The Sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates

it ain’t, ma’am! Like with pictures you can mess up what people say to twist it how you want. Like on TV. You can leave out some words an add some others the way police do, to make people ‘confess’ to somethin they ain’t done. You got to know that, you a cop you’self.”

      Mrs. Frye spoke sneeringly. The sudden hostility was a surprise.

      Iglesias had wanted to think that she’d been persuading Mrs. Frye, making an ally of her, and not an adversary. It was a painful truth, what the woman was saying, yet, as a police officer, she had to pretend that it wasn’t so.

      “Not in this case, Mrs. Frye. Not me.”

      Mrs. Frye folded her arms over her heavy breasts. She was wearing what appeared to be several layers of clothing—pullover shirt, long-sleeved shirt, sweater, and slacks. On her small wide feet, frayed sneakers. Iglesias saw that Ednetta Frye’s nails had been done recently, each nail painted a different color, zebra-stripes on both thumbnails, but the polish was chipped and the nails uneven. The girl’s nails were badly broken and chipped but had been polished as well, though not recently. The daughter wore no jewelry except small gold studs in her ears. The mother wore gold hoop earrings, a wristwatch with a rhinestone-studded crimson plastic band, rings on several fingers including a wedding band that looked too small for her fleshy finger.

      “See, ma’am, I can’t allow my daughter to be any more mishandled than she’s been. No recordin here, or we goin home right now.”

      The woman didn’t remember Iglesias’s name or rank. You had to suppose. She didn’t intend a sly insult, calling Iglesias ma’am.

      Iglesias could only repeat that recording their conversation was for the good of everyone concerned but Mrs. Frye interrupted—“Nah it ain’t! You must think we are stupid people! Have to be pretty damn stupid not to know that white cops turn your word around on you, or say you goin for a ‘weapon’ when you’re reachin for your driver’s license so they can shoot you down dead.”

      Iglesias spoke carefully to the excited woman saying she understood her concern, but this was an entirely different situation. In the heat of confrontations, terrible mistakes sometimes happened. But allowing Iglesias to record a conversation with her daughter, in the safety of the ER, was not the same thing at all.

      Mrs. Frye said, snorting with indignation, that that was just some white folks’ bullshit.

      Iglesias said, pained, that “white folks” had nothing to do with this—with them. They could both speak frankly to her, that was why she’d come to speak with them.

      Mrs. Frye was unimpressed. She said to Sybilla she was going to get her some decent clothes to put on, and they were getting out of this place. Unless they were arrested, nobody could keep them.

      “Mrs. Frye, please—let me speak to Sybilla without recording our conversation. For just a few minutes.”

      Iglesias had no choice but to relent, the woman was about to take away the girl. Arranging for another interview would be very difficult.

      “Nah I’m thinking we better be goin. Talkin with you aint worked out like I hoped, see, ma’am, you one of them.”

      Mrs. Frye spoke contemptuously. Iglesias felt dismay.

       I am one of you, not one of them. Believe me!

      “Please, Mrs. Frye. Just a few minutes. No recording.”

      All this while Sybilla had been sitting mute and shivering. Only vaguely had she seemed to be listening to the adult women, with an air of disdain.

      Iglesias saw herself in the girl, she believed to be fourteen. She saw herself at that age, sulky, sullen, defiant and scared.

      She’d been sexually molested, too. More than once. And many times sexually harassed and threatened. But never raped, never brutally beaten. Not Ines Iglesias.

      The Fryes lived on Third Street, in that run-down neighborhood by the river. Abandoned factories, shuttered and part-burned houses, streets clogged with abandoned and rusting vehicles. Pascayne South High, lowest-ranked in the city. The Fifth Precinct, with the highest crime rate. You had to grow up swiftly there.

      In the Iglesias neighborhood, adjacent to Forest Park, there were blocks of single-family homes, neatly tended lawns and attached garages. There were streets not clogged with parked, abandoned vehicles. There was Forest Park High from which an impressive number of students went on to college and where there were no fights, knifings, rapes on or near the premises.

      But I am one of you! Please trust me.

      Though she hadn’t grown up in the inner city, Iglesias had had good reason to fear and distrust the Pascayne police. Family members, relatives, friends, neighbors had had encounters with (white) police of which you had to say the good thing was, none of these encounters had been fatal.

      Though she knew of encounters that had been fatal.

      Though she knew police officers who were racists, even now—in 1987. After the Pascayne PD had been “integrated” for twenty years.

      It was a mark of their contempt for her, she supposed—making racist remarks when she could overhear.

      Yet, racist remarks that weren’t directed toward her or her kind—light-skinned Hispanic.

      It was African-Americans they held in particular contempt—niggers.

      Though maybe behind her back, in their careless, jocular way, that exaggerated the bigotry they naturally felt in the service of humor, they referred to her as nigger, too.

       Iglesias not bad-lookin for a nigger, is she?

       Man, not bad!

       Got her an ass on her.

       I seen better.

      In a quiet urging voice Iglesias was telling Sybilla Frye how she wanted to help her. How she wanted to know who’d hurt her so badly, who the assailant or assailants were so that they could be arrested, gotten off the street.

      With a little shiver of dread Sybilla drew the blanket closer around her. She seemed to be rousing herself out of a dream.

      Shaking her head looking now scared and miserable. Iglesias was wondering how a rape victim returned to her life—to school, to her friends. Already news of the missing Frye girl found hog-tied in the canning factory was on the street.

      Sybilla leaned to her mother and murmured in her ear. Her swollen lips moved but Iglesias couldn’t make out what she was whispering.

      “Oh honey, I know,” Mrs. Frye said to the girl; then, to Iglesias, with grim satisfaction, “S’b’lla sayin they gon kill her, ma’am. Told her they gon kill her whole family, she tells you.”

      It was strange how Mrs. Frye addressed her daughter gently and lovingly, or harshly and reproachfully. If you were the daughter you would have no way of guessing which Mama would emerge.

      Though generally, it was safe to surmise that when Sybilla did not oppose her mother in any way, in even the expression on her face, the tilt of her head or the set of her back, the gentle-loving Mama emerged.

      “But we can protect you, Sybilla. We can put you in protective custody until your assailants are arrested.”

      Iglesias was a police officer, she said such improbable things.

      How many times uttered by police officers in such situations in Pascayne, to whatever futile end.

      “Off’cer, that is such bullshit. Half the people we know believe that shit you tell them, they shot down dead in the street. Whoever do it don bother waitin for dark, he just shoot. You aint bein honest with my daughter an me, an you know it. Why I asked for an African-American woman, and you aint her.”

      “I