The Juror by George Dawes Green

hell’s been cutting up the newspaper?”
    She holds it up. The front page, with an oblong missing.
    “I did,” he says. Not meeting her eyes.
    “Oh
really
? It was
you
? I thought Mr. Slivey had snuck in here and done it. The missing piece, what was it about?”
    She speaks so sharply and with such venom that all he can do is gape at her.
    She says, “It was about the trial, wasn’t it? I looked through this whole newspaper, I can’t find anything about the trial.”
    “Mom, you told me to. You told me to cut out everything about the trial.”
    “Oh Jesus.” Rolling her eyes. “You don’t do
anything
I say. You never do anything I ask you to, now why the
hell
did you do this? Where is it?”
    He hesitates.
    She asks again. “Where
is
it?”
    “It’s in, I tore, it’s in little pieces.”
    “Why?”
    “You told me to!”
    “I didn’t tell you to make confetti! Did I tell you to make confetti, god damn you!”
    That’s it—he’s lost his hold. He stares down at his lap, and his tears fall straight down. “Mom, you told me—”
    “What did it say?”
    “Mom, you’re not supposed to know. You’re not, you’re not sup-posed to read the newspaper, you’re not supposed to watch the
     TV, you’re—”
    “Tell me what it said!”
    “I don’t know! It said—what? There was a guy they said like a police guy, there was a, they played a
tape
—”
    “What was on the tape?”
    “But you were
there
, Mom. Why ask me?”
    “What did they say was on the tape?”
    “I don’t know. I think they said Louie Boffano told a guy he should dig, a tunnel, and, and kill him.”
    “Did they say Boffano was guilty?”
    “I don’t, I don’t know.”
    “What did they say? Did they say there was
persuasive
evidence,
compelling
evidence, what?”
    “What? I don’t understand.”
    “
Persuasive
. Do you recognize the word
persuasive
? What did they say?”
    “They said—they just said everybody got quiet.”
    “But what did they want you to
think
?” She’s holding his arms now. Squeezing them, digging in with her claws. Hurting him some, but that’s not so bad. What really
     scares him is her voice. “Do they want you to think he’s guilty?”
    “I don’t know. Mom!”
    “Who have you talked to about this?”
    “About the trial? Nobody! You asked me not to.”
    “Yeah? Well I’m not asking you not to anymore. I’m saying, You talk to somebody about this trial, and this is what I’ll do,
     I’ll take your bike and I’ll back the car over it, and I’ll take your computer and throw it out the window, and then I swear
     to God I’ll come up here and I’ll kill you. I will kill you. You listening?”
    “Yes.”
    She lets go of him. She rises. He rubs his face into the crook of his elbow and sniffs. But she gets him by a clump of his
     hair and pulls his face into the light. “What’s
this
bullshit? You think ’cause there’s no man around you can be a crybaby? This is garbage. This, no. This stops now.”

4

bounced around like a dunce with my jaw hanging open….
    A NNIE , a week later, watches Louie Boffano’s lawyer, Bozeman, with his big amiable walrus mustache and cunning yellow teeth, as
     he picks gingerly at the government’s star witness.
    Says Bozeman, “Now Mr. DeCicco, you testified on direct that Louie Boffano was having ‘a problem’ with Salvadore Riggio, is
     that correct?”
    Paulie DeCicco has an imposing hairless skull, a craggy mountain of head. This gives him an air of thoughtfulness, even sagacity—at
     least until he opens his mouth. “Huh?”
    Says Bozeman, “Didn’t you testify that Louie Boffano had become a distributor of cocaine and heroin?”
    “Yeh.”
    “And how do you know this?”
    “I was with him when he did it.”
    “You were his faithful lieutenant, right?”
    “Lieutenant? No.”
    “You weren’t—”
    “I was a
captain
.”
    “Excuse me. Captain. Now,
Captain
DeCicco, who was Louie buying the cocaine from? Could you refresh our