Free The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson

the car washes, Albina Bank, the precinct, the Job Corps office, the gas stations that sold that cut-rate low-octane ethanol shit that gave my ride the coughs.
    Can’t let you off that easy, Mom says. Lets see them. Let’s go.
    The first spot of mine we hit is the hand carwash on MLK. This is where, soon as there was a inkling of heat, the hustlers would gather with their old-schools: chameleon-painted Mustangs, Monte Carlo Super Sports, ’64 Impalas tricked with dual exhausts, El Caminos customed with trunks of big-ass woofers. You’d see the carwash packed with flossy rides, with dudes cooling against a fender or craned by the ear of a blushing young broad. What I don’t tell Mom is how I’d sputter by in my hooptie (a Buick Regal with a faulty alternator) and dream of being among the go-getters, of being posted beside a late-model four-door on pristine five-stars swathed in low-profile meat—how I longed to seize a place in the life.
    I cruise a couple blocks up to Quickies, the brick convenient store where, after a long day of park balling, me and my hoop patnas would slog to (T-shirts drenched and feet on hell in high tops) intent on copping a sports drink or juice, and if we had the loot, a hot link or jo-jos or a flaky bean burrito. We’d hit the store and either tramp back to the park for the close-to-sunset runs or trek back home to wash our sweaty nut sacks. Then around the time I hit my growth spurt, about the time the old heads started letting me ball on the main court, niggers caught in that red and blue strife were turning Quickies’ lot into theWild Wild West. Got to the point where you’d bop out carrying your half guzzled drink and sack of JoJos and get caught in ballistic funk. Quickies is where one of my homeboys from grade school got shot in the chest and lived, where the brother of a JV teammate got shot in the neck and died.
    Where do we end up?
    Where could we end up but the corner of Sixth and Mason.
    I park across from the house and for a time the both of us sit quiet and gaze. The light is dying behind the clouds. Whatever was left of the season’s heat has been sucked out the air. We get out and walk to the fence. They’ve got the lawn cut and the porch painted, a new screen door. What I think of about then is this, I say, and sweep my arm.
    Mom nods. She nods and smirks. Tell me what you remember most, she says.
    When Mama Liza would keep us hostage for hours of prayer and devotion. Stealthing into Bubba’s fruit stash for a kiwi, plum, or mango. Oh yeah, and remember the year you bought me that rolltop desk and encyclopedia set? I say. The one I talked my boys into playing school all summer?
    Yes, I do. Yes, I do, she says.
    Mom, have you ever thought? I say. Sometimes I think, I say, how we spend all this time looking further and further, when what we need was behind us all along?
    Yes, Champ, she says. It would be nice, it would, if we were all at some point sprinkled with light.
    Mom asks how often I come by the old house.
    That’s a good question, I say. Not that often and often, I say. Or whenever I feel the need.
    * * *
    Skate night. We (my girl and me) swank in late with our arms looped. Ain’t been in here in a hot minute, but ain’t much changed. Walls wood-paneled, raggedy carpet, a glass case filled with old skates and trophies, lockers with the paint rubbed to patterns. And it’s dim in here too, disco dim with a light machine playing colored swirls across the rink. We find a seat in the lobby and I help Kim pull off her boots and carry them to the counter, do that and ask the counter girl for new skates for my girl if they have them cause I should. You shouldn’t have, Kim says, and slips on the new wheels. She gets to her feet and scissors her stilts apart this way, then that. Then who walks in but this funnstyle super-skate dude who’s been a mainstay at the rink since my old summer program was coming here on