The Juror (44 page)

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.

The Teacher wraps his fingers around the snub-nose revolver. He pulls it from its holster. He tries to lift it to level.

But then this church fills up with gunfire.

All this dim draggle-tail barnyard rabble making nonsense out of everything I’ve been trying to teach them. The owl, shooting
at him. The pig, in deepening shadow, shooting at him. The churlish Zeke of a besotted farmer, shooting at him. The monkey,
class clown, cutup, shooting at him. Annie, even his Annie, even his stubborn groping grim earthly bride, shooting at him.
Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie, daughter of chaos, killing him.

A
NNIE
waits in the darkness. She has her eyes shut, because these ruins were suddenly much too bright for her, that blossoming
of blood dazzled her.

She’s waiting for the echo of the shots to fade.

Someone takes the gun from her. She lets them draw it from her fingers like a glove.

In the dark silence, the valley begins to speak up.

Some of the marimbas have quit, but there’s one still going, still cranking out a wild honky-tonk Chopsticks. Above her, half
a bird-call. Then to the left, a horse sneezing. Dogs barking. No rhyme or reason, no judgment or law or ordering to any of
this, just odd fragments of sound, coming to her ears. She reaches. Touches Oliver. Reels him into her. Some shout from the
valley and an answering shout from a voice near her. Not Spanish, but that guttural, hive-of-bees local language. Her lips
against her child’s hair. I
will
open my eyes soon, but first I want to remember how beautiful it was to see that man in shards, to see the whole ex-church
stained with his leaping blood, and first I want to listen to the howling dogs of T’ui Cuch. I want to run my fingers along
my child’s eyelashes and down his temples beside his ears down to his jawline and dipping under it, slipping my fingers along
the faint fuzz of Oliver’s neck, lightly, so lightly that it tickles, so that he laughs. So that I can hear him laugh, and
then right after that hear some more of that disorder of the T’ui Cuch dogs and the T’ui Cuch music, that pure ungovernable
ruckus. More of those dogs. More of everything, before I open my eyes. More of this silent weighted sunlight, blood-red on
my eyelids. More of the smell of his hair. More of that hive-of-bees shouting. More of that sneezing horse. A moment or two
more.

Discussion Questions

 1. When Annie Laird agrees to become a juror, it is a decision that irrevocably changes the course of her life. Does she consider
its ramifications before she makes it? What other kinds of seemingly routine decisions commonly shape the direction of a person’s
life? What might the consequences be if those decisions are impulsive?

 2. Annie is attracted to the villain when she first sees him on the street as “some beautiful city guy with gothic cheekbones”
(p. 31). How long does this attraction last? Do you think the author is commenting on the nature of evil? Can evil be seductive?

 3. What do you think of Annie’s art, particularly her “grope boxes”? Why do you think her art appeals to the villain?

 4. Why is the villain called The Teacher?

 5. Annie Laird asks Eddie about The Teacher’s motivation for his involvement in the Buffano case, for scaring her, and perhaps
for his twisted behavior. She asks, “Why is he doing this?” (p. 198). Why do you think he is?

 6. Discuss the way Annie’s behavior changes as a result of the threats against those she loves. How do you think you’d react?

 7. What do you think of Annie’s friend Juliet? Do you think her name was chosen for a reason?

 8. One by one the major characters in the book are killed off. Did the death of any of these characters surprise you? Which
one(s)? Why?

 9. Why do you think boys like Annie’s son, Oliver, are attracted to video games, particularly violent ones? Is there anything
symbolic about Annie playing the video game with Oliver very early in the book and the life-and-death decisions she is forced
to make later in the novel?

10. The page that opens the first section of the book includes the words “varnish, putty, char, clay, moss, fur, wax, turpentine,
ink, cedar.” What do the words refer to? What is the purpose of the heading or excerpt that accompanies each section of the
book?

11. Is this book simply an entertaining thriller or are there layers that go deeper than the suspenseful story? If so, what
are they?

12. What is the difference, if any, between the criminals in the story? Are some better than others? Did you like Eddie? Why
or why not?

13. Do you think the novel takes a “dark” or “negative” position on romantic love? What happens to each of the couples in
the book? What does this say about the various forms of love and attraction?

14. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. When Annie and her
son are writing notes to each other to evade the listening devices, Oliver writes, “Mom we got to fight him.” Annie writes
back, “If we fight him, he’ll kill me.” Who do you think is right?

15. Discuss the final section of the book that begins with “a wild honky-tonk Chopsticks.” Is the ending satisfying? Is it
what you expected?

A Q & A with George Dawes Green

Q. What sparked the writing of this novel? Did a real-life incident or situation inspire you?

A. Thomas de Quincey’s thunderous essay “The English Mail Coach” tells of an approaching accident that the narrator is powerless
to avert. I wanted to re-create that atmosphere. So I dreamed up a terrifying car ride during which a protaganist realizes
that the destination is the murder of her own child. I filed that away in my head and years later, when I came across a small
news item about a juror who had perhaps been threatened by some mobster, I knew that was the story to wrap around this core
terror.