High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And there was Maralena carrying plates of steaming-hot food to the table, slyly nudging her thigh against Harvey’s arm.

  Maralena wore gold lamé pants so tight they might have been poured molten onto her shapely buttocks, belly and legs. And, on her shapely torso, a black jersey tank top. When she’d arrived at the door she’d been wearing a faux-fox jacket over these clothes and on her head her shoulder-length cornrowed hair quivered like slithery little snakes.

  Though I was nervous in the presence of our unexpected guests it was exciting to me to be feeding them. And my brother Harvey, who was my entire family now. Again I felt the happiness of bringing pleasure to others in an immediate and observable way.

  Leander, Tin, and Maralena ate hungrily. At the ShopRite I’d bought a loaf of French bread which they broke into large pieces, shoved into the spaghetti sauce, and devoured.

  “Real good, Lyd’ja!”

  “Re-al good, girl.”

  Maralena seemed just slightly surprised, my cooking was so tasty.

  They ate, and they drank. In a daze of happiness Harvey filled their tumblers with red wine. Flat-faced Tin never spoke but only grunted, moving his jaws like a masticating insect.

  After dinner, Maralena helped me clear away the plates, rinse and wash them by hand. “You a true sister to you’ brother, Lyd’ja. L’nd’r be takin note of that.”

  What Maralena meant, I had no idea. Her exotic eyes were fixed on me, I found it difficult to breathe.

  And Maralena’s special fragrance, that wafted from her hair and from the dip of her black jersey tank top revealing a shadowy crevice between her breasts.

  “Thing is, girl, you’ brother in some deep shit-hole with L’nd’r. Feedin him some nice meal like this is a good thing. L’nd’r got heart, no matter what his enemies say of him he be stone cold killer.”

  Maralena had spoken just loudly enough so that Leander could overhear this remark if he wished. He’d been leaning back in his chair and now let the legs slam against the floor, hard. “Shut you’ mouth, ’Lena, or somebody shut it for you. You read me?”

  Maralena giggled, shivering. To me she said, “That boy just talkin. He ain’t gon touch any blood-kin of his, he know what that bring on his head.”

  Leander sneered, “You sure of that, girl?”

  Boldly Maralena said, “Dint I just say I was?”

  Now the table was cleared, Leander suggested that they play poker—just him, Tin, and Harvey.

  Leander flourished a pack of cards. Showily shuffling them like a professional player.

  I saw that Harvey wanted to say yes. But that Harvey knew he should say no.

  Harvey tugged at his mutilated ear, which was slow to heal and often itched.

  “You, Tin? You in, eh?”

  Tin nodded impassively.

  “Har-vey, my man?”

  Harvey moved his head, numbly. A foolish smile transforming Harvey’s stubbled face.

  Maralena said to me, “They be practicin for ’Lantic City, where they gon get their asses kicked at poker.” She giggled, running her fingers through her cousin’s greased plaits in a way that seemed daring to me, provocative. Leander slapped at her hand. Maralena laughed and stepped away from Leander who was glaring at her, not smiling. Just slightly shaken—(I think this was so)—Maralena slid her arm around my waist, tight. “My girl friend Lyd’ja and me gon hang out in Lyd’ja’s room listenin to some mad cool music. You boys be nice to you’ host now, you hear me?”

  Maralena walked me out of the living room and in the direction of the bedroom. It seemed strange to me, Maralena seemed to know her way around my brother’s apartment. Behind us I heard Harvey’s slow voice: “What kind of—stakes? Are we playing for money? The problem is, Leander—I don’t have much cash right on hand, which you might know.”

  “Shit man, sure I know. This be some friendly way Tin an me, we gon give you the opportunity to win big, climb up out of you’ deep hole. See?”

  Maralena led me forcibly away. Though it didn’t feel forcible since I didn’t try to resist.

  Next day, Harvey lay comatose in his bed until noon.

  He’d lost—oh Christ!—money to the boys.

  How much, I asked.

  Too much, Harvey said.

  How much, please tell me.

  Harvey flung his arm over his face, shivering and shuddering. He seemed about to speak further to me but then I heard his shallow erratic breathing, indicating that he’d fallen back to sleep.

  All that I knew was that the three men had been playing poker and drinking and (just possibly) smoking hashish after Maralena had gone home at midnight and I’d lain on my bed partially undressed, and fell asleep to voices laughing and cursing in the other room.

  It is family life almost.

  They would not hurt family—would they?

  The situation seemed grave to me. Soon, Leander would come by to collect.

  More than a finger-stub. More than a part of an ear.

  There was thirteen hundred dollars in my bank account. I would write a check for half this amount, to give to Harvey—if Harvey would promise me he wouldn’t spend it on something else but give it to Leander.

  “Of course,” Harvey said eagerly.

  “But—you promise? You will give it to Leander?”

  Harvey insisted, yes.

  I didn’t trust Harvey. But I didn’t think that I had any choice in the matter.

  In my bedroom, which was also my study, we’d listened to music from Maralena’s iPhone. Heated dance music it sounded to me, a Latin beat, rap from the islands Maralena said, the DR where she’d been born and from which she’d been brought—by her mother—at the age of five. Much of what Maralena confided in me I didn’t understand, mesmerized by her rich warm musical voice and by her rich warm fragrant skin, the Maralena eyes, the Maralena nose, the Maralena mouth tasting of wine kissing me, lifting her wineglass to my mouth, urging me to drink, red wine that was nutty-sweet, a dark-nutty-sweetness that numbed the interior of my mouth and the interior of my skull as Maralena kissed my forehead, my nose, my mouth and Maralena kissed the ticklish inside of my neck so that I squirmed breathless and helpless and I was lying on the sofa that Harvey and I had dragged into the room which served now as my bed, badly stained and sagging sofa of a kind you’d see abandoned behind a Dumpster, but over this I’d draped a blanket so you couldn’t see the stains and wear-and-tear of decades and Maralena was sharp-voiced suddenly wanting to keep me from falling asleep, shaking my shoulders and her talon fingernails sinking into my skin—“You, girl! Lyd-ja! Wake up!”—her voice urgent, alarmed; so that I thought She has fed me something. Some drug but the thought was a frail straw not nearly substantial enough to jolt me into wakefulness.

  And there came, later, maybe only a few minutes later, or in the middle of the night, which is not a true “night” in Trenton but a glowering-dark riddled with light like wormholes, and punctuated with sharp percussive noises like the snap! of the soul as it breaks from the writhing body, the boy with the Maori mask-face, the boy with the headdress of greased and pungent-smelling dreadlocks tumbling down his muscled back, and Maralena pushed at him, and he pushed at Maralena, Noooo she was pleading, or maybe she was laughing-pleading, for you don’t say Noooo to Leander, not a serious Noooo and there came a creaking of the sofa springs, and Leander’s rough fingers scrambling down my body like a ravenous rat, and between my legs these fingers were poking, between my helpless legs these hard probing fingers defined themselves grabbing, pinching, squeezing, poking-into; and feebly I tried to detach myself, muttering in my sleep in an extinct language I tried to protest, and Leander grunted swinging his legs onto the sofa, prying my legs apart, and Maralena was faint now at the door or already outside the door calling back over her shoulder Damn ol’ swine, that girl too white for you—you break her li’l white neck asshole you gon regret it.

  In the morning my neck ached—my spine, the small of my back, the insides of my thighs, between my legs
which was chafed and ravaged as with the incisors of a devouring rat—but my neck was not broken and my memory dim and retreating and therefore consoling. You can’t remember, whatever did or did not happen is on the far side of a chasm of memory which you cannot cross. Soon then seeking out Harvey whose shallow breathing and pallid skin worried me, at first glimpse my brother appeared to be scarcely alive as if flung across his rumpled bed where his poker-friends had left him and I’d managed to wake him out of that stuporous suffocating sleep and he’d cursed me wanting badly to remain in that sleep and lamenting oh Christ!—first memory that came to him, he’d lost more money; and I asked, How much, how much money did you lose to them and he said, Too much. And then he said, Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.

  7.

  He’d become shorter. Losing height. In the crook of his arm was a deep gash, slowly healing. He claimed it was from the IV line the ER nurses had put into his arm, that had become infected.

  On a battered calendar of Harvey’s I saw a pattern of red x’s. Less frequently, blue x’s.

  I asked him what the red x’s meant and Harvey shrugged. None of my concern.

  I asked him what the blue x’s meant and Harvey said, Rehab.

  But the blue x’s were only scattered through a month. The red x’s were several times a week.

  Getting high?—red had to mean an Up Mood.

  Blue?—the Down Mood.

  I told Harvey, please let me drive you to the rehab clinic. You must have a schedule of treatment there, you can’t afford to miss.

  (Was Harvey trying to cure himself of his drug addiction? Or had Harvey some other, medical condition, for which he was being treated? I’d gathered from careless remarks he’d made that he had infusions at the clinic—his white blood count was “low” and he was anemic.)

  I knew to urge my brother to drink water. Several glasses of water a day.

  “There’s a danger of dehydration. You don’t eat, drink, sleep, take care of yourself properly.”

  “‘De-hy-dra-tion.’”

  Harvey contemplated the word as if tasting it on his tongue. But the taste didn’t interest him.

  “Harvey, you could die.”

  “‘Harvey, you could die.’” Harvey considered this phrase, dubiously. “It doesn’t scan. It doesn’t fly. Though the vowels exude a kind of dull-anxious concern. A kind of mock concern. Not that this fictitious ‘Harvey’ will die but merely could die. Which is a fact for all who live—could die.”

  Harvey seemed to be paying only a peripheral attention to me, absently caressing his mutilated ear that flamed when so touched.

  “‘How scale walls of Hades’—this came to me last night. In the night. Note the short ‘a’ sound. Vowels are a sort of string upon which words are strung. I think so. I think this is my discovery, but it may perish with me.” Harvey laughed, scratching the flaming ear.

  It was late morning. I saw that Harvey would not speak to me in any serious way. Another day lost to us. Unless I worked on the Eweian translation in which, in fact, I had lost faith. Yet working diligently and even obsessively without faith did not seem to me a terrible fate, when the alternative was yet more terrible.

  In the apartment there were strange languidly wafting odors.

  Each day, new odors emerged of faint decay, rot. I’d thought it was the ancient refrigerator but even after I’d cleaned and scrubbed the interior, the smells remained. When I was gone from the apartment, to work in the little library for instance, and returned, the odors were always slightly different, as if the air had been agitated in my absence. Especially if I was away for some time. The apartment might show signs of visitors—rearranged chairs, boxes of books shoved from one place to another. And Harvey sprawled on a small sofa in the living room, notebook on his knee like one who has made a refuge for himself in the midst of great chaos: earthquake, flood.

  At Harvey’s nose, a perpetual glisten of moisture.

  He is a junkie. You know of course. A junkie has no shame.

  In a bemused voice Harvey said, as if thinking aloud: “Montaigne discovered at the age of thirty-eight that death is light and airy—he’d been thrown from his horse, trampled. He experienced no ‘other world’—no God, no Savior. He’d been Catholic of course—everyone was Catholic at that time and in that place, in sixteenth-century France. Montaigne saw that life is the long haul. Dying is the easy way.”

  “And how did Montaigne know this?” I asked, exasperated. “Had he died, and returned to write about the experience?”

  “He almost died. It was near-death. His ‘soul’ slipped from his body, according to his account. For some time, he floated outside his broken body.”

  “We all do,” I said. “It’s called dreaming.”

  “Lyd’ja! You gon drive us to ’Lantic City, yes?”

  Somehow it was—yes.

  Couldn’t say no to Maralena. Basking in Maralena’s hectic warmth and when Maralena spoke of Lyd’ja as my girl friend I felt such happiness, no poetry could begin to express.

  With Maralena was her girl friend Salaman. And another girl friend Mercedes.

  It was upsetting to me, when Maralena came to our apartment with her cousin Leander. Made me sick with jealousy when Maralena joked with flat-faced Tin.

  And sometimes, I had reason to think that Maralena and girl friends of hers came into the apartment with other men, individuals whose faces were becoming almost familiar to me, though I had no idea of their names or who they were—shadowy figures at the periphery of my brother’s life. It wasn’t clear to me whether Harvey was being exploited by these individuals or whether in some mysterious way Harvey was exploiting them.

  Those nights when Harvey hastily shoved me into the back room—“For your own safety, Lydia.”

  Somehow it happened, I was to drive Maralena, Salaman, and Mercedes to Atlantic City. Leaving in the early afternoon from Trenton and returning that night late.

  Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes—these were dazzling young women with faces of the kind you see on billboards beckoning you to the casinos of Atlantic City.

  I felt privileged to be driving them. To be their white-skinned girl friend.

  Harvey smiled a pinched smile. Harvey might’ve been jealous.

  Saying, meanly, “They will bleed you dry, little sister. Be forewarned.”

  I didn’t think so. Maralena was my girl friend.

  Hadn’t Maralena given me her cell phone number with the admonition to call her any time day, night if I needed help.

  Let myself be cajoled into driving Maralena and her friends to Atlantic City and to “lending” them money—most of what remained of what I’d withdrawn from my University account.

  Of the Atlantic City casino-hotels—among them Trump Taj Mahal, Bally’s, Harrah’s, Tropicana, Borgata—it was the faux-luxurious Borgata my friends preferred; Showboat and Rio they scorned as “low-roller” casinos—“For old folks, that come in buses. And some in wheelchairs, in buses.”

  We started off at the slots. Here was low-stakes gambling, a kind of bargain-basement gambling that carried with it nonetheless a certain amount of drama and suspense. At least for those who expected they might win.

  Pulling a lever to start into motion cartoon-fruit symbols spinning past my face seemed to me a gesture of such extreme futility, there was a childish abandon to it. Or maybe it was just the nearness of Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes who were dressed like giant tropical birds in tight-fitting sparkly clothes, high heels, dark-lace stockings. Maralena had silver piercings in her ears and left eyebrow; Salaman had dark-red-streaked hair and piercings in her face and elsewhere, she hinted, inside her clothes; Mercedes, the youngest of the three, had both piercings and tattoos, visible and hidden, and the loudest shrieking parrot-laugh. Mercedes teetered in gold-gleaming high-heeled boots to the knee; she had to show her ID to get into the casino, a fake ID (so I gathered) but the bored security guard, charmed by the girls, didn’t investigate closely.

  Within minutes at th
e slots I’d lost thirty-six dollars’ worth of tokens. Hardly a surprise!

  I imagined Professor A. regarding me with stern disgusted eyes.

  Lydia?—is that your name?

  When someone won at slots—(which was fairly frequent, when the win wasn’t a big win)—the machine lighted up giddily and music erupted in mock-hysterical celebration as, like a sudden spasm of vomiting, tokens flooded out of the mouth of the machine to be caught by the lucky winner in a cardboard container.

  The idea was to arouse envious attention on the floor. To attract others to play the slots, imagining that they might win big.

  My festive companions moved from machine to machine trying their luck. No skill was involved—just brainless luck. Of the three, Salaman actually came out eighteen dollars ahead.

  “Girl, you gon win big tonight. This be a good prem’ition!”

  On the drive from Trenton Maralena and her friends had spoken excitedly of a blackjack dealer whom they knew from Trenton, and it was this Jorge whom the girls sought amid the blackjack players. But no one seemed to have heard of Jorge—“Maybe he not workin tonight, that’d be shitty but you got to figure the man have to take some time off, yes?”—so Maralena reasoned. Much of the time Maralena was in the habit of addressing her girl friends with her back to me, as if she’d forgotten my presence. Their exchanges were high-pitched and bird-like and barely audible to me like exclamations in a foreign language amid the noise of the casino.

  Why was I here! Why, with these glamorous young women whose toffee-colored skin glowed in the casino’s delirious lights, drawing strangers’ eyes irresistibly—why me?

  Harvey had smiled pityingly at me when I’d left the apartment in my sole dress-up clothes—black nylon stretch-band slacks, cherry-colored velour top, black ballerina slippers. While I was driving on the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City Maralena had tried playfully to “tease out” my hair with a comb, a pick, and hair spray, but the result was more of fright than of glamour.