Free The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates

or threw tear gas containers or firebombs into dwellings like this in a pretext of “neutralizing” sniper fire. She hadn’t known Anis Schutt then but knew of how Anis’s (unarmed) sixteen-year-old brother Lyander had been murdered by city police for stepping outside his mother’s house on Freund Street five minutes after the 9:00 P . M . curfew. A sixty-year-old great-aunt of Ednetta’s living in a first-floor apartment in the Roosevelt project had been shot dead through a window unwisely passing in front of a blind with a harsh light behind it—another “sniper” casualty.
    Iglesias was calling through cupped hands not in a threatening-cop voice but a friendly-female voice— Mrs. Frye? Please? We can just speak with you. This is crucial for our investigation.
    Ednetta retreated to the rear of the house. Ednetta climbed panting and sweating to the second floor of the house. Ednetta hid away in her and Anis’s bedroom whimpering like a wounded creaturesprawled on the bed covering her head with a blanket. Jesus help me. Jesus forgive me. None of this my fault Jesus!
    When she revived, the house was quiet. She listened hard to hear if the detectives were knocking on the door, calling for her, but they were not.
    She’d heard a vehicle in the street, pulling away. She hoped this was the police cruiser.
    Damn phone began to ring, she’d thought she’d taken the receiver off the hook. She took that precaution now.
    It was true: Sybilla Frye wasn’t in the brownstone at 939 Third Street. Soon after they’d returned from St. Anne’s Hospital and before Anis had returned to the house Ednetta had taken the girl away to stay with Ednetta’s seventy-nine-year-old grandmother who lived in a ground-floor apartment in the dead end of Eleventh Street at the river.
    High above Ednetta’s grandmother’s windows was I-95 northbound, the elevated Turnpike. There was a near-continuous shudder and vibration of traffic in the apartment like the breathing of a great beast. The air was a pale-cinnamon haze.
    Sybilla’s great-grandmother Pearline Tice had not been informed of the nature of the terrible hurt done to the battered girl but only S’b’lla needin to spend some time with you, Grandma. Somebody act bad with her now she gon conv’lesce. She give you trouble, call me quick!
    Ednetta’s other children still living at home—the younger son and daughter—were in school when the detectives came to the door. Anis had been out and Ednetta didn’t know for sure—often, she didn’t know, and could not ask—if Anis intended to be back that night for supper.
    (Anis had other places he stayed, some nights. Anis had sporadic if precisely unidentified “work” that seemed to pay fairly well—judgingby cash he set out on the kitchen table for Ednetta when he was in a generous mood. It was enough for Ednetta that Anis Schutt kept his clothes and things with her —meaning he’d always be coming back to her . Other places, other women were temporary.)
    Now that Sybilla was out of the house, that was a calming influence on Anis.
    Ednetta hadn’t told him about Sybilla hog-tied in the fish-food factory, and taken to the ER. She hadn’t told him that Sybilla had been questioned by a Pascayne PD detective. Not yet.
    Anis knew some of what had happened. But not all.
    It was like Lyander shot down dead over on Freund Street and his body not found until morning when the curfew lifted. You know that something has happened, it will hit you hard and irrevocably but you don’t know (yet) what it is and you are in no hurry to know.
    That morning Anis had awakened late. You tiptoed around Anis sprawled naked and snoring in bed one of his muscled arms flung out like a gnarly tree limb. And his face that was an ugly-scarred not-young face twitching and grimacing in sleep. Standing above the man seeing his eyeballs shifting inside the tight-shut lids which meant he was dreaming Ednetta lapsed into a dream of her own recalling her friend