by Pete Dexter
“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 tornadoes,” 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 filling the hole. The clay was 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 we
re 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 if 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?”
“I 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. It 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.
He’d alternated all that morning, confused over which way he wanted it to be, then he had lunch with Mayor Horn, and then he returned to his office and found Paris Trout sitting in the leather couch against the wall, staring out at the sidewalk.
Emma Grandy—his secretary—looked up as he came in the door, plainly relieved not to be alone with Trout. Trout took his time turning away from the window. Seagraves saw the lump in his coat pocket. It was square, like a forty-five.
“We got new business,” Trout said.
“What’s that for?” Seagraves said, nodding at his pocket.
“Protection,” he said. He stood up suddenly and walked into the inner office. Seagraves followed him and shut the door. He sat in his chair. Trout paced the length of the room, checking the street from the window each time he arrived at that end.
Seagraves watched him, holding himself still and apart, trying to see if Trout would be revealed in a new way. He was not, and in a moment Seagraves was impatient.
“What in hell are you doing, Paris?” he said. “You come in here armed, peeking out the windows like a crazy man.”
Trout reached into his pocket and Seagraves froze. When his hand came out, though, it was holding an envelope from the United States government. He dropped it on the desk and went back to the window. Seagraves took the letter out and read it. Official notification from the IRS that Trout was the subject of an audit. “An audit?” Seagraves said. “You come in here like this over a notice of an audit?”
“I’m here for legal protection from my enemies.”
“The Internal Revenue Service isn’t just your enemy, they’re everybody’s. There isn’t a reason in the world to take this personal. All you got to do is see your accountant, and then you both sit down with one of their people and work it out. They aren’t all that unreasonable.…”
Trout left the window and stood on the other side of the desk. “There ain’t nothing to work out,” he said.
“You paid your taxes?”
“I pay my lawful bills,” he said. “I don’t take a thing from the government, and I don’t give a thing in return.”
“Never?”
Trout put his hands on the desk and leaned over until Seagraves leaned back. He smelled like tomato soup. “Sit down, Paris,” he said, “so I don’t need my reading glasses to see who I’m talking to.”
Trout moved away but did not sit down. “How long has it been since you paid?” Seagraves said.
He shook his head. “I never started,” he said.
“You been making a living in this country since World War One, and you never paid taxes?”
“I never took a cent,” he said.
“You filed?”
“No.”
Seagraves closed his eyes. “I heard of dirt farmers did this,” he said. “The Negroes, they don’t pay, they don’t have Social Security numbers. I never heard of anybody ran a business of any size that ignored the government. I know plenty of them that cheated, but just to pretend like it wasn’t there …” He scratched his head, thinking of the legalities.
“Technically,” he said a minute later, “you don’t have to file if you don’t owe.”
“That’s what I told you,” Trout said. “I pay what I owe.”
“The government doesn’t leave that to you to decide.”
Seagraves looked at the letter again, then pushed it back across the desk at Trout. “They going to want to look at the books,” he said.
Trout looked at the letter but did not pick it up. “I keep my books in my head.”
Seagraves said, “You’ve got to show them your books, or they can say you’re worth any damn thing they want.”
“I don’t have two cents in any bank in the United States,” he said. “I don’t keep things where just anybody can turn over a rock and find them.”
“They’re going to want to see what you made—”
“They’re welcome to hunt it.” He went to the window again, the gun in his pocket knocked against the sill as he bent.
“That’s the wrong way to handle the IRS,” Seagraves said. “You make it personal, and it gets personal. They kno
w places to look. The government is like the law: It isn’t exactly smart, but it’s relentless.”
It was quiet in the room for a moment, then Trout slapped the wall. “Everybody in the state of Georgia is after my assets,” he said softly. “All over that girl.”
And that fast Seagraves could see her again, lying on the sheet in the photograph. The bones under her skin.
“A person gets mixed up in your business, and then they are your business,” Trout said. He spoke as he looked out the window. “We need to get this appeal settled. Get out from underneath this case.”
Seagraves was affected by the memory of the pictures. “The easiest way to settle it is to serve the time,” he said.
“Easiest for who?”
Seagraves waited a moment, holding himself still and watching, and then he said, “I gone over this, Paris, and I don’t think we’re going to win.”
“You said they made a mistake.”
“They did, but sometimes it isn’t enough.”
“I ain’t going into any work camp.”
“That isn’t voluntary either,” Seagraves said. “The government’s got its hands on you now, and I can tell you it’s a hell of a lot easier to avoid them in the first place than it is to get loose.”
“That’s what I paid you for.”
Seagraves shook his head. “I’ve done what I can for you,” he said. “I tried and I worried, but we aren’t doing a thing now but putting it off.”
Trout came back to the desk one more time. Seagraves saw he was shaking. “I’m the one that decides,” he said.
“You been deciding this from the minute you stepped onto Mary McNutt’s porch.”
Trout sputtered. “That girl … those people brought this on themself. I didn’t go out there shooting them for nothing.”
A long moment passed. “That is exactly what you did,” Seagraves said.
“I can do it again,” he said.
“It’s worn me out, Paris,” Seagraves said. “You’ve worn me out. It’s time to get away from you and your case.”