New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

than Bigmouth for the peoples round here.” The young man said nothing to that. Miss Crawford waited and then she said, “If C-4 got some smart boys, you ain’t one of ’em, so I’m gonna help you out. Was I C-4, not that I’d ever want to be such a devil, but was I, I’d be heading over Bigmouth’s way early Friday morning, while all his boys be getting ready for the showdown and his pet police be keeping their hands off. That’s called a ambush, maybe C-4 knows that word. But go on, you do as you please. Whatever happen, folks around here be better off, one of ’em goes down.” Miss Crawford stared Late Nite in the eyes again, and then she walked away, thinking, was that amnesty real, it might just be a good idea.
    That day before supper Miss Crawford had the Monroe boy come over again. He rearranged the pictures on the wall in her bedroom and carried the broken kitchen chair down to the trash. She gave him a slice of apple pie and asked him what he’d heard about the trouble on the block.
    “Trouble?” The boy looked up sharply. “Don’t know about no trouble.”
    “Well, you know more than I do, so that’s a relief. Maybe it won’t come to be.”
    “Whatever, Bigmouth got it covered.” The child was straight-up bragging.
    “Hope you’re right, boy. I don’t like Rashawn none, but the devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t.”
    “What devil’s that?”
    So she told the child about C-4, over around the other side of the block. “He say he coming over here Friday at noon to take these blocks from Bigmouth.”
    The Monroe boy stared, then finished his pie in two big bites, and gulped his milk. Miss Crawford packed up the rest of the pie for him to take to his momma, and watched him from her kitchen window as he hurried down the street. She hoped he’d hold that pie careful until he finally got it home.
    Miss Crawford heard Officer Aleksandra Joyce come home after her shift the next afternoon, and she popped her head out the door and asked her in. Miss Crawford had coffee ready and a plate of cinnamon cookies just out from the oven.
    “You look tired, child,” she observed as Officer Joyce took off her big belt, with the gun and the flashlight and who knew what all, and laid it on the chair beside her. “Hard work bringing law and order to Newark, I suppose.”
    “That it is,” Officer Joyce agreed. “Worth it if it gives folks like you peace enough to make cookies like these, though.”
    “Why, thank you,” Miss Crawford said. “Have another, please do. Those police, they still giving you a hard time?”
    Officer Joyce shrugged. “I’m still new.”
    “Plus,” said Miss Crawford, “I expect some of them got other ideas about policing than the ideas you got.”
    The young woman sighed. “They sure do, Miss Crawford. The mayor, I know he’s working on it. Like you told me, things take time.” She smiled wearily.
    “Well,” Miss Crawford took herself another cookie, “maybe if more police like you was in the middle of things, it would all get better. So the question is, how we going to get you in the middle of things?”
    “That’s one of the reasons I moved to the neighborhood. So I could know what’s going on. Know more and more people.”
    “And what about things? What about if you know things?”
    “Like what things?”
    “Like, supposing you was to know about a thing that was going to happen. A bad thing, and you was in time to put a stop to it so no one got hurt.”
    “Miss Crawford?” Officer Joyce put down her mug. “You know a thing like that?”
    “If I tell you something,” Miss Crawford asked the young woman direct, “do you know people in the police you could tell, who ain’t in the pocket of no drug dealers nor no gangbangers?”
    “I do,” Officer Joyce said promptly. “My captain was brought in by the chief that was brought in by the mayor.”
    “You saying you trust him?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s very good.” Miss Crawford