How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  ROLLS SAID HE was late for work and left. His boys didn’t say shit. He opened the car from the passenger’s side and thought about what Tayla’s dad would do when he found out. Then he knew she’d never talk. She hadn’t said anything to him as he left, just looked through him like clear glass. The day was hot and bright and he was going to get away with this.

  Even though he was late, Rolls sat in the car a long time with the windows down, feeling the trapped heat leave slow into the world. He thought about going back for her, but got caught on images of G and Dub in there, still working, each pretending he was alone with her. He imagined rushing down the stairs, turning their faces bloody, but the fantasy left and a weight settled in his chest. Bitches ain’t shit, his mind looped. It didn’t work, though. The weight didn’t leave.

  His sweat seeped into the cloth seat, or her sweat still on him. He remembered the moment her body had stopped pressing and she just lay back. Nobody made eye contact after that. Rolls imagined it was just the two of them, tried to turn her on. He even felt her stomach muscles ease.

  When he finally entered her, she shut her eyes tight and winced. The pain made seams of her body. Just focus on me, Rolls had said.

  SHE HAD TO get up. She had to fix herself. She had to get home. She had to get up. She had to fix herself. She had to get home. She had to get up. She had to clean herself. She had to go home.

  Dub had left without a word when he finished, sighing loud and walking heavy, not slinking away like Rakim. Tayla and Gio sat in the quiet a minute. She had to get up. She admitted she didn’t know how to take the city bus and Gio offered her a ride.

  The drive was long and silent and she told herself she wouldn’t cry. The car was hot. The AC was broken and she opened a window. Even in the leather seats she felt every bump, squeezing her legs shut to stop the aching. The only words she spoke were left, right, up ahead. He still looked pretty. Pretty and sleepy like Rakim had looked those nights in the car. She couldn’t believe it. She wanted to scream, but her brain felt muddy and dumb.

  The yards got bigger and more manicured as 114 slid into Cumberland. She straightened the waistband of her dress. She had to clean herself. Gio looked at her and looked away quick. She knew she’d never see him again, never see any of them again.

  When Gio turned back she caught his eyes. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He paused, then asked her which road.

  “Bear Hill.” She had to get home. She was slowly coming back into her own mind. Her eyes watered from the blocks of air that blew through the open window and she felt herself being erased.

  …hereditary

  All of my cousins

  Dying of thirst

  —Kendrick Lamar

  On the stretch of pavement in front of my boy Dub’s house, the RV hit a car and stuck like a beached whale. With cars parked on both sides, the road was too narrow for it to back out or continue moving forward. My cousins Isaac and Z looked into the spring dusk that stretched fingers of light onto the porch, bearing witness to the failed escape. Maybe that’s what vexed Isaac. Maybe he wouldn’t have pressed the issue if the boys inside had just acted like men and approached us about it, anyone about it. Isaac was only twenty-six, but he’d been a man almost as far back as I could remember. His face turned to stone as the RV tried to flee the block and drive off into the sunset.

  Dub stayed put in the faded green plastic chair. We were all on his downstairs neighbor’s porch, where we burned Blacks and drank during the day. In return, Dub let his neighbor crash the house parties we threw even though the dude was in his forties.

  A few neighborhoods over, on my street, someone would have come out, exchanged insurance info, and sent them on their way. Here, they were too far north off Main. We sat around, talked shit, and drank cheap whiskey with ice, just waiting for some drama like this.

  Isaac had turned in the years since I’d last kicked it with him. He leaned over the railing chewing ice. I watched him boil, same way our uncle Paul used to before my pops would calm his brother down with that fathead smile and Paul would cool out. I knew better than to try to calm Isaac down. He’s the biggest-man-in-the-room type character. I waited to see if my pops’ blood would come out of Z. But Z drained his drink and watched Isaac, who swirled the ice in his cup and pressed his stomach over the edge of the railing. Isaac put his cup down slow, pulled his pants to his hips, and bounced into the road. Dub and I didn’t really know what was going down, but he followed quick off the porch into the soft, sunlit street. Dub was a world-class instigator, could turn peanut butter against jelly. Z followed them out and stopped in front of the RV. The kin on my pops’ side were all giants, and Z was one of the biggest. He waved his baseball-mitt hands and stood like a roadblock, big as a house. My steps were slower. Isaac knocked on the side door and the driver finally put the RV in park and got out. One after the other, six boys emptied out. Girls’ voices came from the open windows. The boys wore green pinnies. Some had shamrock glasses on. They looked around at the neighborhood, their necks twisting again and again to take it all in. The sun was beautiful at that hour, but it was falling.

  AT SOME POINT, the church and the bars must have gotten all mixed up. Saint Patrick probably never brewed green beer, and Christians most likely shouldn’t get smashed during Lent. My cousins didn’t keep Lent ’cause they kept only Christ, and I didn’t keep Lent ’cause I had lost Him. Since I’d moved out east with my mom after the split, little by little we let the church go. We were a long way from space and mountains, where I was born, where our family had been whole. We were even further from the house of God.

  When my cousins had first turned up on my mom’s doorstep, a week before, it felt like they’d brought the church with them. They reminded me of when my mom used to make Bisquick pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse, with the butter, syrup, and all. Even back then, when we were little, they still ate her out of house and home.

  In the time since, we’d all grown the same, so they were monsters too. Z bear-hugged me like he used to and I felt my feet leave the ground, which I’d thought was impossible. When he set me down, Isaac looked at me with his hat broke off, his lips grinning at the corners. Isaac had more tattoos than me, and right before he wrapped me up, all the initials and dates stretched along his forearms. My mom and auntie Gina, their mom, went way back. Gina was the only one of my aunts who kept in touch, the only one of my pops’ sisters who liked my mom. Gina had left the hate somewhere back in Georgia, when her and Pops were coming up, and filled the cavern with breath. She stood big as all of us, but filled with air. When she sang, she emptied it all into her voice and loosed it on the church. I’d go back to sermon just to hear her sing.

  The last time I heard her voice, at my pops’ funeral, she pulled notes from a room of tears. Her boys picked up and sang on too. I sat and cried like a child listening to them belt out “Amazing Grace.” They had fixed my pops’ dead face into a smile—just at the corners, like he kept a secret. That was the end of the Campbell men, the men who sat my ass in church and laughed when I called it Mass.

  After my pops’ funeral, Gina couldn’t fill herself up anymore. Both her brothers had been taken by her God inside of two years, and still, she didn’t pick the hate back up. She took the reins. Big Momma laid the weight of the family on Gina’s head the same way she’d laid it on her boys and it was too late for her to change and stop laying it. Last time I heard, Gina was fresh off heart surgery, but her voice still sounded strong.

  Isaac was wild even before Paul and Pops died, but afterward I think he felt the pressure. He fucked around at a juco, down in the California desert, had to repeat a few semesters of school, and ended up graduating the same year as young Z. Together they booked it out of that San Bernardino heat with thirty Mexican girls’ numbers, two diplomas, a proud mother, and lives half in motion.

  When they came to see me, it was near the end of a long year and I was visiting with my mom before Easter. They were in exodus. They weren’t g
etting good work back west, felt stuck, so they’d packed up to give themselves a shot out east. Gina was splintering under the weight of Big Momma, and Big Daddy had been funeral-quiet for fifty years. Without Paul and Pop’s money, my cousins had to make it happen out here before Gina’s load got too heavy and she went the way of her brothers.

  THEIR EYES WERE fixed on the RV. When I was little, Isaac told me everyone either builds or destroys. When you get your fingers on something good, you hold on tight. He wasn’t in the business of taking things apart. I still remembered him, the night before my pops’ service, wide-eyed at 2:00 a.m., scrubbing the church sinks with me because Gina said they weren’t fit for a memorial. The RV was sleek beige-brown—my color. It shined like it had just come off the lot.

  In the warm weather, things began to melt and unravel. Images trapped in blocks, dragged through from my childhood, came apart in the thaw. I wished that RV had wings. I wanted those frozen memories of my cousins to wait there as they were—Z sitting on Isaac when they wrestled, ants all over our feet in the kitchen ’cause we dropped beans and cold cuts and spilled too-sweet tea and never cleaned up, northwestern summer hail stinging our backs as we booked it out of the park after playing ball. No lost boys. But there was just the beached RV, the narrow street, and dirty water from the spring thaw running into drains.

  We stood, the three of us, facing the six. Dub stepped up next to us.

  “You hit my car,” Isaac said.

  “It was an accident,” the driver started.

  “No shit,” Isaac said.

  The driver paused. “We’re headed to Boston for the parade tomorrow, just looking for a gas station.”

  Isaac remained silent and sized the kid up.

  In the warm spring air, I looked down the length of West Ave., watching time sit on the porches with heavy bodies, pushing them into the small yards that swallowed the refuse of our lives.

  “The RV is rented,” the driver said.

  Z and Isaac turned to each other without words.

  “I don’t give a shit. Look at my fucking car!” Isaac said.

  A stranger’s black Camry stood on the street, barely nicked.

  “C’mon, Isaac,” I said. He shot me a look like when we were young.

  “It honestly doesn’t seem that bad,” the driver said.

  “You believe this shit?” Isaac asked Z.

  Z shook his head all mournful-like. I clocked the strangers’ faces. They started to bunch together. One light-skinned with dreads came to stand next to the driver. A group of kids Dub and I recognized from the Manor started walking down the street—Dub nodded to a few and they broke out in grins. The RV boys watched the crowd forming. The block was swelling.

  MY COUSINS HAD been staying with my mom for about a week before the accident. We’d wandered Division in sweats and hoods and white Nikes—camouflaged with the bricks and parks. Since I’d landed a solid job bartending back in Ithaca, I hadn’t been coming around much. I missed the way the spring wind teased the laundry swinging from tired ropes below Dominican banners that caught the breeze and slowly pulled apart like Tibetan prayer flags.

  Since my cousins had arrived, Dub had bounced around introducing them to folks like he was the mayor. He had us kicking it with all his boys, some who weren’t welcome in my mom’s house. Each night, after we danced on walls outside the Manor with white girls who didn’t know they were white, my cousins and I would come home and they would heat up my mom’s cooking—pasta with meat gravy, hamburgers, pork chops. They didn’t touch the salad. Unlike my boys, they cleaned up after themselves. Isaac even tried to take the trash out one night but got shook when he saw a raccoon, and yelled, “Oh, shit,” so loud that my mom crept down the stairs, creaky as a motherfucker, to look in our eyes and see if we were high. Isaac ushered her back to bed, Mom’s spine bent more than I wanted, telling jokes because I think he wanted to protect us all. Back downstairs, he called me a suburb baby ’cause Mom had moved to Rumford, but I called him a punk for being scared of a damn raccoon.

  I didn’t know what my cousins had done in those lost years, but as the block filled, the mass of faces rose out to claim them.

  The frat boys formed an island in the sea—sleeveless jerseys and green sunglasses. They were already wasted but sobering quick.

  “You want our insurance, then?” the driver said.

  “I don’t trust your insurance,” Isaac said.

  He took a step toward the kid. At the end of the street, the last rays of sun caught pieces of tombstones in Mineral Spring Cemetery, sparkling off the granite. The kid didn’t back up. Isaac’s face was reflected in his sunglasses. I inched closer to my cousin.

  “How bad you think the damage is?” Isaac asked.

  The driver turned his head toward the car. “I don’t see any damage,” he said.

  Isaac walked to the car and squatted down to run his hand over a small dent. He paused. “It’s bad,” he said.

  Before anyone could speak, he stood up and turned fast for the RV. Z pushed aside the driver and was through the group to the door, just behind Isaac. They boarded the RV one after the other. The girls remained fixed in the back. Z filled up the entire walkway.

  The frat boys, in their shades and jerseys, piled in behind Gina’s boys. “What the fuck!” one of them said. “This is trespassing,” another kid said.

  Z spun around fast and I thought he was going to swing, but he just stared the kid down until he dropped his eyes.

  The dudes from the Manor gathered around the door and in front, blocking them in.

  “Relax!” Isaac said to them.

  They all started to panic. Isaac stood closest to the girls in back. They looked my cousins over, then locked their eyes on the boys behind, and we all froze a bit, the nine of us packed in with me all the way in the front.

  The driver squeezed around Z to reach Isaac. “Can we please go outside?” he said. “Let’s talk outside.” He was trying to be calm. His voice was low and I could hardly hear him.

  “Listen to him, Isaac,” I said from behind the group.

  “I’m just saying hi,” Isaac said, and sat down next to the girls.

  There were four of them, all wearing lacrosse jerseys and leggings. They were pretty, or at least three were. The fourth one could’ve used some sunglasses. Her face was cramped like God had pinched the dough too tight.

  Isaac turned to the girls and smiled. “Where y’all headed?”

  “I told you—” the driver started.

  Isaac paused and pulled that Try me look, the one where he clenched his jaw, and his face became lean; then leaned back toward the girls. “Where you coming from?”

  Z clocked the small crowd behind him in the RV, arms loose at his sides. They stared past him to the girls.

  “What’s going on?” one of the girls said.

  “You remind me of Jersey girls,” Isaac said.

  One scoffed.

  “You mean trashy?” another said.

  “I like Jersey girls,” Isaac said. “They don’t take any shit.”

  The scoff girl even smiled a bit. Z still stood facing the crowd and no one else tried squeezing through. My cousin was built like two bouncers.

  “You guys don’t have enough makeup on to be from Jersey, though,” Isaac said.

  “All right, what do you want?” the driver asked. He edged closer to Z, trying to get to the girls.

  “Calm down, Kevin,” Scoff Girl said.

  Isaac looked her over and I prayed he’d abandon it all. He smiled. I waited for him to ask her name. I pressed into the frat boys until I was next to Z. Then Isaac slapped his hands on his thighs and stood up, surveying the RV, all the alcohol-red faces and dark shades. He sighed and tilted his head toward the ceiling. He pulled his hat off for a minute and massaged his forehead, then pulled his cap down low across his brow and broke it off to the side again like he was deep in thought.

  “Body work is expensive,” he said.

  “What?” the
driver said.

  “Compensation,” he said. “Two stacks.” He looked over the driver at me. “G, tell—”

  “They know what it means,” I cut him off, then tried to make a joke. “These damn kids and their internet,” I said and shook my head like Cosby would’ve.

  Isaac stared at me for a while like he wanted to laugh at my corniness. I wished he would have, wished I were funnier. His real smile was beautiful and soft and would’ve broke the moment into a thousand pieces.

  The driver glanced at his friends.

  Isaac finally turned back to the boys and said—“My car’s gotta get fixed.”

  Dub pushed through the whispering boys to stand next to Z and me. With so many people in the RV, nobody could move without hitting somebody else. One of the frat boys turned a light on inside. Night had fallen—the RV still surrounded.

  WHEN WE WERE teenagers, I felt like Z would’ve stopped him. He would have balanced Isaac out before he laid into those boys. Isaac didn’t have more spirit than Z, but Isaac had always been volatile. Still, when we were young, Z would challenge Isaac because they were brothers and because Isaac needed it when he got all worked up inside.

  A day before my pops’ funeral, Isaac was cussing out the owner of the megachurch for leaving the place trashed, but really because his momma was sad her brother would be eulogized in a place so dirty, or maybe just because my pops was gone and they were close. At some point during the yelling, Z wrapped his brother up before the cussing could turn to swinging, and the rawness inside of Isaac melted away.

  Z was more like me. He cooked and sang a lot. He and Gina would be two mountains in the kitchen by the stove, pouring the molasses and cutting the ham hocks into the pan of beans, humming hymns together with gentle voices.