Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

— I’m her son, I said.

The hallway, the living room, the front door. Candan walked down the front steps, reached my mother and playfully stepped on the toe of her shoe. She brushed him on the shoulder and held him there. He propped the bag between them and they pressed against it from two sides.

Pinch was as ashamed as anyone by the exhibit. He leaned on our gate, looked away, down the block. Nabisase sat in the driver’s seat with Grandma as her passenger. When Mom and Candan started playing my sister pulled the lever near her foot and popped the trunk. Harder to see the couple through the rearview mirror that way.

I walked over and asked, — Did you tell this guy about me?

— I don’t want you getting angry, Anthony, my mother said. She dropped Candan’s hand as if she’d remembered herself. Would you like if I got angry at you for the smallest things?

— You going to answer her? Candan didn’t touch my mother, he touched me. A finger at my chest, pressing.

— C.D.! What are you doing? You know you hear me!

The security doors on all our homes make a pneumatic hiss when opening. The sound came after the call of Candan’s father, an artifact at their front door.

— I told you to stay in the house! Candan yelled back.

Candan’s father was known as the President, though if this was meant respectfully I can’t say; his own son might have started the nickname and Candan wouldn’t mean it kindly. The President and his wife had a tiny retirement fund; Candan was their sponsor. I’d learned this because my folks carried gossip just like all you others. My family thought an unflattering photo of Janet Jackson was the apex of investigative reporting.

— I need you over to the backyard, the President said.

Candan returned the silver key to my mother; she smiled and watched him walk out our yard into his own next door, then to the front door where his father waited.

— What do you need so bad? Candan asked too loudly.

— I don’t want you over there all on that woman, the President said.

Through the leafless hedge separating their house from ours Mom, Pinch, Nabisase, Grandma and I saw Candan push his father back inside their home. One hand against his dad’s back and the other squeezing the President’s neck.

Grandma stepped out the side door of our home carrying her handbag with two hands, so that the straps hung in front of her thighs and the pouch bumped against both knees. Nabisase followed with a duffel bag over one shoulder; her three gowns were already in the trunk. Mom stood next to the Dodge and tapped the roof with her free hand.

Daylight flattered them. They were good-looking women.

I went inside to get my wallet from my bed in the basement. Upstairs again I turned off the hallway light; the kitchen’s, too. Went to the living room to check if anyone had left the iron burning and Ishkabibble was sitting a foot away from me, on our couch.

I screamed his name two times. With such volume that people heard me outside.

— Shhhh! He slapped my leg hard. Shhh! he said again.

— This is breaking and entering, I told him.

— Until the mortgage is paid this house is mine.

— What if it was my grandmother who found you instead of me? She would’ve died.

He stood up. — Ma’am’s tougher than you think. I didn’t know you scared so easily.

— Don’t make fun of me.

Ishkabibble put both hands up, palms facing me. — I’m not trying to down you or nothing.

— Did you climb through one of the windows? I thought the doors were shut.

— I’m in every house on this block.

— How’s your neck? I countered.

— Skin’s still peeling, he said. Your movie is on.

— I haven’t even had an idea yet.

— Make something up over the weekend. When you come back I’ll have a package for you. Very reasonable rates, I swear.

I walked closer to him; maybe my mother had been beeping the car horn a while or maybe it had just started. — It’s that easy?

— As far as I’m concerned, the movie’s already made.

We shook hands. We hugged. Someone was thumping against the side door.

— I heard his name, Mom yelled.

— I heard it too, Nabisase agreed.

— Ishkabibble! My mother screamed.

— You better turn into a bat and get away before my family sees you, I told him. They don’t like to pay you and they sure don’t want you inside.

He smiled as though the threat was minimal, but clearly he’d never seen my sister throw a punch. There were other voices though. Pinch. Candan. The President, too. On the stairs at the side of our house. My mother’s keys unlocked the door.

When Pinch and Candan came in through the side, Ishkabibble opened the front door. Those two were fast, I swore they had him.

— Get that nigga! Candan yelled.

— Anthony, hold that nigga! Pinch came through.

Ishkabibble went down the front stairs and over my four-foot gate gliding. Then up 229th Street in the direction of 147th Avenue where he might get a bus headed toward Far Rockaway.

Pinch pointed at me. — You shouldn’t be talking with him.

— I can talk to whoever I want.

I said it then regretted this. Pinch stood massive in front of me. His breath smelled like menthol cigarettes. That disappointed me. I mean, to work out so much and then be a smoker.

— You’re cool with him now? Candan yelled over Pinch’s shoulder. Maybe you want to try and repossess my car for him?

Pinch exhaled. He tapped my shoulder. — I’m just letting you know you don’t want to mess with him. He tries to take advantage and it really makes me mad when he does it to people who can’t really take care of themselves.

— Who are you talking about? My grandmother?

Pinch wouldn’t look at me. — Ishkabibble just comes in here and feeds off of us. That’s what I’m saying. He’s getting rich while we’re living like slaves.

I nodded. Pinch and Candan ran out. They got in Candan’s car, a burgundy ’95 Toyota Camry that had a spoiler shaped like a shark’s fin on the hood. As the car moved there wasn’t that slow acceleration. Instead it had the gas turbine vim of a jet.

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

— You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

— I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

— Don’t take it like that. I drove away from our block and toward the Belt Parkway.

— How come Ledric said he met you in prison? my sister asked.

— He was telling a joke, I said.

— Where did you meet him really?

— Halfway House.

New Jersey plays the ass too much. There are so many jokes about the industrial cloud hovering inches above the state and it’s true along I-95, where there’s an odor of pancreatic tumor, but not the New Jersey of I-78.

The interstate was bracketed by great umber concrete slats that defended our path between the throngs of elm and red oak, which pressed so close to the road that they leaned over the dividers and wailed terribly when strong winds shook them alive.

I was content though. Mom had given the driving to me. With this vehicle I had possession over one of the four miracles of the modern age: automated destruction. Another was the unapologetic enjoyment of sweet sloppy cunnilingus.

One hour out of New York we passed a farmhouse with a fenced lot holding two brown foals. They dropped their heads into the grass, but were too shaky on their legs to eat. Foal. I knew the word for an unweaned horse but had never seen one. To me horses were like tropical fruit; I thought they couldn’t be grown in the tristate area. It never registered that horses pull those carriages through Central Park; I’d thought those were mules. They might as well have been okapi for what I knew. Even in Ithaca I’d willfully ignored the world beyond my rented room.