How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  She laughed and rolled off me. Go ahead.

  I started up at the base of her skull, real gentle with just one hand. Then I kissed in between her shoulder blades and started kissing her sides and hips.

  Really? she said. That’s as far as you’re going to make it?

  I flipped her over real quick and started biting her stomach. My teeth marks were bright red in the flesh next to her hipbones.

  Stop, stop.

  I looked up at her.

  Come here, she said. She tossed the hair off her shoulder and I laid my head there. Are you going to let me meet your parents soon?

  Damn, I said, you really didn’t want to fuck again, huh?

  She rolled her eyes at me. You’ve met mine, she said.

  Wandering eyes aside, they had seemed to sparkle in their suburban home near Denver. Truth be told, I imagined it was a lot like the California suburb I’d been born in while my pops still played, before the 49ers did him dirty. Leah’s family had a fire pit out back and the whole family did dishes, synchronized like they were running a motion offense. Then we all sat and watched late-night television. Shit, even though they were Jewish, I could almost envision them caroling together.

  And? I said.

  And I want to meet them, she said. They won’t scare me away.

  That’s not what I’m worried about, I lied, and I went down to kiss her inner thighs. She closed her knees and I rested my head there, gazing at her. She laughed and pinched her face up the cute way she always did. Put your glasses on, I told her.

  Let me meet your parents.

  FINE, I SAID, and spread her legs. Now put your glasses on.

  The moonlight that shone through her lace curtains was pretty on her skin. Her hair was sprawled on the pillow next to where I’d been beside her. I wanted to lie back down and smell her hair again. I wanted to fog her glasses and kiss her thighs and I really did want her to meet both my parents. Our kids would be little JAPs with traces of nigga in them and have soft hair and beautiful eyes and smiles.

  I didn’t ever talk about my family. All she knew were the pictures in my dorm. I even had a few from when I was little, when we were still all together. Maybe she made assumptions about my folks because her parents had worked so hard on their love, like homemade-chocolate-covered-strawberries type love, like surprise-love-poem type love, like Marvin Gaye/vibrator/Jacuzzi-session type love. But I knew the small fractures in her parents’ bond even if she didn’t want to see or hear them.

  That night, after she fell asleep, I packed up my overnight bag, got in my car, and left. I drove along the shore of Cayuga for a while, heading nowhere, with the image of her sleeping sound stuck like hooks in me. The lake was much prettier at night. I parked by the falls in the state park and picked out some town lights across the way.

  It would be three hours earlier in Washington. I hadn’t heard from my pops since I graduated high school, but I tried the numbers I had anyway, once on his cell and once at home.

  Dee picked up and told me he hadn’t been around in months. The world felt on loop.

  “He isn’t picking up his cell,” I said.

  “New number,” she said.

  “How’s Whit?”

  She sighed deep like she had a story. “She’s asleep already.”

  “He still come around?”

  She coughed. “Some things you gotta ask him yourself,” she said.

  I asked for the new number.

  “Hold on.” Her voice sounded a thousand packs worse and crackled through the earpiece. She gave me the new number and hung up. I called three times and each time a man picked up and said he didn’t know a Lonnie. Stop calling.

  A FEW DAYS after I’d gotten my tattoo, Pops said we were going to Burlington Coat Factory to get me jazzed up, but before we even hit the highway, I saw my bags in the backseat. He was taking me to the airport a week early. It was like something was all used up, like we had stopped building together all of a sudden. That was the worst of it. Even then I wondered if we’d ever start again. My ribs still hurt like hell as we walked through the totem poles of the Sea-Tac Airport in silence. They stretched up, towering over him. Faces like legacies carved into trees that had once jutted up into the blue northwest sky, preservations of family histories, legends incarnate. I loved that word. The word was big enough to fill the universe—legend of the sun and moon and stars. Family legends, so many lost.

  We were late and his strides were long. I had to trot to keep up.

  “C’mon, G,” he said. I bumped into people as we went, my eyes fixed on those etched histories. “Gio!” he said.

  “I can get it removed,” I said.

  My face got hot. I tried to stop but he grabbed my wrist and yanked me through the crowd.

  “Dee told me to get it,” I said. “I just wanted a quote.”

  “It’s not about the damn tattoo.”

  I saw a fast-food Chinese restaurant and thought it was my last hope. “Can we get some food? I’m hungry.”

  He eyed the Panda Express, then checked his watch. We stood still and silent for a moment. He was probably thinking about egg rolls and lo mein and thinking about them hard. But then he started to drag me toward the gate again.

  I must’ve asked why a dozen times. He kept yanking my arm until my shoulder hurt almost as much as my ribs.

  “You have to go home,” he said.

  Home hit me like a fist and I stopped asking.

  When we got to the check-in, he confirmed the ticket change. The attendant said I’d be able to get on. He smiled at her and there was a little fear that crept behind her green eyes. It was some of the prettiest green I’d ever seen. He saw the fear too so he said, “Thank ya kindly.” Then she smiled back. My pops knew how to turn the black folk on when he wanted too.

  He gave me five dollars to get some food during my layover in Chicago. I wanted to tell him that I knew, just like the ticket, it was my mom’s money. Instead, I hugged him good-bye. I could feel the sweat beginning to soak through his green shirt.

  There are pictures in my mom’s house of them on vacation in San Diego. His shirts hang like dresses down past her knees. She looks happy in those pics. They both do. He is a happy ghost in those pictures. A happy black ghost with my smile.

  BY THE END of that summer before I returned for my senior year, Leah had quit calling. When I didn’t respond to her messages, the texts and e-mails stopped too. My pops hadn’t resurfaced. Dee and my mom had been bitching at each other about it on the phone for weeks. I wanted to call Leah every day, apologize, tell her what was up, but it was unfair to leave her with two options—pity or bullshit.

  I was back at my mom’s, eating soup and watching the light change through the window. Fall was coming. The sun was crisper and not hazy like the shimmering heat of summer. My mom and I looked at each other across the kitchen table, in silence. When the home phone rang, somehow we both knew.

  She answered it. Her voice was hushed. “Yes, he’s home. Lonnie, he’s been calling you and he—” Her voice was rising and he must’ve cut her off. “Yes, I’ll put him on.” She walked over to me with eyes so full they would have burst if I hadn’t smiled and slouched back in my chair.

  “Soup’s good,” I said.

  “It’s your father.”

  “I’m not here right now.” But she looked like she would crack again so I took the phone. “Ayo, Pops.”

  “What’s up, G-Money? Heard you tried to call me a while back.”

  “Yeah, glad to hear you livin’.” He wheezed into the phone and I felt bad. “You been running?” I asked.

  “What?” he said.

  “Never mind.”

  “I was calling to check up on you,” he said.

  “Ray,” someone yelled in the background on his end. “Ray!”

  He muffled the phone and said something to the dude yelling.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “G, lemme call you right back.”

  “Yeah,
” I said, but there was already a dial tone. I looked at my mom. “It’ll be in May. I’ll give you the date when I know,” I said. “That sounds real nice.”

  The operator’s voice began to play and I hung up.

  A few years later, my cousin finally told me he’d been staying in a funky spot down in Rainier Vista. He didn’t use his real name around the folks he was staying with. The fat nigga had gotten Ray off a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce so that’s what he went by. Ray “Lion” Campbell didn’t have the same ring, though. I didn’t know if he was working or what he was doing. He didn’t even check up on Whitney anymore.

  Tayla and Rolls first met during one of the summer Portuguese feasts in East Providence. She spent a long time just looking at him before trying to be seen. He was standing around an open fire with a cup of red wine and a cup of seasoning to toss over a five-dollar skewer of roasting beef. Even though the cups were plastic and he had Air Forces on his feet, his face looked serious in the light, like he’d built the fire himself and aimed to keep it burning for a thousand years. She left her friends and posted nearby, trying to catch his glance. She was glad she’d worn the powder-blue sundress her older sister, Candace, said made her look refined.

  An hour later they were on the steps of St. Francis Xavier and he had opened the sketch pad he always traveled with. She looked young, and he drew a caricature of her with a preacher’s robe and a lollipop.

  When she asked about it, he said, “You’re so sweet and wholesome, I’ma call you Christ’s candy.”

  It was weak game and she rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in God,” she said. He paused and she quickly added, “At least not in the church sense.”

  He launched into the problems with religious institutions, noted the value of communal worship, all in student-speak. He would be a sophomore at college come fall, and his boys would’ve been too if things had turned out different. She listened for a while before she asked why he was religious. He deflected, asked her where she went to school. She thought about lying but said she’d be a junior at Lincoln High in the fall.

  That made him quiet.

  “Don’t be weird,” she said.

  Rolls looked at her face in the dim orange light from the church and started drawing again. He said he was religious because he needed a compass. “It’s like a North Star,” he said. “People talk themselves out of doing good too often.”

  She wanted to lean in for a kiss, but Candace’s voice played loudly—Fast women are worth less than fast food. Rolls flipped the page of his notebook and sketched some more.

  “You look really pretty when you smile,” he said.

  She studied his profile for a second before reaching out a little too quick, turning his face, and kissing him close-mouthed. “I’m not as wholesome as you think,” she said.

  After that, Rolls started picking her up in secret—secret from her parents and his pops. He told his boys, but they all said she was a myth and asked why he hadn’t brought her around. Rolls joked, but not without pride, about how he had to pull up past her house so her pops wouldn’t wake up. But they all knew that strict parents didn’t always make for good girls and loose parents didn’t always make for loose ones. Rolls liked that she wore dresses, not low-riding jeans with Js. Still, he hadn’t introduced her to his father. The rules would change once he did.

  Tayla liked that he took her around to places alive with noise or places where time seemed to stretch. She liked that Rolls cared about more than just sports and pussy. Though she knew that was probably on his mind too. The way he spoke seemed so composed, like he’d written it out first. Sometimes he’d lower the volume on a song just to tell her the history of the sample that was in it. She’d tell him he was a weirdo and turn the music back up, but she was impressed. She liked the feeling of drifting around with him.

  Still, she was mad that he never introduced her to his boys. She asked why he didn’t take her to Dub’s parties since he talked about them so much. He told her that she wouldn’t like them. Finally, one day, he said that she didn’t belong there.

  She looked out the passenger window for a minute. “I can take care of myself,” she said.

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, Rolls brought Tayla to Dub’s. She drew attention but hardly made a sound. That was her youth.

  Rolls leaned against a boxy, flat-screen TV, one leg crossed in front of the other. She didn’t get tired of taking in the angles of his wiry body. Tight brown pants accented his frame. His face was dark and fine-featured like none she’d ever seen before. He told her that way back, his people were Italian-Ethiopian. He descended from kings.

  Nigga, everybody can’t be king, his boys’d say. It don’t make sense. Some motherfuckers gotta be average. When they really wanted to fuck with him, they’d start calling him Selassie—Your sneakers are trashed, Selassie. Roll another J, Selassie. How much you got on this pizza, Selassie?

  Tayla watched him shift his weight with an ease and lightness. He was the paranoid type, but she didn’t see it that way. She thought it was just artistic energy, something he was bursting with. When they were alone, his thoughts wandered and he’d sketch and draw. Sometimes he talked while he drew, like he was narrating his art to her.

  At the party, he and Dub spoke fast. They were all tipsy and the words flew by her into the kitchen. She lost the thread of their conversation somewhere around moral imperatives and never quite picked it back up.

  “Don’t give me that ‘It’s all relative’ bullshit,” Rolls said. “Some niggas are just heinous.”

  “And I bet you think you’re not,” Dub said. He looked down at Tayla sitting on the plastic folding chair.

  She fixed her skirt and recrossed her legs. The chair creaked beneath her and she glanced at Rolls. He reached down and rested his hand on the back of her neck.

  “So healthy.” He broke into a smile that could pacify a lion.

  She tucked a spiral of hair back behind her ear. The room was empty—just plastic folding chairs, the TV, and a rug that was still rolled up in the corner. Only a couple stragglers remained. It hadn’t been one of Dub’s best parties.

  It was his mom’s place. The party was always there. His mom worked the late shift at Walmart and that left the good hours open for getting down. The space was mostly empty but somehow still cramped. It was on the top floor of a three-family home and was packed to the gills whenever Gio and Rolls bought liquor or whenever somebody came across a cheap bootlegger selling “imported” aguardiente, which meant it had been brewed in a garbage can, and decided to be generous with it.

  When Rolls and Tayla got back to her neighborhood after Dub’s, she touched his knee and said to drive past her street. He looked over at her and she thought he might smile, or kiss her, or ask if she was sure, but he just continued on until they reached the small river with its dirt parking lot that fit only two cars. He cut the engine. The dashboard lights still shone green for a minute. She took in his features once more and knew how good his lips would feel on hers. In the past weeks, they’d fooled around and she’d left him hard. She liked that power. Her mom had told her never to use sex to manipulate a man, but Candace told her that any man worth shit would wait. Her friends told her different.

  The car lights went completely dark. The trees and clouded night made the inside an inkwell, too murky to see him clearly any longer, but she knew he was slouched back in the driver’s seat like usual, leaning so far you could barely see his head through the driver’s-side window. The car sighed and clicked as it cooled. She wanted to ask more about what he and Dub had been talking about earlier. She hadn’t studied philosophy. Really, she just liked the quality of Rolls’ voice when he got excited about something. It was like listening to her mom talk about piano. His voice would come out so loud and assured.

  Before she could speak, his hand was between her thighs. His touch was cool, skin thick. She squeezed her legs tighter but didn’t remove his hand. His breath on her ear tickled. She leaned away a li
ttle, then his lips were below her jaw, his teeth gently on the soft part of her neck. He paused a second and blew cool air where he’d been kissing. Chills went up her arms. She held his head, felt the coarseness of his hair beneath her fingers. He took his hand away and unbuttoned his jeans.

  Headlights passed and for a moment she saw his outline—he was already hard. Her friends had told her it was easy, that all boys get so amped they’ll say you’re the best in the world.

  He propped it up and grabbed the back of her head. Her body caught on the seat belt.

  “Hey,” she said, and stiffened. Her eyes were adjusted now and his smile was dimmed in the dark.

  “My bad,” he said. He undid her seat belt and kissed her again. His lips were gentle, then her head was being forced down over the console again. The gearshift was hard in her stomach. She stopped to turn her body. He put the seat all the way down and pulled her by the back of the head. She coughed a bit.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  She sucked it like the top of a Popsicle, but it was too wide. She looked through the dark at what she thought was his face.

  “Are you, like, huge?” she asked.

  “I’m happy with it.” He laughed, then grabbed the back of her head again. Something about his laugh relaxed her and this time she was able to get her mouth farther down. She used her hand to brace against the seat. Eventually she eased, but time moved slowly. Her jaw started to ache. He draped one arm over her back and slid his fingers beneath her waistband till they reached the top of her ass. She noticed her own wetness for the first time that night. Then he grabbed a handful of her hair and thrust himself into her mouth harder. She gagged but he thrust harder till she thought she was choking and tried to pull away.

  “Breathe through your nose,” he said. “Be a good girl.”

  Snot bubbled in her throat and nose. Still, she kept on and squeezed her eyes shut and thought of how he’d called her beautiful when he caught her fixing the bunches in her dresses and skirts, how gentle his lips were moments ago, his faraway eyes when he drew.