Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

Well, say no more, the man says. He tours us a few doors down to a narrow house with every other window boarded and an old car raised on bricks in the yard. We wind a concrete path to a side door, where our guy tells us to let him do the talking and knocks a knock that must be a code. Dawn clasps my hand, but there’s no comfort in it. The boy that answers wears a folded blue bandanna around his head, a dress-long T-shirt, and pants that could fit him and someone else.

Bear in-pocket? our guy says. Brought him some business.

The boy glares and points us down a hall and we scoot past a clique of other boys still in age range for a good whooping, to a half-opened door with a hole punched though it. Our guy pushes inside. There’s a beasty hunk of a man hunkered at a table with a tiny TV playing shadows across his face. Speak, he says, without bothering to look up.

What it is, our guy says. Got some folks lookin to spend. Told em you was the one to spend with.

Dawn gives my hand another crush. It should be a sign to flee but it’s a sign to still.

Jerry steps forward and tips his trucker cap. Howdy, he says. If you don’t mind, we’d like to start small, and if it’s prime, we’ll spend a whole heap witcha. He yanks a crisp twenty from a fat chain wallet.

What the fuck’s that? Bear says. He stabs his yellow eyes at us one by one. What, you ain’t told them we don’t fuck with no minor licks? he says. He waves a paw. Miss me with this nickel-and-dime shit. Sixteenth and up or no go.

It would be a blessing if Jerry takes offense and we leave. The perfect chance for me to admit I’ve made a mistake, that I’ve got no business here, that I should run home as fast as I can. The problem is, in this life, when you expect it most, no one takes offense enough. Jerry jerks a hundred from his wallet. Not a problem, he says.

We follow our guy downstairs. He tells us not to worry, that as long as we’re spending, it’s all good with Bear. He asks about his pay no sooner than we clear the last step and Jerry unsheathes a pocketknife and slices a generous chunk. Our guy bounds the stairs with his fee stashed in his cheek. This place is like so many others, gloom and dust. A chair with its fourth leg snapped off, a leather love seat ripped to flaps, hole-punched pop cans strewn on a low table. Jerry loads our first bowl, and we spark the blast we’ll chase the rest of the night. Then the circuit: we smoke one pill and another and burn time and who knows what else, and Jerry tramps to see Bear while Dawn and I sit far apart and silent. He buys more dope and returns with a face that, on a night like tonight, you might mistake for love. Jerry wipes his face and shakes his hair and refits his cap. He stands and belts a blues tune, belts two. A boy shuffles to midway on the steps. Ya’ll gone have to bounce with all the bullshit, he says.

Jerry apologizes and the boy disappears upstairs. For a time after, we talk in taps and touches. Jerry goes up and comes down with a face you might mistake — on a night like tonight — for faith. Then more of the same. We pop and sizzle for hours, a day, for what could last a life. We keep on till birds chirp outside and light pipes through the boards covering a busted-out window.

Dawn, poor Dawn, claws the pipe to her chest like the Lamb of God, but we coax it away and pass and pass until the dope is gone and Jerry’s wallet has thinned almost flat. I’m afraid it’s true, he says. What they say about all good things. He turns what’s left in his wallet into a flag and fans it. He plods upstairs a last time.

The end is always so sad, Dawn says. She hacks a cough and worries the cuff of her shirt.

What time is it? I say. What time you think it is?

Why? she says. Who got someplace to be?

I do, I say. Work.

Work will be there, she says. That’s how jobs is, just waiting around for somebody to do them. She stands and throws her arms up: Work, work, work, she says. Jerry floats down with a good-sized sixteenth. He lays it whole on the screen and we burn it down to a shard. We smoke the shard, and when it’s gone Jerry scrapes the resin with the tip of his knife — collects a tiny farewell bump.

That’s it, I say. No more.

Dawn’s face falls down. She turns to me. Maybe not, she says. We could barter.

Barter with what? I say.

With this, she says, and points. I’d do it myself, but I’m on my menstrual and you know how heavy it is. Messy ain’t worth as much.

What? I say. Who? Not me.

It’s not how it started (Mom carried newborn me from the hospital back to Sixth Street — back home), but by the time I was waddling around on my own two, it seemed like we were on a quest to live everywhere there was for us (the us being anyone within a grade of our hue) to live in the city. There was the rental house off Powell where we lived when KJ was born, a place infamous for its pothole minefield. There was the duplex in Southeast that, whenever we tramped inside from the rain (when wasn’t it raining?), our shag carpet stunk of a wet dog. There was Big Ken’s mother’s house on Seventh and Shaver, the place we lived when, one Fourth of July, an atomic-ass firecracker blew in my fist. There was the shabby apartment on Lombard where me and my homeboys would meet under the carports, lay cardboard over oil-slicked concrete, and break dance till the batteries drained on a boom box. How could I forget the two-bedroom townhouse with stucco walls on Thirtieth and Stark? This was where we lay our heads the time Mom and Big Ken took their longest hiatus, where we lived when my guess Canaan was conceived during a bout of make up sex, where we stayed when Big Ken bought me a cherry red moped that, against Mom’s rants, he’d let me wheel on backstreets alone. We moved here. We moved there. We moved for a time back to Sixth. There were those years when we lived across the water in a giant apartment complex called the Wingate Estates. Tennis courts, swimming pool, a rec room, the complex had the works. This was the place we lived the summer I learned how to swim, the summers I rode bike trails and skateboards past Mom’s lax sunset curfew. Twentieth and Belmont. Twelve and Klickitat. There was the month or two for some reason or other I lived with Uncle Sip and a white broad in Tigard. There was the half year we suffered in a raggedy studio on the corner of Williams and Killingsworth, the place we moved to when Mom checked out of her inaugural in-patient program. There and there and back to Sixth — back home. We’d spend months in a spot. A year. Sometimes weeks.

… Then Bubba died and, months later, Mama Liza (how’s that for a lifetime love?) and my avaricious great Uncs strong-armed my granddad into the idea that selling the house on Sixth trumped keeping it in the family. This was around the time white men in khakis and polo shirts were skipping around the neighborhood, smiling sly, knocking on doors, and coercing hella-gullible residents with what must’ve seemed like unrefusable sums. Next thing we had an estate sale in the house on Sixth. Then a for-sale sign popped up. Then I drove by one day in my high school bucket and saw a minivan parked in the back driveway and movers ferrying taped boxes up the front porch steps.

You’d be surprised at what you can find in the classifieds. Case in point, I search the real estate section and luck upon an ad (bet it cost a nice piece of change) that takes up the most space on a page. Big bold letters too.

The Real Estate Guy

BUYING OR SELLING

BANKS OR PRIVATE

NO MATTER YOUR REAL ESTATE NEEDS

WE’RE HERE TO HELP!

503-555-9000!

What do I have to lose? I call, and a couple rings later a wispy-voiced dude picks up. He calls himself Jude the Real Estate Guy, and says he’s at my service. Off-top (maybe it’s the feathery-ass falsetto), the dude sounds super-sprightly, too chipper, really, but I give him my name and the barest details of why I called. He tells me, from what I said (how he can know this now is beyond me, but I’m desperate enough to buy it), there’s less reason to be worried than I think. No joke, not only is homie’s voice cherry to the utmost, it’s also epicene, which in a strange way gives me peace and hope.