Chapter 35
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Marvin Jones kicked his new skateboard up and caught it. He didn’t really want to hang. This was dangerous ground. He hadn’t claimed yet, so he wasn’t protected. Well, he had sort of claimed. He was a choirboy at the Church, but that was getting way old too. The priest wasn’t paying him no never mind since he started getting hair down there, but Momma say he got to do what they tell him ‘cause she wanted to go to heaven and she was too sick to work no more.
He had done like they said and practiced with the sling shot at the old factory. It was cake, the thing they wanted him to do. He practiced until he knew he could get the ball through the window nine times out of ten. That was 90%. It was way cool that eighteen out of twenty was 90% too. He made sure he didn’t tell nobody that he liked math. And, he was getting way better at math every day.
Life was funny. He stole this math puzzle magazine from the old gook’s newsstand and that bastard snatched his hand in some kind of Kung Fu shit that hurt. He was sure the old man was going to rat him out, then he done something strange.
The old man asked him, “Who you stealing this for?”
Marvin told the old man it was for him ‘cause the math books at school were too easy. The old man made him work some of the puzzles on the first couple of pages. He looked real surprised when Marvin did the numbers in his head. Then the old man smiled a smile that reminded him of someone, couldn’t figure out who, and opened the puzzle book to the middle and told him to do the puzzle on page 56. He thought at first that it was a stupid puzzle. It was mostly words, and why would anyone care when two trains going toward each other at different speeds would meet? Once he pictured it in his head he started to puzzle it out. The old man sharpened a brand new Ticonderoga #2 HB and handed it to him. Marvin thought later that he could have run when the old man turned to sharpen the pencil, but once he started on a puzzle he always had to finish it.
When he wrote down two hours and twenty minutes, the old man smiled again and asked. “What grade are you in?”
Marvin said, “Sixth.”
The old man asked him, “What school teaches Algebra in sixth grade?”
And, that’s when things got way weird. That was his word-way. He liked to use words that nobody else used. He asked the old man, “What’s algebra?”
The old man looked a little sad then and stood with his arms folded looking at Marvin for a long time. Then he smiled again and for some reason he looked like Grandpa. Only how a little old Chinese man could look like his way big, black grandpa before he died from the diabetes was way strange. Then that old man said something totally crazy. He said, “You take this book and finish it and come back when you are done and I will give you another one. If you can’t finish it, get as far as you can and come back and show me what you have done.”
The puzzle book the old man gave him was way better than the ones in school. He had gone back two days later and the old man looked through the book and smiled and gave him another one.
People was crazy, man. Shit, I’m supposed to be watching.
Marvin skated down the ally and climbed up the drainpipe and waited. He heard the shotgun blast, but there wasn’t no fire. So he took the black pellet, the one that they said to be real careful with, and shot it through the window, just like he’d practiced. Then he slid down the drainpipe.
He pulled out the towel he had stuck in his back pocket and wiped the rust off his Levi’s and tossed the towel in the trash.
He skated past the SWAT guys who were running around freaking out. He didn’t like the SWAT guys. They were mostly assholes, even the black ones. A block later he dropped the sling in a sewer and skated back to newsstand. He had told the old man he didn’t feel right getting all the free puzzle books. The old man smiled a big smile and said he would put him to work. Today the old man was going to talk to him about inventory, whatever that was.