Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

When I sat next to him again, heard his fuzzy breathing, I forgot sympathy and only remembered the burden. How had he become my responsibility? Nabisase and Grandma expected me at home. Was this how my mother felt before we went to Virginia?

To pass the next hour, since Ledric wasn’t going to tell any jokes, I tore off the cover of the hospital phone book and wrote a few more quick movie entries. Night of the Hatchet, Bet They Die, Easily Eaten. Why did the one-eyed drifter take his hatchet to the people of Tarpenny, Florida? In a surprise twist, they were a town of warlocks and witches and the drifter was a righteous man.

I looked at the words and felt guilty because I wasn’t going to give Ishkabibble a film. Only summaries of them. Not a movie, just letters.

After an hour and a half I left the room to call Grandma and yelled when I heard that Nabisase had skipped school a second day. They were happy to know Ledric was safe.

At home we ate dinner in the living room. We watched television awhile, sitting on the same sectional couch watching the same show, it was actually pleasant enough.

The nice thing about working as a house cleaner is that there’s some room allowed for personal crisis. The Third World isn’t running out of reserves to fill the posts.

Between a short day shift at Sparkle then another night at Clean Up I went to visit Ledric on November 15th. He didn’t seem to have moved since I’d left the afternoon before. It was a good sign, though, that he was still breathing without equipment. I guess that was a good sign.

While I waited I touched his hand. I picked lint out of his hair. There was even some on his eyebrows. What a dummy. I hoped he was alright.

The general practitioners returned after I’d waited an hour, both smiling, holding Ledric’s many medical forms. I thought they were going to discharge him and these were the bills.

Instead each guy tried to outkind the other. If one shook my hand, the other put his hand on my shoulder. The first offered me a stick of gum and the second gave me a whole pack. I thought they were preparing me for an outrageous invoice.

— We looked at the results and had a neurologist in to see Mr. Mayo. We feel very confident now in our opinion that Mr. Mayo has contracted botulism.

From his bed Ledric raised a pointed finger. He struggled to direct that mini-carrot at me. If he could speak, Ledric would be gloating: No hospitals I said. He would have, but couldn’t because the physicians pulled his arm back down then pulled the covers over his belly, right up to his sweaty neck. They snugly tucked him in and grinned.

A problem with dogs is that they can’t be reasonable. I don’t mean just the wild ones.

When I came back from the hospital on Wednesday afternoon my reserves were tapped; a two-day snooze was in order. I wanted to try and get one, at least.

Near my home I stopped at the old white house on the corner to rest against its low fence. My vision was spotty, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten since plucking Ledric from the room he rented.

You did that, I crowed to myself. You saved the boy’s life.

But forget five minutes of pride because Candan’s red Doberman chased me half a block home. It had been out wandering, I suppose.

It could have caught up. It should have. Instead it paced me, staying about an eighth of an inch behind. Not snapping its jaws so much as clicking its teeth. I got so confused that I tripped. When I fell, just two houses from my own, the red Doberman stopped and waited for me to stand.

Soon as I did it sparked again; snarling; going on until I was inside my yard with the gate closed.

The dog then ran past my place, past Candan’s to the one-family home of Henry and Althea Blankets. Older folks with a fat German Shepherd. The red Doberman stopped there to bark hysterically at their yard until the German Shepherd inside the compound answered.

After the German Shepherd started the red Doberman ran to the next house and did the same thing until an Irish Setter completed the quorum.

As I came in the house my sister apologized. — Not another day, she said, before I could.

— You’ll go back to school tomorrow, I told her. Did you see those dogs outside?

She pointed to her bedroom. — I packed my bookbag already. So how did Ledric look?

— Big. Am I that size?

— Did he seem any better though?

— They hadn’t even started treating him yet.

— That’s Anthony? Grandma yelled from the sectional couch. She stamped her good foot on the carpet, summoning me.

She was covered in gossip magazines. Nabisase had walked to the store to buy soda and reading material. Grandma was turned on the couch so her right leg was up.

— Put some rub on my leg.

Grandma meant the mentholated gel, but that was for colds not fractured bones. — It’s not going to stop the pain, I told her.

— I don’t want to talk of hospitals.

— They helped Ledric, I told her. Eventually.

— Sure. Just please rub. Just please rub. Your mother used to do it, but now.

After I was done I rolled her gown back over the right leg and washed my hands in the bathroom. After that I bashed in my mother’s bedroom door.

The lock held, but not the cheap wood around it. The door popped from its hinges after nine good kicks and then it was easy to get inside.

The room still smelled like Ghost Mist, a perfume sold in stationery stores. Usually just beside the South Queens Tattler, a local version of the tabloid news. You were as likely to read about 6th District Representative Floyd Flake’s legislative agenda as the goat in Cambria Heights that looked like Billy Dee Williams.

A streak the size of an otter had dried into one wall where a perfume bottle had shattered. Glass fragments stuck in the carpet hairs.

Mom’s dresser sagged on its little legs because all four drawers had been pulled out, flung around, and without them the cheap wooden frame was weak from years of beatings.

Some of her clothes were still on the ground. A shirt with the arms spread in an explosive diving pose. A pair of pants with the legs crossed over themselves in a sprint.

My mother had never left a sloppy room in her adult life. Where do you think I learned to clean a house with such aplomb? How many weeks had she slept in this mess, preparing herself to leave?

If I’d put the door back up, blocked the opening, Nabisase wouldn’t have seen. It was disconcerting to think about how many times we’d passed Mom’s room and didn’t fathom her life inside. Or felt too tired to ask.

Nabisase went off when she saw the chaotic room. I guess it was unsettling. Down the hall, into the living room, where she didn’t scream but made a smashing sound. She broke the little Sidney Poitier statuette.

She could have kicked in windows, but my mother hadn’t made them. Nabisase picked the small head up, then threw it down again. Once the piece broke she took off her sneaker to crack the rest precisely.

Grandma watched from her convalescence on the couch.

I went to my mother’s bedroom and overturned the bed.

— You got French fried, I told Ishkabibble, because he looked worse today than he had a week before. I couldn’t stay home while my sister broke Sidney Poitier’s chips into bits of dust. After tossing Mom’s mattress around I needed to get out.

Ishkabibble pulled the collar of his button-down shirt away from his skin; took out a plastic bottle wide as two fingers then rubbed lotion on various parts of his reddened neck.

He was planning to meet me because I had a mortgage check for him signed by my grandmother, but she didn’t want him invited home. We agreed to meet on 147th Avenue and 223rd, though I bet if I’d let the scent of Grandma’s draft out to the wind the man would have found me in Sierra Leone.