Paris Trout (32 page)

"It moves," he said. "It goes through
you."

She reached for her glass and drank. The lightning
lit her up, and he saw the muscles of her stomach. When she finished,
she brought the lip of the glass to his lips, and he drank too. The
ice had melted, and the drink was weaker and somehow oily in his
mouth.

"
Where does it begin?" she said.

"
I don't know," he said. "Somewhere
inside."

"Show me."

He smiled and shook his head. She took his scrotum
again, softly now, and looked at his face.

"
Here?"

"
No, further inside."

Her fingers moved behind the scrotum, perhaps an
inch, and she pressed up into him. "Here?"

"
It°s closer there," he said. "I
can't say .... "

Her fingers moved again, separating his cheeks, and
then she put one finger directly in the middle. "Does it begin
in there?" When he did not answer, she pushed her finger into
him until she found a place where it seemed to him that the feeling
in fact began. He nodded, and she watched him closely, as if he were
somehow remarkable or different. "And where does it go?"
she said.

"You aren't going to try to follow it the rest
of the way," he said. She smiled at him and removed her finger.
When it was out of him, he noticed that his penis was half erect.
"Where does it go?" she said again.

He thought for a moment, trying to remember.
'°Somewhere," he said, "it touches a nerve that runs a
message all the way to my toes. The feeling stays in the lower parts,
though. There is no direct connection going up."

She did not seem to understand. "The feeling
itself, I'm talking about," he said. "The actual release."

She nodded.

"
The titillations that build it come from all
over, but you know that."

"
Yes."

He thought again. "I don't think it's a straight
course," he said finally. "I think there is a little track
in there like a roller coaster that it follows on the way out ....
Little drops and then a big one at the end. That's the killer, the
last drop."

She kissed him suddenly in the dark. "Is it the
same for everyone?" she said. "You think it's the same?"

"
It sounds the same when they talk about it,"
he said.

They lay still a long time. The rain and thunder
stopped, the wind almost quit too. "There'll be stars out before
the night's over," he said.

She put her head into the space between his shoulder
and his neck, and he thought again that she might be crying.

He held her quietly, thinking of the things they had
said. In the calm he saw there was something in it beyond the
questions and answers, but he could not see the purpose. As he
thought, he noticed the weight of her hand against his leg. It seemed
to be the spot they were connected, although she was pressed against
him up and down.

Her hand moved — the smallest movement — and
settled again, perhaps a quarter inch closer to his groin. His penis
crawled toward it, moving on its own across the distance, and touched
one of her fingers.

He thought she might be asleep — the steady rise
and fall of her back where he held her — but then, unmistakably, he
felt her finger. It I moved to the underside, touching a spot just
behind the head, and then slowly traced the route backwards,
following it into his body at the junction of his penis and scrotum.

Once again she would not let him move. "Is this
spot close to where it starts?" she said, pushing into him.

"
I think so," he said.

"Closer than before?"

"
I don't know."

She pushed into him further, her finger finding what
felt like the drop at the end of the track, and moved against it, up
and down. He tried to kiss her, she pulled herself back. "Let it
come by itself;" she said.

And he waited, and then the feeling came. Clearly
defined, a beginning and an end. And afterward there was a deep sting
in the place she had found.

She was staring at him.

He moved in the bed, feeling the cool places on his
legs where he was wet.

"What time is it?" he said.

"
I can look." But she didn't move.

He was suddenly uncomfortable, pressed between her
and the wall, and sat halfway up.

"Must be after midnight," he said.

She stood up and walked to the kitchen. He heard the
refrigerator door open and close, the sound of ice cubes dropping
into a glass. She came back and sat on the bed, her breasts were
small without being narrow. She held herself in the same way naked as
she did when she was wearing clothes.

She offered him a drink from the glass, which he
took. It was fresh and strong and sent a shiver through his body, as
spasmodic as the other. "It's one-thirty," she said.

The liquor settled in his stomach and warmed him. He
drank again, returned the glass. She swallowed as much as he had and
then put it away on the table. "I was surprised you drank,"
he said.

"
It helps me sleep. The house is full of
noises."

He sat still and listened, but there was no sound at
all. "You're afraid he'll come back?"

When she didn't answer, he said, "It's funny, I
am affected the same way. I wake up, every morning since the trial
ended, and wonder if Paris Trout is going to come into the office. I
dread to see him, without knowing why."

He saw that she was feeling quiet, and it made him
want to reassure her. "It's not connected to anything he might
do," he said. "Paris Trout lived fifty-nine years without
killing anybody, there's no reason to think he's going to go out
right away and do it again. But there is a quality about him that
reminds a person of something else."

It was quiet again, and he realized that he had
missed what he was trying to say. Something depended on getting it
right. "I hate to lose," he said. "I should never have
lost that case, and your husband knows it."

"
Yes," she said, "you should."

"
I'm not speaking now of what's right," he
said. "Just the legal issue. I'm embarrassed to have lost, and I
don't know exactly how it happened. He reminds me of that whenever he
comes in."

"
That's not it," she said.

He reconsidered, but it came back to the same place.
"Professional embarrassment," he said. "I take
pleasure in the work I do, and I do it better than most."

She reached over the side of the bed for her things.
She got into the dress without bothering with underclothes, then ran
her fingers through her hair. He sat on the bed, watching. Presently
she handed him his pants.

"
All right," he said, "if it isn't
professional, what is it? Not this, because I dreaded to see him
before this happened."

She moved to the window and looked outside. He
dressed himself quickly, the sound of his zipper filled the room. He
saw that she had taken the glass with her. "Hanna?" The
first time he had called her that.

"
The next time he comes to your office,"
she said, "when he first walks into the room, put the case
aside. Don't confuse my husband with what happened at his trial.
Don't meet him halfway, just pull yourself back and see what is
there."
 

The bedsprings creaked as he sat down to put on his
shoes and socks.

She said, "Sometimes if you hold yourself still,
you can tell what something is."

She walked him to the door and opened it without
checking the street. There was a formality between them that he
realized had been there even when their clothes were lying in piles
on the floor. She would not allow him any closer. He patted the small
of her back, wondering what she was thinking.

"
I'll call you,"
he said.

* * *

CARL BONNER WOKE AT first light and looked out the
window, remembering the storm. Leslie was lying with her knees pulled
up into her stomach, her arm covering her face and head, as if she
had been trying, to protect herself from something in her sleep. He
slid carefully out from under the covers, not wanting to wake her.

He walked in his undershorts to the bathroom and
closed the door. He ran hot water into the sink and brushed his teeth
in the same water that he used a moment later to shave. He combed his
hair. He would not go even into his own backyard at daybreak without
combing his hair.

He thought of a storm a long time ago when he had
been outside all night, shining his flashlight along the floor of the
birdhouse, carrying injured canaries into his kitchen.

He thought of that flashlight — three batteries, a
present from the Ether County Council of Scouts at the ceremony
making him an Eagle — wondering where it was.

He put on his jeans and a pair of slippers and walked
from the bathroom to the kitchen and then out the back door. He took
two steps in the direction of the birdhouse and stopped.

The floor of the structure was littered with dead
canaries. There was a pool of water in the center, and some of them
lay in it, half covered. Wings in odd positions caught the breeze and
rocked the small, still bodies beneath them.

He began to count the dead birds. At least forty on
the floor, two more lying, unexplainably, in the grass outside. He
stepped closer, looking into the protected end of the cage, and saw
that some of the birds there were injured or sick. He could not say
how many.

The storm had come from the south, he thought.

He found an empty seed bag — it was heavy with rain
and dripped water across the leg of his pants — and stepped into
the cage. He picked up the birds one at a time, looking each of them
over, and then put them carefully into the bottom. He remembered the
storm from before again; he had lost eleven birds. He was fifteen
years old then, and before it was over, he'd crawled over the floor
of the birdhouse on his hands and knees, scraping the fingers of the
hand that held the flashlight, collecting them one at a time,
bringing them inside, laying them across a towel in the sink.

He'd missed school that day — the only day in
eleven years he was ever marked absent — and taken care of the
birds. The dead ones were heavy and wet, but things always weighed
more when they were dead. He remembered standing in the kitchen that
morning, trying to understand the source of a bird's weight.

He noticed it again now. The cold, wet, heavy bodies.
You could not imagine, finding them like this, that a day before they
could fly. He looked up suddenly and found her on the other side of
the wire, not ten feet away. She was wearing her nightgown and had
pulled a sweater around her shoulders. The sun had broken the
horizon, but not the line of pine trees to the east, and there was a
light fog over the ground.

Tree branches were blown all over the yard, and he
was holding one of the dead canaries in his hand, its head rolled off
to one side at his knuckle. "It didn't seem this bad in town,"
he said.

She said, °'We lost the lights a few minutes."
He saw she was looking at the bird in his hand, and he reached into
the bottom of the sack and left it with the others.

"
It must have come from the south," he
said. "Sometimes when it comes from that direction, you get
storms within the storm." He looked at the bottom the cage
again, wondering how it looked to her.

"
Little tomadoes," he said.

She crossed her arms, hugging herself against the
morning. "You want me to help?"

"
Could you dig a hole?"

She went into the garage for the spade and then began
to dig at the edge of their yard. The ground was hard in spite of the
rain, and he watched her work a little while, the red clay building
into a pile beside her. She liked physical work, it was one of the
things that attracted him to her, one of the things that was
different from the girls here. She would work without rest or
distraction as long as she could see a point to what she was doing.
You could not waste her time.

He collected the rest of the dead birds and put the
sack on the ground outside the cage. Then, carefully, he went into
the protected area and began to inspect the survivors.

When he looked back at Leslie again, she had hung the
sweater on the low branch of a pecan tree and was working in her
nightdress. He watched the muscles in her back through the silky
fabric — it was wet now with her perspiration — and thought for a
moment of the neighbors, but he knew they wouldn't be awake yet.

A little later he left the cage and carried the sack
to the hole. Leslie's legs were spotted with clay. Sweat ran from her
hair down her face, leaving lines in the dust. She did not mind
getting dirty. "That's plenty," he said. "The dogs
won't dig that far."

She hitched her nightdress and stepped out. He helped
her, feeling the sweat on her wrists, and then dropped the sack where
she had been. He pulled it back out from the closed end, and the dead
birds rolled out. Four and five at a time, they seemed to be stuck
together.