The Juror Read online

“Or do you mean the Teacher?”

  “Please.”

  “Say it, Annie. The Teacher will shield me.”

  “The Teacher will shield me.”

  “You trust him?”

  “I trust him!”

  “But it takes a bolt of terror, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes!”

  “It takes riding shotgun with Rodney Grosso, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes!”

  They come out of the curve into a straightaway. A long shallow saddle, valley pasture to either side of them, picket fence.

  He says, “Riding shotgun with chaos. You could have the Teacher locked up, you could sizzle Louie Boffano, you could put away every last mule in the mob—but what are you going to do about this drunk at the wheel? I come out of nowhere. I’m lost, I’m going too fast, I look down the road and it’s a blur but I think I see this kid on a bicycle—”

  Oliver.

  Way up there, more than half a mile, it’s Oliver on his bike, headed home. Must be Oliver: she gets a little flash of his purple shirt. And that’s his lacrosse stick, standing up in back of his bike like a flagpole.

  He’s on the right side of the road, on their side, with no idea of what’s coming behind him—

  “No!”

  She flings her hand out to grab Zach’s arm.

  “Don’t you trust the Teacher, Annie?”

  She forces herself to let go of his arm.

  “Yes. I trust you! Yes.”

  Oliver, turn around and look at this. Please, Oliver, can’t you hear us? Turn around!

  She puts her wrist to her mouth and she bites at it. She pushes her shoulders against the seat back. Writhing to get away from that fear, but she can’t take her eyes off her son, off that purple shirt, that lacrosse stick, that wavering bicycle.

  “Please!”

  “But it’s like trusting in the whim of God, isn’t it? This random Rodney, he does whatever he pleases. He just drifts….”

  He lets the car slide out into the left lane. But that’s OK with her. There’s no car coming the other way, and she wants to give Oliver as wide a berth as possible. Yes, please, give him room. Go by him, go by him, give him lots of room.

  “The least error, and you’re plunged into hell. And who’s going to protect you from that, Annie? What if Rodney should suddenly wake from his daze and see he’s in the wrong lane and overcompensates—”

  He turns the wheel sharply and floors the accelerator and suddenly they’re aiming right at Oliver. Her hand flashes out at him and then she reins it in, she knows she must not touch him, but he’s psychotic, he’ll kill him, they’re headed right for Oliver and she’s clawing at her own face, screaming:

  “OH GOD! OH GOD! PLEASE!”

  They’re a few hundred yards from Oliver and closing and her eyes are straining to get out of their sockets and somehow she’s twisted herself up so that her feet are on the windshield—

  “Who will protect you?”

  “THE TEACHER!”

  “The judge?”

  “NO! JUST YOU! JUST YOU! MY GOD! MY GOD! PLEASE!”

  The car slips toward the road’s edge. On a path to kill her child.

  She slams her hands against the passenger window and slams them again, and pushes her cheek against it and she’s screaming, her foot kicking against the dashboard and not for a moment does she look away: her eyes are locked on that purple shirt dead ahead of them. The wheels hit the ragged shoulder, she’s thrown upward and her head is jammed into the soft roof of the car and the world scrambles. She can’t find Oliver in her vision. She bounces against the passenger window, her face flattens and she’s shrieking and the car’s wheels are shrieking with her, and then she sees him, her son, for one instant, his face right next to hers, he’s turned to find the car so close and he’s stunned—

  But he’s still on his bike.

  They flash past him. The car’s side mirror misses him by inches.

  She whips her head around and sees him back there. He stands there frozen, holding his bike under a hickory tree, and the car’s passing has kicked up a storm of leaves around him. He’s staring ahead of him. He’s alive, he’s OK, he’s alive. She wraps her arms over her head and rolls herself up on the seat and bawls, and rocks herself into a stupor. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.

  9

  the least spit of sound

  EDDIE’s waiting for them, up on the height above the Onion Creek quarry. He helps Annie—shivering, feverish—out of Rodney’s car.

  Then he and Vincent wrestle deadweight Rodney out of the backseat and into the driver’s seat.

  Annie tries to say something. “You can’t… you can’t…”

  “What?” says Vincent.

  “You can’t let him drive….”

  “That’s true,” says Vincent. He places Rodney’s foot on the accelerator pedal, and crosses Rodney’s other foot over it for the extra weight. Then he shuts the door and reaches in and turns the key. The car comes roaring to life.

  Vincent murmurs, “That’s true, Annie—he could kill somebody.”

  Vincent takes hold of the gearshift. Gives it a nudge, another nudge, then abruptly it pops into gear, and he pulls his arm free as the car starts moving. It rumbles down the dirt road. Then off the road, bouncing toward the cliff-edge. Eddie turns away. He’s seen this sort of shit before, he doesn’t need to watch.

  They hear a crackle of saplings, a long pause, and then the splash. Then the sound of waves lapping the banks of the quarry. All done. Simple as that. Eddie opens the door of his own car for Annie, and he helps her in. Vincent is already driving away in his Lotus.

  After a couple of miles of silence Eddie tells her, “When you’re sequestered, when you’re in the motel, you’ll have a roommate. Make sure you’re the one sleeping next to the telephone. OK?”

  She nods.

  Then she asks Eddie, in a small, tired voice: “Why did he do that?”

  “Do what? You mean with Rodney? Ah, Rodney, he was a leech. He was no good. He woulda, they couldn’t get him off the streets, he woulda killed somebody. Is that what you mean? What do you mean?”

  But Eddie knows what she meant.

  He says, “You mean, why did my friend scare you like that?”

  She stares at the road.

  Says Eddie, “It was, hey I know, it had to be hard—”

  She speaks softly: “You said you had a child.”

  “Yeah. Daughter.”

  “He doesn’t have children.”

  “No. No. But listen, it was for your own good.”

  “For my good.”

  “You were gonna fuck things up. Going to the judge. If you’d said anything, we’d a killed you for it. We’d a had to. You know that. It was for your own good.”

  “You’ve known him a long time?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “Hey.”

  Eddie shrugs.

  She says, “He’s not even one of you, is he? He doesn’t have to do this. Why does he do this?”

  “You got too many questions.”

  “Why do you let him do this?”

  They’ve come back to the parking lot at Vic’s. They pull in beside her car. Again Eddie shrugs. He tells her:

  “Hey look. Annie. You scared him, OK? You don’t want to do that. He’s a great guy, he’s, he’s smart as shit, but, but you don’t want to scare him. Annie. I’m just telling you, OK? You don’t never want to try that shit again.”

  THE TEACHER is tending the orchids, discipline where needed. His sterile scalpel flicks away the mushy roots on the Broughtonia. Combs the sphagnum under the Catasetum pileatum. The Paph. Maudiae has caught a cold, so he anoints the leaves using a watercolor brush laden with RD-20 and benomyl. How quickly, without nurturing, living things will lose their shape.

  Their clarity. Their order.

  It surprises hi
m, this exhilaration he’s feeling. He didn’t like scaring her the way he did. He detested the necessity of it. Yet now he’s floating. Soaring. He snips at the leaves of the Maudiae. His every movement partakes of the motion of the Tao.

  How is that simply taking care of such a nasty chore as that one today can give me this surge of good feeling?

  Is it simply that for facing down the darkness, for having the strength to stand up to it, my soul is rewarding me?

  Then for no reason he can put his finger on, he remembers the rocket.

  He was twelve or thirteen, the age Oliver is now. He was out back in the little fenced-in junked-over backyard in Brooklyn, he and Eddie. They were standing before the rocket he’d built.

  He let Eddie be in charge of the countdown.

  The rocket was four feet high, blue nose cone and yellow fuselage. The fuel was a slender canister full of liquid hydrogen and another slender canister full of liquid oxygen, which Eddie’s cousin had stolen from Xerxes Chem.

  Had there been one little flaw in the design, the rocket would have exploded and taken much of Bay Ridge with it.

  But he didn’t tell Eddie about that part.

  “T minus fifty-six seconds,” said Eddie. “And holding.”

  “Why ‘and holding’?”

  “’Cause here comes your old man.”

  The old man was drunk. He stood before the rocket and said, “It’s beautiful. It’s a thing of beauty, huh?”

  “Yeah, but Dad, it’s better you go inside.”

  “No no, a thing of beauty, I must sing to it.”

  “Please Dad.”

  Dad sang an aria from one of his operas. The “Ferito Prigionier” from the Germania. He stood there serenading his son’s blue-and-yellow rocket, raising his voice to the sky.

  Somebody in the apartment house next door leaned out and applauded.

  “My son!” cried Dad. “His rocket! This is poetry, huh!”

  “Dad, come on, it’s not really legal to have a rocket—”

  His father started singing again.

  “Stop it, Dad!”

  “What? What? Franchetti you don’t like? You don’t groove him? He’s not rock and roll, so you—”

  “Dad.”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  Dad went in.

  T minus fifteen, his mama came out.

  “What are you saying to your father?”

  “What do you mean, Ma—”

  “Ah, you treat your own father like dirt. He comes out to sing for you, he loves you—”

  The bedroom window opened and his father yelled out, “Mary! Leave him alone! Huh? He’s with his friend, can’t you leave the poor kid—”

  “Shut up, you jerk! You greaseball fairy—”

  “Leave my son alone, you dumb bitch!”

  She said to her son, “Your father’s a fairy, you know that? You know why—”

  But that was as much as he heard, because by then he had triggered the mixture of the hydrogen and the oxygen. A great white roaring fart of smoke and flame. His mother shrieked and ran toward the house and Eddie had a big wide grin on his face and the thing took off into the cream-colored heavens. Blue-and-yellow rocket, white smoke, cinnamon skirts of flame. Up into the sky. His ears ringing, his skull, all his thoughts, scoured and scorched clean. Clean!

  OLIVER’s trying to get her out of the house, so he can find out what happened. But she doesn’t seem to catch his hints. She pours a box of Rice-A-Roni Chicken & Broccoli into a saucepan, stirs it. Ignores him.

  He says, “I thought, I thought we’d get some, maybe pizza. Or something.”

  Still not a word from her.

  “Come on, I want to tell you what I did in school today.”

  She stirs the rice. She says, “Tell me, Oliver.” The rancor is back in her voice. The old regime. “Tell me about your day.”

  “Oh. It was…” He shrugs. “But I mean, how was your day, Mom?”

  No answer.

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “I asked you how was your day?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She won’t meet his eyes.

  He suggests, “Maybe we’ll go out after? Get some ice cream?”

  “No,” she says.

  He tries a new tack: “Did you talk to Juliet today?”

  She wheels on him. Puts her finger to her lips. “Sh.”

  Then she says, “Juliet? No.”

  He gets up and goes into the TV room and gets his school notebook and comes back and turns to the last page. He writes her a note:

  The guy knows that Juliet

  is your friend. So why can’t we talk

  about her?

  She writes back:

  Don’t ever mention her name in the house.

  Ever.

  He writes:

  What happened today?

  She writes:

  It won’t work.

  He writes:

  Why? What happened?

  She writes:

  I’ll tell you later.

  He writes:

  Mom we got to fight him.

  She writes:

  If we fight him, he’ll kill you.

  He writes:

  I’ll take the chance.

  She glares at him. She grips the pen hard, she’s in a fury. She writes:

  If we fight him, he’ll kill me.

  She underlines me.

  That stops him.

  She gets up and walks around the kitchen table and kneels before his chair. She’s crying, but she’s quiet about it. She takes him in her arms and puts her lips close to his ear and whispers, “Oliver. No.”

  After a minute she rises. She tears the page from the notebook and rolls it into a cone and lights it.

  THE TEACHER thinks, That’s wrong. There’s something wrong there.

  He unfurls from his lotus. He rises and crosses to the console.

  Switches to the tape. Rewinds. Hits PLAY for a moment, then rewinds some more. Hits PLAY again.

  He hears Oliver say it again: “Maybe we’ll go out after? Get some ice cream?”

  The Teacher wonders, Why is he so eager to get out of the house?

  Annie: “No.”

  Pause.

  Oliver: “Did you talk to Juliet today?”

  Silence. Then a minuscule hiss. Maybe distortion? Maybe an escape of steam from the saucepan?

  He plays it again. The least spit of sound. But he thinks he knows what it is. He thinks she’s hissing at Oliver to shut up.

  He plays it again.

  OK. Why would she have wanted him to shut up about Juliet? The question he asked, wasn’t it a reasonable one?

  All he asked her was, had she talked to Juliet today?

  Next, he hears a faint, scratchy, whispery crackle—what is it?

  Wait.

  He opens a drawer and takes out a pen. And on the flyleaf of a book of Tibetan meditations he scribbles:

  AnnieLairdAnnieLaird

  He stops writing. He replays the tape.

  He writes:

  mysoulmysoulmysoul

  Yes, what he heard was the sound of writing.

  They were writing messages to each other.

  And that crackle at the end? That was the page burning. And the sizzle as it dropped into the sink.

  Of course. They thought they had to burn that page of notes or the Teacher would have rooted in their garbage and found it.

  So Oliver knows about me. And about the bugs. And about everything.

  And who else knows?

  Juliet.

  That doctor, of course. Annie must have told that fool of an arrogant doctor. It’s she who would have counseled interference. Juliet, the wild adventurer.

  It’s she who put the boy’s life at risk.

  Dr. Juliet Applegate, North Kent Road, Pharaoh, NY.

  It astounds him, such a paucity of prudence. For the chance to think well of herself, to think herself valiant, for such a paltry thrill, s
he wades headlong and splashing against the rhythm of the Tao.

  How can she tolerate the grasping recklessness of her own soul? the Teacher wonders.

  EDDIE, the next afternoon, is driving the Hutchinson Parkway. He’s tired. It’s been a busy day, and it’s not over yet. First he had to help Vincent wire up Juliet Applegate’s apartment for sound. This was hairy because she lives under a grocery store and the store was open while they worked.

  Next he had to drive all the way down to Queens, where he had a big problem with the Jamaicans. Instead of finding the expected $28,000 in the paper towel dispenser at Luca’s Texaco, he found $24,000.

  Oh! What a bullshit crank-sucking low-esteem boost!

  Probably the Jamaican mule made the skim. But Eddie talked the problem over with the kid’s bosses. If the kid did it, Eddie’s confident his bosses will worm it out of him. Then they’ll kill him. No fuss no muss. Kill his family too. Kill his neighbors. Kill the entire staff of the corner liquor store, for good measure. All in plenty of time for the six o’clock news.

  Eddie envies the crisp organization and the forthrightness of the Jamaicans.

  But still he’s got a vicious headache.

  And still he’s on the road. He’s back on the Hutch, headed north, because he’s got to stop by Frankie’s and deliver a gift from Vincent. A thank-you for Frankie’s help in kicking the shit out of that nosy private eye: $20,000 in cash and an orchid for his girlfriend.

  This particular chore isn’t so bad. Frankie’ll cream his jeans to see all that money. The orchid’ll give him a kick too. He already worships the ground Vincent walks on. He’s never even seen his face, but he thinks Vincent is the Second Coming of the Virgin Mary. Now the guy’s giving him $20,000 and an orchid? For an hour’s work? He’s gonna build a fuckin shrine.

  Eddie knows the feeling.

  Eddie himself, he’s worshiped Vincent ever since he was a kid. Maybe he still does. Although for the last twenty-four hours all he’s been able to think about is that question Annie asked him.

  Why do you let him do this?

  Lady, get the fuck out of my head with your stupid questions, OK? All I want is to deliver this gift and then go on home and find that my daughter is more or less sane. I want to fry us up a couple nice steaks. Shrimp, boiled potatoes, watch Married with Children. That’s all I want. I don’t want to think about fuckin Vincent all night.