Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  But with Grandma, whether I was naked or not, she looked at me the same way. To tell you the truth, if Grandma was trying to get the hem right on my slacks, she could have accidentally bumped into my scrotum sack and I wouldn’t have cared because I knew that Grandma wouldn’t have cared. If anybody else bumped into my scrotum sack like that, I’d probably act like I was dead or paralyzed until they left.

  Grandma just looked at me without talking for about fifteen seconds. That’s a long time to look at someone who is right in front of you. She smiled real thick and slung her arm across my chest. “Them folks is millions and millions of miles away from here today, you hear me? Million miles away,” she said. “I want you to read the Bible every day you’re here. You trying to get free, but you can’t do it by yourself. We gotta get you to that water, City. That’s why your mama sent you here.”

  “Wait.” I sat up in bed. “That’s messed up. Mama really sent me down here to get whupped and baptized for what happened at that contest?”

  I waited for an answer, but the lids of Grandma’s eyes slowly fell down. Her breathing got all heavy again, and about six seconds later, Grandma was asleep, her thick arm still slung across my chest, protecting me from something she wanted me to believe was millions and millions of miles away.

  MYMY, COACH STROUD, AND POT BELLY.

  I grabbed my book and my brush and decided to go out and see if my Melahatchie friends had ever heard of Long Division.

  I really only had three Melahatchie friends: Shay, MyMy, and Gunn. Gunn lived in the Melahatchie projects. Shay lived right down the road a little. MyMy lived in a trailer in the Mexican trailer park right next to Grandma’s house. The only white people in the whole trailer park were MyMy and her mama.

  The dirt underneath the Mexican trailer park was like the dirt at a playground, except it was darker and redder and filled with lots of perfect rocks. There were paper-sack-colored flat rocks with three or four deep scrapes, rocks the shape of chicken nuggets, black rocks that looked like charcoal, and dirty white ones with sharp edges.

  I walked maybe two steps on that dirt when four limping rat dogs starting howling and running circles around these two women who were working on this broken-down Explorer.

  The women saw me looking at them and they stared at me like I had a smushed little foot growing out of my cheek. I didn’t know if they looked at me like that because I had a brush in one hand and that Long Division in the other, or if maybe they had seen the contest and heard what I said about those Mexican kids from Arizona.

  As soon as I stepped to her door there was MyMy’s beady eyes, holding her Magic Slate, and looking crazy as ever. MyMy was ten years old and she was still in that phase where you find a detail about yourself that’s different than everyone else and you try to make that one thing “your” thing. Her thing was trying to talk as little as possible, so she always carried this Magic Slate so she could write what she wanted to say. The only time she’d talk was if she was in the woods across the road from her house. She called those woods the Magic Woods.

  MyMy’s Magic Slate was the old-school kind with the thin plastic over the top, the kind where you wrote with a little plastic pencil and if you wanted to erase it, you had to pull the plastic up. If you met MyMy, you probably wouldn’t be surprised that she would communicate through a Magic Slate. Nothing about the girl was regular. Her glasses weren’t even regular glasses. They were these cheap greasy magnifying glasses that let you see every little movement her eyes made. Her eyes seemed to be back further in her head than normal. And they were blue. But the black part in the middle of MyMy’s blue eyes was big and beady. And even when they looked at you, they kept zooming back and forth way too fast. It made me scared to look at her sometimes. One of the only regular things about her was that she always wore some New Orleans Hornets mesh shorts like the kind I wore to sleep back home.

  As soon as MyMy walked down the steps of her trailer, I could tell by the way she held her head that she wanted me to hug her.

  I didn’t hug her, though. I just said, “MyMy, did you see me on TV?”

  She nodded up and down.

  “What did you think?” I asked her. “You can be honest.” MyMy shrugged her shoulders. “What would you have done?”

  She pulled out her Magic Slate and wrote, “You and Baize are Fameus.”

  “Girl, I know you know how to spell famous,” I told her. “Did you even know Baize?”

  MyMy just looked at me and didn’t say a word. Even before Baize Shephard went missing, everyone in Melahatchie talked about her like she was their best friend. Baize was one of those girls who had thousands of friends on Twitter and Facebook, but she wasn’t that close with anyone in Melahatchie except my friend Shay.

  MyMy and I were headed to the Magic Woods when we saw these two big green trucks with confederate flags in their back windows. They were parked in the middle of the trailer park.

  “Mean white men drive them trucks,” MyMy said.

  “That ‘not talk’ thing you do, I’m just letting you know it ain’t cute. And how are you gonna call somebody white when you are white as a bleach stain?”

  MyMy just laughed and said, “Bleach stain.”

  We walked in the opening of the woods and I was rereading the beginning of Long Division to get a sense of where this hole in the ground was. MyMy snatched the book from me and opened it to the first page.

  “Your name is in this book,” she said.

  “I know,” I told her. “Keep reading. Baize is in there, too. You see the name of the second chapter?”

  “I don’t want to,” she said and threw the book down. “I don’t like that book.”

  “Why? You should read it. It’s not a hard book to read.” She just looked me in the eyes and didn’t say a word. “All the time you been in these woods, MyMy, have you ever seen a rusty handle that leads to a hole in the ground in these woods?”

  “Why?”

  “Have you seen one or not?

  “I think so,” she said. “I think it’s over here.”

  I followed her and sure enough, hidden by some pine needles, was a rusty brown handle coming out of ground. “Oh shit. You ever pull that handle before?”

  MyMy started walking away from me. “I don’t think we should open that.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t want to know.”

  “Girl, please. Who are you supposed to be? We don’t want to know what?

  “You hear something?” she asked me. I listened harder. We heard some cracked bass and a synthesizer blasting from some tinny speakers.

  MyMy snatched my arm and we took off out of the woods and ran back onto Old Morton Road. Coach Stroud was driving the ice cream and watermelon truck our way. No matter where you saw Coach Stroud, he always wore a Titans hat turned to the back.

  Coach stopped his truck in front of us.

  “Hey, Coach!” I said.

  “Hey Wide Load,” Coach said while stretching his neck. “How you making it these days? I heard how you lost your mind on TV but I ain’t been able to watch it on DVR.”

  Coach had this lisp that was deep and ringing, more like Biggie’s lisp than Mike Tyson’s. When I was ten, Mama gave me this slightly illiterate book about how all humans come from Africa. The book had pictures in there of the first man and first woman. The first woman didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen except maybe Michael Jackson, but the first man had a mouth just like Coach Stroud. I’m not saying that I didn’t look lightweight ape around the mouth area, but Coach looked pretty much full ape. That was really one of the best things about him.

  “That’s the little white gal you been running ’round with since you got on TV?” Coach asked and stared at MyMy. MyMy walked up looking all hungry and crazy at the pictures of ice cream on the truck.

  “I ain’t running around with no white girl. I just got here. People spreading rumors about me running around with white girls?”

  “You know how y’all do,” Coach sai
d.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “You still suing the city, Coach?”

  “Well, we working on it,” Coach said. He was one of those dudes who always talked about suing somebody and taking the money he won to the casino to play blackjack. “Always doing something to keep a hardworking black man down. So I gotta handle my business.”

  Coach Stroud smiled as he scratched the sack part of his tight red coach pants. Everyone in Melahatchie said that Coach Stroud was busting booties with my friend Gunn, and when you hear that a grown coach and one of your friends are busting booties, it makes you want to run your big ass back into the woods when you see him scratch his sack.

  I figured that one of the worst things in the world was to have folks think you bust teenagers’ booties. Nobody would ever look at you the same after that. Even when you’re just doing stuff that everybody else does, like scratching your sack, no one would look at you the same. Coach was a walking “Kindly pause,” and that was fine with me. I just hated that I ever even thought I loved LaVander Peeler. No part of me really wanted to touch his sack, but I knew you couldn’t tell people that you loved another boy, because as soon as folks heard the word “love” they would look at me the same way I looked at Coach when he had that sack itch. I wondered, for the first time, what busting booties had to do with love. Once I thought I loved Toni Whitaker and Octavia Whittington, but that was because those girls were the only two real people I thought about when I got nice. They were the people who made my privacy the hardest. As much as I thought I loved LaVander Peeler, I can’t even say that anything about him made my privacy hard. So if it wasn’t love, I just wondered what it really was, and why I felt so much of it when I saw him up on that stage.

  Anyway, I was allergic to watermelon, but Grandma seemed so happy when she ate them, so I decided to use the ten dollars Mama gave me for the trip to buy Grandma a gift.

  “Coach, lemme get one of them baby watermelons.” Coach just looked at me and started rolling his tongue underneath the inside of his top lip. “Gimme one of them baby watermelons, Coach! Why you looking at me crazy?” He still just looked, steady rolling his eyes like he would look if you fumbled in practice or acted scared to hit someone or didn’t run a play right.

  “Come back here with me, Wide Load.” He walked through his truck. I looked at MyMy and walked back with him. “What you doing, man?” he asked me.

  “What you mean, Coach?”

  “What I mean!? Wide Load, you worse than them ignorant-ass rappers grabbing hard on them dicks, selling that poison, and calling everybody ‘niggas.’ You don’t eat no watermelon in front of no white folks,” he told me. “I know them folks in Jackson taught you better. Don’t look at me like that, boy. I don’t care of she is just a little white gal. Like I told y’all during the season. Practice makes perfect. You play the game the way you live your life.”

  “White folks don’t like watermelon, Coach?”

  “Naw, Wide Load. That ain’t it. It just some things you just don’t do. I swear before God that I don’t know what’s wrong with y’all little young boys in this generation. Black men like me fought so—”

  “Oh Jesus,” I said.

  “Now you blaspheming his name? We did our best so y’all could have equal opportunities and some of whatever the white man got. We got a black president in that White House fighting to stay alive and here y’all go trying hard to act like niggas in front of the white man’s woman.” He stopped and looked at me like he’d just asked me a question. “What if Obama acted like that? You don’t see how they love seeing us do things like fighting and acting a fool on TV and dancing and eating on watermelons?”

  “That’s stuff I like to do anyway, Coach,” I told him. “Plus, I like to do other stuff, too.”

  “Shhh. Wide Load. Shut the hell up. I’m asking you how you think that makes us feel?”

  Coach was waiting for an answer, but you know what’s crazy? I’d never thought of Coach Stroud as being any part of the “us” he was talking about. The only time people talked about Coach Stroud was when they talked about Melahatchie’s biddy ball team. And the only time folks really talked about Melahatchie’s biddy ball team was when they were saying we might not need to be coached by someone who liked to bust booties.

  “You ain’t answer me, boy.”

  I opened my mouth, but he interrupted me. “It’s like this, Wide Load. I’mo say it to you one more time. White man see you acting a nigga, he liable to think we all still niggas. Niggas are less than white folks in they eyes. Look what they did to that young brother, Trayvon. If they think you less than human, you don’t deserve no respect. Period. You are a smart young man. I know you understand.”

  “You done?”

  “See, that’s your problem, Wide Load. You play too much. White man see your big ass acting a fool on TV, and he gon’ have a reason to take away the rights we done worked so hard for. Y’all gotta learn how to manage that freedom we got for y’all. You see what I’m saying. Ain’t enough to be free. What you gon’ do with the freedom?”

  Coach was pissing me off even more than Principal Reeves when she gave that wack freedom speech. “Coach, you know something?” I was about to call him a half-ape, half-faggot in too-tight coach pants.

  Instead, I said, “You probably should just give me the watermelon before I say something to hurt your feelings,” and went back around to the side of the truck.

  He leaned close to me. “You act like a li’l head-buster, but don’t never forget, City, that you got a head, too.” Coach leaned back, blinked a few times, and swallowed some spit. “Here you go, boy. That’ll be six dollars.”

  He really had a look in his eyes that told me he wanted to elbow me in the jaw. I thought about how since my friend Gunn was known as the best young fighter in Melahatchie, there really was no telling how effective Coach Stroud was with his hands, but still I wanted him to know something.

  “Coach Stroud.” I looked down at MyMy and thought about not saying this in front of her. “You pissed me off in the back of your truck a few minutes ago, but I guess I really don’t think you be busting Gunn’s booty. I don’t. I just think he’s too young to have a grown boyfriend or girlfriend. And I thought about calling you a ‘faggot’ back there, too, but then I remembered how you were damn near a ninja,” I told him. “I also kinda remembered that ‘faggot’ sounds like some kind of balled-up monster made of ground-up dookie chunks, razor blades, and rotten muscadines. You ain’t no monster, Coach. Not to me.”

  I looked at Coach and I grabbed MyMy’s hand and got a little distance from the truck. “I hear what you saying back there, but can I give you some advice? Fuck white folks,” I told him. “For real! Their eyes ain’t gotta be everywhere you are. Y’all are too old to care about them so much. They can only do as much harm as you let them, and all y’all oldheads are letting them do way too much.”

  Saying that made me feel like Satan in a way because I knew that Coach Stroud couldn’t go up in anyone’s house in Melahatchie, including Grandma’s, and tell on me. Everybody in Melahatchie would allow Stroud to walk on their porch. And they’d sit down with him and they’d laugh loud and talk louder about the weather, the Saints, white folks, or some trifling heathen who wasn’t there to defend himself. But I didn’t know of one grown person in Melahatchie who would let him all the way in their house. Not one.

  Coach Stroud drove his truck on down the road and MyMy and I were on our way out of the woods when that green truck that was parked in the trailer park drove slowly toward us.

  It stopped in front of us. Four men were squeezed into the cab. They were blasting that old Ricky Rozay song, “I’m Not A Star.” One of the dudes had crossed eyes, dimples, red hair, and a pot belly that looked far too old for his face. I had a baby watermelon in one hand, my brush under my arm, and Long Division in the other.

  “You the boy who was on TV yesterday?” Pot Belly asked. “The one with that brush who done all that talking?”

/>   “Yeah, that’s me,” I told him. “My name is City.”

  “City?” He looked down at me. “What’s a boy named City doing out here in the country?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just visiting my grandma,” I told him. “City is just a nickname.”

  “I see,” he said. “Let me ask you this. You fast as you is smart?”

  “For my size, I’m alright.”

  “You faster than this man right here?” he asked and pointed to the only boy in the truck, who wore a V-neck shirt with the arms cut off.

  “That’s a boy,” I told them. “He ain’t no man.”

  “City love to sass, don’t he,” Pot Belly said to the other men in the truck. “You had plenty of sass yesterday on that TV, didn’t you?”

  Pot Belly whispered something to the round-face white boy. The kid jumped out the back and stood next to me. The truck was right in front of us.

  “Now, we gonna say go,” Pot Belly said, “and I want y’all to run after the truck ’til we say stop.”

  “Naw, I’m good,” I told the man. “I’m tired of running. I don’t even know y’all like that.” I put the watermelon down and started brushing my waves. “Plus, my wind ain’t that good ’cause I just raced.”

  “That’s alright, Chucker. We ain’t going that far.”

  “My name is City,” I told him and kept brushing my hair. “You know what? I don’t like the feeling of this situation, so we’re finna go on about our business.”

  “Mind if I look at your brush, Situation?”