A Different Breed of Cat

by Toiya Kristen Finley

Wasn’t my intention to deal with Dutch’s son again, but the past 24 hours left me a little punch drunk. When a man’s not even sure where to find his asshole anymore, he’d do just about anything to retrieve it. I left a note in Dutch’s son’s mailbox to send the white boy to come talk to me at Staley’s. I didn’t want to make up my mind about Old Dutch. There was some truth to all them stories. Yeah. But that didn’t mean they were real, that last night was real. The bar was mostly empty on Sunday afternoon. One couple over in the booth by the bathroom. The girl sat next to the wall, but she rested her head against his shoulder. Her bra was so tight it pushed the long, deep slit of her tits out her tank top. His hand crept up the middle of her thigh, them carryin on no different than all those couples trapped in here years ago before the blues man took the stage.

Bug nodded at me from behind the bar. I took a table in front of the TV. A baseball game, Cardinals vs. Reds, not that I knew anybody who bothered watchin baseball anymore. These weren’t the same tables back from that night. They used to be wood, and these were formica, but the little bar I’d been sneakin into since I was eleven was suddenly strange. This was the place I’d almost died, and these might as well’ve been the same wooden tables and sawdust-covered floors, even though I remembered when they ripped up the floorboards and put in blue-specked tiles.

“I’m surprised you picked Staley’s, considering last night.” The white boy was more casual this time around in a white shirt with long sleeves–in the middle of the summer, no less–olive slacks hangin low on his hips with a tan belt, and a backwards baseball cap. He dared to shake my hand. “You getting us some beer?”

“Not without fake ID.”

He sat. “Nope. Thought you might have some ins. I’m not really into beer, anyway.”

Bug had stepped out back, but when he saw the white boy with me, he came over and gave him a hug. “What’s sup? You been away too long, for real!”

#

I came home yesterday afternoon to discover the old blues man in the living room with Mama. Seein me, he laughed. String of phlegm clung from his palate to his tongue. His undershirt striped the collar of his doody-brown polyester suit with sweat. Old Dutch leaned back in Daddy’s recliner. With both hands wrapped around the mahogany-claw handle, he tapped his cane against the floor. Like he and Mama were old friends, just catchin up. Mama leaned over on the couch and clutched the armrest of Daddy’s big chair. When I walked in, she just blinked at me.

“I haven’t met your grandbabies,” he said to Mama. He didn’t know a lotta grandbabies round here. He fled over forty years ago on account of all them murders. Old Dutch looked me over and smiled, and then came another belly laugh. The giant bubble of his stomach jiggled against his knees.

“Malik?” Mama said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, and we shook. The bag of white bread loafs swung at my side. I thought he’d be slimy, but his hand was dry. His skin chafed mine.

“You got another grandson? Heard a little somethin about ‘im.”

“Yeah,” Mama said. She didn’t afford herself to smile. Lois’s boy.” Lois, the better daughter–the one who died tragic. Didn’t run off and leave her kid behind like mine did. “He don’t live here no more.”

“That’s a shame. You know my son keeps me up-to-date on a lot of goings on. Unh huh.” Dutch slapped on a brown felt hat with a thin slate feather. “It’s been nice re-acquaintin with you. I’ll see y’all later tonight.”

“Why didn’t you tell me he was comin?” I followed her to the kitchen, talked to her back.

She fiddled through the drawer by the stove and pulled out a couple of knives and tossed them on the counter.

“Mama–”

“I’m already behind.”

“Why was he here?”

“Get me the beef and them Vidalias off the top of the refrigerator.”

I massaged the tips of my eyes with my shirt collar. Onion vapors were almost as bad as the cigar and cigarette smoke that would be invadin the house in a couple hours. Mama’s wrists clicked as she chopped, the knife bangin the board. Over the last few summers, Old Dutch came to see his son, and everybody forgot he actually had one til the son came back to Nashville at the time Dutch’s visits started. But Dutch was never so public, wouldn’t never come to see Mama or spend a night gamblin if he didn’t want everybody wary of some agenda.

I ran the tap and splashed some water on my eyes. The tears stung til I could barely hold my eyes open. “Mama–”

She peppered the beef and added garlic powder for the $1 hamburgers.

“Voodoo’s been practiced hundreds, thousands of years? This fool just made some shit up to mess with people.”

Mama slammed her palm into a beef patty. She glared at me. “You the fool here, Malik. Why you think he asked about CF?”

“Lots of people ask about CF.”

Mama turned her back and shook her head. “CF’s alive. Dutch wouldna said nothin if he knew he couldn’t hurt ‘im.”

I didn’t take the man’s reputation lightly. Not at all. Growin up, I heard about the Juju Hoodoo Man. How he dropped almost a bar full of people dead when he found out they laughed behind his back and didn’t tell him about his wife’s affair with a more handsome, popular cat. But older folks loved to fear him too much, and if their kids and grandkids didn’t tremble at the memory of what he done or might have done, we didn’t have no respect. Old Dutch wasn’t no true voodoo man. He didn’t worship African gods or know how to woo people’s minds and emotions with herbs and potions made of animal parts. I didn’t care how he killed all those people. I knew he did it–maybe not how everybody said. And back then, no white cops would bother with dead niggas all over the floor of Staley’s. So, the truth never came out.

“Mama, please don’t let him take you on some mind trip.” I knew how’d she be. All night now, she’d worry. Wonder where CF really was, even after a year-and-a-half, even after nobody on campus or the Florida police could figure what happened. “Mama, if you know what he’s doin, you don’t have to play along.”

Mama stabbed at the onion til I feared she’d chop off her hand.

Saturday night brought its regulars for poker and spades. Mr. Ritchie, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Winters. Daddy’s and Mama’s friends from high school, from around the neighborhood. To partner up, they brought their nieces and nephews or sons or the latest girlfriend they tried to impress. Then there were the cats we’d see every other week, once a month, any time they could borrow the cash. Regulars or broke-ass fools, they all knew Dutch. When I took their money as they came through the back, maybe I shoulda told them he was comin. Dutch was maybe ten years older than most of them, but that didn’t mean some of them couldn’t have been teenagers when it all went down. Some of them coulda been there, though nobody was dumb enough to say whether they got out alive. Me and my friends had our suspicions. It was a favorite guessin game while growin up. Mr. Winters had this constant trickle down his throat. He massaged his chest and struggled to cough but never brought anything up. He turned down advice and suggestions of who to go see to fix it. Mr. Winters said it was one of them things he’d have to live with. Strokes got blamed on Dutch. Retarded grandchildren got blamed on Dutch, even when he’d been gone for years. So when he came into the living room from the kitchen, limpin lopsided with the guitar on his back and puttin all his weight on the right knee, Mama’s guests didn’t move. Didn’t speak. They stared at the man in the brown suit, wonderin if that could possibly be the real thing, or if the fear they always carried for him brought up this phantom.

“It’s good to see all y’all, mmm hmmm!” A kind ol’ grandfather with a big grin. He laughed and exposed that string of phlegm hangin from the roof of his mouth, unaware of how overdressed he was in that brown suit and felt Fedora, but blissfully aware of the respect fillin the room.

Mama ran down the hallway. “So good to see you! So glad you could make it!” She patted Old Dutch on both shoulders. All of her guests greeted him then, asked him how he’d been. Daddy took the guitar off Dutch’s back and set up the amp. We were mostly quiet again while he plugged it up. Nobody wanted to hear the blues man sing.

An hour-and-a-half later, I opened the back door for a white boy in a black Fedora, hard pressed red shirt with starched cuffs and collar, and black slacks with sharp creases. He tipped his hat, and perched the Fedora sideways back on his wavy, dirty-blond head.

Among the spectators at the poker table in the breakfast room, Dutch stood up and laughed. “Hey, now! There’s my boy!”

The white boy grinned. Hands in pockets, he brushed past me and entered a room full of bewildered old black men. His walk was smooth, real smooth, an aggressive stroll with long strides for someone with legs that short. Dutch clapped him on the back. He leaned in, hands still in pockets, and let Dutch give him a hug. The men around the table piled their hands in neat little stacks in front of them, took a moment to draw from cigarettes and cigars. Daddy’d been observin the spades game in the den, but someone in the hall musta told him bout Dutch’s friend. Daddy looked over his shoulder on his way past the breakfast room. He got a six pack out of the refrigerator and stared at me. Then he cocked his head towards the hallway and went back to the den. He wouldn’t dare keep watch himself. He was more afraid of the old blues man than Mama.

“Started to wonder if you were gon make it,” he said to the white boy. “This here’s Young Dutch.”

It’s like nobody really heard what the blues man said. They finally relied on their baser manners and gave the white boy lukewarm hellos, but I know we were all thinkin what in the hell we were gonna do with Another Damn Dutch.

He grinned just as crooked as the hat on his head and looked intently with brown eyes like filmy mud. “Nice to meet you all, too.” He was definitely from around here, but he punched all the syllables. At least he didn’t have that whigger speech. It was difficult to tell his speed–part metrosexy, part old-school gangsta, or both. Young Dutch gave a short bow, and the silver wallet chain tapped his side.

Mr. Lewis and Mr. Ritchie shoulda been more focused on their poker game, but they kept peekin at me over their cards to make sure I kept watch. I sat with both Dutches in the cramped breakfast room, Young white Dutch in the middle. He played with his fingernails. They were manicured and pink, with the cuticles pushed down and the milky moons exposed.

“Why don’t we have some music while we wait our turn?” Old Dutch said.

“You got something new?” white Dutch said.

“Whatever I feel, young fella.”

I followed them into the living room, and everybody waitin up front pretended to be delighted when Old Dutch sat on the edge of the sofa and strapped on that guitar. Young Dutch stuck his nose to the glass of the china cabinet full of Mama’s plates from a Caribbean trip in the 70s. He commented on each one–Aruba, Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Curacao–and analyzed the brushwork of the art next to the china cabinet, paintings of stone streets and solid black figures shakin maracas. I grunted some response. I sympathized with the four men trapped in the living room with their girlfriends. They knew they had to stay right here, and me with them.

“What are your interests, Malik?” the white boy said.

“Not men, if you’re wonderin.”

He smiled but didn’t look at me. “I thought it might be numbers, since you take care of the money.”

“Numbers are cool, I guess.”

“So you’re an accountant? That’s your job?”

I looked back at him and sucked my teeth. “Ain’t got no job. Accountant wouldn’t fly round my circles.” I couldn’t honestly say I wanted to be with my boys at the moment. I could choose this or sippin beers all night down the street. I wouldn’t have to put up with these strange cats all night like I would my friends, but I could busy myself here with Mama’s books once we kicked everybody out. Not even Mama’d bother me then.

“I know that girl who lives across the street from you, near the corner?”

Old Dutch took song requests.

“We were in the same class and ran with the same people,” Young Dutch said. CF’s age then, but he didn’t look it, the little elf in dress-up clothes. “I’m going to see her next weekend. We’re having a little get-together. See how everyone’s doing in college–”

“Yeah?” I said. I crossed my arms and stared at his patent-leather black shoes.

“Sorry, I thought you were interested in her. I know she was close to your cousin. Have you heard from him? I can let her know when I see her.”

I arched my spine. Old Dutch started tunin. “How do you know Dutch exactly?”

“I found something of his.”

“And he was so grateful, he let you take that nickname?”

“We’re really both Dutch. Happy coincidence.”

“So you and Dutch run together, hunh? He’s a different breed of cat.”

“He certainly is that.”

“So, where do you come from…Dutch?” The smoke in the house burnt the surface of my skin. I slipped my hand under the collar and scratched hard. My eyes started to water.

“I live on the other side of the creek.”

The white side, in a decade-old subdivision that was already rundown. It wasn’t as bad as the projects a few blocks over, but those houses were cardboard cutouts. Our neighborhood was old, but the homes were sturdy and had character, their own personality. Mostly, white yuppies were movin in when old blacks died, and the folks in that subdivision across the creek only wished they could afford to live on our side. This cat wasn’t anything more than new-fangled white trash. I rubbed my mouth and smirked underneath.

“Look here, Dutch, your friend, the girl across the street? I’ve known her almost her whole life, and she’s never been interested in me, and she never will be. So, whatever you and Dutch are up to, you can leave her out.”

He smiled at me, and a warmth snaked along the places I’d scratched.

“I don’t know what you think you know about Old Dutch, but they’re just myths.”

Dutch snickered. “What do you think I want from him?”

“Well, it’s a little odd–”

“He’s a good friend. We’re a lot alike. I’ve learned a lot from him.”

“Like I said, Dutch, what you think happened didn’t happen like that. He might teach you a lot of shit, but it’s no true experience.”

With each note, Old Dutch’s chapped fingers slid down the guitar neck, and the silver strings sparked tiny shrieks. Maybe he played to make these chumps lose money to him. Maybe he played to charm their women. Whatever they thought, they tapped their feet–not too enthusiastically–or closed their eyes as they swayed, drunk in his blues. Young Dutch hunched over him on the armrest. He watched Old Dutch’s face with a big grin. Old Dutch didn’t add words. He just hummed. There’s somethin to an old man’s hums. Never bitter or happy, they made me feel what coulda been, what shoulda been if luck had been a touch more kind. But they weren’t for self-pity, neither. Life was good enough, their hums said, even if at the end of the road, they never really got what they wanted.

Dutch’s hands slid like water over the strings. Cascaded down. Rose up. His fingers picked, calloused fingers, ticklin the strings like teasin a woman’s spine. The smoke from Mr. Lyman and Bug’s cigars obeyed the notes. In the soft, yellow lamplight, two blue-white strings hung in the air and burst and plumed in knotted halos. The light in the room turned to dust. Dirty, swarmin, yellow gnat wings whirled before Old Dutch’s face. The old man himself lost the deep wrinkles in his cheeks. The boulder of his gut evaporated til he sat lean ‘n healthy in front of me. The doody-brown jacket and pants slimmed into a shiny, navy blue suit under stage lights. Dutch played the same guitar on a makeshift stage, sweated under a black Fedora trimmed with white.

The air a mix of tobacco smoke, wine, and beer, the scent fumbled my balance. I reeled forward. My head swung down. My feet turned in, sufferin under my own weight. I forced myself forward, and my legs fought me and dragged under the weight of this new song. Muddled words, but Dutch made me understand. Sadness, bitterness, deep sorrow, but also great joy in revenge. Music mixed in dirty light. It was heavy and tangled my muscles. My right leg twisted in til I thought my hip would snap. Dutch sat on that makeshift stage, a man within a blue-black flame, untouched, unburned, his body a vapor encased in fire. I couldn’t even choke for breath. I looked for the door, knowin the only thing that could save me was gettin out from under Dutch’s song. Bodies slumped over the bar. Beer ran down pine and puddled on the floor in dust and shattered glass. Women lay dead on top of men. Men lay dead on top of women. On the floor. At their tables. Those who couldn’t get free through death twitched and screamed. I tripped over a woman starin up with bulged eyes and wide mouth, in awe of God or the Devil, whomever came to get her. Her pelvis jerked towards the ceiling, electrocuted by Dutch’s song. I fell. Crawled. Inhaled sawdust. My face grazed the floorboards. I gasped. Oxygen wouldn’t go down my throat. My lungs throbbed, and a slow fire climbed down my abdomen and into my groin. My body bucked against the floor. My lips spread wide. The hinges of my jaw slowly cracked apart.

“Malik!”

I blinked and breathed in grass and healthy summer dirt. Arms wobbled a bit, but I pushed myself up on my knees.

“What’s the matter?” Mama yelled from the porch. My shoulders slumped, and my neck bowed under my head’s weight. I stared at the front yard across the street.

Young Dutch bent down beside me. He poked in my mouth with the tip of his index finger. A manicured nail rammed over my teeth, and his cologne bittered my saliva. He fished out a wood chip and wiped it across my bottom lip. It hung there wet.

“You’re right,” he said. “Knowledge’s got nothing on experience….Would you happen to know who got away that night?”

#

I stared at the TV above Young Dutch’s head. Bug poured our wings in the fryer. Skins bubbled in fat.

“You gonna smoke?”

“Why do you think I smoke?” he said.

I shrugged. “Old Dutch smokes.”

“Everybody smokes, man. I do whatever the hell I want. I’m not his bitch.”

“You can leave my grandmother alone now, okay? Nobody came to her house that night. She didn’t hide nobody. Her father didn’t hide nobody. My family didn’t get in Dutch’s business.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I asked her. She swears. She thinks Dutch is gonna hurt CF. If she knew anybody who got out alive, she’d tell.”

Young Dutch nodded. “I used to think CF was a little bitch. Now I get him. I respect him….I met him once.”

I coughed up a laugh, looked at the table, and shook my head. “That’s bullshit man. Quit fuckin with my grandma.”

“No, for real. He crashed an overnight we had at this retreat out in Gallatin. His girlfriend came. Blond girl? Well, ex-girlfriend by then. She followed him to try to get him back. He came to talk to your faux girlfriend. CF and her always stayed close, didn’t they?”

“I guess. It’s good he never got caught with none of them private-school poetry textbooks she kept feedin him. He woulda gotten more punked out if my boys ever caught him with that shit. Not like you would understand that.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” he said. “I know exactly what that’s like. I had family wanna beat the shit out of me because I went to private school. Shit, if I got treated like your boys and you did CF, I would have run and never come back too. I think CF’s just fine. I think he’s living exactly how he wants. It’s guys like you who piss me off.”

CF made his way back to the dorm. I watched him from the trees off the pathway between the dorms and quad. A humid Florida night, swamp mist settled in a net of clouds from ground to sky. Grey light covered him, but I still saw him clear, even from the back, that same lanky-legged boy I’d last seen when he left for college. Shoulders hadn’t broadened or body filled out. He wasn’t payin attention. He thought he was safe, not like when he was back home–lookin out for boys in the neighborhood who jumped him once he turned the corner. Not like how he snuck his girl upstairs late at night.

I went right up to him and squeezed my left forearm to his neck and covered his mouth and nose with my right palm. When he saw my face, he didn’t fight. I dragged him back into the trees. I kneed his sternum and held him down. CF was resigned. His eyelids drooped. His tongue searched behind his mouth, poked his lips out, but he never said nuthin. When I was five or six, I wanted to know what this felt like, to choke. I tested it on myself, strangled my neck with both hands and wondered if I could go too far. My throat got sore under the tension. It took longer than I thought. I swallowed, and my windpipe strained. It hurt, but it wasn’t so bad, so I squeezed a little tighter. My body fought to breathe. I couldn’t stand it no more–my windpipe pinched narrow. I dropped my arms.

I wasn’t stoppin now. My hands around CF’s neck, I pressed in harder, crushed down. I knew he was waitin, waitin to see how much strain his throat could take. His body hadn’t given out yet. I put all of my weight onto his sternum. Now he struggled, and I’d make sure he wouldn’t get up again.

“What do you care if anything happens to CF?” Dutch said. Over his head, the Cards and Reds were playin on TV. Bug had brought us a basket of honey BBQ wings. “You helped run him off, asshole. Your grandmother’d kill you if she knew what you really did to him.”

My hands throbbed. Fingers ached where I choked him, pressed down through CF’s Adam’s apple and his windpipe and his spine. I yanked my hands under the table. This was not a memory. This didn’t even happen. I never saw my cousin after he left for college. The last thing I heard, the last thing I knew, he promised to come home Christmas after that first semester ended. But I knew I did it, too. Knew how good it felt to beat that buttery skin one last time.

“I don’t know what you wanna do,” I said. I didn’t want him to know what I’d seen, but he already knew. “I done told you Mama didn’t do nuthin to disrespect your friend.”

#

Mama alone, still in church clothes, ate an apple in the living room. She cut with a paring knife and slurped the uneven slices off the blade. Feet propped up on the coffee table, she stared into the china cabinet. I opened the drapes and fell back in Daddy’s big chair. Mama glanced at me for just a second. She gave me a piece of apple. Then she went back to starin through the china cabinet.

“Where you been?”

“A walk.”

“You get them lotto picks?”

“No. I wanted to talk to you before I made the rounds….Mama, you can’t worry about CF. You can’t listen to either of them damn Dutches. You know better than me how they are.”

She shook her head, frownin. “Always talkin shit when you don’t understand….Why don’t he come home? Why won’t he come see me? It was easier when I thought he passed on, but why is he stayin away on purpose? Is he hurt? Is he sick? This is so bad of me–forgive me, Jesus–but I hope he’s somewhere where he don’t remember who he is. I’d rather take that than know that boy abandoned me.”

I couldn’t tell her he was alive, and I couldn’t say he was dead. Neither answer was the right one. “He, he wasn’t happy.” Maybe I wanted to help cause I really couldn’t stand it when she was like this, or maybe I didn’t want her to know what I’d really do to CF if I had the chance. I couldn’t be sure.

She threw the knife against the table. It skidded across the glass and landed on the carpet. “Wasn’t no reason for him to be unhappy. He could do anything, smart as he was. Get anything he wanted. Only reason he wasn’t happy cause your dumb ass wouldn’t leave him alone. You shoulda protected him!” She poked my temple with her index finger, and my neck snapped back.

I almost slapped her hand. I was grown now, and she liked to forget it. Respect her or not, her grandson or not, she needed to know I would never let her touch me that way again. But she was sobbin when I turned around. She leaned forward, and her head almost hit the coffee table. Her eyes clenched shut as far as they could go. Tears slipped through the grains of the wood.

A wail grew behind her closed lips, and it thundered to a scream. She never opened her mouth. The cracked veins in her forehead, the stringy tendons in her neck–I watched them pulse and quake, and she started drawin it out of me. My cousin was a little bitch. I knew he’d never be more than that, but listenin to Mama….I bowed my head and scratched the back of my neck. I covered my face with my T-shirt collar and rocked myself in Daddy’s chair.

#

Still couldn’t find my asshole. So I was at Dutch’s son’s Sunday afternoon, after I’d told myself three years ago I’d never step in that house again. Old Dutch sat on a recliner on the back porch in a cigarette-stained undershirt with the guitar in his lap. Young Dutch sat next to him on a milk crate singin with eyes closed and head raised. Dutch’s son watched them from a beat-up paisley couch.

I shoulda traded ya in

when I had the chance.

Fore I found myself

in this circumstance.

“What ya got?” Old Dutch said.

Young Dutch answered:

I gotta pocket full of rocks,

too much absinthe screwin my head,

“C’mon!” Old Dutch said.

a trail of might have beens,

and a cold…damn…bed.

Old Dutch laughed and swung up the neck of his guitar as he made her wail.

I shoulda traded ya in

when I had the chance.

I gambled my happiness–

“Hello?”

Old Dutch and Young Dutch–I interrupted their song, cut off the white-boy blues and the scratch in his voice when he ended a phrase. Young Dutch stood to greet me, but he didn’t offer to shake my hand. He kept his hands in his pockets, and the wallet chain swung at his side. He smiled all bright-eyed, lookin more like a little boy than usual in that backwards baseball cap, of all things.

“Sir,” I said to the old man, “please believe me. My Mama didn’t help nobody from Staley’s when it went down. She don’t know nobody who got away.” I was there for myself as much as for her, not really sure what the old man had done to me, not really sure what more he was plannin to do. But I wanted these memories bottled up tight.

“Yeah,” Dutch said, “we settled all that last night. You lucky to be livin with that good, honest woman. Mmm hmmm.”

I looked to Young Dutch. I wouldn’t give him the anger I knew shoulda been there. Then I looked to the son for help, for anything. Behind that unpicked afro hangin over his forehead and bushy moustache, he sucked his teeth, ready for me to leave, but the white cat’s grin just grew bigger and turned sideways. It spread til his lips parted and his mouth sparked some teeth. I could feel them comin, and I couldn’t take a step back and leave before Young Dutch pulled somethin else out of me–a memory of what never was or what I’d wished and never gotten. But this time the memory was real. Me punchin CF black and blue for his poetry scribbled on Post-its and his good grades and his soft face. Mama askin us what happened and neither one of us fessin up. Her givin him big hugs when he came home every day and yellin at me cause I was happy bein nuthin. I just prayed this little shit would let me go and leave me in peace.

“There’s two kinds of miserable,” the white boy said. “Miserable because you are who you are, and you don’t hide it. Then there’s the other miserable, where all you can do is hide who you are because life would be too unpredictable, too scary if you didn’t.” He fiddled with the chain at his side. The muddy film on his eyes froze over. “You tell your mama she doesn’t have to worry about CF.”

“Go on back to your grandmama now. I’m sure she’s worried with you over here with me.” Old Dutch laughed and coughed.

I sniffed hard, pulled snot down into my mouth and spit. I nodded at Old Dutch, then the white boy. Young Dutch smiled.

Mama was asleep on the couch in the living room when I got home, legs propped up in front of her. The paring knife had fallen to the floor, and the apple core rested in a coaster on the coffee table. Once the football games were over and they got bored, my friends would probably come for me, wanna sip beer for a couple hours til a better idea came along. I decided to find a decent enough reason to stay home. I shuffled through the stacks on Mama’s desk in the den and found the books and went back to my room. I recalculated all the numbers from last night, erased tallies and filled them back in the grids. It was better than figurin what else I was gonna do.

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