High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “She real pretty,” the girls said of me, to one another, as if I were not present, or couldn’t be expected to understand their speech, “only the girl got smile more, show she hot.”

  If Professor A. could see me now, with my girl friends in Atlantic City! I felt a deep flush of shame and incredulity at the thought.

  (Professor A. had recently sent me an email, which I had not yet opened, still less answered. The director of the Newcomb Fellowship program had sent me several emails, which I had not yet opened. And there was some difficulty with the bank in the University town in which my fellowship installments were supposed to be deposited... All of these matters hovered in the distance like casino lights glittering and winking in the stark New Jersey night. Shut your eyes, such lights disappear.)

  Gorgeous Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes were part of a small hectic crowd around a blackjack table. Was this a “hot” table? Were players winning here? The dealer wasn’t Jorge it seemed but his dark-gleaming eyes slid onto Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes with a certain zestful recognition. He was a light-skinned Hispanic with a thin mustache, tight stylish clothes and a look of sly bemusement. A robot programmed for blackjack, the mechanical motions of a card game of stunning and lethal simplicity. His hands shuffled cards, his hands doled out cards, his hands swept up and retrieved cards and in the interstices of such motions your fate was determined: win, lose.

  The girls were so fervent, so hopeful. Of course, they’d been drinking. Their drinks were festive and tropical as their clothing and hair. Not for their white-skinned girl friend Lyd’ja to warn them The house always wins. That is the point of casino gambling.

  They’d have liked me less, if I spoiled their excitement with such warnings. Maralena would not swoop upon such a dour boring person and wetly kiss the corner of her mouth.

  Within minutes, however, the girls had lost money at blackjack. Precious five-dollar tokens, swept away by the Hispanic dealer with the thin mustache. There had been the expectation—(maybe I’d felt this too)—at least, the childish hope—that being exceptionally pretty “sexy” girls with an obvious if unacknowledged rapport with the blackjack dealer, that they would have a better chance of winning than more ordinary players of whom most were middle-aged white men with raddled jowls.

  There had to be some special reward in Atlantic City, if not elsewhere, for looking like Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes.

  “You play with us, Lyd’ja! C’mon, girl! We got to get back what we lost, can’t go home broke!”—so they plucked at my sleeves.

  “I don’t think so,” I said faltering, “blackjack isn’t my—game,” but they laughed at me, not altogether pleasantly I thought but as you’d laugh at an exasperating relative slowing you down by dragging a paralyzed leg, or a blundering blind relative. “We gon pay you back, Lyd-ja—long before we headin home. But you got to help.”

  So I stood with them at the blackjack table. I was a hesitant player, destined to lose. At least at the slot machine my failure had been less conspicuous. Blackjack was an exhibitionist’s game—you had to expect to win, or your instinct was to stand mute, and withdraw your tokens. To lose a bet publicly—this was hard.

  But we lost. And we lost again.

  “Fuck!”—Maralena’s voice was not so musical now but New Jersey nasal and flat.

  When we drifted from the blackjack table at which we’d lost, the blackjack dealer didn’t so much as glance after us. Two rowdily inebriated couples pushed in eager to take our places.

  Abruptly then we left the classy Borgata, which my companions bad-mouthed as a stuck-up shitty place. They’d bypassed craps, roulette, baccarat—these games intimidated them. Even blackjack took too much thinking. My companions thought of gambling as an opportunity to win.

  The remainder of the Friday evening we spent at Trump Taj Mahal on the Boardwalk. Here, amid a sleazier sort of glamour, the girls seemed to feel more comfortable. The crowd was younger, less well dressed, with less money to spend; louder, brasher, more conspicuous drinkers. Despite its prime location on the Boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal was visibly run-down. (The famous Boardwalk itself was run-down, too. Homeless men were camping on benches and in doorways trying to shield themselves from the chill wind off the Atlantic Ocean; some of them looking so still, stiff and cold, wound in filthy blankets like mummies, Mercedes was moved to giggle nervously—Them ain’t corpses are they?) But inside the garishly lit casino roaming men were attracted to the girls, bought them drinks and “bankrolled” them so that they could continue gambling.

  This was the purpose of coming to Atlantic City, I realized. They’d made the trip before. They’d “gambled” here before. The prizes of the evening had to do with free money, so to speak, plucked by the girls like overripe fruit on a tree.

  I did not mind being sidelined, watching. Like a chaperon, though I wasn’t much older than my friends. Out of my black handbag which was nothing like the small glittery evening bags the girls were carrying I drew a half-dozen pages of the Eweian manuscript printout to read, or try to read, despite the dim lighting that made everything seem undersea.

  Infanticide. Ritual cleansing. Not an act against the infant but an act of desperate self-survival. Involuntary, instinctive.

  I thought this must be so. In a long-ago era before God entered time with His strictures of human moral behavior.

  Yet, there were other aspects of the text in which the author’s meaning was less clear. I was beginning to see that the ancient text contained another, secret text inside it. The surface text was just a patina, the truth lay beneath.

  “Girl, put that shit away—it Friday night in ’Lantic City not some crappy ol’ schoolroom.”

  Maralena and Salaman caught me squinting at the manuscript pages and slapped them out of my hand.

  As the hours passed, the crowd in the casino increased. Roaming men appeared to be circling us like rogue-male animals. Some of them offered to buy us drinks, dinner. What principle my companions had for coldly dismissing such invitations, or warmly accepting them, I could not determine for all the men looked about equally attractive, or unattractive, to me.

  Yet: how happy I was! Not knowing where I was.

  The alcohol had gone to my head. I didn’t know what one of the men had bought me—vodka? I heard myself laughing gaily.

  “Are you these girls’—teacher? But what’re you doing here, ’Lantic City on a Friday night?”

  In the Taj my friends returned to blackjack. It was 10:20 P.M.

  Separated from them by other players, I could only see their backs—the backs of their heads. I felt a thrill of panic—I would lose them, they would be lost to me. Was I not responsible for them, driving them to Atlantic City in my car? For each girl had now a male companion, to buy her drinks and lend her precious tokens. I wondered what Leander would think of his sexy cousin’s behavior. I wanted to think that Leander would disapprove, and sic Dargo on any predatory male.

  I wasn’t jealous. (I don’t think so.) I wasn’t envious. But maybe I was beginning to be concerned for Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes whom I would be driving back to Trenton that night, as we had planned.

  Why was I here? Where was this place? A swirl of mad music, strobe lighting, heart-quickening cries and laughter. Some distance away at the slots one of the manic machines had erupted in victory, spewing lights, marching music, tokens. You had to wonder who’d won—had he/she won big, or, more likely, won small.

  Most wins were small. Just enough to keep the machine going.

  Most players were losers, in fact. Otherwise, how could a casino keep in business?

  I’d known from a Trenton newspaper that most of the Atlantic City casino-hotels, like those in the more prestigious Las Vegas, had had a very bad year. They were hemorrhaging money. Several had filed for bankruptcy. The very Taj Mahal, a landmark on the Boardwalk, was deeply in debt.

  Yet, the party continued. The gaiety continued. The gamblers had no sense of the casino as a business enterprise out to exploit thei
r naïveté, no more than they had of fate. It was sobering to me to realize how each day, each night, indistinguishable from one another in the windowless casino in which no clocks were ever displayed, individuals placed themselves at the slot machines, at the blackjack tables, riveted to their immediate transient fates. They were like entranced spirits of Hades—nothing could wake them from their trance except a sudden win. It was yet more sobering to see that so many were elderly, walking with difficulty, with canes, or walkers; yet grimly determined to play the slots, to yank the levers, peer at the whirling fruits through bifocal glasses. So many were African-American, a surprise to me. And Asian-American, another surprise.

  What a joke! My brother and I squandering what remained of our youth in research into arcane “religious” subjects. How could we imagine that anyone cared, that we could make a serious contribution to our culture that was a fevered casino-culture obsessed with big wins?

  The pages they’d slapped from my fingers were on the floor, beneath my feet. My fingers groped for them but couldn’t pick them up. How scale walls of Hades?—the question came unbidden.

  I’d had a drink—I’d begun a second drink—confused, that the drinks tasted different.

  Somehow, sharing a drink with Mercedes. She’d brought her man-friend to meet me—unless this was a man-friend for me. His face looked like a clam’s face—if a clam had a face—upon which a dyed-black mustache had been pasted. And what remained of his hair was dyed-black, combed over a lumpy scalp.

  “You these girls’ teacher—somebody said? What kinda class is it, Lyd-ja, you are teaching?” Very funny, the clam-faced man laughed heartily. I saw a nubby glisten inside his mouth, a metal-laced molar.

  This man, Mercedes’s friend, was trying to escort me somewhere—to the blackjack table? to a nearby bar?—but I managed to wrest my arm loose from his fingers. He cursed me, bluntly. On an escalator I was borne upward—escaping from Clam-Face—the air currents in the Taj were such, I felt the ends of my hair lifting in the breeze—and at the top of the escalator there was an open space, and a brass railing where you could stand to gaze out over the interior of the Taj designed like a bad Indian stage setting, the “Taj Mahal” as imagined by a crude American entrepreneur.

  I wanted a microphone! I wanted to be heard! I leaned over the railing waving my arms like a demented semaphore.

  “‘How scale walls of Hades’! Plato says this is a veil of illusion! A cave of illusions! Delusions! The casino is the cave! You must wake yourself—save your souls!”

  A security guard came quickly to lead me away. No one below in the milling casino had heard me—no one had so much as glanced up at me—except my concerned friends Maralena and Salaman who ascended the escalator after me.

  Maralena said to the security guard, “Hey man, she just kiddin. She not drunk, hey. Not ust to all this excitement, like—she mostly stay home in Tr’nton. We take care of our girl friend, OK?”

  The security guard was tall, well beyond six feet. He wore a uniform that fitted his muscular body like a glove. His face was blunt-boned, his skin as velvety-dark as Leander’s. I wanted him to look at me kindly, or at least not with open hostility, but he ignored me entirely speaking to my companions in a low baritone bemused/exasperated tone:

  “She is drunk. You think I can’t recognize, you’ friend is drunk? Just keep her from high places. Don’t matter what bullshit she be sayin, nobody can hear her anyway. You got me?”

  “Thanks man! We appreciate this.”

  And Salaman said, almost wistfully: “Man you one sweet cool dude.”

  “I be drivin. Girl, you sleep in the backseat.”

  Maralena spoke firmly. Though she’d had far more to drink than I had she’d managed to “sober up”—she claimed—with two cups of black coffee.

  Coffee! The mere thought turned my stomach.

  Maralena and Salaman helped me crawl into the backseat of the Mazda. The vinyl seat cover was icy-cold. How many drinks had I had?—not more than two, or three.

  Still, I did not feel—well, “real.”

  Confused as I’d been falling down the stairs at—what was the name of the residence hall—not Jester College—but another place: where my Newcomb Fellowship provided a room for me—my heel catching in the frayed carpeting on the stairs and I’d plunged down, down...

  Hello? Are you all right? Let me help you...

  “How she doin, you think? She ain’t ust to drinkin or maybe stayin up late.”

  “She ain’t ust to nothin much.”

  They were laughing at me. Not cruel but affectionate laughter.

  Or maybe, slightly ridiculing laughter. Now my wallet was empty of all paper money.

  “She pathetic, eh? She just don’ get it.”

  “L’nd’r, he like her OK. He say, the white-girl sister is gon be his girl, they get things straight between them.”

  “What’s that mean—‘things straight between them’?”

  “Fuck how’d I know? L’nd’r ain’t even my cousin, he just some boy hangin around my uncle’s house, we all growin up.”

  And they laughed together. No idea why.

  It was mean of them to laugh at me when I was helpless.

  In the jostling car, on the cold vinyl seat, I kept trying to wake up yet with each effort I fell back into sleep. Trying to explain to a buzzing crowd How scale walls of—whatever.

  Someone was missing: only three of us in the car hurtling at above the speed limit on the Garden State Parkway in the starless late-night through New Jersey countryside blank and bleak as a cinder wall. For reckless Mercedes had decided to stay a while longer in the casino—she’d connected with a man who’d offered to drive her home in his Jaguar, or maybe he’d rent a room for them, a suite, at the Borgata.

  Maralena said, vehement and disapproving, “That girl! She gon regret this! Her age, she don’t know shit how to handle a man even some old pissy white asshole like that one. You wait, she gon be sorry.”

  “Her pappy, he gon be damn unhappy. Fuck, I ain’t gon mess with him.”

  Now I was worried, Mercedes hadn’t come back with us. As the girls’ “teacher,” I would be blamed for her absence.

  If something happened to Mercedes, I would be blamed.

  Trying to determine how much money I’d lost that night—tokens I’d gambled away, given away or “loaned”—each time I calculated the sum it was different.

  No less than five hundred dollars, certainly. Six hundred?

  Next I knew, I was being shaken awake by Maralena—“Lyd’ja! Wake up girl, you home.”

  The car wasn’t car-jacked after all. One of my friends had called a relative on her cell, to come pick them up at Grindell Park.

  And there was Harvey helping me to walk the stairs. Agitated and disapproving saying words I couldn’t decipher, chiding me, cursing me, in Aramaic for all that I knew.

  8.

  An evil smell in the apartment. Smells.

  And whenever I went out, and returned, the contrast between the outdoor air—(even the polluted “outdoor air” of Trenton, New Jersey)—was so extreme, I felt faint stepping into my brother’s apartment. Something has died here. Mice, rats in the walls...

  It was always shocking to see, my brother who’d once been over six feet tall, now no taller than I was, and nearly as thin. I slid my arm around his waist to assist his walking and Harvey was resistant at first then unprotesting, ironic. His vertebrae felt loose like marbles caught inside his skin.

  Harvey hated the clinic. Hated rehab, and the clinic where he had to submit to “blood work”—two small vials of blood drawn from his veins that had become increasingly shrunken, difficult of access.

  These were veins in arms, legs, even feet. In case you thought these were veins merely in Harvey’s arms.

  In the days following Atlantic City I awaited the wrath of Mercedes’s pappy. I feared that something had happened to the reckless girl and I would be blamed. I feared that something had happened and I would neve
r see my friends again. Yet I could not bring myself to telephone Maralena on her cell phone, I seemed to know beforehand that my friend had no interest in hearing from me; if I identified myself she would exclaim in her bright vivacious bird-voice Who? Who that? Sorry you callin a wrong number.

  Must be that I loved my brother, that was why I was here.

  Depressing clinic on State Street, Trenton. Not far from Book Bazaar but we had no time for Book Bazaar today.

  Welfare, Family Services, Trenton Rescue Mission. Pawnshops and bail-bond shops amid vacant stores on every street. And the white dome of the state capitol building rising above the ruin of the city, less than a mile away, like a luminous cloud.

  It was trickery, but also desperation. For ever more that I lived with him, and came to know him, and beneath the patina of his difficult personality, came to love him—I wanted to know my brother’s secret for then perhaps I could save his life.

  “How’s my brother doing, d’you think?”—it was a deceptively casual question put to the nurse at the clinic who might’ve seen me once or twice before in my brother’s company, but didn’t really know me; for the medical records of patients are meant to be confidential, and Harvey had not ever revealed to me what his medical condition was except he was “anemic”—had some kind of “low blood count.” And he’d had some sort of “rehab” that had to be related, I supposed, to drugs. The nurse hesitated before she confided in me, in a lowered voice, and in a way to indicate that she assumed that I already knew these somber facts—

  “For HIV patients, it’s the medication—how well it works, and how they tolerate it. How their general health is, of course. Your brother has other issues too, you know—he isn’t using now, he says, but—he was.”

  For the nurse, it was Harvey’s (possible) drug use that was the issue; for me, the stunning news was HIV.

  My brother was HIV-positive!