My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

crime the assailants were likely to be sentenced to longer prison sentences, if they were found guilty; but there was the possibility, if they insisted upon a jury trial, that they might be acquitted by a sympathetic (i.e., white) jury. If he could devise a way in which such a defense would not backfire and make things worse, in the media for instance, their lawyer was considering the boys might claim self-defense.

      The boys had been drinking for most of the evening. Two of them were underage which involved the others, for having supplied them with alcohol; the 7-Eleven storekeeper who’d sold them the six-packs was in trouble as well. They’d been driving around, at the mall, returned from the mall, drinking and tossing beer cans. Stopped at Friday’s, where there was a crowded bar scene, later at Cristo’s (which was taking a chance, our father sometimes dropped by Cristo’s on Friday night). Past Kerrigan Field. Past Patriot Park. Kirkland Avenue, Depot Street, Delahunt. Saw this guy in a hoodie riding a bicycle on Delahunt looking kind of suspicious to us like he didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Something in the bicycle basket looked like could be stolen goods. We did not see his face—we did not know who it was … If they’d shouted after him it was just a way of talking, scaring someone who (maybe) didn’t belong in the place he was in. If Jerr aimed the car at the bicyclist it was just to scare him not to run him down at the side of the road.

      And the way he tried to escape crawling away, yelling to leave him alone. Like what a guilty person would do.

      Like cops, they were. Neighborhood “vigilantes.” Keeping strangers from breaking into houses, stealing cars.

      Their lawyers were suggesting this possibility. “Vigilantes”?—“fighting crime”? Like the possibility of self-defense.

      Problem was, the boys weren’t in their own neighborhood. Hadrian Johnson happened to be in his neighborhood.

      Yes but they hadn’t known. Like they hadn’t gotten a look at their victim’s face until—later.

      Delahunt was a darkened road at this time of night. Strip mall, fast-food taco place, gas station. At Seventh Street there was a small trailer court with a string of unlit lights, from the previous Christmas. Beyond that a potholed street of small wood frame bungalows lacking a sidewalk, called Howard.

      Following the bicyclist along Delahunt. For the hell of it.

      Well—who rides a bicycle at night? Looked like a tall dude, not a kid. Not a young kid. And what was in the basket?

      Reflectors on the back of the bike and the bike looked (they could see, squinting in headlights) like it might be pretty expensive. Stolen merchandise?

      The bicyclist was acting guilty, they thought. Bumping along on the shoulder of the road. Knew they were there, and coming close to him. Maybe he thought they were cops. So he tried to pedal faster, fast as he could, intending to turn into a dirt lane opening ahead in a field, looking to escape. For whoever was in the car was coming close to him, honking his horn like machine-gun fire. Guys yelling out the windows.

      It would turn out that Hadrian Johnson had spent the evening at his grandmother’s house on Amsterdam Street a mile away. Sometimes when Hadrian spent time with his grandmother who suffered from diabetes he stayed the night but this night, he did not. Bicycling home to Howard Street along a stretch of Delahunt where if there was traffic it was likely to be fast but there was relatively little traffic at that hour of the night, he’d been ten minutes from his mother’s house when a vehicle had come up swiftly behind him swamping him with its bright lights, deafening horn, derisive shouts, curses.

      Thud of the front right fender striking the bicycle, a high-pitched scream, the fallen boy amid the twisted bicycle trying to free himself and crawl away …

      What happened next was confused.

      Hard to remember. Like something smashed and broken, you are trying to reassemble.

      Still it was an accident. The boys would claim. Had to be, for what happened hadn’t been premeditated.

      Striking the bicyclist, could see by this time that it was a kid, (maybe) a black kid, but (still, yet) no one they recognized, so Jerr braked the car to a stop, had to check the bicyclist to see if he was all right …

      True Jerr did stop the car. True they did exit the car.

      True they did approach the (injured?) boy who was trying to crawl away from them at the side of the road …

      (Was it true, all four boys had exited the Chevrolet? Or had Walt remained inside, as Walt would never cease to claim?)

      Here is a fact: nothing of what happened was what Jerome, Lionel, Walt, Don had meant to happen. Which wasn’t to say that they remembered clearly what had happened.

      Just that they’d been drinking. The older guys had gotten the beer for the younger guys. Saturday night. Deserving more from fucking Saturday night. Not ready to go fucking home just yet.

      But only seconds, they’d stopped on Delahunt. Not even a minute—they were sure. Vaguely aware of traffic on the road, a vehicle passing. Someone slowing to call out the window What’s going on? and Jerr yelling back We called 911, it’s OK.

      And then panicked and back in the Chevrolet. Driving away with squealing tires like a TV cop show. And even then they would (afterward) claim they’d scarcely been aware that the badly injured bicyclist was dark-skinned, still less his identity: seventeen-year-old Hadrian Johnson from their own school.

      SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT OF NOVEMBER 2, 1991, AN ANONYMOUS call was placed to 911 reporting a badly beaten young man lying unconscious and unresponsive at the side of Delahunt Road, South Niagara, a bicycle twisted beside him. An emergency medical team from South Niagara General Hospital was immediately dispatched and the stricken young man brought back, by ambulance, still unconscious and unresponsive, to the ER.

      The victim would never regain consciousness but would die, of severe brain damage and other traumatic injuries, nine days later.

      No other calls to 911 had been reported that night. But the following morning when news of the beating began to spread through South Niagara an anonymous caller reported to police that he’d been driving on Delahunt Road the night before, around 11:40 P.M., when he’d seen a vehicle parked at the side of the road, where someone, it appeared to be a young black man, was lying on the ground bleeding from a head wound as four or five “young white guys” stood around him. It had looked, the caller said, as if there’d been a fight. He’d slowed his pickup then accelerated when the white guys saw him for they were looking “threatening”—“drunk and scared”—and he’d thought he saw one of them with a rifle.

      Maybe not a rifle. A tire iron? Baseball bat?

      He’d gotten out of there, fast. Hoping to hell they wouldn’t get in their car and follow him.

      The caller went on to identify the car as a mid-1980s model Chevy, dull bronze, pretty battered, rusted, and dented—“Especially, you could see that the front right fender was bent all in from where they’d hit the kid. You couldn’t miss that.”

      He hadn’t gotten a good look at the boys. Just “white kids”—“maybe high school age, or a little older”—but he’d tried to memorize the license plate number: “first three digits—KR4—something like that.”

       Louisville Slugger

      IF THE FUCKING BAT HADN’T BEEN THERE.

      Because none of it had been premeditated. Because it had just happened—the way fire just happens.

      Because it had been rattling in the back of the car, for months. Why’d he carry the bat loose in the car he’d liked to say For protection.

      Sort of, he meant it. But it was a kind of joke too.

      Because most things, fucking things in his fucking life,