All the Water I've Seen Is Running

by Elias Rodriques

  Always forget how quick them storms roll in, I say.

  Here one second.

  Gone the next.

  Des opens his pack of cigarettes and counts them.

  You trying to get active? I ask.

  What you got in mind?

  Fixing to go see Brandon.

  In my peripherals, I see Des lean onto his knees and look at me. I keep watching the backyard, where the reedy grass shifts. I cannot see what moves it. It could be a snake. Around here, most are harmless. In high school, I often saw their guts, pink and pulpy like smashed grapefruit, scattered on the road by some tire. Older folks said watch out for the brighter ones but never taught the difference between the poisonous snakes and the fakers. They just said enough carry poison around here that we ought to be careful.

  You finally ready to stomp Brandon out? Des asks.

  That’s not entirely right, I think to myself. Brandon is one of the few people I know who was as close to Aubrey as I was and he was the last person to see her alive. I suspect he can tell me more about her than anyone else. But if I’m being honest with myself, Des isn’t entirely wrong either.

  Finally, I say, Just got some questions. Want to figure out why she was in his car. Maybe hear what she was like when he saw her. What I missed out on.

  Whatever you say, bro. I been had a bone to pick with him.

  Des walks into the house and I follow. We enter the garage, where cardboard boxes line the wall, framing a silver 240SX from the late 1980s. Two black racing stripes run the length of the doors. In the back, a small spoiler peeks out.

  Old-school, I say. Always talked about building one of these together.

  Then you went and left on me.

  My fault.

  Don’t trip, he says. Once a brother.

  Always a brother.

  When we were in high school, though Des and I looked nothing alike, teachers often asked if we were related. Neither Des nor I argued with them. In fact, Des misled them, often referring to me as a cousin, and when people asked me if we were related, I said it was a small island. When we were alone, we joked they couldn’t tell the difference between Jamaicans. We didn’t mind. We took care of each other like family.

  As Mom gets older, when she tells stories about our family, I often have to ask how we are related, and she often reveals that we don’t share blood with many of the people we call Uncle or Auntie. We’re not related to Auntie Selena; she grew up in the same village as Grandma and, years later, showed Grandma around Brooklyn, so when Auntie Selena returned to Jamaica, we visited her for dinner frequently. Uncle Eugene dated Auntie B when the two were in high school in New York; he had two boys with another woman shortly thereafter, and when Auntie B had her own children, he gave her all their hand-me-downs, at which point Auntie B’s husband began inviting him to their dominoes games. Auntie Q worked with Mom at the university and the two became good friends before I was born; I was so used to seeing her around that, when I started speaking, I called her Auntie without prompting.

  Though I have long thought of Uncle Rodney as a grandfather—he is the same generation as my grandmother—we’re not related to him either. He was the brother of Mom’s stepfather. When Uncle Rodney was ten, his mother died, and he went to live with Mom’s stepfather and Grandma. Grandma helped him dress for his mother’s funeral, at which he wore a tie that Grandma tied and a blazer, the sleeves of which hung to his knuckles. That evening, Grandma helped him get ready for sleep and sat with him in the bed in their front room until he dozed off.

  On Monday, Grandma walked him to school and went to the white woman’s house to clean. When Grandma returned home, she saw him sitting on his bed, crying. She asked what happened. He said the kids at school chased him and called him Red Man. That day, as on many others, Grandma ran her fingers through his hair and sat with him until he calmed down. Because she raised him as though he were her child, Grandma remained close with him after the end of her marriage to his older brother.

  Like Grandma, Mom helped raise another’s child when she was young. In the mid-1970s, after Mom and Auntie B bounced from house to house, Grandma finally sent them plane tickets to America. Mom was fourteen and Auntie B was sixteen when they arrived at JFK. Grandma met them in baggage claim. She was shorter than Mom remembered, mounds of wrinkles collecting beneath her eyes. She held hands with a light-skinned boy wearing overalls who stood to about her waist. His shoes were still soft. She told them he was their brother. (Mom never met his father, who had disappeared before she arrived in the States.) His name was Fitzroy Junior. Grandma said it meant son of kings. Mom later heard it meant illegitimate son.

  That summer, Mom and Auntie B took care of Uncle Junior while Grandma cleaned homes. When Grandma returned from work, she watched him while Mom cooked dinner. They continued that routine until school started. Then Grandma left Uncle Junior with an auntie who lived upstairs. After school, Auntie B and Mom picked him up from the auntie, who left to work the night shift. Whenever I ask Mom about him, she says she raised her brother as if he were her son.

  Though Mom and Auntie B reared a sibling they were too young to parent, they continued to beat each other. I assume they hit Uncle Junior too. I’ve never known a Henriquez to spare the rod. Even so, whenever he comes up, Mom says she should have disciplined him more. Maybe then he wouldn’t have fallen in with a bad crowd. Maybe then he wouldn’t have died alone in an abandoned warehouse in the ’80s, when she was in her twenties and raising a child of her own.

  Des slams the car door, knocking me out of thought. I get in. The seat feels firm against my body. I spread my legs wide and rest one arm between them. Des’s Arctic Breeze air freshener is the same scent that was in Uncle Winston’s car when he picked us up from the airport when we moved to the States. Cool to the nose, an earthy undertone. The passenger seat looks untouched, but the driver’s is warped and wrinkled.

  These bucket seats? I ask.

  Just mine, Des says. Saving up for the other.

  The engine roars awake and then purrs steadily.

  New engine? I ask.

  How much money you think I make? I got a new engine, but I’m working at the car wash? Nigga, that’s the muffler.

  My fault, I say.

  Des clicks the garage opener and the chain rattles behind us. It lurches forward, stops, and repeats until open.

  You been running around on them subways too long, bro, Des says. Made a jit out a grown man.

  Who you calling a jit? I’m the one that put you on to souping up your car.

  Des turns on his stereo. The console lights up and he plugs his phone in. Bass kicks from the trunk, the car seat shakes, and my back rumbles. I nod without realizing it. Pimp C raps about the hydraulics on his ’64 Chevy, though I’m not moving to him so much as to the beat filling the car.

  Man, they don’t build speakers like this up north, I say.

  Round every corner down here.

  Folks ain’t got money to eat but their subs still knock, I say as Des reverses out of his driveway and I lean my arm out the window, hoping the air will settle the nausea that a hangover or McDonald’s or my nerves have brought.

  Riding around in the car like this feels just like high school.

  I ain’t have a car in high school, Des says. You was catching rides with them white boys.

  You right. More like we on the back of the yellow bus, on the way to school, sharing headphones.

  We drive through the F section, passing lines of identical one-floor white houses. Their lawns extend from the homes through a divot where rain collects to the road. Where the two meet, grass leans over the crumbling asphalt, not yet piercing through.

  Let me play something, I say.

  Des gives me the cord and I plug my phone in. As the song begins, repeating high piano notes sound like a slowed-down theme from a horror movie. Des nods to the beat. A small smile creeps in when the bass hits. The chorus starts, but my ears are tuned to the yells looped into percussion, conjur
ing images of grown men circled around a fight, of fists beating against cheekbones, of drawn blood. Des and I rap along with Lil Scrappy about weak men afraid of dying in the streets, blood collecting in their mouths, heat filling their souls.

  This song was the shit back in the day, Des says, clapping.

  Man, tell me this ain’t sound like the future back then.

  Thought for sure Lil Scrappy was going to get huge, bro.

  I can’t believe he ain’t blow up.

  Turning onto Old Kings, Des’s turn signal sounding like a metronome, he says, Now he just sounds old-school.

  So much of the future became the past so quickly. When I was younger, I thought my brother would be there forever. Mom named my brother Junior after her own brother. In the late ’80s, after Fitzroy Junior died and when Junior was still young, he and Mom moved back to Jamaica. When my brother was about six, Mom got pregnant with me and moved in with my father. After I was born, my father constantly reminded Junior that he was not my father’s son. Sometimes, after Mom left him alone with my father, she saw bruises on his face. She always asked what happened. They never said anything.

  When my father wasn’t around, Junior hit me. Most of the time, he just slapped me upside the head. Once, he told me to climb into his sleeping bag. Then he zipped it up and held the exit shut. It was darker than when I closed my eyes at night. I clawed at the soft fabric. My breath rebounded hot in my face. I screamed and he laughed. Then I heard Mom yell. Her palm hitting his body sounded like the crack of the belt she hit me with. Junior’s hold loosened. I crawled out of the sleeping bag. Mom slapped Junior across the face. I ran between them and hugged Junior until she stopped.

  In the States, after Mom found a job, she made Junior pick me up from school. Sometimes, when the other kids picked on me in the schoolyard for my accent, for my mixed features and for being a sissy, he threatened to beat them up. When the men on our block talked to us, some of whom I now realize were homeless or slanging, Junior spoke so I didn’t have to.

  When I bothered Junior, when I embarrassed him, and when I was acting like a girl, he beat me. Once, when I was nine, I threatened to tell on him for hitting me and he ran away from me. I couldn’t catch him. I had to find my own way home. When I got there, he stood on our stoop and asked what took me so long. He opened the door, took me inside, and made me something to eat.

  When we got home, we usually watched reruns on TV. After an episode or two, Junior tried to sketch, from memory, the cars from James Bond movies. After Mom bought him a subscription to Hot Import Nights, he drew as many cars in the magazine as he could before the next issue came, when he started over and gave me the old issue. Every time I accidentally bent the pages, he hit me.

  When Junior left for college, he called to talk to my mother but not to me. Sometime after we moved to Florida, he failed a class and lost his financial aid. He dropped out and moved in with us. His student loans defaulted. After a month, he started working part-time at a garage in the Publix strip mall to help Mom with his student-loan payments.

  In time, Junior befriended the other mechanics. Because he was too young to go to bars, they invited him to their houses to drink. After a few months, they asked him to join them on a side-job. He agreed. He drove them to Daytona and they told him to pull into a gas station. They hopped out and told him to keep the car running. He listened to the radio while they were inside. Then they came out wearing ski masks and holding a black duffel bag. The cops pulled them over before they made it to the highway.

  For a long time, Aubrey was one of the only people I spoke to about Junior. Because her father was also in prison, she understood our relationship, which was too hard to describe to anyone else: Junior and I were never close, but once he was locked up, I was one of the only people on the outside that he talked to. That made Junior and me closer in a way, but it also kept us at a distance. And it certainly didn’t make up for the beatings.

  These days, I pick up when he calls, which is rare. I don’t talk to him or Mom or any of the people who cared for me as often as I should. When I do, I never really listen; I mess around on my computer or do my dishes. They speak and I respond occasionally, mostly yeses and nos, and the occasional question to keep them speaking until it’s been long enough that I don’t feel rude ending our conversation.

  There’s always a distance between us, one I opened every night I lost to dancing and drinking at after-hours queer parties and awakened to a missed call. I feel that distance with Des too. Though we were there for each other when we were broke, I don’t know how to make up for all the texts I didn’t respond to.

  Des rolls the window down. The wind coming in chills my face.

  Where Egypt at? I ask.

  Working.

  On a Saturday?

  You know how nurses are, he says. People dying every day of the week.

  What she think about you spending your day off with the boys?

  Told her we’d see her later on, Des says as we turn onto Palm Coast Parkway. What about you? You got anyone wondering what you’re doing down here?

  Was seeing someone. Over now though.

  Got on your nerves?

  Got busy. Started to get in the way of my job. Resented having to spend time with them when I was behind on grading and lesson planning. Sooner or later, I realized it wasn’t that important to me. So I let it go.

  Classic Daniel. Always working.

  As we drive over I-95, cars racing below us, I hear Virgil’s numbed voice after I told him I wanted to break up. That night, he called me and asked questions in quick succession at a high pitch. He tried to convince me that I was being rash. His voice sounds loud to me still, sitting in Des’s car, until the silence of the song having ended stirs me from my thoughts. I put on Lil Wayne. The high, repeating piano keys move faster than the last song. Des looks at me, I look back at him, and he nods. He raps along to the best song from the year he was the best rapper alive.

  This shit right here, Des says.

  Thought he was going to rap like this forever.

  You remember that day at practice, Des says, when we was talking about how Lil Wayne was the best rapper ever and your quiet ass got real loud and said we was dead wrong. Said it was Tupac.

  I was in deep, boy, I say. Remember Junior always used to say Biggie was the best rapper, so you know me, I had to rebel. After he got locked up and I got his Walkman and his CDs, I listened to Until the End of Time on repeat because it was the only one he had.

  Next day you caught me before practice and made me listen. Had me rewinding tracks in the locker room to hear what Tupac was saying. Then you just started shooting the shit with us at practice. You still hung with the white boys on the weekends because we ain’t have no cars so couldn’t nobody come pick you up, but we was the ones you was trying to make laugh at practice.

  It all started with him.

  We coast down the hill and Des turns the music down. Then he asks, You remember where Brandon stay?

  Went out there with Aubrey once, I say. Should be able to figure it out. Off the same road Twig and me and his friends used to fishtail on.

  Dirt road?

  They got anything else out in Espanola?

  We stop at the first stoplight on the other side of the bridge. Just over the retention pond to our left is a Golden Corral that wasn’t here when I lived in Palm Coast. A road built after I moved continues past it out of view. I wonder what new businesses and buildings have arrived after they stopped building when the crash hit.

  You talk to Twig much? I ask.

  Not really.

  Sure he’d be happy to see you. Only white boy on our side in the Brawl.

  Most of the distance runners didn’t talk to the sprinters. I was the exception because I tracked into AP classes with some of them and because Twig befriended me. But they didn’t talk much to Desmond.

  While they were off doing distance runs, we ran the track. Coach Howard called us the Fam. They hired him my senior y
ear to replace the previous sprinting coach, whose Army Reserve unit was called to Iraq. He was a short, jet-black man with small eyes and close-cropped hair on the side with waves on top. At our first practice, Coach Howard wore a black shirt, which clung to his chest. He spoke to us the way I imagined his drill sergeant spoke to him. Things were going to be different now, he said. Under him, we were going to sweat and bleed together. That would make us a family.

  Behind me, Des whispered, That mean I can’t fuck on Egypt no more?

  Everyone laughed.

  You, Coach Howard said. Come up here.

  Damn, man, Des said under his breath, looking down at the ground as he walked.

  Every family has nicknames, Coach Howard said. We just got our first one. Turn around, Junior. Your new name is Loudmouth. Now, Junior, what’s your name?

  Desmond, Coach.

  You must not have heard me, he said. What’s your name?

  Loudmouth, sir.

  After that, he gave the long sprinters our workout: four 350s at 80 percent. As we waited for him to start us, I tried to steer my thoughts away from the pain to come. He said go. I burst forward and accelerated almost to top speed. The adrenaline numbed me so that I forgot that I was running through the first curve. Midway through the first straightaway, I inhaled deep again. This time, my lungs burned. As I entered the second curve, my legs weighed me down. I tried to ignore them, but I couldn’t block out the burning in my lungs. I was out of shape.

  I didn’t want to die again. Midway through the second curve, shoulder leaning over my left hip, I was running toward death. I wanted to slow down to let it pass me by. I tried to focus on my breathing. I couldn’t give up. I had survived much worse: The time I vomited after my first practice, the time Junior beat me for embarrassing him in front of his friends, the time my father backhanded me until my nose bled. I couldn’t let this break me. As I exhaled, I burned what little gas was left to accelerate and switched my hips faster. This was my ticket out of here. I wasn’t going to end up like Junior. I couldn’t lose, not even at practice. I slungshot out of the curve and onto the straightaway as my body went upright. I pulled my knees up and kicked down. The end neared. I was in front, but I wasn’t running to win anymore; the race was over. I was running to rest.