The Juror Read online

Juliet waits. Annie sways on her swing. “Oh, God. I don’t, God, I don’t know.”

  SARI KNOWLES, at home, fixes herself a salad but can’t eat it. It’s all she can do to nibble a single leaf of lettuce.

  She only wishes Slavko would answer his phone.

  Yesterday he told her machine that he’d found out something about Eben, but now she can’t get hold of him. She calls and calls, but he’s never there.

  What about Eben? Another woman?

  I should go to Slavko’s office, she thinks. Tonight. Right now. Even if he’s not there I can leave a note.

  Something about Eben. He knows something about Eben. Eben Eben Eben. Stop saying his name, girl, or you’re going to start bawling again.

  She gets into the shower but no sooner has she put her head under the water than she thinks she hears the phone ringing. So she has to turn off the tap and listen. Silence. It was only a ringing in the pipes. She turns the water on again. Again she thinks she hears the phone. She knows it isn’t the phone—but still, it might be. So off with the water. More silence. This life, damn. She stands there dripping, with no water coming down. This pain. God. Eben, this is too much pain. This dome of damn silence I’m living under, Eben, you prick, look what you’ve done to me.

  Don’t you ever ever ever try to come back to me, Eben, I’ll spit in your face, I’ll claw your eyes out, I swear I will.

  Then she hears a car in her drive, and she thinks, Eben? Could it be Eben? No. But it might very well be Slavko, who could tell her something about Eben—so she steps out quick and grabs a towel and dips her head and dries her hair. The doorbell rings.

  Jesus, this guy shouldn’t come without calling but really I don’t care, it’ll be nice to talk to him. My new friend, my comfort. We can get drunk again. She puts a robe on and runs to the door and opens it.

  It’s Eben.

  He’s brought an orchid. He’s wearing a gorgeous Brioni jacket and Converse sneakers. He’s wearing his screwy smile. He says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Keep your flower,” she says. “Get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’ve been missing you. This is the toughest deal of my life, Sari. It’s going to be the sweetest when I win. But I’ve been missing you every minute.”

  She hates him. Even the sound of his voice, everything disgusts her. She says, “The other night, the last time you called me—where did you call me from?”

  “From home.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what you told me then.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Fuck you. You called me from your townhouse?”

  He squints. He looks away a moment, then meets her eyes again. “Well, no.”

  Exactly, you greasy liar. So now what new lie are you going to try to cover yourself with?

  “I called you from another home, Sari.”

  “Another home? What the hell are you trying—”

  “I have a cabin. Near Garrison, overlooking the river. I never take anyone there, it’s just for me. It’s not much more than a lean-to. But when I’m stressed, that’s where I go. I’ve been going there every night for the last week. How did you know I wasn’t at the town-house?”

  She glowers at him.

  He asks her, “You don’t trust me? You should trust me, Sari.”

  Her eyes drop. She can feel the hatred starting to break up inside her. But she doesn’t want it to break. She wants to keep this solid wall of rage. She thinks, No. He’s lying again. He doesn’t have any secret cabin. This is all bullshit.

  Then he says gently, “I’ve never asked anyone this before, but, well, would you like to see it?”

  “See what?”

  “My cabin.”

  “Go there?”

  He nods.

  “When?”

  He takes her hand. He starts to draw her outside.

  “Jesus, Eben, no!”

  He tugs. “Come with me.”

  “You don’t really have a cabin?”

  “Come right now.”

  “But, I’d have to, I’d have to put some clothes on—”

  “It’s a beautiful night, Sari. I’ll lend you some clothes when we get there. Just come.”

  She laughs.

  No. Don’t laugh.

  Jesus, don’t give in so quickly, don’t. But she can’t help but laugh. She lets him pull her out with him. In her house robe, in her bare feet. He shuts her door and leads her across cool gravel to his car, and holds the door open for her, and she laughs some more.

  Where’s that pain?

  She has a vague memory of a lot of silly pain, which thank God is all behind her now.

  OLIVER’s mom gets in the car and casts him a sharp look, and when he tries to say something she puts a finger to her lips. She pulls out of the lot onto Warbler Hollow Road, and he figures he’s screwed now. Grounded for at least a month, which is an unpleasant prospect all right, but even worse, she must think he’s a schizo paranoid. She and Juliet both—they must think they better get him locked him up before he wigs out and hurts someone.

  Mom takes the long way home. Over to Ratner Avenue and then to Old Willow Avenue. Dusk is dampening the leaf light in all the sycamores.

  She pulls over beside the statue of Hannah Stoneleigh on her horse, and she asks, “What’s that? Behind the statue, what’s that?”

  “It’s a skeleton, Mom. For Hallowe’en.”

  “Is it? Let’s check it out.”

  So they walk down to the statue.

  They look at Hannah and the top-hatted skeleton who rides behind her. Oliver is only waiting for her to broach the subject. To say, Maybe it’s time to get you a little therapy, boy.

  But what she says is, “Oliver, we can’t talk in the car. Ever. They might have our car bugged. I’m sure they have our house bugged. Do you know what a bug is?”

  He nods.

  It doesn’t matter how powerfully he’s been imagining all this—it astonishes him to hear her confirm it.

  She says, “For all I know maybe they’re listening now. Maybe they’ve bugged our shoes or something, but that’s a chance I’ll take. Once we’re back in the car, though, you don’t know anything about this. Not a word. Not a question. You make one slip and everything is ruined, you understand?”

  He nods.

  “Say it. Say, ‘I’ll never talk about this in the car.’”

  “I’ll never talk about this in the car.”

  “‘Or in the house.’”

  “Or in the house.”

  “You were right, it’s one of Louie Boffano’s men. He says I have to say ‘Not guilty’ or he’ll hurt us. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it before. Do you understand why I couldn’t tell you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “You sure? Maybe you were, you were afraid, so you called Jesse—”

  “No! Mom, I only guessed it last night.”

  “We can’t go to the police.”

  “OK.”

  “These men? Oliver, they don’t care about the police. They’d kill us anyway.”

  He nods.

  She says, “We’re going to try something. I mean I am, but it’s Juliet’s idea. I’m going to, maybe I’m going to talk to the judge, try to get out of this. Maybe our lives will change tomorrow. Maybe we’ll leave Pharaoh and won’t ever come back. Are you scared?”

  Truly he doesn’t, at this moment, feel any fear at all. In fact he feels that now that his mom and Juliet are working together on this, the big guns, everything’s in capable hands.

  But he doesn’t want to sound childishly cocky, so he hedges. “Yeah. I’m a little scared.”

  “So am I,” she says. “But I’m also, I’m glad I’m doing something. I can’t just do whatever this bastard tells me to. I thought I could, but it was killing me. I’m glad you went to Juliet, Oliver. God, I wish, I only wish we could kill him. I wish we could kill that motherfucker.”

  �
�Motherfucker?” he says. He almost smiles. She almost smiles back.

  She asks, “Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pizza?”

  “Yeah. Mom, we can go to the mall?”

  “We can go the mall, we can go to your arcade, you can waste countless quarters, I’ll waste them with you.”

  THE TEACHER outside his cabin, under stars and a slight moon. He stands behind Sari, who’s shaking her head, amazed by the view. He watches her taking it in. The dark gnarled orchards. The lights of villages, the far smears of neon. The starlit sails of three sloops way off on the black Hudson.

  She says, “Oh.”

  The Teacher is also moved. It’s been a month since he’s visited this little cabin, and he always forgets how lovely it is.

  He touches her and she turns. He asks her, “Are you cold?”

  “Mm, a little.”

  Then she puts her hands on his shoulders and makes a little leap up, and wraps her legs around his waist. She’s still in her house robe, and it falls open, and her bare sex presses against the metal of his belt buckle. He carries her into the cabin. She rubs her cheek against the stubble of his jaw.

  He sets her down and stretches out beside her.

  No lights, no candle. Only the starglow on this rough bed. The deep shadow of the rafters above them. For a long time they lie there scarcely moving, their lips touching, simply breathing in each other’s breath. His fingers graze her temple, her earlobe.

  Patience, he thinks, and he sets to work.

  Much later, he’s lightly shaping her breasts with his tongue, whisking the nipples to a peak, making her ache, driving her slowly into a frenzy. She writhes. She wants more. She tries to pull his hand to her groin, but he allows her only a touch of a phantom fingertip along the lips of her sex. No pressure. Letting the petals open in their own good time.

  He tells her, “Look outside.”

  Through the open cottage door, down on the river, a barge—a lozenge of lights as pale as the lights of fireflies—moves slowly from one jamb of the door to the other. That huge simple night out there, which by now has fully surrendered to him. Clear title. My universe. A long time passes, then he slides down and kneels before her. With the tip of his tongue he makes a circle around her clitoris—then slides it the length of her furrow. Darkness within darkness within darkness, said Lao Tsu, the gate to all mystery. He makes another circle. She moans and arches her pelvis against his mouth but he retreats. She subsides. He returns. But he gives her only this light grazing touch of his tongue.

  “Oh God, Eben. Please. Let me come.”

  He tells her in a whisper, “Not yet.”

  “Oh please,” she says. “I want to come now.”

  “Don’t come till I tell you.”

  Much later, past midnight, she’s sitting on his lap, both of them facing the door, his cock is deep inside her, and he looks out the south window and he can see both Orion and the Pleiades at the same time. The iron pattern of the Hunter, and beside it the messy blur of the Pleiades. Like me and Annie, he thinks. All over the hemisphere tonight people looking into the sky are seeing Orion’s discipline and the sweet wild confusion of the Pleiades, but what do these constellations stand for? They stand for us. For me and Annie. For the Teacher and the Juror. All over the world, whatever names they give to their star-myths, they’re really the myth of the Teacher and the Juror. He laughs out loud.

  “What?” says Sari.

  Her voice reminding him that he’s not with Annie, not in the flesh, not now. He’s with this other woman. But it doesn’t matter. He tells her, “This night!”

  Much later, a bat flies into the cabin. Sari’s scared but he whispers to her, “It’s all right, it won’t touch us, it’ll be gone soon, I’m here,” and he keeps fucking her, his rhythm is undisturbed. She holds her breath and they hear the odd engine of the bat’s wings all around them and then the bat finds the door again.

  Later, he’s on top of her and he decides that the time has arrived. He begins to move more quickly. He drums himself into her, with a little hook at the end of each beat, a harsh sliding against her pelvis that brings her to the brink, and again to the brink, and again—and this time he lets her go. He lets her moans sharpen into a wail. She thrashes, she tears at his chest with her claws.

  He decrees his own eruption as well, and as it boils up he opens his mouth to cry out and he looks for and finds Annie in the darkness. Annie. Laughing the way she laughed when he was in her studio touching her sculptures. That time when she laughed so hard because he was going to make her rich and happy and she was falling in love with him, and he’ll never see her laugh like that again, will he? He’s in pain, and he roars. Wounded, in a bitter rage, in the splendor of his conquest, he roars.

  8

  Who will protect you?

  ANNIE finds parking in the lot of the monstrous county courthouse. It’s easy. She’s early, there’s almost no one here.

  She’s never parked here before. Every morning of the trial she’s left her car at a police barracks near 1-684, then waited with the other jurors for a van to take them to the courthouse. The authorities seem worried that if she parked here, one day she might be followed home.

  It’s touching, their concern for her peace of mind.

  She rushes up a flight of steps. Passes under the mock-ruins of an archway and comes to the atrium. Bizarre, deconstructed, concrete. Apparently this horror of a courthouse was built sometime in the late seventies, when intimations of entropy and anarchy were all the rage.

  At the atrium’s center grow cactus shrubs and a willow tree. And three towering chunks of glass, black glass, clustered about a great shapeless mountain of rubble.

  At the door to the court offices she tells the guard that she has an appointment with Judge Wietzel. He sends her through the metal detector.

  Down a dismal corridor that’s been done up to simulate the feel of a cave. Ersatz flickering from ersatz wall-sconces.

  At Wietzel’s chambers a secretary tries to stop her, but Annie can see right into the judge’s office. He’s pulling on his robe. Annie murmurs to the secretary, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t tell you why but I’ve got to see him.”

  She walks right past the startled woman. She steps into the judge’s office and shuts the door behind her.

  Wietzel turns. His usual look of flabby complacency is not in evidence. He’s worried, and his eyes are on her hands. Checking, Annie supposes, to see if I’ve got a gun.

  She shows him empty palms.

  “Excuse me,” he says as he steps back from her, takes refuge behind his desk. “I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  “I need to see you. You know who I am?”

  “Yes.” Withering chill in his voice. “Yes, you’re a juror. Open that door please.”

  “I have to talk to you alone.”

  “Do you have a problem?”

  “I do, I’m—”

  “Well, let me just explain to you, that when you come into my chambers, it’s not a trivial thing. You don’t come in for a chat. When a juror visits a judge, this can have serious consequences.”

  She stares at him.

  What is he saying?

  Is he saying he’s in with them?

  He clears his throat. “Now, if you do have a serious problem and you still want to talk about it, I’ll call the defense attorney and the DA, and we can—”

  “No!”

  “Excuse me?”

  She says, “I want to talk to you alone. I don’t, I don’t want them. I only want to talk to you.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  She opens her handbag and pulls out the letter from Juliet.

  “You can’t talk to me alone,” he tells her. “And whatever that is, I don’t want to see it. Not without all the attorneys present.” He clasps his hands on the desk in front of him and leans toward her.

  She pulls back.

  He is. He is in with the
m.

  Of course he is. They have all the money in the world, why shouldn’t they have him in their hire? She says, “What are you telling me? You’re telling me I’m making a mistake?”

  “Ma’am, what I remember about you is that I gave you every opportunity to get out of serving on this panel. But you insisted. You wanted jury duty. You recall?”

  She nods.

  “So. You want to serve, you don’t want to serve. You have some problem but you don’t think the defendant has a right to hear about it. I think you’re wrong. I think he has every right. He happens to be on trial for murder. Now shall I see if I can locate his counsel?”

  He lifts his phone. He looks at her. She hears the dial tone. She puts the letter back in her purse.

  “No,” she says. “No, I’ve changed my mind.”

  She backs up a step, then she turns and walks out.

  SLAVKO is sitting on the floor of his office at three in the afternoon. He’s writing a poem, which is called “It Doth Suck,” and though it’s his first poem it’s a goddamn good poem. He reads over what he’s got. He reaches to his left for the bottle of Jim Beam. He doesn’t look because that would involve turning his head to the left and it hurts too much to turn his head to the left. Or to the right, for that matter. So he reaches without looking, and puts his hand into a quart takeout container from Luk Dhow. Last night’s supper. His hand comes back wearing the quart container like a glove. Presently he figures out that it’s not a glove. He shakes it off him.

  He forces himself to turn his head. Finds the bourbon and gives it a yank.

  While licking his hand he rereads his poem:

  IT DOTH SUCK

  Sucks, huh?

  All pretty sucky? What do you say?

  Fuckhead, hey fuckbrain, cat got your tongue?

  It genuine sucks.

  What did you think, it was going to get better?

  Be glad to answer that, but I can’t because of

  The BEEP BEEP BEEP

  From that semi outside on Main Street.

  It’s backing up!!

  For shit’s sake,

  In traffic, everybody’s pissed. BEEP BEEP BEEP,