The Sacrifice (37 page)
Was this happening? He’d thought that it was not going to happen. In the jammed traffic, some vehicles were being closely inspected but most were not. Vehicles driven by black youths were the ones being searched. Lone drivers and middle-age or older drivers, not. But they were asking him if he was carrying a concealed weapon or anything that was “sharp” and he tried to answer them saying
No sir
but the spine-pain came so sudden, he nearly fainted. “Oh Jesus God”—whisper like a prayer escaped his lips.
His right leg lost strength, a nerve tingling and aching from his buttock to the sole of his foot.
“Watch it!”—the elder of the cops regarded him with a kind of involuntary sympathy, ravaged-looking black man, wincing pain in his face. There is no disguising such pain. “Lean against the car, Mr. Schutt.”
They hadn’t drawn their pistols. They had captured their prey but not a dangerous prey after all. The pain came so bad, even leaning onto the car, grabbing at the roof wasn’t enough to keep him standing. Apologizing to the cops
Sorry, oh Jesus I am sorry, my leg . . .
He was on his knees on the pavement. White cops standing over him uncertain what to do with him. He’d tried to stand, you could see he had tried. But he had not the strength, he’d sunk to his knees on the pavement. And it was a confused time. Not far away, there were pounding feet. Black boys running. Cops shouting at them. Sounds of sirens. Like a wounded animal Anis groaned aloud in misery, indignation, fury scrambling to haul himself back to his feet, to stand upright and confront the cops pitying him. And the older cop gripping his arm as if to help him, and the younger cop hovering close, and both of them talking to him and the words had no meaning, he’d ceased listening for there went Anis’s hand into the left-leg pocket,
fumbled to grip the gun, nickel-plated handle, and his finger on the trigger that was always larger than you expect, and in a movement graceless but expedient as all of Anis’s movements had been since the cops had first approached him in his vehicle he managed to remove the heavy revolver from the pocket, aimed it upward, and fired—a quick shot—and another shot, and another—the first bullet struck the older cop on the underside of his jaw blowing much of the jaw away, second bullet seemed to have struck the cop’s forehead above his right eye tearing away bone and gristle, and the third bullet, and the fourth and fifth bullets, striking the younger cop in his face and neck where the bulletproof vest couldn’t save him so taken by surprise his face was an utter blank like a moon, in an instant shattered and bloody, broken.
The white cops were down. Within seconds it had happened. Anis gripped the gun lifting it in both hands, in an ecstasy of triumph aiming the long barrel at whoever was approaching, and another time fired, the final bullet, though his finger continued to jerk the trigger on the emptied chambers even as he was being shot, he hadn’t seen where the final bullet had gone, eyes shut as he dragged himself along the pavement, beyond the front grille of his vehicle; in his confused memory this was a dead end on Ventor, by the river, he would crawl into someplace on the dock, a hiding place of the kind boys knew about, one of those big pipes into which he’d crawled as a boy; a pipe not so long you couldn’t see the dim halo of daylight at the farther end, and you could hide there. Still, they were firing at him. Yelling at him and at one another and their shouts sheer sound, animal-sounds of rage. The long-barrel gun had slipped from his fingers. Dragging his useless legs, his broken spine. Muscled shoulders, thick-muscle neck, they were firing in a half-circle around him crouched and each of them aiming to kill. And his face pressed now against the part-collapsed chain-link fence, and his torso, outstretched arms . . .
This was the dead end of Ventor he could not crawl past to get to the dock and the river and the big open pipes, Anis Schutt would die here straining against the badly rusted fence like an animal that has crawled away to die amid mummified remnants of newspaper, styrofoam litter caught in the chain-link fence where even now he could anticipate the weight of a booted foot on the back of his neck.
Shooter down! Finish him.
Though it is set decades later,
The Sacrifice
is strongly linked to my novel
them
(1969). The Detroit “riot” of July 1967—(more accurately called, by individuals who’d lived through it, the Twelfth Street Riot)—as well as the Newark “riot” of July 1967—resulted in a number of carefully researched studies into “black urban civil disorder” in subsequent years, but these were not available to me at the time of the composition of
them
.
Among the many books, articles, and online materials consulted for
The Sacrifice
are three which have been of particular interest:
The Algiers Motel Incident
by John Hersey (1968)
The Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders
(1968)
The Special New York State Grand Jury Report in the Tawana Brawley Case
(October 7, 1988)
PHOTO BY STAR BLACK
JOYCE CAROL OATES
is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers
We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde
, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the
New York Times
bestsellers
The Accursed
and
The Falls
, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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With Shuddering Fall
(1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1967)
Expensive People
(1968)
them
(1969)
Wonderland
(1971)
Do with Me What You Will
(1973)
The Assassins
(1975)
Childwold
(1976)
Son of the Morning
(1978)
Unholy Loves
(1979)
Angel of Light
(1981)
Mysteries of Winterthurn
(1984)
Solstice
(1985)
You Must Remember This
(1987)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
(1990)
Black Water
(1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
(1993)
What I Lived For
(1994)
We Were the Mulvaneys
(1996)
Man Crazy
(1997)
Broke Heart Blues
(1999)
Blonde
(2000)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
(2007)
COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY NAGIB EL DESOUKY / ARCANGEL IMAGES
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SACRIFICE
. Copyright © 2015 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Title page photograph © artcphotos/Shutterstock, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-06-233297-4
EPub Edition JANUARY 2015 ISBN 9780062332998
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