The Juror Read online

  So what’s the point in lingering here, Slavko? Can’t we move on now?

  He has only three drinks at Gillespie’s.

  Then he drives some more.

  He finds himself driving to Ossining. He finds himself driving by Sari’s house, and slowing down. Like he did last night. Driving by and slowing and checking.

  Checking what?

  Don’t know, who’s asking?

  Tonight her car is there, but all the lights are out. Too early for her to be in bed. So she must be on a hot date somewhere. Steaming hot passionate date with that bastard.

  Maybe she’s over at the bastard’s townhouse.

  He heads more or less in that direction, until he happens to glance down and note that the gas gauge has fallen to empty. Far below empty, in fact. It’s somewhere down in the Pit of Vapors.

  But luckily he’s not far from a gas station.

  One of these new moonbase gas stations. He pulls in and stops at a bright sodium-fluorescent pump island. The pump starts right up when he squeezes the trigger. They let him pump before paying. What classic green-gilled suckers!

  He fills up. He goes in and the sad fellow at the register tells him, “Fifteen dollars and forty-two cents.”

  “Really? That much? I don’t have that much.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You think I’m made of money?”

  “You mean you can’t pay?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “You mean exactly?”

  “Yeah. How much do you have?”

  “I don’t really have anything.”

  “You forget your wallet?”

  “No, I have my wallet. I don’t have any money in it.”

  “Wait a minute. Hold on.”

  The clerk picks up the phone, punches the A button.

  Says Slavko, “Are you calling the federal authorities? You gonna send me to jail? Shivved, smacked around, raped repeatedly for six months? Because my wallet’s empty? Oh well. Fair’s fair.”

  Says the clerk, “I’m calling my boss.”

  The clerk has a few words with his employer, then puts Slavko on the line.

  “This is Mr. Hooten. What’s the problem?”

  “There you have it, Mr. Hooten, you’ve nailed it again. What’s the problem? After all, Slavko’s not hopelessly stupid. Some find him witty. He’s honest, he’s not bad-looking. So what’s hanging us up here? What’s the problem? Well, I’m thinking some crucial piece must be missing.”

  Mr. Hooten says something irrelevant. But Slavko forges ahead.

  “If only I could figure out what piece! What tiny flaw! I ought to be a neurosurgeon! Or a poet! Instead every humiliation that can be visited upon a suburban American male is visited upon me. Except! I still have my wheels. Oh yes, fuck you very much, Mr. Hooten, I may not be able to pay for it but I still have a full tank of gas in the old Jalop and I can cruise from here to—”

  Mr. Hooten shouts at him: “Put the clerk back on!”

  Slavko does. He turns to the other waiting customers and tells them, “I still have my wheels. I still have a full tank of gas. You call me a loser?”

  The clerk hangs up the phone and tells him, “My boss says if you clear out of here in the next thirty seconds then I don’t have to call the police.”

  JULIET’s in Manhattan with Henri, at Nightbone’s Poetry Cafe. It’s Slam Night at half-past ten and the cafe is going full throttle. Slow cyclone of smoke, hecklers, junkies, zombied Eurozeros. A smattering of undeniable crazies (for example the man over there humming into half of a plastic bowling pin). A few celebrities (for example Paul Simon on the balcony with that woman three times his height)…

  Bob Bozark, the MC, is up there in his trademark Fedora and loud suit, and he’s profoundly, brilliantly, into his Snarling Leprechaun subself. He spews acid to his left. To his right. He dips and weaves and he’s by God a cauldron of attitude, and finally he introduces the next poet and rushes offstage to down another beer….

  Juliet notices that someone is staring at her. A striking-looking guy in a black leather cop’s coat.

  Juliet stares back.

  She’s playing no games here. This is her only night off for the next two weeks. There’s no time for shilly-shally if she wants to get laid. If she wants to get Annie’s peril out of her head for a while (and if she doesn’t she’ll go crazy), if she wants to get closer to that man’s screwy smile and fine cheekbones and forest-green eyes, she’s going to have to let him know her intentions and leave nothing to chance.

  So she sends him an enormous smile.

  Then some blond tart sits down beside him.

  His damn date. Back from powdering her nose.

  “That bitch,” says Juliet.

  “Huh?” says Henri.

  Juliet nods in the direction of the interloper.

  Says Henri, “What did she do?”

  “She stole my boyfriend. I just hope she never comes into my hospital is all.”

  Now stepping up to the microphone is the poet of the moment: a compact, tomboyish black dyke. When the applause dies down, she announces the title of her poem:

  “I Want to Fuck You, Or, Straight Talk to that Redhaired Mama in That Table Near the Corner.”

  Everyone turns to look at Juliet.

  The poet launches. A breathless bellowing full-tilt explicit erotic ballad, and she booms it out over gales of laughter, and she is kind of cute. In her poem Juliet is spread-eagled on the stony lap of Alice in Wonderland in Central Park, and the poet is looming over her and there’s lightning flashing in the trees above.

  Everyone loves the poet’s fever lust, her bantam cockiness. Every straight woman in the joint is reconsidering her stance.

  And Juliet—high as a kite, blushing a deep crimson—Juliet is having a blast here. Jesus, she only wishes Annie were here to enjoy this with her. The poem explodes into a shrieking orgasm. The cafe rocks with cheers. The poet leaps down and weaves through the tables, and Juliet stands and opens her arms and the poet rushes into them. Juliet shuts her eyes for the kiss. A little tongue fluking around in there. What the hell—she flukes back. Why not, why the hell not? It’s like kissing a man really, except that she has to lean so far down, and there’s a hundred pairs of eyes upon her. The place is coming apart at the seams. Shivaree of whistles and catcalls. The judges hold their scores aloft, and they’re all perfect tens. Of course the poem itself stank—no one’s fooled—but the show was a hoot, the kiss was great daring fun, so who cares?

  Then Juliet looks up and the next poet is the devastating man in the black cop’s jacket.

  What he reads is sort of a real poem. This embarrasses everyone here. Not a party poem, not another paean to decadence, but this moving villanelle about a winter spent on a volcano in Iceland. With a crow perched in a rowan tree.

  The rough wind of his voice is so compelling it quiets even these drunks and dregs and scene-clingers. They don’t follow the poem but they give him a respectable score anyway. When Bob Bozark returns to the mike, sarcasm drips from his fangs—he must have been truly impressed.

  Then the round is over and Juliet works her way up to the crowded bar and orders beers for her and Henri.

  The black-jacket poet slips into place on the other side of her.

  He says, “Hello, Doctor.”

  “How do you know I’m a doctor?”

  “I brought a friend into your hospital once. Up at St. Ignatius? Car accident. Nothing serious. You took good care of him.”

  “Is that so?”

  Oh, good. Christ, Juliet thinks, how clever can I be? Is that so?

  “We didn’t speak,” he tells her. “But it’d be hard to forget you. My name’s Ian Slate.”

  “I’m Juliet. Did you really live in Iceland?”

  “Long time ago I did. I was reporting, covering the summit in Reykjavík. When it was over I took a few months off.”

  He flashes his crooked grin. Already she’
s hooked on his green eyes.

  “Do you have more poetry?” she says.

  “Sure. You’d like me to bore you sometime?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “I’m with someone tonight. But could I get your number?”

  She shrugs.

  He produces a pen. She writes her name and number on a napkin. But as she’s handing it over, damn! Here comes the girlfriend. Appearing out of nowhere, with a bitter frozen grin.

  Ian Slate is very smooth, though.

  “Sari,” he says, “this is Juliet Applegate. She’s a doctor at St. Ignatius. Next time I read my poetry in Westchester she wants me to tell her, so she can watch me make a fool of myself.”

  The girlfriend says firmly, “Eben, we need to go. But it was so nice to meet you, Juliet.”

  And she offers Juliet her comely claw.

  ANNIE is lying in bed in her hotel room. Her roommate, the Mt. Kisco matron, has been asleep for hours, but Annie is still wide awake, thinking about Turtle. She’s trying not to think about what she has to do in that jury room. So instead she thinks about Turtle and Drew, and those days in Brooklyn that have always been so painful to remember—but now they seem mild and piquant. Now they’re the good old days.

  That first winter after art school. Living in that warehouse in Greenpoint, on Franklin Street right by the East River. You could get up on the roof at night and look to the lights of midtown Manhattan. The ice-sculpture of the Chrysler Building, cold Citicorp. And closer by, the black cylinder of the shit vat, where all the city’s frozen shit was ladled out onto barges and carried off.

  Living in that loft, shivering. She was making huge animals, sleepy mammoths, out of hydrocal and wood and tar and feathers. Trying to force herself to make political art so the galleries would notice her, but she just couldn’t do it. She kept building those huge shaggy animals, and she was so lonely and sad that winter she thought she was going to die—until she met Turtle, who was the bass player in the band that practiced downstairs on Tuesday nights.

  Turtle had a fuzzy beard, little pig-eyes, a small beak nose like a baby eagle’s. He hated the city. He took her to Grand Central and they got on a train and went north to a random station and walked till they found a meadow and then pushed the snow off a rock wall and had a teeth-chattering picnic.

  Then on the way home the train car was steamy and she curled up in Turtle’s arms and went to sleep.

  And suddenly the winter wasn’t so bad for Annie.

  Turtle was studying at NYU to be a paramedic, on the off chance that his Great Rock Career didn’t soar. He wanted to take care of people. The notion of suffering disturbed him powerfully. He had a puppy-eagerness and awkwardness. Great jolts of love and tenderness kept shooting from him.

  On another picnic, in another meadow, he kissed her with frozen lips. She wasn’t sure that’s what she wanted. She wasn’t sure she wanted to make love to him. But that night she did, on her dusty mattress, and she had a pretty good time. So she slept with him twice more.

  But there was something lacking in him; what did he lack? Thinking of it now, in this dark hotel room, it makes her cringe to think that he lacked some kind of power. To think that simple good-heartedness wasn’t the power she was fool enough to crave.

  Then his band got a new singer, Drew, who was lanky and drugged and off kilter and sometimes mean and smelled a little rank. He had a brilliant wit, though, and he had eyes and a jawline that Annie could not cure herself of, and he drove her in his old bread truck to the Brooklyn anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge and parked and they crawled into the back of the van and talked for hours and then among the tire irons she sucked his dick, which was long, spicy and unruly. He bruised her mouth. As she sucked she squeezed her thighs together and when he came, she came, and she kicked out and stubbed her toe on the van’s back door.

  She couldn’t call it romantic—but it seemed to satisfy some thirst.

  She kept taking trips with him in that van. She broke Turtle’s heart. She felt guilty over this, but the guilt scarcely made a dent in her overall excitement. When she became pregnant Drew persuaded her to keep the child. He stayed with them for a year and a half and then he got restless and flew to Bali.

  Last she heard he was living in Prague singing old Beatles tunes to teenage girls on the Charles Bridge.

  And Turtle went to a village in the highlands of Guatemala where they think he’s a doctor and they come to him night and day. He’s learned to play the sort of flute they call a chirimía. He plays it in the festivals. Once in a blue moon some errand will send him down to the city of Huehuetenango, and he’ll call Annie.

  Or anyway he used to.

  And tonight, in this strange bed with the Caruso Hotel’s facade lights spilling in through the window and no sleep, no chance for sleep, Annie finds that Turtle, his pig-eyes, his dumb clingy unsought love for her, is the only thing in the world she can think about to take her mind off the other thing, the thing that’s killing her.

  SLAVKO long past midnight, nothing else to do, figures he’ll drive by Sari’s place one more time. Just to see if she’s home yet.

  She is.

  And he’s with her.

  His Lotus in her driveway. Oh yes, the powerful-because-he’s-so-soulful E.R. is here.

  Slavko parks down the street. He fiddles with the radio. He waits and watches.

  Sari’s house is quiet. No doubt at this very moment E.R. is presenting his graceful and classical penis to her mouth. To her rosebud mouth. How nice for them both. Me, my sexual days are over, so it’s really quite all right for me to sit out here in the October witch-cold listening to splats of static and the high school football scores on the radio, and to look up at that house and know that you two kids are up there all cozy and fucking your ears off and having a wonderful time.

  Eat shit, Eben Rackland. Die from doing it, Eben Rackland.

  Slavko allows himself another little swallow of bourbon.

  Take it real slow, Ebenezer, I’ve got all night. Don’t hurry on my account. Go ahead and fuck her again. Wouldn’t want to waste any of your precious silver soulful seed.

  Sari’s porchlight comes on.

  E.R. steps out.

  Sari comes out a step herself. In her robe, wrapping it around her, wrapping it tight against the cold. E.R. turns and takes her head in his hands and pulls her lips to him. Kisses her gently, then draws away.

  But still he holds her cheeks with his fingertips.

  The rhythm, the command, is all his. In this transaction Sari is a porcelain doll. And Slavko in the Buzzard feels pea-green anger spraying all over his guts.

  Just kiss her and blow, fuckhead.

  At last E.R. steps down from Sari’s porch and walks to his car. She calls something after him, but Slavko doesn’t hear it. Quietly, quietly, he rolls his window down. He listens.

  He hears E.R., in the crisp hollow night, saying, “Whenever I can, as soon as I can, you know that.”

  Sari frowns a moment. But recovers herself, and sort of smiles, and turns to go back in.

  “Hey,” E.R. calls to her softly.

  “What?”

  “Lover.”

  “What?”

  “Show me.”

  Her smile broadens, though she tries to rein it in. “Come on, Eben. People, people might be—”

  “What people? At two in the morning? Show me,” and he tucks his lower lip under his teeth boyishly. A trick that makes Slavko feel like puking but it seems to win Sari over. Abruptly she tilts her chin up, throws her robe open and strikes a pose.

  Her breasts are an uplifting sight to behold. Her pubic hair has been shaved into a narrow strip, like a teardrop, like the top part of an exclamation point. She puts her hands on her hips to hold the robe open, and even from here you can see what great pleasure she takes in offering up this vision of herself to E.R.

  And as for Slavko?

  You mean the loser? Oh, he’s nothing. He’s but a chunk of gloom out here. He’s
the sicko pervert she was afraid might be tom-peeping this performance. The very deviant himself.

  But he’s not getting anything out of it. Her beauty only hurts him. He looks away. He hears E.R. say, “You know I’m on a leash. You know I can’t go very far or for very long. I love you.”

  Slavko hears him get into his car. He hears the satiny engine come to life. Slavko watches as E.R. backs onto the street and drives up the hill away from him. Sari, shivering, bundles the robe tight about her and watches after him.

  Slavko takes out his little log book, and he writes:

  2:40 E.R. leaves SK home, w Arning Road. P.

  The P is for pursuit. He slips the notebook into his jacket pocket again.

  Sari’s still lingering. Watching the place where E.R. vanished.

  Go on to bed, Sari. Get warm.

  Let me go after this guy.

  At last she does go in—and at the moment she shuts her door, Slavko starts up the Buzzard. He leaves the headlights dark and ascends the hill as quietly as he can in this old bomb. But as soon as he has topped the crest, he drives the pedal into the floor. The Buzzard pants. Trying to catch E.R.’s distant red glimmer.

  Driving without lights is taking a big chance. Cops see me, I’m fried. No lights, DUI, reckless driving, lapsed insurance, invalid inspection sticker, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, murder and dismemberment of same, etc.

  But it’s only me and E.R. on this road. And if E.R. sees headlights in his mirror, he’ll be gone like a rabbit. So Slavko has to drive blind. He squints to see the center line, and leans into his meager luck.

  At Eastgate Road, E.R. takes a left toward the river. Passes the seminary, passes the big stone church—and then he turns into the drive of the Caruso Hotel.

  Old dowager elephant. Used to be a whipped-cream palace of luxury, but now the paint’s flaking off, the grillwork on the balconies is rusting. Place has become a draw for second-rate conventions and cheesy weddings. And sometimes when one of these affairs needs extra security, the management calls Slavko.

  E.R. parks and walks briskly toward the lobby. Slavko stays out on the main road until E.R. has gone in, then he pulls into the drive. He parks off to the side of the hotel’s vast lot. He pauses to make a note in the black logbook. Then he follows E.R. in.