Long Division(47)

I stood there waiting for the cat to meow again, but it didn’t. It just stood there looking at me. I realized when I stopped talking all big and bad that a heavy whiff of sad like I’d never felt before was getting closer and closer to my neck. Reading about my family and other black folks not being able to pee in a good bathroom was different than seeing a white folks’ bathroom locked and a colored bathroom just open for anything that wanted to come in. It said “colored” on the door, but it might as well have said cats, spiders, possums, coons, and roaches, ’cause it was open to them just like it was open to us.

The cat took me all the way to back of the Co-op, where there was this rusty clothesline with white sheets hanging on it. Right there in the middle was this one scraggly Doberman doing the do to this other fatter Doberman. They weren’t making no barks or no moans. They were just doing it like they were the last dogs on Earth.

The cat walked up about a foot from the Dobermans and sat on its hind legs. Then it started looking back and forth at the Dobermans and me. I can’t really blame the cat. I’d seen dogs doing it before, but this was different. I would have bet my new computer and book that they wouldn’t be doing it like that if they were doing it with any other dogs. You never think of dogs being in love, but those dogs were. They really were.

While I was watching those dogs, as crazy as it sounds, my body started to feel like I was watching Porky’s. The Dobermans weren’t even that cute as far as dogs go either.

I didn’t like how the dogs were making me feel, so I started stomping and yelling, but they kept doing it like no one was screaming. All around the back of the Co-op were these little jagged gray rocks. They were too little to really throw far or hard, but they were good enough to hit a dog in the head if you threw a handful of them.

I cocked my arm back and dotted the heads of those Dobermans with gray rocks. The scraggly top Doberman got off the bottom Doberman real slow and they both just looked at me, along with the cat. And I swear the cat licked its paws and actually said in the most smooth voice I’d ever heard in my life, “Wow. You a real fat asshole for that right there. You don’t know better than to throw rocks at love?”

“You talk?” I asked the cat. Right then, I wondered if everything I’d experienced in the last day and a half was a dream, or if somehow, some way, I’d gotten trapped in someone else’s story.

“Don’t even worry about what I do,” the cat said. “You should probably get your fat ass to running, though.”

I slowly turned the corner and headed back toward the woods to find Shalaya Crump and Jewish Evan Altshuler. When I looked over my shoulder, all three beasts were sprinting at me, led by the cat, whose head looked less fat when he was sprinting.

I took off.

They were getting closer, but I jumped the ditch and landed in the woods. Even though I scratched up my face, my legs, and the computer, I didn’t even care. When I got closer to the hole, I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump about the Dobermans and the talking Red Naval cat and the colored bathroom. The closer I got, though, I didn’t hear Shalaya Crump and Evan arguing at all. I figured I’d look in the hole and they’d be right there, wrestling or playing Mercy or Thump in a way that would make me wanna throw up.

I walked all the way up to the hole and peeked down in it. Damn. Damn. Damn.

I was in 1964 all by myself.





COMMON TO MAN.


On Sunday morning, Grandma and I got in the Bonneville and headed to Concord Baptist Church at a little past eleven in the morning.

Nothing made sense.

I had found out that there were actually two Long Division books, the one I kept in the house and the one I decided to leave in the work shed with Pot Belly. But the existence of at least two books was less confusing than the words in the books.

Maybe the book wasn’t a book at all, I thought. Maybe the book was the truth. If it was the truth, I had to figure out what it had to do with me. And if Baize wasn’t actually missing, but maybe just time traveling, that meant that Pot Belly hadn’t really hurt her at all.

“City,” Grandma interrupted my thoughts while turning down the radio, “when you get saved, act like you got some sense. You hear me? Whole lotta folks get saved and it take them an entire life before they start living by God’s word. That’s them ol’ deathbed conversioners, them ol’ heathens trying to get to heaven a lifetime too late.”

I told Grandma that the car smelled like something died in the backseat and asked her who she was talking about. She ignored the comment about the smell and said that she wasn’t talking about anyone in particular.

When we made it to the dirt parking lot of Concord Baptist Church, the Bonneville stopped and Grandma swiveled her neck toward me. With her eyes a-twitching and mouth a-moving, almost in slow motion, Grandma said, “Okay now, City. It’s 11:45. We still got time to send you up for altar call. Don’t act a fool up in here.”

Grandma and I walked into this little heated waiting area before you walked all the way into the church. We held hands. “Your hand’s wet as a wash rag, City,” she said. “Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” I told her.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t lying. I stood there looking through the window at the congregation. Scared was in my mind, but it was way in the back closet. In the front of it was this excited feeling of walking into church and having all those folks treat me like the celebrity I was. Right beneath that feeling was another kind of wonder. I didn’t wonder about what was going to happen as much as I wondered about what the white Jesus above the pulpit was thinking.