Long Division(83)

Meow

That fat-head black cat, with the “Red Naval” collar around its neck, appeared and started meowing right outside the hole. I grabbed the cat and brought it down in the hole with me. “Don’t call me an asshole, okay?” I told it. “You were right last time, but still…I ain’t in the mood for that. Man, I lost my daughter and my half-wife and now I’m stuck in 2013. You hear me? Ain’t you supposed to be old and dead?”

The cat licked its paws and pawed at something in the shadows of the hole.

I reached over toward the shadows and saw that it was pawing at Long Division.

“Wait,” I told the cat. “Can you tell me who wrote this?”

Meow

I opened the book to the last chapter. With the cat lying on the side of my lap, the top of the hole open, and the light blue of the computer screen cupping my greasy face, I closed the book and wondered if I was the reader or somehow, actually, the writer of the book I had in my hands.

“Wait,” I said to the cat. “Did I write this? When?”

The cat ignored me and kept scratching its ears.

“I know this is supposed to be all dramatic,” I told the cat, “but can you just help me understand what this book has to do with me? Somebody knows and I’m just tired of not knowing.”

It just kept licking its paws.

“Thanks a lot, homie,” I told the cat and sucked my teeth. “Where would I be without you? Did you ever really talk to me?”

The cat yawned and started licking its own ass.

Making Baize really reappear was going to be harder than making her disappear, harder than anything I’d ever imagined in my life. And I was going to have to do it all with a book without an author called Long Division, Baize’s computer, a fat-head cat, and a hole in the ground.

That’s one of the only things I knew. I also knew that “tomorrow” was a word now like the thousands of other words in that hole. I closed my mouth, pulled down the top of the hole, and imagined more words in the dark.

But someone else was in the hole with me.

I heard more breathing and more fumbling around, so I walked toward the noise until I was close enough to smell dried sweat, pine trees, and ink.

“Who is that?” I said, sounding scared as hell. “How’d you get down here?”

I gently reached and rubbed my hands up, down, and all around their noses, their eyelids, their dry lips and ear lobes. I found their thighs, their flimsy T-shirts, and finally all of their crusty hands. I had one more match left from the book I’d taken from the 1960s, so I went in my pocket and struck the match.

“You!?”

Slowly, we opened our red eyes in the dark and taught each other how to love. Hand in hand, deep in the underground of Mississippi, we all ran away to tomorrow because we finally could…





COVERED IN INK.


Out in the Bonneville, LaVander Peeler sat in the back and I sat up front with Grandma. She sat there not saying a word for a few minutes, with one hand on my thigh and the car running. She took her hand from my thigh and cupped her face with both hands before massaging her temples with her thumbs. I placed my left hand on the back of her neck and rubbed it like she’d do to me when I couldn’t sleep.

I sat there, waiting for Grandma to say something and, really, waiting to hear from her how being in love with Jesus was going to help us out of whatever situation we were in. I didn’t want no silly voices pass-interfering when Jesus decided to let me know what to do next. But even if you put it on strong leash, and even if you’re saved, the imagination makes more noise than a little bit and takes you wherever it wants to go.

And my imagination did exactly that. It took me right across the road in those Magic Woods and it had me stepping on dead catfish and brittle monkey bodies and the blue crossed eyeballs of white folks. All the while, all I could hear around me was Uncle Relle saying, “Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit. Gotdamnit.”

Jesus, I thought to myself, if you’re there, I’m not trying to cuss you. I swear I’m not.

Then, it took me back to a bed on a stage where Mama, Troll, Shay, Gunn, and MyMy were there and they were all kissing me all over my stretch marks and showing stretch marks I never knew they had. Without warning, my imagination calmed down and took me right back to my baptism and that Halona King song was blasting on level eighty trillion.

I pulled Long Division from my bag. “Grandma, I’m fine,” I told her. “Really.”

“Your face,” she said.

“What?”

“It looks like my baby done aged fifteen years in two days. Lawd, have mercy. Please have mercy. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“Oh, naw. I’m fine, Grandma. I’m just waiting, but it shouldn’t be long now.” I sat there with Long Division, trying to get situated in the passenger seat of the car. “In a way, everything is right here.” I handed her the book. “I think Jesus wanted me to find this book. You should read this one day. There’s another one in the shed.”

“I picked it up,” she said.

“You did? Good. You should read it.”

“I love you, City,” she said and put the book back on my lap. “Galatians 6:9 say, Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. I ain’t giving up, but I didn’t do good this weekend and I reckon they ’bout to come for me. I want you—”