by Pete Dexter
"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 Eagl
e — 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.
"I'm sorry for them," she said. She was leaning on the spade, her chin resting on the back of her hands.
"It's not as personal as it was," he said. "It turned into a business, and that changes the way you feel about them."
"How many are there?"
"I didn't count. Forty-five or fifty, maybe a dozen more back there that won't make it. A hundred and fifty dollars . . ."
She stared into the hole. "It doesn't have to be a business this morning, Carl," she said.
"I'm not fifteen anymore," he said. He thought for a moment and said, "Although you wouldn't know it sometimes, the way people are in town."
"Let them just be what they are," she said, meaning the birds.
He took the shovel from her and began Hlling the hole. The claywas heavy but dry — even standing water wouldn't soak into it more than a few inches — and she winced when it first landed on the birds. In a moment, though, they were covered, and she walked back into the house without another word while he finished the job.
He found her fifteen minutes later in the tub, crying. The door was cracked open or he would not have looked inside. The water had turned dirty orange, and she was lying with her head half submerged, her face wet and streaked, not making a sound.
"Leslie?"
She shook her head, embarrassed. She did not like him to see her cry. He knelt beside the tub, finding one of her hands in the water to hold. "It's only birds," he said. "You don't care about them."
She got her hand away from him and then cupped some water with it and brought it to her face.
He found her hand again and kissed it. The sight of her digging came back to him, a direct and practical kindness. "You'll get used to it here," he said.
She slid farther down, until the waterline was right underneath her jaw. "Something is different here besides the place," she said. "It changed you to come back."
He smiled at her.
"There wasn't a purpose to everything in Massachusetts," she said.
"The day we unpacked our things here, you were deciding which books we could put in the bookcase where anybody could see them."
She found a washcloth somewhere under her legs and ran it over her shoulders. They were like the rest of her, muscled and soft at the same time.
"It isn't college," he said.
"No," she said, "it isn't."
"I didn't have to make a living up there. I didn't have people watching me."
She closed her eyes as if she could not stand to see him. "What is left for them to see, Carl?" she said. "You were the best Boy Scout in the world when you were eleven years old, and somehow that has obligated you to be the best Boy Scout forever."
"Eagle Scout," he said. But she did not smile. She opened her eyes, though, looking at him in a pitying way he did not like.
"I was teasing," he said.
"The other thing . . ." she said. He waited, knowing what was coming. "You worry how I seem to people here."
He shook his head, knowing it was true. "There is nobody going to tell me who to marry," he said.
"We're already married," she said. "What I'm talking about is that you wish you weren't."
He dropped the few inches to the floor as if she'd hit him. He felt her watching him and knew if he said anything false, she would know it. "I worry that you don't try to fit in."
That hung in the air like the heat off the bath water.
"I worry that you try too hard," she said finally. He dropped his chin onto his chest and closed his eyes.
"Do you remember the football game?" she said a little later.
He looked up and found her staring at him. She had stared at him the same way that afternoon, sitting in a crowd of alumni waving Tufts University banners, her hand under the blanket covering their laps, it felt like ice on his cock. He had come off a moment before Holy Cross scored, and the whole side of the stadium had groaned, as i
f it were hoping for something else.
She groaned for the next two weeks every time he ejaculated. "I want to be like that again," she said. "I want to have those kinds of secrets."
"People find out those kinds of secrets here," he said.
"What can they say? That I gave the first Boy Scout in Ether County a hand job at the football game? Do you think people hold you in less regard for something like that?"
"l think people might not want their lawyer having sex in public," he said.
"I would."
He felt her mood improving and took her hand again. "That's because you don't need a lawyer," he said.
And he saw the confrontation had passed. She stood up and reached behind him for a towel. The last thing he saw before she wrapped herself inside it was the water dripping off her pubic hair.
He sat behind her on the floor, his back against the toilet, while she combed out her hair. lt was thick and black, cut short, and stayed exactly where the comb left it against the nape of her neck. He saw the outline of her bottom beneath the wet towel. It was a sweetheart of a bottom, but she was right. Somewhere in the move it had lost its appeal.
"Did you thank Harry Seagraves?" she said.
"No, he wasn't there."
"I thought he always came to Kiwanis."
"He probably got caught in the weather," he said. "Maybe I'll drop by his office this afternoon. I don't want him thinking I'm ungrateful."
He stood up, stiff from sitting against the toilet, and undressed himself to shower.
* * *
THE LAST THING IN the world Harry Seagraves wanted to see Tuesday afternoon was Paris Trout sitting in his office. He had been thinking about Mrs. Trout all morning, the way she had held him still and focused him on the mechanics of his own release — a feeling which had been going on inside him for thirty, thirty-five years — in a different way.
He had left her place feeling, on one hand, as if it were only the start of things with her and, on the other hand, as if it were over. For all they had done, he hadn't gotten close to her at all.
