How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  The fire tore at him, seeped inside him. He thought his gear was failing. Even amid the heat, he tried to get up to a crouch but couldn’t bring himself to. At last he lay flat and used his elbows to pull himself forward. All the walls were burning now. He shut his eyes tight. He could feel the solid handle of the hook against his thigh as he crawled. He thought about smashing his way out, but he knew it was a fantasy. Suffocating, he let his thoughts run away—a beautiful woman he should marry, the mother of his child, his child, a felony worth of pills. He didn’t want that to be what his family remembered. The ceiling began to sag, ready to collapse.

  Still flat on his stomach, he realized he’d never find the doorway. He rose on numb legs to a crouch. His eyes opened once more, swept the room once more. Everything was lit. Then the water came.

  OUTSIDE, THE WOMAN stifled her cries for a long time, occasionally choking loudly. Moss tried to rest his hand on her but she shook and shook.

  Rye, half conscious, couldn’t look her in the eye. “There was no one,” he kept saying, even though the words were weak in his throat. The house still smoked.

  Rye’s eyes stung. Babe stood a few feet away. Moss took statements. Sirens took the night. Babe should’ve pawed Rye like a cub or said something, but he knew that it wasn’t the time. Rye smoldered, the pain yet to set in. He crossed himself once and thought about the pills that were still in his locker at the station. He hoped they would let him clear his own shit out. As they pulled him onto a stretcher, he prayed again that the Marissas were sleeping soundly.

  In her message later, Marissa said that Rye kept repeating that he couldn’t find anyone, over and over, like he’d developed a tic. She said 5 percent of his body was burnt. He was laid up. She asked me to come see him. The messages from my mom said it was all over Channel 6.

  When I got Marissa’s message, I told myself I’d call back. A few weeks later, I picked up the paper and saw that firefighter Sean Fernandez had died in a different city at a different time. I read the whole article. He had dreamed of being an NFL running back. The captain called him effervescent.

  The whole world felt preemptive. I never even checked to see if they’d gotten the books.

  The night of the Cottage Street fire, a body was pulled from the gutted home, burnt beyond recognition.

  Simone Perez had grown into a woman men called out to relentless on the street. She told some of the stories to her man, L, about visiting her family back in DR and sidestepping out of trouble like she had shady-nigga radar.

  So one day when she was out walking on Newbury and three men, one of them with a clipboard, approached her, she didn’t cuss them out or put her head down and walk faster. She paused, ready to roast them. They asked if she’d like to be part of a photo shoot. She laughed in their faces and asked how stupid they thought she was. Then a short dude with an accent took out a black binder and opened it. There were pages upon pages of photos, photos of his paintings. The packed ave., corner store, parade crowd had all been caught in motion, in a moment where life vibrated to the surface and couldn’t be suffocated. He made the world seem like it was posing. Those were only the stills. When she got to the portraits, she noticed they were all men, all black, all in control—of themselves and, in that moment, perhaps, the world around them. The eyes in the paintings were dead set at the viewers, daring them to try and take anything else. She wanted that.

  Once upon a time, L had had that look about him, but she’d gone to take premed science classes at Gordon, a Jesuit college up north of Boston in the countryside, and he had stayed put and slowly worn down. When she came back he was different, but she couldn’t forget the first L.

  The man with the accent seemed to be made of wires beneath his clothes. His tight woven scarf, peacoat, and leather boots were curiously clean. Above all, he had an official-looking clipboard. He reminded her of the creative-arts majors at Gordon. While she studied the work, he explained that there would be a meet-and-greet. Dressmakers from the top fashion houses would fit her and all that. Some of the top photographers would take pictures. Then he would turn their work into portraits. Her mind slipped away. When her mom had been healthy, she used to make all Simone’s clothes. The girls at her school would ask where the clothes came from and she never told. The man with the accent said her dress would be stitched to her exact dimensions.

  It sounded like game. She tried not to look impressed—to convince herself this was nothing special. As the spring breeze blew some cool across their bodies, she asked why he’d picked her.

  “Self-possession,” the man said. He took out his card, Brandt Cameron, and wrote his personal cell number on the back.

  FIVE MONTHS PRIOR, L had quit his job as an electrician’s apprentice. When he’d started, he kept saying the money would get good, but she’d heard him bitch often enough about lugging cables across roofs for eleven bucks an hour while his toes froze in his boots to know he would quit before he did.

  The first few months after he put on some weight. She offered to pay for some classes at CC, but instead he got a job telemarketing cheap home-security systems. He didn’t feel good about the minor panic he caused customers on a daily basis, but he was coming up quick on thirty and needed work. Since college Simone had been treading water as a secretary at an architecture firm—scholarships to dental school were few and far between—but for the third year, she was preparing to take her DAT.

  L had been there since before, when she had braces and carried her sketches of Le Petit Prince. Back in high school, when the world was getting ahead of him, when he was making schemes about his future as a music-video producer and mogul, she had tried to rein him in, give him steps, get him to think about college, finance, business management, anything more tangible.

  DUB’S BOSS, SYLVESTER, had given them all types of ways to tap into people’s fear. In his heart of hearts, Dub knew most of the ways were suspect but couldn’t pass up the possibility of a 20 percent commission. Most people just cussed him out. Some creatively, like the guy who said he hoped Dub became dyslexic and could never read a phone book again. Nights at work were seldom good.

  But despite having moved into a shoe-box apartment after a couple lean months, on the day he and Mone visited the house on Parkside Ave., Dub pretended he wasn’t dead broke. The real-estate agent had gotten there early. He could tell by the way the spot smelled like scented candles—cinnamon rolls. She wore business clothes and smiled a lot. Her teeth were large. Dub didn’t really like women in suits. He thought it made them look like dykes. He wasn’t used to dealing with real-estate agents, just with landlords who hated their jobs, some who carried heavy wrenches because their tenants had loose definitions of “the first.”

  Mone kept her eyes low, but he could tell by the way she shook her head at the small flaws—worn linoleum in the kitchen, missing bars in the banister, the weathered porch—that she really loved the place. If she hadn’t, she’d have been more polite for wasting the woman’s time. At the first place they’d visited, the agent had gotten out of a cleaning van still in her sweats and T-shirt. After trying the wrong keys a few times, she opened the door to a cross between a litter box and an ashtray. Mone had been polite, respecting the woman’s hustle. Now her rudeness was apparent. She loved the house. He thought of his younger brother Nick’s new spot, almost twice the price and in Lincoln, of all places, near a damned country club. Dub didn’t like quiet neighborhoods. He didn’t want Nick’s life either. Still, he couldn’t deny Nick’s place was nice. It had all sorts of space, plus a pool in back. Dub paused in the family room of the Parkside house. The carpet was dingy—no stains, just worn down.

  Simone listened to L downplay the house at every turn—I thought the yard would be bigger. The kitchen linoleum needs to be replaced. Is the water pressure always like this? Easy fixes, really, but she could see him doing the math in his head. He’d been doing the math since he’d left his apprentice job. Nothing was good enough, even though she knew he was running out of money
fast. He put money in the wrong places. He still bought new sneakers as soon as they came out and wanted to take her around to clubs. She thought they were both too old for that, but she’d always relent and smile because he’d say, You look so good, I gotta show you off.

  She imagined what he’d think of Cameron’s work, how it might look over the fireplace if they could, by some miracle, move in here. Cameron’s offer sprang up in her mind like it’d been coiling there for days. She wondered if he’d found someone else to paint. She knew enough to know the house was a stretch, at least at $197K, and that was after all the mortgage-application costs. It was damn near impossible. She remembered the way her Gordon friends rattled off names—Caravaggio, Cézanne, Vrubel—ivory-sounding names. She knew that a Brandt Cameron would never land in a place like this. She thought of how her white girlfriends sent nudes to their boyfriends and then got mad when their men shared them with their friends. And now she had a chance to be made into royalty on a canvas. She chose to believe the world was finally laying opportunities at her feet.

  They waited till they crossed back over Newport to speak.

  “You can’t even see the river,” Dub said as he came to a stop at York.

  “Did you see that backyard, though?”

  “That ratty-ass patch of grass?”

  Simone cut her eyes at him. They neared his apartment, where the houses atrophied like they were sick with something incurable. But only a few streets north stood a pocket of homes so clean, it felt fake. In high school, Dub would borrow his boy Rolls’ car to drive her out near the lake in Slater Park to fool around. Pawtucket could surprise you. Or sometimes, during free periods, they would just wander up Denver Street, where he’d point to the houses and ask which one she wanted when he went to the league.

  She was too religious to actually get down and too smart to pretend Dub wasn’t talking to other girls. She knew he liked that she was the class president and liked how the teachers took him more seriously when they saw them walking together. And she liked being smarter than him. She felt their relationship could never get out of hand that way.

  “You follow up on that maintenance offer?” Simone turned onto his street and imagined him in the reflective vests, hopping out the truck and using his hands to fix the city. She hated to admit it, but she liked that he was mechanical. It was manly.

  “I got a job,” he said.

  ON THE WAY home, Simone stopped to get takeout for her folks—pork chops, rice and beans. She hated picking up things she could cook herself, but her mom was having another episode with her MS, and El Paisa was her favorite. She pushed that out of her mind and focused on the smells from the bag, and the Supremes bumping from the speakers. After a minute she got sick of the idea of love lost and shut off the stereo, listening instead to the wind through the open windows.

  After her parents were fed and on the couch watching Yankees’ spring training, she dug in her purse to find Cameron’s card. His website was beautiful, the background floral and simple. There were links to galleries he’d exhibited in around the globe. She felt awoken, not starstruck. She looked through the photos slowly, taking in the sheen on the skin, the faces, some famous. Did people actually buy these? She read the dimensions and wondered how the hell they fit in homes. Maybe they’d wind up in museums someday.

  Cameron had a high voice—said he was glad she called. Of course he remembered her, said she wouldn’t regret this, then gave her a time and place. She’d have to get to Boston in two days. She was too caught up to ask any questions and felt dumb on the phone. It was an alien feeling.

  After the conversation, she kept scrolling through the pictures, studying the posture of the people. The paintings were saturated in grace and decadence. The kind that would sink a normal home. She imagined them scrubbed down, then painted over, the way they did the murals near her aunt’s in Olneyville. There was no need to look in the mirror. She knew how to pose. She and Dub had gone through a few honeymoon phases over the years, and when things were good, he liked to make her lie on the bed after they were done. She never let him take real pictures, but he would make a box with his fingers and pretend he was snapping shots wildly. She’d tell him to stop but mean the opposite. Sometimes she was tempted to actually let him snap one, something just for him. Not something forever like the Cameron paintings. Now she imagined floods in the glass galleries, the colors of Cameron’s work running together until every one of the paintings was bloated and mud-colored.

  A DAY LATER, Simone stopped by L’s before he went to work. She thought maybe the shoot could get both their minds off the house, stop the falling feeling. When he said no before she even finished the question, she pulled up the website on her phone.

  Dub remembered a girl they used to go to high school with who got caught up in some shit like that. Now there was a video of her on the internet with over a hundred thousand views on a site Mone would’ve been disgusted by. He’d known a lot of girls who got passed around, neighborhood property. Mone had a good head on her shoulders, though—she wasn’t the type.

  She sat up from the small armchair and slapped his foot, which hung off the bed. The midday sun shone bright through the worn curtains. It looked like an apartment with cats in it, but he had none.

  He moved his foot back onto the bed and continued to look at her phone, peering up to see what his girl’s face looked like.

  “What do you get for it?” he said. He handed back the phone and picked up a Ring magazine. It was filled with flyweights he’d never heard of. No one cared about flyweights. They didn’t hit hard enough. Everyone wanted to see knockouts. Dub was the type to talk shit in the barbershop, like if he ate healthy and jumped enough rope for a month, he could be a heavyweight contender.

  “I didn’t ask,” she said. “How about being excited for me?”

  “Slave labor.” He pointed to a picture in the magazine. “At least they get paid for their work.”

  Simone looked out the window. The woman next door was picking cigarette butts out of the small flower beds on the sides of her steps.

  Dub caught her staring off, concentrated on her eyes. The ceiling slanted behind her, bright and backlit from the light outside. It was late-spring warm. She looked good in her yellow dress. He wanted to peel it like a banana, and sat up to tug the loose fabric.

  She snatched it back and tilted her head away from him.

  “Just don’t expect too much,” he said.

  She eyed him up and down. “I never do,” she said.

  “Yeah, aight.” He leaned forward, grabbed her under the arms, lifted her onto the narrow bed with him. He pulled her dress up and blew on her stomach like she was a trumpet. Her body shimmied like cold water touched it. They kissed and he sucked on her bottom lip, then leaned back to take her all in.

  DUB HATED HAVING to wear a tie to a job where no one even saw your face. Plus, since his weight gain, he felt like Mone’s fat little nephew, the one they called Albóndiga. He told himself the mirror at work made everyone look like shit. Still, he tried to smooth out the bunches in his shirt. If he could lose fifteen or twenty pounds, he might be able to model himself. Ha. He’d been out with Mone so many times when people laid weak game on her. He assumed that was just a young-woman thing. She wasn’t a model either, not that she wasn’t beautiful enough, but models didn’t breathe the same air. They did juice cleanses and had purse dogs. Models from around the way ended up getting loud in beauty salons and going nowhere fast. Just like the old-heads down at Atomic talking about how they could’ve been on the Red Sox if they went to the batting cages more often.

  Sylvester was on him about low sales. Despite wanting to spit on him, Dub knew he couldn’t go another night without getting an appointment. He watched the evening sun fall, threw back a NoDoz, and put on his serious voice.

  Mr. Airewele, do you know about the rising crime rates in your area?

  When unemployment goes up…

  He tried to keep it factual, for the most part—
sometimes even tried to keep it light.

  Oh, you have dogs? Nothing some cheap steak and pepper spray can’t solve, you—

  But Sylvester said that jokes and charm didn’t sell in this business. Dub knew as much, but these people were strangers. Whipping up hysteria seemed like a job for governments and news agencies.

  He went into the break room to eat a few oranges. The manager came in so he pretended to be on the phone. When the manager was out of sight, he sat down and played with the peels.

  His boss poked his head into the room again. “The most important call is the next one,” he said.

  Dub chewed the orange pieces slow. They were sweet and cleaned the taste of NoDoz off his tongue. He needed two appointments that night and he’d be back on track for his number. He remembered Mone running her hand along the mantel and looking out the sliding glass doors to the porch. The yard was nice. He could even put up a swing set if they had kids. He shoved the rest of the orange into his mouth and chugged some water to clear his head.

  Mr. Johnson? The man had a gruff voice. Dub took a shot. Are you aware that the Rhode Island gun laws aren’t in any hurry to change? Oh, you own one yourself? Smart man. Do you sleep with that gun on your nightstand?