The Juror Read online

  It says, so loud I can’t think.

  It’s the National Anthem

  Of my life. God it sucks. Okay? And this here,

  This is my poem. Juliet, I had wanted to not send

  It to you, but now I’ve got a new girl

  To not send it to.

  Is there a minimum number of poems, he wonders, to qualify for the Nobel Prize? Wouldn’t just one be enough if it was a real corker?

  There are some corn chips around here somewhere.

  He spots the bag under the desk. Two inches of corn chip mulch at the bottom of the bag, he could eat that. But there’s a cockroach down there too, looking quite content, sassy actually, his little feelers quivering. Well, when you’re through, my friend.

  Always serve the guest first.

  Daylight comes in through the grimy window. Why doesn’t somebody turn down that god-awful daylight? Somebody?

  Instead, somebody knocks.

  Oh, what, do you think I’m going to answer? Are you out of your flea-fuckin mind, boy?

  Today Mr. Czernyk regrets that he is not receiving any guests larger than a cockroach. No thrashings today, please. All thrashings, please come back tomorrow.

  The door swings open. Of course he’s forgotten to lock it.

  It’s Sari.

  He cringes.

  The office is a mess, a stinking mess. So is he. His jaw is swollen up and black and blue and shades of forest green. His nose looks like a watermelon somebody put in the back of the fridge and forgot about for two months. Also the beating has thrown his eye sockets out of balance. Furthermore he has crumbs and bourbon stains and drops of Luk Dhow’s special sauce all over his shirt.

  However, he believes that his fly is all zipped up. Well, well, he thinks, detail like that, should be a goddamn wellspring of pride.

  Sari gasps when she sees him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  Running her eyes up and down the wreckage of him.

  “What happened? My God!”

  Oh she’s beautiful. It ought to be a class-A felony to let something as beautiful as that meet up with carnage like this. He’s so humiliated he wants to die.

  This humiliation makes him angry. He snaps, “You didn’t hear ‘Come in,’ did you?”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “God, have you been to the hospital?”

  He shakes his head. “I’d love to but I’ve been so darn busy. Busy as a beaver, you know what I’m saying?”

  Why is he doing this to her? She’s not to blame here. But the way she’s standing there, it gets under his skin. She’s standing there taking in the catastrophe of the office. She keeps shaking her head. He sees her eyes hesitate a moment at the splotch of blood on the wall, and then at the spattering of blood on his papers, and again at the Jim Beam bottle by his side. She’s appalled, yes. She pities him. But still she keeps one hand on the doorknob, she keeps her shoulders back in that brisk designer jacket of hers, nose uptilted a degree or two. She means to keep a world of distance from all this.

  She asks, “Someone you were investigating or something? Did they do this?”

  Again his rage gets the better of him. He mutters, “That’s privileged information, Ms. Knowles. Tell me, what can I do for you?”

  “I’ve been, been trying to call you. Did you get my messages? I wanted to tell you, well I know you did a really good job, and I wanted to thank you. And to pay you, to settle up.”

  “What needs settling?”

  “I mean I won’t be needing you anymore. Your services. Because, well, Eben, he explained to me. Everything. And we’re fine. I mean a lot, I hate to say it, but a lot of our trouble was my fault. My impatience and all. My lack of trust. You know?”

  He lowers his eyes. He can’t look at her.

  “So I wanted to settle up. So if you could figure out your hours and all—”

  He still can’t look at her but he says, “Hey, guess what? Happens I was just noodling those numbers? And this is kind of unbelievable, but the retainer covers everything. To the penny. To the tenth of the penny, in fact. You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “Oh.”

  “To the mole on Abe Lincoln’s nose,” he says.

  She gives a nervous little laugh. “Well that’s good then.”

  “To the hair growing out of the mole,” he says.

  “Great.” And then before he can start in on the mole-hair’s individual cells, she changes the subject. “Oh, by the way, you said, didn’t you say on a message that you’d found something out? Something big?”

  She has to wait for his answer.

  “Yeah,” he finally mutters. “I thought I had. An indiscretion on the part of Ebenezer Rackland, I mean an indiscretion of epic proportions, hoo Daddy. But it turns out it was committed by some other Ebenezer Rackland.”

  “Oh.” Again the nervous laugh.

  But then her voice relents a little, she lets some of the softness back in. “Slavko, look, I wanted, I wanted to tell you, that night in the car? I won’t forget that. If you hadn’t been there I would have gone over the deep end. You were great.”

  “Just doing my job,” he says.

  She asks him, “Is there anything I can do for you, Slavko?”

  “Yeah. You can shut that door softly. When you go out? Don’t slam it. I got kind of a headache.”

  She murmurs goodbye. He keeps his eyes on the floorboards till he hears the door click shut.

  Then he reaches and pulls the swivel chair over to him. He upends it and wedges it against the filing cabinet and uses it to help himself to rise, painfully. He limps to the window. He’s in time to see her cross the street and get in her car and drive off. He presses his face against the dirty glass and watches till she’s gone, and then for a long while after she’s gone.

  EDDIE waits on Route 22 about a mile up from the Park & Ride, and when Annie drives past he slips in behind her. Stays on her for about half a mile, then flashes his lights. Once, then twice. The signal. She slows and lets him pass. As he goes by he looks over at her.

  She won’t look back at him.

  They’d given her no warning of this, this summons to a rendezvous. She must have been thinking that soon she’d be home, home with her kid fixing dinner or watching TV or whatever, and now all of a sudden she’s got to follow Eddie wherever he wants to take her, and she must be tired and scared and upset. She’s focusing straight ahead. Dark pouches under her eyes. Her hair pulled back severely from her face.

  She’ll shatter at a touch, Eddie thinks. At any pressure.

  Ah shit, he thinks.

  Woman, why did you pull that stunt? Going to the judge, how the hell did you think you were gonna get away with that?

  ANNIE follows the car of the man she calls Johnny. It’s a strange switchback route that he’s taking her on. North by slow baffling zigs and zags, into horse-and-woods country. Then west, then perhaps south. As she drives, she starts to worry about Oliver. Today is Wednesday—his real lacrosse day. After practice he rides his bike home, and she’s supposed to be there when he arrives.

  If she’s not, he’ll get scared.

  She frets over this. Her fretting starts to loop around in her brain, and she has to say to herself, almost out loud: Cut it out. It doesn’t matter. So what if I’m a little late? He’ll survive.

  Concentrate on the business at hand, Annie.

  Which is this: If Zach Lyde has found out that she went to the judge, how is she going to placate him?

  Seems like she’s got no choice but to come clean, tell him everything—except leave Juliet out of it—and beg his mercy. And after all, how much can he fault you? You went to the judge but you didn’t say a word. Truth is, now he should be trusting you more than ever.

  Stroke his feathers. Don’t let him rile you. Stroke and stroke his feathers and he’ll let you go, and maybe you can slip away tonight, drive to Juliet’s and figure out your next move. There must be someone who will help
us. Must be. Someone.

  Johnny pulls into the lot of a restaurant called Vic’s, and she follows. She knows vaguely where she is—Vic’s is an Italian place in the deep woods north of Pharaoh. With a clientele that comes up mostly from the city. A traditional crowd. Drive by on a weekend evening, the parking lot will be packed with big American boats, Lincolns and Caddies.

  As she pulls in, she sees Zach Lyde coming out of the restaurant. He’s got someone with him, some guy who looks to be dead drunk. Zach guides him over to a big white ramshackle convertible in the parking lot. Then he looks over at Annie and gestures to her: Come.

  She gets out of her car and walks over.

  Gracious Zach Lyde makes introductions.

  “Annie, I want you to meet Rodney. Rodney, this is my friend Annie.”

  Annie mumbles hello. Rodney looks her up and down. “Oh Jesus,” he says. He turns to Zach. “What’re you talking about, your friend? I mean I know what you two are doing. This chick’s a fuckin knockout. Fucking Knock Out.”

  Rodney’s got long black greasy hair. He wears owl glasses and a green golfing jacket that’s too short in the arms. Zach says with a grin, “Rodney here is a gallon of sewage that’s backed up from New York City.”

  “Hey don’t gimme that shit,” says Rodney. “You and your fuckin ’69 Knicks. Your fuckin Earl the Pearl. You think he could play Ewing? Ewing would fuckin—”

  “You ready to go home, Rodney?”

  “Ewing would blow his, I mean blow, blow his fuckin lights—”

  “I’ve offered to drive Rodney home in his car. I think he’s had a little too much. Will you ride with us, Annie?”

  “Hey, shove it up your ass!” says Rodney. “I’ll drive my own fuckin car. I can drive. Drove here, right?”

  Zach ignores him. He takes off his jacket and says, “Rodney, let me try on your jacket.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s a nice jacket. Let me try it.”

  When Zach Lyde puts it on, the absurd jacket looks almost stylish.

  “OK. Get in the car now, Rodney.”

  “Fuck your mother.”

  “In the back. I want Annie up with me.”

  “I bet you do,” says Rodney.

  Zach holds the rear door open, and Rodney crawls into the backseat of his own car. He sprawls.

  “I bet you, I bet, I bet you fuckin do.”

  They drive through the hemlock woods. Rodney’s old bomb gasps through the lower gears, but it comes into its own once it works up a little speed.

  “Rodney is not making a great success of his sojourn on Earth,” says Zach. “He’s drunk. He’s an imbecile. He’s—”

  “Hey shut up!” Rodney snarls from the back. “So what are you, what are you, some kind of angel from heaven?”

  “But he has a brute cleverness,” Zach goes on. “He never forgets who his friends are. And his friends keep his head above water. After all his DUIs, still he’s on the road. He put a pedestrian in intensive care last year, yet his license is still valid.”

  Rodney’s head suddenly lurches between Annie and Zach. “You said you had some Scotch, shit-for-brains. Break it out.”

  “Annie,” says Zach, “would you look in my bag for the bottle that’s in there?”

  Something like a gym bag on the seat beside her. She rummages inside it. Dimly reminded, as she does, of her own artwork—her Grope Boxes. The faint recollection that she used to be an artist. She touches something that feels like… a pair of glasses? Then an infant’s bottle. She pulls it out. “This?”

  “Give it to Rodney.”

  But the very idea incenses Rodney.

  “What do you think, I’m gonna stick that in my face?“

  “Good Scotch in there, Rodney. I don’t want you spilling. It’s easy. Suck on it. Do you think it will affect my regard for you? It won’t.”

  “You asshole,” Rodney groans, but he plucks the bottle out of Annie’s hand. She sees in the corner of her vision that he’s taken it into his mouth, that he’s guzzling at the nipple.

  “Now lie down, Rodney.”

  “What?”

  “Lie down. Get comfortable. I put something in there to make you sleepy—so go to sleep.”

  Rodney murmurs some complaint. But Annie hears him settling himself.

  Says Zach, “Now would you give me the eyeglasses?”

  When she takes them from the bag she sees they’re not really glasses. Just a frame. A black and owlish frame like the frame of Rodney’s glasses.

  Zach puts it on.

  “So what do you think?” he asks her. That lopsided grin of his at play. “How do I look?”

  She says, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m doing Rodney,” he says. “I want to see what life looks like from Rodney’s eyes.”

  She hears something like the chirr of a cricket coming from the gym bag. Says Zach, “There’s a phone in there—would you hand it to me?”

  She passes him the phone.

  “Yes?” he says.

  She faintly hears the voice on the other end telling him, “The Dragon Boy’s up.”

  He checks his watch. “OK. That’s perfect.”

  He sets down the phone. He speeds up a little. He glances again into the rearview mirror.

  “Look at Rodney now, Annie. Look.”

  She turns. Rodney has curled himself fetally around the bottle. A drool of Scotch runs down his chin. Softly snoring.

  Zach asks her, “Why do you suppose he’s like that?”

  Try to seem agreeable. Try to go along with him. Zach Lyde is in some kind of state. Manic. Something burning in his eyes.

  She asks, “You mean why is, why does Rodney drink?”

  He seems not to have heard her. He says, “He likes that bottle I gave him, doesn’t he? It’s put him at his ease. That’s all he wants, really—that nipple. Everything else scares him, and he doesn’t like to be afraid. He’s like the rest of us—he spends most of his time trying to keep out of fear’s way. Anything not to feel fear. Anything. Give up sex, give up love, give away every rag of your self-respect, drink yourself to death—but please God, no fear.”

  Then silence. Say something, Annie. Think of something to keep him talking.

  She tries, “Don’t you ever feel fear?”

  “I feel it all the time. I had a bout with it today.”

  He slows at a fork in the road, and takes the left-hand tine. Warbler Hollow Road. Oliver’s school is down this road.

  He glances over at her. In his brown eyes those gold flecks are glowing. He says, “But I bow to fear, to its necessity. It’s terror that teaches me my shape. Do you understand?”

  “Why are we going this way?” she says. “Where are you taking me?”

  He speeds up. The tires drift in the turns.

  He says, “I’ll go in one direction till I run up against so much fear I can’t take another step. One can only go so far into the dark. So far out to sea before fear turns us around. We’ll say so much to our boss or our lover or our mother—and not another word. We’ve reached the border. We’ve found out the shape of our lives.”

  Then he laughs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Am I rambling? It’s from my nightmare today. Whenever I descend from a spell of terror, I’m always full of ideas. Elated, foolish. Long-winded.”

  They approach the school. The classroom building, then the parking lot, the phys ed fields.

  Annie slides her eyes over to check out the lacrosse field. But it’s empty, except for a pair of stragglers in the bleachers changing their shoes. In the parking lot a boy hurries toward a waiting minivan. He tosses his lacrosse stick into the back and jumps in.

  Zach does not slow down.

  He says, “Lacrosse. They say it’s the most dangerous sport in the country. Well, if it weren’t dangerous the boys wouldn’t play it. It wouldn’t mean anything. Would it?”

  He looks over at her.

  She knows what he’s going to say before he says it.

  H
e says, “Your son, Oliver, he plays lacrosse, doesn’t he?”

  “What are we doing here?” she demands. Let him, let him hear the wobble of panic in her voice, what difference does it make? “Who’s the Dragon Boy?” she asks. “Why do you want to bring me—”

  “You don’t know what you love, Annie. You’re letting the gray suits tell you that what you love is Justice. Or the legal code of the state of New York. Or your honored place in the community. And I think it will take terror, the real nightmare edge of loss, to teach you that really these trifles don’t concern you at all—that all you care about is your kid and your work and a handful of your friends—and if the gray suits can’t protect these, then who needs the gray suits?

  “And they can’t—they can’t protect you. Judge Wietzel? He’s too busy looking out for his own career, how’s he going to rescue you? You didn’t realize that? You haven’t had enough terror, so you went out to roust up some more? The judge, the cops—Annie, how can they shield you against someone like me? Look at me. I’m Rodney Grosso, I’m drunk, I’m a piece of human garbage and I know it. I’m driving too fast because I’m getting fat and old and that scares me but on the road I’m still a young buck, so I take this curve too fast—”

  They are going too fast. They come around a sharp bend and nearly skid off the asphalt before he gets the wheels under control.

  “Stop,” she says. “Please… stop.”

  “Do you think you can stop me, Annie?”

  “No,” she says. “No please, I’m—”

  “Do you think you can contend with me?”

  “No. No, I didn’t mean… I didn’t tell the judge, I didn’t, please!”

  “If you think you can stop me, why don’t you try? Right now. Jump at me, go for my eyes—I think that’s your best opportunity.”

  “No! No I swear to you—”

  “But I’m Rodney and I’m drunk and I’m cutting things close, and if you throw me off my concentration you know I could veer off the road. I could kill somebody.”

  “I won’t! You can, you can—”

  “Who will protect you, Annie?”

  “You will.”

  “You mean Zach Lyde?”

  “Yes!”