Bro, what’re you so afraid of? Des asks.
Me?
You doing all this talking about dying, sure don’t sound like you ready for it. Got me wondering if this the same nigga I walked back with from J-Boogie’s house.
The night you were mad high?
Paranoid as hell. Walking through the F section, looking into every patch of woods. Worried lights rounding the corner was a car coming to kill us. Every time I seen a truck I thought some redneck was about to hop out with a shotgun and spray us. And finally one more car rounded the corner and I flinched and you flipped. You remember what you said? You quit laughing and your face turned to stone. You just looked me dead in the eye and you said, It’s been open season on niggas for a minute now. If some redneck’s going to blast you, ain’t nothing you can do about that. So what you scared for? And what you said had me shook. You ever heard of a Florida nigga shivering in the summer?
Quit lying, bro.
Deadass. Looked at you and ain’t know who I was walking with. Then the chill went away and I felt it.
Des lights a cigarette. A thin line of smoke curls around his face and he blows out a plume that catches the wind. It rushes left and dissipates into the air.
Felt what?
Numb. Straight numb. And it ain’t scare me or nothing. Sometimes when I get scared, I remember that. Remember how calm it felt knowing that if I was going to die, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Des pulls on his smoke. I look at the ocean. My eyes haven’t yet adjusted to the night. The Atlantic’s a far-off dark mass, seething and roiling like bodies trapped beneath a black blanket.
You remember what happened next? Des asks.
I started cracking on you.
Your stone face busted open the biggest fucking smile, man. Turned from killer to comedian on a dime bro. Deadass.
I don’t know about all that.
You ain’t got to know shit. Nigga, I’m telling you what I know.
I look for waves in the ocean, for the white frothy foam in the wake. But all I see is the blanketed bodies, the chorus of hands pushing at the fabric, hoping for a tear.
Seen the same look today when you lost it on Brandon. He ain’t seen it because he was off somewhere else. But I seen it. You was pretending the drink getting a hold of you was what made you leap out your body but I seen it. Seen it since before he passed you the bottle. Reason I had my gun out before you swung on him. So tell me this. How in the hell did the nigga that flexed on death become so obsessed with it?
Finally, in the distance, I see the swirls of froth atop the skim running up the shore.
I ain’t that dude no more, I say. Ever since I left—in college, in New York—I been fronting like I ain’t speak with a accent before I got there.
Like you ain’t never seen dirt roads.
Like my mom’s car ain’t sit in the driveway for weeks after hurricanes, I say. Been fronting so long, I done forgot everything. Then Aubrey died and I started thinking about home. Started talking to my mom and she told me all these stories about our family. How she grew up on a dirt road. Ain’t even have a fridge, bro. Used the river to keep their cheese cold. We was real country people. And just like that, one generation later, we gone from rivers to fridges, dirt paths to roads, and I’m up there in the biggest city on Earth, running around and I ain’t know if I’m country or I’m city. Had me wondering why I was up there, if I learned anything.
Des lowers his cigarette from his mouth.
You seen snow? asks Des.
I turn my head and look at Des. His eyes shine in the moonlight. They’re glassy from sleep and liquor. I begin to chuckle.
Country boy ain’t never seen nothing seem funny to you? asks Des.
It ain’t that, I say. Just thought you were about to ask something deep.
The waves patter on the shore like feet pounding the pavement.
So you seen snow?
Yeah, bro, I say. Yeah I seen snow.
The wind picks up.
Me, I ain’t never seen snow. All the water I seen is, Des gestures to the ocean and the inlet, running.
I remember when this place felt like all I would see of the world. My only keepsake from back then is a family picture that was taken a few months after Junior got locked up. Junior never liked cameras and he never smiled for them, but he asked Mom to pay to have the picture taken when we visited him. An inmate ran the studio with the permission of the guards. Junior chose the pale-blue backdrop scattered with white clusters. Mom was in the middle, frizzy hair streaked with gray, arms crossed because the guards didn’t allow touching, not even between the free. I stood to Mom’s right, hands at my side, lips pursed the way they did at the beginning of a race. Junior stood to her left, gray dusting his hair, unintelligible ink lines peeking out from his blue jumpsuit. The smiling mother and her two unsmiling sons with the blue sky and the white clouds behind them, we look like a triptych of a family just arrived in heaven, the closest the three of us will get to an afterlife.
I pull the picture out of my wallet. It’s faded now from years of friction. Then I put it away. It’s late. The waves are still far, but they’re getting closer. Beyond them is the horizon where, in a short time, the sun will begin to blot out the night’s stars. The skim covering the sandbar that separates the Atlantic from the Intracoastal has progressed on both ends, the brackish waters and the saltwater meeting and mixing. Small rivulets run in both directions from tide pools. With time, the skim will deepen, the sand will disappear, and the daily struggle between the inlet’s current and the ocean’s tide will begin. But for now all I see is Des’s silhouette, blurred in the foreground.
You just about out of here, Des says. You going to be all right up there?
I’ll be all right. And when I’m not, I’ll call y’all. Call my mom. Thinking about flying back to Jamaica to see her. Definitely going to fly down more and see y’all.
Even if you don’t, Des says and then shrugs. You always going to be Florida.
Three-eight-six till I die.
And if anyone runs up on you and wants smoke, you just let them know you got an army of no-good, Southern-drawling Florida niggas at your back.
Des chuckles and nods. I smile. Then we turn away from each other.
Des says, You going to teach them kids what you learned down here?
Couldn’t avoid it if I tried.
You going to call old boy?
Think so. Don’t know if he’ll take me back.
You still got to try.
Des is quiet again, and I know exhaustion is coming for him, but I don’t want to give him up to sleep just yet.
Thinking about moving back for real, I say.
You bullshitting.
Deadass. Don’t know when, don’t know how, don’t know what I’m going to do if I make it back, but I don’t know how much longer I can live without all of this.
Look who done finally grown up, he says.
Took me long enough.
Des opens his pack of cigarettes. He shifts and the remaining two rattle around in the near-empty box. He picks up the bottle and squints at it. A few inches of dark liquor remain. He perches a cigarette between his lips, lights it, and then says through the smoke, Getting late. Almost killed the whiskey. Almost out of smokes. What you trying to do?
Send Aubrey off, I say.
Des passes me the bottle. The Atlantic’s getting closer. The Intracoastal’s fighting to meet it. A pair of headlights rushes over the bridge, passing the gas station’s insistent glow.
Rest in peace, I say.
Big ups to one of the realest, he says.
I tip the bottle on its side. The dark liquid rushes down the neck and a thin stream waterfalls into the sand. It pools and bubbles. I expect to see the saltwater rushing through the sand’s pores to meet the whiskey. I hope to hear the voices of ancestors whose names I have never known, the baritone voice of my great-grandfather beneath the lime tree, the quiet sound of my grandm
other telling her daughters she will send for them soon, Mom telling me and Junior we’re starting over in the States, and Junior telling me about the cars he’ll buy when he gets out, joining a voice unmistakably light and shrill and airy: Aubrey’s. But instead all I hear is the waves crashing on the shore.
Their sound transports me back to the moments after Aubrey and I finished gigging and we had traveled back to where we shoved off. We spent hours that night talking about her dreams, ones she described in such detail that, instead of the dark night in front of us and the unchanging river, I saw her make her way through her life. She was still skinny and her face still smooth in my mind, but her hair and the clothes she wore were different, the image of her a mishmash of the Aubrey I knew then and the signs that I imagined showed maturity. As I watched her move and start new jobs and travel, I smiled then, as I am smiling now, the memory of her no longer an intrusion pulling me away, but a visit from a friend I have not seen in a long time, a much-needed excuse to step away from all the scheduled affairs of the day to talk with someone I miss. I let my cheeks widen and open my mouth to show my crooked teeth because I don’t fear what Des will think when he sees them. He smiles back and claps a hand on my shoulder and we nod.
Glad I knew her, I say.
Des nods and then says, Should we head home? Egypt’s going to kill me if I let her sleep in that car all night.
One last race?
You know I ain’t never turned down a challenge, Des says.
Last one to die?
Des laughs into a cough, and then spits phlegm onto the beach.
Too old for that shit.
He takes off his shirt, throws it into the sand, and hoists up his shorts. I do the same.
Where to? he asks.
Where the river meets the ocean.
Fuck am I supposed to know where that is?
I imagine us, two shirtless boys racing across the flat plane of the beach, the ocean waves rolling in beyond us. We’ll run upright, shoulders bent slightly over our hips, raising our knees just shy of ninety degrees, the balls of our feet spraying sand behind us. We’ll sprint like young men again, speeding along without fear of death until we feel the cool of the thin film of water where the brack meets the fresh. We’ll race until we feel the wetness where the natural tides that they forced my ancestors to cross meets the man-made channel where I fished under the quiet cover of night with the girl I loved when she lived and again after she died.
You’ll know, I say.
Des drags his heel across the sand to make a starting line. I place my left foot just behind it, lower my body, lean over my knee, and look down. He does the same.
Want to call it? he asks.
On your marks. Get set.
Before I can say go, Des leaps in front of the line. I shake my head and take a short, terrifying step forward with my left foot. I let the lean proceed into falling. My right foot catapults under me, trying to catch my weight. The loose sand sprays outward as I try to raise my feet to land on their balls, but I keep striking the ground at midsole. My legs are heavy. My knees push forward but I struggle to raise them, let alone kick down with any real force. I’m falling more than I’m flying.
By the time my body has straightened out and I look up, Des is in front of me. The ridges that once indicated his shoulder muscles are gone, replaced by pockmarked acne he didn’t always carry. His shoulders turn out awkwardly, arms stiff at his sides.
Though there’s no way I can reach top sprint mechanics when I’m this out of shape—though I fear the pain I’ll feel when this ends—the familiar cold, the coarse rush of air through my nose tasting like iron or blood when it hits my tongue, awakens something in me that I haven’t felt in a long time. I breathe as deep as I can, which is far more shallow than it once was. I repeat to myself that I must keep breathing and everything else falls into place and pace. The distance between me and Des narrows. He bobs up and down in the rolling sand and my vision shakes and still I see that he’s getting closer. The sand stiffens and cools; the water was just here. My step lands closer to my toes. Des’s shoulder is just in front of mine.
Though I cannot close the gap, our legs begin to move in sync. We lift and kick at the same time. We cannot escape the other’s stride. We do our best to hang on, swept away less by a desire to win than by the pace that neither of us has set but that neither can escape, when finally I hear the patter of water beneath my feet and feel the spray of cool droplets from Des’s stride and know that he has won.
Nigga, where you going? Des yells as he slows down and I keep sprinting past him. I charge ahead, leaning over my shoulder now the way we leaned over the track’s curve, turning toward the river to join a cool breeze rushing toward the inlet. I won’t look back but I know Des is there, following me. I run into the water that’s climbing now to my ankles, the sand suctioning my feet to the floor from the moment they strike the ground until the moment I wrest them free. I hear him yelling, Nigga, where you going, as the water climbs to my shins, cold now, much colder than the ocean, a kind of cold that reminds me of the piercing-blue sky on winter days in the Northeast city I now live in.
The chill wrests whatever sleep there is from my body and I picture the smile on Des’s face as he follows me into our brackish, unclean river. I cannot hear him speak, but I know he’s muttering under his breath, This nigga, as the water climbs all the way to my knees. And I don’t need to ask to know that he’ll do as I’m doing now and leap headfirst into the river, the water so cold for a moment that I can feel nothing else. I know that he and I, who ran across Flagler County the whole day and then sprinted across this beach in the stone’s throw between night and dawn, returning to this murky river like amphibians who need it to live, will swim upstream. And when I finally resurface to see Des, perhaps behind or perhaps in front, I know that I will scream that word that I have avoided since I touched down, that word that speaks to us in a way no other does, that word that means as much for what it does not say as for what it does, that word whose difference from its parent Des and I have fought for, that word in which the absence of one sound is the presence of something else entirely, a presence somewhere between a story and a history, between fate and fatal, between an inlet and an ocean, and I will say, That’s my nigga.
And when Des arises and I claim him at the top of my lungs, he reciprocates and the wind flares with an intensity that wicks the spray off the meeting currents into the air, droplets shining for a moment in the dying moonlight. The breeze is cool but warming, an afterlife of this North Florida winter, its speed and temperature something like the one I imagine was supposed to carry my dead ancestors back to Africa, like the one I hope caught the women of my family when they buried their people, and like the one I hope will be there to greet my brother when he finally makes it out. And finally the weight of all the stories about my family and of walking their well-trod trails no longer feels like an anchor but like a buoy, keeping me afloat where the river meets the ocean.
Another flare of the wind and a rush of the current makes Des and me stumble and we steady our feet, our hands clasp, and we dap each other up in all the motions that came so easily but felt so foreign earlier today, the same ones that feel like a bed long slept in now. And when our arms circle each other’s backs, we do not pull away as quickly as we had this morning, our bony, tough bodies pressed against each other, firm and unyielding, stable as support, and we’re young together, we’re boys together, we’re boysboysboys.
Egypt Sings of Droughts and Floods
These trifling niggas. Daniel and Desmond. Left me in the car. Acting like I was just going to sleep the whole night. Like they don’t know no better. Rolling around in the water. Like it’s their home. Like the moon don’t know they’re wandering.
It’s about three in the morning. The dark sky’s gray-blue. Morning’s coming soon. It’s later than late. It’s later than I’ve been out in a long while. Twig’s still sleeping in the back seat. He drank so much he could sleep
in a ditch if he found himself one. I drank too much too. The liquor and lingering sleep make it hard to remember what I’m doing here, how long we’ve been doing this.
Tati loved the night stretching longer than we thought it could but moving so fast we thought it short. She said as much the last time we were together, the night of the almost-fight at the Lion. After Aubrey jumped in, apologized, and ran off, Desmond dropped me at Tati’s. It was around four in the morning, but Tati was going to be deployed in Afghanistan the next week, so we spread the night out as far as we could. I sat down on her back porch and watched the trees sway in the breeze through the screen. She went to the kitchen, returned with a tall glass of water, said I couldn’t leave till I finished it.
I ain’t drink that much, I said.
If you say so.
I gulped the water down. Tati turned to the backyard. Since her mom passed, we could be as loud as we wanted. We didn’t say anything. The house felt empty. The frogs droned steadily, but they’d been out for so long that I couldn’t distinguish them from the static of wind-tossed trees.
You see the way Desmond was looking at that white girl? she asked.
Who you telling? I said. Way he was talking on the drive home, you’d think Aubrey saved everyone’s lives tonight.
Wasn’t nothing going to happen anyway. Scared old boys. Way they was jawing at each other, wasn’t nobody going to hit nobody.
I don’t know, I said. Thought for a second you were going to hit Brandon.
Thought you might too.
All the Water I've Seen Is Running Page 20