The Juror (21 page)

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.

E
DDIE
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?

A
NNIE
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.