Grisham's Juror

by Timothy Braatz

  We passed the quiet business parks and half-lit high-rises of downtown Irvine, and space seemed to open up around the freeway—fewer lights, less congestion. I felt lighter too. We were back in south county.

  -Can I talk yet?

  -No. Just listen. We’re gonna dump the gun in the harbor.

  More psychotic giggling from the passenger seat.

  -You got a problem with that, Pete?

  -No, that’s great. Great idea. What if it doesn’t sink?

  -Yeah, right. Like The Bagel didn’t sink.

  Pete had assured me, when we launched his doomed picnic table, that the harbor water was so polluted we could float a car across it. When did we graduate from harmless pranks to inexcusable crime?

  -I think I might have been wrong.

  -No kidding.

  -He wouldn’t be selling drugs out of his house. It’s too risky. In that business, you can’t let anyone find out where you live.

  -Like you would know. Like you would know anything about anything.

  -No, I saw it on tv. You make your transactions on the street.

  -Remind me never to listen to you again. Ever.

  When we finally reached Dana Point, the evening fog was hanging thick. That boded well. I drove across the bridge to the harbor island and found a quiet place to park—no one around except a young couple holding hands. I told Pete to bring the gun and follow me. When he started to say something, I shushed him. I was taking charge, keeping him on a short leash, this was no time for his antics. We followed a sidewalk—steady but nonchalant—until we escaped the streetlights, then picked our way across a rocky embankment, slippery with dew, to the water’s edge. Dark, foggy, secluded—the perfect spot for our rotten work. I kept my voice low.

  -Throw it far.

  -Why are we doing this again?

  -Because you stole it. And you held it to someone’s head. And threatened to kill him. That’s like three felonies right there.

  Pete lifted his t-shirt and pulled the pistol from his waistband.

  -Here, you do it.

  He held it out for me to take.

  -Why?

  -My shoulder.

  I hesitated. I’d never held a real gun. But someone had to chuck it.

  -Okay, give it to me.

  It was surprisingly small. And light. Too light.

  -What is this? Is this real?

  Pete leaned against a large rock.

  -Dude, I…dude.

  He tried to say more, but couldn’t. He was shaking with laughter. He was holding his stomach. I was holding a toy.

  -Are you fuckin’ kidding me?

  Aren’t toy guns supposed to be bright orange? I pulled the trigger and it went snap. A cap gun.

  -This is what you pulled on Bud Jack? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?

  My voice was getting louder. I was losing all composure. I didn’t care. The third time was a roar.

  -ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING ME?

  Equal parts fury, amazement, and relief.

  -I…I tried….

  Snap, snap—I shot him twice. Strange how it felt satisfying—pointing a pistol, squeezing the trigger. He affected a moan and slid off the rock, clutching his chest. I wiped the gun with my shirt, like I’d seen in the movies, and threw it out over the dark harbor—the gun, not my shirt. It didn’t go far and landed with barely a splash. It wasn’t going to sink. Then I climbed back up the embankment, leaving Pete to die.

  -Dude.

  My first impulse was to get in the car and drive away, let him find his own way home, but I needed to think, needed to reconsider what had happened in Mrs. Wilkes’s front yard, so I just kept walking through the warm, foggy night, past my parking spot, toward the south end of the island.

  One thought stopped me in my tracks: Pete had come to my rescue with a cap gun! Spaghetti Repetti had held a plastic toy to what he thought was a drug dealer’s head. Unfuckingbelievable! Maybe Pete was right, he should head for Vegas—talk about going all in.

  Then I was walking again, almost blindly, through the fog. I found myself counting steps—one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four—and every step seemed to bring another question. Was Bud Jack actually a drug dealer? Did he kill Juan Castro? What was he doing on the streets of Huntington Beach that night? Had Grandma Wilkes perjured on his behalf? And why did the Wilhites care about his trial? Was Public Defense a charity or a conspiracy? What conclusion do I draw? WWJD?—What Would John Do? Hand it off to the Grisham writing stable, no doubt, let them work out the details.

  One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. I was still amped up, still had adrenaline to burn. I crossed the street and passed the rows of yachts asleep in their slips. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. And suddenly, like the timeline revelation, it came to me: it didn’t matter if Bud Jack was guilty or not, I was innocent. There was no felony in the front yard, the gun was fake. And I had acted in good faith, I hadn’t been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, I had to vote not guilty. If a killer went free in Long Beach—not my fault, not my responsibility.

  And with that, a calmness came over me. For a moment I pictured the toy gun ending up in some foamy harbor backwater, floating in a tangle of plastic bags, dead fish, and seaweed. Then I stopped thinking about it altogether. My pace slowed until I felt weightless, like I was floating in still water, neither hot nor cold, only soft—maybe a sensation that goes back to the womb. A foghorn moaned and sea lions barked in reply. I heard the splash and hum of an invisible boat crossing the ghostly harbor. When I ran out of sidewalk, I sat on a damp bench facing west, toward the harbor mouth and out to sea. I think. The harbor channel reaches across to a breakwater, where pelicans often line up by the hundreds, but I couldn’t see it. Through the gray-black fog, I could only pick out a green light marking what I guessed was the end of the jetty. My mind felt exhausted. Not sleepy, just spent.

  I heard a cough and the scuffle of feet. A figure was emerging from the shadowy soup and gradually finding form. Three feet short of the bench, he pulled up. It wasn’t Pete, unless Pete had recently acquired baggage—a sleeping roll, a large plastic trash bag—and grown a bushy beard. The man stood there, perplexed. He hadn’t expected to see me. Was I sitting on his bed? Then the foghorn sounded again, drawing his attention seaward.

  My instinct is to avoid homeless people, don’t want to invite an awkward situation, like he might ask for money and not take no for an answer. But I wanted to greet him, acknowledge his presence, the guy was probably pretty lonely, if only I could think of what to say. Again, the small talk problem. He spoke first.

  -We beat on against the current.

  Something like that. His mumble was hard to make out, and he said it turning away.

  -Sorry?

  He didn’t answer.

  -Wait. You want the bench?

  More mumbling, and he faded back into the thick night.

  I sat for a while longer—just sat. Lacking vision, my other senses sharpened. I felt the moisture on my arm hair and heard water lapping on rocks. I smelled the guano stench left by pelicans. I became aware of the slow rise and fall of my breathing. Was it my imagination, or was the green light brightening?

  It wasn’t my imagination, because then the breakwater appeared. And then I spied a signal buoy floating farther out in open water. The fogbank was lifting, like a curtain pulling back to reveal a window on the world. My world. On a suddenly clear night. A few miles up the coast, the hillside lights of Laguna winked at me. Beyond that, I could see the vague glow of Newport and Huntington, and way in the distance the faintest luminary hint of Long Beach. Were we really there tonight? It already seemed so long ago. Some experiences are so foreign there’s nothing to hold onto. Yet that moment on the bench—I can still recall how I felt. With a little concentration I can, even now, conjure up the sensation, the softness—quiet, serene, nothing to think about, nothing to do, like I could have sat there forever. Then as quickly as it opened, the curtain closed, fog re-enveloped the harbor, th
e breakwater vanished. Only the green light remained.

  THE PLAYS OF TIMOTHY BRAATZ

  In The Devil and the Wedding Dress (1994), God’s “prosecuting attorney” speaks in rhyme, appears in different guises, and places a curse on four scheming businessmen. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in reverse—rather than the proverbial birthday suit, the accursed quartet unknowingly sport wedding dresses. And it’s Job updated—the lead character loses wife, job, and home, and struggles to reconcile the essential Judeo-Christian contradiction: an all-powerful Creator allowing human misery. Rather than add to the misery, we’ll only say that Gabriella’s Garden (1996) is about a prisoner trying to write himself out of a Latin American dungeon, and move quickly northward to the more delightful mayhem of Helena Handbasket (1999), which includes two Spanish conquistadores captured in Yucatán, a timeless Mayan priest, a clueless American grad student, and two policemen employing good cop/bad cop, also smart cop/dumb cop and tall cop/short cop, to interrogate an anthropology professor suspected of blowing up a corporate executive who was angling to exploit a Mayan community. But it’s really about a televised cooking show and the commodification of everything. This sprawling adventure wants to get in your face, or at least your kitchen—the cooking show host lobs a raw egg at the audience—while the almost stream-of-consciousness New and Nobler Life (2000) tries to sneak up on you. The characters are avoiding, denying, and forgetting something unpleasant—they just talk and talk, even when their heads are mounted on a wall like hunting trophies. When the truth finally emerges—a mass grave, a genocide—they swear never again, then take their bloody revenge. Commodification and revenge are also themes in One Was Assaulted (2001). While no eggs are thrown, the audience members, addressed as investors in a dot-com corporation, are complicit in the commodification of storytelling. In the story they are told—and are invested in—a poor black woman shows up on the doorstep of a comfortable white couple who unknowingly own stock in the corporation that recently downsized her. She won’t be denied, the homeowners are well-meaning but have their limits, and the ghost of Harry Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, wanders in to defend the use of atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. His surprise visit is only strange at first, and one sees a writer’s worldview emerging: skeptical of the usual stuff—war-making politicians, corporate greed—but with middle-class citizens as both victims of modern structural violence and also enthusiastic participants. In Guns, Lies, and Lullabies (2002), a veteran of the US invasion of Grenada hides the shame of that crime behind a fantasy of battlefield heroism, and the deceit tears his family apart. In Paper Cuts (2003), it’s a talented, young college graduate who escapes into his imagination, who would rather play the victim than face the twin disappointments of a failing romantic relationship and unfulfilling career options. But what an imagination it is: the police surround his apartment, business envelopes are made from human skin, there’s a mole in central intelligence, and, none too soon, the actors step out of character and shoot the playwright. It all adds up to five levels of reality—or is it six?—including a film and a radio broadcast. In this milieu, the crude propaganda of Soviet commissars is unnecessary; we now have “commistars”—celebrity newscasters who show us the world as seen from the top. The centerpiece of The Commistar (2004) is a superstar ex-quarterback’s rise to the news anchor desk, and subsequent fall to the drunk tank. He’ll be rehabilitated, of course, but not before having to brush shoulders with the unwashed masses, some of whom happen to resent what he stands for, and he narrowly escapes a serious beating in the jail cell. Indeed, he’s saved by a jailed antiwar protestor who courageously intervenes to neutralize the conflict. Such courage always raises the question, How far would you go, how much would you risk, for what you believe in? The frustrated sculptor in Paper Dolls (2005) wants to raise awareness of the criminal injustice system, which is just fine with his girlfriend, until his artwork takes over her living room and he starts talking about sculptures that will explode in public spaces. He is inspired by the historical example of John Brown, an activist who would go as far as necessary and who would risk everything, but in the end the sculptor must choose between radical art and domestic tranquility. John Brown’s story gets more attention in When Saints Go Marching In (2007), particularly his historic but unknown meeting with Harriet Tubman. She agrees to lead his raid on the South, but illness keeps her from participating in the doomed adventure. Brown is hanged at the end of Act One; Tubman takes over Act Two. She serves as a Union Army nurse, spy, and expedition leader, and the Emancipation Proclamation proves old John Brown was right all along. Soldiers and actors, farmers and hunters, and an ambitious theater director all come together in Cossacks Under Water (2009). The director wants to help a flooded Iowa town, so, naturally, she stages Tolstoy’s short story, “The Cossacks,” on a nearby farm and recruits locals to join her New York ensemble. Tolstoy’s story is faithfully told, albeit with comic interruptions—local resentment, a wannabe Shakespearean, more rain—and the now familiar multiple levels of reality: a play about the making of a film about the staging of a play based on a classic short story, because it’s not enough just to exist anymore, self-promotion is everything.

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