Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  I kept looking at Baize for the sign, but I didn’t know what the sign looked like. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows a little bit.

  Out of nowhere the smaller Klansman swung the butt of the rifle like a baseball bat and hit the bigger Klansman right upside of the head.

  He went down, and a small box of matches fell out from under his sheet as he knocked over the computer as he fell. I picked up the box of matches, jumped on the man, and grabbed him by his neck. While I held him down, Baize was kicking him as hard as she could in the privacy while the song was still playing. His eyes kept blinking as the white of his sheet turned liquid maroon right below the left eye hole.

  It looked like magic.

  Standing above us were Shalaya Crump and the smaller Klansman. He dropped the rifle and both of them looked at it.

  “Take the rifle, Shalaya. What you doing? Pick it up.”

  She finally took it.

  “Shoot him.”

  She looked down at me. “Just shoot that asshole somewhere!” It was the first time I’d used “asshole” around a girl.

  Shalaya Crump tossed the rifle back down and took the sheet off of the smaller Klansman.

  “Oh. My. God,” I said to Baize. The smaller Klansman under the sheet wasn’t a man at all. “Jewish Evan Altshuler?”

  The room was silent, except for more music that came from Baize’s computer and her constant coughing. Evan and Shalaya Crump stood in the middle of the room touching fingertips while Baize and I managed to tie the hands of the bigger Klansman with this cheap-looking black belt that she had in her backpack.

  Shalaya Crump saw me watching her so she pulled her hand away from Evan’s. I didn’t know where to throw my eyes, so I threw them at the tied hands of the Klansman. His hands were so small for his size. They couldn’t have been much bigger than Baize’s hands. And you know how grown white men have a lot of hair on the outside of their hands? This Klansman’s hands were bare as mine.

  Baize pulled out her phone and started taking pictures of the man. “Should we take his sheet off, too?” she asked me.

  “Nah. It’ll be harder to hurt him if we take it off. He looks like a monster now, right?”

  “Not really,” she said. “More like a white boy in a white sheet.”

  “Good point.”

  Baize and I started busting more jokes about monsters, goons, and Klansmen when Shalaya Crump hugged Evan with her back to me. I looked up and his eyes were closed. When they opened, he came near me.

  “City, I ain’t mean no harm with all this,” he said. “You think you can save someone’s life, you do it. I reckon it can get messier than you think. You know what I’m trying to say?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “That’s my brother,” he said and pointed to the Klansman. “Never thought in a million years I’d have to let loose on my own brother with a rifle.”

  “I never thought in million years I’d follow a white boy who calls himself Jewish into a hole in the ground in 1964,” I told him. “Thangs happen, I guess.”

  “Ev, come on, man,” the Klansman said through the sheet. “These folks ain’t none of your friends. Tell ’em why we did it. I never did nothing disrespectful to a Negro in my life. You know that.”

  “You shot my granddaddy,” I told him, “just because you could. That ain’t disrespectful enough?”

  “No I didn’t,” he said through that sheet. “I didn’t. We were just coming to burn the school down.”

  “With him inside?”

  “Yeah, but they said he’d already be dead.”

  “Who shot him?” The taller Klansman didn’t answer so I looked to Evan. “Who shot him, Evan? You?”

  “City, you know he didn’t shoot no one,” Shalaya Crump said. “Quit being so Perry Mason.”

  “How do I know? Just because y’all went through something, I’m supposed to trust him. His plan got all us in trouble in the first place. How come you can’t see that?”

  Baize went in her bag and started blowing her nose and hocking up mucus. She spit it in these blue napkins she’d brought with her.

  “Mr. Gaddis probably did it,” Evan said.

  “Wait. It’s real convenient that folks can blame everything on Gaddis, ain’t it?” Baize asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “And how come you ain’t the real Klan? Y’all were gonna burn up this building with a black man’s dead body in it, right? And y’all wearing white sheets with holes for eyes, right? That’s real Klan-ish of someone who ain’t in the Klan, don’t you think? Maybe all white folks in the Klan are just Klan-ish, you feel me?”

  I looked at Baize and loved her smart mouth so much in that second. I didn’t love it because I was somehow responsible for it. I just loved that there was someone alive who could say the things I thought but didn’t know how to fully say. It would take me a week of planning to come up with the clever stuff she could come up with in seconds.

  “Yeah,” I said to Evan. “Y’all might not be all the way Klan, but y’all both are mighty Klan-ish to burn down a building with my granddaddy in it.”

  “But they didn’t burn down the building,” Shalaya Crump said. “Nothing got burnt down.”

  “We was just trying to save our family,” his brother said. “That what y’all were fixing to do, too. If it’s right for y’all, it’s right for us, ain’t it?” It was so odd to hear a teenager’s voice coming from under a Klan sheet. “Some of these folks hate anyone who ain’t them. If you ain’t the right kind of white or you ain’t Christian or you ain’t Southern or you ain’t whatever they want you to be, you might as well be a Negro, especially with that Freedom Summer coming.”

  “But y’all can hide,” Shalaya Crump finally said to the brother. “Don’t you see what we’re saying? We can’t ever hide.” She looked hard at Evan. “That’s all I was trying to say earlier.”

  “We been trying to hide long as I remember,” Evan told us. “And hiding, it’s damn near worse than the getting caught. Because you only hiding from yourself. How you supposed to like yourself or anyone else if you done convinced yourself that you deserve to be hunted by yourself?”

  “First, that’s too many ‘yourselfs’ in one speech,” Baize told him. “And whatever you talking about, y’all decided to fix that by walking around in sheets, acting like the Klan?” She looked up at me. “Can I cuss?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Fuck that, Mr. Klan man,” she said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka. What’s a yucka?”

  Baize laughed at me and shook her head.

  “Say what you want,” his brother broke in. “They was coming for us just like they came for y’all and we was just trying to survive. What would you do if y’all were in our position?”

  “But that’s the point, dummy,” Baize said. “We can’t be in your position. They came to you to get us. Would they ever come to us to get y’all? Ever?”

  “But if they did come to you to get us,” Evan asked, and looked up toward the trees, “what would y’all do?”

  I looked at Baize, who looked at Shalaya Crump, who looked at me. Then I looked at Evan and wanted to want to say something so much that my throat muscles started cramping, but nothing came out.

  Nothing could.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”

  “What y’all think we should do with him?” Shalaya Crump asked me and ignored his comment. “Can we just let him go?”

  I looked up at her and the strangest thing happened. Jewish Evan Altshuler, Shalaya Crump, Baize, and the teenage Klansman were staring right at me. Somehow, some way, I was supposed to have a plan.

  “Um,” I said and snuck a look at Baize’s face. I kept my eyes focused on the wooden desk and thought about how much I hated eyes. I had this dream one time where I was backstroking in a bowl full of pound cake batter. In between strokes, something exploded. The explosion made the bowl turn upside down and all arou
nd the outside of the bowl was this slow-dripping pound cake batter. The batter started forming these eyes that stared and blinked slower than human eyes. I knew the eyes couldn’t touch me, so you’d think I would feel safe, but being surrounded by blinking pound cake eyes was the scariest thing I ever felt. At least, that’s what I thought before I was sitting in a desk in the middle of that Freedom School in 1964. Three sets of eyes in that room belonged to people I wanted to love me, and those three sets of eyes were burning my insides out.

  “I got an idea,” I told them. “Let’s put him in the hole and send him to another time.”

  “But how do we know that’ll work if we’re not sure if it’s the hole that’s special or if it’s us that’s special?” Baize asked.

  “You’re special, Baize. You are, whether you were born a time traveler or not,” I told her.

  “Just because we’re blood doesn’t mean you have to say even wacker stuff than usual,” she said. “I’m for real.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Look, we got a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Let’s go.”

  We kept the hood on Evan’s brother and walked toward the hole. He talked the whole way, mainly to Evan. “Evan, come on, man. Take off the gotdamn hood. What was I supposed to do?”

  Evan never said a word back. He just walked with us, but I could tell he was nervous about what was about to happen to his brother.

  “You sure you want us to do this?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “You might never see him again. You don’t have to do it to make me happy.”

  “Where you think he’ll end up?” Evan asked her.

  “You know what’s messed up?” I said. “If your brother ends up in 1985, I don’t think nothing bad would even happen to him. Without the sheet, he’s just a regular white boy. No one would know he was Jewish unless he told them, right?”

  “I don’t know about that. He wouldn’t be safe in 2013,” Baize said. Her voice was cracking at this point.

  “Why? Because the goons’ll get him?” I laughed.

  “Yep,” she said. “They would! They wouldn’t even care if he was Jewish or Italian or none of that. You show up wearing a white sheet like that and it’s a wrap for you.”

  “Girl, are you a secret goon? You act like Melahatchie goons are worse than the Vice Lords or something. Only thing is when I was there I didn’t see no Melahatchie goons.” I waited for Baize to say something back but she just smiled at me, shrugged her shoulders, and tried to catch her breath.

  “Wait,” Shalaya Crump said and stopped walking. We all stopped too, even though we were just a few feet from the hole. “My question is, why send him to another time if he’ll be fine no matter where he goes? Ain’t that so lip sync?”

  We all looked at Shalaya Crump, including Evan’s brother. I tried hard to think about what it meant to be so “lip sync” but I couldn’t get it. “Lip sync?” I asked.

  “Yeah, like Puttin’ on the Hits. Why go through the motions if it’s just a motion?”

  “E-motion?”

  “Naw, City, a motion.”

  That was a good question, but if I said I didn’t know, it would have made my plan look half-baked. “We want him to experience what we went through, right? All the e-motions.”

  “Does that mean he has to suffer?” Shalaya Crump asked.

  “We suffered,” Baize told her, and walked right up to the hole.

  “Right, but we’re gonna remember suffering whether he suffers or not,” Shalaya Crump said.

  We opened the hole and after tons of punching, scratching, screaming, and kicking, Baize and I got Evan’s brother in the hole while Evan and Shalaya Crump watched. Evan grabbed the hood off his brother’s head while he was in. His brother had a young face but half the hairs on his head were actually gray.

  “Why’d you take that off?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just didn’t seem right to send him to another time with that thing on his head. We gotta be fair.”

  “Who put ‘that thing’ on his head?” I asked him. “Ain’t nobody make him wear it, did they?”

  “You’re right,” Evan said. “But we can’t put it back on him now.”

  “Gimme the hood,” Baize said. She was sitting at the base of a magnolia tree. The color in Baize’s face was fading. Part of me thought she was gonna put the sheet on her head just for fun. That’s kinda what I wanted to do.

  Evan handed it to her and she put the hood on her little left hand like a huge glove. “Don’t you think it’s crazy how all the Klan members are always boys?” Baize asked. “I mean, what would a Klansgirl even say? If I was white and messed up in the head, I’d be the first Klansgirl in Mississippi. Then I’d change the whole Klan style, too. I wouldn’t be messin’ with no fire or lynching nobody. My Klan would go town to town with coloring books asking folks who didn’t get along to color together. If they didn’t color right, they’d have to spit a sixteen-bar freestyle about sheets. I’m for real.”

  Baize took out her phone and snapped a few pictures of the hood like it was a puppet. After she was done, she threw the hood in the hole and started coughing. With Evan’s brother begging and pleading, all four of us pushed the door to the past, present, and future shut. Well, two of us did. Evan and Shalaya Crump acted like they were pushing but I saw them both keep their eyes closed, gritting their teeth, just going through a motion.

  After a minute of silence, I opened the hole and looked in. We couldn’t see anyone, but none of us knelt down and really looked all the way in. “I wonder where he went?” I said. “You think y’all would’ve sent him away if you were by yourself?”

  “I know I wouldn’t,” Shalaya Crump said.

  “Me either,” Evan said and looked at Baize. “Is she okay?”

  Baize, who was already on her knees, put her head in the hole to make sure he was gone. “I’m telling you,” she said. “I would’ve done it by myself. Ride or die. You think that dude can just come back tomorrow, though? Or like, do you think he’s gonna just fuck up whatever time he lands in?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Anyone who says they really know anything about yesterday or tomorrow is a liar. Look, we need to get you some help.”

  Baize turned her head to me, forced a smile, and said, “You’re too worried. Don’t worry. I’ma be fine.”

  We were all lying on the ground outside the hole. I was on the end next to Baize; Shalaya Crump was next to her; Evan was on the other end. The whole time I’d been in those woods, I’d never stopped and looked up. The tops of the pine trees swayed in tiny circles like long green index fingers. Behind those fingers, the sky was changing from faded-blue-jean blue to new-Levi’s blue, and drunk-looking lightning bugs were starting to, as Baize said, get their wink on. “Baize?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So you knew all the time, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I knew.”

  “When did you know?”

  “After you stole my computer, I kept wondering why your eyes seemed so familiar.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wasn’t all the way sure, and I didn’t want you to disappear again. I figured if I played along, we would all be friends. All of us. That’s the most I was hoping for. We ain’t got to be family again, but I at least wanted us to be friends.”

  Shalaya Crump turned her head toward Evan, then looked back at Baize, who was still looking up at the sky. Then Shalaya Crump slowly turned back toward Evan. “Do you even care about how the time travel works?” she asked him. “I mean really care.”

  “I care,” he said, “but, like I said, I think I know.”

  I grabbed Baize’s hand. “Forget them,” I said under my breath because I didn’t know what else to do. “You think the sky changes when people jump from time to time?”

  “No,” Baize said. “Do you?”

  “If it don’t change, can you imagine what the sky sees? Like the sky, it probably knows how the time tunnel really works.” I looked
at Evan. “The sky probably knows what’s gonna happen next. It probably knows what’s happening in the Freedom School and the Shephard house and that community center right now. I bet no one else knows how truth can change except the sky.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the point in knowing if you can’t change it?” Shalaya Crump said. “I’d rather be able to change it than to know it.”

  “I guess you’re right, huh? That’s kinda worse than even watching a bad television show you’ve already seen. Then at least you can change the channel when you know exactly what’s gonna happen next. The sky, it’s gotta just watch everything and sit there changing from dark to day to dark to day no matter what.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Baize said.

  “But I still wonder.”

  “Wonder what?” Baize asked me.

  “Well, if you could ask the sky anything about change and time, what would you ask it?”

  We were all quiet, listening to the wind, blowing at the lightning bugs, and squeezing the hand in our hand whenever we heard a car or footsteps move down Old Ryle Road.

  “I’d want to know who my parents were,” Shalaya Crump said, “and why they left when they did. And can I have two questions?”

  “Yeah,” Baize said and coughed nastier than she had all day. “Some people are the sky, though.”

  “I’d wanna know what I’m supposed to do now to help time and change in Melahatchie be less painful,” Shalaya Crump kept talking. “I know that’s so Agatha Christie, but I wanna do the right thing. It’s hard when time and people keep on changing, though.”

  “I don’t get it,” Baize said.

  Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word. I raised my head off the ground and looked over at her. She was looking right at Baize, who was looking up toward the sky. “I just never meant to hurt you,” Shalaya Crump finally said.

  At that point, Shalaya Crump understood what I figured only parents could understand about their children. Baize was more than just sick. She could only be born if Shalaya Crump and I had her in 1999, but the longer we were in 1964, the more Shalaya Crump and I knew that Baize would have to eventually disappear.