Her finger went back to the story. "Whatshisname
in the paper. My daddy said they ought run him for governor, and he
would collect every vote in Ether County."
Hanna opened her purse and found a dollar bill.
"Trout," the girl said, reading the paper upside down. "Mr.
Paris Trout. The other one is Buster Devonne, but everybody knows
him. You can't get elected when you're too familiar."
She put the dollar on the counter and waited while
the girl made out the check. She was slow with her addition and
labored to print the numbers. The tip of her tongue appeared between
her lips. Hanna turned on the stool and began to tremble. There was a
fluttering in her throat and on her lips. She stood up, trying to
stop it, trying to get out before someone noticed.
The girl looked up, her pencil still on the pad.
There was lipstick on her front teeth. "Was everything good?"
she said. Hanna smiled at her. She thought for a moment there might
be
lipstick on her own teeth. She did not
trust herself to speak now, because she knew the fluttering would be
in the words too.
They ought to make him governor.
She saw how it would be then, that it would be public
and that she would be part of it — part of the story and part of
the legend afterward. In that moment she thought of leaving Paris
Trout, but she was afraid.
Not so much of him — although that was part of it
too — but of asking again for a different life. She imagined
herself poor, without work or a place to stay. Without the look in
his eyes the moment before he pushed himself inside her.
The girl took the check and the dollar bill to the
cash register. She searched the keys as if she had never seen the
machine before. The fluttering spread to Hanna's cheeks, just beneath
her eyes, and she knew she was going to cry.
She nodded at the people sitting at the counter and
started out the door. The girl called to her from the cash register.
"Ma'am? You forgot your change."
"That's all right, dear," she said. "I
left it for you."
The girl checked the money in her hand. "It's
sixty cent," she said. Hanna Trout walked into the sunshine. She
paused on the sidewalk for a moment, and then, without meaning to,
she looked through the glass back into the pharmacy. The girl was
still watching her. The was a little flash of pink nails as she waved
good-bye.
It was three blocks from the pharmacy to the store.
Hanna walked with her head down, afraid she would see someone she
knew. The fluttering had taken her over.
The store was locked in front, in two places. Paris
Trout was the only man in Cotton Point who put two locks on his
doors. She found the keys in her purse and went in and then closed
and relocked the door and sat in the dark on a box of tomatoes. She
needed to calm herself before she saw customers. She took deep
breaths until the air went in and out of her chest without catching.
A few minutes later she stood up to open the store
and suddenly heard his voice. She jumped at the noise, not expecting
him here now, with the story all over town. She stood in the aisle
that ran the length of the store. The office door was closed, but
there was a light in the space between it and the floor.
His voice seemed to shake the cans on the shelves.
°'What in hell is it you want from me?"
It was quiet a moment, she waited. Then Paris again:
"I will not be abused like this. No sir, not over a Negro debt
.... "
She thought it must be Harry Seagraves in the office
with him because her husband did not use the word "Negro"
except in legal matters. She could not hear the attorney's reply,
however, and then Paris was speaking again.
"
I warn you," he said. "More blood
will spilt than it already has."
He was shouting now, and it frightened her. He kept
guns in his office. He kept guns everywhere. The reply, if
there was a reply, was so soft she could not even hear the tone of
the voice. It seemed to infuriate her husband, though.
"
By God, I'll finish this now!"
And she knew in that instant that Paris would shoot
him, and she ran to stop it. Her skirt caught her knees, and she
stumbled. She heard him again, a wordless scream, just as she got to
the office. She turned the knob, expecting to find the door locked.
It moved with her hand, though, and the door opened.
Her husband was sitting at his desk, pointing a heavy
— looking square pistol at the ceiling. There was no one else in
the room. Slowly he brought the muzzle of the gun down until it
rested, together with his one open eye, in the middle of her chest.
He was unshaved, and there was dried food in a corner of his mouth.
The other eye opened, blood red.
"
Dear Jesus," she said. She was faint and
leaned against a folding chair near the wall.
He stood up, holding the gun at his side now, and
crossed the room.
She thought he meant to explain himself, but he
walked past, smelling of urine, and looked out the door, one way and
then the other.
"
There's no one in the store," she said. "I
haven't opened."
He turned back into the room and looked at her like
six crates of melons that showed up unordered. His pants were spotted
and his zipper was open. She smoothed her skirt and brushed a piece
of lint off her blouse, hoping in some way that normal motions would
make things normal.
He watched her, without a hint of movement in his
face. It came to her that things were changing now, right in the
room, and would never be retrieved.
"Sometime ago," she said, "you
borrowed a sum of money from me. In light of the circumstances, it
might be prudent to return it now."
She had no idea how those words came to her or how
they were received.
He walked back to his desk and sat down. "You're
my wife," he said.
"
I had that money before."
He shook his head. "This mess with the Negroes,"
he said — there was the word again — "it don't have the
first thing to do with you."
She began to speak, but he interrupted her. "It
don't have nothing to do with the law either. I make my deals and
live by them, and Jesus save those that don't do the same."
"
I don't want what's yours," she said. "I
want my loan repaid."
He slammed the side of the gun against the desktop,
upsetting the bottle of mineral water. Mineral water was always
somewhere around, here and at home. Paris Trout would not drink from
the tap. The bottle rolled across the tabletop, leaving a trail of
small puddles.
He made no move to stop it.
The room was quiet except for the sound of the bottle
rolling across the wood and then dropping onto the floor. She met his
stare, then looked away. In that moment she saw he was afflicted.
"I am sorry for you," she said, looking at
the floor.
He made a noise she understood to be a laugh. "That's
a lie," he said. "You're sorry for every child ever come
out of its mother's pussy barefoot, and people that's old, and all
the sumbitches play with their own toes up to the asylum, but you
ain't sorry for me."
She looked up again and saw he was laughing at her.
"I caught you fibbing," he said.
"
I want my money returned," she said.
"You know what else?" he said. "I know
why you said that. You want me pitiful, so you can feel the way
you're supposed to. Because if somebody ain't pitiful or sick, you
don't know how to act nice."
She blushed at the words and stepped backwards toward
the door. The smell of his urine was fresh in her nose again.
"Well?" he said. "Is that a fact or
not?"
"I don't know," she said.
°`You lied again."
She began to back out of the room. He came up off the
desk, and the pistol came up with him. She stopped dead. "You
lied," he said.
She said, "What do you want?" She could not
anticipate him at all now.
He looked at the empty bottle on the floor. He said,
"Get me a drink from the store, then clean up what's spilled."
The mineral water was sitting on a shelf at the front
of the store, near the door. Her intention was just to walk out. When
she got to the door, though, there was a woman waiting on the other
side. A small child hung from her arm, lifting his feet to swing or
tip her over, it was hard to say which.
Hanna recognized the woman — she was married to one
of the deans at the college — but could not remember her name.
Hanna let her in. She waited until the woman was past and then kicked
the wedged stop under the door. Open for business.
"
Can I help you find something?"
"
Thank you," the woman said, "but I'll
manage." The woman's accent was southern, but not local. She
carried herself in a dignified way, even with the child swinging from
her arm. Hanna straightened herself, thinking of her own dignity.
She picked a bottle of mineral water off the shelf
and headed back toward the office. She did not want this woman to see
Paris, she did not want to be thought of in a piteous way. Something
hung on the woman's opinion.
"
I'll be back directly," she said.
Paris was in the spot where she'd left him. Precisely
the spot. The bottle was still on the floor near his feet, a trail of
spilled water formed half an ellipse across the desk. The gun,
thankfully, was back on the desktop and out of his hand. She crossed
the room and handed him the mineral water.
There was a metal sink in the corner, and she found a
dry sponge there, wet it and wrung it out, and wiped the desk. He
opened the bottle, following every move. Neither of them spoke. She
stepped around him, bending to wipe the spilled bottle up off the
floor, and then there was a slamming noise in her ear, and she was
suddenly out of focus. She fell against the desk, beginning to
understand that he had hit her, and then his hand was around her
neck, his weight pinning her to the desktop. There was a heat in her
ear and numbness somewhere inside.
Still, neither of them spoke. The only sounds she
heard were his breathing and hers and the rush of blood in her head.
Her cheek lay flat against the desk, and her eyes were open, but he
was working from the other side, where she could not see him.
It was connected somehow to the girl he had shot.
A movement then, above her, and he set the bottle of
mineral water on the desk a few inches from her nose. She wondered if
she'd closed the door to the office, afraid that the woman would come
back to find her when she was ready to pay for her things.
She pulled suddenly, with all her strength, but he
only fastened down harder, until she cried out. Not words, only a
sound. He lifted her skirt, and she felt a coolness on the back of
her legs.
"
Paris, please . . ." The voice did not
sound like her own, it was squeezed and comic.
He brought the skirt all the way up. It hunched in
front and caught against the edge of the desk. He jerked at it,
lifting her off her feet. And then it was loose, and a moment later
she felt the soft weight of it on her back.
"
I will not tolerate this," she said.
There was no answer, and in a moment her sight
blurred, and she wondered, in a dreamed sort of way, if he had
somehow left. Then she felt his hand on her, running over the cheeks
of her bottom. He slapped her once there, the force of it moving her
head, rubbing her cheek into the wood.
Then his hand found the elastic at the top of her
underpants and pulled them down her legs until they fell of their own
accord around her feet. She fought him, rising an inch off the desk,
but he pushed her back where she had been. She thought again of the
woman outside, p picking a few things up on the way home.
No one came in for more than a few things, people did
their heavy shopping at the A&P.
She saw his hand. It closed around the bottle of
mineral water, taking it at the bottom. There was a moment of calm
then; she thought she could talk to him while was drinking.
"
Paris, look at yourself . . ."
She felt him move, she thought he meant to let her
go. Then she felt him between her legs, pushing to get inside. The
thought came to her in that same dreamed way that he had planned
this, it was why he hadn't zipped his pants.
He pressed harder, pinching her legs against the edge
of the desk, and she cried out. She heard him at the same time, the
sound he'd made earlier, almost a laugh. There was something wrong
with the location, though; the noise seemed to come from the side..He
pressed into her and pushed a little ways inside. She kicked out
behind, as high as she could, but there was nothing there.
He pushed deeper, and there was a different pain,
this one tearing her and lifting her up onto her toes, and she
realized then that it was not Paris inside her.
He used the bottle like a lever. One end was seated
deep in her vagina, the opening to her body became the fulcrum, and
he lifted her in that way until she felt the warm water running into
her and out, running down her legs into her shoes.