All the Water I've Seen Is Running

by Elias Rodriques

  Tati stood up and walked to the edge of the porch. She ran her nails along the screen. They made a rattling sound like a can rolling down the street.

  Thought I might, she said, but I wasn’t going to. At least, not unless he hit me first.

  He might’ve.

  Then we really would’ve had a problem.

  Desmond might’ve pulled out his gun, I said.

  You might’ve jumped on Brandon.

  You might’ve hit back.

  We would’ve gone to jail. Tati chuckled. How you like that? Army comes to get me but they can’t because they done locked me up for fighting these rednecks.

  Tati opened the door and walked out into the backyard. I followed. The loose dirt was soft and cool against our bare feet. I dug mine in until my toes were covered.

  You scared? I asked.

  Yes and no.

  What you scared of?

  Tati walked to the magnolia tree, pulled a branch down, and plucked a flower from it. When she put her nose to it, she smiled.

  You think soldiers go to heaven? Tati asked. Like if I kill someone, is that going to keep me from getting in?

  Last I checked, you ain’t been to church in a minute. Thought you ain’t believe.

  Might not, Tati said, or I might just be mad at my mom.

  Tati dipped her nose into the magnolia again and breathed deep. This time, as I watched her, I could almost smell its sweetness, though I knew she was thinking about her mom. She spent so much time grooming that magnolia tree and this garden, despite the armadillos trying to run off with her vegetables and petals, despite this soil too loose for plants to set down roots. Tati, thinking of her mom, and me, thinking of her.

  I don’t think I believe, she said. But if I did, I don’t know if soldiers would get in.

  Most of us wouldn’t get in anyway.

  Tati walked to me and ran her hand behind my ear to pull my hair, which was long and straightened then, from my face. Then she placed the flower in the space behind my ear. A sweet smell fell like a soft blanket draped by a parent tucking a child in for the night, and I couldn’t tell if the scent came from the flower or from Tati’s hands, until she pulled them away. Then she said, Hope that made up for that white girl reaching for your hair.

  The nerve, I said.

  That look you gave me when she touched you.

  The amount of time I spent in the bathroom after, fixing my hair. I couldn’t tell if it got messed up because we was getting wild or because she fucked it up.

  We laughed and then I pulled the flower out from behind my ear. I ran my fingers over its soft petals, put my nose to it, breathed deep the almost-too-sweet scent, and then exhaled. When I looked up, Tati was looking at me, a small grin on her face.

  I’m going to miss this, she said.

  Staying out too late with these trifling-ass niggas?

  Rednecks damn near shooting at us.

  Riding home together.

  Sitting on the porch.

  Trying to keep from getting hungover.

  Running our feet in the dirt.

  The magnolias.

  The warm nights.

  The nights.

  What about the nights?

  The mornings come, and also the nights.

  We lived together in those early morning late nights. We learned the fullness of our lives, talking about all the small glances that the boys did not see and all the words the boys did not hear. We forgot things that they wish they knew and we knew things they would never remember.

  Sometimes, we knew that when they woke up, they would not remember what happened, like at Daniel’s going-away party, the day before he left for California, in late August or early September. After Daniel went to a party with Twig and the white boys, where he got drunk, he met us at J-Boogie’s house around midnight, about an hour late. He stepped onto the back porch wearing a sleeveless hoodie, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. Sweat shone from his forehead and he smelled like the pineapple scented body spray he bought at the Daytona mall. He gave me a hug and kissed me on the cheek, and then did the same to Tati, who pushed him into the group of boys, all of whom dapped him up.

  These boys is too much, Egypt, Tati said to me. Always getting drunk so they can pretend they ain’t remember getting handsy with us.

  They too scared to when they sober.

  Rightfully so. I’d smack that nigga six ways from Sunday.

  Then someone handed out shots that nobody needed. Everyone but me downed them and it was quiet for a moment. Then Daniel said, Now, I ain’t no faggot, but I love all of y’all niggas.

  He tried to give a speech, as though he could command a room, but people kept talking. When Daniel devolved into repeating himself quietly, I took his drink and told him I was taking him home. Then we got in my car with Desmond and Tati. Along the way, we stopped at Taco Bell, and Daniel mentioned that he was queasy. We pulled over and he knelt in the grass. When I stepped out with him, the dew climbed past my flip-flops and wet my feet as Daniel barfed. He wiped his mouth and started talking about how much he would miss us and then he started crying. Desmond helped him up and Daniel kept crying and talking about how he couldn’t even stand up without us. He didn’t know how he was going to survive in college.

  As we ushered him back into the car, Tati shot me a look, surprised Daniel was a sad drunk. I certainly didn’t expect it. He kept talking about all the things he would miss as I drove him home. We sat in his driveway until he quieted down and then I took his keys and opened the front door as quietly as I could, but Daniel tripped and fell loudly enough to wake his mother up. After she came out of her bedroom, Daniel started vomiting again. We dragged him to the bathroom and he kept crying as he puked up everything, even the water we made him sip between rounds. When he finished but was still breathing heavy, he said he had a secret he’s been keeping from us for a long time that he didn’t want to keep anymore, and he said his dad beat him when he was a kid. Ms. Henriquez and Desmond got real quiet. Daniel cried.

  He beat me, Daniel said, and I loved him.

  Then he talked about how Aubrey didn’t want him but he loved her too, at which point Tati kneeled down next to him, grabbed a tissue, and wiped the mucusy spit from his mouth. She gathered that boy playing at being a man into her arms, rested his head on her shoulder, and patted his back until he stopped crying. A while later, she pulled him away, his tears staining the shoulder of her pale-blue shirt, and we put him to bed. Ms. Henriquez walked us to the front door, where she said, I don’t think he’s going to remember this, but now you know.

  Then we drove to Desmond’s. I stepped outside to say good night and Desmond said he had to talk to me. Tati returned to the car. When we were alone, the night lasting so much longer than I thought it would have and Desmond swaying like the liquor turned his legs to Jell-O, he said, It ain’t fair. Ain’t fair Baby D’s dad beat him. Ain’t fair my dad walked out on me. Ain’t fair niggas is shitty fathers.

  Even though he and I both knew I was a Daddy’s girl, he was too drunk to hear me, so I let him talk for a while, thinking it would calm him down. Instead, he worked himself up until he cried and I held him. When he finished, he tried to get me into his bedroom. I said no. He kept trying. I waved to Tati, who came outside, said good night, and pulled me back into the car.

  As we drove away, I asked Tati, You think they cry when we not around?

  You mean with each other? Tati asked. I nodded. Them niggas? If they did, they wouldn’t know what to do with us.

  Tati laughed and I rolled my eyes. She nudged my shoulder and I laughed.

  I don’t trip too much about it though, she said. Just leaves us more time to ourselves.

  Them niggas can’t handle they own feelings. How they supposed to handle us?

  Right, Tati said. We a whole lot to handle.

  In the quiet of the late night, finally alone as we drove home, we rehearsed the events of the night and all the things that we thought but did not say because the boys were
around. That night, rare because Daniel was with us instead of with the white boys, and rarer still because he unburdened himself the way he did, was one that Tati and I never spoke about to the boys again.

  We two secret keepers always found each other in long nights with the boys. We did so after the Brawl at the County Fair. After Aubrey pulled Daniel out of the fray, as Tati swung on a boy that Desmond tried to hold still, someone yelled cops. Desmond ran back to his car with his boys and Tati and I ran back to my car. We sped down US-1 and Tati watched the road behind us for what felt like miles. When we came to a red light and finally figured we were free, Tati cracked a wide grin and started laughing.

  Can’t believe we got away with that, I said.

  Them boys lucky, Tati said. I was fucking them up left and right before them cops came.

  I’m saying though, I said. Thought we couldn’t scrap because we was girls.

  Forgot they was dealing with some knocking niggas out on the way to the school bus,

  Earrings off, weave snatching, nail breaking,

  Three-eight-six till we die,

  Florida bitches.

  We laughed until we were quiet. Then, the adrenaline wore off and I said, Hope Baby D got home safe.

  Daniel? Tati said. Man, that boy peeled out before shit even got started. Don’t know what he was doing out there anyway.

  Acting like he tough.

  Dragging that white girl all up in our business.

  Him and Desmond, I said. Them boys better learn to take care of themselves.

  After we laughed at the two of them, we retold the story of that night to each other, beginning with meeting up at my house without the boys and arriving at the county fair just the two of us. We told each other the story again at practice on Monday, when the brawl came up and Daniel and Desmond talked over us, bragging to the boys about all the damage they did. But the ways they looked at each other and the ways they finished each other’s sentences were different from before. When Desmond punched the redneck for calling Daniel out his name, that was probably the first time anyone had ever hit someone for that skinny Jamaican boy who grew up as his father’s whipping post. When Desmond shoved Daniel out of the crowd and told him to get home, that was the first time I ever saw Desmond, who expected all his boys to jump into scraps with him, try to keep someone safe, to keep someone’s future alive. That day at practice, as they spoke, I gave Tati a look and she smirked, and then all the girls on the team watched us and smiled. When the boys lined up for their heats, providing the privacy to share stories not to be repeated, we shared all the details the boys couldn’t know.

  I doubt those boys romping around on the shore have the good sense to figure out what questions they need to ask to learn what they don’t know. I can’t imagine Desmond told Daniel much about life after graduation. The meals he missed working two jobs and helping his unemployed mom pay the mortgage and the car loan. The hours of sleep lost after he quit one of his jobs to enroll at community college and did his homework in the late hours. The lies he told to try to impress me when we first started going on dates. The times he was lying on my bed and asked me what I thought Daniel was doing. There is so much that has happened that turned our life into the monotonous habits that fill the time between work, into imagining the wild nights a friend is having in a Northeast city, and into drinking too much and throwing hands with your chosen sister at a bar. There are so many fragments they take for whole.

  Remembering me and Tati speaking in those quiet hours in this night turning to morning makes my eyes ache and water until I open them once more and wipe the moisture from their corners. When I dry my hands on my pants, I step out of the car to see Daniel and Desmond climb out of the water on the shore like primordial life taking its first steps, one of them hobbling along from overexertion, their skins glistening from the slimy waters catching the blue moonlight, which makes them look like they are made of onyx. As one wraps his arm around the other to stabilize his limp, though I cannot tell which moving statue is Daniel and which is Desmond, I remember that the shore on which they walk will all be underwater, not just when the skim turns to tide but when the sea levels rise and the ocean drowns the land. The image of this flood overwhelms me, the shore turning into ocean, the rocks ascending from the sand becoming reefs, the car in which Twig still sleeps rusting, and I imagine some far-off future, when we live on stilted houses above the land we refused to abandon when the United States declared it no longer a part of the nation, when smoking finally kills Desmond and Daniel returns for the first time since tonight, and Daniel and I will place Desmond’s cloth-wrapped body in the boat that we’ll shove off from the home that Desmond and I will raise our children in, and Desmond’s coffin will follow the trail of the Intracoastal to this point where he and Daniel bathed in its waters.

  My eyes wet thinking about our future and, not wanting to miss this opportunity, I scuttle down the rocks, slipping on a loose one near the bottom but catching my footing on the shore, and run myself into stability, toward Daniel and Desmond, who smile from ear to ear. Before I have neared, they see the purpose in my pace and direction, and they stop to wait for me. My arms extending wide, my bones clank into their sides as I wrap my hands around them and my feet slip in the shifting sand, throwing my weight onto them, who try to lean on each other but cannot, and we all fall down. A tangle of limbs on the shore, sand cast above us by our impact and then the wind, I say, Y’all niggas always leaving me behind, at which the two of them laugh, until Desmond says, We here now. When Daniel asks if we should wake Twig up, I tell him no; this is our time.

  It’s unlikely, so unlikely, that we found ourselves here in the Earth’s history between the emergence from the ocean of this land we call home and its eventual reclamation by the water when the tides rise, this short time in our long lives after we befriended each other and then gave ourselves to work’s routines and still somehow returned to each other. In our minutes before the sun rises and we have to drive Daniel back to his car, before he flies home and cannot be counted on to call us or to return, we do not retreat from touch the way that Daniel and Desmond once did; we linger here, looking something like a multi-limbed monster, in this moment that the land is not yet the ocean’s floor.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Elias Rodriques

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

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  Jacket design: Yang Kim

  Jacket photographs: (pier) John Sullivan / EyeEm / Getty Images; (river)

  TalbotImages / Getty Images

  Book design by Lovedog Studio

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Rodriques, Elias, author.

  Title: All the water I’ve seen is running : a novel / Elias Rodriques.

  Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020053069 | ISBN 9780393540796 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393540802 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS3618.O3596 A79 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053069

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