Long Division(70)

“But that don’t make it right,” the woman said and started walking out of the door, shaking her head from side to side. “You got a wife, Thon. Even though my face burnt up don’t mean you can fill my chest up with salt.” From nearly out of the doorway, she said, “Y’all need to get out this building and go ’head home. Thon don’t listen to reason. Never did until it’s too late.”

“Oh, okay,” I said and looked at my wrist like I had on a watch. “Well, Mr. Thon, we need to get on out of here. I have a message for you. You might need to watch out for the Klan,” I told him and put my hand on his back. “Somebody told us that they were coming to get you. We were supposed to tell you so, yeah, I guess we’re telling you. Watch out for that Klan. So…”

I looked at Baize and she was looking right in my mouth like it was covered in purple Kool-Aid. “What you looking at?” I asked her. “That’s true. Well, we’re gonna go now. You should probably leave here soon. Thank you. We’ll holler.”


Baize and I walked out of the school and she headed across the road toward the Co-op. She didn’t say a word, and I had no clue what she was thinking. I just kept looking at how she waddled like me, and had a perfectly shaped head like Shalaya Crump. Was I really a father? I kept thinking about how crazy time was even if you weren’t hopping from present to future to past. In just like five minutes, I had discovered the daughter I never knew I had, met the shady granddaddy I never knew, and found out that the girl I would have given up my eyeballs to kiss was actually my wife. In that five minutes, I met the human being I would become without actually remembering becoming that human being.

People always say change takes time. It’s true, but really it’s people who change people, and then those people have to decide if they really want to stay the new people that they’re changed into. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be this new person. But I was sure that my daughter didn’t need to be fighting Klansmen.

Baize stopped in front of the Co-op and rested with her hands on her knees. She was straining to keep her breath.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine. Allergies, I think,” she said. “I just wanna see if the water is still back here.”

As we passed the Co-op, I tried to shield Baize’s eyes from the “COLORED” door. The cat and the Dobermans were just chilling in front of the sink in the bathroom. Baize looked at the door, then looked at the animals, then just shook her head.

“That cat, that’s the one that talks,” I told her. “I swear to God.”

“I believe you,” she told me. “You ain’t gotta swear to God.”

The work shed was right next to the clothesline, but I hadn’t even noticed it before. Behind the Co-op and the work shed were these train tracks and on the other side of the train tracks was the Gulf of Mexico. In 1985, there was this rickety little pier where we’d go and sometimes throw rocks or watch people fish. The pier’s wood was this splintery deep brown and maroon. Baize kept her book bag on and just walked right up on the pier. At the end of the pier, she just stood up on her tippy toes.

“You hear that, Voltron?”

I listened. I heard birds singing and sea creatures dipping in and out of water, but mostly I heard wind. When you’re listening for something special and you don’t hear it, you start to sniff for something different. “I don’t hear nothing but wind, Baize. Can we go?”

“Back home,” she said, “there ain’t no pier. When you come out here, the water, it’s still crazy black in some places from all that oil.”

“Oil?”

“Yep. You can light a match and throw it in one of the oil spots and sometimes the flame can stay lit for a whole minute. You know what’s really ill? When you come out here and look at the water, you can see the lightning bugs getting their wink on, you know, lighting up against all that black.”

“Is it pretty?”

I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. She just cut her eyes at me and blinked in slow motion the same way Shalaya Crump would when she thought something I’d said was ignorant as hell.

“It’s blue,” she finally said. “All of it.”

“Blue? You said it was black?”

“It is, but it’s all so blue, too, because of the black. Don’t you see it?”

“Look Baize, we gotta go.”

“Man, I come out here all the time and imagine this is a beach with palm trees and mountains in the background,” she said, “but no matter how nice I see it, the sky ain’t never quite right.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said with her back to me. “I hate it. Folks act like they hate the oil now more than the wind, but me, I’d kill the wind, the sky, and water if I could. I ain’t lying. I always imagine that my first video is gonna be me rhyming against a computer-generated dude who looks like he’s made of black water, like Terminator 2, except he’s gonna be called Swaginator and I’m killing that fool in the first minute of the video.”

“Why, though?”

“Why what?”

“Why kill the sky?”

“Because it took my family. Shit. I told you that.”

“No, you didn’t. What do you mean, the sky took them?”