The Sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates

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       St. Anne’s Emergency

      OCTOBER 7, 1987

      She’d been left to die.

      She’d been beaten, and raped, and left to die.

      She’d been hog-tied, beaten and raped and left to die.

      Just a girl, a young black girl. Dragged into the cellar of the old fish-factory and if she hadn’t worked the gag out of her mouth, to call for help, she’d have died there in all that filth.

      It was that 911 call. That call you’d been waiting for.

      You’d expect it to be late Saturday night. Or Friday night. Could be Thursday night. You would not expect the call to be Sunday morning.

      And that neighborhood by the river, East Ventor and Depp. Those blocks east of Camden Avenue. High-crime area the newspapers call it. After the fires and looting of August 1967 spilling over from the massive riot in Newark, the neighborhood hadn’t ever recovered, Camden Avenue west for five or six miles looking like a war zone twenty years later, shuttered storefronts, dilapidated and abandoned houses, burnt-out shells of houses, littered vacant lots and crudely hand-lettered signs for rent for sale that looked as if they’d been there for years.

      Many times, the calls come too late. The gunfire-victim is dead, bled out in the street. The baby has suffocated, or has been burnt to death in a spillage of boiling water off a stove. Or the baby’s brains have been shaken past repair. Or there’s been a “gas accident.” Or a child has discovered a (loaded) firearm wanting to play with his younger sister. Or a man has returned to his home at the wrong time. Or a drug deal has gone wrong. (This is frequent.) Or a drug dose has gone wrong. (This is frequent.) Or a space heater has caught fire. Or a carelessly flung burning cigarette has caught fire. Or a woman has swallowed Drano and has lain down to die. Or a gang of boys has exchanged multiple shots with another gang of boys. Or a pit bull maddened by hunger has attacked, sunk its fangs into an ankle and will not release the crushed bones until shots from a police service revolver are fired into its brain.

      Calls of desperation, dread. But exhilaration in being so summoned, in a speeding ambulance, siren piercing the air like a glittering scimitar.

      You are propelled by this speed. You are addicted to the thrill of danger, this not-knowing into which you plunge like a swimmer diving into a swirling river to “rescue” whoever he can.

      But now there is this call—to change your life in a way you will regret.

      Damn it wasn’t true the ambulance had taken its time getting there! Sixteen minutes but we’d been slowed down on the bridge and the 911 dispatcher had given us an incomplete address.

      It being a black neighborhood, it would be claimed. The EMTs from St. Anne’s had taken their time.

      We’d responded to the dispatcher as we always did.

      We said, there was no difference between this emergency summons and any other—except what would be made of it, later.

      When we arrived at the corner of East Ventor and Depp we hadn’t known immediately where to go. The dispatcher hadn’t been told clearly where the injured girl was.

      Something about a factory. Factory cellar.

      So we’d wasted minutes determining what this meant. We’d been told “cellar”—so we had flashlights in case flashlights were needed. Searching for a way through the chain-link fence until a woman appeared and screamed at us about a “dying girl”—a girl “bleeding to death”—and directed us where she was.

      First thing we observed was that the girl (later identified as “Sybilla Frye”) lying on her side on the cellar floor on a strip of tarpaulin seemed to be conscious but would not respond to us, as if she was unconscious.

      When we came running down into the cellar with flashlights we saw that the girl’s eyes were open but immediately then she shut them when the light came onto her face. We saw her lift her hands to hide her face from the bright light.

      It was our concern that the girl was in severe physical distress, in shock, or bleeding internally, we had to determine immediately, or try to determine, before lifting her onto a stretcher.

      Her face was bloodied and battered. There was a towel or a rag partly tied around her head and her hair was matted with filth.

      There were no evident deep lacerations of the kind made with a sharp weapon or gunshot. Wounds were superficial, though bloody. There did not appear to be a severe or life-threatening loss of blood.

      There was a strong smell of excrement—possibly human, or animal.

      It looked like the girl had been tied with a clothesline but when we arrived, the clothesline had been untied. The woman who’d met us outside said she’d found the girl tied and had untied the girl. Her wrists and ankles had been tied behind her—“hog-tied.”

      Well, we thought there was something strange—the injured girl had been communicating with the woman who’d found her, the woman told us—but then, she wouldn’t communicate with us.

      She was limp and her arms were, like, falling loose—like a person would be if she was unconscious. But when we touched her she stiffened up. She’d shut her eyes tight and kept them shut.

      That girl was in a state of shock! She didn’t know who we were.

      We identified ourselves. She had to know we were a rescue team.

      But she was scared! She was terrified. She was just a girl and somebody had almost killed her. She might’ve thought we were her assailants coming back. She was shivering—her СКАЧАТЬ