The Juror (6 page)

Sparks flash from Annie’s eyes. “
My
job? Oh great, it’s nice to know I’m still involved. Hey, listen to me, Mr. Lyde—”

“Call me Zach.”

“Listen—”

“And may I call you Annie?”

“You can call me whatever the hell you want. But I don’t want to have anything to do with these, these—”

“Sleazy patrons? Does the notion of that offend you? ‘Sorry, Duke,’ says Raphael, ‘but you’re corrupt and sleazy and you boil
your enemies in oil, so I don’t want your help—I’ll just slip quietly into obscurity—’”

“What I’m saying—”

He stops her. “Annie, what do you think I get out of this? Money? I don’t make money on this. I don’t need to. What I do for
a living, I do well.”

The waiter appears. Glides soundlessly onto the terrace, but Zach Lyde raises his hand slightly, and without taking his eyes
off Annie he says, “David, not now? Please?”

The waiter retreats.

Zach Lyde leans in even closer to her. “I do this so an artist like you can go into your studio and make your boxes and not
worry about whether or not your kid gets fed. OK? So your thoughts can be as chaotic as you need them to be. And your life
won’t have to suffer. So all those idiots in the art world, those gnats, they won’t bother you. So you can
work.
”

Abruptly he looks away from her. Blows out a breath of air. Shakes his head. “But look, it’s your career. Keep your boxes.
Keep your check too, consider it a grant… my compliments. I wish you luck.”

He turns, looks for the waiter.

“Mr. Lyde?” she says quietly.

“Zach.”

“Zach. You know, you know you
are
very persuasive.” She tries to smile. “It’s just that this is… this is. Oh God.
Sudden.
It’ll take some getting used to, I guess. That’s all. That’s all I meant. I guess.” She looks down at her smoked-salmon summer
rolls. She laughs. “Did I tell you how delicious this was? Though I, I’m not sure I can eat any more.”

“That’s OK. Anyway, you have to go. You have that jury duty, right?”

“Oh yeah. Right. Forgot. Real life.” She shakes her head. “I wish I didn’t have to go, though. I feel like, there’s really
a lot we could talk about, I mean I’m sorry, I wish I didn’t—”

“Be other opportunities.”

“Yes.”

“For example dinner.”

“What?”

“Will you have dinner with me tonight, Annie?”

O
LIVER
coasts on his bike. With his chin in the air he looks straight up into the great sugar maples along Church Street, the shuddering
leaf-caverns, until his mother, riding behind him, cries sharply, “
Ol
iver!” Then he drops his eyes, and in truth the bike
had
been sort of straying off to one side of the street….

Side by side they coast down toward the lake. To the corner with the old stone library, where Church Street meets Old Willow
Avenue.

Oliver slows not with the hand brake but by wobbling the wheels.

They wait for a few cars to go by on Old Willow. Then they cross the road and bounce over hummocky yellow grass to the bike
trail that runs alongside the lake.

He calls back to his mom, “So will I get a new bike?”

“Oliver,” she says.

“No, I mean a new Mongoose, Mom, why not?”

“I’m serious. Shut up.”

“Who’s listening to us, Momba?”

“I don’t care. You do not say one word.”

They pass the bronze statue of Hannah Stoneleigh, the Revolutionary War heroine of Pharaoh, clinging to her bronze horse and
shouting a bronze shout.

Says Oliver, “How about a PowerBook?”

“What?”

“A PowerBook. It’s a computer with a built-in Trac-ball.”

“I know what it is.”

“Will I get one?”

“No. And if you breathe a word of this to anyone—you hear me?—you’ll get a Trac-ball built in to your little throat.”

“Momba.”

“What?”

“That wasn’t funny.”

“Wasn’t supposed to be.”

“It was kind of stupid.”

“Good.”

“Ha ha ha!” he mocks. “A Trac-ball built in to my little throat! Ho! Ha ha!”

He rises up and pushes down on the pedals. The lake breeze whips up around him. “Ha ha
ha
!” he shouts as he speeds away from her. Think of Momba famous. We’ll buy the Dills’ house up on Horsepound Ridge, and Mom’s
friend Juliet can come over to use the pool.

He calls back, “
Move
it, Mom!”

Soon they’re cruising together up Seminary Lane. They pass Shawn Cardi, who gives them a nod and a quick cool fartlike honk
from his bike’s electronic horn. Makes Oliver feel a little sheepish to be seen hanging around with his mother. However Shawn
Cardi has his own problems. He’s a buzzbrain, for one thing. And
his
mother is the funeral director in town. So Oliver returns his nod sort of curtly and leans way back on his bike like he’s
riding a Harley, and he thinks pretty soon it
will
be a Harley he’s riding. I mean we could buy a lot of land, right? And I wouldn’t need a driver’s license on my own property,
would I?

Theoretically, he thinks, I could be riding a Harley tomorrow.

And once I get good at it, by say sometime next week, I can start letting Juliet ride behind me.

Home stretch now. Past the snippety lawn of Mr. and Mrs. Zoeller and their lawn troll (all three of whom Oliver despises).
Then their own wild yard. He banks to the right, arcing into the driveway just ahead of Mom. Rides around to the back, by
the Indian bean tree, and jumps off. He walks the bike to the back stoop, and he’s about to reach up to open the screen door
when he sees the skull.

“Holy shit,” he says. “What is
that
?”

Stupid question, though—it’s plain what it is. It’s a human skull, hanging in front of the screen door.

Mom comes up behind him. She gasps.

A tag, like a laboratory ID tag, hangs from the skull. It reads OLIVER LAIRD.

Then Oliver feels something drilling against his temple and into his ear and slashing down his neck, and he wheels. Another
burst of water hits him between the eyes. His assassin is up in the Indian bean tree. Juliet.

“You’re dead.”

She’s peering around the trunk, with a Super Soaker submachine gun held against her shoulder. Green-eyed, red-haired Juliet,
Mom’s best friend. Squinting down the sights.

“Down, you’re dead.”

“Not fair!” Oliver cries.

“Fair? Death is not fair.”

“I’m not armed!” He opens his mouth to raise further objection but she blasts it.

“It’s time to die, Oliver.”

He shrugs, and lets his bike fall, and drops to his knees, and slowly pitches forward. Winds up in a sort of kowtow. Looking
up at her sideways. She jumps out of the tree. She’s 6’2”. She has sort of a boyish body but with a few soft confusing female
turns. When she’s gossiping with Oliver’s mom, or when she’s horsing around with Oliver, she slouches a little, she relaxes.
But he’s seen her flirting with men at a restaurant and once at a barbecue, and once in a parking lot with another resident
at her hospital, and on those occasions she rose up to her full height and even leaned back a little, and swayed slightly
as she talked, swayed like a snake, and Oliver wishes she would stand this way around
him
once in a while.

From his dead-man’s kowtow he asks her, “Whose skull is that?”

Juliet gives his mother a hug, but she keeps her rifle pointed at Oliver. “Yours, loser. Can’t read your own name?” Then she
asks Oliver’s Mom: “So what’s this earthshaking news?”

Says Oliver, “Hey, is it
real
? Where’d you get it?” He jumps up and unhooks it from the screen.

“Neurosurgery resident gave it to me.”

“A boyfriend?”

“None of your business. He
wants
to be my boyfriend. And the skull wasn’t a bad idea. Better than flowers anyway.”

“So do you like him?”

“You’re an incredibly nosy creep.”

“Yeah. I am.” He works the hinge of the skull’s jaw and makes the sound of a creaking door. “Yah—ah—ahh. So do you like him
or not?”

“How can I like him? He’s a neurosurgery resident. Do you know how incredibly boring neurosurgery residents are?”

“Uh-uh.”

“If you have two hours to live, spend it with a neurosurgery resident, it’ll seem like two years. You can keep the skull,
if you promise not to take it to school or anything. I don’t think it’s legal to own them.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

Juliet steps around to the corner of the house and fetches her bike from where she’s hidden it. She says, “Yeah, well, I thought
your warped little brain would enjoy that.” Again she asks Mom, “So what’s this news?”

Oliver jumps in. “She got three red spots.”

Juliet doesn’t get it.

“That’s it, that’s true,” says Mom. “Three red spots.”

“And she’s got more coming,” says Oliver.

Juliet, palms upward: “You have measles?”

Both Oliver and Mom grinning. The skull also enjoying this. Then Mom makes her announcement. “I sold three pieces.”

Juliet’s jaw drops. “
Annie
.”

“To a very influential collector. Who has visions of…” She waggles her fingers. She can’t find the word. “God,
superstardom
for me.”

Juliet, her mouth wide open, lets fly a shriek. “
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
”

“Ssshhhh!” says Mom.

“
Annie!
”

Mom’s got one hand on her hip, and she sashays that hip. “Twelve thousand dollars
in my pocket
.”

“ANNIE!”

Juliet jumps up and down in place. Hops close to Mom and grabs her cheeks in her big hands and smushes them together so Mom’s
lips push out like a fish.

“ANNIE! THAT IS SO… FUCKING… UNBELIEVABLY….”

“Shh!” says Mom.

Mom puts both her hands up for a high-ten slap. Juliet pounds at them with her fists. So excited she doesn’t know what she’s
doing. Mom, laughing, grabs her wrists to restrain her, but Juliet pulls her arms free and then scoops Mom into an embrace. Pummels
her back. So much taller than Mom, she’s draped over her, banging away at her back and then quitting that and squeezing her.
She winks at Oliver and stretches out her long long arm like a tentacle, and takes his neck and starts strangling him, forgetting
that she’s already killed him today.

T
HE TEACHER
sits half-lotus in his old one-room schoolhouse. He fixes on the representation of
salagramas
that he’s painted on the shining wood floor.

The pyramid of red disks.

He draws a breath.
Puraka
.

His breath runs down the spiral corridor of his spine, down along the road that Black Elk called the red road, down to the
dark pond and the spreading white cypress tree.

Rechaka
. The breath is released.

He draws another breath.
Puraka
.

One of the red disks begins to float in front of him. A crimson globe, as light and small as a thistle, and inside of this
globe is his father. His father is drunk. He’s sprawled on the rug in what they called the “wreck-room,” in the basement of
the house in Bay Ridge. He’s singing the “Cinta di Fiori” by Bellini. In his lyric baritone, with white spittle at the corners
of his lips.

The Teacher breathes out.
Rechaka
. The globe wobbles, floats off.

Another globe comes floating by. He looks in.

He sees himself in the kitchen of that Bay Ridge house. Havoc of heaped plates, moldy food. He spreads mustard on a slice
of Sunbeam Round Bread. In the fridge he finds some old salami. He tears away the edge that’s going bad—the warped rind. When
he turns, he notices that a roach has crawled onto the bread and is hip-deep in mustard. He moves his hand slowly till it
hovers above the roach. Then he snaps his wrist and snatches it, and holds it up between thumb and forefinger, delicately.
All its mustard-yellow insect legs running like hell, but it’s not getting anywhere.

Rechaka
. He dismisses this vision.

He breathes in. Another globe floats up.

His mother, shrieking at the bathroom door, kicking it. The door flies open. His father is taking a shit, and he’s got an
open volume of Thomas Aquinas on his knee. Says his mother, “So
now
what, Princessa?” His father gets up. A teardrop-shaped turd falls from his ass as he rises, and drops onto the toilet seat.
With his pants wrapped around his ankles he steps forward. He tries to spit in her face, but he misses. He smiles at his son,
and shuts the door.

The Teacher, with his breath, arranges all three disks into a pyramid, two low and one high. He fusses with their alignment
until the geometry seems immaculate, unassailable.

Then he inhales them.

He rises.

He plays his messages. Sari. Sari again. Sari a third time.

He goes to the console and summons up channel one, Annie’s kitchen. He listens. Her visitor, the doctor woman, is still there
with her; they’re chatting away, and the Teacher’s schoolhouse is filled with their laughter. It’s good to be with them.
The Master travels all day without ever leaving his house
, says Lao Tsu.

Annie and her doctor friend are talking about Zach Lyde.

A
NNIE
’s appalled. “The shirred? No. Not the shirred.”

“Why not?” says Juliet. She’s still laughing. “That’s such a sexy number. You look so sexy—”

“Juliet, will you stop it? I don’t want to look sexy. This man is my potential patron. He is
not
a potential…”

“What?”

“Boyfriend. Whatever.”

“Oh no. No of course not, Annie. He’s only gorgeous, thoughtful, rich as Croesus. Doesn’t approach your standards. Though
it is sweet of you to consent to this mercy-date with the poor—”

“This is not a date!
Not. A. Date.
And besides you left out self-confident and funny and you didn’t say anything about his cheekbones.”

“All right! That’s the way! You’re
wearing
that shirred thing, girl. And don’t be shy with him—”