High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates

clicking sound so he winced and wetted his pants.
    Nasty and stupid the teacher called him. Not like the other children.
    If not like the other children, then like who? What?
    Those years. How many years. As in a stalled city bus, diesel exhaust pouring out the rear. Stink of it everywhere. Da had gone away and left them, Mama sat at the kitchen table fat-thighed and her knees raddled. Same view through same flyspecked windows. Year after year the battered-tin diner, vacant lot swooning with weeds and rubble glitter of broken glass and the path worn through it slantwise where children ran shouting above the river. Broken pavement littered like confetti from a parade long past.
    Or maybe it was the pledge of something vast, infinite. You could never come to the end of it. Wavering and blinding in blasts of light. Desert maybe. Red desert where demons dance, swirl in the hot winds. Never seen an actual desert except pictures, a name on a map. And in his head swelling to burst.
    Demon-child they whispered of him. But no, he was loving, mad with love. Too small, too short. Stunted legs. Head too big for his spindly shoulders. Strange waxy-pale moon-face, almond eyes beautiful if you took care to look, small wet mouth perpetually sucking inward. As if to keep the bad words, words of filth and damnation, safely inside.
    The sign of Satan coiled on his underjaw began to fade. Like the skin eruptions of adolescence. Blood drawn gradually back into tissue, capillaries.
    Not a demon-child after all but a shy anxious loving child with the Bible-name no one could pronounce— Jeth-ro . Betrayed by the eyes of others seeking always to laugh and to sneer. Betrayed by having been squeezed from the womb before he was ready.
    Not a demon-child but for years he rode wild thunderous razor-hooved black stallions by night and by day. Furious galloping on sidewalks, in asphalt playgrounds where his classmates lay fallen, bleeding and dying. The older boys who tormented him, the older girls giggling and poking him through his pants— Jeth’o! Jeth! Through the school corridors trampling all in his way including teachers, adults. Among them the innocent children, casualties of war. Furious tearing hooves, froth-flecked nostrils, bared teeth, God’s wrath, the black stallion rearing, whinnying. I destroy all in my path. I was born without mercy.
    Not a demon-child but he torched the school where they’d laughed at him, rows of stores, run-down wood frame houses in the neighborhood with rotting stoops to the sidewalk like his own. Many times the smelly bed where Mama and Da had hidden from him, when he’d been a baby. And no one knew of the raging flames, and continued as before in ignorance of the demon among them born without mercy.
    This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at a face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory at the Trailways bus station. The man’s face appears beside his, looming above his like a moon. The face larger, stained teeth glistening in a wet sly smile. Maybe at one of the churches, he’d seen this face. Maybe it was Mama who’d introduced them. One of the ministers, to take the place of the elder. And the fingers clutching at his, that little (secret) tickle of the thumb against the palm of his hand, so he’d laughed, and shivered, and was ashamed. And now, that face has followed him here. In the mirror beside his. And the hands touching him, tickling at first, and then harder so he could not break away and he could not breathe for something tarry-black flew up to his face, covering his mouth, his mouth and his nose, he could not breathe and began to fall into the tarry blackness, and the hands gripped him, and the arms gripped him, and the mouth sucked at him, and he opened his mouth to scream but could not. And a door opened and there came a shout Hey! What are you perverts doing! Jesus. And the voice faded, the door was shut again in revulsion. The