Slapboxing with Jesus (Vintage Contemporaries Original) by Lavalle Victor

Author:Lavalle, Victor [Lavalle, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307803382
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T20:00:00+00:00

My mother walked in on us rubbing each other on my tenth birthday. I was supposed to see a movie with my uncle. There was no party because it was a weekday. To her it must have looked like Malik and I were dancing, his back against the wall. We weren’t touching, not most of us. That’s what it was like.

When the door opened I didn’t hear it. The sound the carpet made brushing up against the door bottom didn’t warn me of anything. There had never been a lock, but when my mother pulled at my arm I fell onto my bed, thinking, How did she get in here? Malik stood against the wall with his eyes closed and his lip bit. Like silent movie reels, scenes skipped by: my mother putting her arm around Malik’s neck, my mother and Malik leaving the bedroom, me following them; my mother slamming the front door and locking it, pushing me into the bedroom and pulling the door closed from the outside. —Stay in there, she said woodenly through the wall; I crawled backward, wrapping my sheets around me.

I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until Uncle Isaac was shaking me awake.

He sat on the edge of my bed with his back to me. He turned and looked over his shoulder. —Your mother tells me something happened today.

I stared at his short afro my mom said all jobs found acceptable. He moved like he was going to face me but then he wouldn’t. I wished I had heat vision so I could burn a hole through his skull and all the things he’d been told could leak out onto my bedspread. Then I could soak it all up and throw the cover out the window, out of our lives forever and he wouldn’t have to look at me the way he did when he finally turned around. —Instead of a movie, he said, let’s go play some basketball.

I nodded, tied sneakers in silence; he watched me.

Outside, my uncle bounced the ball like a pro. He wore his loafers, slacks, a button-down shirt, but he moved like a kid.

—Anthony!

My friends were climbing the parking lot fence across the street. It was the place kids could go to do football or stickball without having to stop every time a car came crawling down the block. I waved. They forgot about me as they disappeared over the chain-link. I looked up at my uncle, thought of asking him if I could go with them, but I was afraid of this motherfucker when he was in a good mood. It seemed like the same fat garbage floated before all the apartment buildings; in snowy winters when the mounds were covered in white, we’d scale them like tiny Matterhorns. I waved away some flies.

—Come on, Uncle Isaac called to me as he stood at the mouth of the park.

People were coming and going, it was chilly. The older ones sat on the benches that circled the park,

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