by Pete Dexter
He nodded. "She's divorcing him. If you would push yourself out the front door once in a while, you'd know what he did."
"Why in the world would I want to know that?"
"It's where you live," he said. "It isn't Philadelphia, but we get a killing once in a while. If it's the noise you miss, there's some to be had."
Outside, a squall of bird sounds rose and fell. "It isn't the noise," she said.
He mixed seeds and vitamins into a bucket and started out the back door and then was suddenly filled with feelings for her.
He said, "You want to help me feed the birds?"
* * *
EARLIER THAT SAME DAY Paris Trout had come to see Harry Seagraves.
In the four and a half months following his conviction on second-degree murder, it was the third time Paris Trout had come to Seagraves's office. The first time was after Seagraves had prepared the appeal to Superior Court, the second time was the day Buster Devonne was convicted of assault and sentenced to six months, and the third visit — today's — was to ask why the appeal had been rejected.
None of those meetings lasted fifteen minutes.
The appeal was written to almost a hundred pages but centered on only two points: that the pictures of the dead child should not have been admitted as evidence and that allowing Mary McNutt to show the scars of her wounds was prejudicial and beyond the scope of the complaint against Trout.
Trout never asked to read the appeal or the opinion rejecting it. He sat in Seagraves's office both times, arms crossed, and listened. And on this morning, when Seagraves finished, he'd said, "What court next?"
Seagraves took a long breath. The papers were lying on top of his desk in an open folder, corners of the pictures showing underneath. He kept them hidden beneath the papers and would have kept them in another folder altogether except he was afraid they would be lost.
"I don't know," Seagraves said. "We ought to think about this, if it s worth your money."
Trout had not changed expression. "Is the State Supreme Court the next court?" he said.
'°You know the courts as well as anybody," Seagraves said.
"Then that's where we're going."
"We need to reconsider our case," Seagraves said. "There"s no hurry now, we got time."
Trout did not seem to hear him. He stood up and walked to the door. "If the court made mistakes — if it wasn't your mistakes — then you got to write it in a way that it's clear," he said. Then he left.
Seagraves pulled the pictures out then.
He was looking at the child again, the reflections of light from the flashbulbs shone on her shoulders and forehead, the places her skin lay against her bones. He knew the pictures by heart, they came back to him sometimes early in the morning — looking at Lucy asleep in her blindfold would in some way remind him of the other darkness that had fallen across Rosie Sayers's eyes — and sometimes sitting in a courtroom or when he was out to dinner or making a speech.
He spent the day in his office, avoiding calls and appointments, thinking of the child and Paris Trout.
At four o'clock Lucy called, wanting to know if he would be home for supper. He could not place her voice at first, and then, even as it became familiar, there was a long minute when he could not remember how she looked.
"I've got Kiwanis," he said.
"Oh, I had Betty get us some sirloins," she said.
"They'll keep a day."
"Then I don't know what to have tonight . . ."
It occurred to him that this same conversation, with variations for chicken or roast beef, had been going on for close to twenty years. And then, as they spoke, he noticed that the low December sun had stretched across the floor and halfway up the bookcase on the far wall, glaring off the titles, and somewhere in that moment the fact of the child's death was fresh again.
"Harry?" It was Lucy, but even the shape of her was gone now. It was as if she were lost somewhere in the dark parts of the bookcase. "Harry, are you there?"
"I've got to go," he said.
"What am I going to do about supper?"
"I've got to go," he said again, and then he hung up.
When the phone rang again, he didn't answer.
* * *
IT WAS SIX O,CLOCK before he left the office. It was beginning to rain, and the air felt cold. He walked across the street to his car, started the engine, and waited for it to warm up enough to put on the heater. In the dark he began to shake.
He put the car into reverse, backed out into Madison Street, and drove, without thinking of what he was doing, to the corner of Draft and Samuel. The lights were on inside, he saw her once, moving toward the back of the house. He found himself walking toward the door, then he was knocking.
A sudden wind almost took the hat off his head, and he held it in place and waited for her to answer. The porch light went on, the door opened. He did not move.
"Mr. Seagraves," she said, not surprised at all.
She stepped out of the doorway and he filled the empty space, dripping rain. "I was on the way to a meeting," he said, "and I saw your light."
She did not answer him.
"Did you contact Mr. Bonner?"
"Yes," she said. "He said he would accept my case."
Seagraves was still holding on to his hat, unsure if he should remove it or not. "He's a fine young man," he said. "I'm sure he can handle it."
"He seemed confident," she said.
He smiled in spite of himself "Young lawyers are always confident. It's a failure of our law schools."
"Let me have your coat." He let her have his coat and his hat.
"Have you eaten?" she said. "I was just fixing myself a bite."
He shook his head. "I have to sit through a Kiwanis dinner in a little bit, and you cannot face that on a full stomach."
"A drink?"
And he smiled and rubbed the rain off his cheeks. "I'm surprised you would take a chance."
She offered him a seat on the couch and fixed him a drink. She made one for herself too.
"Well, Mr. Seagraves," she said, "what is on your mind?"
He sipped at the drink. The room, he noticed, had been painted since his last visit. The windows had been washed, the furniture moved to new spots on the floor.
"I don't know," he said. "I happened to think of you on the way somewhere else, then I saw your lights." She watched him and waited. "I don't know why I stopped," he said.
She said, "Perhaps I reminded you of something when I called this morning."
He took another sip, and with the taste of it still in his mouth he began to tell her. "I am bothered by the case I tried for your husband," he said. "Aspects of it have transcended the courtroom and have not left me alone since."
"Which aspects?" she said.
"The girl herself." It was quiet in the room, and he drank again. "Somehow I've obligated myself to her. The meaning of what has happened will not settle one place or another. It moves, again and again, so I never know where to expect her or when she will intrude on my thoughts."
He stood up and walked to a chair that was closer to hers. "There was a moment today," he said, "when I felt a remorse as strong as if I had shot her myself?"
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee, and drank from her glass. He saw that she was not going to answer.
"I remembered today that you warned me."
"I warned you about my husband," she said.
Seagraves nodded. "He was in today, shortly after I spoke to you."
She reached out at that moment and touched his hand, the one holding his drink. She ran her fingers along the side of the glass and then, cool and wet, across the back of his wrist. Her fingers stopped there and settled.
"Does it affect you that way?" he said. "Do you think of her too?"
She shook her head no. He noticed her neck, the tiny wrinkles at the bottom, the smooth rise to her chin. "Not like that," she said. "I saw her alive, in the store. She'd been bitten
by a fox, and I took her to the clinic. It's not the same."
It was quiet.
"During the course of the trial," he said, "Buster Devonne asked for a payment for his testimony. We gave him a thousand dollars — I gave him a thousand dollars — for what he said."
She thought a minute. "It didn't help Paris."
"No," he said, "it went against him as hard as it could." Seagraves sighed. "He was convicted, and punishment was handed down, and that ought to be it. But the child is on my mind. The law dealt with this and moved on, and I'm still tied to it."
"Cut it loose," she said.
"I don't know how."
"My husband is the connection," she said.
He thought for a moment, and she absently began to follow the line of his watch with her fingers, teasing the skin next to it. "I can't drop a client in the middle of appeals," he said.
"Why not?"
"It's unethical." He brought the glass to his mouth and took a drink this time, not a sip. "You can't just get rid of a client because you don't like what he did. Not after a guilty verdict. The time for that is before you take the case."
"I got rid of him," she said.
"That's personal, this is business."
She moved her fingers off his arm and sat back in her chair. "We're all only one person," she said. "You can't separate what you do one place from another."
"I have to," he said. "I'm a lawyer."
* * *
THE NEXT TIME SHE went into the kitchen, he followed her. There was a clock in the wall, seven-fifteen. He was already late for the Kiwanis meeting. He leaned against the sink and watched her make the drinks.
The wind was picking up outside and seemed to be coming from the south.
"Is it different now?" he said. "Living alone?"
She smiled at him from the sink. "Do I miss being half drowned in my own bathtub, you mean?"
"I mean, are you still afraid of him?"
"I have more time now," she said. "I think about him."
"Has he been back?"
She shook her head. "Not once since he moved out . . ." Then: "He's afraid, too."
She handed him the glass, and at the same moment he noticed the first feelings of intoxication. It felt like his brain was waking up happy. "Of what?" he said.
She shrugged. "That he's poisoned."
"He thinks you did it?"
"That," she said, "but it's more than that."
"How long has he been believing he was poisoned?"
"I don't know when it started. You don't notice everything at once."
He thought of her new in this house, beginning to notice her husband's peculiarities. He reached out and touched her arm, about the same way she had touched his. She looked at his hand, and for a moment nothing moved. Then she drank from her glass, then she led him into the small room just off the kitchen and sat down on the daybed against the wall. The shoes dropped off her feet. She brought her knees up under her chin and hugged her legs. She took another drink.
He sat down with her, kicking off his own shoes. The only light in the room came from the kitchen and lay in a rectangle across the floor. "I was glad to see you tonight, Mr. Seagraves," she said. "You have a kind nature."
He did not answer for a moment. He heard her drink, the ice cubes falling back into the bottom of the glass. She moved her legs, and the skirt of her dress fell into her lap. She did not seem to notice.
"Somehow," he said, framing the words, "there is a connection. You and I and Rosie Sayers are tied into each other's secrets."
"I told you my secrets," she said. "You haven't told me yours."
"I paid Buster Devonne," he said. "That's a secret."
It was quiet a long time. They drank and stared out the window into the branches of a black tree. The wind was blowing harder now, everything outside trembled.
"I told you about the girl," he said.
He sat farther back until he was resting against the wall. She had not moved, and from his new position he saw the outline of her legs against the light from the open kitchen door. The straight line across the top of her thighs, the roundness underneath, where the muscle lay. He thought of touching her there, underneath.
"My darkest secret," he said.
She turned then and took the glass out of his hand. She put it on the reading table beside the bed, along with her own.
"The thing he did with the bottle . ..."
She waited.
"I cannot get that out of my mind."
Still there was no answer.
"It aroused me," he said, and so it was all out.
He could see her eyes now, the rest of her features were lost in the dark. "That was hardly a secret, Mr. Seagraves," she said finally.
"Are you disappointed?"
He thought he saw her smile. Then her hand was touching his arm and then his cheek. Her face came close, and he felt the heat off her skin a moment before she pressed herself into his neck. He thought she might be crying.
He began to rock her, as you might rock a child. "I didn't mean I wanted to do that myself? he whispered. "I wouldn't inflict that on a person .... " He moved back and forth, smelling alcohol and shampoo, and she moved with him. For a moment they seemed to be synchronized with the tree branches outside the window, but then the wind suddenly died and the branches stopped, and Seagraves kept rocking.
In the sudden calm his voice seemed louder. "There are things like that buried in everybody," he said. "That doesn't mean you want to act on it, just that it's there. We are all flawed people."
She tugged at a button of his shirt then and laid her hand on his stomach. Her face moved against his neck and she kissed him once, softly, along the line of his jaw. His head slid against the wall, and she followed it, kissing him again, moving herself over him until his head was stopped by the bed itself. There was a sudden coolness, and he realized she had unbuttoned his shirt, top to bottom, and pulled it away from his chest.
She sat up, watching him. Her features were distinct now, his eyes were more used to the dark. Her hand moved from his stomach to his belt. There was another tug, and that was loose too. She looked up from her work without a trace of a smile. She unzipped his trousers, as practiced at it as he was himself. He began to sit up, to help her, but she put her hand against his chest and pushed him back.
Then she was not touching him at all. She reached for something out of his view. Her drink.
She brought the glass to her lips for a long minute, and then put it back on the table. She leaned toward him again and kissed the corner of his mouth. Her lips were icy at first, and he tasted the liquor, and then they moved, slippery and cold and opening, until her tongue was touching his teeth, and it was cold too. Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, following the places she had kissed, and settled behind his neck, pulling him up into her mouth.
He felt his penis pushing against the opening in his boxer shorts, and he moved a few inches against the bed, trying to realign it. The vision of his penis coming through the opening struck him as childlike and embarrassed him. And at that movement the head found the crack and poked through, perhaps half an inch.
He tried to move again, but she wouldn't let him. A hand on his stomach. She pulled back and stared at the opening in his shorts. She put the tip of her finger in her mouth and turned it as it came out, as if she were carrying something, carrying it down and out of his sight, and then her finger was circling the ridge of his penis, so softly he could not say exactly when it stopped.
She watched him growing and then touched him again, at the mouth. "It's leaking," she said. He lay absolutely still. She pulled away again, unbuttoning her dress. He did not try to help. She leaned forward, and it fell away from her shoulders. She pushed it over her hips and lifted her legs, without effort, and it was gone.
Seagraves was struck at her acrobatics.
He noticed then that her underwear was gone too, if she had been wearing any. There was no brassiere. He felt her breasts agains
t his chest. He reached behind and touched the back of her leg, feeling the round muscle, and followed it up until he reached her bottom. The edge of his finger lay against pubic hair, and it was wet and cool too. He whispered, "Let me out of my pants."
For a moment she did not move, and then she brought her knees up and lifted herself off him while her hands followed his ribs to his hips, and then his pants and shorts were coming off and down. His penis felt like it was caught outside the elevator door on the way to the top floor.
He whispered, "Oh," but she didn't stop, and a moment later his shorts and trousers were down around his knees. He tried to push them further, but she straddled him, holding him still. Pay attention. Her face began to drop toward him again, and a moment after he felt the press of her cheek, he felt her fingers around his scrotum. She used it to guide him inside her. A soft, insistent pressure that would not let him move.
She held him in that way and slowly lowered and raised herself, pulling back to watch his expression. Little bits of light from the doorway caught in her eyes — the spark — and then lightning lit the room, turning her white. The thunder that followed shook the house. He jumped at the noise, and she squeezed him sharply, stopping him, her own lowering and rising progressed without change, unattached.
"Don't move," she said. "Not even when it's time."
He started to answer, but she shook her head. There was another roll of thunder, farther off, then more lightning. Shadows danced over the walls and ceiling. A few minutes later she closed her eyes and seemed to shake inside, a long time. And in her shaking he began a shaking of his own. She held him, though — the only still thing in the room — and he spent himself without the distraction of movement, tracking its course as it came and passed, the clearest the feeling had ever been.
When it was over, she pulled his pants the rest of the way off; and his socks, and lay with him on the bed. The storm came in waves, with quiet moments in between.
"I never paid enough attention to the feeling before," he said.
She did not answer right away. Then: "What is it like?"
"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.
