With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the
rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and
tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched
outward.
* * * * *
There was little about Jason's trial to entitle it to more than a
back-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, that
were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures
encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are
pressed down by the waters of unreality.
It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks
of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon
advice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his
voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum
with the parchment too tired to vibrate.
Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and the
curiously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth still
marked him.
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