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.
29
— 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.
Before the money I gave him a large envelope.
Ishkabibble’s enthusiasm went to rubble when he found it was no movie script.
— That’s not what I wanted to do. This is it.
— A book? he yelped after I explained.
— A book. He was doused.
— A book! He threw it to the ground.
No worry though, I’d bound the sheets of paper in a gray plastic expandable folder. They were all in there: on the backs of Uncle Arms’s flyers, napkins from the coffee shop in Lumpkin. The torn-off front cover of a hospital phone book and many sheets of legal paper I’d found at home.
— You don’t like it?
— Tell me where the movie went.
— Why worry about one when you’ve got two hundred of them here?
Ishkabibble must have been used to this kind of disappointment. He thinks a woman should buy a Jeep Wrangler, but she wants an Acura. A guy borrows money to open a business and decides to burn it on a boat instead. No one wanted his advice, just his funding.
— I can’t hardly read these. What’s this say?
— The Dead Reserved a Room, I read. 1974. When a woman in her fifties, Dorie, inherits the old motel her grandfather once ran she travels there, to Michigan, in the hopes of making it a profitable business again. When she arrives a number of women from the local college are lodging there. At first there’s little to disturb their lives and the older woman befriends the college students. Eventually the girls are killed off. Each time it’s Dorie who finds them. She discovers that her grandfather is killing them from beyond the grave. He doesn’t want Dorie taking their advice: sell his hotel and move to Chicago where she’d always hoped to be in a band. A quieter version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of family businesses gone awry.
— You have got to be kidding, Ishkabibble said.
— Should I read another one?
— I got it. I’ll take that. No problem. I’ll think of something. He tapped the collected pages. I never heard of any of these though.
— And I’m sure you know the banking laws better Than I ever will.
— That suit makes you look like a football player, he said. Big Man. Feel like helping me out now that I’m going to help you?
He asked politely, and that made the difference.
We didn’t walk far, still on 147th, but right before it reaches Farmer’s Boulevard. On one side of the street there were private homes, but across from those a hive of warehouses that saw local and long-distance deliveries fifteen hours a day.
Next to a red weathered matchbox of a deli was a yellow home so humble its back was to the public road. The front windows and porch faced an abandoned yard not the street. Ishkabibble posed me right on the grass. He really told me how to stand; with my arms crossed and not to speak even if the guy inside said something to me. Ishkabibble knocked on the side door, which was actually the one that faced the street.
There were no security bars over the windows. This didn’t create an air of freedom as much as implied there was nothing valuable inside.
That side door opened then Ishkabibble stepped aside so that the man could come out. Bald, but with a fastidiously maintained long beard. More gray than black. A real mantle of righteousness. He shut the house door behind himself. They spoke a bit.
Ishkabibble pointed backward, toward me. I thought he was bragging about my film encyclopedia. Getting a few advance sales. He was smiling if the homeowner wasn’t. I waved at the bald man and he pointed at me, a response I mistook for friendly.
— You don’t threaten me, he yelled. Hear?
I said, — Zuh?
It was just surprise that made me stutter, but he heard what he wanted to.
— Fight? he said to me. I’ll fight you, you ras. .
Before he could finish the curse Ishkabibble said, — I don’t want it to come to that and neither does he.
This was me Ishkabibble referred to. I’m the ‘he’ at the end of that sentence.
The homeowner, despite respectable flustering, looked summarily defeated; as if street boxing was actually a question of weight classes. I leaned back against the man’s fence and it made some noise, sure.