Paris Trout (30 page)

And he understood that his one abiding interest —
the songbirds he kept in a shelter he built in his backyard — would
never be more than a hobby. He was not meant to end up teaching
biology.

The boy's fascination with birds — like his grades
and his Scout accomplishments — was common knowledge in town, and
some years fifty or sixty mothers, hoping to influence their own
children in the same direction, would empty the five-and-dime of its
canaries and  parakeets at Easter, only to bring them back a
month or two later for refunds, feet up in the bottom of the cage.

Carl Bonner lost very few birds.

They were his only
childhood friends — the birds and the friends he invented.

* * *

CARL BONNER HAD RETURNED to Cotton Point with a wife
and opened an office on the second floor of the Jefferson Building, a
few hundred yards up the street from Harry Seagraves's firm.

His wife's name was Leslie Morgan Bonner, and she was
a sincere disappointment to the many townspeople who felt a personal
stake in Carl's life. It had been assumed that he would end up with a
Miss Georgia or someone outgoing.

Leslie Bonner was from Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and she
kept to herself. While her husband accepted memberships to the
Kiwanis Club, the Moose, and the junior Chamber of Commerce, she
eschewed the ladies' auxiliaries and stayed home. He taught Sunday
school at the First Presbyterian Church, she met him in front
afterward and attended regular services.

Within a year there would be rumors in town that she
could not have children.
 
Their
house sat at the end of Leisurebrook, the first development built in
Cotton Point. A small brick house with two bedrooms. He mowed the
lawn twice a week, and she spent afternoons under a wide straw hat,
working in the flower beds. When people waved or blew a horn, she
would sometimes look up from her flowers, but she would not return
the wave, and she would not smile.

The birdhouse was in back. It was a circular shape,
built mostly of wire, with the northern side enclosed. Canaries and
lovebirds and , parakeets. The birds were advertised in the American
Ornithological Society's monthly publication, and from time to time a
pet store in Atlanta or Macon would order a hundred at a time. More
often the orders were for two or three birds.

Carl Bonner kept meticulous records and sent
Christmas cards to even the smallest customers.

He was as obsessive in business as he had been in
school, and as isolated. And even though he had very little, he
watched the community of lawyers on Madison Street, thinking they
would try to take it away — this in spite of the fact that his only
work was what they sent him.

He made collections, he
handled their pleas when they were out of town. He would do their
research and accept indigent clients they did not want to handle
themselves.

* * *

ON THE DAY HANNA Trout hired him, Carl Bonner went
home early. There was a Kiwanis Club meeting at seven, things to do
at home.

He found the front door of his house locked. Leslie
was sitting at the window, reading. She saw him, but she didn't move.
The birds began to chatter in back, knowing he was there. He let
himself in, wondering if his neighbors had noticed yet how often he
needed a key to get into his own house.

People in Cotton Point did not lock their homes, they
went off all day without closing the front door.

She was sitting cross-legged on the couch in shorts
and one of his undershirts. It hung by narrow straps from her
shoulders, sleeveless, the drop of cloth under her arm showing the
crease of skin at the bottom of her breast.

He wondered if she had been in the yard without her
brassiere again. He walked down the hall to their bedroom and changed
into dungarees and an old shirt. She followed him in, still holding
the magazine, the New Yorker. He buttoned the shirt and tucked it
carefully into his pants, checking himself in the mirror.

"
You look fine," she said, "the birds
will be dazzled."

He noticed she had not brushed her hair. She lit a
cigarette and sat down on the bed with her knees spread wide apart.
He saw that she had shaved her legs. The smell of the smoke — a
different thing from the smoke itself — filled the room. "Was
there any mail," he said, "besides the magazine?"

"Word from the outside world?" she said. He
didn't answer, and in a moment she said, "Bird things. They're
on the kitchen table."

He went down the hall into the kitchen. Last night's
dishes were still in the sink. He found the monthly newsletter from
the American Ornithological Society and checked to make sure it had
included his advertisement. She came in behind him, bringing the
smell of her cigarette, a faint odor of soap. She dropped her
magazine on the table and took the newsletter out of his hand.

"I have Kiwanis tonight," he said.

She held his hand against her mouth a moment, then
guided it underneath her shirt until he felt the weight of one of her
breasts resting on his knuckles. She was always doing something he
did not expect. The first night he asked her out, she had come back
from the ladies' room and put her panties into the pocket of his
coat. Until that moment he had thought she was shy because she didn't
talk much.

He did not move now. She stood in front of him,
watching his face. Another moment passed, and then she pulled away.
"It's not the same here, is it?" she said.

"
Everybody's different when they go back where
they come from."

"Everybody hates tits in their hometown?"

He saw the windows were open and hushed her.

"I'm quiet," she said. "You couldn't
hear a damn shotgun over the birds anyway."

He moved away from her to shut the window. "I
wish you'd make a few friends," he said.

"
It isn't that easy for me," she said.
"Besides, look at you. You don't trust anyone. All this Kiwanis
Club, Junior Boy Scouts of Commerce is a pose."

He got the window down just before she finished that.
"You can't make everything a choice," he said. "It
isn't you on one side and how I make a living on the other. That's
not the way things are after you're married."

"We're not married like other people," she
said.

"You do what you have to do first," he
said, "and then what you like. And right now I have to take care
of the birds and then go to Kiwanis."

It was quiet a little while, and then she went back
into the living room and opened the magazine.

"
I need to see Harry Seagraves tonight and thank
him," he said. He waited, but she did not ask for what. "He
sent me a client. Hanna Trout." He saw she did not recognize the
name. "Married to the man that shot that Negro child this
summer."

"
Shot a child?" she said.

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."