The Residue Years

by Mitchell Jackson

  Dude swings to face us and sorts the crowd and stops on me. Ain’t that right, bro? he says. Tell em I’m right, bro, he says. We look each other dead in the face, in the eye. He spares me the homicide of saying my name.

  The judge drops his gavel and calls the bailiff and the bailiff stomps over and catches dude by the shirt and lugs him into the aisle and towards the exit. The whole time he chants, One down, one up, one down, one up, one down, one up, his head cocked in such a way you’d think he was a saint.

  And shit, maybe he is. Church and court, it’s all the same—pews, a throne, a God, the accused.

  Chapter 31

  I need you.

  —Grace

  Their voices fall to me on the street. Call to me to gaze up at the stained glass. Me still until I hear a break in the song. I skirt inside and mount the steps and, when I get upstairs, stand back as far as you can from the stage. Up front near the choir loft, a circle of members laugh and chat. Okay, okay, the director says, and the members file into the rows of the loft. The organist plays a chord. The director waves fingers bedecked with silver. La, la, la, la la, they sing, and somebody’s off-key.

  I stroll down and find the pastor sitting in a front pew with a Bible balanced between his legs.

  Well, well, well, he says, and sits the Bible aside. If it isn’t one of God’s glories. Let me guess, you came to lend us a voice.

  No, Pastor. I say. I came to see you.

  Then here I am, he says.

  Do you think we could talk in private? I say.

  He leads me behind the stage and pulpit, past a closet packed with the choir’s new robes, leads me into a dank room with walls lined by rusted pipes. He clears a fold-up chair and places it before a desk scattered with MLK fans and a portrait of him and his wife. He stacks the fans into a pile and turns the portrait to face me.

  I need you, I say.

  He loosens his tie and undoes his top button, exposing an inside collar rung with black. He asks what’s the trouble but I can’t tell him. He glides around the desk and lays a palm on my head, a touch full of a man’s strength and the fear of God. He prays, and while he does, I think, Yes, yes, there are such things as happy endings; they are wrong, those who say the happy ones haven’t lived long enough. He lifts his hand and opens his eyes and holds me in them an instant. The choir’s next hymn floats in faint from outside the walls. He asks if I’m in danger.

  No danger. But trouble, I say, and compose. I am dignified, and this I want him to see. Pastor lifts a Bible from his drawer, thumbs pages, asks if he could read me a verse. Corinthians 3:17, he says: If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.

  I take out the state papers and show him and watch his eyes track along as he reads. He finishes and he smooths the paper and lays it across his desk. How can I help? he says.

  Pastor, I know I haven’t been here long, but if you could come, I say. I would love it if you could come and speak. If you can. If it’s not too much trouble.

  Pastor folds the letter into fourths and slides it across to me. When you’re one of us, you are one of us, he says. And we take care of our own how we can.

  When we leave we float past the choir and down the aisle and down steps and out of the church and onto the street, where this early spring warmth drops from the clouds. Hope to see you Sunday, he says. He catches my hands and presses them into a form of prayer. Keep faith, keep faith. We push on. We testify, he says, and glides back into the church.

  Me alone hoping the choir sends another song falling. Where to next arrives as a taste in my mouth. I troop around to Big Charles’s store to buy a pop and chips and my first pack of cigarettes in months.

  Thought you quit, he says.

  I did, I say.

  He shakes his head.

  It’s one of those days, I say. But just this one time, that’s it.

  He snatches a pack off the shelf and thumps it and lays it on the counter. Boy, if I had a dollar, he says. But fuck it, you good for business.

  Best to pay and leave before I have the chance to reconsider. A foot out the door it’s as if I’ve wandered into a new county. The first drag stokes my chest and feels better than it has, the best it might feel ever again.

  Chapter 32

  Answer A is this:

  —Champ

  When we were knee-high to an ant, wet behind the ears (you know all the little sobriquets the old heads love to tag you with), and everything else they called us in those days, every time we were doing something we (the we being me, my bros, and any one of my intractable-ass first, second, or third cousins) had no business doing, Mama Liza would say it’s all fun and games … It’s all fun and games till somebody gets their eye gouged out … It’s all fun and games till somebody busts their head wide open … It’s all fun and games till somebody scrapes all the skin off their knees. When we were older, she didn’t even have to finish the sentence. She’d catch us committing some stark crime, shake her wig askew, make her eyes go all ecclesiastical, and say, It’s all fun and games …

  Professor Haskins is hunched over a stack of papers with his door cracked. He hacks a loud cough into the crook of his arm and swivels slow at the sound of me entering.

  Got a sec? I say.

  For you, he says, sure.

  He pats the couch, tells me to have a seat.

  The cushions suck me low.

  What can I do for you? he says.

  About the program, I say. Can you tell me more?

  He grins, taps a ditty on his desk. So you changed your mind? he says. Ready for politics?

  No so much politics but school, I say. Do you know the deadline, what I’d need?

  He frowns and shakes his head, his frosty natural going back and forth. There’s meat under his eyes and a bulge above his belt. Well, Shawn, he says. I’m afraid the deadline has come and gone.

  Oh, I say, and fight the suck of the couch cushions onto my feet. Guess my next question is moot.

  Not so fast, he says.

  But I thought you said I missed it, I say.

  You did, he says. He shuts the door, sits at his desk. He pushes his specs up the bridge of his nose, wheels his seat close. Now, this stays between us, he says, and puts a ring finger to his lip. The word is there’s one spot left and pressure from the dean to fill it. He explains how to apply—the recc letters, the essay, a speech.

  What I tell him is all I need is a shot, as if I’ve considered the whole process all before. But that’s always been my gift: Say it first and believe it second. I tell him, no sweat, that the info goes no further than me. He tells me start quick, recites the drop-dead deadline. You should see me when I bop out all buoyant—a theme song playing in my head. The recc letters: cool. The speech: cool. But the essay—not so much. Though you all know me; by the time I stroll out of Smith Hall, I got the inkling of a half-ass plan.

  The campus ain’t but yay big. But that ain’t stopped me from exploring, from getting my Jacques Cousteau on in buildings where they seldom hold classes, where the rooms are so cold that even this time of year, sitting alone in them like I do some days, my blood runs cooler. No bullshit, every now and again, on days when my meter’s full and there’s time to burn, or days when you can bet there’s a ticket waiting on my windshield, I search the campus for a quiet space. This is how I found the elevator where I used to steal off with this chick from my black studies class. What can I say about her? She was a superbad, smart, with fierce short hair and heart-attack hips and thighs, the kind of chick who makes me feel inferior. Add to that she had an ass that could turn staunch assologists into teary-eyed swains. Fortunate me and she were assigned to work on a project. We stopped by the campus bar the night we finished the project, tested our threshold for microbrews, and somehow ended up on Marine Drive watching planes take off. I’m not sure when, but sometime that night I said some slick shit (or maybe it wasn’t so slick and she was hella-credulous) I’ve been dying to r
ehash: We got to make the most of this, I said. This moment right here is history right after right now.

  Now, maybe that sounds corny to you, some world-class drag, but say that sitting on Marine Drive, say it with the right song playing and the rain making music on your hood, and beyond-your-limit of alcohol swooshing your brain, say it right then, and it just might sound like the suavest shit you ever said in your life. And I don’t know how it is where you from, but I told you all a while ago what that equals around here.

  Here’s the extended remix of the story: She let me hit in the car that night and, after our next class, was game for a second go-round in the elevator I’d found in the emptiest, coldest building on campus. Even more unbelievable was this: For the rest of the quarter, she’d let me coax her to that same building for another shot.

  Why’d I tell you? Answer A is this: I don’t fuck for the sake of fucking or fuck for sport like other fools; I fuck for stories, tales I can trade with my boys after. Shit, if they cared more about chess than chasing skirts, I’d set my sights on becoming a black Bobby Fischer, but since they don’t, and since, how I see it, lying on your dick is a transgression worse than treason, what else can I do?

  I stop by the phone booth and return a couple pages before I bounce, the last of which is to Todd, who says he wants to up his usual buy. The timing don’t surprise me. For as long as we’ve been doing business, he’s been a godsend. He never flakes on a meet time or dickers with short bank; what he does is once a week or so call to meet and pay with big bills arranged faceup and folded over. I swear, clients like him make this life feel infinite.

  Hold up, godsend? What the fuck? One of you should’ve checked me for that.

  Todd’s a great, great customer, but, real speak, he’s also a sucker-for-love type too. There was this one time when I stopped by his old crib to handle business and he answered the door in a wife-beater and boxers, with his braids undone, looking like he’d just got his ass whooped, when in truth he was damn near disemboweled over a broad. Most guys, in front a crowd, they’ll claim they’re tough boss-mack-player types, but away from the public, in those recesses where the lie of us won’t live, they’re Romeo-drink-the-poison-for-a-pretty-young-Juliet kind of punks, and choice client aside, count Todd in that group. That day I stopped by, he whined and whined about the broad and likely would have kept right on whining if I didn’t cut him short: Listen, man, it’s all fun and games till they got you where you like them more than they like you, I said. You need a new plan. You can’t keep treating these chicks like crystal statues.

  I don’t know, man, he says

  Damn, thought you was a player, I said. I thought players know some of them is dying to be dogged. Don’t you know a gang of broads is mystic flagellants.

  Homeboy lit up a blunt and sucked. Like many a cliché dope boy, his whole crib was redolent of some of Oregon’s finest, reason why a contact high was wagging its middle finger in my brain.

  And I ain’t talking physical either, I said. You’d be surprised how many chase heartache, need it to feel whole.

  He took another pull and gazed at me, sclera the color of blood, a half-moon of white in the crease of his scorched bottom lip.

  I’m tellin you some real shit, bro, I said. Put the cease-and-desist on the search-and-rescues.

  You will never guess what homeboy’s response was after all that free G. (G as in game, peoples, stick with me!) It was this: Champ, what the fuck’s a flagellant?

  Why did I mention the story? Right here, right now? Reason why is what happened at Todd’s was on my mind last week when I went to this super-hood hole-in-the-wall in Southeast, a spot where the chicks looked hella-weary, and every other dude wore a just-paroled-long-pinkie-nail, a spot where I ended up rapping to this chick I knew from jump I had no intent on pursuing. Macked her digits out of no more than habit, stuffed them in my pocket, and took my black ass home. But my luck, if it’s luck, you’ve got to love and hate it. Kim sleuthed the shred of paper out of my jeans (since a real player checks his pockets before stepping foot in his crib, what am I?) while I was in the bathroom and wouldn’t hear word one of my sorry-ass excuse. She cursed me into a salt pillar and cried and cried. You would’ve thought she’d cry till dawn, cry for a day, sob all the way till the new year. She’s got a bulging heart, my girl, one that stumbles outside her like a sixth sense, feeling. But the cold part, the part I know deep deep at the source, is that she’ll hurt for now and forgive. Can she hurt for now and forget? Tough guess, but against myself most times, I keep giving her chances to try.

  Peoples, peoples, ladies especially, you few sentient gents. Tell the truth, you got to be tired of my vagina monologues. You’ve got to be tired of all this wannabe boss-mack-player talk of pussy and conquests and general female malice. Let me apologize in earnest to those who’ve had it up to here. For you, you, and you who’ve passed that point. Trust and believe, trust and motherfucking believe, I’m tired, so tired, of living this talk. It’s hard, maybe impossible to believe, but I’m not a bad guy. Maybe chickenshit beyond recourse but not mendacious. All my skirt-chasing and tough talk is no better and mostly worse than a flimsy shield. From more than you all will ever know. From more than I may ever know. From more for sure than I could ever call up the courage to speak on.

  But what I will say is this: Who’s your first love? What happens when that first love warns you to save room for hurt and spends half your life applying the most harm? How do you protect what bleeds?

  Forget that shit they preach on risk and reward. When it comes to a heart, my heart, being butt-naked and swollen in the world, it’s the greater the risk, the deeper the scar.

  But weep for me not, though. I don’t want no parts of it.

  That’s not why I said what I said. I said all I said to ask this: Can you do me a huge, huge solid and translate? Cause the times I’m talking pussy and conquest and general female abuse, what I’m really talking is wounds.

  Wounds and salves.

  Wounds and bows.

  Wounds and deeper wounds.

  Chapter 33

  Then here I am.

  —Grace

  I watch the news till the news goes off. I lie down and sit up. Lay down and sit up. I edge to the edge of the bed and half watch a late-night show. I lie back, force my eyes shut, and pray for a dream. Nothing, so I get up and throw on my robe and slink into the kitchen and fix a hot tea. I leave the mug to cool and take out my pack—it’s lasted all week—and light a cig on the stove. It flares orange and shivers in the slice between my fingers. The smoke pirouettes in my breast as I sit crossing and uncrossing my legs.

  What about my boys? What about what I’ve missed of them? The one or two birthdays. The umpteen missed games—T-ball, football, basketball. The nights I blew school plays, recitals, parent-teacher conferences.

  Thoughts like this can bring it on, and when you feel it building, you make a list of who to call. Of who will offer a haven. Of who will remind you how far you’ve come.

  My God. I could call Champ, Pat if he’s out, my sponsor, but there’s a strength to be gained from fighting this urge alone. Get through this and I can escape them all. I smoke another cigarette too close to the brown, stub it out in a bowl, slink into the room, and lie across the bed wishing this time sleep finds me, but instead end up splashing in and out of sleep with these nerves, with my neighbors keeping up noise above my head. I take out the state letter and read it once more, remind myself to keep faith, that this will all work out in the end. It will all work out for us in the end. I drag out of bed and dress and tramp to Big Charles’s corner store. Big Charles is hunkered behind the counter and don’t look happy to see me. Don’t look surprised either. Let me guess, he says, and slants his mouth. So much for the last time being the last time. Look like you well on your way to puffin again like an old broke stove. He pulls my brand without me asking and tosses me a book of matches that he says are on the house. I pay and skitter out with my eyes cut to the floor. I s
top and trash the packaging and light up and feel the first sweet pull knock the shake from my hands. I give the second pull time to do its work and flit down Williams for home. The block is wet and clear but for two bodies up ahead hard to make out. This late I should cross the street, I think, but I don’t. Closer, I drop my head and blow a wreath and judge the distance between us by the sound of their voices, the footfalls of a heavy boot. When I’m a step past them, she calls my name and frights me into a dead stop. I turn slow and Dawn and I are face-to-face. Knew I’d see you, she says. Knew it soon as I seen Champ. She steps closer and presses a cold bony cheek against mine and asks why I’m out and what I’ve been up to.

  Working, I say. Just working and going to church. There ain’t much time for too much else.

  I know that’s right, she says. I seen Michael the other night and he said ya’ll was out together not too long ago. She steps back and swings an arm over the man’s shoulder. This is Jerry, she says. Jerry drives trucks, but he’s off two days and wants to party.

  She and I so many times out. The nights she coaxed me from bed while the boys were asleep with a promise, never kept, that I’d be home before they woke. The nights we crouched in a black corner and went rock for rock through every red cent of a state check. This woman was in the room when Champ was born, is the godmother of my baby boy.

  What do you do with all of this?

  We either are or we aren’t.

  Where we go, there we are.

  I am new.

  I am strong.

  Faith without works is dead.

  No, thanks, I say. Not for me.

  Oh, girl. Did I say? she says. It’s all-expense paid.

  Makes me no difference, I say.