The Juror Page 33

  “Well, you know we can’t land right in the valley. I told you that.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s a ridge on the west, sort of a road there, way up above the town. I’ll try to land there. If I can even find it. Then we have to walk down from there.”

  “To run.”

  “Yeah, to run, but still it’s a long way.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all downhill, at least there’s that.”

  For a few minutes, nothing in his ears but the engines.

  Then she says, “Do you want me to talk about my child? About Oliver?”

  “Oh, that’s OK.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I understand. It’s OK.”

  She says, “That investigator I told you about—once he asked me what was in my head. In my bead. I told him I was thinking about Oliver. About nothing but Oliver. But that wasn’t true. That was a lie. The truth is, I haven’t been thinking about Oliver at all. When I’m with him, I try not to even look at him. And when I’m not with him, every time he comes into my head I turn away. Turn my thoughts away. I think about something else. I keep everything dark in my head. Do you want me to think about him?”

  “No, really, I didn’t mean—”

  “How can I think about my child? If I think about my child, I’ll think about my child being killed. If I think about that, it’ll split me open. If I love him, even if I just love him, that’ll split me open. I don’t love him. I don’t keep that around. You want to know what I keep around?”

  “If you—”

  “Hate. That’s all. That’s all I think about. Those headlights down there, that little light of his down there, it’s about the size of a beetle, isn’t it? I think I could reach down in the dark and find it, that’s all I have to do, grope around in the dark till I find it and squeeze it, crush him to death. You know what? You know what I just realized? I don’t care whether he kills my child or not. You know? I don’t love my child, there’s nothing left of my child inside my head anyway, so what do I care?”

  “Hey, Annie, stop. That’s not true—”

  “Shut up. What right do you have to tell me what’s true? Or what’s not true. What do I care what’s true or not. I just want to kill him. That’s all I want to do, just kill him and kill him and kill him. Please, get there, land this plane.”

  “Soon.”

  “Land us.”

  “We will.”

  “He wants to see me holding the body of my son, why should I do that? It’s just a body, why should I hold it up for him? I won’t, I will not. I’ll hold his body, that fucker, I’ll hold him up and I’ll eat his heart, please, will you go faster, will you get there, will you land this thing, please! I just want to eat that man’s heart! He can kill all the children he wants, that’s fine with me, let him kill, kill Oliver? I don’t even know Oliver, let him! Let him kill, let him, if he wants to kill let him kill but when he’s done I want to eat his heart. Do you understand? I want to eat that man’s heart! Please! I WANT TO EAT THAT MAN’S HEART! PLEASE! DON’T FLY ANY MORE! GET THERE! LAND THIS!”

  THE TEACHER, at the first light of dawn, sees a little store by the side of the road, and a light is on. He’s tired, tired of this mud-driving, and he’s hungry. He pulls over.

  Dead silence when he shuts the taxi door.

  He looks down the mountain road he just came up. He wishes she were here with him. He hopes she found some transportation. There won’t be much time after he kills Oliver before the police come. He won’t be able to wait long. She’ll have to hurry. Hurry, Annie.

  Find some way.

  The sky is utterly clear and filling up with light the way a sail fills up with wind.

  He thinks of the morning when Lao Tsu left his Book of the Way with the Royal Gatekeeper, and walked out of China forever.

  He steps inside the store.

  There’s a table and three Mayans having breakfast. They make room for him. He has eggs with salsa, and mutton stew and tortillas, and sweet sweet coffee. The coffee is so sweet it makes him laugh.

  He says to the men, “Hay una fiesta hoy? En T’ui Cuch?”

  “Sí,” says one. All three of them are drunk as skunks. “La fiesta.”

  “Empieza muy temprano?” the Teacher asks.

  “Sí. La carrera. Temprano.”

  The race, the T’ui Cuch horse race, they’ll start it bright and early. There will be a crowd, and Oliver will be in it, and he’ll be easy to find.

  ANNIE runs from the wrecked airplane, runs in the rose light of daybreak across the barren black potato field till she comes to the field’s edge and looks down the steep cliffside.

  Below, far, swaddled in mist, the village.

  “It’s too far,” she says.

  Buddy hobbles up beside her. “Fucked my knee up,” he says. “My knee, my plane, my whole life, fucked.”

  “Hours. It’ll take hours.”

  “We’re just nothin but fucked,” says Buddy.

  Annie turns. A small crowd of Mayans have gathered in the potato field. Some of them gawk at the wrecked plane, some of them gawk at Annie.

  One of them is a boy on a gray horse.

  The boy is wearing a gaudy riding jacket. His hair has been braided and ornamented with long rainbow scarves.

  Annie asks Buddy, “That boy? Why is he dressed like that?”

  “For the fiesta. I expect he’s gonna ride in the horse race today.”

  “What horse race?”

  “In T’ui Cuch. Some kind a horse race. I don’t know.”

  “Will you ask him something for me?” says Annie.

  “Yeah,” says Buddy.

  “Will you ask him if his horse is a fast horse?”

  THE TEACHER lingers at the little store. He buys himself a nice wool coat with the pattern of a bat on its back, and he buys himself a small wooden representation of the local black saint, San Simón.

  Then he asks the three men at the table, who are just finishing their sweet coffees, “Quieten ir conmigo? A T’ui Cuch. Tengo un auto.”

  They confer among themselves.

  “Sí. Gracias, señor.”

  They all get into the taxi.

  One of the men hands him a bottle of the local white lightning. The Teacher takes a swig, and his eyes water and the men laugh. A festive atmosphere in this taxicab, and every moment is chiseled into his mind’s eye and into his memory. They ride up over the mountain and down into the valley of T’ui Cuch.

  When they come into town he drives carefully around the loose chickens and the sleeping drunks and the families that are heading into the market where the horse race will begin. He finds a place to park, and says farewell to his passengers. He salutes the village policeman, who is barely able to stand. He walks briskly into the market.

  Cacophony of marimbas and trumpets, and the church bell is tolling. The dusty trees are crowded with boat-tailed grackles, who are all screeching at once, and children are screeching with them. A costumed dance is under way. Looks as though it’s been going on all night, the dancers stumbling and shuffling. And in the soccer field the horses are gathering, and the men are dragging them by the reins and swearing at them. Oh, it’s all noisy and colorful, and perhaps charming if it were some other occasion. If he were coming here as a tourist, coming with Annie and Oliver for example, a gringo family gawking at the local grotesqueries—then all this nonsense wouldn’t irritate him so much. But what he wants now is silence. He wants solemn clarity. He wants a revelation of pattern. He wants the world to be as clean and simple as that sky up there.

  A ragged boy approaches him with a tray of boiled peanuts. “Maníes? No quiere maníes, joven?”

  He smiles. “Sí, por favor.”

  He buys a bag, and gives the boy a five-quetzal tip.

  And while the child is still blinking at it, the Teacher asks him, “Conoce un mucbacho, un gringo, se llama Oliver?”

  “Oh-levar? Sí. El gringito? Sí, sí.�
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  “Y dónde está?”

  “Ahorita?” The boy scans the market, looking for Oliver. He raises his eyes to the steep hillside. Suddenly he points. “Oh-levar,” he says.

  A knot of five boys, on a street overlooking the market. Looking down at the field of horses. Oliver not apparent. But two of the boys wear masks and gaudy robes. One’s a horned bull, the other a long-faced deer.

  One of the unmasked boys waves a shirt, and the bull paws the ground with his feet and then rushes that rag.

  “Yo no puedo verlo,” says the Teacher.

  “Está allí,” says the boy. “El Toro.”

  The boy-matador wheels, and the bull wheels with him, around and around, then dizzily cartwheels into the dust. Slowly picks himself up. Lifts up his mask. It is Oliver. He pushes his hair out of his eyes and laughs and replaces the mask and he’s the bull again.

  The peanut seller shouts, “Oh-levar!”

  But fortunately the marimbas and the church bells and the grackles drown out his call. Oliver doesn’t hear, doesn’t turn.

  “Por favor,” says the Teacher. He puts a hand on the peanut vendor’s shoulder. “Mi visita… es una… sorpresa.”

  The kid shrugs. “OK.”

  Now the bull and the deer separate from the other boys. They start to ascend the hillside, climbing a long earthen stairway.

  “A dónde van?” the Teacher asks.

  The kid shrugs again. “No sé. Probablamente a las ruinas.”

  He points to the crumbling carcass of a stone church, high up on the hillside.

  “Gracias,” murmurs the Teacher. “That’s perfect.”

  He winds through the milling throng, crosses the marketplace, hurries up to the long stairway. This he climbs. Quick strides. Up through a narrow space between two thatch cottages. He looks over the palings of a whittled-sapling fence into a garden, where a woman is weaving at a backstrap loom. Her young daughter squats beside her. The woman smiles, and the Teacher smiles back. He holds up his bag of peanuts, and tosses it to the girl, and nimbly she catches it. He wishes Annie were with him. He climbs on.

  The stairway meets a road that zigzags up the steep hill. When he looks up he catches another glimpse of the bull and the deer.

  The mask, that’s wrong. That mask is clutter. I want to see your face, Oliver. Your open clear face.

  But still the Teacher is content, because he can feel the power gathering. The wild din of the market is fading, the shape of the valley is showing itself. He likes the geometric Jacob’s-ladder structure of this road. He likes to think of the measured distance between himself and Oliver, the distance that grows a bit shorter with every one of his long strides. He climbs higher, passes through a huddle of thatched homes and comes to a clearing.

  Again he spots Oliver.

  Though it’s just for a moment, as the boy trudges between dry corn fields. This time he’s alone. His friend the deer must have gone home, must live in one of these houses. There are only the two of us now. Simpler and simpler.

  Only the one child and the one man climbing dutifully to the meeting-place.

  The Teacher hastens his steps. A little impatient now, eager, can’t help it. He trots through the corn patches and through an orchard and out into an open field. Just above him is the ruins of the church. Oliver has paused. He’s standing on an old ruined retaining wall of the church, and he’s looking out at the view. The Teacher supposes that the child has noticed him, but with that mask it’s hard to tell.

  Anyway it doesn’t matter, he’s never seen my face, he won’t recognize me. To him I’m just another gringo tourist in a hurry to visit the church.

  Oliver turns and goes inside. The Teacher is sweating but he can’t take off his woolen coat without exposing the HK. He stops for a moment. He looks down the hillside and sees the village and the road winding away from it. A lovely lone horse on that road. The Teacher draws a deep breath, wipes his face with his sleeve.

  Then he angles across the hillside and ascends the stone steps of the church.

  Under the arch into the great wide-open nave. With the roof gone, it’s only a shabby stone courtyard. Silent. Weeds burgeoning in the stone cracks.

  Oliver. Where are you?

  Blood-encrusted cross in the middle of the courtyard.

  Then he sees Oliver, his horns and his gaudy robe, down at the far end of the nave. In the old chorister’s gallery, leaning against a wall, looking the other way. What’s he doing? Is he taking a leak? Reading something on the wall? What is he doing?

  Is he weeping? Is he weeping from homesickness?

  I will comfort you.

  The Teacher takes a step closer, and says in his gentlest voice, “Oliver. Your mother, your mother’s sorry she left you. And she’s coming back for you. Today, Oliver. She’ll see you today.”

  The kid doesn’t move.

  “Oliver.”

  The Teacher notices that there are no hands emerging from the sleeves of that robe. Makes no sense. A breeze comes into the church, a gust of pure chaos blowing down off the mountain, and it flurries the robe’s hem, and the Teacher sees there are no legs either—only sticks.

  It’s a scarecrow he’s talking to.

  He draws his pistol and wheels.

  No one.

  But then a man’s voice, a southern drawl, comes from the wrap-around balcony above:

  “Go on now. Drop your pistol.”

  Faces show up at the balcony’s stone rail. Human faces, and masks, and cross-eyed shotguns, and rifles.

  “Drop the pistol.”

  But the Teacher needs the pistol.

  Monkey masks, owl masks, jaguar masks, swine masks. And the ones without masks, they wear masks as well. The Teacher thinks he needs to kill all the animals in this zoo, before they suffer another moment of the tortures of this masked random world. This loveless havoc! When love is denied! This jumble, this ragtag riot of cross-purposes, I detest this as much as you do, poor creatures.

  A shotgun goes off. The shot hits his hand. His HK and three of his fingers skitter across the stones. He flaps his hand contemptuously to dismiss the unruly jolts of pain, and spatters of his own blood fly into his eyes. Spatters. When Love is denied, Pattern shall become Spatters.

  Then he sees Annie up in that balcony.

  Annie?

  Oh Annie, it was so fierce you could not stand to raise your eyes to it! Orion and the Pleiades, Teacher and Juror, the dam-break onslaught of the Tao roaring about our hearts and scouring us clean, scouring us of this filth and shambles, Annie, and if there has been any error, I swear if I have strayed one step from that Path of Scorched and Scoured Love…

  She raises a pistol, a .38, and takes aim at him.

  But before she can fire, Oliver comes running up beside her. With his bull mask pushed to the top of his head, he stands at the railing and looks down. Annie tells him, “Go back! You’re not supposed to be here!”

  “But so what?” says Oliver. “Here I am.”

  “Then turn around.”

  He doesn’t, though. He’s lost in studying the bleeding man in the courtyard. The Teacher with his missing fingers. The Teacher—who sinks slowly to a squat now, because he wants to gets his good hand closer to the snub-nose .22 that is strapped to his calf.

  Annie says it again, much louder. “Turn around, Oliver.”

  Loud enough this time for everyone to hear. Still the boy dawdles.

  The Teacher smiles up at him, and thinks, You’ll need to overcome that hesitation of yours, Oliver. The dreaminess is fine but you’ll also need to learn how to act. Before it’s too late, before opportunity slips away.

  The Teacher thinks, If you’d do what your mother asked you to do, she could kill me—and I know she would kill me too, I see it in her eyes—and then the power of the Tao would be scattered to the wind, and you’d still have that little life that you so cherish.

  One of the gringos says to Annie, “Put it down now.” Must be her old boyfriend, Turtle. “
Just put the gun down. We got him. OK? He can’t hurt you now.”

  Annie ignores him. She says, “Oliver, you’re not going to see this! Turn around.”

  Says Turtle, “Annie, you can’t, he’s unarmed! It’s murder! You can’t!”

  “But I have to,” she says.

  “Damn it, Annie, we’ve got him! It’s over! Put it down!”

  “He’ll kill my child.”

  “He’s going to prison!”

  “But when he gets out he’ll kill my child.”

  “GIVE ME THE GUN!”

  Turtle reaches for it, she steps back.

  “I have to,” she says.

  Now the Teacher, in a soft voice—but in these old ruins it carries well—calls to her. He says, “No, listen to the man. Listen to all of us, Annie, because we love you. If the Guatemalans send you to jail, who’ll raise Oliver? Think of your child. Forget vengeance, we have no use for vengeance, do we? Think of, think of—”

  He reaches into his thoughts for something Lao Tsu might say, a word to bring her to heel, some flash of wit to restore order. But there’s so much distraction! This menagerie of animal sentinels. That distant marimba racket. The shimmer of his own hand as it approaches the cuff of his trousers, the hidden .22. That sheer sunlit mountain. The flock of grackles flying against that mountain—

  Too much sunny surface-of-things. The Teacher can’t quite focus. He falters a moment—and Oliver fills the pause.

  Oliver says, “Mom, you’re right. Kill him.”

  Then the boy turns his back to the Teacher.

  Oh, but it’s too late for you, my child, it’s far too late because now Annie is mine again. I have her great gray eyes in the grasp of my own. I have her unruly spirit in thrall, overwhelmed by this voice of mine, this voice that runs so easily along the valley-channel:

  “Think of Oliver,” he cries. “What happens to Oliver if they send you to a Guatemalan prison?” His fingertips brush the smooth skin of the .22. “How would that serve you? Annie, for the sake of your child—”

  Perhaps he should not have said that. He sees her arm leap from her pistol’s recoil, and a bark emerges from his own throat. He seems to have lost touch with his tongue. He hears a great roaring. He seems in truth to have lost touch with one half of his body, with one half of the world. Some part of him is being flooded with blood. He wants to spit that blood out, but he’s not sure if this whirlpool of blood is in his mouth or in the socket of his eye, and he’s afraid he might spit out his eye. Confusion is at large. The sky-trail of the Tao grows faint. Less light, less and less. Just barely light enough to see the back of Oliver’s glittering robe.