High Crime Area (13 page)

“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—bull
shit.
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.”

“But I—I don't have six hundred dollars...”

In fact, of course I did have six hundred dollars. I had somewhere beyond sixteen hundred dollars, in a banking account near the University.

This was my fellowship, or rather part of it. Monthly installments were wired to the account, not much, but enough to cover my expenses month to month. I had to suppose that Harvey too had such an arrangement at the seminary, or had had such an arrangement before he'd dropped out.

Leander leaned close to me as if he could read my thoughts. I felt a sensation of faintness, quickness of breath. I thought
He can't hurt me here in front of witnesses.

Yet—were there “witnesses” on Camden Avenue? Traffic moving in an erratic stream of stops and starts—a predominance of vans, trucks, buses—a scattering of dark-skinned individuals waiting at a bus stop—a few grim-faced pedestrians. In this part of Trenton, no one dallied: everyone had a mission, to get somewhere else. If Leander threatened me, or attacked me, would anyone so much as glance in my direction? Would anyone
care
?

He was laughing at me. Between us there was a bond of some kind: as if we'd known each other in the past, intimately.

The Maori tattoo: an eerie curdled-cream-color, bracketing half his face like sharks' teeth.

“He say you' name is—
Lyd-jai?
You gon be my friend, girl—you see. There's ways of payin back what you' brother owe, we work out just fine betwin us,
Lyd-jai.
”

These were ominous words. I did not quite hear these words.

I did hear
Lyd-jai
. Harvey must have spoken with Leander just recently, without my knowledge, telling Leander my name.

Leander reached out to touch my face—to frame my face in his hands. His movements were snaky-quick, I had no time to pull away.

Long fingers framing my face, a pressure of thumbs at the corners of my eyes.

“You be pretty-girl, you' eyes some kinda
blue
—like sky. But not Trenton sky.”

Leander spoke with a mocking sort of tenderness. I stood very still, not breathing, just slightly on my toes, as he was pulling upward at my head, straining my neck.

He leaned his savage smiling face to mine. His nostrils were enormous. And the dark-purplish lips enormous. At the corners of my eyes, the pressure of his fingers tightened. I tried not to panic thinking
He could gouge out my eyes. He could snap my neck. He is restraining himself.

Instead, Leander stooped and took hold of my lower lip in his teeth. It wasn't a kiss—it was a bite: a quick sharp nasty bite of my lower lip.

Then, a sudden release.

Laughter in my face, and release.

Dazed, I stumbled away. I managed to find a tissue in my handbag, to press against my bleeding mouth.

At first I wasn't sure if it was blood that I was tasting, or saliva that seemed to be flooding my mouth.

If he is infected. HIV, AIDS.

I walked away—no one on the street seemed to have noticed Leander and me.

Or, if anyone had noticed, he had not intervened.

I was headed for—where?—a grocery store. Pinneo's Market: a corner store with a small littered parking lot.

Possibly Leander was watching me, hands on his hips, standing behind me. Or maybe he'd disappeared.

Grocery store!—food store! There was virtually no food in Harvey's refrigerator. I recalled my parents enjoining me to shop for Harvey, cook for him, make sure that he ate... But I had to feed myself, too. By mid-morning of this first full day in Trenton, I was ravenously hungry.

In the little grocery store, which looked to be very old, family-owned, smelling of Mediterranean spices, cloves of raw garlic, black olives, I pushed a rickety cart along narrow, congested aisles of mostly canned goods. Out of nowhere a boldly bright girl of about nineteen, with toffee-colored skin, and dyed-cranberry hair in stiff cornrows, approached me. At first I thought she worked in the store, then I saw that she was a customer, or had followed me inside.

“Say, girl—that my cousin L'nd'r I saw you just now talking with. Girl, I wouldn't.”

“Wouldn't—what?”

“Wouldn't hang out none with L'nd'r. That be a mistake. Get too close with that type, y'know? L'nd'r no common cit'zen.”

The girl's smile was a sneering sort of smile, yet not unfriendly. She was a gorgeous young woman of about my height, much fleshier than I was, with thick crimson lips and heavily made-up eyes like a model in a rap-music video.

“Girl, you hearin me? You lookin kinda—lost. What you got to know is, my cousin L'nd'r is not one for trifling.”

“He—he's a friend of my brother's...”

The girl laughed as if I'd said something witty.

“Girl, he ain't no friend of any
brother
. Believe me, girl. You better run-like-hell in some other direction from L'nd'r is what I'm saying.”

“Thank you. I will ‘run-like-hell' when Leander comes near, I
promise
.”

The girl laughed. She introduced herself as Maralena. I meant to continue shopping but she followed close after me. “There's no good buyin ‘fresh produce' in any store like this. It's all old-stuff, see. You get it home, it's goin brown. Just get like can-things, bottle-things, like that. Freezer-things, you got to check the date. He put the old crap up front, the new stuff at the back. You got to use your thinking, a place like this. He gonna cheat you he see you some white-girl dropped by ain't gon be a steady customer.”

I felt a sensation of warmth for Maralena. She looked nothing like her dark-skinned cousin but she was as exotic as he with her beautifully cornrowed hair and glamorous eyes. She smelled strongly of something fruity, sweet—hair pomade? Her mouth was swollen-looking as if it had been vigorously kissed and sucked.

She wore clothes in layers. Long-sleeved black T-shirt over a tight little black short-sleeved T-shirt. Tight black skirt that barely covered her buttocks and beneath thin black leggings and black boots to the knee.

I'd placed a few items in the rickety cart. Pasta in a cardboard box, cans of “spaghetti” sauce. Boxes of cereal. A jar of applesauce, a quart container of yogurt, a container of vitamin D–fortified milk. And cans of condensed soup. At the checkout counter I hoped Maralena would have gone away but there she was waiting for me, checking her cell phone. When she moved her head, the cornrowed plaits rippled.

“I better walk you to you' car, girl. Maybe come along, you goin to Grindell Park. Don't want nobody hittin on you.”

4.

Why are you here. Why living in such a place.

What are these people to you. Harvey, answer me!

But Harvey shrugged off my questions. Harvey seemed scarcely aware of his surroundings. Of his old life as a seminary student he'd brought few clothes, books in boxes scattered about the apartment, folders of manuscript drafts, notes, and photocopied texts. (The texts were in languages unknown to me—extinct languages like Aramaic, Attic Greek, Koine Greek, Sanskrit and Latin.) Often Harvey hid away in his bedroom—(a squalid room he needn't have forbade me to enter, one glance inside was enough to dissuade me)—working on translations of certain of these texts, or on his own “private” project.

This was encouraging, I thought. Harvey was still connected with his scholarly work; he had not given up entirely.

“Certainly I haven't
quit
. I never
quit
. I am in a kind of
suspended time,
that's all.”

“But—is it an official leave? Does your advisor know where you are? Are you still getting money from your fellowship?”

“I refuse to be interrogated,” Harvey said coldly. “Worry about your own fellowship.”

Several times, I begged Harvey to share with me what he was working on. To read to me, for instance, a passage of Biblical Aramaic, which I had never heard read aloud, and then to translate it for me.

“No. Not possible.”

“But why not?”

“I said
no
.”

“But—I'm interested in Aramaic. In the cosmology of the Hebrew Bible. My work with the Eweian text, the theme of the ‘creation of the world and of the first man and woman'—all those instances of ‘sacred births'—I'm very interested, Harvey.”

“You don't know enough to be ‘interested' in my subject.”

Coldly and cruelly my brother spoke. But then, a moment later, I saw that his creased face shone with tears.

He'd begun to forget, he told me. His knowledge of ancient languages was “leaking” from his brain. He had to work many times longer at translating just a passage, than he'd worked a year ago... Sometimes he couldn't recognize a word and when he looked it up in a dictionary he saw that it was a common word, one he knew well.

I persuaded Harvey to show me the photocopied text which he was trying to translate and of course it was incomprehensible to me. Yet, like the musical cadences of Leander's and Maralena's speech, fascinating.

Codes to be decoded. Secrets to be revealed.

Just to acknowledge the forbidden mystery. To approach it.

There was a room in Harvey's apartment that must have been at one time a child's room. A nursery.

A small room overlooking, at a little distance, desolate Grindell Park where drug dealers and their customers did business through daylight hours and well into twilight when their furtive and unvarying figures dissolved into night.

Take the room, no one's using it, Harvey said. He'd given up expecting me to leave.

I had given up expecting to leave, for the time being.

For I was shopping now for Harvey, and preparing meals for him, as for myself.

I was able to work in these new surroundings, I'd discovered. A curious thrill came over me opening my familiar Eweian text in this new place, spreading out my papers, translator's dictionary, drafts. Harvey's apartment was not wired and so I could work on my computer only as a word processor; but if I wanted to do research on the Internet, I could take the laptop to the Grindell Park library which was open for limited hours three days a week, and plug it in there.

My room I swept, cleaned. There was even a table to serve as a desk and another, lower table, upon which I could spread my things.