Paris Trout Read Free

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.