Townes, or anybody or anything. The only people you can count on right now are your lawyer and your family, and that is what I came over here tonight to impress on you. We'll begin on the rest tomorrow, when there's more time .... " He stole a look at Mrs. Trout and then smiled because she'd caught him.

"I'm sorry to push my way into your house at this hour," he said to her, "and I hope you will forgive the abrupt nature of this business."

Trout looked off in another direction while Seagraves spoke to her, as if he were waiting for him to finish tinkling in the bushes.

"What is the nature of this business?" she said, studying his face. Seagraves considered her again, noticing her eyes. They were as dark as the coffee she'd brought him. He found himself attracted. He said, "I think perhaps that is something you'd better discuss with your husband, Mrs. Trout." He saw that did not satisfy her.

"If you like, you could come with Paris to my office tomorrow and we'll go over it in detail." He looked at Trout for help, but Trout was still focused a long way off.

"The details are not my interest, Mr. Seagraves," she said, looking right into his face. "My interest right now is what act has brought you to this house tonight. There is a girl involved. What has happened to her?"

"It isn't scandalous," Seagraves said. "l can assure you it isn't that."

He shook her hand and then let himself out the front door. Trout had not moved or changed attitude.

Seagraves walked a few steps toward the street and then stopped to light a cigar. He felt relieved to be out of the house. He thought of her bottom as she climbed the stairs and tried to remember the oldest woman he had ever taken to bed. There had been a whore in Atlanta during his first term in the state legislature — she had seemed old to him then, but that was a long time ago, when he didn't know what old was.

It came to him slowly that the oldest woman he had ever had was his wife. And that was a long time ago too.

* * *

IN THE MORNING HARRY Seagraves walked to work. He followed the sidewalks to the college, speaking to everyone he met, and crossed the campus on a diagonal to Davis Street. His office was half a block up, on the second floor of the Dixie Theater Building, and you would never know, looking at the building or the offices inside it, that his was one of the richest and most successful law practices in the state.

He kept it that way intentionally, resisting changes. The people he represented — in the legislature as well as the courts — liked the way things were and worried in an unfocused way that they were somehow losing what they had, mostly to the federal government.

His secretary was a middle-aged woman named Emma Grandy. She looked up as he came through the doorway. "Mr. Townes has called twice," she said.

Seagraves looked at his watch, it was twenty minutes after nine. He had known Townes would call, but he had expected him to take more time to think it through. "Would you call Cornell Clinic for me," he said to her. "Inquire to the condition of one Rosie Sayers."

"Yessir," she said.

He walked into his private office and took off his coat and his shoes. His feet hurt from the walk; he determined to have someone look them over. He couldn't decide between a doctor and a shoe salesman; they didn't bother him at all after he ran.

The office was filled with old furniture and pictures. Lucy as Miss Ether County, 1935. His brother's children as babies. There was a diploma from Georgia Officers Academy on the wall, along with his law degree from the University of Georgia. Class of 1934.

Mrs. Grandy knocked on the door and looked in. She had a child's face and took everything he said seriously. She understood the law as well as most of his partners but kept it to herself.

"I called the clinic," she said. "Rosie Sayers is quite grave .... "

Seagraves nodded. "Did you talk to Dr. Braver himself?"

"No sir, Dr. Braver was busy. I talked to his girl."

"If you get a moment later," he said, "you might try to get the doctor on the phone for me. I'd like to speak to him myself."

"The girl said he was in surgery," she said, "some little boy that cut himself this morning on the rocks at the church — "

"Whenever he's finished," Seagraves said. "It's no hurry."

She closed the door, and Seagraves picked up his telephone. Ward Townes answered the other end himself. "County prosecutor's office," he said, "good morning."

Seagraves said, "Mr. Prosecutor? This is Harry Seagraves."

"Thank you for getting back to me," he said. "There was a problem yesterday afternoon down to Indian Heights .... "

"I heard that," Seagraves said.

"I thought you might. You still represent the Trout family?"

"As far as I know."

"Then let me suggest that you bring your client by my office this afternoon, save us getting Chief Norland upset, having to pick him up." `

"Charges been pressed?"

"Not yet," Townes said. "But people been shot."

"We might could settle this between the parties, save everybody some aggravation."

"I think it's too late," Townes said.

"Does this mean you aren't in a settling mood today, Mr. Prosecutor? We could come in some other time."

"That girl he shot in the stomach, she's fourteen years old," he said. There was no anger in the words, it sounded more like an argument you might have with yourself, trying to decide what to do.

"That somebody shot," Seagraves said. "There was more than one gun. Buster Devonne had a gun, maybe some of them had guns too."

"Buster Devonne's already told me who did the shooting," Townes said. "He came in yesterday afternoon after it happened."

"Buster Devonne is a known liar."

There was a pause, Townes considering Buster Devonne. "He said Paris shot the girl. Followed her into the kitchen to finish it, and then both of them lit out the back like thieves."

"You believe him?"

"You don't?" Townes said.

Seagraves measured his answer. "I believe Paris Trout's been a businessman in Ether County a long time," he said. "His sister's a court I clerk. People know him, they traded with him. Not just whites. He's got loans out all over the county. Indian Heights, some in the Bottoms too, and there isn't anybody either color ever heard of this Sayers girl or her people."

"Obscurity isn't grounds to shoot children in the state of Georgia," Townes said, and there was something in his voice now. "The law doesn't say anything about the social station of the deceased."

Seagraves saw the conversation had somehow turned personal and moved it a different direction. He said, "Buster Devonne, he cracked so many burrheads they had to take him off the police. The first man in the history of Cotton Point, Georgia, they took off the police for assaulting Negroes. He went from that to cotton stealing, you brought him in this office yourself for that.

"He got off on cotton stealing, and the next thing you know, he's got a death grudge against a man, all he did was catch Buster stealing his cotton. Bragging all over town he's going to do this and that to some dirt farmer — hell, I think he was a Methodist — and then sneaks out one night and sets his chicken coop on fire.

"You couldn't find a jury in Ether County that is going to believe the testimony of a man that settles his grudges by setting chickens on fire — not over Paris Trout."

Townes said, "The man was there. It's what he said. The clinic reports the girl made the night, but she won't make another. The nurse said isn't a thing left to do for her but dig a hole."

"That isn't up to the nurse, to say that she's gone."

"That's so," Townes said, "but she's shot, four, five times, and I want to see Paris Trout about that at one o'clock in my office this afternoon. If he isn't here, I'll send Chief Norland to get him."

"No need for that," Seagraves said. "I think we'd both be served to keep this as uncomplicated as possible."

"Thank you, Mr. Seagraves, and we'll see you at one."

Seagraves put the phone back in its cradle, surprised at Ward Townes's sudden anger — which wasn't noticeable unless you knew him — and opened one of the lower drawers in his desk. He put his feet in the drawer, resting them on somebody's papers. He didn't look to see whose. He thought of Buster Devonne on the witness stand testifying against Paris Trout. Confused and undignified and scared.

He thought of Buster Devonne, and then he thought of the witnesses from Indian Heights. Paris Trout would be sitting beside him all the time in a blue suit, where the jury could compare him to his accusers. He might not need to say a word.

Still, something in it tugged at him. He called Mrs. Grandy in the outside office. "Did you locate Dr. Braver yet?"

"No sir, they said he's having a time with that boy."

"Keep trying him for me," he said. "Meantime, get me Paris Trout. He'll be at the store."

"Yessir," she said. A minute later she knocked and put her head inside. "There's no answer at the store," she said.

"Did you try the house?"

"Yessir, I got his wife, but she said Mr. Trout wasn't there." Harry Seagraves took his feet out of the drawer and slipped them into his shoes.

"You want me to keep trying?" she said.

"No," he said. "I'll go over there myself. I need the exercise."

She said, "What if Dr. Braver calls?"

He said, "Tell him I'll be over to see him directly."

* * *

SEAGRAVES FOUND PARIS TROUT in the back office of his store. The front entrance was still locked — it was after ten o'clock — so Seagraves had walked around the block to the alley and found the door there open. Trout was holding his head in his hands when Seagraves caught him, gray hair spilling out between his fingers, his elbows resting on the table. He was focused on a bill of sale in front of him. There was a bottle of mineral water next to the paper and a strong body odor in the air.

Seagraves said, "Mr. Trout?"

Trout looked up slowly. His eyes were blood red, and the front of his shirt was wrinkled, as if he'd slept in it. "It's here in black-and-white," he said.

A light bulb hung from the ceiling, a little behind the table, and when Trout took his finger off the bill of sale, the shadow faded and grew until it covered most of the document.

"Right here," Trout said. "Account payable, Henry Ray Boxer. One thousand and twenty-seven dollars for a 1949 Chevrolet. Neither God nor man can say that debt wasn't legal. I have the proof." He pushed the paper at Seagraves, Seagraves did not move. "Look for yourself?

The bill of sale was written in a tiny, neat handwriting, the signatures were scrawled and unreadable. Seagraves did not try to read it.

"Ward Townes called, like we thought," he said quietly. "He wants to see us this afternoon at one o'clock."

"Does he care to see the bill of sale?"

Seagraves said, °'We can bring the bill of sale."

"It's black-and-white," Trout said again. "That car was sold as legal as the seal of Georgia." His eyes opened wider, a frightening color. Seagraves realized he had no idea whatsoever of the transformations going on in his head.

"It would be a good idea you went home and changed shirts," he said. "Shaved, cleaned yourself up."

Trout touched the bill of sale again. "He don't need me," he said.

"He's got everything he needs to settle this right here."

"No," Seagraves said, "we got to see him ourselves."

Trout suddenly stood up and slammed his fist into the middle of the table. Dust stirred, it settled. "He don't believe these are the real signatures?"

Seagraves was suddenly aware of the size of Paris Trout and the size of the room, and he wished he'd used the telephone. More than that, he wished Paris Trout was somebody else's client. This had a feeling he didn't like, that he was drawn into something further than he ought to be.

"Sit down, Paris," he said, and was surprised when Trout sat down. He began to pace. Trout followed him with his eyes, back and forth.

"We got a problem here between us and the prosecutor," he said. "It isn't black-and-white, at least you better hope not. It doesn't matter what's in any bill of sale, it concerns people that have been shot." Trout stole a quick look at the paper. "It isn't in the goddamn bill of sale," Seagraves said. He leaned across the desk, smelling dried sweat, a faint odor of vomit. "It's in Cornell Clinic. There's a child in Comell Clinic named Sayers, and she's been shot four times and is all but done living. That's all Ward Townes wants to talk to you about now, and you would be smart to prepare yourself, not to make this worse than it is."

Trout blinked his red eyes and waited. Seagraves found himself suddenly calm. "Listen, now," he said. "I want you to take yourself home, bathe, and put on something it don't look like you've been wrestling pigs. And then, at one o'clock on the dot, you be at the prosecutor's office, looking like somebody, and talk to the man about that girl. Not that you shot her — don't put yourself in as deep as you did with Hubert Norland — but talk about the girl, acknowledge her."

Trout patted the paper on the desk. "This is the proof," he said.

"Don't use that word this afternoon," Seagraves said. "Don't try to tell Ward Townes what proof is." He thought for a moment and put it a different way. "I'll be with you," he said. "I can stop you from saying the wrong thing, but I can't make up the right words and whisper them in your ear. I believe this thing is . . . an affront to Ward Townes. Something in it is personal, like you had insulted him. Treat it like that, like he was offended."

Trout sat still. "How much is this gone cost me?" he said finally.

"I don't know," Seagraves said. °'Some of it's up to Ward Townes, some of it's up to you."

Trout took a mechanical pencil out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Seagraves. "I want you to write it down," he said.

"Christ Almighty, Paris . . ."

The pencil was green and translucent, he could see little specks floating around inside. The eraser was worn smooth at the corners, and the word SCRIPTO was worn half off the side. It was a nineteen-cent pencil, and Trout had kept it probably five years.

"The price to represent my legal case. I want you to put it right here on a piece of paper, so we both know where it is."

Seagraves put the pencil on the table, beside the mineral water. He noticed spit floating on top. "The price depends on the time," he said, "you know that as well as anybody." It was part of the enigma of Paris Trout that he had graduated from law school himself, someplace up in North Carolina, but never practiced law.

Trout shook his head. "I want one price," he said.

"I don't discuss price," Seagraves said. "I got a girl that prepares the billings, but she can't tell you a thing until we determine what that child in Cornell Clinic's going to do and what Ward Townes intends to do about it."

"I want a number wrote down, right now at the start," Trout said.

"That's how I do business." He was smiling now, as if he had Seagraves trapped. Trout's teeth were yellow and gapped, and against his will, Seagraves imagined the way it would have looked when he shot the girl.

"All right," he said, "you tell me what you did, and I'll tell you how much it costs."

Seagraves took the chair in the corner and moved it to the table. He did not want to be in the room with Trout and what he had done — he had wanted it softened first, to read it, have one of his clerks take the statement — but there was something in Trout that pushed things farther than they were intended to go.

Trout sat still. His face was changed, but it held the smile. "What did you want to know?" he said.

"Everything you did in that girl's house."

Trout rubbed his ears and pushed the hair back off his face. "The family owed me a debt," he said. "A legal debt . . ."

Seagraves did not try to guide him now. He waited to see where the story would go on its own.

"It was eight hundret dollars, I sold him that Chevrolet, and I told him I get my money. It was eight hundret for the car, another two hundret and twenty-seven for the insurance. I always tell them I get my money. You can ask any coloreds in Cotton Point, they'll tell you the same thing."

Seagraves stared at Trout and waited.

"I warned that boy when he brought the car back," he said. "He busted it up, wanted me to forgive the debt." Trout shook his head. "I don't forgive debts," he said. "I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return."

Seagraves sat still.

"And I went out there, to Indian Heights where this family is, to collect my money."

Seagraves stopped him. "You thought they had eight hundred dollars in the cookie jar?"

"I never said so. I went out to get them to sign me a note to have it took from their pay. That's all that was intended, to get my note signed."

"You brought Buster Devonne," Seagraves said.

"That debt was legal. That's all anybody's got to do, look at the bill of sale. I am a businessman, I don't make nothing up." Trout moved in his chair, looking uncomfortable. "I don't have a cruel heart," he said.

Seagraves smiled at the phrase.

"We drove out to the house," Trout said. "This boy Thomas Boxer was on the porch. Buster Devonne had the note, and Thomas Boxer wouldn't sign it. He had his feet on the rail. I shook him by the collar. There was people behind their curtains now, and you forgive one debt, ain't none of them going to pay you ever.

"Then the boy rose up like nobody's business, made to grab me, and I went to sit him back down. The girl got in the midst of it — she put herself in the midst — and then the woman. The ruckus moved into the house, where the girl and the woman was shot. The boy run off, and I wouldn't want his conscience to live with."

Seagraves said, "Who shot the girl and the woman? Was it Buster Devonne or was it you?"

"Don't know," Trout said. "It was cloudy in the house, and it's still cloudy when I think about it."

"Cloudy?"

"Smoky," he said.

"You told Hurbert Norland they had guns?"

Trout thought for a moment and then said, "Yessir."

Seagraves heard the lie in that. "You got your gun?"

Trout opened the drawer to the table and came out with an ivory-handled Colt automatic. He laid it on the table between them, with the barrel pointed at the bottle of mineral water. "That's the one I carry," he said. "You can take it if you need, I got spares here in the store."

With the gun on the desk, Seagraves imagined the scene again, how it might have looked to the girl. "Did you clean it when you got back?" He was going slower now, thinking better.

Trout nodded and said, "That gun cost two hundret and forty dollars, you damn right I cleaned it."

"Did you look at the clip, see how many rounds you'd fired?"

Seagraves studied the gun, there was something out of the ordinary.

"What is that, a thirty-eight?"

Trout smiled. "No sir," he said, and he picked it up in his open hand, as if he were weighing it. "This is a forty-five. A lot of people make the same mistake; it don't look like what it is."

"How many times was it fired?"

Trout shrugged. "Didn't count," he said.

"You removed the clip when you cleaned it."

"I loaded it back up," he said. "I didn't count the rounds."

"What did Buster have?" Seagraves said. "Did he have a forty-five too?"

Trout shook his head. "He got a thirty-eight. The same one from when he was on the police. Buster gets a gun he likes and sticks with it."

Trout put the automatic back on the table and Seagraves picked it up. He thought of the girl in Cornell Clinic and the accidental nature of her associations. What would she make of a rich white man, holding the gun that shot her? He wondered suddenly if she could read. If somebody had somehow shown her the story in the newspaper beforehand — the story that she'd been shot — would she have known what it was?

"And there were guns in the house," Seagraves said.

Trout did not answer, did not seem to understand what Seagraves meant.

"Did you see guns? You said they had guns too."

"I might," he said.

· "Did anybody touch them?"

It went slow, with Trout taking his time to consider the answers.

"I would say so, yes, sir."

"This girl might of touched a gun?"

"Might of."

"And the woman might of touched a gun?"

Trout shrugged. "It got smoky," he said. "You couldn't tell who was shooting .... "

Seagraves heard the false sound in that, and Ward Townes would hear it too. What he would do about it Seagraves didn't know. On the whole, Townes was sweet-dispositioned — some days you couldn't tell he was even a prosecutor — but there was something in him that wasn't sweet too, and Seagraves saw no reason to bring it out.

He stood up, and Trout stood up with him, making the room crowded. "If a man were to come in here today," Seagraves said, in an off handed way, "and told you this or that was the way to run your business, would you listen?"

"What man?" Trout said.

"I don't care, President Eisenhower. Would you listen?"

"Not to that sonofabitch."

"Then Marvin Griffin. Would you listen to Governor Griffin?"

"To run my business?"

"That's right."

"Marvin Griffin ain't been in a business like this."

"What if he was? What if Mr. Griffin had a business like yours up in Atlanta, and he came in here tomorrow and said this or that was the way things ought to be done."

Trout took it to heart. "I would tell him to get the hell out," he said.

"Hold that thought," Seagraves said. "Hold that one thought when you see Ward Townes this afternoon. That you're coming into his store."

Trout started to answer, but then he stopped. Seagraves said, "Leave your bill of sale here. Let him ask for what he wants to see." Seagraves looked at the paper on the table. The gun was there too. "All except that," he said. "Let me have the weapon, he'll need that, and I'd just as soon as it wasn't on your person when it changed hands."

Trout picked up the gun and handed it to Seagraves. Seagraves put it in the pocket of his coat.

"I'll want that back," Trout said. "You tell Mr. Townes I want my property returned."

"It's his store," Seagraves said.

"It's my property."

"Not now," Seagraves said. "There is nothing connected to you and that girl that's yours, and there is nothing you want to claim."

"I ain't ashamed," Trout said.

Seagraves was on the way out but those words stopped him, and  for a moment he fought an urge to quit Trout on the spot. "I know you aren't," he said, "but I want you to try."

"You ain't told me what it's going to cost," Trout said.

"You haven't told me what you did."

* * *

SEAGRAVES LEFT THE STORE the way he had come in, walked up the alley to the street, and turned left. A dozen people spoke to him in the two blocks to Comell Clinic, most of them he recognized from Homewood Community, where the state hospital was. During his tenure in the state legislature Seagraves had gotten city water for Homewood, and controlled every Democratic vote there since. And there weren't any Republicans, not even in the asylum.

People in Homewood named their children after Harry Seagraves, some of them even believed he lived there. He took his time, speaking to everyone who spoke to him, commenting on the weather a dozen times between Trout's alley and the glass door to Thomas Comell Clinic. There had been no winter that year, and people wanted him to reassure them the seasons weren't gone forever.

He stepped through the doors of the clinic, smiled at the nurse sitting at the desk and then at the patients waiting in chairs around the room.

The nurse straightened herself and smiled. "Mr. Seagraves," she said.

"Miss Thompson," he said, reading the name off her blouse. She was a small-boned woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, and her hair hung in a ponytail over one shoulder. She put in time on her looks, and Seagraves imagined her ponytail matted against his own shoulder, wet from the bath. He put it out of his mind.

"I wonder if I might see Dr. Braver when he has a minute," he said.

She went for the doctor, and he took a seat against the wall with the patients. He signed the cast on a boy's foot and gave him a quarter to buy a Moon Pie and a Dr Pepper after he was finished with Dr. Braver.

The doctor came through the door a moment later, and Seagraves left his seat. Dr. Braver was wearing white shoes with pink soles, a white belt, rimless spectacles. He did not smile when he shook hands, but then, Seagraves had never seen him smile.

He noticed an intimate look pass between the doctor and his nurse as they came into the room, however, and surmised that she was doing what she could in that direction.

"What may I do for you today, Mr. Seagraves?"

There were specks of blood on one of the doctor's sleeves and a spot of red on the gold watch he wore under it. He had snow-white hair and had been that way since he was twenty-five years old.

"I wonder if we could have a moment in private," Seagraves said.

"We could," Braver said. He looked quickly behind Seagraves at the waiting patients and then spoke to his nurse. "Ain't nobody dying on us, is there?" he said.

"No sir," she said.

"Good," he said. He held the door to the back rooms open, and as Seagraves walked through, the doctor spoke again to his nurse. "Call Dr. Bonner for me," he said. "Tell him I said to do something about the rocks out to front of the church."

"Yessir," she said.

P. P. Bonner was not a medical doctor, but the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. Seagraves recalled his boy, Carl, the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state, had gone off to Tufts University in Massachusetts when he was only sixteen years old. Won medals in Korea and was getting ready to graduate law school himself.

Seagraves did not remember the boy well, only that he was famous in Cotton Point and had always seemed too polite. As if he wanted something from you.

Dr. Braver followed Seagraves through the door and then led him down a long hallway to his office. He did not sit down or offer him a seat.

He removed his glasses and cleaned them with a corner of his coat.

"Yessir," he said, "what can I do for you today?"

Seagraves was direct, anything else was wasted on Braver. "A prognosis on Miss Rosie Sayers," he said.

Braver blinked at the lawyer. "To what specific purpose?" he said.

"I represent an interested party," he said.

'°What party would that be?"

"Paris Trout," he said.

Dr. Braver scratched the side of his ear and then studied the end of his finger. "Prognosis," he said.

Seagraves nodded.

"Tell you what," Dr. Braver said, "I'll leave you make your own."

He walked back out of the office and then up two flights of stairs. He seemed in more of a hurry now, and Seagraves's feet began to hurt, keeping up.

At the top of the second flight of stairs the doctor opened the door, and Seagraves walked through it, pleased to hear the doctor breathing hard, and found himself at the end of a long, narrow hall. The hall was dark, lit only by the sunlight from the rooms. All the way down, the doorways seemed to glow.

Dr. Braver walked ahead again, first to the nurse's station, where a woman as white-haired and serious as the doctor himself was sitting, reading the Saturday Evening Post. There was a painting of a doctor's office on the cover, a red-headed boy with freckles in a sling. It reminded Seagraves of Carl Bonner. He thought it must be a sign, to think of the boy twice in the same day.

The woman looked up from the magazine, saw it was Braver, and straightened herself to look alert. "You're early for your rounds, Doctor?" she said.

Braver nodded at Seagraves. "This is the famous attorney Harry Seagraves," he said. "He wants to look in on Miss Rosie Sayers on a legal matter."

If the woman knew the name Harry Seagraves, she did not show it. "Well," she said, without ever looking at Seagraves, "she's right where you left her."

Braver walked past the nurse and almost to the end of the hall. He went slower now, as if the reason to hurry were gone. The last door on the left was closed to the hall, and that was the one. Seagraves could read the number, 313. Braver turned the handle and stepped aside.

There were eight beds in the room, all but one occupied. An orderly sat at the far end, his chair against the window, his feet resting on one of the beds. His chin was tucked into his shoulder, and his arms were laid across his stomach.

"That there is Miss Sayers," the doctor said. His voice seemed too loud for the room, and at the sound of it the orderly stirred and then scrambled.

Seagraves looked in the direction Braver had indicated and saw the girl. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth protruded and lay across her bottom lip. The pillow rose up around her face and softened it, she looked like some dark-centered flower.

Somebody in another bed coughed and then moaned. The orderly was on his feet now, smoothing his hair. Braver paid him no attention. He walked to the girl's bed and looked at the chart hung at the foot. Seagraves stayed where he was.

"You want to see the girl, Mr. Seagraves, here she is."

Seagraves walked as quietly as he could across the floor. He kept his eyes in front of him, not wanting to look into any of the beds he didn't have to. Seagraves had an aversion to illness. Braver handed him the girl's chart and moved closer. He held her eyelids open, each side, he checked the needle going into her arm. He seemed rough with the girl, but it was less in the way he touched her than the way he let go.

"That line acrost the top of the chart is the times," Braver said, laying his fingers along the girl's neck for a pulse. "All the patients in this room are in jeopardy. We keep an orderly in here day and night, and he carefully checks each patient's life signs on the hour, and that way we know when they have passed on."

He looked at the orderly over the word "carefully."

Then he let go of the orderly, in a way that was related to the way he let go of the girl, and returned to Seagraves. "You can see from the blood pressure notations on Miss Sayers's chart that at seven o'clock this morning she was nearly expired."

Seagraves looked at the chart but could not read it. "By eight," Braver said, "she rallied back, and by nine she regained consciousness and complained of pain."

The doctor pulled the sheet back and Seagraves realized the girl was naked. It took a moment because of the bandages. They had wrapped her arms and covered her whole stomach, from the little tuft of pubic hair to her chest.

It was the undamaged parts that touched Seagraves, though. Her shoulders and legs were no bigger than the bones underneath them. He could have wrapped his hand all the way around her neck. The doctor looked at the orderly and said, "Scissors."

The orderly produced a pair of scissors. They had long handles and took a small bite. Braver accepted them and began to cut the wrapping off` the girl's stomach, starting at the bottom and working up. The orderly stood by, waiting to be of use.

Braver finished the cut and opened the dressing. The hole was almost perfect, crusted around the edge, smaller than Seagraves had imagined.

"This right here is the approximate angle of penetration," Braver said. He moved farther up the bed and pointed slightly down. "It perforated her stomach and liver and ended up in her right buttocks."

Braver removed his finger and stepped away. "You want a closer look, Mr. Seagraves?" he said.

"The bullet's still in her?" he said.

"One of them is," he said. "The others passed through her appendages. Her arm's broke in two places. Come get a good look if you want, it ain't catching."

Seagraves said, "I never asked to see this."

Braver took off his glasses again and cleaned them against the corner of his coat. He put them back on and then pulled the sheet back over the girl. It fell half across her still, narrow face, covering half her mouth, part of her cheek. It fell like the first shovel of dirt. Seagraves felt a panic loose somewhere inside himself.

"All I asked for was a prognosis, Dr. Braver," he said, and the sound of his own voice quieted the feeling.

Braver looked at the orderly, who still hadn't washed himself of sleep. "The orderly here excepted, Mr. Seagraves, I believe that you will find an agreement among the medical community that Miss Rosie Sayers is dead." He picked up an edge of the sheet and dropped it over rest of her face, covering everything but the fuzz on top of her cad.

Someone moaned, someone coughed. Braver was fastened on the orderly again, the orderly was looking at his watch. "It must of only happened," the orderly said.

Braver held him a minute longer and then said, "Have it cleaned up," and walked out the door. Seagraves followed him, making no effort to keep up, picturing the  small, perfect hole in the girl's stomach. He felt the gun then, a secret in his pocket. And the secret settled on him with a weight, distinct from the gun.

* * *

SEAGRAVES LEFT THE CLINIC without speaking another word to Dr. Braver. He crossed the street to the campus of the officers' academy, stepped into a cluster of trees, and got sick. He collected himself there and then returned to his office. He borrowed a car from Dick Spudd and drove out to Indian Heights.

He did not tell Spudd, the junior partner in the firm, where he was going. The car was a new Cadillac, and he was fussy where it went. Seagraves found the house almost without trying. He stopped the car when he saw it at the end of the road. There were youngsters in the yard, a man sitting on a chair in the porch. The house had two front doors, both of them were open. A pair of chickens picked their way through a ditch, eating gravel, and there were car tracks in the clay alongside the house.

The man on the porch was watching him. Seagraves found himself out of the car, walking toward him. He stopped at the foot of the porch and looked up. The sun was behind the roof of the house, and Seagraves had to squint to see him. "Mr. Boxer?"

The man shook his head. "No sir."

"Are you Thomas Boxer?"

"No sir. You must of have the wrong house."

Seagraves looked up and down the street. "Is this where Mary McNutt lives?"

"No sir, I tol' you this ain't the right house for you."

Seagraves held out his hands. "I don't mean nobody harm," he said.

"What that in your pocket?" the man said.

Seagraves felt the weight there and shook his head. "I'm an attorney of the law," he said. "I don't shoot nobody."

"Uh-huh."

He took the first step to the porch, the man sat up. "I wonder if I might look inside," he said.

"Fo' how long?"

"Only a minute," Seagraves said. "I just want to see where it I happened."

The man nodded at the entrance on the right. "In there is where it happened," he said.

"May I go in?"

"He'p yourself," the man said. "People been through it already, I don't see how it make no difference one more."

Seagraves stepped onto the porch and then, nodding at the man, into the house. It was cooler inside than out, the smell of gunpowder was still in the room.

He went through quickly. There were stuffed chairs in the first room, and a cot. Beds in the second and third, and a kitchen at the back of the house. A wood stove, a table, an old trunk sitting in the corner.

In the kitchen he stopped, knowing this was the place. It was the smallest room of the house, and the ceiling back here slanted down for reasons he could not discern. He imagined Trout, stooping to fit himself into this place where he did not belong. The pots and pans were hung from nails over the stove, a line of canning jars sat empty against the far wall. The door from the kitchen outside hung half off its hinges.

Paris Trout had come into this room, where there wasn't anything, and taken a child's life.

Seagraves had accustomed himself to the gunpowder now and could not smell it, but there was something in its place, bitter and metallic. More of a taste than an odor.

" He turned back toward the front of the house, meaning to leave the way he had come, but the taste got stronger, and he could hear the words the man on the porch said when he came in: "This ain't the right house for you."

Seagraves looked back through the rooms, and the taste filled his mouth. He saw that something had been stirred as he came through and was waiting for him now to come back.

He pushed open the back door and stepped outside. He was dizzy in the sudden light and steadied himself against the side of the house. He closed his eyes, feeling the shaking in his hands and legs. He remembered he had been sick earlier, he thought he needed something to eat. When he looked again, there was a child not five yards away, barefoot in a dirty pink dress, sucking her thumb. It seemed to Seagraves he had seen the girl before. He smiled but the taste was still in his mouth, and then he was sick again, without warning, without anything in his stomach to come up. His eyes watered, and he bent in half.

And beyond the noises coming out of his body, he heard the child screaming as she ran. She was screaming that the devil was back. He straightened himself and walked back to the Cadillac. The man on the porch sat in his chair, watching him, and people on other porches watched him too. The only sound was the child — the same child — standing in the road now, screaming it over and over, the devil was back. No one moved to hush her.

Seagraves opened the car door and sat heavily behind the steering wheel. The taste was still in his mouth. He fit the key into the starter, and then the passenger door opened — he never saw even a shadow of movement — and then a freshly decapitated chicken was spraying blood and feathers all over the front seat, pounding the air and the seat with its wings, propelled a different direction each time its feet found a hold.

Seagraves covered his face with one arm and found the door handle with the other. He spilled out of the car backwards and fell into the road. He got to his feet, opening the car door wider, and waited for the chicken to spill out too. But the chicken had lost its range now and lay on the floor between the brake and the clutch, its movements reduced to spasms.

Seagraves waited, keeping his eyes inside the car but feeling the dark faces on the porches and in the windows. The chicken stopped moving. The windows and seats were sprayed with its blood, and tiny spotted feathers hung everywhere. There were larger feathers too, one of them floated in a puddle near the chicken.

He waited, and then he reached in for the bird, and as he touched it, it jumped, as if it had been hit by a current of electricity, and Seagraves jumped too, and yelled. And then, ashamed of himself; he took the chicken by the feet and dropped it in the road. The chicken had turned the rearview mirror almost straight down, and as Seagraves adjusted it, driving slowly up the road and beginning to talk out loud to settle himself; he saw one of them walk into the road and retrieve it.

Dinner.

* * *

SEAGRAVES DROVE THE CADILLAC to Bud Ramsey's Sinclair filling station on Samuel Street and left it to be cleaned. He walked from there to his home and found Lucy sitting in curlers and lipstick in the kitchen while the maid vacuumed the living room. She made a face when she saw him and closed the top of her robe.

She said, "What on earth?"

He sat down heavily across the table. "Would you get me a Coke-Cola?" he said.

She reached across and picked a feather off his lapel and looked at it carefully. "Your suit's spotted," she said.

"Would you get me a Coke-Cola?" he said again.

She got him the Coke. It was a six-ounce bottle, and he took all of it at once, drinking as fast as the suction of the thing would allow, and then set the empty bottle on the table. Lucy picked it up and put it in a wooden case she kept just inside the basement steps.

"Let me take those clothes," she said. "I'll get them to the cleaner's."

Seagraves stood up and allowed himself to be helped out of his coat and then his shirt and pants. He stood in the kitchen in long socks and his underwear, and she held his clothes in her fingers and studied the spots in the material. "Are you bleeding?" she said.

"No," he said, "it's not human."

The pants hung suddenly by less fingers. "I don't think the cleaner's can get this out," she said.

He walked upstairs, she came up behind him. He washed his face in the bathroom sink and then drew a bath. She stood at the bathroom door. He would have told her what had happened — he wanted to tell what had happened — but it wasn't like a story, with a natural orderand reason to the events. Lucy needed things lined up in front of her before she could see them.

She took the curlers out of her hair, and it gave her a softer appearance. She picked up a brush and began to stroke her hair. He took a breath, there was a pain deep in his throat from the vomiting. "Did you say something, Harry?" she said.

He did not answer. The bathroom felt distinctly empty. She stood on her toes in front of him, putting her face close to his, and kissed the air near his cheek. "Momma kiss," she said.

"I saw the girl Paris Trout shot," he said.

She pulled away from him, wide-eyed, as he knew she would be. She always went wide-eyed at news."What did she say?"

He stepped out of his shorts, then his T-shirt. He climbed into the tub and turned the water off with his toes. She stood in the doorway, looking down. °°Was it an affair of the heart?" she said.

Seagraves eased himself in until the water covered his shoulders.

"No," he said, "it was business."

°°He did business with a colored girl?"

"That would seem to be a problem," he said. He saw that his wife was disappointed that it was not an affair of the heart. She said, "I could understand if it was love . . . I mean, you've seen his wife. She would not appear to have . . . affectionate inclinations .... "

"You can't tell without being in the bed," he said. "It might be the opposite, that it's Paris who isn't interested."

"I don't think so," she said. "He's old, but he looks vital."

Lucy only speculated on the "affectionate inclinations" of women who were attractive in a different way than she was herself. Mostly the ones who wore less makeup. Neither of them ever mentioned her own inclinations, which were scarce. She sat down on the edge of the tub, and he pictured Hanna Trout climbing the stairs, Nurse Thompson with her wet hair lying against his shoulder, the girls he'd seen at the college on the way to work.

But the other face came with them, with the sheet dropped half across its mouth, calm and persistent. He would look away when he saw it, but in a moment he would see it again. It was there like his own reflection, glimpsed in unexpected moments.

He sat up in the tub, trying to clear himself of her. "What is it?" she said.

He picked up the soap and washed his arms and his chest. "I don't know myself," he said. "I got to sit down with Ward Townes and Trout this afternoon, and I expect it will sort out."