Read Online New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

was mayor, did it? Strictly, that one wasn’t no boy, excepting that Miss Crawford was so far past her threescore and ten that she could call anyone a boy she liked to, thank you very much. That other one, he was a grown man with expensive suits and a gap in his teeth and he should have known better. Oh, he spoke beautiful. If he’d took to preaching instead of politics he’d have had any pulpit he wanted and Miss Crawford just knew he could’ve sold the Lord to the Devil himself. That was the trouble with him right there. In the boy’s first campaign the gap-toothed mayor kept telling everybody who’d listen, Newark’s not for sale , but he was the one buying and selling. He was everyone’s friend and everyone’s favorite uncle, he threw ice-cream socials and all, and he got big glass buildings built downtown. But here in the Central Ward, were the schools safe? Did anyone think to fix the sidewalk cracks, where poor Leteesha Monroe broke her leg? Did the police run off the drug dealers from the playgrounds? Course not. They stopped their patrol cars and called the dealers over, but sure as God made little apples, that was to get their share of the take. Miss Crawford might be eighty-eight, she might be five feet tall and weigh less than a sack of flour, but she knew what time it was. Maybe the boy would be as bad when he got elected, but he couldn’t be no worse. And the elevator was running. So she voted for him, and he lost, but then he won the next time, which was now.
    So it was a new day in Newark.
    Now, that didn’t mean the old day was gone away. Things took time, Miss Crawford knew that. Those gangs peddling their poison had cleared out from the schoolyards, and that impressed Miss Crawford. The new mayor promised that and he delivered it. But those same no-account punks sneered from the streetcorners now, and the police cars still rolled up and rolled away. That would be the hardest part of the new mayor’s job, to Miss Crawford’s mind: straightening out the police. He could hire all the new chiefs he liked, and the new chiefs could take up the rotten apples when they found them, and she’d seen that start to go on already. It was just, there were so many of them. Which wasn’t no way saying Newark didn’t have police you could trust. It surely did, and more every day.
    That nice girl who moved in upstairs from Miss Crawford in January, she was a new officer, just out of the academy. She was from Weequahic Park over in the South Ward, but the police assigned her to the 4th precinct and so she moved here. “Like the mayor,” she told Miss Crawford in her kitchen as they got acquainted, very neighborly. She poured Miss Crawford coffee and said, “You know, when he was a councilman he represented the Central Ward so he wanted to live here. In the old Brick Towers, you remember that place? He inspired me.”
    Well, there you go, Miss Crawford thought. Do right and you never know how far it’ll spread. She told the girl officer—Patrol Officer Joyce was her name, Aleksandra Joyce—about how she used to live in Brick Towers too, with the councilman before he was mayor, about him carrying groceries and walking the stairs.
    Officer Joyce’s face gleamed. “I knew he was like that, I knew it. And I thought the old mayor taking down Brick Towers right after that first election, that was just spite.”
    “Oh, child, it surely was.”
    “Well, I’m glad anyway,” the girl had said impulsively. “If there was still Brick Towers, you would never have moved here, Miss Crawford, and then we wouldn’t be friends.”
    That made Miss Crawford feel all warm, and she sat in Officer Joyce’s kitchen more times than that. The girl needed friends too, you could tell that when she talked. She shrugged it off, acting all tough police, but Miss Crawford didn’t get to be this old for nothing.
    “It’s always like this for new officers, I guess,” the girl told her. “Especially women.”
    “Life’s hard