Long Division(74)

“Hold up. You want the cord, right?” she said to the Klansmen. “What’s the use in having the cord if you can’t use the thing? Look.”

Baize plugged the computer up and typed a few things on the screen. “Okay, come here.” Music came from the computer. “Walk right in front of the screen and see what happens.” Baize did something that made the computer screen turn into a TV screen, and whatever was in front of the computer ended up on the screen. The bigger Klansman looked down at the screen and saw himself. “I can show you how to work it,” she said.

Just like before when all the words I typed on the screen were famous, whoever walked in front of the computer looked famous on the screen, too.

The bigger Klansman handed the gun to the smaller one. He walked in front of the computer and started moving his arms like he was an Egyptian. If the past day hadn’t been filled with more craziness than a little bit, this would have been the craziest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Baize knelt down and pushed a button that made these twinkle sounds come from the computer. A voice from the computer whispered, “…1, 2, 3, uh.”

It wasn’t loud overall, but the specific sounds in it were louder than anything I’d ever heard. It really sounded like something from the future. Not the 2000s, either—more like the 3000s. Baize actually stood up and started dancing in front of the computer screen as best she could. You could tell it took a lot for her to actually move because she was getting so weak. She started dancing near me and said, “When I give you the sign, clothesline the big one.”

I said okay and kept watching her dance. I couldn’t believe I was watching her dance on a TV screen with Klansmen in the background and a dead man slumped over a desk with a bloody hole in his back in 1964.

After a while, though, Baize had all of us, including the two Klansmen, dancing in front of the screen and trying to move in front of each other to see who could look the most famous. Baize made us form a version of a really tight Soul Train line. Two of us danced on the side and one person jammed in the middle going toward the camera.

I started it off by doing a robot into the Pee-wee Herman, and then I mixed it with a Prince move, where I looked at the camera and licked in between my fingers right in front of the computer.

Then Baize came through trying to do some dance where she acted like she was hammering really fast with her whole body. She was so sick and so weak, though, that it looked like she was doing it in slow motion. Her nose was bleeding a little bit the whole time, too. She broke the hammering thing off into some hard locking, too. Boom! Bam! Lock! Lock! Then she acted like she was riding a bike side to side, and she ended it doing this dance I saw Doug E. Fresh do.

Next came Shalaya Crump, who tried to do a back glide into a moonwalk and a Michael Jackson spin, and then she got right up on the camera and started prepping. She put both hands in the air and worked them back and forth in sync with her long neck. Those other years didn’t have nothing on 1985.

Finally, the bigger Klansman stood in the middle. He asked for the rifle back from the smaller one and just stood there posing, with his hands folded up like he was on top of a mountain. At this point, the voice in the song started chanting something about a Polaroid picture: “Shake it…” The bigger Klansman didn’t move at all until he handed the rifle back off to the smaller Klansman and broke down into this mean twist, super close to the ground. When he was right up on the computer checking himself out, the dude copied Baize and did the Doug E. Fresh dance, too.

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.