That must have been an old gurney the paramedics had, from the wheezing noise it made when dragged out of the President’s house and along our uneven sidewalk. Actually, it sounded more like whimpers.
When the EMTs pushed past me I saw the red Doberman, Viper, on the gurney. It had a claw hammer lodged in its neck.
The dog looked longer stretched out on the white bedding. Viper was on its side so the one visible eye squeezed shut and opened again, slowly. The hammer was so far inside that only the wooden handle showed. The metal head, both blunt end and sharp, had gone deep into the muscles. Viper opened its mouth to bark, but such noises were obstructed. The most it could do was sigh through the nose.
There were two paramedics, a man and woman. The guy had a body like telephone cord; he stood at the foot of the gurney massaging the Doberman’s lower paws. He was crying.
The woman didn’t seem as deeply affected. She kept digging her nose.
– You pick up animals now? I asked the woman.
–The call was just about an attack, she said. Didn’t know who was hurt until we got here.
– Oh damn it! Ledric came running from my front door, down the steps and to the EMTs.
– She’s bleeding, he told them.
– Another damn dog? the woman asked.
– My beautiful girl, Ledric told her.
I could see where each paramedic’s sympathies lay. The humanitarian ran into my house with her emergency kit, Ledric right behind, as the partner wheeled Viper to the ambulance. The crowd let him go, but slowly. They wanted to see.
The police went around taking witness statements for a few minutes. I wondered what they’d ask me.
The paramedic who’d helped my sister soon ran down the front stairs, carrying that heavy black box slapping on her left thigh. – Don’t put that dog in my ambulance, Ricky! Shit!
Ricky was already loading Viper inside.
The President was propped against a squad car while two cops interviewed him. He was tired; they were tired. The President’s wife walked out of the house with a third police officer, but Candan didn’t.
– Ricky! Stop! We’re calling Animal Control!
A heavy woman leaned against the ambulance and hadn’t yet bothered to move. The other cars on the street had been converted into benches. Three boys climbed up two trees. As the crowd got louder the youngest kids covered their ears.
Nabisase came to the doorway with Ledric. Her face was almost gone behind white tape and bandage. She looked like a poison warning before me.
I waved at them from the sidewalk. Relieved, even happy.
– Hello, Anthony, Mrs. Blankets said and smiled at me. Is that your book I’ve heard about? she asked.
I showed it to her and she clapped twice, enthusiastically. Genuinely. A festive mood filtered through the crowd.
My sister and her boyfriend went back inside. As I greeted other people, Grandma stood at the front door. She opened it and left a bag outside, at the top of the stairs.
I walked up to it. Some of my clothes were inside. I didn’t care about the jeans or T-shirts. Someone had packed my two other suits. I wore the purple one now. When I stood again, after touching through my belongings, Grandma locked the security door. She did that when I was watching.
– I could break this door open easily, I said.
She leaned against the handle. – Don’t.
– Where’s my money?
– It is with your clothes, she said. We apologize, Anthony, but there is no room for you.
– Who’s going to take care of you?
– Your sister will stay.
– I thought she said she was moving.
Grandma nodded. – Her or you.
– You could let me have the basement. I won’t come upstairs.
– I apologize, Anthony.
– You’re overreacting, I insisted.
– I do no such thing.
Grandma closed the door.
Let her try to live on an envelope-stuffer’s salary. He’d have to mail out 80,000 letters a month to cover the mortgage. I decided to be happy. A person can do that.
There really were worse situations than mine; like Viper had a hammer in its neck.
The crowd laughed, watched the paramedics wrestle the Doberman in and out of the ambulance. The woman screamed at Ricky as she pulled the gurney out and Ricky, refusing to lose, tugged the gurney back in. Even the President watched. I waved at him, but he didn’t notice.
Standing on my front stairs I could see past the crowd, over their heads, behind them.
To 145th Avenue.
Where the old German Shepherd, once owned by the Blankets family, jogged by without a leash. Without an owner. It went along.
After the German Shepherd two Pit Bulls ran behind the crowd.
A Jack Russell Terrier.
One limping Basset Hound.
A Rottweiler. A Rottweiler. A Rottweiler. A Pug.
More Pit Bulls.
Soon so many dogs were shooting down 145th Avenue that cars couldn’t pass. The dogs seemed to know what would happen. Traffic stopped.
A skittering, yippering Chihuahua went by. Eleven kinds of mutts.
The air took on that wet-sock smell of canine breath.
The EMTs stopped arguing. Both climbed on the ambulance’s rear bumper. Children were lifted onto their parents’ shoulders. Police put away their big, black notepads. Viper continued to breathe.
It was impossible to believe there were this many loose dogs in Rosedale. Even if they’d been imported from nearby Laurelton. It made no sense. Had to be two hundred now.
But I recognized the fat, haggard German Shepherd when it passed 229th Street a second time. Six minutes later it passed a third. Every one of them did. The Great Dane. The Mastiff. The Affenpinscher, too. They weren’t running away. They were running laps.
Now there really are only two ways to react to the extraordinary. The first is to ponder the grand purpose until all the fun is sucked away, the second is to enjoy it. The President’s Wife left his side and ran toward the breadbasket of the crowd. She screamed, – I got $80 on Mr. Frame’s boxer! Somebody better take my personal check!
Then everyone started making bets.
The dogs sprinted along 145th Avenue until they reached 225th Street. There they made a right for one block, right again on 144th Avenue, down to Brookville Park, right once more to the corner of 145th and started again. A good-sized circuit. I thought some driver, at least one, would beep at the dogs and scatter them, but not one did.
Beers were passed around soon. Given away by any men or women with a few in their fridge. All gamblers paid out when their dogs lost a lap and then picked a new breed each time. The police had to put the President in a squad car, but they left his windows down and told him how much his wife was losing.
November 26th, 1995, was the last time I lived with my family but I didn’t know it then. I’d thought our fight was just a mishap not a tragedy. Mom had put them through it one thousand times. Couldn’t they endure one more? It was such a surprise the first night I tried to get back in and my sister called the law.
That evening, the hounds formed a barrier. Their vigorous bodies blocked us in. We were free to mill around here, but not beyond. A person could run from one corner to the other but never, really, away. We were together. We were bound.
And I was a grown man in my fine purple suit. My black shoes fit me snugly. I held the front cover of my book to my chest. Anthony James. I felt the raised capital letters through my shirt; it was like I was screaming my name back at my own heart. That made me laugh. That made me wiggle. I felt so powerful I could have torn the moon in two.
Acknowledgments
Chris Jackson. Hard editing from a kind man is any writer’s dream. Literature needs fifty more of you. Friends.
Jenny Minton. Together from the start. Smart, exacting. You’re wonderful.
Dr. Raymond Smith supplied much needed information on botulism and
its treatment. And attested to the snobbery of American physicians for their foreign trained peers.
John McCarthy’s The Official Splatter Movie Guide served as a model for Anthony’s own horror encyclopedia.
Last, I’d like to express my affection for fat people and crazy people everywhere.
The title: an explanation
An ecstatic is a term once used in places as diverse as seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Bengal to describe people whose actions were impossible to understand. The average person saw a man or woman who suddenly spoke gibberish or refused to bathe; a person they knew became a stranger. Seemingly overnight. Some saw these transformed people as possessed, or touched by God. Calling them ecstatics was a way to explain the unexplainable. Now, it seems likely that many of the ecstatics were mentally ill. I learned this curious history long before I finished my novel, but in the way it intertwined religious faith, the human need to know the unknowable, and mental illness, it fit. In a way each member of the family is, at one time, the Ecstatic. They are four people at the mercy of their minds.
—Victor LaValle
Victor La Valle
THE ECSTATIC
Victor LaValle is the author of the short-story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, winner of the PEN Open Book Award. He has also been awarded the key to Southeastern Queens. He lives in California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.
Books by Victor LaValle
SLAPBOXING WITH JESUS
THE ECSTATIC
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Victor D. LaValle
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Crown edition as follows:
LaValle, Victor D., 1972—
The ecstatic: a novel/Victor LaValle.—1st ed.
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Uganda—Emigration and immigration—
Fiction. 3. Fatherless families—Fiction. 4. Schizophrenics—Fiction.
5. Grandmothers—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3562.A8458 E28 2002
813’.54—dc21
2002006766
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42848-6
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