The Sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates

they knew to be some kind of schoolteacher—(these were boys born in Red Rock of parents from the Dominican Republic who lived upstairs from Ada)—and for a weak moment Ada considered asking them to accompany her … But no, these rude boys would only laugh at her. Or something worse.

      Outside, Ada walked to the rear of the building. No one ever went here, or rarely: behind the tenement was a no-man’s-land of rubble-littered weeds and stunted trees, sloping to a ten-foot wire fence at the riverbank, against which years of litter had been blown and flattened so that it resembled now some sort of plaster art installation. In this lot tenants had dumped trash that included refrigerators, mattresses, chairs and sofas and even badly broken and discolored toilets. (Ada recognized a broken lamp that had once belonged to Kahola, her sister must’ve tossed out here. For shame!)

      Ma and Karliss were right: Ada shouldn’t be here. Hadn’t there been a murder in this block, only a week ago, one in a series of young black boys shot multiple times in the back of the head, dragged into an abandoned house to bleed out and die …

      But this person, if it was a person, was alive. Needing help.

      Noise from jetliners in their maddening ascent from Newark Airport a few miles away, that began in the early morning and continued for hours even on weekends. Ada couldn’t hear the crying sound, with those damn jets!

      Ada checked to see: was anyone following her? (The tall black-skinned Dominican boys, who hadn’t said a word to her though she’d smiled at them?) She made her way through the debris-strewn lot to the fence, that overlooked the river. Here she felt overwhelmed by the white, vertically falling autumn sunshine, that blinded her eyes. And the wide Passaic River with its lead-colored swift-running current that looked to her like strange sinewy transparent flesh, a living creature with a hide that rippled and shivered in the sunshine. Oil slicks, shimmering rainbows. The Passaic had once been a beautiful river—Ada knew, from schoolbooks—but since the mid-1800s it had been defiled by factories and mills dumping waste, all sorts of debris, tannery by-products, oil, dioxin, PCBs, mercury, DDT, pesticides, heavy metals. Upriver at Passaic was Occidental Chemical, manufacturers of the most virulent man-made poison with the quaint name—Agent Orange. Supposedly now in the late 1980s in these more enlightened times manufacturers had been made to comply with federal and state environmental laws; cleanups of the river had begun but slowly, at massive cost.

      When she did move away from East Ventor, Ada thought, she would miss the river! That was all that she would miss, even if it was a poisoned river.

      It had long been forbidden to swim in the Passaic—(still, boys did, including Ada’s twelve-year-old nephew Brandon: you saw them on humid summer days swimming off rotting docks)—and most of the fish were dead (if any survived you’d be crazy to eat them but every day, every morning at this time in fact, there were people fishing in the Passaic, mostly older black men with a few women scattered among them).

      Ada’s grandfather Franklin had been one of the fishermen down by the docks, in the last years of his life. He’d been happy then, Ada had wanted to think. Bringing back shiny little black bass for her grandmother to clean, gut, sprinkle with bread crumbs and fry in lard. How much poison they’d all eaten, those years, not knowing any better or indifferent to knowing, Ada didn’t want to speculate.

      This morning the river was bright and choppy. There were a few boats, at a distance. On the farther shore were shut-down factories and mills that hadn’t been operating since she’d been in high school. Vaguely she could remember her father and grandfather working at Pascayne Welding & Machine when she’d been a little girl in the 1960s, then later her father worked at Rand Alkali Pesticides until his health deteriorated and he’d been laid off. (The pesticide factory sprawling among seven acres of “hazardous” land within the Pascayne city limits had been shut down by the New Jersey Board of Health in 1977 for its toxic fumes and carcinogenic materials. There’d been a settlement between Rand Alkali and the State of New Jersey but whatever fines had been paid had made little difference to the sick employees like Ada’s father whose disability pension was less than his Social Security, and the two checks together came to less than he required to live with any dignity in even the shabby tenement at 1192 East Ventor.)

      Ada listened: there came the crying again. Now, it sounded like a plaintive mewing, that had all but given up hope.

      Definitely, the sound was coming from the old Jersey Foods factory next-door.

      The fish-canning factory was a ruin that would one day slide into the river, next time it flooded. Last time, the spring of 1985, filthy river-water had risen into the factories on the riverbanks as into the dank dirty cellars of residences like Ada’s. A powerful stink had prevailed for weeks. The state had declared a disaster area for some and a makeshift shelter had been established in the high school gymnasium and the Pascayne Armory. Fortunately, Ada and her family hadn’t had to be evacuated. Kahola had been living with them then.

      Approaching the factory with its broken, boarded-over windows Ada tried not to think This is a mistake. I am making a mistake.

      There was no man in her life, as there’d been in her sister’s life. Not a single man in Kahola’s life but numerous men. Ada was too free to make decisions of her own, too reckless. It was the price of her female independence and a certain stiffness, resentment even, about inhabiting a fleshy female body. Oh, she was frightened now. But damn if she’d turn back. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

      The cries seemed to be coming from the factory cellar. Bad enough to be inside the nasty fish-factory, but—in the cellar! There were steps leading down, a door that had been forced open years ago. Everywhere was filth, storm debris and mud. Ada drew a deep breath and held it.

      She thought—It’s only a cat. A trapped starving cat.

      A wounded cat.

      Planning how she would trap the cat—in a box?—somehow—and take it to an animal shelter.

      (But how practical was that? The shelter would euthanize the cat. Better to keep the cat.)

      (But she couldn’t keep the cat! No room for a scrawny diseased alley cat in their place already too small and cramped for the people who lived there.)

      It was 8:20 A.M. It was a bright cool Sunday morning in October. Ada Furst would recall how she made her way into the cellar down a flight of steps littered with broken glass and pieces of concrete as she continued to call in a quavering voice—“Hello? Hello?” A pale, porous light penetrated the gloom, barely.

      The cry came louder. Desperate.

      Ada blinked into the shadows. Ada took cautious steps. She could hear someone whispering Help me help me help me.

      Then she saw: the girl.

      The girl was lying on the filthy floor in the cellar not far from the entrance, on her side facing Ada, on a strip of tarpaulin, as if she’d been dragged partway beneath a machine. She appeared to be tied, wrists and ankles, behind her back. It looked as if there’d been a wadded rag in her mouth, she’d managed to spit out. And around the girl’s head was a cloth or a rag she’d worked partway off. Her hair was matted with mud and something very smelly—feces? Ada began to gag. Ada began to scream.

      “Oh God. Oh God! My God.”

      A girl of thirteen, or fourteen. On the filthy floor, she looked like a child.

      Ada was stricken with horror believing that the girl was dying: she would be a witness to the girl’s death. She’d wasted so much time—she’d come too late—the girl was shivering uncontrollably, as if convulsing. Ada crouched over her, hardly daring to touch her. Where were her injuries? Was she having a seizure? Ada had a confused sense of blood—a good deal of blood—on the tarpaulin, and on the floor. It seemed to her that the girl had been mutilated somehow. The girl’s bones had been broken, her spine deformed. Ada would swear to this. She would swear she’d seen this. Certainly the girl’s face was swollen, her eyes blackened and bruised. Dark blood had coagulated at her nose, that looked as if it had been broken. How young the girl seemed, hardly more than a child!