How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  Isaac would sit at the table behind a bowl of some sweet cereal and watch. That was years before he began to mark memories on his neck and forearms alongside Bible verses he had known since birth and before. I’d always thought he was made in the image of his namesake—“laugh” in Hebrew, the one waited for, the official son. But a lot had changed since we were kids. Now, that rented laughter had expired and the energy inside him had changed. It had even changed since the funeral. Or maybe it had been changing always and I never noticed.

  Back on that cool northwest night when I must’ve been about eleven, under the stars and sirens, with Isaac’s face knotted from his father’s blows, he rested in Gina’s soft arms while she hummed something so sad that I wondered if we’d feel it forever. That’s my memory, his body slung against the rotten wood stairs, draped in his mother’s arms, clear-eyed and harmonizing with her voice. I wondered then if whatever had happened to Uncle Bull that made him try and beat the life out of Isaac would happen to us. I wondered if the water that strengthened our roots would dry up, and we’d be like Big Daddy, crossing the country searching for whatever work, only to find that we’d lost Sundays and home. I wanted to remember my cousins as they were before, when they were smaller and the world was smaller and hadn’t yet reached through to crack their armor.

  Dreads came forward next, took off his sunglasses to show sunken, red-rimmed eyes. His blond-brown dreads looked well kept. Even in the dim yellow glow of the RV, I could tell his eyes were light enough to change in the sun. Our complexion always needs the sun—it eliminates questions. My stomach sank.

  “Two thousand is a lot,” he said. He stressed the words like he had come to terms with the King’s English.

  Isaac grinned and Dub smirked, getting excited.

  “Not for you,” Isaac said.

  The kid clenched his fists, flexing his long arms all the way up to his shoulders. He was younger than Isaac—forty pounds lighter too.

  “We don’t have it,” Dreads said.

  “You got it.” Isaac paused. “Show me your wallet.”

  Dreads froze.

  “That’s what I thought,” Isaac said.

  “Somebody call the cops,” the driver said.

  Dreads looked at the driver like he’d just yelled “Bomb!” on an airplane.

  “Where they at?” Isaac asked.

  Dub laughed and the kids from the Manor who’d crept to the door of the RV laughed too.

  “Look around you, son,” one said. They laughed more.

  To his credit, the driver did look around. He shifted his weight a few times, feeling how many layers of people stood trapped behind him.

  The RV grew silent and the sound of more voices from the street rose. Cars honked and people yelled and laughed.

  “We might have a couple hundred,” Dreads said.

  Isaac was silent for a while. I got nervous staring at him. He widened his stance. Dreads glanced at me, but I looked away. I knew he’d appeal to me. I got closer to my cousins to avoid it. People shouted from outside, asking what was happening, trying to get in.

  Dub yelled—“This is pay-per-view, nigga.”

  Dreads stared Isaac down and tilted his chin up. With no words he crossed the space to swing, but Isaac had quicker hands. The contact happened in an instant. Dreads stumbled back into his friends. They held him up. The driver reached for Isaac, who leaned away. Before the driver could swing too, Z had put him in a body lock. “Bad move,” he said.

  Dreads got to his feet to square up again but faltered and almost fell down. He had heart, but he was giving up near fifty pounds to Isaac. People pushed and shoved. I grabbed Dub ’cause I saw him cock his fist back. Dreads’ friends held him under his arms to keep him from slumping.

  Isaac stood with one fist clenched and drew one hand behind his back. “You ain’t want it,” he said, lifting his shirt slow. “Don’t be dumb.”

  The people from outside were now trying to force their way onto the RV. “He hit him with the one shot,” someone said.

  The girls reached for their phones and Isaac turned to them. “Don’t,” he threatened. “You’re cute, not stupid. Don’t be stupid.” His voice had no shake in it.

  I let Dub go and we looked around waiting for someone to leap. The air inside the RV was wet with beer and sweat, and the spring night couldn’t press its way to us. We were caged in.

  IN THE BED of Uncle Bull’s pickup, heading back from cleaning office buildings on a cold night, I sat under the tarp next to Z, where the heat came from. Pops was alive and fat in the front and Bull was okay. In those moments, I was black, or maybe it didn’t matter because we were all black and I was my pops’ son. Or maybe it didn’t matter because we were together and headed to Crack in the Box, all hungry. Or maybe we had just gone and were all full. It didn’t matter ’cause Isaac was cracking jokes while our laughter drowned in the jackhammer rumble of the wind against the tarp and our closeness kept us warm.

  Now my cousins were scrambling for scraps. Maybe they just didn’t know how to ease themselves into a world that kept denting their pride. Dreads and I might’ve shared some shallow college stories about waking up one morning dehydrated with some dumb shit drawn on our faces, when we stole our friends’ Pedialyte and knocked back out, but I didn’t know what stories my cousins had. Too much had passed. We couldn’t pick up where we’d left things.

  “How much do you have?” I asked Dreads.

  Isaac was startled out of his focus. The RV stared at me. The frat boys talked. I avoided looking at my cousins.

  “We have to count,” the driver said.

  “I know you got two,” Dub said.

  “Two.” Isaac nodded and stared at me for a minute, daring me to interrupt again. I wanted the block to push off my family, and these boys to leave my city, and my cousins to find space somewhere and something cool and sweet to drink.

  The RV boys turned in toward one another and took out their wallets slow. I saw some kids try to leave money in there. I checked Isaac to see if he noticed. Some kids pulled it all out, even the crumpled singles. Isaac and Z were talking low and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I snatched the stack from the driver. Isaac reached to grab it from me, but I turned my back to him and counted it out. The scent of money pulled Dub up close to me. I could smell his hair grease as I straightened the bills. My fingers were cold.

  “A little over nine hundred,” I said.

  “Not good enough,” Isaac said.

  He reached for his belt again and the driver broke out to hit him. This time Z grabbed him in a choke hold. Everyone watched as he squeezed. The kids tried to pry him off and he started swinging his elbows. I caught the glow from the porch lights along the street outside the RV. I had my phone in my hands. I pressed nine, then one. I looked at my cousins—Isaac ready to swing if anyone touched his brother—then put my phone away. Dub stared me down like he’d seen. It was my mom in me that pressed the numbers to begin with, that’s what I told myself. I wanted to stand next to my cousins.

  I threw my arms around Z’s neck. “Z, stop!” I said.

  He let go and the driver fell into his friends, who sat him in a seat next to the kitchenette table. For a moment the group pushed and shoved some more, dangerous close to a brawl. But the next moment they realized, again, what that’d mean. One of the kids shook the driver’s arms to help the blood flow back to his head. He must’ve been a wrestler.

  “We don’t have any more,” the driver said real weak.

  I knew they did but said nothing.

  Isaac turned to the girls. “You too,” he said.

  “What?” Scoff Girl said.

  “Take out your money,” Isaac said.

  They weren’t shocked and reached for their purses and wallets. One mumbled under her breath and the others were too shook to speak. I came up next to Isaac and held the money out. He watched the four girls fidget for a long time. As Scoff Girl handed him the money, she stared him straight in the eye like he
was clear glass.

  Z watched Dreads’ blood drip onto his shirt from his busted lip. In the dim light of the RV, I could see the gash in Isaac’s knuckle pool red and snake down his fingers. Dreads said something through his swelling mouth. I heard only gentle waves, or water, or maybe it was just the hum of the city turning on lights in the night—currents of electricity burning to get away. The narrow street glowed orange. I held the money out to Isaac once more, but he acted like he didn’t see, stayed still. Scoff Girl pulled out her phone on the sly and he slapped it out of her hand. She stopped talking. The frat boys slunk into themselves. Z’s stone face had broken at last. He looked tired and sad. The money clammed a little in my hands.

  Finally I stepped toward Isaac. “Cuz, you took this shit far enough,” I whispered.

  Our eyes locked for a minute. He smiled, but with something sinister to it. Not the way he smiled when we used to sneak into the fridge and eat pinches of coleslaw on Saturday nights before the church cookout.

  “Money’s money” was all he offered.

  I wanted to rip the bills and scatter them around the RV. Instead, I held the wad at shoulder height and dropped it. The bills started to fall to the ground. Some caught the air and wobbled.

  “You crazy?” Dub said like the money was his.

  When they reached the floor, Isaac stooped suddenly, began scooping up the bills in a frenzy, making sure none got lost behind feet or in the dimness. Just as quick, he stood up, straightening himself again. He patted his hand on my face. “You’re lucky you family,” he said.

  I stood between the kids and my cousins. Dreads’ mouth was swelling awful. His eyes averted. I went to speak but froze. The drama washed over. I started pushing my way through the RV. Z reached out to grab me, but I was gone. Outside, I made my way through the Manor crowd. More people had gathered. They asked me questions, but I ignored them.

  The night was gentle. I walked Lorraine until it met Mineral Spring and kept walking. Under the streetlights, a boy with soft hair and brown skin pushed a plastic car down one of the cracked driveways. I wondered who his parents were. What world of stories they spun around him. Maybe his aunt told him, like mine told me, One drop makes you colored, child, and don’t forget it. He wasn’t old enough to disbelieve it. He wasn’t old enough to believe it wasn’t about that or be convinced that it was. He probably just laughed and smiled while his aunt dragged her long red nails through his mane, turning his hair into braids. But that was my aunt, and my hair was too fine to hold the braid for long. Maybe he had never heard those words. Maybe he wouldn’t need them. The breeze blew and I felt the cool air coming with stories mixed up in it. It was earlier back west and I hoped that Gina was singing—

  Hop in that water

  and pray that it works.

  By the third penthouse, Dub finally cracked. He turned to an elevator filled with mostly Upper Manhattanites and said, “Y’all live like some fucking rappers.”

  A few people in the elevator let some laughs go. Dub didn’t know that these folks didn’t talk about money. Money was all we talked about.

  He kept going. “Damn, your parents must be richer than God.” He ran his hand along all the elevator buttons and circled the PH.

  “Calm down, Dub,” I said. I flashed a smile at the two pretty women who were dressed out of catalogs—tight black pants and baggy shirts—smiles perfect like their dentists were family friends. They pretended to be on their phones, or they were on their phones and we weren’t even on their radar.

  We’d been to two parties already, one of which had a few of those huge Belvedere bottles that look like molten-silver missiles, accompanied by a few plates of capers and lox just for the hell of it. Rolls and Dub weren’t about the fish, so we dug in the fridge. Among the mausoleum of takeout containers, we found some fancy cold cuts and cheese and ate them by the fistful. This was the first time I’d invited my boys from home to visit Manhattan with me. We were crashing at Blake’s place in Midtown. He was my boy from college and had been showing us around.

  When the elevator stopped at the third spot, the door opened right into the apartment. A menacing painting hung above a lacquered wood dresser. Everyone else started to push toward the music, but Rolls stopped for a second to look at the art. It had menace ’cause the blue and purple hues that were layered into the human figure made it look sickly. The figure was swollen and decaying, the skeleton exposed in places. The backdrop was black-green, like the very air in the frame was poisonous. Dub took one look at it and asked how much it was worth.

  “It’s an Albright,” Rolls said, and I smiled ’cause my nigga Rolls could talk artistic circles around anyone.

  “So how much it cost?” Dub asked again.

  The party had moved on and Blake shot me a look.

  “I don’t know,” Rolls said. “It belongs in a museum.”

  Upstairs, after a few drinks and a piss, I used my phone to check my bank account, as I had almost every hour since I’d deposited the check the week before. Pops’ life insurance came to me almost a year late, but the check sent my mom into tears all over again—twenty-eight grand and change, the fattest check I’d ever seen with my name on it. After the tears stopped, Mom got right back on her grind looking for a settlement from the NFL, but Whit, my little sister from my pops’ other woman, and I were still in shock. Whit was getting a lot more. She was set to get paid, and I mean paid, at least in our sense of the word, until she hit twenty-five.

  As for me, the week before I went to New York, I used fifteen grand to pay back funeral costs, because dying is expensive, then five for unpaid taxes, and I threw the rest in my bank account, which brought the total to $8,732—a nice chunk that could buy a decent car, or a lot of rent, or a damn good down payment on a food truck. That’s what Rolls wanted for me. He always said, You’re a food artist, man, embrace that shit. But he was usually just high and glad that it was my ass doing the cooking for everyone.

  Mom hadn’t sued Pops’ estate for alimony or unpaid child support because that wasn’t her style, but she did stay up late into the nights looking through his medical records frantically, the way meth-heads collect rocks and random shit like that when they’re out of this world, seeing if she could file suit against the NFL for personal injury or some other negligence. I didn’t know if it was about the money or some idea of misplaced justice, but night after night she sat with the documents stacked on the kitchen table and riddled her notepad with doodles of stars and arrows and the 49ers logo over and over. I think she was even upset that my sister was getting paid so much more than me.

  I kept waiting to see if the NFL was somehow going to snatch the money back. My mom always talked about the league with bile in her speech. She said the owners wouldn’t hesitate to club baby seals to get their money. I tried to tell her that Pops had been a grown-ass man, not a baby seal, really an overgrown-ass man if we wanted to be technical about it.

  In the bathroom, I rinsed my mouth out with cold water and took a sip. The countertop was black marble, and my eight grand was still there, shining in bold digits on my phone screen.

  On the terrace, Blake handed me a drink. “Cup up, nigga,” he said.

  I took a sip. “Is this straight?”

  “Nah, there’s ice.”

  “Clown,” I said, and took another sip. Trap music poured out from somewhere and I tried to figure out if I was looking toward Jersey or Queens. Every elevator ride was like a fucking Tilt-a-Whirl to me—add some liquor, and east, west, north, and south became a real problem.

  “Don’t babysit.” Blake nodded at the drink and I downed it.

  “Is that Jersey?” I pointed off out into some skyscrapers.

  He laughed for a while. “It’s Midtown, nigga.”

  The only thing I knew about Midtown was that it was hard to catch a cab there and that the Hollands, Blake’s folks, owned a palace there—American royalty without the title. Blake was a III, Duke Blake the III of Midtown. That sounded pretty decent to me.


  The last time I’d stayed with him, right before his first paralegal contract, we came in during the early-morning hours and I lingered in the hallway, outside the light from the kitchen and the glass living-room walls that looked out over Midtown skyscrapers. I studied a framed quilt for a while. Its borders were worn and it sagged from long use. The frame was made from a dark, oiled wood. Josephine Baker hung across the way in gold and toffee brushstrokes, a soft blackbird with yellow and silver wrapped around her chest and thighs. The poster looked like a marquee advertisement and was in French. I gave up trying to read it. The light rose up gray, bristling underneath the heavy blinds that covered the glass walls, turning the wide windows to eyelids trying hard to stay shut. When I finally made my way into the sitting room, the Hollands’ faces were deep in shadow. I heard them swirl their drinks. Blake’s pops was up at all hours causing mayhem, enjoying the company of his wild children and the life he’d built. It was four thirty and he had a red plastic cup of liquor. He crossed his legs, then stretched them out and recrossed them in that classy way, with a heel resting on top of his knee.

  “I can’t do that,” I said, nodding toward Mr. Holland’s pretzeled self.

  He smiled and put a hand through his white hair the same way Blake did. “The key is having no muscle to work against,” he said.

  We reveled in our drinks and the minutes of predawn, before the sun would chase the calm away completely.

  “Have you heard anything about the offer?” his father asked.

  “Soon,” Blake said.

  Mr. Holland took a long sip from his plastic cup, making the ice an avalanche in the quiet. “Just make sure you show it to me.” He said it like a king would.

  Ballplayers in this country are royalty too—I was $8,732 royal. My pops had never given me the real like that, but I had a few of his old jerseys hanging in my room like regalia. Even though they reached my knees when I was little, I used to wear them to school on show-and-tell days.