The Residue Years (26 page)

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.

… And we all by now should know what that is.
—Champ

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.

He asks me when and where I'd like to meet and I say as soon as we can at the coffee shop near the mall. How's today? he says.

It's easy (it ain't but two customers inside, and one of them is an Asian) to spot Jude a couple hours later in the coffee shop. He's the one crammed in a corner booth. I call his name and he looks up and ekes out. Right off you can't help but notice he's as bulky as I am thin (wonder if he feels about his girth how I feel about my slight), with dark hair silvered above his ears, saggy jowls, and a snout that's a normal nose squared; scratch that, with
a nose that's two human noses cubed! What I mean to say is the tiny voice I heard over the phone must be stuck inside the wrong dude.

Nice to meet you, he says. He asks if I want coffee or water and unbuttons a loose sport coat. Judging by his smile (too toothy for a grown-ass man) homie's cool tank is running on fumes—if you ask me another positive sign. He excuses himself and bops to the counter, hella-tons on his tippy-toes, and returns with bottled waters. I twist off the top and swig. He rifles through a folder embossed with his name and slogan. Bud, I always like to start with two things I believe about business, he says. You've got to be able to give people what they need, sometimes even before they know they need it. The second is forget what they say about mixing business and personal. That's a load of crapola. I do my business with people, and to me that's always personal.

Jude's voice is, at best, an infinitesimal bit off the sissified, an octave or so below what mines was in high school, those years my teammates used to bust my balls about my pitch, the years I would tense something treacherous at the prospect of answering a phone and being mistook for a chick.

You ever met a stranger who confides their life story (low-lights, highlights, dashed dreams, five-year plan) a second past an intro? Have you ever? Jude tells me he was born in Lubbock but lived a little bit of everywhere, says his old man was a die-hard lush who could never hold a job and every year disappeared for a season. Jude confides that he's childless, with an ex-wife who wants to fleece him to pennies, and at present is doing a helluva helluva job. He claims he was a D-1 philosophy-minoring middle linebacker headed for the pros till he tore an ACL and took up binge-eating and pill-popping. The confessions go on. The man
admits that ever since he wrecked his knee, even though he kicked the pills, he hasn't been able to shed the weight. So I ended up here, Jude says. Cause every smart real estate man knows this city is the new frontier.

But enough about me, he says. What about you, bud? What's your story?

Show me a nigger with that much trust and courage, who's that open from jump. Forsure, forsure, I can show you a nigger who ain't. What I don't tell Jude is what I shouldn't tell Jude. And we all by now should know what that is.

Jude says his old man preached that a man's business is a man's business, so he can understand keeping some things to myself, but when I'm ready, if I'm ever ready, that I could breach the code.

I tell him about the house, the backstory of my sacrosanct great-grands, and how long it was ours; about the new owners and my tour and the fact it isn't for sale; about what I think I can hustle if, no, make that
when
we convince them to sell. Meantime, Jude jots notes in the pad he pulled from a folder, turning animate tufts of dark knuckle hair.

He sets his pen aside and gulps his drink. Bud, I've never been one to mislead. This sounds tough, but I promise to do the best I can. He slides out of the booth and flashes those seismic teeth. What am I saying? he says. If it can be done, we'll do it. Rest assured you've found the right guy.

Outside, Jude throws on his thin standard-issue (two ovals stretched out to points, the same style for every white male on earth!) white-boy shades. He asks how far we are from the house, and when I tell him, he says that we should go have a look-see, and offers to drive. His ride is a white rental with shampooed cloth
seats and logo-stamped rubber mats. He keeps his hands at ten and two the whole way there and hazards not a single mile per hour over any posted speed. Better safe, he says.

When we get to Sixth, he cruises by the house and keeps going around the block, to get, he says, a feel for the neighborhood. The next time around he parks a distance back and gets out and tippy-toes up to the house. He gallivants (if he's worried about the owners thinking he's a snoop specialist I sure can't tell; got to love that white man's audacity!) around the front, the back, the side facing Mason. Meantime, I'm leaned in my seat invisible-man style on straight tenterhooks that the husband or the wife will spy Jude or me or us both, believe me shady, and ground this whole expectant business before it ever grows wings. I peek over the dash and see upgrades from the last time I drove by, new paint on the porch and what looks like a good power-washing for the rest of the place—signs I can't or won't decode. Jude makes another trip around the house and tippy-toes back to the car.

Wow! Now, that's what you call a home, he says. You know, there's nothing like owning your own piece of terra firma, Jude says. If this was the Middle Ages, when land was your one and only piece of wealth, you might have to fight for it. In those days, possession ruled, he says. If you had it, you owned it; if you found it, you kept it; if you wanted it, you had to fight. And that's pretty much how it stayed till William the Conqueror came along, defeated King Harold, and declared ownership of every square inch of England. It was the new king that gave land rights to his officers and made them tenants-in-chief of huge plots of land. Wasn't long before those chiefs were getting rich subletting their land, then passing their riches and rights to their kids. They called it the feudal system, Jude says. But some people call it the birth of
the aristocrats. He takes off his standard-issue shades and wipes his nose. And Shawn, let me tell you, after all this time, a home's still the best way to leap from one class to the next, to get a foothold in the world.

He leaves the car off and we sit. I watch an old man hobble up the steps of what's maybe still Miss Mary's house. Watch a boy skip his scooter along the sidewalk. Mist gathers and Jude lowers his window and sticks his head into it. He reels himself in, straps on his seat belt, grabs the wheel on the numbers, and turns to me. Bud, whether they will or won't, we hope for the best. And I'll do all I can. All I can and more. But I can tell you one thing sure, he says. This won't be cheap.