High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

man-who-was-a-minister was gone. He wasn’t sure, he’d thought it was a minister, and Mama had thought he was, but Mama was sometimes mistaken and when this was so, Mama would not admit her mistake and became very excited if you tried to correct her. The side of his head hurt, he opened his eyes not knowing at first where he was then seeing he was lying on a filthy floor partway inside a toilet stall. And urinals along the wall, filthy. And sink and mirror splotched with filth. And the smells, he could not breathe. Where he’d been dropped, like garbage. Dropped and kicked in the chest, with the hope that his heart would cease beating but it had not. To his shame he saw that his trousers had been opened, the front of his trousers crudely unzipped and the zipper broken and Mama would know, if the zipper was broken. He was breathing now but so shallowly he could not catch his breath. He was crying, and he was whimpering. Someone came to lift him by the underarms, in disgust. Get out of here. Go away from here. Shame! The age you are! Never come back here, go away to Hell where you belong. Barely he could walk, the pain between his legs was so severe. Pain in the crack of his ass, the tender skin broken, bleeding. Barely could he make his way through the bus station waiting room where every eye was fixed upon him in revulsion and mirth.
    Demon-child. Look!
    Crawling away to die. Where he’d hidden. One of the boarded-up buildings on the river. Crawl through a window, and inside. Dropping to the cellar floor. And there, a metallic surface in which the face awaited except now he saw how the mark of Satan was upon him, in his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood? Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. Shifting of Earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows something other in. Or the something other has been inside you all along and until now you do not realize.
    With a strange sick calm he knows. Knows even before he has seen: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star: pentagram.
    The ministers had warned. Five-sided star: pentagram .
    It is there, in his right eye. He rubs at it frantically with his fist.
    Runs home, two miles. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Mama knows there’s been trouble, has he lied about taking his medication? Hiding the capsule under his tongue then spitting it out? Jesus yes but you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes he was born wrong and nobody’s fault, nobody’d told any of us don’t smoke don’t drink that shit they tell the young mothers today nobody told us, like nobody told our mothers or their mothers, see? Yes but God must’ve wanted it this way. Yes but your love wears out like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words not echoing up to God but downward into an empty smelly well.
    Nineteen years old, and stunted-growth like a dwarf, or almost. And the rounded shoulders of a dwarf. Shaved-head glinting blue. Little bumps, knobs and shallows in the shaved-head, and a constellation of pale freckles. People thought he’d been sick, his hair had fallen out, he was so skinny, gangly-limbed. But luminous shining eyes women at church knew to be beautiful. And on the street, where he’d wandered miles. Strangers, smiling at him. Smiling nervously, tensely at him. Smiling as Christians are bade to do, not to judge. And in the neighborhood near his home he was known by a first name like a Bible name— Jethro . Weird sweet boy but excitable, couldn’t look you in the eye. Twitching his shoulders like in a spasm like he’s shrugging out of somebody’s grip.
    Fast as you can run, somebody else runs faster!
    Or, pursuing you in a vehicle. Horn honking, and guys screaming out