The Sacrifice Read online

  “Nah I don’t hear nothin’. Aint hearin anything.”

  “Right now. Hear? It’s somebody hurt, maybe . . .”

  “Some junkie or junkie-ho’. No fuckin way we gonna get involved, Ada. You get back here.”

  Ada laughed sharply. Ada detached her mother’s fingers from her wrist. She was a take-charge kind of person. Her teachers had always praised her and now she was a teacher herself, she would take charge. She wasn’t the kind of person to ignore somebody crying for help practically beneath her window.

  Down the steep creaking steps with the swaying banister she was having second thoughts. In this neighborhood even on Sunday morning you could poke your nose into something you’d regret. Ma was probably right: drug dealers, drug users, kids high on crack, hookers and homeless people, somebody with a mental illness . . .

  She couldn’t hear the cries now. Only in her bedroom had she really heard, distinctly.

  Years ago the factory next-door had been a canning factory—Jersey Foods. Truckloads of fish gutted and cooked and processed into a kind of mash, heavily salted, packed into cans. And the cans swept along the assembly line, and loaded into the backs of trucks. Tons of fish, a pervading stink of fish, almost unbearable in the heat of New Jersey summers.

  Jersey Foods had been shut down in 1979 by the State Board of Health. The derelict old building was partially collapsed, following a fire of “suspicious origin”; its several acres of property, including an asphalt parking lot with cracks wide as crevices, as well as the rust-colored building, lay behind a six-foot chain-link fence that was itself badly rusted and partially collapsed. Signs warning NO TRESPASSING had not deterred neighborhood children from crawling through the fence and playing in the factory despite adults’ warnings of danger.

  In the other direction, on the far side of the dead end of Depp Street, was another shuttered factory. Even more than Jersey Foods, United Plastics was off-limits to trespassers for the poisons steeped in its soil.

  You’d think no one would be living in this dead-end part of Pascayne—but rents were cheap here. And no part of inner-city Pascayne was what you’d call safe.

  It was Ada’s hope to be offered a full-time teacher’s job in an outlying school district in the city, or in one of the suburbs. (All of the suburbs were predominantly white but “integrated” for those who could afford to live there.) Then, she’d move her family out of squalid East Ventor.

  Six years she’d been hoping and she hadn’t given up yet.

  “God! Don’t let it be no baby.”

  (Well—it wouldn’t be the first time a baby had been abandoned in this run-down neighborhood by the river. Dead-end streets, shut-up warehouses and factories, trash spilling out of Dumpsters. Some weeks there wasn’t any garbage pickup. A heavy rain, there came flooding from the river, filthy smelly water in cellars, rushing along the gutters and in the streets. Walking to the Camden Street bus Ada would see rats boldly rooting in trash just a few feet away from her ankles. [She had a particular fear of rats biting her ankles and she’d get rabies.] Nasty things fearless of Ada as they were indifferent to human beings generally except for boys who pelted them with rocks, chased and killed them if they could. And what the rats might be dragging around, squeaking and eating and their hairless prehensile tails uplifted in some perky way like a dog, you didn’t want to know. For sure, Ada didn’t want to know. Terrible story she’d heard as a girl, rats devouring some poor little baby left in some alley to die. And nobody would reveal whose baby it was though some folks must’ve known. Or who left the baby in such a place. And the white cops for sure didn’t give a damn or even Family Services and for years Ada had liked to make herself sick and scared in weak moods thinking of rats devouring a baby and so, whenever she saw rats quickly she turned her eyes away.)

  Ada was uneasy remembering Ednetta Frye from the previous morning. She’d seen the distraught woman first crossing Camden Avenue scarcely aware of traffic, then in the Korean grocery, then approaching people in Hicks Square who stared at her as you’d stare at a crazy person. Ednetta had seemed so distracted and disoriented and frightened, nothing like her usual self you could talk and laugh with—it was Ednetta who did most of the talking and the laughing at such times. There’d been occasions when Ednetta had a bruised face and a swollen lip but she’d laugh saying she’d walked into some damn door. You guessed it had to be Anis Schutt shoving the woman around but it wasn’t anything extreme, the way Ednetta laughed about it.

  Ada was at least ten years younger than Ednetta Frye. She’d substitute-taught at the middle school when Ednetta’s daughter Sybilla had been a student there, a year or two ago; she knew the Fryes from the neighborhood, though not well.

  They were neighbors, you could say. East Ventor crossed Crater and if you took the alley back of Crater to Third Street, somewhere right around there Ednetta was living in one of the row houses with that man and her children—how many children, Ada had no idea.

  With her education degree and New Jersey teacher’s certificate Ada Furst liked to think that there was something like a pane of glass between herself and people like the Fryes—it might be transparent, but it was substantial.

  But the day before, Ednetta hadn’t been in a laughing or careless mood. She’d been anxious and frightened. She’d showed Ada photos of Sybilla as if Ada didn’t know what Sybilla looked like—Ada had had to protest, “Ednetta, I know what Sybilla looks like! Why’re you showing me these?”

  Ednetta hadn’t known how to answer this. Stared at Ada with blank slow-blinking eyes as if she hadn’t recognized Ada Furst the schoolteacher.

  “She’s probably with some friends, Ednetta. You know how girls are at that age, they just don’t think.”

  Ednetta said, “S’b’lla know better. She been brought up better. If Anis get disgusted with her, he goin to discipline her—serious. S’b’lla know that.”

  Ada said another time that Sybilla was probably with some friends. Ednetta shouldn’t be worried, just yet.

  “I don’t know how long you’d be wantin me to wait, to be ‘worried,’” Ednetta said sharply. “I told you, Anis don’t allow disrespectful behavior in our house. S’b’lla got to know that.”

  Clutching her photographs Ednetta moved on. Ada watched the woman pityingly as she approached people on the street, imploring them, practically begging them, showing the pictures of Sybilla. Most people acted polite, and some were genuinely sympathetic. There was something not right about what Ednetta was doing, Ada thought. But she had no idea what it was.

  Ada was ashamed now, she’d spoken so inanely to Ednetta Frye. But what did you say? Girls like Sybilla were always “running away”—Ada knew from being a schoolteacher—meaning they were staying with some man likely to be a dozen years older than they were, and giving them drugs. What she could remember of Sybilla Frye from the middle school, the girl was sassy and impudent, restless, couldn’t sit still to concentrate, had a dirty mouth to her, and hung out with the wrong kind of girls. Her grades were poor, she’d be caught with her friends smoking out the back door of the school—in seventh grade. None of that could Ada tell poor Ednetta!

  Ada knocked at the second-floor door of a woman named Klariss—just a thought, she’d ask Klariss to come with her. But Klariss was as vehement as Ada’s mother. “You keep outa that, Ada. You know it’s some drug dealer somebody put a bullet in, or some druggie OD’ing. You get mixed up in it, the cops is gonna mix you up with them and take you all in.”

  Weakly Ada tried to cajole Klariss into at least coming outside with her, in back of the building—“You don’t have to come any farther, K’riss. Just, like—see if anything happens . . .”

  But Klariss was shutting her door.

  In the front vestibule were several tall teenaged boys on their way outside—ebony-black skin, mirthful glances exchanged that signaled their awareness of / disdain for stiff-backed Ada Furst they knew to be some kind of schoolteacher—(these were boys born in Red Rock of parents from t
he Dominican Republic who lived upstairs from Ada)—and for a weak moment Ada considered asking them to accompany her . . . But no, these rude boys would only laugh at her. Or something worse.

  Outside, Ada walked to the rear of the building. No one ever went here, or rarely: behind the tenement was a no-man’s-land of rubble-littered weeds and stunted trees, sloping to a ten-foot wire fence at the riverbank, against which years of litter had been blown and flattened so that it resembled now some sort of plaster art installation. In this lot tenants had dumped trash that included refrigerators, mattresses, chairs and sofas and even badly broken and discolored toilets. (Ada recognized a broken lamp that had once belonged to Kahola, her sister must’ve tossed out here. For shame!)

  Ma and Karliss were right: Ada shouldn’t be here. Hadn’t there been a murder in this block, only a week ago, one in a series of young black boys shot multiple times in the back of the head, dragged into an abandoned house to bleed out and die . . .

  But this person, if it was a person, was alive. Needing help.

  Noise from jetliners in their maddening ascent from Newark Airport a few miles away, that began in the early morning and continued for hours even on weekends. Ada couldn’t hear the crying sound, with those damn jets!

  Ada checked to see: was anyone following her? (The tall black-skinned Dominican boys, who hadn’t said a word to her though she’d smiled at them?) She made her way through the debris-strewn lot to the fence, that overlooked the river. Here she felt overwhelmed by the white, vertically falling autumn sunshine, that blinded her eyes. And the wide Passaic River with its lead-colored swift-running current that looked to her like strange sinewy transparent flesh, a living creature with a hide that rippled and shivered in the sunshine. Oil slicks, shimmering rainbows. The Passaic had once been a beautiful river—Ada knew, from schoolbooks—but since the mid-1800s it had been defiled by factories and mills dumping waste, all sorts of debris, tannery by-products, oil, dioxin, PCBs, mercury, DDT, pesticides, heavy metals. Upriver at Passaic was Occidental Chemical, manufacturers of the most virulent man-made poison with the quaint name—Agent Orange. Supposedly now in the late 1980s in these more enlightened times manufacturers had been made to comply with federal and state environmental laws; cleanups of the river had begun but slowly, at massive cost.

  When she did move away from East Ventor, Ada thought, she would miss the river! That was all that she would miss, even if it was a poisoned river.

  It had long been forbidden to swim in the Passaic—(still, boys did, including Ada’s twelve-year-old nephew Brandon: you saw them on humid summer days swimming off rotting docks)—and most of the fish were dead (if any survived you’d be crazy to eat them but every day, every morning at this time in fact, there were people fishing in the Passaic, mostly older black men with a few women scattered among them).

  Ada’s grandfather Franklin had been one of the fishermen down by the docks, in the last years of his life. He’d been happy then, Ada had wanted to think. Bringing back shiny little black bass for her grandmother to clean, gut, sprinkle with bread crumbs and fry in lard. How much poison they’d all eaten, those years, not knowing any better or indifferent to knowing, Ada didn’t want to speculate.

  This morning the river was bright and choppy. There were a few boats, at a distance. On the farther shore were shut-down factories and mills that hadn’t been operating since she’d been in high school. Vaguely she could remember her father and grandfather working at Pascayne Welding & Machine when she’d been a little girl in the 1960s, then later her father worked at Rand Alkali Pesticides until his health deteriorated and he’d been laid off. (The pesticide factory sprawling among seven acres of “hazardous” land within the Pascayne city limits had been shut down by the New Jersey Board of Health in 1977 for its toxic fumes and carcinogenic materials. There’d been a settlement between Rand Alkali and the State of New Jersey but whatever fines had been paid had made little difference to the sick employees like Ada’s father whose disability pension was less than his Social Security, and the two checks together came to less than he required to live with any dignity in even the shabby tenement at 1192 East Ventor.)

  Ada listened: there came the crying again. Now, it sounded like a plaintive mewing, that had all but given up hope.

  Definitely, the sound was coming from the old Jersey Foods factory next-door.

  The fish-canning factory was a ruin that would one day slide into the river, next time it flooded. Last time, the spring of 1985, filthy river-water had risen into the factories on the riverbanks as into the dank dirty cellars of residences like Ada’s. A powerful stink had prevailed for weeks. The state had declared a disaster area for some and a makeshift shelter had been established in the high school gymnasium and the Pascayne Armory. Fortunately, Ada and her family hadn’t had to be evacuated. Kahola had been living with them then.

  Approaching the factory with its broken, boarded-over windows Ada tried not to think This is a mistake. I am making a mistake.

  There was no man in her life, as there’d been in her sister’s life. Not a single man in Kahola’s life but numerous men. Ada was too free to make decisions of her own, too reckless. It was the price of her female independence and a certain stiffness, resentment even, about inhabiting a fleshy female body. Oh, she was frightened now. But damn if she’d turn back. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  The cries seemed to be coming from the factory cellar. Bad enough to be inside the nasty fish-factory, but—in the cellar! There were steps leading down, a door that had been forced open years ago. Everywhere was filth, storm debris and mud. Ada drew a deep breath and held it.

  She thought—It’s only a cat. A trapped starving cat.

  A wounded cat.

  Planning how she would trap the cat—in a box?—somehow—and take it to an animal shelter.

  (But how practical was that? The shelter would euthanize the cat. Better to keep the cat.)

  (But she couldn’t keep the cat! No room for a scrawny diseased alley cat in their place already too small and cramped for the people who lived there.)

  It was 8:20 A.M. It was a bright cool Sunday morning in October. Ada Furst would recall how she made her way into the cellar down a flight of steps littered with broken glass and pieces of concrete as she continued to call in a quavering voice—“Hello? Hello?” A pale, porous light penetrated the gloom, barely.

  The cry came louder. Desperate.

  Ada blinked into the shadows. Ada took cautious steps. She could hear someone whispering Help me help me help me.

  Then she saw: the girl.

  The girl was lying on the filthy floor in the cellar not far from the entrance, on her side facing Ada, on a strip of tarpaulin, as if she’d been dragged partway beneath a machine. She appeared to be tied, wrists and ankles, behind her back. It looked as if there’d been a wadded rag in her mouth, she’d managed to spit out. And around the girl’s head was a cloth or a rag she’d worked partway off. Her hair was matted with mud and something very smelly—feces? Ada began to gag. Ada began to scream.

  “Oh God. Oh God! My God.”

  A girl of thirteen, or fourteen. On the filthy floor, she looked like a child.

  Ada was stricken with horror believing that the girl was dying: she would be a witness to the girl’s death. She’d wasted so much time—she’d come too late—the girl was shivering uncontrollably, as if convulsing. Ada crouched over her, hardly daring to touch her. Where were her injuries? Was she having a seizure? Ada had a confused sense of blood—a good deal of blood—on the tarpaulin, and on the floor. It seemed to her that the girl had been mutilated somehow. The girl’s bones had been broken, her spine deformed. Ada would swear to this. She would swear she’d seen this. Certainly the girl’s face was swollen, her eyes blackened and bruised. Dark blood had coagulated at her nose, that looked as if it had been broken. How young the girl seemed, hardly more than a child! Her clothing was torn and bloody. Her small breasts wer
e bared, covered in a sort of filthy scribbling. Cruelly her legs were drawn up behind her back, hog-tied.

  Ada was telling the girl she was here, now. She would take care of her, now. The girl would be all right.

  “Is it—Sybilla? Sybilla Frye?”

  Feebly the girl tried to free herself, moaning. Ada pulled at the ropes binding her wrists and her ankles, which were thin ropes, like clothesline—tugged at them until a knot came loose and she could lift the girl in her arms, into a partially sitting position on the filthy tarpaulin. The stench of dog shit was overwhelming. The girl was shivering in terror. Saying what sounded like They say they gon come back an kill me—don let em kill me! When Ada tried to lift her farther, out of the filth on the tarpulin, the girl began to squirm and fight her, panting. She seemed not to know who Ada was. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She fell back heavily, as if lifeless. Ada would not wonder at how readily the knotted rope had come loose, at this time. Ada was begging the girl: “Don’t die! Oh—don’t die!”

  Yes I saw she was Sybilla Frye. I saw that right away.

  Ada Furst ran stumbling and screaming for help.

  A first-floor resident in her building called 911.

  An ambulance from St. Anne’s Hospital, two miles away on the other side of the river, arrived in sixteen minutes.

  The first query on the street would be—She goin to live?

  Then—Who done this to that girl?

  “White Cop”

  OCTOBER 7, 1987

  Jesus help me

  Say they gon kill me, I tell anybody Dear Jesus help me, they hurt me so bad and they will do worse they say next time my mama they gon hurt bad an my lit sister an any nigra they find where I live, they told me they will murder us all