The Juror (3 page)

“Oliver. This is serious. This isn’t a game. The reason I’m a lunatic to do this isn’t because it’s dangerous—it’s not. It’s
just that it’s such a nuisance. Mr. Slivey’s going to kill me for taking the time from work. And when the TV’s on I’ll have
to be careful that I don’t see anything about the trial. And anything in the
Reporter Dispatch?
You’ll have to cut it out so I don’t see it.”

“But you never read the paper anyway, Mom.”

“I know, but still.”

“You just wrap things in it.”

“I just want to be sure. You know? And when the trial’s over and we start to deliberate, I’ll be sequestered. Means I’ll have
to stay in a motel for a while. You’ll have to stay with Mrs. Kolodny.”

Oliver nearly chokes on his gum. “Mrs. Kolodny? You mean
overnight?
Mom, tell me you’re kidding.”

“I tell you I’m
not
kidding. Yes, overnight. More than one night.”

“How long?”

“Don’t know. However long it takes to reach a verdict. Maybe a week. Or, I don’t know.”

“A week? Why? You go out, you come back in, you say ‘Guilty.’ You say, ‘Fry the sucker.’ How long can that take?”

“I don’t know.”

“Six seconds?”

“Maybe. Or maybe a week.”

“A
week
with Mrs. Kolodny? Momba, why are you doing this to me?”

Annie shrugs.

The road forks and she takes Seminary Lane up the hill away from the lake. A pair of big three-story Queen Anne elephants
to the right, with a view to the water. On the left are homelier cottages. She slows and turns at their own small bungalow.
She tells Oliver, “OK, you got two minutes to change your clothes, then I’m taking you to work with me.”

“Mom!” Panicky whine. “I’m supposed to meet Jesse at the churchyard—”

“Can’t help you. I promised Mr. Slivey. Got to post some orders, that’s all. Only an hour or so—”

“Mom, in an hour it’ll be
dark.
Jeez, I trashed the whole freakin afternoon at Mrs. Kolodny’s and now you tell me—”

“Two minutes, you miserable little snot. Hustle.”

T
HE TEACHER
waits in the red Lotus S4. He’s got Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in A Minor coming over the Magnus. He’s parked on a side street,
which runs into Seminary Lane two hundred yards ahead of him. His car sits under a linden tree, under a razor-blue sky. He
has the speaker turned up on the cellular phone, and his friend at DMV is telling him:

“License JXA-385 is registered to an Annie Laird. Address: 48 Seminary Lane, Pharaoh, New York. Anything else?”

The Teacher speaks above the violins. “This woman has a son. He’s twelve years old, I presume he’s in elementary school or
middle school somewhere around here. Could you find out something about him?”

“I can try.”

“Don’t push, don’t force it. Drop it if you can’t finesse it.”

Skirl of wind. Leaf-shadow trembling on the red hood before him. A girl sails past on her bike. Liquid-limbed, maybe sixteen.
Her near haunch is piston-straight as she coasts past. She seems to admire his red car. Am I too conspicuous, he wonders,
in such a vivid red Lotus on such a plain street? Am I taking unnecessary risks?

I am, yes.

He whistles along with the flute.

The cellular phone buzzes, and he touches the panel.

“Yes.”

Eddie’s voice: “Vincent. She’s coming out of her house now.”

“With her child?”

“Yeah. With.”

“They don’t see you?”

“No. I’m parked way down. OK, they’re getting in her car.”

“Careful. I think she sounded somewhat frightened in court today. She might be looking for a tail. If she comes your way—”

“She’s not gonna. She’s going up
your
way, Vincent—and she’s in a fuckin hurry.”

“
Up
the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Get on her, Eddie.”

“Yeah.”

“But give her plenty of room. If you lose her, that’s no tragedy, we’ll pick her up some other time—but
don’t let her spot you.
”

Then the Teacher waits.

A moment later, he sees Annie Laird’s car blur by, on Seminary Lane. Only one glimpse of her. Her worn-at-the-edges loveliness.

Next, Eddie’s car passes by.

The Teacher pulls out, but he doesn’t follow them. He drives the other way, back down the hill. To his right a few houses,
then a long stand of woods, and then he comes to her rusted mailbox. He eases up, his eyes prowling.

Across the road is another stand of trees, sloping down toward some big houses and the lake. Must be a stunning view in the
pitch of winter, with the trees bare, but for now there’s still some feeling of seclusion. On Annie’s side of the street the
next bungalow is a hundred yards down, and there’s a prim wood fence in between.

He pulls into her drive. Takes his car all the way to the back, to the space between the bungalow and the old wood barn behind
it.

Quiet back here.

He attaches the phone to his belt. Takes his Heckler & Koch P7 from the glove compartment and slips it into the shoulder holster
under his jacket. He reaches under the seat and draws out his doctor’s bag.

As he walks up to the bungalow a male mockingbird opens up in the big Indian bean tree above him.
Mimus polyglottos
, the Teacher’s favorite.

Two cracked-concrete steps up to the back porch. The screen door whimpers as he opens it. Wasps’ nests over the lintel—that
clay-pot smell of old wasps’ nests. Then the clutter of the porch. An old sofa, eruptions of stuffing. Carcass of a freezer,
tires, lacrosse stick and lacrosse mask. Two bikes in fair condition. One with the masculine crossbar, the other without.
Therefore they take bike rides together, mother and child. OK. Maybe we’ll ride with them someday.

It takes him less than half a minute to pick the lock with his lock-gun.

He steps into the big airy kitchen. Sets his bag on the enamel-top kitchen table and withdraws from it a Mustek page scanner
and a Toshiba notebook computer.

He scans into memory the list of numbers by the telephone. He rummages in the tall desk and finds some letters, some bills,
invitations to gallery openings. These he also scans.

But he simply purloins the loose, scattered pages of an old telephone bill. She’ll never miss them.

He uses his Phillips to remove the cover on the wall phone. Behind the printed circuit board he sets a small black device
with two pairs of wires coming out of it: an “infinity bug.” For monitoring both the phone
and
the kitchen. One pair of wires is already hooked to the supersensitive Lartel microphone. Using wire nuts, he parallel-connects
the other pair to the telephone wires.

While he’s working, Eddie calls him on the cellular.

“She stopped up at the top of the hill, Vincent. Couple of miles from you. Big old building, got a sign out front says ‘Devotional
Services, Inc.’ Parking lot’s empty. I guess everybody’s gone home by now. She went in with the kid. Used a key.”

“Where are you?”

“Up the road from her. Turned around. I’m ready.”

“What do you suppose she’s doing?”

Says Eddie, “I dunno. Must be some kind of church. Maybe she’s praying. Maybe she’s some kind a religious freak. You know?”

The Teacher grins. “She’s at work, Eddie.”

“Yeah, right. Working for some guru who dicks her every Tuesday afternoon. Vincent, you ought to let this one go. You can’t
read fuckin religious bozos. They get weird on you, they don’t think straight—”

Then I’ll tame her
, the Teacher thinks,
with the simplicity of the Nameless.

Says Eddie, “I’m telling you, she’s bad news, I smell trouble.”

“Eddie, I think what you’re smelling is your own fear.”

The Teacher disconnects.

In the homey, sloppy TV room, he shoves aside a pile of old newspapers and
Art in Americas
and finds a wall socket. He unscrews the cover and installs a Hastings 3600 mike linked to a parasitic transmitter.

He notices a photograph on the wall. Some hound-eyed guy looking soulfully toward the camera. Behind him is a thatch cottage
and goats and a cornfield. He’s wearing a shirt with a Guatemalan ikat design.

Her brother? Her lover?

The Teacher recalls that Annie carried a Guatemalan handbag into court with her.

He soaks up the photograph with the scanner.

Then he takes his bag and goes upstairs, to the bungalow’s broad-shouldered garret, to where Annie and her child have their
bedrooms.

A
NNIE
has a mantra for times like these:

If I’m a data processor now, a data processor and nothing but a data processor, I can be an artist two hours from now.

She thinks it again. She shuts her eyes. She concentrates.

If I’m a pure and immaculate
vessel
for data processing…

She laces her fingers together and stretches them. Then she opens her eyes and goes to work.

She becomes a fiend, a speed-trance demon, and she enters one order in one minute thirty-seven seconds, and the next in fifty-six
seconds.

Mostly the orders are for
Knockin’ the Devil WAYYYY Back!
—the new dual-cassette album featuring the hyperenthused Reverend Calvin Ming.

Other orders ask for the Rev.’s golden oldies:

You Need a POWER-Scrub for Those Sins!

Say Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! YES! To Jesus!

One scoop of the wrist to slice the envelope open, a quick jerk to slip the order out. Some of the handwriting is atrocious,
and only by reading the addresses with her gut and not letting her brain get involved can she decipher them. Her fingers skim
over the keys like a horde of gnats.

Eighteen more orders and I’m gone, I’m the wind blowing out of here.

She doesn’t pause to consider how much she loathes this job. Knowing that if she stopped to reflect on that for even an instant,
she’d be obliged to get up and pace around and fume and pound the desk and shriek
Say No! No! No! No! NO! To This Shitwork!
And scare the hell out of Oliver, who’s sitting peacefully in the corner pondering his math homework.

And what good would it do? She’s never going to get out of here. She needs the flexibility of this job. Slivey may be an asshole,
but he lets her set her own hours, and because she’s come to know the business better than he does himself, he grudgingly
tolerates her many zone-out screw-ups.

So she types, she rides those keys, she gathers momentum. When bored Oliver asks her an odd kid question, she furnishes her
odd adult reply without any thought at all. Without slowing a beat. When Oliver gets up and starts playing some game that
involves taking three one-footed hops then turning and launching a wadded-up sheet of notebook paper at the benign image of
our most Reverend Calvin Ming, she only murmurs, “Oliver. Sit. Math.”

She loses no time, and soon she has only four orders left.

Then the phone rings.

“Damn.”

Slivey.

He starts, “I left you a stack—”

“I’m doing them now, Mr. Slivey. I’ll leave them on your desk.”

“All right. And what time will you be rolling in tomorrow?”

“I won’t be rolling in at all. You know that. I’ve got jury duty.”

“Oh, you’re kidding. I thought I told you to get out of that.”

“You did. But I didn’t. It’s my civic responsibility, Mr. Slivey.”

“Your ci-vic re-spons-ibili-ty?” He sniffs. Big disdainful snort of air. “Uh-huh. And have you forgotten your responsibility
to the Lord?”

“I never forget the Lord, Mr. Slivey.”
He pays my wages.

“Who’s going to get out the orders? Who’s going to figure out your filing system—”

“Corinna can—”

“Corinna? Corinna’s a fucking idiot.”

“Mr.
Slivey
.”

“Claim hardship. I mean it. Tell the judge about the Lord’s work here. Tell—”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Annie—”

“Praise the Lord, Mr. Slivey.”

She hangs up on him.

She blazes into those last orders.

And when at last she has keyed in and printed out, she carries the whole mess over to Corinna’s desk and dumps it there.

I’m free. Sort of. For a little while.

She steps over quietly to where Oliver is sitting and writing intently. She looks over his shoulder. First-Shield Auxbar and
his faithful lizard-steed Rog are racing through the Tunnel of the Accursed.

Oliver looks up at her. Blinks. “What?”

“Math.”

“This is, this is for English. English homework.”

“Yeah, a likely story. Let’s go.”

“So soon, Mom? You sure you don’t want to stay longer? I mean this place is such a Blast-O-Rama….”

T
HE TEACHER
opens the door to Annie’s barn-studio. As he feels for the light switch he gets a whiff of her materials. Varnish, putty,
char, clay, moss. Fur, wax, turpentine, ink, cedar: he picks out the scents one by one. Breathing, quietly, in the dark. Then
at last he finds the light.

The place is bedlam. Works-in-progress everywhere. Tools running wild.

His gaze roams randomly till he sees the sculptures on the far wall.

They don’t look much like sculptures. They’re simply a row of crates, like orange crates perhaps, except that the spaces between
the slats have been sealed, and the wood has been stained and lacquered all over. And beneath each crate is a brief coquettish
skirt.

As the Teacher approaches, he sees that above one of the crates, taped to the wall, is a newspaper headline:

He puts his hand under the skirt of this crate. He reaches up into the darkness until his fingers encounter something heavy
and globular and furry. As big as a grapefruit, hanging there in the dark. He feels along the fur and comes to another great
globe, in the same sac as the first.

Two huge hairy testicles.

God’s balls?

He laughs out loud. He squeezes one of them. Our juror, he thinks, has a sense of humor.