Long Division(43)

“I reckon I need to see the answering machine working to understand it,” he told Shalaya Crump. “But listen, we can save all three of the folks I told you about. Just gonna need your help for just one day. Y’all can make it back before the sun goes down.” As I walked closer to them with my computer in my arms, Jewish Evan Altshuler looked up at me. “We need you too, City,” Evan said.

“You know that hole we went in yesterday?” Shalaya Crump asked me. “It’s not just a time tunnel to the future, City. He thinks—”

“My name’s Evan,” he interrupted.

“Evan thinks there’s one in 1985, and that there’s one we went to in 2013, and there’s one that we ain’t even seen to 1964.” Shalaya Crump looked over at Jewish Evan Altshuler. “He said he’s been there already. That’s where he’s from.”

“This white boy is lying to you,” I told her.

I was getting tired of Jewish Evan Altshuler. It messed with me that he knew my name and that my granddaddy disappeared in those woods, but that I didn’t know nothing about his life. That’s not even what messed with me most, though. When I looked in Evan’s face and eyes, I couldn’t see fifteen years old. His face was timeless in a terrible way. It looked like a face in a book that I would never read.

When I looked at Shalaya Crump’s face and eyes, I could see how I thought she looked during every year of her life. I swear that I could look at Shalaya Crump and see her as a four-year-old girl straight running all the kids in Head Start. And thinking about it right there, and watching her, I understood that it was Shalaya Crump’s eyes that showed me her age more than the face. Sometimes, Shalaya Crump’s eyes stayed big as dirty silver dollars and they didn’t blink for minutes. When they finally blinked, you would think you were in a tiny bathtub with a ton of hummingbirds ’cause they blinked so fast. Other times, Shalaya Crump’s eyes looked right at me, blinked slow, and made me feel like I was jumping off of a space mountain onto a trampoline of clouds drawn by the baddest artist in the world. It’s hard to explain, but I swear a lot of it had something to do with Shalaya Crump’s eyes and how slow and fast they blinked at the same time.

If I could see all that in Shalaya Crump’s eyes, you’d think it would be pretty easy to see something like that in Jewish Evan Altshuler’s eyes, too. But this dude’s eyes were so tired, so droopy, and so blue that it was hard for me to believe that he was fifteen ever. I mean, he looked thirteen or maybe even ten in the body, but his face looked like it had died a long, long time ago. Jewish Evan Altshuler looked like he had spent all of his years getting punched in the eyes by bucktooth ghouls with the boniest fists you’d ever seen in your life.

And I just couldn’t figure out how a white boy who looked like that could get the attention of someone as magical as Shalaya Crump.

“Ain’t lying,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “And I ain’t white. I told you, I’m Jewish. I’m a Jew. Born right here in Melahatchie in 1948. My Uncle Zachariah and his family live right next to us.” He looked at me. “You from Chicago, you said. My cousins go to temple every now and again ’round over at Beth Israel on the West Side. You know where that is?”

“Can you hold on?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “That would make you 36 years old?”

“Fifteen years old. Be sixteen next month,” he said.

Jewish Evan kept talking. He explained that in 1964, his family was one of a few Jewish families from the area who wanted black folks to have the right to vote and go to schools with decent books. He claimed that our granddaddies and his uncle and brother didn’t just disappear. He said that all four of them were run up on in a Freedom School, and they were hanged and burned by “people acting like they were the Klan.”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘acting like’ they were in the Klan?”

“Folks who got them were dressed like they were in the Klan, but it wasn’t really the Klan,” he said.

“Why?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

“I don’t mean no disrespect. It’s just that in my life, I seen clear as day that there ain’t really no ‘why’ when you dealing with the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.

“Yeah, but you just said we ain’t really dealing with the Klan,” she said.

“Get your lies straight, man,” I told him. “You said we were dealing with folks who dressed up like the Klan.”

“What I know is—”

Shalaya Crump interrupted him again. “There’s always a ‘why,’ Evan, and what you saying don’t make no sense at all.”

“Exactly. I know it sounds crazy as a four-eyed dog,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. But it’s supposed to happen tomorrow.”

I just stood there waiting and wondering if there was more to his crazy story. “Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get why we should go back and risk our lives to save folks who we think are dead anyway.” I looked over at Shalaya Crump. “What you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I don’t wanna wake up in the future and wish we would have done it.”

“But do you want to do it?”

“I mean, City, we’d want someone to come save us today if we knew we were gonna be dead tomorrow. Shoot, that’s a fact, right?”