The Residue Years Read Online Free Page A

comes a woman, no coat, with her wet hair matted. Closer, she looks about Mom’s age and, like Mom, makes you wonder if she’s lived a hard-knock life or not. My mother will be out soon, and I can predict the promises she’ll make, a script after years I can recite verbatim, speeches she may believe, but maybe doesn’t. But that matters not. Whatever plans Mom has this time, grand or small, starry-eyed or dull, my plans will be under her plans holding them up.
    OneverythingIlove. We. Won’t. Lose.
    The woman from a few seconds ago, she’s hocus pocus in my rearview—poof. Vanishes, and when I swivel to see where to, there’s an unmarked patrol car idling at the crosswalk. Your boy keeps cool at first (clean records create reckless confidence), but when they start towards me, I push the sack in my boxer briefs, hop out my ride, and shuffle towards the nearest house, a place that favors our old house on Sixth—home. Two sets of stairs to reach the front door, and I climb each one slow. As if I’m cursed with early arthritis, a janky hip, a trick knee. Truth be told, I’m giving the kind officers time to get busy with another call, to find more pressing work elsewhere, anywhere but here, but wouldn’tyou know it, there must be nothing pumping in Northeast, nada, and since it ain’t, I’m the object of the officers’ affection, their one and only true love, and right about now they’re sending their amore through a searchlight, stabbing it all inside my ride, which, Ibullshityounot, bucks my eyes the size of silver dollars, and buries my breath down deep where it’s hard to find.
    And peoples, trust me, you’d be breathless too, or worse, if you knew what I know about the Feds’ famous math: 100 to 1—a.k.a. the Bias Effect, à la Len Bias, the former college star who overdosed himself into old glory’s cocaine demigod.
    What I see: a porch junked with trash bags big as boulders, old bike parts, rusted tools, busted cardboard boxes, a mound of soggy clothes. What I feel: my heart stall, a vein in my neck grab. When my heart gets to pumping again, I pound at the door. No—my bad. There I go being a hype man for myself. On the forreals, it’s a feathery-ass knock, but I’m ready to strike a convo with whoever answers.
    Hello, sir, I don’t mean—
    Excuse me, miss, I know it’s late, but—
    Hey, lil man, let me holler at—
    But see here’s the problem: Through the thin curtain covering the window the whole house is black. Ain’t enough light in there to make a shadow. In a nimbus I harvest my cell and make a Broadway show of dialing my homeboy Half Man. No lie, it sounds as if someone installed an amp in my earpiece. Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole block heard it ringing over and over, heard me calling my homeboy to no avail, which shouldn’t be no big old surprise since dude could make a career of being absentee: Gayle “Half Man” Kent: the CEO of Mr.-Never-There-When-Need-Be, Inc.
    A car splashes past, bass turning its trunk into a booty music live show. Soon after I lay a second round of heavy-ass knocks on the door, pounding that sets (sans self-hype this time) my knuckles afire and ratchets my pulse to the sound of a siren. And peoples, let’s call that siren freedom’s theme song cause that’s what it is, trust and believe, cause the ones who disbelieve are either doing time or indicted.
    Police pan the light across the yard, the house, then relentless again on me, and meanwhile, I’m glancing this way and that, and feeling the sack crawl down my crotch towards the loose elastic of my boxer briefs. Any second they’ll order me off the porch with my hands held high. Another second and they’ll trap my wrists too tight behind my back. And right between these fates sits the crossroads.
    Run or stay?
    Toss or keep?
    Felony or misdemeanor?
    Life has options! This