Long Division (17 page)

After my granddaddy drowned, Grandma put a deep freezer in the shed filled with ice cream and animal parts. On the walls were these wooden shelves stocked with jars of pickles, preserves, pigs’ feet, and just about anything else Grandma could think of to can. If you ever got hungry, there was always something in that shed to eat, and it was probably going to be something super country like pickled pigs’ feet or raccoon. Or ice cream sandwiches.

Two little steps led up to the door of the shed. When I stepped on the second one, I heard some rattling and then four slow thumps. I stepped down from the steps and looked back at Grandma’s house. The back door and all the windows were open.

The shed key turned and I was in.

On the floor of the shed, lying in fetal position, was Pot Belly, covered in dried blood, sweat, and sawdust. He smelled like rotten butt hole and piss, too. All he had on were white underwear and mismatching church socks. His legs were chained together from the knee to the ankle and his hands were handcuffed behind him. His hairy back had these softball-sized blue splotches on it.

“Aw, man,” I said to myself and closed the door behind me. I could see his back and belly heaving in and out so I knew he wasn’t dead. I touched his belly with my index finger and he started scooching away from me.

“Why are you in my granddaddy’s shed?” I asked him. “And why is your belly so hard, man?”

He didn’t respond, so I kicked him in the back really gently. “I said why is your belly so hard? I’ll kick a hole in your kidneys if you don’t turn around and answer me.”

Quick as a match, the man turned as best he could. His mouth was stuffed with a grimy sky-blue-and-white rag. Pot Belly looked different in the fetal position, with chains wrapped around his legs. He looked a lot smaller, and I don’t just mean smaller in size; I mean smaller in everything

I got on my knees and got closer to his face. Up close like that, I saw that his thin lips were long. They reached out further than Grandma’s lips and connected with these frown lines that didn’t really frown. And his eyebrows looked like some hyper five-year-old girl had gone HAM on him with one of those jumbo red crayons.

Without thinking, I grabbed a few hairs from his eyebrows and yanked as hard as I could. I figured he’d try to scream, but he just looked me right in the eye and started blinking slowly.

“What you do to my grandmother?” I asked him. “She wouldn’t have done this to you if you didn’t do something to her. You try to kick her in her back and call her a nigger, too?” I started flexing like I wanted to hit him in his mouth. “If I take that out of your mouth, what’s gonna happen?” I asked him. “Will you yell?”

He shook his head side to side.

“I thought you were dead,” I told him and touched the rag in his mouth. “And I hoped you were.” I took my hand off the rag and looked at him. “My name ain’t ‘nigger,’ you know, like you said it was. Nobody’s name is ‘nigger.’ My name is City. Really, it’s Citoyen. Folks down here call me City.” He still didn’t say anything. “But you probably knew that if you saw the contest, which I’m guessing you did since you made all those jokes and kicked me in my back. You know that if you had known my name is City in the first place, you wouldn’t be bleeding and stinking up this shed.” I took my pointy finger and pushed him right in the middle of his head.

It was so hard to look at his eyes ’cause neither one of them looked like it was looking at me.

He started using his eyes to direct me to his left side.

“What?” I asked. “What you want?”

He kept looking down toward his side. I pushed him over and looked beneath him. “What? Where’d this come from?”

There was a book beneath him with the cover facing down. I picked it up and turned it over. “Is this a joke?” I asked him. “How’d this get in here?” It was
Long Division
. “Is this my book? Or are there two copies?”

He looked at me and nodded his head up and down.

“Something about this ain’t right,” I said to him, and myself. I thumbed through the book to see if it was the same one I was reading in Grandma’s house. “You know where Baize Shephard is?”

He shook his head side to side, then rested it back on the sawdust.

I sat a few feet from Pot Belly and decided I’d read a few chapters of
Long Division
before I left. It seemed like the right thing to do.

After Mama Lara disappeared down the road for her morning walk, I went back and brought my new computer and book out onto the porch. I knew Mama Lara would know I’d stolen the computer if she saw it, and she’d think
Long Division
was something kids shouldn’t be reading since the word “nigga” was on the very first page. As cool as the book was, it still wasn’t as cool as the computer, and I wanted everybody who walked or rode down Old Ryle Road to see that I had something they could never have.

I’d been typing on the computer and waiting on the porch for Shalaya Crump for 30 minutes when I saw a person out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head toward the Night Time Woods and saw the person jump back into the woods. I was never scared of those woods, or of the Shephard Witch, to tell you the truth. I kinda didn’t believe in witches or magic. I figured it was just Shalaya Crump trying to play me for a fool.

When I got all the way into the woods, it felt like one of those dark dreams where you watch yourself get eaten by a bucktooth ghoul before waking up. I pulled my sweat rag out the small of my back, closed the laptop computer, threw the book on the ground, and got ready to pop a bucktooth ghoul in the forehead if one stepped to me.

Anyway, as soon as I took about three steps into the woods, I had to pee. One of the best things about coming down to Melahatchie for spring break was that I got to pee outside. I found a dusty area near the Shephard house where I could try to spell my name.

“Hey, boy,” I heard a deep froggy voice say from behind me. “What you got in your hands?” The voice sounded like it was coming from behind a box fan. I didn’t even plan on turning around, but I did just to see the face that was carrying a voice like that.

The only white boy I’d ever seen with a fro was this old dude on PBS who made you fall asleep and dream about floating while he painted the finest in bushes and clouds. But this white boy had the same kind of fro. He wore a puffy blood-red sweatshirt with bleach stains on it and “Fresh” across the front in green letters. The sweatshirt was way too big for him but he had it tucked in these nice sky-blue pants that were a mix of jeans and slacks.

I angled myself so he wouldn’t see my privacy while I was crossing the T in my name.

“Ain’t trying to see your johnson,” the boy said. “Relax.” I shot my eyes down to his feet and these glowing green fat laces in his All Stars. “What you looking at?” he asked me. “You some kind of queer? If you are, you are. Just like to know what kind of man I’m talking to.”

“Naw, man,” I told him. “Um, I like booties. I like girl booties.”

“Boobies?”

“Naw. Booties,” I told him. “I like booties. Big ol’ girl booties, and boobies too, I guess. But mainly booties. You wouldn’t know nothing about that.”

“You like big ol’ girl booties?” He knelt down, tried to stop himself from laughing and brushed his shoes off. “Where you from, buddy?”

“Chicago, man. I’m down here for spring break because folks stay shooting folks too much in Chicago. I’m in a gang, though.” I was so nervous and being so raggedy with my lies and I had no idea why. “What about you, with that fro? White boys ain’t supposed to have fros like that.

“Ain’t white. From a little bit of everywhere, though,” the boulderhead boy said. He started coughing and eyeing my laptop computer. “Where’d you get that contraption in your grip anyway?” He wiped his mouth.

The white boy’s bottom teeth were so crooked that they zigzagged, and he had the chappiest top lip I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like frozen vanilla frosting was just sleeping on that thing. And his nose was closer to his top lip than it should have been, so it looked like he was constantly smelling his own chappy frosting. The skin on his face was so Saran Wrap tight, too, that the head and jaw bones damn near burst right through his skin. And I hate to gross you out, but there were a few scabbed-up scars on the top-right side of his face that jutted out like raisins. To tell you the truth, I kinda wished I had some scabs like that on my face so I could pick them off before I went to bed.

“This is a laptop computer,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“Evan,” he told me. “That’s what they tell me.”

“They? What’s your last name?”

“Altshuler. What’s the date?”

“Like aw shucks?” I asked him. “Man, your name, it don’t make a lick of sense. It’s 1985. March. You from the future? 2013?”

“Naw, I ain’t from no future.” He pointed past the Shephard house, toward Belhaven Street. “I’m Jewish.”

Evan’s eyes opened up big after he said that, like he expected me to say something mean. I was kinda surprised, because I never met a person who said they were Jewish before, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue what it really meant. Since we moved to Chicago from Jackson last year, I heard the word a lot more, but people used the shorter version, “Jew,” and sometimes it was a noun and sometimes it was a verb. In elementary school, I heard about Adolf Hitler torturing Jewish people and how some of them got hanged and drowned in Mississippi back in the 1960s trying to help black folks get the right to vote, read, and pee in the same bathroom as white folks, but that was it. I just didn’t know what to do with this boy saying he was Jewish when he just looked like any slightly deformed white boy to me.

“Can I ask you a question?” I tried to change subjects and come back with a question that might make him stop looking at me so hard. “Is it okay if I ask you why you look so sick? And not even just sick. I’m saying you look crazy dusty. How old are you?”

He looked at the ground and mumbled, “Fifteen. Just told you that I ain’t white.”

“My name is Voltron,” I told him. “Folks call me T-Ron.”

“No it ain’t,” he said. “Citoyen is the name they give you. Folks call you City.”

“What did you just say?” I asked him.

“I know who you are,” he said and stepped closer to me. “Your name is Citoyen Coldson. You was born in Jackson and moved to Chicago two years ago. Your mama dropped you off at your Ma-Maw’s house yesterday. And you lost your granddaddy, your Ma-Maw’s
husband, in these woods. Right over yonder.” He pointed toward the Shephard house.

“I gotta go, man,” I told him. “Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not that you’re Jewish. It’s just that I don’t like the look in your eyes. You can understand that, right?”

“You need my help, City,” the boy said. “Let me show you something.”

“What?”

“The past.”

“The past what?”

“I need to show you the past,” he said. “Listen to me. We can change it.”

I couldn’t figure out how Jewish Evan Altshuler knew anything about my mama, my Mama Lara, or my granddaddy disappearing. It was something that only the truly craziest of white characters on a crazy show like
Fantasy Island
would say. Shalaya Crump always said that truly-crazy-white-folks talk always came before truly-crazy-white-folks action. And Mama, Mama Lara, and Shalaya Crump always told me that if you popped someone in head who was white and crazy, you could go to jail for life. So I had to be careful with this dusty white boy.

“Oh really,” I said. “The past, huh? I hear that. That’s nice to hear. So nice. And um, I want you to show me that past, but I’m finna go home first and eat me a bologna sandwich. You want me to bring you one?”

I started walking backwards toward Old Ryle Road, but Evan walked toward me. “I’m serious, City. You need to see this. We can stop it. Come back with me. That house,” he pointed to the Shephard house. “It used to be a Freedom School. You know what a Freedom School is?”

“Yeah,” I lied, “I know. It’s a school where they teach freedom.”

“They burned that school down to the ground with our families in it. Yours and mine. They took their bodies over to the—”

“So,” I interrupted him, “you want some Sandwich Spread and mustard on your bologna sandwich, right?” And with that, I turned toward the road and sprinted like Carl Lewis until I was all the way out of the Night Time Woods, away from the craziest white boy I’d ever seen in my life, and back on the porch of my Mama Lara’s house.

I wasn’t on the porch longer than two minutes, wondering how much of what Jewish Evan Altshuler said was true, before Shalaya Crump opened the door to her trailer. She had an unwrapped package of saltines in one hand and a cold drank in the other.

Shalaya Crump walked to the middle of Old Ryle Road and stood across from my porch sipping on cold drank. I thought she’d come over to my porch immediately. Instead, she took a big gulp of cold drank, gobbled up three saltines at once, then walked down the road and hopped in the woods.

I figured Shalaya Crump was gonna go in the woods and wait five minutes for me to follow her. When she saw that I didn’t come after her, she’d shamefully walk up to my porch and we’d talk about my new laptop computer, my new book, and how she was jealous of the girl with the greasy forehead. Or, I figured she’d come out screaming after seeing Jewish Evan Altshuler’s ugly face.