Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “César? Hello. My name is . . .”

  Zwilich spoke with practiced warmth, calm. Pulling out a chair at the counseling table, at his usual place: back to the door. Outside were Mercer County guards. Mercer County Family Services shared cramped quarters with the Mercer County Department of Parole and Probation and was adjacent to the Mercer County Youth Detention Center, which was an aggressively ugly three-story building made of a stony gray material that looked as if it had been pissed on over a period of many years, in jagged, whimsical streaks. You came away thinking that these walls were covered in graffiti, though they were not.

  Early evening, a Friday in late June. Parole and Probation had shut for the weekend, but Family Services was open for business, and busy.

  One of those days that, beginning early, swerve and rumble forward through the hours with the numbing, slightly jeering repetition of an endless stream of freight cars. Even as Zwilich’s life was falling into pieces he was speaking in his friendly-seeming and upbeat voice to Diaz, César, whose latest arrest sheet lay before him on the table, beside a folder stamped “Mercer County Family Services: Confidential.”

  “. . . and I’m here just to ask you a few questions, César. You’ve been in counseling with Family Services before, I think. This time we need to clear up some problems before you can go home. Can you hear me?”

  The batlike boy sneered, smirked. You had to think that he was very frightened, yet his manner was hostile, insolent. He was rocking from side to side, gripping his scraped elbows. He was muttering to himself and laughing, and Zwilich, an adult male in his mid-thirties, old enough to be César Diaz’s father and wishing to project a fatherly or older-brotherly manner, wishing to convey to César Diaz that he sympathized with him, respected him, he was on his side and not on the side of the enemy, had no doubt that if he could hear the obscene words the boy was muttering, a hot flash would color Zwilich’s cheeks above his patch of whiskers and his heart would kick in revulsion for the boy, but luckily Zwilich couldn’t hear.

  He would tell Sofia, It’s been one of those days.

  Which? Which days?

  A day of temptation. Terrible temptations.

  And did you succumb?

  Goddamn, he was not going to succumb. He’d had a few drinks at late lunch to buoy his spirits, and the prospect of a few drinks this evening, alone or with another, somewhere improvised, filled him now with a gassy sort of elation, like a partly deflated balloon someone has decided, out of whimsy or pity, to inflate.

  Zwilich spoke. Kindly, with patience. Such evil in him, his secret little cesspool glittering deep inside the well of his soul; it was his task, a sacred task, to keep the lid on. Yet the boy resisted. Staring, stubborn and unyielding, at a bloody smear on the table before him, where he’d wiped the edge of his hand after having wiped a skein of bloody mucus from his nose. Zwilich was thinking that César Diaz, exposed in pitiless fluorescent lighting, might have been drawn, with finicky, maniacal exactitude, by Direr or Goya. No mere photograph could capture his essence. His forehead was low and furrowed in an adult expression of anguish indistinguishable from rage. His bony boy’s head had been shaved, as if to expose its vulnerability, breakable layers of skull bone upon which a scalp, reddened with rashes and bumps, seemed to have been fitted tight as the skin of a drum. A very ugly head, an aborigine head, crudely sculpted in stone and unearthed from the soil of centuries. The arresting officers had pegged César Diaz as possibly gang-affiliated, but Zwilich thought that wasn’t likely; the kid was too young and too scrawny—no gang would want him for a few years. The shaved head was more likely Mrs. Diaz’s precaution against lice.

  Zwilich suppressed a shudder. Itchy scurrying sensation at the nape of his neck, his jaws beneath the whiskers. He’d caught lice from clients in early years. But not for years.

  According to César Diaz’s mother, he’d been sniffing glue with other boys earlier that day, and coming home he’d caused a “ruckus” in their building, he’d been “violent,” “uncontrollable,” “threatening.” Glue sniffing! It was an epidemic among boys César’s age, in certain Trenton neighborhoods. If Zwilich hadn’t been assured that César had been examined by a doctor, passed back into police custody, and delivered to Family Services for evaluation, he’d have thought the boy was still high, or deranged. Sniffing airplane glue was the cheapest, crudest high, scorned by serious junkies (meth, heroin) for causing the quickest brain damage. The boy’s bloodshot eyes shone with an unnatural intensity, as if about to explode, and a powerful odor of unwashed flesh, sweat, grime, misery wafted to Zwilich’s nostrils.

  It would be traumatic for César to be kept overnight in detention, but there, at least, he’d be made to take a shower. A real shower. As in a slow-motion dream sequence, Zwilich could imagine the bat-boy cringing beneath hot rushing water, layers of filth gradually washing off his skinny body, in swirls at the drain beneath the boy’s bare feet. The darkish Hispanic pallor emerging, a startling beauty, out of encrusted dirt.

  He felt a sudden pang of tenderness for the boy. As if he’d glimpsed the boy naked and vulnerable and begging for love.

  “César? Will you look at me? Your mother has said—”

  Now César looked up sharply. “Mama? She here?”

  “Not just yet, César. Your mother is very upset with you, and worried about you. She’s hoping that we can—”

  “Mama comin’ to take me home? Where’s she?”

  The bloodshot eyes widened, excited. The bony shoulders twitched like broken wings.

  “Your mother might—possibly—be coming to take you home tonight. Or it might be better for you to stay overnight at the—”

  “Mama here! Mama! Goddamn fuck Mama!”

  “César, hey, calm down. Sit still. If the guards hear you and come in, our interview is over.”

  Zwilich frequently saw young offenders, as they were called, not only handcuffed but their cuffs chained to waist shackles; not infrequently, since adolescents were the most desperate of all offenders, their ankles were shackled too. Trooping in and out of the detention center next door, kids in neon orange jumpsuits, cuffed and shackled, and it was an unnatural and obscene vision that passed over by degrees into being a familiar vision, one that induced a sensation of extreme fatigue in the observer, like simply wanting to give up: die.

  As if reading Zwilich’s wayward thoughts, César bared his yellow teeth in a taunting smile. “Hey, man? You be cool? I goin’ home. Mama come? Mama sorry now?”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “Mama sorry. Yes.”

  The boy spoke with such vehemence, Zwilich didn’t doubt that yes, Mama was very sorry.

  The wan, stale odor of sorrow blew through air vents in the old State Street building. Some smells, in the first-floor men’s lavatories, were feculent, sulfurous, a prefiguring of the farthest-from-daylight pit of hell.

  Six years on the staff at Family Services, Zwilich would have been promoted to supervisor by now except for budget cuts through festering New Jersey, and departmental resentments. Inevitable that he’d provoke resentment, being overqualified for his job and inclined, beneath his courteous manner, to exasperated patience, irony. Most days he wore black jeans and a white cotton dress shirt and sometimes a necktie—sometimes a lead-colored necktie. He wore expensive silver-threaded Nikes, in cool weather a black leather bomber jacket to align himself with, not his colleagues, still less his superiors, but his clients. His bristly sand-colored whiskers were trimmed into a goatee; his still-thick hair, receding at his temples, was trimmed in a crew cut that gave him, in these uncertain years approaching forty, an air of youthful vitality and waywardness that at times Zwilich still felt. He hadn’t quit his job as Sofia had quit hers, in disgust, dismay. He had plans still. EnvironmPh. D. law, a Ph.D. in social psychology. He wasn’t old. He wasn’t broken. Maybe inclined to sarcasm—can’t be helped. He didn’t want to think that without a clear future, a vision of some sort of happiness, the present becomes unendu
rable in a very short time.

  He asked César, How’d you like some pizza? A Coke? and César shrugged okay cautiously, as if suspecting a trick; it’s a world in which, if you’re eleven years old, some older guy, or could be a girl, holds out a pizza slice for you, a can of Coke, and when you reach for it slaps your hand away, laughs in your face. Zwilich made a quick call on his cell phone, the pizzeria across the street where sometimes he ordered takeouts. Poor kid was probably starving. The least Zwilich could do, feed him.

  It was Zwilich’s task to interview the detained juvenile and make a recommendation to his supervisor, who, in the flurry of late Friday, and in his trust in Zwilich’s judgment, would do no more than glance at the report and pass it on: whether to release César Diaz into an adult relative’s custody or keep him overnight, or longer, in the juvenile detention facility. Zwilich disapproved of keeping kids as young as César Diaz even overnight in detention, where the oldest boys were sixteen. Inmates were segregated according to age and size, but still, a boy like César would be abused.

  Probably something like that had already happened to César. Not once but many times.

  On Monday, a Family Court judge would rule on César’s case. Probation and outpatient therapy were most likely, unless, if Family Services recommended it, he were incarcerated in a juvenile facility. A kid’s life in Zwilich’s hands, like dice to be tossed. A wild thought came to him: take César Diaz home.

  A call to Sofia to come back, see what I’ve done.

  Except Sofia wasn’t answering his phone messages to her. Where was she staying, with whom, in Trenton or possibly in Philadelphia: Zwilich had suspicions but no clear knowledge.

  . . . love you but frankly I’m afraid of you, terrified of going under with you, drowning

  He’d been shocked: Drown? With him?

  As if Zwilich were a depressed man, was that it? Sofia was fearful of the contagion?

  He’d hated her in that moment. He’d wanted to slap her beautiful, selfish face.

  If they’d had a child. By now, children. When two adults cohabiting fail to have children, they remain perpetual children themselves.

  “Well, César. See you’ve been busy.”

  Zwilich whistled through his teeth looking through the boy’s file. He’d been taken into police custody five times, twice within the past three months. Vandalism, petty thefts, disturbances at school and at home, glue sniffing. A previous caseworker had noted that one of the vandalism episodes included “desecration of a cemetery” and another the torture of a stray dog. It was noted that an older neighborhood boy had tied a rope around César’s neck and yanked him around, causing him to faint, when he’d been nine; another time, César had fashioned a noose and stuck his own head into it; yet another time, more recently, he’d forced a noose over his six-year-old brother’s head. He’d been picked up with two older boys for stealing from a 7-Eleven store, and not long afterward he’d been arrested for vandalism in the rear lot of the 7-Eleven store. He’d been several times suspended from school. Following these incidents he’d been assessed by Family Services psychologists and counselors and given sentences of “supervised probation” with required therapy from Family Court judges who hadn’t wanted to incarcerate so young a child. But Zwilich thought the next judge wasn’t going to look kindly on all this.

  The prosecutor for the case had told Zwilich that he intended to ask the judge to incarcerate the boy in juvenile detention for thirty days minimum. César Diaz required psychiatric observation as well as treatment for the glue sniffing, and it was “high time” for the boy to learn that the law is serious. Sour, prim as a TV scold, Zwilich’s colleague said, How’re kids going to respect the law if there aren’t any consequences to their behavior?

  Zwilich sneered: Who respects the law? Whose behavior has consequences? Politicians, mega-corporations?

  He’d said, “Hell, this is a child who’s been arrested. Look at him, he’s so small.”

  Now, in the counseling room, Zwilich wasn’t so sure. Fury quivered in César’s tightly coiled little body; halfway you expected him to spring up at you, like a snake baring its fangs.

  “. . . want to hurt your mother, César? Your little brother? You love them, don’t you? Tell me.”

  “Din’t hurt nobody! Shit what Mama says.”

  “I think you love them. Sure you do. Why’d you want to scare them, César? Tell me.”

  César shrugged, sniggered. You tell me.

  In César’s file it was noted that his father, Hector Diaz, was deceased. Zwilich said, in a confiding voice, “My father died when I was a little boy, César. I was just six. I know what it’s like.”

  César looked interested, briefly. His eyes shifted with caution, a kind of adult shyness, wariness. As if, like the offer of pizza, this might be some sort of trick.

  Zwilich said, “I still miss my father, César. But I talk to him, in a way. Every day I talk with him.” Zwilich paused, wondering if this might be true. He certainly talked with someone, in a continuous tape loop of improvised, pleading speech; but that someone seemed not to be listening. “Do you talk with your father too?”

  César shrugged, evasive now, down-looking, wiping at his leaking nose. Zwilich had several times offered him tissues, but the boy disdained them, preferring to wipe bloody snot on his fingers and his fingers on the table. Zwilich tried another father question, but the boy wasn’t responding. You had to suppose that this was a misguided tactic: probably the kid hadn’t even known his father, or, if he’d been told that somewhere he had a father, he’d been told that the father was dead.

  Father deceased. One problem out of the way.

  When Zwilich proceeded to ask César about the thefts from the 7-Eleven store, the boy become animated, agitated. Now he began to chatter incoherently in an aggrieved voice. The 7-Eleven clerk must have been an Indian; César muttered a racist slur. There was indignation in his little body, and he eyed Zwilich insolently, as if to say, So what, man?

  The boy was mimicking older boys he admired, neighborhood punks, dope dealers, the slatted rat-eyes, jeering laugh, junior macho swagger. In a boy so young the effect was as comical as a cartoon that, upon closer inspection, is pornographic.

  Zwilich knew these kids. Some were “juvies,” others were adolescents, “youths.” Their souls’ deepest utterances were rap lyrics.

  He pitied them. He was sympathetic with them. He detested them. He feared them. He was grateful for them: they were his “work.”

  You would wish to think that César Diaz, so young, could be saved from them. Removed from his neighborhood, which was poisoning his soul, and placed—where? In a juvenile facility? But the youth facilities were overcrowded, understaffed. Zwilich admired some of the administrators of these facilities, for he knew of their idealism—their initial idealism, at least—but these places were in effect urban slum streets with walls around them.

  César continued to chatter, agitated and aggrieved. Zwilich glanced at his watch, worn with the dim digital clock face on the inside of his wrist as if the exact time were a secret Zwilich didn’t wish to share: 6:55 P.M. The date was June 30, 2006.

  Each day, each hour. Equal to all others. If God is in one of these, God is in all of these.

  He believed this! He wanted to believe.

  Yet: If God is absent from just one of these, God is absent from all of these.

  The pizza would be arriving soon, the Cokes; these would help. One of the guards would rap on the door: “Mr. Zwilich? Delivery.” César would observe the counselor paying for the meal, bills removed from Zwilich’s wallet in a gesture of easy generosity. Sharing a meal with a client, in these cramped quarters, was a technique of Zwilich’s, a friendly maneuver, intimate yet not overly familiar. You felt the urge to feed, to nurture, a kid like César, who had to be famished.

  At the thought of pizza, Zwilich felt a mild stirring of nausea. Beer fat, whiskey fat, in flaccid flesh at his waist, a secret fat, for Zwilich was a lean, lanky, sti
ll-young-looking man, five feet ten inches, one hundred seventy pounds, given to small gestures of vanity—smoothing the bristly hairs of his beard, running his fingers through his brushlike hair, checking to see if—yes? was it evident?—the deep bruised indentations beneath his eyes suggested insomniac nights, or late-drinking nights, restlessly surfing TV. The first mouthful of gummy pizza cheese, greasy Italian sausage, and scorched but doughy bread would repel him, and his thirst wasn’t for syrupy-sweet Coke.

  She loved him, she’d said. But didn’t want to go down with him, and he’d said, But I thought you loved me, in the most piteous voice, and she’d said, backing away so he couldn’t touch her, pull her off-balance toward him as in a clumsy dance, I love you! But I goddamn don’t intend to drown with you. Alcohol—addictions of any kind, including nicotine, the most common painkillers—were more difficult for women to overcome than for men; it must be biochemical, genetic. Zwilich hated it, that his wife feared him, when first time he’d met her, at a bar in New Brunswick, in a gathering of medical students, Sofia had been drinking whiskey, straight. He’d been stunned by her beauty, her strong sensual mouth and vivid physical presence. The sight of a woman drinking whiskey aroused Zwilich, for it was rare in his experience and often the prelude to a sexual encounter, as it would prove with this woman after she’d become his wife.

  Nine years! Since he’d first met her. Of these nine years, they’d been married seven.

  If they’d had a baby. Babies. What then? Zwilich had no idea but couldn’t think that having babies was the solution to a riddle that taunted you every time you looked into a mirror: You? Why?

  Here was César Diaz, a young woman’s baby. It had to have seemed that little César was someone’s answer, a temporary answer, to the riddle Why?

  Freely César was speaking, boasting of his friends. Lots of friends, César’s friends, to look out for him. If he went “inside”— if he was “kept here.” No clear transition then to a story about someone who’d fired a gun into the air, they be drinkin’ this guy brother home from Ee-rock he in the army he have this gun shoot this gun, bullet go high in the air then fall, hit some old guy, poor old guy next-door back yard he hit, poor old guy he have bad luck the bullet hit him neck, he don’t get to the hospital he die in ambulance you see on TV? Everybody talkin’ about it but nobody know who shoot the gun. César grinned, laughed. He’d been tapping his neck to indicate a bullet entering, shaking his head, laughing. Nobody know.