Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

Figured you’d show anyhow, he says. You never was one for listening.

Where are my sons? I say.

They gone, he says.

That’s a lie, I say. Where are they?

Lie to you for what? he says. Who are you to lie to?

He looks over my shoulder and I turn to see what he sees. It’s a car coming towards us. Kenny struts down the pathway and waits on the slope while I’m held stillest. Helen pulls up and he helps her out of the car and makes a show of whispering to her. She frowns and tucks a bag that cost my life, all of my life, to her side and waves a ring awesome even in this failing light. KJ climbs out and squints at me as if I’m a thing made of steel and wood, and stands in place with his arms at his sides. It takes him forever to lope over and begrudge me a limp squeeze.

Aren’t you happy to see me? I say.

He answers too low for me to make out.

My youngest climbs out and stands, looking doleful, his eyes on this man, this woman, on his brother, settling on me. We step to meet each other and he presses his head in my chest and pulls me close. His heart knocks against mine and when we break, he takes his time slugging for the house. He gives me a farewell glance before crossing the threshold. Then it’s me and this man and this woman face-to-haughty face. Kenny kisses Helen on the head and cossets her ring. They beam at each other in a way that makes me want — the lucky ones get more of a life than they’ve earned — to do them harm. She huffs and flounces off, and Kenny stands back, arms folded. You’ve never seen a man this smug.

Yous about a dirty, I say. Plain dirty, I say. What you been telling my boys?

Grace, you don’t get it, do you? You still don’t get it, do you? he says. The boys got eyes. They can see.

The come up.

Try one without them.

My first regular was this cluck who called himself Showtime who used to rush for me during my second go ’round on the curb. He was as old as one of my unc’s and had a hairline caught in a permanent zeek — a push back to the fulfillity. For a pinch off one of my fatter pills (if you ain’t peeped it yet among othings we call them pills) he’d roam a shout distance off and wouldn’t show his face until he had a buy. He was good for hustling up twenty licks, forty licks, the odd fifty, miniscule end in retrospect but business that popped my profit cherry.

Then there was this white man across the water in Vancouver who wore black biker leathers and a long-ass ponytail. He ran with a band of methheads turned crackheads or methcrackheads, most of them longshoremen or truckers by trade. Clockwork, he’d hit my line for a few hundred dollars worth of dope (pill for pill too so choice profit!) for him and his seafaring, long-haul buddies. We used to meet in this department store on Mill Plain and do the swap in a vacant aisle. You should have seen him after that, a hirsute blur out the store. But me, more cautious then, made habit of lagging, would drift into a longer line, buy a load of knickknacks, and stroll out proxy-blithe.

You want to come up? Trust, you ain’t coming up without them.

Without clientele like this full-time hustler/part-time basehead. Picture this husky dude with skin three times onyx, eyes that shine hepatitic gold, and a flat-backed head swathed yearlong in a linty skull cap. But don’t let aesthetics or the fact that he partakes of the occasional beam-up throw you. Homie is oh so serious about his (our) bread. Orders an ounce every other day and by the day near the first of the month and has never once dickered for a bulk deal, complained the dope’s discolored, nor said a foul word about an aftertaste.

No bullshit. Where would I be without them?

Without dude I’ve been dealing with off and on, more steady than not, since I first started getting fronted whole ones. He’s this OG Crip with fat cornrows and a cold-ass effluvium and who, on the low, might be part bigfoot — a size to, with no windup at all, slap a bantamweight non-pugilistic nigger such as me into forever sleep. But rancidness aside, homie orders a minimum of four-and-a-half and most times more with the drawback being a drawback I can bear: he rathers I deliver to one of his spots (boarded shacks where hordes of destitute clucks burn through settlement checks, SSI and state checks, through what’s left of their crippled pride), pop-up dopehouses he runs with crews of young blue-rag deuces.

Nah, wouldn’t be shit without them, minus the one I’m here to meet tonight. Best customer of the bunch. Past or present.

I’m parked by the corner store, shadowed, solicitous, half a whole thing (the shit was too bulky for my boxer briefs) stuffed in a Ziploc in a paper sack that’s crammed inside my sleeve. Half a whole one is a big fucking lick, could put a nice dent in whatever down payment (no, not if but when and how much) Jude works out. This happy shit is what’s on my mind when a car pulls up in the rear and flashes its lights. Budging for headlight blinks while hitting a solo lick for a half kilo? You would think not, but … I stick my head out the window and see an arm waving me back, hear a voice, Todd’s voice, calling my name. The part of my brain that makes sound, the most sound, decisions says let him come to me and do the deal in my ride, but you know how I do.

This a new ride? I say.

Rental, Todd says.

Oh, okay. What kind? I say.

You got that on you? he says.

Fasho, I say.

Cool, he says. Let’s roll.

We pull off slow, with Todd finger-steering and the music on whisper and the wipers lulling and the dashboard lit in neons. We make a few turns to the drum of languorous rain.

This lick has got me breaking my embargo on business after sundown, but we know why, correct? Plus, as I said, me and dude go back. Way before his sucker-for-love scene, we both pledged Brothers Gaining Equality, a fledgling high school fraternity (you wouldn’t catch me pledging a college frat now, plodding campus with an ego gassed on Greek myths) made up of upperclassmen and a freshman or two. BGE held can drives, coat drives, community cleanups, spoke to kids, danced at step shows, threw parties, volunteered weekends at old folks’ homes. As it happened, Todd pledged a couple months after me and rocked with the group till years later we lost steam.

He pulls to the curb on a gloomy side street, and I give him the sack. You can feel how heavy it was when it leaves me and the shit ain’t in any way negligent.

This everything? he says. Homeboy’s redolent of high-powered chronic, got lower lids the shade of sliced peaches. Of course, I say. You know how I do. He hands me a brown paper sack with its edges rolled closed. All there, he says, a scarlet sclera dialed to me, the other scoping the road. Yeah, I know it is, bro. That’s why we do business, I say.

I open the sack expecting a bundle of big faces arranged faceup and folded but scoop a handful of fucking board-game bills!

Ha, I say. Good one.

Todd hits the locks. He hits the locks and, on God, dynamite would make less boom! The click is a brisance that shoots through my ears and into my head and stomps down my spine. What’s worse, someone springs from the backseat and chokes me around the throat. That someone smashes a gun against the side of my eye and, on my life, this can’t be true; how could it? That fast my face goes cold; that fast the rest of me does too. Don’t say one motherfuckin word! he says, and grinds the gun till the gun breaks skin. There ain’t no life flashing past. No white lights. No image of Jesus floating above my head. There’s a trickle of blood scribbling into my eye and this nigger easing off with lethal calm.