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
About the Author
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.