Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

Here’s the mantra of me and my homeboys: Don’t let daylight catch you! When you live with your girl you can explain away loads of suspect business, but strolling in at the crack of dawn ain’t one of them. The homies, some of them would rather catch a misdemeanor (a couple of them actually have) and spend a night in a holding tank than face their girl after she’s spent a whole night seething. Now it ain’t a hard fast rule break when I creep through my front door, but it’s that hour when the sun ain’t far off from being an orange badge behind the clouds. I hope Kim’s asleep, but hope, what’s that? She’s on the couch with the blinds open and the lights off. What you doing up? I say. Kim keeps her back to me. Long strands fall over her shoulders. Long legs sprawled in shadows sectioned by blinds. She don’t say a word; matterfact, she don’t shrug or jerk or nothing. She’s got it bad, that not-answering shit, but all I can do at this hour is sigh. What you doing up?

The news, she says. Guess you didn’t see it.

Who watches the news? Why would I be watching the news? I say.

Why wouldn’t you? she says. If you did, you would’ve heard about the big bust.

What that got to do with me? I say. I know you ain’t worrying over the next nigger’s troubles.

Kim throws a small and hard thing across the room, knocks a picture of us at the Rose Festival carnival off the wall. I tip over and rehang it.

Keep thinking it’s gonna be the next person, she says.

She looks fierce. She never looked this fierce. Not when we met. My freshman year at P State. She was walking up to the bar on campus, a sway of hips and a strut to annihilate a young punk. Where we met should have been the harbinger of harbingers, but I didn’t have it in me to dismiss a girl with a walk like that. She’s couple years older but I lied about how old I was (claimed the age I am now) and we were shacked up quick enough that the shit might’ve been bad judgment. And the truth is, though I talk tough, and these last couple years ain’t been no romance novel (show me a love that is), I wouldn’t trade her for no one — period. What’d your boy Nietzsche say: There is always some madness in love. There is always some reason in madness .

Maybe the old German saw into the maw of my tomorrows.

The stories I could tell. How once she found my car outside a chick’s condo and sliced my tires; how she once wrote, Fuck You Champ , in red lipstick all over my windshield; how, after a random fuck rang our home line, she ripped my laptop screen off its hinges; how the night of the day her girl allegedly spied me on a lunch date she doused me out of a dead sleep with a pot of cold water and warned next time it’d be hot!

Good sense says I’ve hurt her too much to keep her, says too that I’ll never find another who loves this hard, who knows what it means to have a home, knows too what it means to have a home and lose one. I sit down beside her and pull her close, wishing I could snatch out my heart and show her, but knowing, with all the room I’ve saved for hurt, this mettle ain’t much to see.

She breaks loose and flurries into the room, me chasing. She flops at the edge of the bed and takes off her top. It’s hard to see where she starts and the dark ends. If this were another night, I’d lay her down, work her panties low, and slide inside — the only alibi she’d believe. But I don’t have the mettle for it. Or tonight I’m made of too much steel for it.

Kim gets up and walks to the dresser. She takes out a paper and pamphlets and tosses them on the bed. The pamphlets show pregnant women. What’s this? I say.

A decision, she says.

Decisions. Our last was not long ago and we said never again.

But the punk in me knows I’ll press soon enough for another, a last (you would hope) clinic visit.

What the pimps in my life, what all the two-bit players and the model apathetic lovers never told me, was this: For those of us who can feel, the guilt never leaves, it only ever gets displaced.

Big strength was my mother’s blessing. The strength to birth Pat and me in less than a year. To wake every day before dawn to cook and ready us for school and spend the rest of her day mopping and folding and washing and scrubbing, to do that and look past what her husband’s family, Andrew’s parents, Mama Liza and Bubba, who were well off from bootlegging, said about her and hers. Since I wanted to be strong too, I was Mom’s shadow, scouring the tub with ammonia, and hand-mopping the tiles till they were clean as our silverware. For this my mother treated me as a friend, told me secrets she never told Pat, roused me from sleep some nights to sit with her well after she’d sent him to bed.

The morning it happened, Mom kissed my eyes wide and told me to wake Pat and I hustled down the hall and up the steps to the attic, where my brother slept in a room that, no matter how bad Mom stayed on him to clean it, forever smelled like feet. To wake Pat you had to snatch the covers off him, which he knew but never liked. We headed downstairs to a breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs, and homemade biscuits. Mom was standing over the stove and Andrew was reading a paper, wearing a shirt Mom had stiffened crisp with homemade starch. My mother was wearing the same thing she wore each day: a nightgown, a black head scarf, and fall-apart house slippers. Mom fixed Andrew’s plate and hovered close while he took his first bite. She asked him if he was going to fix the blinds and he said that he would and that he didn’t need any more reminders. When he finished, Mom stalked him out of the kitchen and into the living room. We heard her ask again about the blinds, heard the door slam shut.

Pat and me were finishing our plates when she came back in and ran a tub of water and piled pots and pans and skillets in the sink. All you could hear was those dishes and Pat scraping the last bits of food off his plate. Pat swallowed his last mouthful and pushed away from the table and stood gazing at our mother.

Mom, he said. Is Daddy a good man?

Of course, she said.

Mom, he said. Do you love him?

What kind of question is that?

She snatched his plate off the table and grunted it back to the sink. Pat looked at me and I looked away.

Well, if you love Dad, Pat said, then why do you get mad and try to hurt him?

This sucked the color out Mom’s face. She dropped a plate and stared into the sink. You could count the words she spoke to us for the rest of the morning and that afternoon after school. She was more of herself later that night, letting me piece puzzles in the living room while she hummed along to her favorite 45s and waited for Andrew to come home.

He slugged in late and slumped on the couch. He kicked off his shoes, undid the throat of his shirt, propped his feet on the table, and lay his head back. My mother watched all this, waited till he was settled, and asked again about the blinds, asked if he planned to fix them that night as he had said he would. He said no, he’d do it the next night, said with all of his bother.

Mom stood and sighed. She sighed from a deep place and you knew it. She walked over and dragged a needle across her 45. She tied her scarf and smoothed her gown and sent me to my room, where I lay in my bed counting, counting, counting, how long it would take for her to erupt. It didn’t take long at all before the screaming began, before Andrew whisked past my door and up the steps to Pat’s room. Then I heard Mom in the kitchen. Then I heard Mom stomping up the steps. The boom of their voices coaxed me into the hall. That’s where I saw Mom and Andrew tangled at the top of the steps, saw light catch the blade of a long knife, saw Andrew push and my mother tumble down the steps. It hurt to look, so I didn’t look, not until she was at my feet, a blade in her chest, blood soaking through her gown. She died before I let her go.