Long Division (29 page)

People always say change takes time. It’s true, but really it’s people who change people, and then those people have to decide if they really want to stay the new people that they’re changed into. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be this new person. But I was sure that my daughter didn’t need to be fighting Klansmen.

Baize stopped in front of the Co-op and rested with her hands on her knees. She was straining to keep her breath.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine. Allergies, I think,” she said. “I just wanna see if the water is still back here.”

As we passed the Co-op, I tried to shield Baize’s eyes from the “COLORED” door. The cat and the Dobermans were just chilling in front of the sink in the bathroom. Baize looked at the door, then looked at the animals, then just shook her head.

“That cat, that’s the one that talks,” I told her. “I swear to God.”

“I believe you,” she told me. “You ain’t gotta swear to God.”

The work shed was right next to the clothesline, but I hadn’t even noticed it before. Behind the Co-op and the work shed were these train tracks and on the other side of the train tracks was the Gulf of Mexico. In 1985, there was this rickety little pier where we’d go and sometimes throw rocks or watch people fish. The pier’s wood was this splintery deep brown and maroon. Baize kept her book bag on and just walked right up on the pier. At the end of the pier, she just stood up on her tippy toes.

“You hear that, Voltron?”

I listened. I heard birds singing and sea creatures dipping in and out of water, but mostly I heard wind. When you’re listening for something special and you don’t hear it, you start to sniff for something different. “I don’t hear nothing but wind, Baize. Can we go?”

“Back home,” she said, “there ain’t no pier. When you come out here, the water, it’s still crazy black in some places from all that oil.”

“Oil?”

“Yep. You can light a match and throw it in one of the oil spots and sometimes the flame can stay lit for a whole minute. You know what’s really ill? When you come out here and look at the water, you can see the lightning bugs getting their wink on, you know, lighting up against all that black.”

“Is it pretty?”

I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. She just cut her eyes at me and blinked in slow motion the same way Shalaya Crump would when she thought something I’d said was ignorant as hell.

“It’s blue,” she finally said. “All of it.”

“Blue? You said it was black?”

“It is, but it’s all so blue, too, because of the black. Don’t you see it?”

“Look Baize, we gotta go.”

“Man, I come out here all the time and imagine this is a beach with palm trees and mountains in the background,” she said, “but no matter how nice I see it, the sky ain’t never quite right.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said with her back to me. “I hate it. Folks act like they hate the oil now more than the wind, but me, I’d kill the wind, the sky, and water if I could. I ain’t lying. I always imagine that my first video is gonna be me rhyming against a computer-generated dude who looks like he’s made of black water, like
Terminator 2
, except he’s gonna be called Swaginator and I’m killing that fool in the first minute of the video.”

“Why, though?”

“Why what?”

“Why kill the sky?”

“Because it took my family. Shit. I told you that.”

“No, you didn’t. What do you mean, the sky took them?”

“I mean, I never got a chance to see them again because the sky took them away from me.”

“They didn’t drown?”

“If they really drowned, their bodies would have come up sooner or later.” Baize turned around and headed back across the pier and over the railroad tracks.

I grabbed Baize’s hand as we walked by the bathroom again. The cat and the Dobermans weren’t in there any more. We looked across the road and headed toward the hole. “Look, I hear what you’re saying about your parents disappearing and all that, but I’m taking you home.”

“Home as in 2013?”

“That’s the only home you got, right?”

“I ain’t going back home without you,” she said, and kept trying to look me in the face. “Voltron? Voltron! Yo! You said you wanted my help.”

“I changed my mind, Baize. You’re too young for this. You sound sick, too. I bet it’s that time of the month. Things are about to get crazy. And you know what else? Folks can tell just from how you dressed that you ain’t from the ’60s.”

“They can tell the same thing about you, Voltron,” she told me. “Don’t worry about my time of the month. I came prepared. I just gotta get right with the air here.”

“Look, don’t make it harder than it has to be,” I told her. “2013 is farther away from 1985. So I’m closer to these folks just based off of time. Plus, look at you. You got that ugly haircut for a girl and that dumb backpack on and folks in the 1960s, they be knowing things?”

“Okay, for real.” Baize got right in my face even though I was running from her eyes. She grabbed my chin. “No, you did not just say ‘Folks in the ’60s be knowing things?’ Really? It’s like that? You should feel so lucky that someone thinks you’re kinda cute,” she said, “because…”

“Don’t say that!” I grabbed her by her shoulder blades and shook her. “Don’t ever say I’m cute. You don’t even know cute. My line is crookeder than a Smurf house and I fart in my sleep all night long, and when I smile one of my eyes…see it?” I pointed to my left eye. “It’s a little bit crusty and bloodshot all the time. I think I got permanent pink eye. For real! It’s contagious, too. Don’t—”

Baize tried to knee me in the privacy but I turned and she got me in the left thigh. In the middle of our tussle we heard twigs breaking and leaves crunching. “Shhh,” I whispered to her. “You hear that?”

“Don’t tell me to shush,” Baize whispered back. “I only said someone thinks you’re cute. Not me, dummy. Don’t act like I’m trying to get with you. I don’t even roll like that.”

We were both still, but it was too hard to see if someone was coming because everything was so green and full.

“Voltron,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I think that lady back there was my great-grandma.”

I started to ask her how she knew when from about ten feet away, we saw someone on the ground crawling toward us. It was
Shalaya Crump. I ran over and helped her to her feet. She hugged my neck and held me tight as I’d ever been held for a whole minute without saying a word.

I let go of the hug, but Shalaya Crump kept squeezing tight. I whispered in her ear not to say my name in front of Baize, but Shalaya Crump was actually crying right there in my arms while looking directly at Baize. It was one of the top two things I never thought would happen. I pulled away from her hug and asked, “What happened to your Jewish friend, Evan?”

Shalaya Crump tried to talk, but something terrible must have happened. Every time she started to talk, her teeth got to chattering. Baize walked up and started rubbing her back, too. Finally, she got something out. “It’s worse than we think. They…”

“Who? I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t know how to turn it on. The mayor…his uncle…if they didn’t stop this Freedom School from being used, the Klan was gonna go after them. They wanted to run them out of Melahatchie.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know…”

“Know what?”

“The Klan was going to kill Evan’s family if they didn’t put on sheets. They Jewish and they were gonna help with the schools. They gave Evan a gun. It was Gaddis’s plan.”

“Who gave Evan a gun?”

“His brother gave Evan a gun and they told him to shoot me in the shoulder.”

“I know you scared,” I told her, “but you doing your own long division right now. Just get in and get out like you tell me. Please! I don’t get nothing you’re saying.”

Baize jumped in. “Wait, who is Evan?”

“Girl, don’t you see grown folks talking?” I told her. “There’s a guy named Jewish Evan. Go ahead and finish. Damn.”

“Evan took the gun and he pointed it at me, then he aimed it at his brother’s leg and pulled the trigger but he missed. Then they beat him even harder.”

“Wait,” I said. “So his family was planning on killing our granddaddies and burning the church? Where’s your granddaddy at?”

“They made them do it. They ain’t never meant to kill him,” she said. “They only wanted to kill your granddaddy. That’s what they were planning to do when they caught you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“But they got thrown off with that computer. That’s when Evan came in with that BB gun.”

“He didn’t really save me,” I said. “You know that, right?” Shalaya Crump didn’t say anything. “You think Evan saved me, don’t you?”

She ignored me and kept talking. “They got the computer and they said that if I didn’t bring back something to turn it back on in the next hour, they were gonna beat him even harder. If they give the power cord to the Klan, they think the Klan will leave them alone or they could sell it for enough money to start over in another place.”

“What? That’s the dumbest mess I ever heard in my life. Are you serious? What’s wrong with these folks? This is the stupidest place I’ve ever heard of in my life. I hate this ol’ backwards-ass place. Don’t you feel like this is someone else’s story?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know what I mean. It’s just that this ain’t our story. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

Baize walked up between us. “The computer ran out of juice. That’s all.” She went in her backpack and pulled out this weird-looking long cord with a big square head. “This cord right here is what they need.”

I kept asking Shalaya Crump questions when Baize interrupted again. “Wait. Do you have my phone, the little thing Voltron stole?”

“Why do you call him Voltron?” Shalaya Crump asked.

Shalaya Crump and Baize stood there looking at each other. I said, “What y’all looking at? Why y’all staring at each other like that? Damn. Talk.”

They moved their eyes back to each other. While Baize was looking at Shalaya Crump’s feet, Shalaya Crump was looking at Baize’s forehead. Then they locked into each other’s face. And you know what Baize said? “You’re hotter than I thought you’d be, up close.” She really said it. “Seriously, you must work out.”

“Just pushups and crunches,” Shalaya Crump said, and went in her pocket and pulled out Baize’s phone. She handed it to her and Baize flipped it open and pushed a few buttons.

“You think that school thing has some electric outlets in it?” Baize asked. “If you can get those people to bring my computer back, I got an idea. Y’all are killing me with all this drama.”

While we were walking, I thought about how I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump about all that Baize and I had experienced. I wanted to tell her about watching a huge TV and eating dinner and shaming myself at that Spell-Off. But after she said all that about fighting off the Klan and almost getting shot in the shoulder and meeting Jewish folks who were forced to act like they were in the
Klan, my time together with Baize in 2013 looked super lame. It really did. You really never know what other folks are doing when you think you’re having the craziest experience of your life. Plus, I thought that if I would have just gotten back in the hole earlier, I would have experienced that crazy time with Shalaya Crump and Evan, instead of making a fool of myself in 2013.

I was thinking of something to say when we heard
Pow! Pow! Pow!

The smell of gasoline was everywhere when we walked into the Freedom School. Lerthon Coldson was slumped face down on the desk.

Baize didn’t scream, but she kept gasping and coughing. Shalaya Crump held Baize’s hand and I don’t even know why but I went toward Lerthon.

“Don’t touch him!” Baize said. “It’s a crime scene.” I looked at Baize like her bread wasn’t all the way done. “I’m serious. If you get your DNA in it, or compromise the crime scene, the police could blame you.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I wasn’t about to walk up and touch Lerthon at all. I had never been one of those people who loved blood. A lot of my friends in Chicago and Melahatchie would split open baby birds or throw puppies into cracked ceilings. I always fought them after they did it because it seemed like the meanest thing to do, especially to something that would never really hurt you that much. This was different, though. Right in front of us was a man who wasn’t alive any more. And the fact that this dead man was related to me didn’t even matter. What mattered is that he was alive and smiling and lying through his teeth ten minutes earlier, and now he’d never be alive or smiling or lying again.

Baize was actually sitting down in the corner coughing into her shirt. And Shalaya Crump was watching me watch the body.

“We never should have done this,” I said really low to Shalaya Crump. “I wish someone would’ve told me not to follow you. We never should have done this. I wish I woulda stayed my fat ass at home. Now everything is messed up. I did this for you. I stole Bibles for you. Went to the future for you. Followed some white boy for you. Made a fool of myself in 2013 for you. You know that, right?”