Hey, Joe

by Ben Neihart

  When he opened his eyes, he had an intuition of movement just outside his vision. He repositioned his face, cheek to glass, so that he had a view—however askew—of Al Theim's yard. Mr. Energy himself chased his sister across the grass; with every stride, the muscles in his back writhed beneath the skin. As he caught up to her, she turned to face him, arms flopping at her sides. He wrapped his arms around her, his front to hers, and lifted her, and then fell forward with her in a kind of tackle.

  Joe sighed to himself, put a dramatic hand to his forehead, and fell backwards on his mattress.

  Ten minutes later, Joe was knocking on her door. "Mom," he called, "what are you doing? Do you wanna watch this video with me?"

  "Come in."

  He creaked the door open and stepped just inside the room. "I didn't mean all the stuff I said. It was really selfish of me."

  "Don't even worry," she said. "We both need to let it out."

  "Yeah, I think we do."

  "So we're in agreement."

  The room was shadowy except for the outside light coming in the window beside her bed. She had a stack of work papers beside her.

  "You have that concentrating look," he said. "You're doing hospital crap?"

  "Yeah."

  "You have enough for the whole weekend?"

  "Well, I don't know. There's always enough.''

  "Sure."

  She held out her palm. "Put the movie in, honey. I'd love to watch it."

  "Is your VCR working okay?"

  "I think so."

  He walked over to the bed, sat on the edge, and bent forward to put the tape in. He pulled the remote from the top of the TV and lay back, helping himself to a handful of cashews from a jar that lay on its side in the surf of bedcovers. "Sal-ty." He laughed.

  "Sur-prise." She giggled.

  He looked over his shoulder at her. "Crank-y."

  "Not anymore," she said lightly, and smiled as if a blue jay had just landed on her shoulder.

  ' 'Cool if I click the mother on?''

  "Sure."

  The blue screen disappeared and was replaced by the first, precredits, scene. Joe, as an intoxicated teenager, lay on a stone bench in the backyard. Daddy, dressed as a priest, performed the rites of exorcism.

  Joe moved his lips along with the words his dad said on screen: "How long. Lord? Wilt thou be angry forever? Shall thy jealousy burn like fire?" His shoulders tightened in anticipation of what would happen next, and then it did: a dire shadow passed across Joe's on-screen face, and the scene ended, and the credits began. It had taken his dad almost the whole weekend to edit that scene just right.

  The entire movie lasted half an hour; in it there were two more exorcisms, several more intense passages that Joe had chosen from the book of Psalms, and a little bit of gore. There were two scenes in the backyard, two in Joe's bedroom (done up with aluminum foil and black sheets), and one scene just inside the front door. It wasn't the worst piece of shit Joe'd ever sat through, but he knew that no one but him and his mom would ever want to sit around like this, watching it from beginning to end, enraptured.

  5:15 p.m.

  Seth Michaels was heavy in the shoulders. He was tapered at the waist. He was twenty-six, with diffuse goals, and he was still led by his prong in most of his actions. This afternoon, as a deliberating juror on dinner break, he was sequestered in the Holiday Inn across the street from the civil court building. The first court trial of his life!—and tonight, if all went well, there'd be a verdict. He stood at the window naked, looking out. The afternoon sky was the color of plum flesh. Rain gushed down the streets, overflowing onto the swirl of lawn in front of the hotel. Traffic signals tossed in the wind, and an occasional spark of lightning photographed the skyline. Fury, fury, he thought to himself, pulling back his gaze, fixing his eye on the window glass itself and his reflection. The beauty of his arm lay in its many contrasts: the muscle mass of his biceps beneath soft pale skin; the leaner, twitching forearm muscles beneath wiry black hair. He tensed his fist a few times, admiringly, and then looked down at the scene below him. Three satellite trucks were parked on the sidewalk. A dozen or so reporters, holding umbrellas that were emblazoned with their stations' call letters, huddled together. City and court police mingled beneath the hotel's taxi awning.

  "Come back to bed."

  "Oh," he drawled, "we were in the middle of something." He turned away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place. He stood motionless, letting his eyes adjust to the dark.

  "I got to get back to my room before long," the woman juror murmured. "Let's finish."

  "Can you see me?"

  "It's not that dark, baby."

  "I want you to make me hard."

  "Come over here and I will."

  "No. From there. With me standing here."

  She groaned. "Don't play me."

  "I want you to be helpless."

  "Right."

  "You're so weak you can't speak."

  "Are you serious?"

  "You're drifting in and out of consciousness."

  "No."

  His heart stirred at her refusal. "Just lie still. Breathe. Let me listen. Five minutes."

  She tossed around in the sheets, and after a moment whispered, "Okay."

  Her name was Rita Ledet, and it had been Seth's intention to secure her Not Guilty vote. Had been. He had marked her at the very moment he first saw her in the jury-pool room. She'd worn a willing, cynical face, so he'd sat beside her, flirted with her, spoke to her with deep respect, listened to her, and discovered that he'd judged her correctly. Rita was a lonely woman who watched too much TV and paid close attention to the stories in which everyday people lucked into huge sums of money. She seemed not to differentiate between those who won the lotto and those who filed improper lawsuits and those who accepted bribes. The last had been Seth's ambition. He was supposed to pull her by the throat into his tank of filth.

  But today, during deliberations, he'd finally decided not to. He didn't want her vote; and now he was happy just to finish their negotiations here in the room and be done with her. Call it another step toward home. He would leave New Orleans tonight without reaching his goal of knocking every pretty ass the city offered. Rita was his consolation, he guessed: a thin-limbed dainty whose body folded beneath his like oversized butterfly wings.

  He swaggered to the side of the bed. ' 'What kind of music do you like, Rita?" he asked, prong in hand.

  Excellent girl that she was, she didn't answer.

  After a moment, he dropped onto the bed with exaggerated force; Rita's slim body lifted off the mattress for one sweet moment, and when she landed Seth lifted her shoulders up onto his kneeling lap and bent forward to kiss her. "I love you," he whispered into her hair as it fanned across his thighs. "You can't die, honey; don't die on me, dear." His giddy testicles had contacted their friends, the synapses along his spine; the frantic conversation, the exultations, reverberated in his ears.

  "I feel so weak," Rita said, remaining perfectly still. "I'm so helpless." There were beads of sweat across the front of her chest, and in spatters on her nipples, and an eyedropperful topping off the elegant cup of her belly button. She blew a mouthful of air: "I'm scared."

  "I could let you die," he said, nearly weeping, his face hanging just above hers. He swiped a finger along her shoulder, drew a parallelogram. He put the finger in his mouth, and it swelled on his tongue as if to choke him. "Your pulse is getting weaker. I think it's time." He shoved her gently from his lap and rolled on top of her, his full weight behind his knees, pressing into the mattress on either side of her pelvis.

  He pulled his face abruptly away from her, weepily caught his breath, and then slid his mouth up the front of her body. He used his chest and one arm to pin her to the mattress as he licked the curls of hair along the side of her face. Stripping the oil from one thick lock— as if meat from a bone—he took a mouthful of the next, until the side of her head was matted with his spit. He closed his mouth ov
er her ear, held it gently with his teeth like a bite of apple before you break the peel. As she turned her head away from him he released the ear; the sight of it glistening with his saliva gladdened him as if in some small way he had just given birth.

  Mine. My secret. It was one of many.

  Seth wasn't here by accident. He'd been paid $50,000 to seat himself on the jury. It was a civil case brought by the Lady Rampart orphanage against its former patron, the Myrtha Murphy Shaw Foundation—named for the trust's chairwoman, a coffee heiress. Seth's job was to hang the jury, thereby giving Rae Schipke, Mrs. Shaw's henchwoman, enough time to clean out her bank accounts and flee the country. Upon completion, he'd get another $50,000. An outright reprieve was worth half a million, but even under civil law, which required only nine votes for a verdict, that would be impossible.

  The first problem was that Lady Rampart was a model institution, beloved in the city. The boys who lived there, full of vigor and self-discipline, were supported by the mayor, the city council, nearly every church and TV station. If it hadn't been for police misdeeds, Seth was sure that Schipke would have been convicted during the initial criminal trial last year, and thrown to the wolves. But cops had searched without warrants and fudged some of their sworn testimony, and the district attorney's case had fizzled in open court. With the civil suit, the orphans were ripping for a jackpot to compensate.

  Second, Schipke was fucked in the head. She sat in court dressed in remorseless leather or silk, as if there weren't three lurid charges against her: sexing up a handful of the older boys at the orphanage, using foundation money to keep them quiet, and most damning, molesting two eleven-year-old boys whom she'd had to her home for weekend sleepovers. On each point, there'd been credible testimony, descriptions of the wispy growth of hair and arc of moles around Schipke's genitalia; in fact, the only witness in Schipke's defense had been Mrs. Shaw, who offered an improbable alibi for the nights on which the molestation had been alleged to occur. Shaw had grown up with Schipke's late mother, and treated Rae like a daughter.

  The third problem was that Seth hated Schipke for what she had helped him make of himself, and had needed only the least stirring of his withered conscience to let her hang.

  Now Rita whispered, "You're crushing me."

  "I know. I can't help myself. I want to destroy you."

  "I can't breathe."

  "Try," he said, propping himself on his elbows, bearing his hips down on her.

  She blew wet breath on the hollow at the base of his throat.

  "O-kay," he said, and as he gruntingly slid down her body and began to slip his dick back inside her, she worked her arm free and took a handful of his neck. She inched fingers up the peak of his jaw and dug her nails into his lips. "What's this?" he asked.

  She used her other arm to pressure him off her, and she rolled with him so that he lay on his back and she straddled his waist "You're losing blood," she said. "You're drifting out. You can't speak."

  "Save me," he panted. "Please help me."

  Jury duty was the biggest gig that he'd pulled for Schipke, but it was hardly the first, nor did he take it more seriously than his many earlier chores. He'd become her job boy without regret or shame or gravitas.

  It had happened like this: In ascending to the position of executive director of Shaw, a foundation whose assets had leaped past $100 million during the 1980s, Schipke had broken some backs. She was someone who kept track of her enemies and wished to lash them. For that certain kind of help, she'd turned to her lawyer, Darcy Favrot. He had his own firm, and also taught a class in ethical rhetoric at Tulane's Freeman School of Business, where one of his students was Seth Michaels. Darcy had an intuition, based on the mercenary voice of Seth's class papers, and arranged the Michaels-Schipke introduction. It was five years ago that Seth began as an intern. Rae hired him, and trained him—subtly for the first month, but once he caught on she ushered him without hesitation into her world.

  He started off snooping for license plate numbers on Audubon Place, the private, guarded street where the presidents of banks, mineral companies, and restaurant chains lived. Rae had only wanted to know who was visiting whom, which forces in town were excluding her from their dinners, but Seth gave her more. He worked through the night, accessing public records on computer databases until he'd compiled financial portraits of the owners of each car. The next morning, he gave the notes to Schipke.

  "This ought to be illegal!" she said and did a touchdown strut, flapping papers above her head.

  Within a month, she had filled Seth's head with all of her grandiose apocalyptic musings. They'd begun having sex in her office late at night. She asked him to take on meaner chores. She increased his salary.

  He broke into the Tulane and Loyola fund-raising offices to photocopy alumni files, which included records of stock holdings, assessments of property values, and other helpful documents. He telephoned anonymous threats to zoning board and city council members. He flattened tires, broke windows. For two years, he performed bad deeds in modest daily increments.

  But in the fourth year he made the mistake of letting himself be thrilled by the fear his actions caused, and he got carried away. There were victims, hurt seriously: Nonie Daniels, of the Carthage Mill Company, whom Seth ambushed outside her back door one night and knocked unconscious; and Drew Oostdaam, the daughter of an NOPD beat cop, who cowered on the floor of her butt-ugly new Mustang as Seth shattered its windows with a tire iron. And his final target, the one who almost died, was a righteous good guy named Jim Yonce, a first-year law student investigating the foundation on behalf of the Citizen Law Clinic. Schipke hated him because she couldn't stop him from organizing every pussy little radical in town for the fight against the so-called exploitative and antiprogressive forces that Shaw funded. When Seth was through with him, Yonce had to enter the hospital, and then a rehab facility.

  Soon thereafter, Seth gave Schipke his notice. They whittled an understanding: he'd keep his mouth shut and so would she; she'd pay him for another year, or until he left town. Seth didn't hear from her until one vaporous night this summer, when he was in bed with a young thing he wanted to impress. Schipke called. She told him she had one more job for him.

  "This is the big one," she said. "Nothing physical."

  "How big?"

  "This is real fresh pussy. You're first on my list."

  "Tell it to me."

  She told him that she had taken the liberty of calling a hacker friend of hers who knew the city's computer systems. This friend had checked Seth's name against the register of potential jurors and made an adjustment. Furthermore, Rae said, certain lawyers were predisposed to Seth's serving.

  "You're a bona fide candidate," Rae said. "There's a letter on its way from City Hall. I hope you'll say yes."

  "Yes," Seth said.

  Seth buried his face in her belly as she straddled his face. He tasted minerals, oily and sweet and stony. He could taste his own humusy bouquet. He cried out in terror and kicked his feet up from the mattress as a near-orgasm spasm bent his insides.

  "Slow down, baby," she said. "I'll have to give you a sedative."

  "No," he whispered, "far too much danger. I'm not healthy, I'm not healthy enough."

  "You seemed so healthy, white boy. All of them whites at the start, during jury selection, and it come down to you and two yats who can't read. All of them others had excuses; they didn't want to drive into the city. Stay their asses out in Kenner." She took his chin in her damp fingers and moved his head so their eyes met. She hobbled her face down toward him and laughed; a bubble of her humid breath coated the inside of his throat. "But you stayed on. Why's that? What is it that you want from Rita?"

  Seth cracked his mouth open into a grin. "Pussy?"

  "Bitch!" She slapped his cheek.

  Seth made a high sigh. The root of his balls sparkled all the way up inside his lower back. His chest, with her ass sitting right on it, was more sensitive and communicative than he'd ever have
imagined; it alone pumped an extra couple of pints down into his prong. "Who voted me foreman, honey?"

  "I didn't."

  "Who'd you vote for?"

  "Me."

  "Fuck if I would."

  After they came, Seth for the second time, he rolled onto his back and Rita used his belly for a pillow. The room was entirely dark; its smells were as in the back of a cave. The air above the bed was dark and speckled white as if with stars.

  "Honey?" he said. He liked the way this felt, her supple cheek resting on him, rising and falling with his breath.

  "Mmmm," she murmured.

  "Do you want to know how I'm going to vote?"

  "Y'already said in deliberations," she said with a hitch of suspicion.

  "I know what I said. But I have to tell you something. I was being like truly the devil's advocate. I was wrong."

  She lifted her head off him, and the skin on his belly felt cooler, as it did when he took off his shirt after a gym workout. "What are you gonna tell me?" It was true. There was almost disappointment in her voice.

  "I think Rae Schipke's guilty."

  "You do? But what about—"

  "I do."

  "And that's how you're going to vote?"

  "It is," he said. "It is." A spray of laughter drifted from his mouth and floated to the ceiling. Rain beat against the windows. Softer than the rain, farther away, sirens spun.

  "So am I," Rita said.

  "We'll both have clean consciences then."

  "Truly." Now she sounded relieved.

  Alone now beneath his stained covers, Seth realized with dread that he didn't want to leave the motel room's dark, sterile calm. The drapes were absurdly heavy. The pastel paintings on the walls soothed. Even the feel of the crispy, chemically clean carpet on his bare feet was reassuring. Maybe, he thought, now that he was going to have to leave town in a rush—tonight, if he wanted to be sure of avoiding Schipke's wrath—he'd be living in hotels for a little while: He would like that.