The Residue Years (24 page)

I can only hope, beyond this, baby bro feels the same.
—Champ

A courthouse is an omen for a nigger like me, but I'm four-flats down for baby bro, so here I am, here we are (the
we
being Ms. H, the rest of his knucklehead class). Our tour guide is a jolly twenty-something short-cropped blond that, by the face, ain't got a criminogenic bone in his body. He meets us at the building's entrance and welcomes our group to the Multnomah County Courthouse. We're at the midway of a line that winds out the door. What must be the usual sorts filing in, filling in swift-like too, though soon as I think that, our good fortune dies a fast death at the hands of the slow-moving or slow-witted or both, stalling progress with over-metaled belts, pounds of jewelry, pocketfuls of change, and way too much electronic shit for an earthling. But today's our day. Our guide escorts us to the head of the clog and holds it while we amble through the detectors, while, on the other side of the machines, we fall into an oblong circle under the semi-circumspect gaze of stout sheriffs. And let me say this right here, right now: Whoever designed the sheriffs' puke-green uniforms gave a rat's ass about the stain they'd leave on your eyes, my eyes, or anybody else's.

Our chipper blond lodestar leads us to a conference room on the second floor and we pick seats at a massive oak desk that must
be old as all of us added together. It takes a spate of shushing from Ms. H to coerce the boys out of fidgeting and talking and general unconcern, and in that tease of hush, our guide points at the enormous portraits of stern white men lining the walls and asks if anybody can name the name of a Supreme Court justice. Wouldn't you know, the boys turn absolute mutes, search here and there for an innocuous spot to fix their eyes. I taunt baby bro into response. He guesses wrong, but give him credit. Not a single one of these nascent knuckleheads risks a next try.

Our guide stands at the head of the table and asks another question. He waits. He waits in vain. Okay, well, let's get started, he says. Our court system has three basic functions. To interpret laws, settle disputes, and strike down laws that conflict with the Constitution. He stops and rakes his hair—you know, that patented spread-finger white-boy rake. There are four types of courts: trial courts of limited jurisdiction, trial courts of general jurisdiction, intermediate appellate courts, and courts of last resort. This courthouse is a court of general jurisdiction. He explains how criminal courts are the body of law that preserves a person's basic rights, that anyone that violates those rights has committed a crime against the people.

And who the people posed to be? says one of the boys.

You are, I am, we all are, the guide says, and flashes one of those halcyon smiles that could only be a birthright. Felonies, he says, are the more serious crimes and punishable by a year or more, while sentences for misdemeanors seldom run more than a year. Later today, he says, you'll see criminal proceedings. He goes on and, no lie, to say the least, old green eyes is loquacious as they come.

Canaan folds his arms on the desk, droops a few times into my
fam's famous somnolent nod, and lays his head in his crooked arms. Almost everyone else around the table has wandered off into never-never land. This I take (it's why I'm here, right?) as my cue. I march around to baby bro's seat, tell him he best not embarrass us, and joust a finger in his back. He straightens, jerks his arms off the table, a beacon for his boys, you'd hope, but hell nah, they carry on in the clouds. Towards the end of his spiel, our guide cites a long list of phenomenal stats, the last of which is how every day the courthouse produces a stack of papers tall as a full-grown man, what he calls the paper trail.

Morning court. We're some of the first inside the courtroom and take up an entire bench back in the back and part of the next row up. We're the first, but a finger snap and the room is chock-ablock with all sorts: with attorney types carrying leather briefs, with dudes who look as though they ain't bathed since the new year flipped, with chicks who've graffitti'd their faces in colors (stark mascara, layers of blush), with ladies who've pinned broaches to their lapels. On the other side of a waist-high wall sits two tables, bare minus a pair of angled microphones and yellow notepads. The jury box, the court reporter, the witness stand, it's all there just like you see on TV. The bailiff asks the room to stand while His Honor strolls out to his bench, a throne of polished wood bedecked with a gavel and a life-sized bronze sculpture of our glorious state bird. He takes his seat beneath a huge replica of old Harvey Gordon's (disclosure: our guide told us this in the intro) state seal.

I clamp Canaan's shoulder and give it a squeeze. I am here, it says. We are here, it says. And it counts.

Once, when I was working for a summer program, we took a vanload of problem campers to the Justice Center for one of
those scared-straight shock visits. The first stop of the visit was the booking room, where severe deputies fingerprinted the boys (never dawned on me till now they were entering them in the system forreal forreal), snapped their mug shots, printed the mug shots, and gifted the prints as souvenirs. Next, they dumped us in a holding cell supercharged in world-class funk, I'm talking a stench to make your respiratory system shut right the fuck down! But the holding-cell funk wasn't the pinnacle. They escorted us past pods of inmates banging against thick glass and booming (See you when you get here! Top bunk's all yours, baby boy. Look at the cutie pies!) to the cafeteria, where, after they fed us a jailhouse special: tuna fish on stale white bread, acerbic potato goop, and fruit cups with dubious expiration dates, they marched out a trio of lifetime felons to rant from a kissing distance on the pitfalls of crime. Can't say for sure the effect the trip had on the boys, but what I can say is this: When we left, all I could think was, Not me, no way I could stand even a second locked up. And here's the truth of the truth of the truth: I can only hope, beyond this, baby bro feels the same.

We are not this, I whisper to Canaan. This is not for us.

Watch enough TV and you'll get to thinking, like me, that judges spend most of their days sentencing headline cases, but His Honor (dude looks a little too affable for the job) presides over a lineup of anonymous business: a discovery status hearing, a preliminary hearing, a suppression hearing, a probate hearing, a show-cause hearing for an unpaid fine, a motion, an arraignment, an appeal, a criminal trespass charge, a charge of felon in possession of a firearm, and, of course, of course …

The deputy escorts a dude dressed in county blues that I used
to see out working the curb. He strolls in uncuffed, his arms behind his back anyhow. He glimpses me over his shoulder and gives me a dispirited what's-up nod.

Canaan peeps this and asks if I know him.

Not really, I say.

Dude's lawyer (by his suit, he must've cost a few bucks) asks to approach the bench. You'd need bionic ears to hear the exchange between him and the judge, but whatever it is, they seem to agree. The judge trumpets dude's charges, Distribution of a Controlled Substance and Possession of a Control Substance (the infamous DCS/PCS one-two punch), lists the conditions of homeboy's plea (he won't be home no time soon), launches into a soliloquy about how disappointed he is, how it bothers him to convict so many men who look like him, young black men for drugs, and so on. He asks dude's lawyer if his client would like to speak.

The lawyer announces his client wrote a statement.

Ms. H glances down the row at us. I catch Canaan whispering across me to one of his boys, and give him a merciful elbow-jab.

Dude stands and glances from side to side and back at us. He pulls his shoulders tight and sighs. Your Honor, I'd like apologize, he says. I'd like to apologize to you, my family, my community, to God. My actions were wrong and harmful and cannot be justified. He blathers another couple lines of canned contrition, then stops abrupt and balls his sheet to zilch. The move plunges the room into a Catholic hush. Fuck this! he says. You think this gone stop? It won't. And whoever think so, need think again. Cause we out here neck-deep, he says. If one go down, one come up. If one go down, one come up. That's the rule, he says. One down, one up is the only law that counts.

Dude swings to face us and sorts the crowd and stops on me. Ain't that right, bro? he says. Tell em I'm right, bro, he says. We look each other dead in the face, in the eye. He spares me the homicide of saying my name.

The judge drops his gavel and calls the bailiff and the bailiff stomps over and catches dude by the shirt and lugs him into the aisle and towards the exit. The whole time he chants, One down, one up, one down, one up, one down, one up, his head cocked in such a way you'd think he was a saint.

And shit, maybe he is. Church and court, it's all the same—pews, a throne, a God, the accused.

I need you.
—Grace

Their voices fall to me on the street. Call to me to gaze up at the stained glass. Me still until I hear a break in the song. I skirt inside and mount the steps and, when I get upstairs, stand back as far as you can from the stage. Up front near the choir loft, a circle of members laugh and chat. Okay, okay, the director says, and the members file into the rows of the loft. The organist plays a chord. The director waves fingers bedecked with silver. La, la, la, la la, they sing, and somebody's off-key.

I stroll down and find the pastor sitting in a front pew with a Bible balanced between his legs.

Well, well, well, he says, and sits the Bible aside. If it isn't one of God's glories. Let me guess, you came to lend us a voice.

No, Pastor. I say. I came to see you.

Then here I am, he says.

Do you think we could talk in private? I say.

He leads me behind the stage and pulpit, past a closet packed with the choir's new robes, leads me into a dank room with walls lined by rusted pipes. He clears a fold-up chair and places it before a desk scattered with MLK fans and a portrait of him and his wife. He stacks the fans into a pile and turns the portrait to face me.

I need you, I say.

He loosens his tie and undoes his top button, exposing an inside collar rung with black. He asks what's the trouble but I can't tell him. He glides around the desk and lays a palm on my head, a touch full of a man's strength and the fear of God. He prays, and while he does, I think, Yes, yes, there
are
such things as happy endings; they are wrong, those who say the happy ones haven't lived long enough. He lifts his hand and opens his eyes and holds me in them an instant. The choir's next hymn floats in faint from outside the walls. He asks if I'm in danger.

No danger. But trouble, I say, and compose. I am dignified, and this I want him to see. Pastor lifts a Bible from his drawer, thumbs pages, asks if he could read me a verse. Corinthians 3:17, he says:
If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are
.

I take out the state papers and show him and watch his eyes track along as he reads. He finishes and he smooths the paper and lays it across his desk. How can I help? he says.

Pastor, I know I haven't been here long, but if you could come, I say. I would love it if you could come and speak. If you can. If it's not too much trouble.

Pastor folds the letter into fourths and slides it across to me. When you're one of us, you are one of us, he says. And we take care of our own how we can.

When we leave we float past the choir and down the aisle and down steps and out of the church and onto the street, where this early spring warmth drops from the clouds. Hope to see you Sunday, he says. He catches my hands and presses them into a
form of prayer. Keep faith, keep faith. We push on. We testify, he says, and glides back into the church.

Me alone hoping the choir sends another song falling. Where to next arrives as a taste in my mouth. I troop around to Big Charles's store to buy a pop and chips and my first pack of cigarettes in months.

Thought you quit, he says.

I did, I say.

He shakes his head.

It's one of those days, I say. But just this one time, that's it.

He snatches a pack off the shelf and thumps it and lays it on the counter. Boy, if I had a dollar, he says. But fuck it, you good for business.

Best to pay and leave before I have the chance to reconsider. A foot out the door it's as if I've wandered into a new county. The first drag stokes my chest and feels better than it has, the best it might feel ever again.

Answer A is this:
—Champ

When we were knee-high to an ant, wet behind the ears (you know all the little sobriquets the old heads love to tag you with), and everything else they called us in those days, every time we were doing something we (the
we
being me, my bros, and any one of my intractable-ass first, second, or third cousins) had no business doing, Mama Liza would say it's all fun and games … It's all fun and games till somebody gets their eye gouged out … It's all fun and games till somebody busts their head wide open … It's all fun and games till somebody scrapes all the skin off their knees. When we were older, she didn't even have to finish the sentence. She'd catch us committing some stark crime, shake her wig askew, make her eyes go all ecclesiastical, and say, It's all fun and games …

Professor Haskins is hunched over a stack of papers with his door cracked. He hacks a loud cough into the crook of his arm and swivels slow at the sound of me entering.

Got a sec? I say.

For you, he says, sure.

He pats the couch, tells me to have a seat.

The cushions suck me low.

What can I do for you? he says.

About the program, I say. Can you tell me more?

He grins, taps a ditty on his desk. So you changed your mind? he says. Ready for politics?