High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Thank you, Brother Chester! That was what this congregation was thirsting to hear.

  The Preacher was invited to stay for supper with the Reverend and his family. But the Preacher explained he could not stay that night. He was in transit for he was badly needed elsewhere.

  There is always terrible need. Sometimes I think we dare not lay our heads down to sleep, or we will lose all that we’ve gained.

  The Preacher was given to such pronouncements, grave and matter-of-fact. It was not always clear what the Preacher’s meaning was, yet you did not doubt that the Preacher knew.

  You will come back to us? Brother?

  Of course I will come back to you, Brother. In my heart I will not depart.

  The collection of $362 was divided between them—Reverend Tindall and the Preacher who was known to the Reverend as Chester Cash.

  In the alley beside the asphalt-sided church the Preacher’s van was parked.

  The van was dark as an undersea creature. Even its windows were dark-tinted. On the roof of the van was a wooden cross painted a luminous white and secured with ropes and on this was written in crimson block letters

  T

  H

  E

  CHURCH OF ABIDING HOPE

  U

  S

  A

  The van was a 2000 Chrysler minivan and its chassis dented and scarified but it appeared to have been recently painted. It had been recently painted in some haste for there were smears of iridescent dark-purple paint on several of the windows like fingerprints.

  From the threshold of the Church of Abiding Hope, you could see the van parked in the alley. But you could not see into the van for the windows were tinted.

  It must have been that the Preacher had no family remaining in Detroit for he had not sought them out and did not seem to wish to speak of them now. When Reverend Tindall asked after the Preacher’s mother, the Preacher glanced downward and replied in a murmur—Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

  Reverend Tindall asked after the Preacher’s ten-year-old son who’d accompanied the Preacher to the Church of Abiding Hope the previous spring.

  The Preacher frowned as if trying to recall this son. As if just perceptibly startled by the question.

  Nostradamus has chosen another pathway, it seems. He has gone to live with his mother and her people in the Upper Peninsula.

  A fine boy, Reverend Tindall said. You had said, your son would follow you into your ministry?

  He was but a child then. He has not put aside childish ways. And he dwells now among Philistines—it is his choice.

  The Preacher spoke sadly yet not without a shiver, a twitching of whiskered jaws, as if the memory of a young son’s betrayal were fresh to him, and painful.

  Reverend Tindall seemed about to ask another question about the lost son but then thought better of it. For the Preacher was breathing quickly and stroking his whiskered jaws unsmiling.

  By His light, the Preacher said in a lowered and quavering voice, I walked through darkness.

  Brother, Amen!—Reverend Tindall clamped the Preacher on his shoulder.

  Because the Preacher was a frugal man, and chose to spend his money solely on necessities, he lived in the minivan much of the time when he was in transit. In the van he kept clothes, books and documents, a miniature kerosene stove, canned food. It was a part of the Preacher’s ministry to visit small churches across the country and to deliver guest sermons where he was welcomed. Abiding Hope is a family, the Preacher said. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. We are one, inside our skins. Everywhere, we recognize one another.

  As he stood on the threshold of the little asphalt-sided church on Labrosse Street, Detroit, speaking with Reverend Tindall in the early evening of April 12, 2006, the Preacher glanced at the van parked in the alley a few yards away. His deep-socketed eyes encircled the van. Clearly there was something about the van, its very stillness, its iridescent-purple chassis and the surprise of the luminous white cross secured to its roof, that riveted his attention.

  Brother, are you sure you can’t stay the night? Or at least have supper with us?—Reverend Tindall seemed disappointed. His glaucoma-dimmed eyes blinked and blurred.

  The Preacher thanked him kindly. The Preacher had now the keys to his van in his hand. With a wide smile the Preacher explained that he was bound for the West Coast, for Carmel, where a new ministry in the Church of Abiding Hope awaited him.

  7

  I-80 East Michigan, Ohio April 13–14, 2006

  Take my hand, he said.

  But the child would not.

  I say to you, son—take my hand.

  When the quivering child did not lift his hand, did not obey, Daddy Love seized the hand, and squeezed the little fingers with such force, the smallest finger audibly cracked.

  Inside the gag, the child screamed.

  On I-80 east a continuous stream of vehicles.

  On I-80 east Daddy Love drove at just slightly below the speed limit taking care that the white-painted wooden cross on the roof of his vehicle wouldn’t be shaken by wind and blown off. He was a patient driver who took little note that vehicles were constantly passing him. In the wake of enormous trailer-trucks, the Chrysler minivan swayed slightly.

  Like souls passing, Daddy Love thought. The stream of vehicles.

  He was among them and yet elevated. It was Daddy Love’s particular destiny that amid the mass of humankind only a very few like him were possessed of the power to see.

  Eastern religions believed in the “third eye”—in the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. Through meditation, through zealous religious practices, the “third eye” opened and vision flooded the brain.

  Daddy Love was one of these. From boyhood he’d been gifted with such visions. Like the power of X-rays to see through flesh. Daddy Love saw.

  It was a particular insight of the brain. An activated and excited area of the brain just behind the eyes. The frontal lobe, it was called. Neurons fired in mysterious surges like heat lightning soundless in a black summer sky.

  But such scientific terms, mere words, meant little to Daddy Love who understood how words were purely invented and how if you were a master of words, you were a master of men.

  Ordinary individuals could not understand. Ordinary individuals comprised somewhere beyond 99 percent of Homo sapiens.

  You had to suppose that the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and so Nirvana—(or maybe that was the Hindu heaven not the Buddha heaven)—at about the age of Daddy Love when he’d been, in that long-ago lifetime, a gangling boy named Chester Czechi who’d first seen.

  He’d known he was a special case. He’d known that he would be forever a pilgrim in his life, embarked upon a (secret, thrilling) pilgrimage, utterly unguessed-at by others.

  Even his family. Especially his family.

  (Daddy Love smiled, recalling. He had not seen his fucking “family”—fucking “relatives”—who’d betrayed him to the Wayne County, Michigan, juvenile authorities, aged twelve, in twenty-six years.)

  Now on the interstate highway what the ordinary eye saw wasn’t the Chrysler minivan but the luminous white cross secured to the van’s roof.

  The cross was approximately four feet in height. The horizontal plank was approximately three feet.

  The cross did shudder in the wind. But Daddy Love, who was a natural-born carpenter, a visionary with a talent for using his hands, had secured it tight, with both wires and rope.

  The cross was a curiosity: some observers might smile. (In recognition of the sacred cross, or in condescension that a cross might be so awkwardly affixed to the roof of a minivan.) Some might try to read the crimson letters hand-printed on the cross.

  Most would lose interest and look away after a few seconds.

  State troopers looking for a beige, battered van on the interstate would take little interest in this iridescent-purple minivan in the service of the Church of Abiding Hope.

  Also,
the van’s license plates were New Jersey. The child had been taken from the Libertyville Mall in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

  Daddy Love loved to be invisible. In the eyes of ordinary mortals and fools, the superior man can make himself so.

  Spray-painting the van iridescent purple and securing the white cross to the van’s roof was a means of rendering the van invisible.

  Daddy Love had cultivated such strategies in the past. To move through life invisible at will you had to create distractions that drew the attention of ordinary individuals.

  The ordinary individual, Daddy Love had discovered, was not so very different from a child in his perceptions and expectations.

  Hunting his prey, for instance, Daddy Love rendered himself close to invisible. He wore the clothing of an ordinary man, exactly what an ordinary man might wear to the mall on a weekday afternoon, to buy a few items at Sears, Home Depot.

  A nylon jacket, unzipped. T-shirt, jeans or work-trousers. Not-new and not-expensive running shoes.

  On his head, a baseball cap. But not a team cap. No discernible color, maybe gray, or beige.

  The whiskers were conspicuous, that was a fact. But the whiskers were of a pale powdery-gray color they had not been at the Libertyville Mall and the tinted glasses hiding the eyes rendered the eyes invisible and unidentifiable.

  (He’d heard, on the van radio turned low, the bulletin-news. Child-abduction-news out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. “Breaking news” it was breathlessly called. Had to laugh to hear a witness report how, in the mall, a few minutes before the child was taken, the witness hadn’t seen anyone watching the mother and child—no one suspicious.)

  Witnesses never get it right. Witnesses see only what their eyes see, not what is invisible.

  Once. Daddy Love had wrapped white gauze and tape around his (left, bare) leg to the knee and hobbled most convincingly on a crutch. An old ruse of Ted Bundy’s and immediately recognizable to an enlightened eye but the foolish trusting eye of a young mother who’d brought her eight-year-old to a playground—in Carbondale, Illinois—hadn’t recognized it. Excuse me ma’am could you help me—I’m having trouble getting this trunk open—damn crutch gets in the way…

  Hunting his prey at the Libertyville Mall, Ypsilanti. Here was the Midwest. He’d never have risked Ann Arbor which was where the university was, and not really the Midwest for everyone there was from somewhere else or was bound for somewhere else. But Ypsilanti was the very heart of the Midwest: a nothing-place.

  He’d hunted his prey at the mall for several days in succession. He’d had a premonition, one of his boys was being prepared for him, soon.

  Both inside the mall, and outside, he’d hunted. And inside again. Mixing easily with other Daddy-shoppers for he was in no hurry.

  Kindly Daddy Love held open doors for young-mother shoppers with children. They were grateful murmuring Thank you! Nice of you.

  Scarcely a glance at Daddy Love, as they passed through the entrance. Some of them pushing strollers and others gripping children’s hands.

  They moved on. Not a backward glance.

  Of every one hundred children perhaps one interested Daddy Love in the depths of his soul. Of every two hundred children perhaps one excited him.

  Of every thousand children perhaps one very much excited him.

  Daddy Love trusted to the higher power that streamed through him, to allow him to see.

  He would be immediately alerted: a child destined to be one of his.

  A child who required, for the salvation of his soul, not the merely adequate birth-parent, but a parent like Daddy Love.

  The hunt was thrilling. The hunt was ceaseless. The hunt was one in which Daddy Love participated, invisible.

  In public places: malls, city squares, amusement parks, camping sites and hiking trails, beaches. Rarely near schools, for such territories were dangerous.

  And rarely playgrounds of course. (With a few exceptions over the course of twenty-five years.)

  The best time for the hunt was late afternoon shading into dusk. Before lights came on. Before the eye quite adjusted to the fading light.

  People were tired then. Young mothers, their shoulders sagging.

  Daddy Love was quietly thrilled by the hunt. Daddy Love was not ever impatient or agitated but passed among ordinary individuals as if he were one of them.

  Except Daddy Love was not one of them. He’d never been!

  Daddy Love ceaselessly, ingeniously inventive. Daddy Love had invented the Preacher, for instance.

  The Preacher’s dark garb, with the surprise of the Preacher’s crimson vest and neck-scarf. The Preacher’s grave and gracious manner, the blessing of the Preacher’s fingers, and the Preacher’s joyful smile.

  Daddy Love was younger than the Preacher, for sure. Daddy Love was not so self-regarding and so pious. Daddy Love liked to joke, and the Preacher had never been known to joke.

  Daddy Love considered the Preacher in the way that you might consider an uncle who’s good-hearted and sincere and just not cool.

  If women touched the Preacher’s hand, or drew their fingers along his arm, or leaned to him, to smile, to murmur in his ear inviting him to have dinner with them, the Preacher did not quite know how to respond except with a stiff smile. But Daddy Love knew.

  The Preacher was intriguing to Daddy Love, but only for a limited period of time. The Preacher did make money, upon occasion. You could not lock eyes with the Preacher’s gravely kindly gaze and not feel the urge to open your wallet to him for in giving money to the Preacher you are giving money to Jesus Christ Himself—so it seemed. Yet with relief Daddy Love tore off the Preacher’s clothes, folded them and put them away in his trunk, in the rear of the van. With relief Daddy Love shook and shimmied in his body, loose-limbed as a goose, a younger guy, a guy with a sly smile, a guy who grooved to rock music, rap music, a guy you’d like to have a drink with.

  Daddy Love was a man whom other men liked. And certainly, a man whom women liked.

  Children, too. Boys younger than twelve.

  Daddy Love was that restless American type. Except he’d settled (more or less) in the East, or the Midwest, he’d have looked like a rancher in Wyoming. Or a (slightly older) hitch-hiker making his way to the West Coast.

  Daddy Love couldn’t say was he happiest in motion, in his van, which he’d painted and repainted several times since its purchase, traveling east or traveling west on I-80, or was he happiest once he’d come to rest for a while, a few months at least, maybe a year, once he’d established a home-site. Wherever Daddy Love was, there was his kingdom.

  Such strategies of evasion, flight, and escape! No ordinary individual could hope to understand.

  Son you are coming home!

  Soon you will be home, and safe.

  Son d’you hear me? I think you do son.

  Daddy Love loves YOU.

  Through the countryside of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and across the Delaware River into New Jersey, these many hours, hours bleeding into hours, Daddy Love never ceased to address the child behind him, in the rear of the van.

  Daddy Love is bringing you to your true home for Daddy Love is your true Daddy who loves YOU.

  Inside the ingenious Wooden Maiden the child made not a whimper.

  Inside the gag, not a muffled cry.

  Daddy Love was a stern daddy and yet loving. He’d taped a split to the little broken finger. Child-bones heal quickly but must not heal crookedly.

  The child would learn quickly: each act of disobedience, however small, would be immediately punished. No exceptions!

  Zero tolerance!

  And when the child obeyed, and was a true son to Daddy Love, immediately he would be rewarded with food, water, the comfort of Daddy Love’s strong arms and the gentle intonations of Daddy Love’s voice. This is my son in whom I am well pleased.

  Quickly then the child would learn. They all did.

  He’d read of “conditioning”—the great American psychologist B. F. Skinner and before him
the nineteenth-century Russian Ivan Pavlov. But his natural instinct was to reward, and to punish, in such a way as to instill love, fear, respect for and utter allegiance to Daddy Love in the child-subject.

  The child was to be played like a musical instrument. Sometimes gently, and sometimes not-so-gently. For Daddy Love was always in control.

  When he’d first sighted the child in the mall he had estimated that the child was about four years old. For Daddy Love, this was a quite young child.

  By the age of eleven or twelve, the child was less desirable. The child was a pubescent. Daddy Love had little patience with pubescents and still less with adolescents.

  The younger the child, the more desirable. Though Daddy Love did not want a baby—hardly! In any case, a baby was too much effort. A baby required a female as a caretaker.

  An older child had obvious disadvantages: he would remember much of his old family, that would have to be cast off.

  This child in the mall, happily chattering as he petted plump white nose-twitching Easter bunnies in an enclosure, was unusually alert, bright, and talkative. Daddy Love had been quite ravished!

  But, how ordinary the mother.

  Not coarse and vulgar like some. The woman’s face wasn’t luridly made up and her hair was a decent drab-brown brushed back behind her ears and her ears weren’t studded with a half-dozen glittering piercings. She wore jeans but not “skinny” jeans. She wore a belted sweater that looked hand-knitted. (The belt was twisted in back, which gave her a disheveled look of which she was blissfully unaware.) Her body was slender, stringy. She had no hips and virtually no breasts. (How had she nursed her baby? Her milk would be watery, curdled. This was not a mother.) She wore sneakers. On the third finger of her left hand she wore a plain silver wedding band advertising Yes! Believe it or not, somebody married me. She was perhaps thirty years old and not getting any younger: when her face wasn’t smiling, “lit up” by the most banal Mommy-love-and-pride, it was a frankly tired face. The husband would soon be unfaithful, if he hadn’t been already. Who’d want to climb into bed, sink his dick in that. For the woman was clearly ordinary, and hardly fit for the radiant child.