I hobbled onto the infield and sank into a crouch. Head cast down, I tasted iron and worried my throat was bleeding. A wind blew and almost knocked me over. North Florida in February was cold, but I was sweating, so I couldn’t tell if I was going to shiver or overheat. Trying to catch my breath, I berated myself: I gave up on the race. I looked around. The other runners paced with their hands on their heads. They weren’t tougher than me. They didn’t know what it was like to go to bed hungry. They hadn’t survived my father. Anger carried me back to the starting line and washed away the pain through the next heat’s beginning. For the rest of practice, I alternated between belittling and aggrandizing myself, the two voices spurring each other on until I couldn’t hear anything else.
In time, I learned that sprinting after dying was normal for Florida track. When we didn’t vomit, coaches said we weren’t working hard enough. When stomach acid turned our throats tender, they said the burn was how we knew we wanted to win. And when we placed at meets, we proved their strategies worked. They said little about the time spent at the trainer’s, taking ice baths or applying heating pads to soothe our shin splints, tendonitis, hip-flexor strains, pulled quads, torn calves, knee problems, weak ankles. They never discussed the injuries their runners developed in high school that prematurely ended their collegiate careers. And they didn’t mention the people whose bodies gave out before the season’s end. Instead, they reminded those who remained that track was a fight between yourself and your pain. The toughest runner came out on top.
That day, when I finished last in every heat, was my initiation into our struggle with dying. After Coach dismissed us, I stepped off the track, kneeled over the nearby gutter, and stared into yesterday’s rain. I vomited brown-orange mucusy bile into the dark waters. Coach patted me on the back, congratulated me for working hard, and walked off as I retched again. When I finished, I walked toward the school bus. My calf cramped, my right leg clipped my left, and I fell. On the ground, I told myself I was never coming back.
Need some help?
A distance runner wearing a Boston Red Sox shirt held out a hand slippery with sweat. He helped me up, tucked his arm under mine, and walked me to my bus. His name was Will, but everyone called him Twig.
That night, when I lay down to sleep, my throat felt like sandpaper had rubbed it raw. My sheets felt like they were trying to smother me. But when my mind drifted to Twig, I fell asleep. My bed was wet in the morning. In the summer, I joined the cross-country team with him. After our summer practices, when I lay down for a nap, I slept easily.
Soon I started hanging out with Twig and his friends, the other distance runners. We mostly played videogames and cards or drove around looking for something to do. Throughout it all, we repeated jokes we had heard, the raunchier the better. A bit Jason often repeated: What do you call the kid of a Black man and a white woman? An abomination. In response, I joked about white boys having small dicks, and so on. We hoped to prove we were funny without caring who we hurt, stopping only to talk about all the things we were going to do when we left this boring town.
Even Aubrey got serious when she and I talked about the future. We mostly hung out at lunch because track and cross-country occupied my non-school hours during the year and because she spent her summers hanging out with her sister and her best friend, Jess. Over our meals, she often talked about what we were going to do when we finally did see each other outside of school. She was going to take me mudding or hunting. I never pointed out that the folks who did those things didn’t want someone who looked like me around. Instead, I said I wished I could come. She said I’d love it. But even when I was free, she never invited me.
One afternoon, in the fall of my senior year, Coach canceled practice. Aubrey said we were hanging out. I said I had homework due the next day. She said I could do it at her place. After school, she drove us home in her Ford sedan. She wore a teal hoodie with a maroon dove on her chest. Her lips shone pink from a thin coat of gloss. Her eyeliner made her light-brown eyes look large and dark. She turned to me and I turned away. Gray clouds lay low in the sky. It would rain soon.
Aubrey rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. She turned on Skynyrd, who played something like a Southern-rock version of a funeral arrangement. Above a guitar’s high-pitched whine and an organ, a nasally man sang, telling his girl he had to go, but he hoped she would remember him. As the singer compared himself to a bird, Aubrey talked about her weekend plans: drinking, fishing, hunting.
After twenty minutes, we arrived at her home in the B section. Her sister and parents were out. Aubrey parked and we entered her house, one of the only ones I had seen that was not carpeted. She led me to her bedroom in the back. Garth Brooks and Toby Keith looked down from posters on her wall. Her bed was three times the size of mine, her light-blue sheets unruffled and uniform in color as though never washed. I put my backpack in the corner and sat on the dark wood desk. She opened her closet. Shirts and jeans, identical except for color. She separated the teal shirts from the light-gray ones to reach the lone empty hanger and hung her Hollister hoodie up. I wondered how much her wardrobe cost.
Why’re you sitting on the desk? Aubrey asked.
I made a corny joke about preferring tables. She didn’t laugh. Tapping on the window announced the rain outside. Aubrey kept watching me expectantly until I sat next to her. I had never sat on a girl’s bed before. The mattress was firm, sturdy. Her sheets were soft but didn’t stick. My stomach fluttered. I scanned her shelves.
Ain’t know you read that much, I said. You should be in the honors class with me.
I don’t like reading like that, she said. Just murder mysteries, the bloody ones.
You’re creepy as all hell, I said.
Aubrey slapped my arm. I said we better start our homework, took out my honors English textbook, and flipped to the night’s reading. She asked what it was. I told her it was a selection from the first novel ever: The Odyssey. She said she hadn’t heard of it.
Y’all will get there, I said.
We use a different textbook than y’all brainy kids.
Aubrey asked what The Odyssey was about. I said it was about a man trying to get home. She said that was a silly thing to write a book about. Everyone goes home every day. I said it’s different after years on the road. She said she slept in her bed every night. Everyone in Palm Coast did. She wished she could’ve slept anywhere else. She was so unlike my rootless family, who rarely had beds of their own, so unlike me.
I stare at the ground and blink fast, breathing deep in the way coaches taught us to do when we finished a heat. After I clear my throat, I look up at Twig and ask, How she end up in his car?
I don’t know, bro.
She hated this place. She ain’t even like Brandon that much.
According to you, Twig says.
According to her. She said it. If she would’ve just been somewhere else, she’d still be alive. I don’t get it, man. She was so young. She ain’t even live here no more. How’d it happen to her?
Don’t really get it myself, Twig says. I mean, I know she’s gone, but I don’t really believe it.
I got to talk to him. Maybe if I hear a little bit more, it’ll really sink in. Maybe I’ll feel better.
And, I think to myself, Brandon and I both loved her. We share a kind of bond. He’s the only one who will really know what I’m going through.
Twig shakes his head. Then he says, You lying.
How I’m lying?
You ain’t want to talk to him. You want to fuck Brandon up now that you ain’t the skinny boy you was back then.
You don’t want to swing on him?
After a pause, Twig says with a shrug, Even if I did, ain’t nobody seen him since the crash.
I know where his daddy stay. Pretty sure he still lives there.
Brandon’s crazy. You go out there, you might never come back.
I ain’t no punk.
Ain’t nobody calling you soft, says Twig, but there ain
’t no reason to come back and get yourself killed.
Rivers
After I gather my things, I get Twig to drop me at my car at the bowling alley, claiming I need to get a start on the day. When I turn the engine on, I realize I haven’t eaten anything. Though I haven’t touched fast food in years, I drive to McDonald’s. I consider sitting inside until I see the plastic tables, where we ate off the dollar menu for many evenings after Junior dropped out of college and his student loans defaulted, leaving Mom to struggle to pay his debt and our bills. Once, after we finished our meal, Mom stopped at the counter as we were exiting. She ordered three caramel sundaes: a treat for our walk home. I yelled at her for spending money we didn’t have on something we didn’t need. The people around us stopped to look. The cashier and Junior turned away. Mom’s face tightened. I worried she might cry. Then she said softly that she deserved nice things too. I was so obsessed with money, so angry at Mom for bringing me into a world she couldn’t afford.
My cheeks warm with embarrassment. I join the drive-through line, order a meal, and pull up to the window. An acne-faced teenager hands me my bag and I speed away.
I should go to Grandma’s nursing home, but I’m not ready yet. I call the place, let them know I’m running late, and eat while driving to Linear Park. On the way, I see the private health center, a sandstone building with a California-style red roof, where Twig’s family moved his grandmother after she fell and broke her hip. I wonder if she died there. I pass the building, drive down the narrowing road crowded by thin-trunked trees, and park in the crowded oval lot.
Years ago, Twig and I sat here in his car, waiting for cross-country practice when an August thunderstorm rolled in. The rain covered our windshield with rivers. Our team pulled up next to us, but no one stepped outside. Twig’s air conditioner didn’t work and the car insulated us from the storm’s cool. The heat hung thick in the air, as did the funk of our trainers. Sweat pasted my clothes to my skin. It was too hot to run. Besides, I only joined cross-country to stay in shape for track season and to hang with Twig, and as a sprinter, I never knew how to pace myself, so I always started out too fast and then struggled through practice. Our runs were always difficult for me, but with today’s heat, this one would be miserable. I asked Twig if Coach would cancel practice. He said Coach wouldn’t cancel practice for a tornado. I said I preferred the rain. It made the heat bearable.
When the storm slowed to a light drizzle, we exited our cars and jogged down the gravel pathway into the woods as the shower became a mist. We crossed the bridge over a stream bulging brown. The rain stopped. Bright-yellow lights spotted the path and the woods where the sun pierced the canopy. The air was heavy with rich soil. When I inhaled, I still felt out of breath. Sweat covered my body. Thin gray wisps of steam rose from the pavement like clouds returning home. We were running in a sauna. Today was going to be hell.
In the distance, sunlight reflected on the river where the silt-fed stream poured into it. As we approached, the Intracoastal’s brown-gray waters spread out in front of us. Twig surged ahead and pulled his shirt off. His arms were thin enough to wrap a hand around, but muscles carved valleys in his freckled back. He ran down the gray dock and past the boats owned by the people who lived in the nearby condos, all of whom seemed rich to me then. He stopped, kicked his shoes off, and leapt. I followed him into our cold man-made river.
Underwater, I opened my eyes and saw a yellow screen. The river stung my eyes shut. I surfaced gasping for breath and saw Twig grinning. We treaded water as teammates surfaced, tadpoles born from the river. From the path, Coach yelled at us. We turned around. When the river was shallow enough to stand, its mucky bed clung to my feet. I walked onto the shore, where oily waters coated me like a film of mist. That evening, my body itched. Light pink swelled below my brown skin. I sprouted hives.
It was so hard not to scratch myself, I remember, a grin starting to spread across my face, as I get out of the car and walk down the path. I struggle to stifle it for fear of what others might think of a lone black man smiling to himself. Every half minute or so, a bicycle or a mother running with a stroller passes. As I near the river, there are more and more people walking. I stop at the fork. Left is European Village, its cluster of apartment buildings sharing a courtyard lined with restaurants. In front is the river. On its edge, a black man stands ankle-deep in a faded denim bucket hat and a Nautica tall tee, casting a line.
Caught anything? I ask.
The man turns around. Patches of a scraggly beard cluster on his cheek. His skin shines with sweat.
Not yet.
What you fishing for?
Anything that bites, he says. I ain’t selling nothing though.
I ain’t buying.
All right now, he says, turning to face the water.
All right.
He doesn’t want to talk. Maybe he doesn’t read me as Black. Maybe he thinks I’m not from here, my accent Northern. Or maybe he just wants to fish in peace.
I walk away from him and from European Village and cross a small bridge. On my right, pale-green grass extends into trees that seem to go on forever. On my left, motorboats coast down the gray river. The path swivels out to a man-made bluff no more than four feet above the water. I climb down the incline and onto a sand-dirt shore. As the river travels up it, the water turns transparent and white froth bubbles on its surface. It stops and then returns. A thin film follows, some of which descends into the dirt-sand’s cracks with a slurping sound.
I visited this small shore often after Junior dropped out of college and money got tight. Whenever my friends wanted to drive to Five Guys for a burger, I never had money for gas, let alone a meal. I declined their invitations and spent my evenings wandering Linear Park’s not-yet-paved path to this beach. I sat on the shore and watched the brackish tide climb.
Sometimes, when Aubrey wasn’t out drinking with her friends and when I had minutes on my Virgin Mobile phone, I called her and she joined me. On warm nights, we waded into the water, splashed each other occasionally. On colder nights, we sat cross-legged and watched the oily smelling river pass. She joked about alligators and snakes stalking us until she tired of tormenting me. Then we lay on our backs and looked up at the stars or the fast-moving clouds overhead. I tried to ignore the fear of some reptile ambushing us. Aubrey talked about whatever bothered her, which seemed to come easier when we weren’t looking at each other.
After a while, she trailed off, stood up, and skipped rocks. I joined her, but I wasn’t very good, so she always made fun of me. She said I was the only boy in town who ain’t know how to throw. No wonder I ran track. Couldn’t do any other sport. Sooner or later, I asked her to show me what to do and, eventually, her advice took hold. I learned to bounce them seven or eight times before they sank. I hoped one day we would get one all the way to the other side of the river that kept us company. We never did.
Since I left for college, I have not set foot on anything like these spits of dirt. I didn’t know it until seeing them now, but I’ve missed them.
I didn’t realize how many of my high school memories took place by the Intracoastal until recently, when Mom said that there is a river in every Jamaican’s life. Mom and Grandma shared a river, the Negro in New Monklands. (I don’t know the origins of the river’s name, nor does Mom.) There are no pictures of Grandma from back then, so I imagine her as she looked when I was young: a stout caramel-complexioned woman, hair densely settled at the scalp that thinned as it grew, and a nose that spread at its base like a tree’s roots. Mom says that, every morning, Grandma walked to where the goats grazed on Guinea grass. In the early hours’ cool, she approached cautiously until one let her pet its back. Then she placed a bucket beneath its belly and ran a hand from the top of the swollen udder to its tip.
When Grandma filled the bucket, she set it to cool on the Negro’s bank. Then she waded shin-deep into the river and stopped where the current slowed. She pulled a cheesecloth from the riverbed: her goat cheese,
which the Negro kept cool because they didn’t own an icebox. A few paces down, other women from the village left their buckets on the bank and followed suit. When they finished, they stopped for a moment to share guesses about what the morning sky portended for the day’s weather or to complain about the white people whose homes they cleaned after they cooked for their families. Grandma never said much, according to Mom, but she laughed a lot before everyone returned home to finish cooking for their husbands and sons, who would soon leave for the fields. When she was young, Mom thought that if she put her ear to the Negro, she could hear the women laugh.
When she got older, in the mornings after Grandma left for work, Mom fished there every day. When that bored her, she waded to its center and sat on a half-submerged rock. She dipped her feet in its cool waters and sat there until the sun became too hot. Then she forded the river once more to return home.
One summer day, Mom sat on her throne when a drizzle started. She was too busy watching raindrops ripple the moving surface, and the occasional fish, to notice the rain picking up and the river growing. The water browned from the banks washed into the stream. By the time the summer shower pelting the stream sounded like a stampede, the Negro was too high to cross. She pulled her feet out and clutched her knees to her chest.
After some time, she saw a tall dark-skinned man with fraying, graying hair on the riverbank. The man yelled for help. No one came. He looked over his shoulder and then at her. He stepped into the Negro. Once waist-deep, he tilted. When he caught his footing, he waded forward in fits and starts, pausing only to secure his balance, until he reached the rock. He grabbed hold. Mom inched toward him. He pulled her to his chest, and she clung to him. The current tugged as he carried her through the rain-gorged stream until they reached the shore.
That man caught a fever and died soon after. Mom went to his service in the church that was little more than a room. When it was her turn, she approached the coffin and told him she would never cross the Negro again.
All the Water I've Seen Is Running Page 5