High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Until now I’d imagined that I knew my brother. I had not always liked him—(to be candid, Harvey hadn’t much liked me, or even noticed me)—but I had always admired and envied him and hoped to emulate him in his strategies of escape from our household.

  Parked my car at the trash-littered curb in front of 11 Grindell and by the time I removed the key from the ignition the sharp-eyed gangsta boys in the park had already checked it out—secondhand, tarnished, economy-sized, foreign (“Mazda”)—and dismissed it.

  Still, I locked the doors. My laptop computer was inside, beneath a pile of clothes.

  The English Tudor house, once a private home, had been crudely renovated and partitioned into apartments. What must have been an elegant front foyer was now an entryway with a scuffed and soiled tile floor and along one wall a row of cheap aluminum mailboxes.

  At a distance of several feet I could recognize Harvey’s pinched little block letters—HARVEY SELDEN, APT. 3B.

  Two hulking young men in their twenties were descending the stairs, loudly. With them was a large bald dog that, sighting me, began barking hysterically.

  The taller of the young men was gripping the dog’s chain-leash. Seeing the look of fear in my face he laughed and assured me—“Hey li’l dude, Dargo ain’t no danger.”

  The young man was rail-thin, lanky. His skin was the hue of eggplant, velvety and beautiful. But out of his head sprang fantastical dreadlocks that fell halfway down his back and the way he stared and grinned at me was not comforting.

  “You sure you in the right place, li’l dude?”—with a quick canny assessing gaze taking in my pale skin, my facial features. “Come lookin for Mister Selden, is you? He home.”

  He was laughing at me. Quick-flashing shark-white teeth as he gripped the dog’s leash loosely enough so that the dog could lunge at me, as I backed away and cringed.

  The dog was pig-shaped, with a pig-snout. Pinched little eyes glaring with rage. It was a pit bull, I thought—bred to attack.

  He will not let that dog attack me. Of course he would not.

  In my fright and confusion I had no more than a blurred impression of a third person, an older man, in the gloom of the first-floor landing, who’d been following the young men and calling after them on their thunderous descent down the stairs. It might have been that the young men had taken something from the man he hadn’t wanted to give them but they were so openly derisive and playful, they didn’t seem like thieves.

  As I cringed back against the row of cheap mailboxes the dreadlock-boy allowed the incensed Dargo to stand on his hind legs and snap and bite at me, so close I felt the dog’s hot spittle on my hands, which I’d raised to protect my face.

  The other youth was shorter, and heavier; his skin was sallow, his eyes pinched and his face curiously flat like a sea-creature that is all spherical face, with frontal eyes. His grin was strained and elated as if he’d have liked his friend to release Dargo but he kept a formal distance between us, half-hiding behind the dreadlock-boy who was smirking and teasing: “He you’ brother is he, hey? Girl, that be some bro-ther.”

  I had no idea what this jeering remark meant. The young man was combative and self-possessed and spoke in a fluent, fluid, mocking way, like a rap artist; on the right side of his handsome face was a tattoo, savage yet symmetrical. Seeing how he’d frightened me he relented, “Yo, damn dog!”—yanking Dargo away.

  The two youths were loud-laughing and contemptuous slamming out the front door. I was trembling badly: Dargo’s spittle was cooling on my hands.

  Whoever had been on the first-floor landing hadn’t seemed to see me cowering in fear below, or hadn’t cared to see. He’d retreated and disappeared from view.

  Had it been Harvey? I seemed to know, yes it was.

  I knocked on the door of 3B. Inside there was silence, as of an indrawn breath.

  “Hello? Harvey? It’s... me.”

  I lifted my fist to knock again, a little louder, and the door was suddenly opened, and there my brother Harvey stood before me, a look of astonishment on his face.

  Astonishment and something else—dismay, disapproval.

  “Lydia? What are you...”

  Harvey blinked and squinted behind me, toward the stairs. I thought He is disappointed. He expected the boys to return.

  In our mutual surprise we stared at each other. Here was something strange: Harvey was shorter than I remembered him.

  My brother had always been tall and lanky, since he’d been a young teenager. By the age of twenty he’d been at least six feet tall. But now, he couldn’t have been more than five feet eight or nine. (The last I’d had my height checked, I was about five feet six.) And Harvey was thinner, almost sickly. His narrow jaws were covered in stubble and his eyes, always mournful and brooding, were threaded with broken capillaries.

  Harvey appeared to be only partly dressed. Soiled jeans, an undershirt, no shoes and no socks.

  I tried to explain, They had sent me.

  Harvey would know who they were who’d sent me to look after him and also to spy on him for their sake.

  (I had called my parents back, to get Harvey’s address. Why I had capitulated to their unjust demand I will never know.)

  (All of what followed from that act was nothing I had wished for myself and yet somehow, it seemed to be unfolding as in a script written by a malicious stranger, in opposition to my deepest desire.)

  Harvey was in a state of such nerves, I had to repeat what I’d said. He kept glancing behind me, peering down at the foyer below. Outside, the dog’s hysterical barking had faded; the boys were gone.

  Dismayed Harvey stared at me, his youngest sister. He’d have liked to simply shut the door—shut it in my face—but instead he sighed, and relented, inviting me inside.

  “Since you’re here, Lydia.”

  He is not happy to see me. Of course, this is a stupid mistake.

  I stepped inside the apartment. I glanced furtively about the room—a high-ceilinged dimly lit space containing mismatched shabby furniture, boxes and cartons and stacks of books and a badly scuffed hardwood floor. The windows were without curtains or blinds. The overhead light was a bare bulb of about sixty watts. It might have been a hotel room in a cheap welfare hotel.

  Harvey was very distracted. Though he tried to talk to me, and to listen to me, clearly his mind was elsewhere; he was alert to every sound in the house, and on the street; a muscle twitched in his unshaven jaws and his bloodshot eyes seemed without focus. He failed to invite me to sit down. He failed to offer me anything—even a glass of water.

  There was a discomfiting smell in the place—something acrid, fermented, gassy. And beneath, a prevailing odor of dirty laundry, unwashed flesh.

  Gamely I tried to explain another time why I’d come, why my parents had sent me. I did not tell Harvey that I was on a mission to “help” him—that would have been insulting to his pride.

  My brother had always been proud. Vain of his high grades, his “good-boy” reputation. Adults had admired him. Less so, people his own age.

  “Father and Mother would have come to see you themselves,” I said, unconvincingly, “except—it’s so far for them to drive, and they’re—old... not well...”

  My parents were not old, really: scarcely in their sixties. Not old.

  Nor were they unwell, so far as I knew. Despite what they’d said on the phone.

  All this while Harvey was trying clumsily to hide something in his hand. Trying to divert my attention he maneuvered himself to a table in a corner of the room, where he shoved whatever he’d been holding—(a small package or bag?)—beneath a pile of newspapers.

  By degrees Harvey regained a measure of his old composure. He’d gotten over the shock and something of the displeasure of seeing me in the corridor outside his door and spoke to me in the voice of an elder brother giving advice to his naïve and intrusive sister: “Jesus, Lydia! You shouldn’t have come here. Our parents have nothing to do with my life any longer—they are the on
ly bond between us, and that bond has been broken. They know this, and you should know it, too. You should not be their handmaid.” He paused, wiping furiously at his nose. He’d worked himself up to a kind of anger. “I guess you can stay the night, then drive back tomorrow to—wherever you came from.”

  Surely Harvey must have known where I was in graduate school, at which distinguished University, quite as distinguished as the seminary he’d quit, and so this was some sort of brotherly insult, I supposed. I tried not to feel hurt. I tried not to reveal hurt.

  “If that’s what you want, Harvey. But I think...”

  “Yes. It is what I want. Haven’t you been listening, for Christ’s sake!”

  In Harvey’s presence, inevitably I was cast back into the pitiable role of baby sister—an object of bemused affection, or affable contempt. My sisters had sometimes liked me, and sometimes not; not often, my older siblings had time for me. Now Harvey said, coldly: “Our parents have no right to interfere in my life—or in yours. This is not a safe environment for a girl like you.”

  I thought But what about you?

  For it seemed to me, in the dimly lighted room, that was badly cluttered as a storage room with boxes (unpacked books and papers) on the floor, and scattered white plastic bags underfoot, that something was wrong with my brother: part of his face was missing.

  Harvey’s hair was long and unkempt, falling to his shoulders, but at the crown of his head he was beginning to go bald. The effect was eerie—as if someone had grabbed his long hair and tugged it partway back his head.

  For as long as I could remember Harvey wore his dull-brown hair conventionally cut, trimmed at the sides and back. He’d dressed neatly, inconspicuously. If he was to be a “man of God” it was not as a fervid Evangelist preacher but as a scholarly theologian like his hero Reinhold Niebuhr. He’d never smoked, never drank, so far as anyone in the family knew; he’d never been involved with girls or women, and had had few friends. He’d never appeared in my sight so altered, so—disheveled. It was as if a giant hand had snatched up poor Harvey and shaken him, hard. His skin was both sallow and red-mottled as if he were very warm; his hair hung in his face, in greasy strands. He wore soiled jeans and a soiled T-shirt. In college and at the seminary he’d worn proper white shirts, ties, and jackets; he’d acquired a settled yet expectant look as of middle age, while in his early twenties. My parents had proudly shown photographs of their only son studying at the distinguished seminary at which Reinhold Niebuhr had himself taught fifty years before. Our son is studying to be a man of God!

  Such silly boastfulness was typical of my parents. Perhaps it is typical of all parents. I did not feel envy for Harvey, only resentment and frustration.

  When I did well in school, my parents seemed scarcely to notice.

  Good work Lydia. Very good.

  There is a finite supply of love in a family, perhaps. By the time the youngest child arrives, that supply has diminished.

  Harvey was complaining: “You don’t seem to understand, Lydia, that this part of Trenton is an environment in which a—a person—like you—will be singled out for the wrong kind of attention. You will be singular. You’re a young Caucasian woman, you’re attractive, you’re alone, and you are vulnerable.” Attractive and vulnerable were uttered accusingly. Alone seemed to me unfair.

  “But I’m not alone. I’m with you.”

  Harvey stared at me, offended.

  “You are not with me. You’ve just intruded, uninvited. And you’re leaving, tomorrow.”

  I saw that Harvey’s hands were trembling. His fingernails were ragged. He looked at least ten years older than his age. We had not embraced in a greeting—we hadn’t brushed lips against the other’s cheek—but I was aware of my brother’s fierce breath like something combustible. The thought came to me Oh God—he’s sick. He’s a drug addict. I didn’t wish to think that my brother might be paying those hulking youths to service him in ways other than just supplying drugs.

  In a bitter voice Harvey continued to complain about our parents intruding in his life, and how little they understood of his life. He’d worked himself up into a state in which he was cursing the seminary as well—a “Protestant refuge against reality.” In a voice heavy with sarcasm he spoke of individuals whose names meant little to me, professors of his at the seminary.

  The seminary was one of the oldest and most distinguished seminaries in the United States, overlooking the Hudson River just north of New York City. It had been a great honor for Harvey to receive an appointment as a fellow at this seminary after his graduation from college; my parents had boasted of nothing else for months. But now, Harvey seemed to be expressing contempt for it.

  I was waiting for Harvey to suggest that we go downstairs to my car, and bring my things into his apartment—my hastily packed suitcase, a backpack and my laptop. But he didn’t seem to think of it. I couldn’t help thinking He is waiting for me to be discouraged, and to leave.

  It was then I saw: Harvey’s left ear had been injured. It looked mangled as if it had been partly bitten off and was covered in ugly dark scabs, all but hidden by his straggly hair.

  “Harvey, what happened to you? My God.”

  “What—where?” Laughing irritably Harvey tried to pass off my alarm as some curious foible of my own.

  “Your ear. Here.” Gingerly, I meant to touch the mangled ear but Harvey pushed my hand away.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my ear. Jesus!” Harvey’s sallow face was flushed with embarrassment. I remembered how, as a child, usually a very well behaved boy, Harvey would suddenly flare up in anger if one of our sisters teased him a little too long or made a gesture to touch him.

  I remembered the lanky-limbed “good” boy striking out with his fists. Kicking.

  He turned on me, furious. It was the first time since I’d stepped into his apartment that Harvey had actually looked at me.

  “What about you? It looks like somebody blackened your eyes. Your face is bruised. What the hell happened to you?”

  I’d forgotten my accident entirely. My face was more or less numb, and no longer throbbed with pain.

  “I—I had an accident. I slipped on a staircase, and...”

  Harvey clearly disbelieved me; nor did my explanation sound very plausible, even to me.

  “I wasn’t beaten.”

  “Well. I wasn’t beaten, either.”

  “But your ear looks mutilated. Part of the lobe is missing...”

  Harvey ran his fingers rapidly over the scarred ear. “It was an accident, too. Dargo mistook me for someone else.”

  “That horrible dog? He attacked you?”

  “Leander—that’s Dargo’s master—wasn’t to blame. Leander wouldn’t hurt me. But it was a confused scene, there was a lot going on and the dog got confused. Such things happen, in Grindell Park.”

  Wryly, Harvey rubbed the scabby ear. And then I saw that the tip of his little finger was missing, too, on his right hand.

  3.

  A night passed, and another day, and a night. Harvey was gentlemanly enough to lend me his bed—but such a lumpy, smelly bed, with grungy bedclothes and a pillow that looked as if it had been flattened with a baseball bat; when I asked Harvey for clean sheets he laughed at me and said the God damn sheets would be cleaned when someone took the laundry to the Laundromat, how else?

  I thought this was probably an invitation, in my brother’s oblique way, to take the laundry to a Laundromat for him; to stay a while longer, and be of help.

  Of course, Harvey would never have appealed to me directly.

  So I drove to the nearest Laundromat, which was on Camden Avenue a half-mile away. There was a grocery store close by so I set out for the store while Harvey’s laundry was being washed.

  And there on the sidewalk was Leander taller and more savage-looking in sunlight, half his face a lurid tattoo and dreadlocks falling down his back.

  “Hiya li’l dude. How’s it goin.”

  I was trying not to
acknowledge him, not to see him. Except of course Leander recognized me and knew exactly who I was.

  The relief was, Leander didn’t have the pig-pit-bull with him, straining at the leash. It seemed strange to see him alone on the sidewalk, not unlike an ordinary pedestrian. He said, in a mock-accusing voice: “Y’know—you’ brother owes somebody a sum. He told you this, eh? Like six hundred eighty-eight dollars the fucker owe. You will pay, eh?”

  “I will pay—why?”

  “You brother say you are here to help him. You here to get him well again. He love you, he say. My sister is the one of all the world, I love.”

  Leander spoke extravagantly. His speech was a kind of music. What he said was unbelievable but he spoke with such sincerity, you wanted to believe. As if it were Harvey and not Leander who spoke: Harvey the young idealist and not the burnt-out Harvey who was now.

  “Well. I love Harvey, too.”

  “There you go, girl! That be good for both.”

  The dark-skinned boy loomed over me smiling and twitching his lips that were thick, protuberant. As his eyes were protuberant, like the eyes of a primitive African carving. The tattoo looked painted-on, savage; it appeared to be a copy of the Maori tribal tattoo that the ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson had had tattooed on half his face. Leander’s breath, too, was fierce—combustible. Heat lifted from his oily-dark skin, where he’d left partway open a smart black suede coat that fell to his knees; beneath the coat, he was wearing just a suede vest and a gold chain.

  I said I didn’t have so much money. I said I was a student, like my brother.

  Leander said, sneering, “You too old, be a student! Fuck that bullshit, man! Neither of you, specially him. Ain’t be any asshole gon believe you be students of—what?”

  “I am a—a graduate student—cultural anthropology—”

  “Cuntchural ’pology—bullshit. Like you’ brother sayin he gon be some kinda preacher. Is that fucked, man! He owe us this sum six hundred ninety-eight dollars, man. It goin up all the time, man—‘int’rest.’ He say you come here, gon help him out.”