The Juror (22 page)

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.

He 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!”

“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.

E
DDIE
’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.”

T
HE 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 him, 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—”