New Jersey Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The next afternoon was sunny again. Miss Crawford went out. She took a breath in the bright sunshine and walked around the block the other direction.

  The boy standing in her way on this side wasn’t C-4 himself. Miss Crawford supposed that meant he was off somewhere doing his drug-dealer business, which was the only time Bigmouth cleared off his square of sidewalk too. This boy here, she didn’t know what his momma called him but on these blocks his name was Late Nite. He stepped aside after the tiniest little look at her, like she wasn’t worth his worry. But she stopped in front of him and tilted her head up—he was a tall one—and she said, “Yo, son. You work for that ugly boy, call himself all letters and numbers?”

  Late Nite drew his eyebrows together. “Say what?”

  “C-4,” she said impatiently. “Came over here to talk to him.”

  “He’s busy.” Late Nite looked like something was funny.

  “Don’t you mock me, boy. He hiding out already?”

  The snicker stopped. “What?”

  “I say, is he hiding out? ’Cause that ain’t gonna help him Friday.”

  “Friday? What’s that?”

  “It’s the day at the end of the week. The day Bigmouth and his crew from over there—” she jerked her chin “—say he gonna come over and clean his clock.”

  “What clock? What you talking about, clock?”

  Miss Crawford regarded the young man. “I don’t like that Bigmouth none,” she finally said, “but Lord Almighty, at least his crew ain’t stupid. Maybe I was wrong. Never you mind.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait, old lady. Just wait. What the hell you saying?” He stepped around in front of her.

  “Watch your tongue, boy. Don’t no one curse at me.”

  Late Nite rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yo, sorry. But lady, what you saying?”

  “Not sure I should tell you now. Like I say, maybe I was wrong.”

  He made a fist, though he didn’t raise it to her. “If you got something you think C-4 oughta know …”

  Miss Crawford took a quick step back, eyeing the clenched hand. She didn’t take her eyes from it as she swallowed and said, “Why I’m here, I was studying on it, and I decided, if one boy gonna be running both blocks, might better be C-4 than Bigmouth.”

  “Running both blocks? Who say?”

  “Bigmouth. Starting Friday. High noon, he be here, like this was some stupid movie. That’s what started me thinking. C-4, he mean and ugly, but he run a business. He don’t be playing no games over here. If we gotta choose between a clown and a hard case, maybe best we have a hard case. I imagine, C-4 make a deal, probably he stick to it.”

  “That’s for sure.” The young man waved it aside. “You telling me Bigmouth and his crew coming here Friday, to get up in C-4’s grille?”

  “How many times I gotta say it before it sink through your thick skull? Bigmouth, he’s thinking this the time to do it, because of the amnesty.”

  “Amnesty? What the—what do that mean?”

  She gave a sigh. “The police amnesty, you natural fool. All them cops C-4 be paying to watch his backside, they getting amnesty this week if they sign a paper says they ain’t gonna protect you all anymore. The mayor, he wanted them to have to tell all about you too, but that got negotiated. You know that word?”

  “Course I know that word,” Late Nite snapped. “You mean—”

  “Yes, young man, I mean you on your own now. You tell C-4, he see any of ’em coming for their payoff, he better run, because from now on they gonna be ratting on anybody tries to offer them money. That was part of the negotiation.” She looked to see was he following her, then added, “Of course, Bigmouth, he on his own too.”

  He stared at her. “Old lady, how come you telling me this?”

  “’Cause you say C-4 too busy to talk to me.”

  “That ain’t what I mean. I—”

  “Oh, I know what you mean, boy. I come over here because next week or the week after, new cops is gonna be asking to be paid off by you punks. Things don’t never change. But like I say, C-4 a better bet 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.”<
br />
  “That’s very good.” Miss Crawford nodded, satisfied. “Yes, I believe that’s very good.”

  Though she wasn’t one for excitement, come Friday morning Miss Crawford was just a little bit wistful that she wasn’t a fly on the wall in that basement hole Bigmouth called his headquarters. She wasn’t positive what the NPD had planned, but it involved special officers, not the usual ones on these blocks, who were still deep in the pockets of the drug dealers and everybody knew it but no one could prove it. Miss Crawford did go out and sit on the stoop across the street early in the morning, so she saw C-4 and his boys coming around the corner. She was interested to see that the officers who swept them up were in plainclothes, so C-4 and his boys wouldn’t scatter nor throw their guns away, while the ones who pounded on the headquarters door just after so they could grab Bigmouth and his crew getting set to head over to C-4’s territory, they were in uniforms. One of them in uniform was Officer Joyce, which gratified Miss Crawford. She was also gratified that the whole operation was so cleverly planned that no shots were fired at all. Though still, it was a good thing it had happened in the morning, while the children were at school. No use having them in danger, hanging out on the stoops and all. There was no need for them to see it, they’d hear all about it by suppertime, C-4 and Bigmouth and all their boys in jail.

  Miss Crawford went home and turned on the radio while she baked a sweet potato pie. She listened to WBGO because of the old-school jazz they played, which she and her Teddy had always enjoyed, and then the news came on. It told about the alleged gang members arrested, most of them in possession of weapons, just that very morning. The police suspected these young men of dealing drugs, though they couldn’t prove that yet. All very well, thought Miss Crawford as the radio went back to music, but those guns every one of them were carrying was the real problem for those boys, and that problem was very bad. Being caught with a gun like that was a sentence for sure. How long it was going to be, well, that depended on if you had anything to say that the police wanted to hear. Those boys would be racing to sell each other out, starting already.

  The timer dinged and Miss Crawford took the pie out of the oven and set it to cool. Then she settled herself in front of the TV with the cat on her lap. The new mayor was going to be making a speech, about how the people of Newark were taking the city back. Miss Crawford wanted to hear it.

  NEWARK BLACK: 1940–1954

  BY C.K. WILLIAMS

  Vailsburg (Newark)

  Black coal with a thunderous shush

  plunging into the clearly evil-inhabited coal bin.

  The black furnace into whose maw

  you could feed paper to watch it curl to black char.

  The hats women wore with black, mysterious veils,

  even your mother. The “mascara” she’d apply

  more meticulously than she did anything else.

  With her black lashes she was almost somebody else.

  The incomprehensible marks on blackboards at school

  you conquered without knowing quite how.

  The black ink in the inkwell. The metal pens

  with blots that diabolically slid from their nibs.

  Black slush, after the blizzard had passed

  and the diesel buses and trucks were fuming again,

  but you still remembered how blackly lovely

  the branches of trees looked in new snow.

  The gunk on the chain of your bike.

  The black stuff always under your nails.

  Where did it come from, how to get it out?

  Even between your toes sometimes there was black.

  The filthy tires hung on hooks in the garage-store

  we had to pass through to get to our shul.

  Black Book of Europe, first proof of the war on Jews—

  illicit volume, as forbidden to Jewish children as porn.

  Black people the states in the South began to send up,

  keeping what they needed for cheap labor and maids

  and exporting the rest: a stream of discarded humans,

  with the manufacturing plants just then closing down.

  The photo of black children in the ’20s, frolicking

  on the bench of the Lincoln statue by the courthouse.

  I took the bus once to go sit in its lap, his lap:

  how kind he looked, how surprisingly hard his bronze lap.

  The other statue, Captive’s Choice, in a park:

  the girl kidnapped by Indians who forgets she’s white,

  then, “saved,” gives up Indian husband and children.

  Who decided it should have been that, and there?

  The first black kids in our school, fine with me,

  because Clarence Murphy, sixteen in fourth grade,

  stopped beating me up because I’d killed Christ

  and raged instead with even more venom at them.

  I was afraid of Clarence but not of black people,

  except that day on the bus: the sweat-stench of men

  who’d worked hard and not had time yet to change.

  Though I already knew it was shameful, I fled.

  “Blackballs” to keep Jews, Italians, and Irish,

  then naturally blacks, out of the country clubs

  in Maplewood and Montclair. The unfunny jokes

  about signs on their gates: No Dogs, Niggers, or Jews.

  Our gangster hero, Longie Zwillman, who had a black car;

  so did our mayors—bought off, we were told by “interests.”

  Irish, Italian, finally at last a black mayor:

  all the bought-off ones with their Cadillacs of corruption.

  Thick soot on the bricks of the mills by the tracks,

  smoke billowing, then extinguished forever.

  Rivers with rainbows of oil on their surface,

  their beds eternally black venomous chemical sludge.

  Miles of black turnpike and parkway pavement

  scrolled out onto the soil of the no-longer farms.

  You could speed now from one place to another

  and not see the slums, the factories in broken-eyed ruin.

  Everywhere ruin—did nobody see it arriving?

  Urban flight, urban decay, shopping centers and malls,

  the department stores downtown shuttered,

  then small businesses, theaters, and the rest.

  The finally unrecognizable city, done in by us all.

  Only the ever benevolent Lincoln, unblackened

  by time or pollution, emblem of promise and hope,

  patiently waited, patiently waits.

  PART II

  ROMANCE & NOSTALGIA

  LOLA

  BY JONATHAN SANTLOFER

  Hoboken

  I met Lola on the PATH, the train that goes under the Hudson River, a thought I tried to deny twice a day when I rode it back and forth to Hoboken, the idea of the tunnel suddenly sprouting a leak, water shattering subway windows, pouring in, drowning me, always on the edge of my mind, which is why I focused on everything else.

  Lola was sitting across from me, head buried in a paperback, one of those romance novels with a girl in the arms of a brawny he-man. Her black-red nails tap-tap-tapping the back cover had me hypnotized until she looked up, blue eyes lined with kohl, dark arching brows as if she were about to ask a question though she wasn’t looking at me, just reacting to the sound of the subway doors opening and closing, but it was enough, a moment, a connection. She went back to her book and I noticed the gold band on her finger, which was disappointing, not like I was thinking we’d get married or anything, but I’d have preferred she was single, which makes things easier.

  She was a little younger than me, maybe thirty though I’m no good at ages, no good at numbers of any kind, which is why they never let me do the measuring at the place where I build made-to-order stretchers for successful artists, which I don’t mind, I like making them—I’ve always been good with my hands, and it’s quiet work, just me a
nd two other guys, and I take pride in it, sanding the edges and making sure the corners are perfectly square because there’s nothing worse than a lopsided painting—though sometimes I get a little resentful that I spend my days building stretchers for other artists, but that’s life, right?