Paris Trout Read Online Free PDF Page A

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