Chapter 2

The pretty young clerk of court that briefed the jury on the “do’s and don’ts” of jury duty for the duration of their appointed time was not in the least amused at Ralph’s need for sleep. She was jabbing the eraser end of her sharp number two pencil into her nicely curved hip like she wished it was his ass at the other end.

He saw his new friend Gloria throw him a sympathetic look and it bothered him more than the clerk’s displeasure because he hated to be pitied by any skirt, even one he hadn’t schlonged physically. Of course, he had no doubt he would be unable to resist doing the old two-step with the attractive Gloria should the occasion arise unexpectedly. She had given him all the familiar signals a broad sends to a guy looking at her pretty ass and ogling her poorly concealed breasts.

She even turned sideways slightly giving him a taste of leg almost all the way up to her mysterious secret female place. It was enough to give him the willies just thinking about stretching her the way almost all females love to get it from new male acquaintances.

When he looked back at the clerk of court, he saw that she was studying him with a calculating stare. For a moment, he had to admit, he didn’t know if she was thinking about shit-canning his ass from jury duty for having unclean thoughts about a fellow juror or if she was contemplating how it would feel to wrap her pretty long slender legs around his middle-aged trunk and letting him make her take it down dirty and nasty and not the least like her useless drunk of a husband.

He was making the last bit up but he knew for a fact that most of these hard-working young female government workers were loaded down with kids, some wanted and some not wanted, with, usually, some worthless piece of shit spouse sucking off their tit in more ways than one. Their boring jobs made them restless and they were generally “easy lays” for guys like him with no reason to avoid giving it hard to a married woman in need of a hard dick when times were tough.

Ralph was uncertain of Gloria’s story but he suspected she had a deceased husband in her past. Not one that she had plotted to put six feet under, but one that succumbed to too much booze, too many affairs, and who avoided doctors like the plague. It was a shame because she was prime fuck material and it bothered him to think about her going to bed alone at night with only a battery-operated device for company.

The six alternates looked just like the other jurors but he sensed they were the “second team” in the eyes of the clerks of court and they were treated like second-class citizens just like the Mexicans wandering up from the south to work the fields at a time when blacks were figuring out how to get all the government handouts that they were entitled to. It was a full time job just to figure out that labyrinth of paperwork and qualification logic.

There were only two blacks on the twelve seated jurors and he thought for a moment that might be a bit discriminatory, but then he realized that was probably proportionate to the population in the state which was similar to the national average of black demographics. The absence of Hispanics was due to them not being able to get driver’s licenses without birth certificates and the computer didn’t have them in the jury pool. They did qualify for almost everything else and probably all voted because of the new “absentee” voting that allowed everyone to do the whole thing by mail and not show any identification.

It was probably not coincidental that there were six females and six males on the jury.

He figured that when push came to shove the entire line about “random” this and “random” that was a bunch of bullshit that went out the window replaced by the nimble fingers of some female clerk of court shifting people into the right slots to prevent a mistrial from happening.

He looked around at the other jurors.

They had already removed the six alternates to another room which would be connected to the courtroom by closed circuit television so they wouldn’t miss any of the little details of the trial procedures. He tried to remember what they looked like but all he could recall was that they were three men and three women.

Besides him and Gloria, the other ten jurors were pretty much a passive group, silent for the most part; it was redeeming quality that left him hopeful the trial would progress rapidly to a swift conclusion. At the end of each row of jurors, a pair of overweight black housewives sat like unemotional bookends waiting for their instructions. They all had tag with their juror number and their first name on it to make it easier for the judge to address them.

The other three females on the jury were all seated in the front row placing five of the six women up front with only one male in their midst. Ralph found it to be a bit amusing because the lone male was a well past middle-age retiree with decidedly feminine mannerisms leading the other jurors to assume he was not the sort of fellow to chase after the other gender. His name was also Ralph, so they added the number one after his name and the number two after Ralph Donovan’s name to distinguish between them. The black woman in the front row was Claudine and the black woman in the second row was Arlene. It was a bit confusing because they looked almost like twins and they sounded like they came from the same area in Mississippi. The other three females were all youngish and definitely in their twenties wearing fashionable clothing and carrying that aura that marked them as “hot numbers”.

Ralph could appreciate that sort of appeal in terms of his own hunger for female companionship but he had already accepted his share of future female flesh would be of the middle-aged and on up variety. Still, it was nice to ogle their plump rumps shifting on the padded seats and watch them make various corrections to their make-up and lipstick using their ever-present small compact mirrors to be as accurate as possible. It was easy to remember their names because they were all one-syllable and quite popular. He could say it like a little rhyme leading into a fairy tale of sorts, “Fay, Ann, and Sam”. He assumed that “Sam” was short for Samantha, but made no inquiry into the specifics.