The Residue Years (17 page)

Her stomach is firm and swollen.

I drop on the couch and shake my head.

This is a blessing, I say. Such a blessing. How far are you along?

Sixteen weeks, Champ says.

Amazing, I say. Your first child. My first grandchild.

One look at them together and you can see into their trials. How tough it will be to hold a baby above all else. But they will have me. This is another shot for me.

I get up and go into the kitchen and Champ follows. He stands behind me, his chin on my shoulder, while I prep. Mmmm, can't wait, he says. He turns me around and pecks me under an eye. He grabs milk from the fridge and gulps and puts it right back on the shelf—a sin in my home. He smirks, a little rim of white over his lip. Yeah, I know, I know, he says, wiping the white with his shirt. But I'm grown, he says. Overgrown.

So grown you lost your manners, I say. I sure hope that isn't what you teach your own child. That's not what I taught you.

Geesh, so serious, he says. He does a shuffle. It's the dance he'd do when he was young and wanted something I couldn't afford. Before there was little I could afford. Before he stopped asking me for anything at all.

Boy, stop, I say. It won't work.

It's Christmas, Mom, cut me some slack. And a little time too, he says. I need to let some water run on this overnight funk. Let me shower and dress and it's Chef Champ at your beckon.

This is a joke. He has to know he's no help whatsoever in the kitchen. It's a miracle that he and she don't eat out evermore or starve. His brothers have been cooking full meals for years, but Champ might burn down a house, though you can't blame anybody but me. Frying a burger or boiling wieners is about all I ever tried to teach him, which almost doesn't count since I never let him practice. He'd amble into my room at all hours—mashing a fist in his eye and complaining he was starved. Whenever he did, I'd stir and fix him a snack or meal or whatever he thought he wanted—a response, God knows, that never once felt wrong.

A firstborn could be the most we'll ever see of bliss.

The food cooks, and I stroll into the living room. The tree's decked in gold and silver, and presents that match the color scheme. This sure is a beautiful tree, I say. You think you guys bought enough gifts? I lift a box tagged for KJ and feel its bulk—pounds of it.

You know your son, Kim says. Too much isn't enough.

There was a time when Thanksgivings Champ would produce a Christmas list with his gifts ranked. He'd give me the list and ply me with the sweetest gapped smile and I'd appease him with the promise that I'd do what I could. Every year for years
too, that's what I did. Why wouldn't I? He kept A's in school, never got time-outs or notes home or suspensions, not to mention in those days Kenny was paying most of the bills. If ever there was a time, that was the era when the world felt abundant. When I felt big in the world.

Champ lazes out and we open gifts. You should have seen me last night wrapping and rewrapping what I bought, fussing over the tape and folds. Kim opens hers first, detaching the bow with care, pulling the tape gentle. Not the fancy you're used to, I say. But it's the best I could do on a budget. She pulls out the pants and rubs the cotton against her cheek and tells me they're so soft and kisses me on the cheek. Thank you, thank you. I love them, she says.

Champ don't go at his gifts like he used to; he used to shake the box and guess and guess what it was, but now he peels the tape back slow and lifts his gift into view—a Bible. He touches the gold-painted finger tabs and fans the pages. Oooooh, good-lookin, he says. The Good Book. Been looking high and low for a new one, but my fair luck, they been sold out since Black Friday.

Funny, I say. But I was hoping you'd think it was thoughtful.

Sheesh, Mom, he says. Where's our sense of humor? Thank you. Thank you so much for the gift.

You're welcome, I say, and ask him if he remembers our Christmas Eve plays, how he used to whine and pout the years he wasn't cast as Jesus.

Sure do, he says. Jesus of Nazareth, that was me. But now I know for sure that paying for the next man's sins ain't the shot.

There's snow left from last week's storm and winter's glow is a presence among us. Champ hands me a long box topped with a yellow bow and I strip the wrapping as if I might reuse it—waste
not, want not—and uncover a three-quarter-length lamb's-wool coat, dead-on the one I've been eyeing for months.

Only the best for me and mines, he says. He leans back, full of himself, a munificent smile. You shouldn't have, I say, and trace the arms and the shoulders and around the collar. He helps me try it on, tells me to go into the room and check it out in the full-length mirror. I flit in his room and check myself in the mirrored closet doors, turning one way and then the other and flipping the collar and fingering the buttons, having my moment.

He or she has left one side of the closet half closed and you can see an open safe on the floor among boxes. Easy, I slide the door to get a better look inside, see stacks and stacks of bills—not sure how much, but I'd guess more than I ever made in a year of work—see gold jewelry, see what could be hard dope wrapped in plastic. Of all what I see the drugs are what shoot the air right out of me, and all the light.

I am new
.

I am good
.

I am strong
.

I am powerless over people
.

I am powerless over my children
.

I drag out working to fix my face.

So what's the full-length verdict? Champ says.

Can I ask a question? I say. How much did you pay for this?

Mom, it's a Christmas gift. A gift. Asking about price is bad etiquette.

Champ, how much?

It's a gift, he says. He makes a face he made as a boy. And I'd
give the world for him to be that boy again, without ever worrying when I might come home, whether or not I'm safe, where I've been, without ever the wonder of why I'm not myself.

Okay, I say. You're right. It's Christmas. I'll let it go for now. Let's enjoy.

Later, Champ sets the table and Kim serves the drinks and I bring out the food, the turkey and dressing, the candied yams, the macaroni and cheese, the collard greens, the roast, the deviled eggs—a feast to last for days. He carves the turkey and says grace as well. We eat with the TV showing sports. They don't have much to say and I have less to say than that. It takes much too much strength to fight what I see. My son on a corner, his pockets swollen with a sack of shards, or him holed in a dank house. You wonder if he treats them as the worst of them do. How could he let me see it when I told him not to let me see it; now how can I ever see past it? Canaan and KJ call after dinner and wish us all aloha. I leave with unopened gifts under the tree.

New Years, the morning of my first day off in forever, and this return is a resolution. I lug a Hefty bag laden with all Champ has bought me these last months into the building: the coat, the clothes, the clock, everything. He answers wearing a wrinkled V-neck T-shirt and tuxedo pants, a gold chain lying over his shirt, bright diamonds in his ear. I drop the bag by his feet and by his eyes he can't believe it.

What's this? he says.

It's yours, I say. I can't.

Can't do what? he says.

I told you not to let me see, I say. You should've kept it from me.

See what? he says.

Too much, I say. It was all there. I saw it all.

What time is it? he says. It's too early for this. Come inside.

No, I say. I take the car keys out of my pocket and drop them on the bag.

Oh boy, he says. Ooooh boy. That Bible got you tripping like this? What the Bible teach us but how to suffer? he says. That's what you want for us? Suffering?

Son, we can get away from
Him
, I say. But no one gets so far they can't get back. I leave, track the line of lambent bulbs to the stairs. There's a cold that belongs outside, belongs out of this world, in the lobby and through the lobby glass there's the Honda, parked by the curb, its wheels flecked with dirt. I totter outside and into the street and face the building and search the windows, and there's my son gazing at me with his arms crossed and a face I can't make out. I turn away from him and close my coat, this nothing coat, and march off against a treacherous wind.

You hate to think it, hate to say it.
—Champ

Last school year me and Big Ken were the emergency contacts. What that meant was, the times they couldn't reach Big Ken or when they could but he couldn't get away from work, they called me. They called me more than once too. Baby bro stayed in some elementary school strife: backtalking the teacher, scuffling in the lunch line, forging notes home, was in the office so much the little nigger damn near had a reserved seat in detention. The last time they called they were vague about the transgression, but were clear it was grave, that he had to be picked up ASAP. I got the call while I was on campus between classes. I blew my next class and drove the fast lane most of the way to his school. When I got in the office, the school's hawk-beaked secretary thrust a stack of carbon copies in my face. Meanwhile, I glimpsed the principal (he and I had had words) in his office nursing a vainglorious-ass smirk. The secretary had security take me down (as if I needed directions) to the detention room, where my bro was stooped over a lefty desk with his faced smashed in his arms. I caught him by his collar and, with the security (a fossilized waif who couldn't make an infant follow rules) stalking us, I drug him out of the school. It felt like there was a set of eyes pressed against every single window, watching
me shove Canaan into the car and slam the door, watching me storm around and seethe at him through my windshield. Me huffing and groping for slick calm. Don't ask me why I was so hot without the details. Could've been the way the principal looked at me or the latent grudge over it being me once again attending the issue instead of Big Ken, instead of Mom, who was still in her program; don't ask me why, but that day I had a mind to fire on baby bro right there in the bright broad light of the lot. Lucky for him the watchful gaze of a building of witnesses made me think twice. I took out Canaan's paper and read the script:

Canaan Thomas, a student with a history of behavioral problems, was involved in an altercation with Mr. Glisan. Mr. Glisan ordered Thomas to run lines for dressing down late for class and Thomas refused. Mr. Glisan then asked Thomas to leave the gym, at which point Thomas cursed Mr. Glisan in front of the class. Mr. Glisan requested once more that Thomas leave the gym and report to the principal's office at once. Thomas responded by tossing a ball in the stands and threatening to bring a firearm to school to shoot Mr. Glisan. School security was alerted and Thomas was escorted to the main office. Thomas is hereby suspended from school pending a hearing for expulsion.

What to do??? Read it once. Read it twice, then asked him, with fist and heart open, for his side of the story. He said he showed up a couple minutes late for class, and in front of the whole team the coach fired a ball at him and said to run suicides. He (my granitehead bro) tracked the ball and kicked it to the other end of the gym (this was a bad move, of course, but as it turns out the lil
homie was locomotive) and told the teacher what he could do with his suicides. He claimed that day that the teacher called him a loser and a waste and only then did he curse (another dandy move but youngster was caught, bad breaks to boot, on that steep, steep slope of flawed judgment) and say he'd get his older brother (me) to come the next day and whoop the teacher's ass. This was what made the teacher call security, not, as baby bro alleged that day (his eyes leaking Oregon raindrops) because he threatened to bring a pistol to school.

Man, they got you in the system now, I said. Satisfied?

For the record, my peoples, yes I know it could have been a snafu picking a side. But who gives a rat's ass whose story I believed? The end game was this: my baby brother won't be back in “regular” school (oh, the shit we forsake) for at least a year if ever at all.

At Canaan's new school (an alternative school housed among a bunch of warehouses) the office, or what I'm guessing is the office, is empty, desolate, so I stride down the hall and peek inside the first open door and introduce myself to a lady sitting behind a messy desk. She greets me all cherry-like, and I tell her why I came. She knows Canaan, his grade, his class, and offers to walk me over.

Canaan's class is in another building, and from the office to his class you can see the shabby warehouses, forklifts, bereft wooden pallets. Up ahead a semi pulls onto the lot, its engine making the sound of tools knocking, and muscles towards a garage where men in grimy jeans and hooded jackets wait in the cold. My escort stops and rubs her shoulders and points to the building. It's really awesome you came, she says, her nose and ears chilled soft red. She strides off hugging herself.

Dinged lockers, a lone lefty desk tagged with
Fizzuck Mizz. H
, a dented trash can, that's what I see inside. The classroom door is closed, but you can see the teacher (I'm guessing she's Ms. H) through a window cut in the door. She's standing by a portable chalkboard dressed in slacks and a blouse. She points to the word DREAM written in giant letters on the board. I crack the door and wave and she smiles and waves, and I stroll in searching for baby bro in the seats. He's posted in a row nearest the back and sinks in his desk when I look at him. This classroom is all these classrooms. There's a hand-drawn box on the board with a name in it, a wall of maps showing countries these youngsters, like it was for me and my patnas, got a 0.01 percent chance of seeing as nonsoldiers, a laminated poster of the classroom rules. Ms. H announces me to the class, all boys, and warns them on their best behavior.

What, he posed to be babysittin or somethin? says a youngster with level-five acne. Ms. H tells him to show me respect and the little peon balls a sheet and shoots it well short of the closest trash can.