The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Hello?” the very, very old black man said into the receiver.

The phone had not rung for more than a week and a half by his reckoning but really it had only been a little more than three days. Somebody had called, a woman. She seemed sad. He remembered that she’d called more than once.

Classical piano played softly from a radio in the background. A console television prattled away, set on a twenty-four-hour news station.

“Is somebody there?” the old man asked before his caller could speak.

“Papa Grey?” a male voice said. It was a young man’s voice, free from the strain and gravel of age.

“Is that you, Reggie? Where you been, boy? I been waitin’ for you to come by for a week. No, no, two weeks. I don’t know exactly but it’s been a long time.”

“No, Papa Grey, no, it’s me, Hilly.”

“Who? Where’s Reggie?”

Hilly went silent for two seconds and the old man said, “Is anybody there?”

“I’m here, Papa Grey,” the voice assured. “I’m here.”

He was certainly there, on the other end of the line, but who was it? the old man wondered. He looked around the room for a clue to his caller’s identity but all he saw were piles of newspapers, boxes of every size and shape, and furniture. There were at least a dozen chairs and a big bureau that was tilted over on a broken leg; two dining tables were flush up against the south and east walls. His tattered mattress under its thin army blanket lay beneath the southern table.

“That was Etude no. 2 in A-flat Major by Chopin,” the radio announcer was saying. “Now we’re going to hear from . . .”

“Papa Grey?” a voice said.

“. . . half a dozen bombs went off in and around Baghdad today. Sixty-four people were killed ...”

Was the voice coming from the radio or the TV? No. It was in his ear. The telephone—

“Who is this?” Ptolemy Grey asked, remembering that he was having a phone conversation.

“It’s Hilly, Papa. Your great-nephew. June’s daughter’s son.”

“Who?”

“Hilly,” the young man said, raising his voice slightly. “Your nephew.”

“Where’s Reggie?” Ptolemy asked. “Where’s my son?”

“He can’t come today, Uncle,” Hilly said. “Mama asked me to call you to see if you needed anything.”

“Heck yeah,” Ptolemy said, wondering what anything the call and the caller meant.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you need anything?”

“Sure I do. I need all kinds of things. Reggie haven’t called me in, in a week, maybe, maybe it’s only three days. I still got four cans of sardines and he always buy me a box of fourteen. I eat one every day for lunch. But he haven’t called and I don’t know what I’m gonna eat when the fish an’, an’, an’ cornflakes run out.”

A piano sonata began.

“What do you want me to get you?” Hilly asked.

“Get me? Yeah, yeah. Come get me and we can go shoppin’. I mean me and Reggie.”

“I can go with you, I guess, Uncle,” Hilly said unenthusiastically.

“Do you know where the store is?” his great-uncle asked.

“Sure I do.”

“I don’t know. I never seen you there.”

“But I do know.”

“Is Reggie coming?”

“Not today.”

“Why? No . . . no, don’t tell me why. Don’t do that. Are you comin’, um, uh, Hilly?” Ptolemy smiled that he could remember the name.

“Yes, Papa Grey.”

“When?”

“One hour.”

Ptolemy peered at the clock on top of his staggering bureau.

“My clock says quarter past four,” Ptolemy told his great-nephew Hilly Brown.

“It’s ten to twelve, Uncle, not four-fifteen.”

“If you add forty-five minutes to that,” the old man said. “I should be lookin’ for you before too much after five. Anyway, it have to be before six.”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

Ptolemy could hear fire engines blaring in the distance. There were floods down south and Beethoven was deaf. Dentifrice toothpaste was best for those hard-to-get places.

Maude Petit died in fire. Ptolemy could hear her screams along with the sirens that cried down the street outside and also in the fire bells that clanged way back then in Breland, Mississippi, when he was five and she was his best friend.

Ptolemy started to rock on his solid maple chair. One of the legs had lost its rubber stopper and so made a knocking sound on the parquet floor. He felt like he needed to do something. What? Save his little playmate, that’s what. He was bigger now. He could make it through the fire, if only he could get there.

He could smell the tar roof burning and feel the heat against his face. He rubbed the tears away and then looked at his old weathered hand with its paper-thin, wrinkled skin. Black as that hot tar, black as Maude’s happy little face.

Where was Reggie? Where was he?

The clock still said 4:15. It was just like when he used to work for the undertaker and he had to wait for six o’clock to come on the big black-and-silver wall clock that hovered in the hall outside from where he swept the floors around the tables that held the bodies of Maude and her whole family. They smelled like gamey meat cooking in his mother’s father’s deep-pit barbecue. The fire-men threw Maude’s dog in the garbage. Maude loved that dog and so Ptolemy snuck around the back of the big green cans they used to throw away everything that the Petit family owned and he stole Floppy’s body and buried her down by the river, where Ptolemy had shown Maude his but she was too shy to show him hers.

They were a match for each other, Earline Petit had said.

It was probably a match that started the fire that burned down the house, the fire captain said.

A woman was singing opera in a voice that made Ptolemy think of strawberry jam. He tried to get to his feet by leaning forward and pushing against the arms of the chair. He failed on the first and second tries. He made it on the third. Standing up hurt in three places: his elbow, his knee, and ankle. One, two, three places.

The short refrigerator was humming but empty.

The clock said 4:15.

The lady news announcer was talking about a white girl in Miami who was taken away by somebody that nobody knew. Ptolemy thought about the . . . what did Mama call it . . . the inferno of the Petit’s tarpaper home; the yellow fire that waved like tall grass in the wind and the dark shadows that looked like the silhouette of a tall man moving through the rooms, searching for Maude like Ptolemy wanted to do, like he should have done.

The clock must have run down, Ptolemy thought. So how would Reggie know when to come if time had stopped? Ptolemy could be stuck there forever. But even if there was no clock, clock-time, he would still be hungry and thirsty, and how could he find the right bus to take him to the tar pit park if Reggie didn’t come?

The knock on the door surprised Ptolemy. He was resting his eyes, listening to a man talk about the money people have to pay for war and school while a trumpet played, a jazz trumpet that carried the sound of black men laughing down the hall in the whorehouse Coydog brought him to when they were supposed to be at the park playing on the swing.

While Coy played poker, or was with his girl, Deena Andrews would bathe Pity, that’s what they called him, they called him Pity because Ptolemy seemed like blasphemy, though no one could say why. Deena would give Pity a bath and comb his hair and say, “I wish you were my little boy, Pity Grey. You just so sweet.”

The knocking startled him again.

Ptolemy went to the door and touched it with both hands. He couldn’t feel anything but hard wood.

“Papa Grey?”

“Who is it?”

“Hilly. Sorry I’m late. The bus got stuck in a traffic jam.”

“Where’s Reggie?”

“Reggie couldn’t come, Papa Grey. Mama sent me to help you go to the store . . . You know, June’s daughter.”

June was a young woman who went out in hussy clothes on Friday nights when she should have been home with her children. And Esther . . . his sister took care of Hilda, George, and Jason.

“Whose boy are you?” Ptolemy asked the door.

“Marley and Hilda’s son,” the voice on the other side of the door replied.

Ptolemy heard the words and he knew that they meant something, though he could not conjure up the pictures in his mind. He wanted to ask another question to make sure that this wasn’t that woman who came in his house and stole his money out of his coffee can.

Ptolemy strained his mind trying to remember another thing that only a friend of Reggie would know. But every time his mind caught on something—it was a broad rise in Mississippi that had blue mist and white clouds all around. The sun was going down and the heat of the day was giving up to a mild breeze. There were birds singing and something about a man that died. A good man who gave everything so that his people could sing, no, not sing but live life like they were singing . . .

“Papa Grey, are you all right?” the voice beyond the door asked.

Ptolemy remembered that he was trying to recall something about Reggie that the young man through the door should know. He was, Reggie was, Ptolemy’s son, or his grandson, or something like that. He was tall and dark, not handsome or slender, but people liked him and he was always nice unless he was drinking and then he got rough.

Don’t drink, boy, Ptolemy would tell him. Drinkin’ is the Devil’s homework for souls lost on the road after dark.

“What did I used to tell Reggie about liquor?” the old man asked.

“What?”

“What did I tell him about liquor?”

“Not to drink it?” the voice replied.

“But what did I say?” Ptolemy asked.

“That drinkin’ was bad?”

“But what did I say?”

“I don’t know exactly. That was a long time ago,” Hilly said.

“But what did I say? To him,” Ptolemy added to help the young man answer the question.

“Uncle Grey, if you don’t open up I can’t help you go shoppin’.”

Ptolemy slapped his hands together and backed away from the door. He laid his palms upon the stack of ancient, disintegrating cardboard boxes piled next to the entrance of his one-bedroom apartment. He brought his hand to his bald head and pressed down hard, feeling the arthritic pain in the first joint of three fingers. One, two, three. Then he reached for the doorknob, gripped it.

Just the feel of the cold green glass on his hand brought back that crazy woman into his mind. The woman who came into his house was named Melinda Hogarth, somebody said. She knocked Ptolemy down and made off with his coffee-can bank. She was fifty. “Too old to be a drug addict,” Ptolemy remembered saying.

“Get outta my way, niggah,” she’d said when Ptolemy got to his feet and tried to pull his bank back from her. “I will cut you like a dog if you try an’ stop me.”

Ptolemy hated how he cringed and cowered before the fat, deep-brown addict. He hated her, hated her, hated her.

And then she did it again.

“Don’t open the door unless it’s for me or someone I send,” Reggie had told him. And he had not opened that door for anyone but Reggie in three and a half, maybe five years, and nobody had stolen his coffee-can money since. And he never went in the streets except if Reggie was with him because one time he met Melinda down on St. Peters Avenue and she had robbed him in broad daylight.

But Reggie hadn’t been there in a week and a half by the old man’s calculation. He would have had to send somebody after that long. Anyway, it was a man’s voice outside, not crazy Melinda Hogarth. Ptolemy turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Down at the end of the long hall a young man was walking away. He was a hefty kid wearing jeans that hung down on his hips.

“Reggie.”

The young man turned around. He had a brooding, boyish face. He looked familiar.

“I was leavin’,” he said down the long hallway. His expression was dour. It seemed as if he might still leave.

“Did Reggie send you?” the old man asked, holding the door so that he could slam it shut if he had to.

“No,” the boy replied. “Niecie did. Mama did.”

Reluctantly he shambled back toward Ptolemy’s door.

Old Papa Grey was frightened by the brute’s approach. He considered jumping inside his apartment and slamming the door shut. But he resisted the fear; resisted it because he hated being afraid.

If you know who you is, then there’s nuthin’ to fear, that’s what Coy used to tell him.

While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.

“Can I come in, Papa Grey?”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”

Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

“June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”

“Sure you can.”

“You have to move back so I can get by.”

In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.

The old man smiled but did not move.

Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.

Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.

“What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.

“What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”

“Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.

“Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”

But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.

“The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”

“I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”

“You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”

“Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”

“You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.

“It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And the toilet don’t work.”

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”

“I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”

“What thing?”

“The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”

“What thing, Uncle?”

“The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”

“What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.

“I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three-quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.

Hilly switched off the radio.

“Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”

“All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”

“But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”

“But then all you got to do is find your station,” Hilly said, crinkling his nose to keep the foul odor out.

“Turn it back on, Reggie . . . or Hilly, or whatever . . . just turn it back on.”

The young man put up his hood and used it to cover his nose and mouth. He turned the radio on at a low volume.

“Make it have more sound,” Ptolemy demanded.

“But you not gonna be here, Papa Grey.”

“Make it more.”

Hilly turned up the volume and then said, “I’ll be out on the front porch waitin’, Uncle. It stink too much in here.”

Hilly went out of the door, leaving it ajar. Ptolemy was quick to close the door after his great-grandnephew and throw the bolt. Then he moved quickly so as not to forget what he was doing. He scanned the piles of boxes and stacks of cartons, dishes, clothes, and old tools. He looked under the tables and through a great pile of clothes. He shuffled through old newspapers, letters, and books in the deep closet. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a large gray spider suspended in a corner. For a moment he thought about shooting that spider.

“No,” he whispered. “You don’t have to shoot a spider. He too small for shootin’. Anyway, he ain’t done nuthin’.” And then Ptolemy remembered what he was looking for. He went to the closet and took out a stack of sheets that his first wife, Bertie, had bought sixty years before. Under the folded bedclothes was an electric steam iron set upon a miniature ironing board. Under the iron lay three unopened envelopes with cellophane windows where Ptolemy’s name and address appeared.

One by one Ptolemy opened the sealed letters. Each one contained a city retirement check for $211.41. He counted them: one, two, three. He counted the checks three times and then shoved them into his pocket and stood there, wondering what to do next. The radio was on. It was playing opera now. He loved it when people sang in different languages. He felt like he understood them better than the TV newsmen and women who talked way too fast for any normal person to understand.

There was a plane crash in Kentucky. Forty-nine dead. It was Monday, the twenty-eighth of August. The spider stared down from his invisible webs, waiting for a fly or moth or unwary roach.

Somebody was waiting for Ptolemy. Reggie. No, not Reggie but, but . . .

There was a chubby young stranger standing on the concrete stairs of the tenement building when Ptolemy came out into the daylight clutching his outside right front pocket. He squinted from the bright sun and shivered because there was a breeze.

“What took you, Papa Grey?” the unfamiliar stranger asked.

“Do I know you?”

“Hilly,” he said. “Hilda’s son. I’m here to take you shopping. Did you lock the door?”

“’Course I did,” Ptolemy said. “It’s Monday and you always lock the door on Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, uh, um, Saturday, and, and, and Sunday. You always lock the door on them days and then put the key in your front pocket.”

“Hey, Pete,” someone yelled from down the street.

Ptolemy flinched and backed up toward the door, hitting the wood frame with his shoulder.

A tall woman, almost as fat as the stranger who called him Papa Grey, was coming quickly up the block.

“Hold it right there, Pete!” the woman yelled. There was a threat in her voice. “Wait up!”

Ptolemy reached for the handle of the door with his left hand but he couldn’t grasp it right. The woman climbed the stoop in two big steps and slapped the old man, hitting him hard enough to bump his head against the door.

“Where my money, bastid?” the woman shouted.

Ptolemy went down into a squat, putting his hands up to protect his head.

“Empty yo’ pockets. Gimme my money,” the woman demanded.

“Help!” Ptolemy shouted.

When she bent down, trying to reach for the old man’s pocket, he twisted to the side and fell over. The woman was in her fifties and dark-skinned. The once-whites of her eyes were now the color of cloudy amber. She grabbed Ptolemy’s shoulder in an attempt to position him for another slap.

That was when Hilly grabbed the woman’s striking wrist. He exerted a great deal of strength as he wrenched her away from his uncle.

“Ow!” she screamed. She tried to slap Hilly with her free hand.

“Hit me an’ I swear I will break yo’ mothahfuckin’ arm, bitch,” Hilly told her.

Almost magically the woman transformed, going down into a half crouch, weeping.

“I jes’ wan’ my money,” she cried. “I jes’ wan’ my money.”

“What money?” Hilly asked.

“It’s a lie,” Ptolemy shouted in a hoarse, broken voice.

“He promised to gimme some money. He said he was gonna give it to me. I need it. I ain’t got nuthin’ an’ everybody knows he’s a rich niggah wit’ a retirement check.”

“Bitch, you bettah get away from heah,” Hilly warned.

“I need it,” she begged.

“Get outta heah now or I’ma go upside your head with my fist,” Hilly warned. He raised a threatening hand and the amber-and-brown-eyed black woman hurried down off the stoop and across the street, wailing as she went.

One or two denizens of La Jolla Place stopped to watch her. But nobody looked at Hilly or spoke.

The street was narrow, with three-story structures down both sides of the block. One or two of the commercial buildings were painted dirty white but everything else was brown. Apartment buildings mostly—a few with ground-floor stores that had gone out of business. The only stores that were still operating were Blanche Monroe’s Laundry and Chow Fun’s take-out Chinese restaurant.

Ptolemy pressed his back against the wall and rose on painful knees. He was trying not to tremble or cry, biting the inside of his lips to gather his courage.

“Who is she?” Hilly, his savior, asked.

“Melinda Hogarth,” Ptolemy said, uttering one of the few names he could not forget.

“Do you owe her money?”

“No. I don’t owe that woman nuthin’. One day a couple’a years ago she squeezed my arm and said that she needed money for her habit. She just kept on squeezin’ an’ sayin’ that and when I finally gave her ten dollars she squeezed harder and made me say that I’d give her that much money whenevah she needed it. Aftah that she come an’ push in my do’ an’ took my money can. That’s why I nevah go anywhere unless Reggie come. Where is Reggie?”

“Come on, Papa Grey. Let’s go to the store.”

Why you shiverin’, Uncle?” Hilly asked when they were walking down Alameda toward the Big City Food Mart.

“It’s cold out heah. An’ they’s that wind.”

“It’s just a breeze,” Hilly said. “And it’s ovah eighty degrees. I’m sweatin’ like a pig as it is.”

“I’m cold. Where we goin’?”

“To Big City for your groceries. Then aftah that, Mama want me to bring you ovah to her house.”

“You got money?” Grey asked.

“No. I mean maybe five dollars. Don’t you have money for your groceries?”

“I got to go to the place first.”

“The ATM?”

Ptolemy stopped walking and considered the word. It sounded like amen, like maybe the big kid was saying, “Amen to that.” But his face looked confused.

“What’s wrong, Uncle?” Hilly asked.

Ptolemy looked behind to make sure he knew how far he was from his house. He noticed that Melinda Hogarth wasn’t following him like she once did when she knew that he was going to the place.

“You really scared him,” Ptolemy said to Hilly, shifting their conversation in his mind. “He slapped me an’ knocked me down an’ you said, ‘Get outta here,’ an’ he run.” Ptolemy giggled and slapped his hip.

“You mean she ran,” Hilly said. “Not he.”

“Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean she. She ran. She sure did.” The old man giggled and patted the big boy’s shoulder.

“Do you wanna go to Big City?” Hilly asked again.

“I gotta go to the place first.”

“What place?”

“The place for in my pocket.”

Hilly noticed then that his uncle was holding on to something through the blue fabric of his pants.

“You got somethin’ in your pocket, Uncle?”

“That’s my business.”

“Do you want me to help you with that like I helped you with that bitch slapped you?”

Ptolemy snickered. He would hardly ever use a curse word like that, but he felt it, and the big boy saying it made him happy.

Laughin’ is the best thing a man can do,” his aunt Henrietta used to say back in the days after the Great War when all the black folks lived together and knew each other and talked the same; back in the days when they had juke joints and white gloves and girls that smiled so pretty that a little boy like Ptolemy (who they called Petey, Pity, and Li’l Pea) would do cartwheels just to get them to look at him.

“Do you want me to help you with what’s in your pocket, Papa Grey?” Hilly said again. He reached for Ptolemy’s hand but the old man shifted away.

“Mine!” he said protectively, shaking his head.

Hilly put his hands up, surrendering to his great-uncle’s vehemence.

“All right. All right. But if you want me to help you, you have to tell me where you want to go.”

“The place,” Ptolemy said. “The place.”

“The ATM?”

“No, not that. Not where they say amen. The place where, where the lady behind the glass is at.”

“The bank?”

When the old man smiled he realized that his tongue was dry. He had to go to the bathroom too.

“What bank?” his nephew asked.

This question defeated Ptolemy. How could somebody be so stupid not to know what a bank was? He’d been there a thousand times. And he was thirsty, and he had to urinate. And it was cold too.

“Do you have a bank card in your wallet, Papa Grey?” Hilly asked.

“Yes,” Ptolemy answered though he hadn’t really understood the question.

“Can I see it?”

“See what?”

“Your bank card.”

“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout.”

“Can I see your wallet?”

“What for?”

“So that I can see your bank card and I can know what bank you want to go to.”

“Reggie knows,” Ptolemy said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Reggie’s out of town for a minute, Papa Grey. And I don’t know what bank you do business wit’ so I got to see your wallet.”

Ptolemy tried to decipher what the boy was saying and what he meant. He didn’t understand what there could have been in his wallet that this Reggie, no, this Hilly, needed to know. He did fight off that crazy woman. He did know Reggie. And he had to go to the bathroom and drink from the faucet, Ptolemy did—not Hilly/ Reggie.

Ptolemy took the wallet from his back pocket and handed it into the young man’s massive hand.

Hilly, whose skin was melon-brown and mottled, sifted through the slips of paper and receipts until he came upon a stiff plastic card of blue and green.

“Is your bank People’s Trust, Papa Grey?”

“That’s it. Now you finally found out what to do,” the old man said.

“Hold it right there,” an amplified man’s voice commanded.

A police car pulled up to the curb and two uniformed officers climbed out, both holding pistols in their hands.

Hilly put his hands up to the level of his shoulders and Ptolemy did the same.

“John Bull,” he whispered to Hilly. “They must be lookin’ for robbers—or, or, or black mens they think is robbers.”

“You can put your hands down,” one of the cops, the dark-brown one, said to Ptolemy.

“I ain’t done nuthin’, Officer,” the old man replied, raising his arms higher even though it hurt his shoulders.

“We don’t think you’ve done anything, sir. But is this man bothering you?”

“No, sir. This my son, I mean my grandson, I mean Reggie my grandson come to take me to the People’s Bank.”

“He’s your son or your grandson?” the white cop in the black-and-blue uniform asked.

“He’s my grandson,” Ptolemy said slowly, purposefully. He wasn’t quite sure that what he was saying was true but he knew that he had to protect the young colored man from the cops.

Don’t let the cops get you in jail, Coydog McCann used to tell him on the porch of his tarpaper house down in Mississippi, in Breland, when Ptolemy was seven and the skies were so blue that they made you laugh. Don’t evah let a niggah go to jail because’a you, Coydog had said. Be bettah to shoot a niggah than turn him ovah to John Bull.

“My grandson, Reggie, Officer. My grandson. He takin’ me to the People’s Bank an’ to the sto’.”

“Why does he have your wallet?” the dark-skinned cop asked.

“He wanted to tell where we was, where it was, you know. Where it was.”

“Are you his grandson?” the cop asked Hilly.

“His nephew, Officer,” Hilly said in a respectful voice that he had not used before. “He calls me Reggie, who’s my first cousin, but I’m Hilly Brown, and Reggie the one usually take care of him. I was lookin’ in his wallet because he done forgot the address of his bank.”

Ptolemy studied the police as they watched his nephew.

Hilly was his great-grandnephew, he remembered now. He was smaller the last time they’d seen each other. It was at a party in somebody’s backyard and there was brown smog at the edges of the sky but people were still laughing.

“Are you okay, sir?” the white cop asked Ptolemy.

“Yes, Officer. I’m fine. Reggie here, I mean Hilly here, was protectin’ me from all the thieves in the streets. He takin’ me to the bank and the food store. Yes, sir.”

The four men stood there on the dirty street for half a minute more. Ptolemy caught the smell of maggots from a nearby trash can. There was danger in the air. Ptolemy thought about Lee Minter, whom he saw run down and beaten by a cop name Reese Loman and his partner, Sam. The cops had truncheons. After the beating, Lee lay up in a poor bed in a tin house, where he died talking to his baby, LeRoy, who had passed ten years before. Lee called the cops fools for trying to arrest him for something they knew he didn’t do, and then he ran. The dying man had a fever so hot that you didn’t even need to touch him to feel the heat.

The policemen said something to Hilly. Ptolemy heard the deep voices but could not make out the words.

“Yes, Officer,” Hilly said to the white cop.

Ptolemy remembered that you were always supposed to speak to the white cop. Sometimes they had black men in uniform but it was the white cop that you had to talk to.

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said after the policemen got in their car and drove off. “We got to get to the bank before they close.”

It was a long, crowded room with a high counter down the middle and another one against the window that looked out on the street. Opposite the picture window was a wall of glass-encased booths where women cashed people’s checks and took deposit money for their Christmas clubs. Ptolemy used to keep a Christmas club for Angelina, Reggie’s daughter . . . or maybe it was William’s daughter, yes, William’s daughter, Angelina. And he also kept a holiday account for Pecora, even though she never liked him very much.

There were too many people in there. Ptolemy tried to see them but they began to blend together and no matter how many times he saw somebody when he looked around no one was familiar to him. And so he kept moving his head, trying to see and remember everyone.

“Let’s go to the counter, Papa Grey.” Hilly took his arm but Ptolemy wouldn’t budge. He just kept looking around, trying to make all of those faces make sense.

“Don’t it bother you?” the older man asked the younger.

“What? Come on.”

Ptolemy wasn’t going to be pulled around until he could make sense of that room. It seemed very important, almost as much as protecting that boy from the bulls. Didn’t he know that you weren’t ever supposed to take out your wallet on a street? If the thieves didn’t get you the police certainly would. The young people didn’t seem to have any sense anymore. They didn’t know. All the people on line and at the counters didn’t know what to do, and so it was dangerous on the street.

“Come on, Uncle.”

One man wearing a bright-blue suit with a long double-breasted jacket stood there talking to a blond-headed black woman who was smiling and wore no wedding ring. The blue-suited man looked very much like the gangster Sweet Billy Madges, and she, blondie, was familiar too. But it wasn’t anything to do with Madges and his whores. The blond black woman was like Letta Golding, who lived in a room across the courtyard from which a great oak had arisen.

“That oak,” Coydog would say, “is like Christ a’mighty coming up outta the clay, fed by the graves of all the dead souls that believed in him.”

“Do you believe in him?” Li’l Pea asked.

“If things goin’ good,” the wizened old man opined, “not too much. But when I’m in trouble I can pray with the best of ’em.”

If he was small enough, a little boy could climb on the limbs of that tree and clear across the courtyard or up or down to the walkways of any of the eight floors of that Mississippi Negro tenement.

Coydog lived there for a while, and Li’l Pea would visit him whenever he could.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly beseeched.

Letta was beautiful and friendly. Li’l Pea often found himself climbing up to the seventh-floor window of her apartment because she never pulled down the shade; even if she was naked and in the barrel she used for a bathtub, Letta would stand up and smile for Ptolemy and touch his cheek or kiss his forehead.

“You a nasty boy,” she’d say if he came up to her window and she was naked but she’d be smiling and he knew that she wasn’t really mad.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly said again.

“What?”

“Do you have a check to cash?”

He was still standing in the crowded bank and not in Letta’s bathroom. This realization was a surprise for the elder Grey but not a shock. He was used to going places in his mind. More and more he was in the past. Sometimes with his first wife, Bertie, and then later with the woman he truly loved—Sensia Howard. Even when she had been untrue to him with his good friend Ivan, he couldn’t get up the strength to leave Sensia—or to kill her.

The next thing Ptolemy knew he was standing at the counter with the three checks for $211.41 in his hand. Hilly was getting him to sign on the back over some other words that the boy had written.

“You stay here, Papa Grey,” Hilly was saying. “I’ma go over to the teller and get your money.”

Hilly had the checks in his hand but Ptolemy did not remember handing them over. He had signed them and now the boy was on the other side of the dividing table, standing on line at a teller’s window.

“That your son?” a woman asked.

She was old but not nearly as old as Ptolemy. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy, but he had twenty years on her at least.

“No. His name is . . . I forget his name but he’s my nephew, either my sister’s son or her daughter’s son. Somethin’ like that.”

“Oh,” the short woman said. “Mister, can you help me?”

“Um, the boy there does most everything for me,” he replied, thinking that he should go over on line and stand with, with . . . Hilly.

“I need five dollars more to make my telephone bill,” the woman said. She wore blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and a cap with a long transparent green sun visor.

“I don’t take care’a the money,” Ptolemy said. “I let the boy do that. I can’t hardly see the fingers on my hand and so he count the money so I don’t give ya a one instead of a, of a five.”

The woman was the same height as he. She once had clear brown eyes that were now partly occluded with wisps of gray.

“My name’s Shirley,” she said.

“Ptolemy,” he said, “but they call me Li’l Pea.”

“What kinda name is that?”

“It was Cleopatra’s father’s name,” the old man said. He had said the words so often in his life that they came to his lips automatically. He didn’t even know if they were true because it was Coydog told him that and his mother had said, “That Coydog just as soon lie as open his mouf.”

“The queen of Africa?”

“What’s your last name, Shirley?”

“Wring,” she said with a smile. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

“Double-u ara eye en gee,” Li’l Pea, Pity, Petey, Ptolemy Grey repeated.

The woman smiled and lifted her left hand, which held the leather straps of a faded cherry-red purse. She placed the bag on the counter and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took a piece of pink tissue paper, which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large, dome-shaped pale-green stone.

“Emerald,” Shirley Wring said, placing the delicate jewel on his upturned fingers. “You can hold on to it until I get my Social Security an’ then I can buy it back for six dollars.”

Ptolemy stared into the sea-green crystal, admiring the flashes of white and yellow from the inner variations as it tumbled between his fingers.

A treasure, he thought. Glee set off in his chest, like the sunlight through the window ignited the jewel in his hand; he felt delight at the reward that Shirley double-u ara eye en gee delivered to him even though they were strangers. He experienced a deep satisfaction in the pleasure of her trust in him. He thought about Letta carrying him in through the window and tolerating his presence while she dressed and put on the red lipstick that her boyfriends paid for so dearly.

The excitement became a pain in his chest. Ptolemy, now gazing into the cloudy-eyed woman’s brown face, understood that these feelings were strong enough to kill.

He smiled broadly then and said, “Girl, you a beam’a sunshine at the end of a long day of rain.”

He put the ring in his pocket. Shirley stared at him, smiling hopefully.

Hilly came up to them then.

“Okay, Papa Grey,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Gimme my money,” Ptolemy said.

“Later . . . at the sto’.”

“Now,” the old man commanded, “right here in this room.”

Hilly handed his great-uncle a paper envelope filled with bills in small denominations.

“This is Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

He was no longer looking around the room, wondering at the changing faces. Ptolemy spread the envelope open and took out a ten-dollar bill. He gave the money to the woman and then took the emerald ring from his pocket.

“Will you take this gift from me, Shirley double-u ara eye en gee?”

Hilly moved his big, heavy head back and forth with a perplexed twist to his face. Shirley smiled. Ptolemy lifted the ring higher.

“You’re a sweet man, Li’l Pea,” she said, taking her collateral and squeezing it between gnarled fingers.

She put the emerald in its tissue and placed the pink paper in her velvet bag. Then she put the black velvet sack into the faded red-leather purse. Shirley Wring made a movement that was the start of a curtsy and then shuffled off to get on line to pay her phone bill.

“She a friend’a yours?” Hilly asked.

“That’s a woman there, boy,” Ptolemy replied, thinking about Coydog talking to him when he was young and didn’t know a thing.

“Wanna go to the store now?” Hilly suggested, putting his hand on his uncle’s shoulder.

“What’s your hurry?” Ptolemy asked.

“Nuthin’. We just gotta go.”

They went to Big City Food Mart and filled a plastic basket with bologna, store brand Oat Ohs, margarine, sour pickles, a bag of mini peanut butter cups, peanut butter, rye bread, orange juice, Big City brand instant coffee and creamer, and six ripe red apples. The total at the cashier came to $32.37. When they got out of line Ptolemy counted the money he had left: $169.04. He counted it three times and was starting on the fourth when Hilly said, “Come on, Papa Grey, we gotta take these things home.”

“Somethin’s wrong with my change, Reggie, I, I mean, Hilly.”

“Nuthin’s wrong,” the boy said to Ptolemy’s shoes. “That’s a lotta money you got there.”

They brought the groceries home to the apartment crowded with everything Ptolemy and his wives and his family and theirs had acquired over more than just one lifetime. Hilly put the food onto shelves and into the ancient refrigerator while Ptolemy counted his change again and again, wondering if somehow Shirley Wring had tricked him.

He thought about his trunk and Sensia, the emerald ring and Reggie—where was Reggie?

“Your money’s fine, Uncle,” Hilly said. “Now we got to get to Mama’s house.”

“Where?”

“Mama need you to come see her,” Hilly said, his brutal face ill-fitting the request.

“What for?”

“She di’n’t say. She just said to tell Papa Grey that Niecie need him to come.”

“Niecie?” All the floating detritus in the old man’s mind sank to the bottom then. The ring and Shirley Wring, the money and Melinda Hogarth, even the fire that killed Maude and the stroke that took Sensia disappeared from his mind.

Niecie. He was only thirty-six when Niecie was born but she was still the daughter of his niece. That’s why he called her Niecie, though her mother had named her Hilda. He was her granduncle and her godfather and she was the coppery color of a year-old Indian head penny. Her mother was sitting in the big chair with Niecie on her lap and Charles, June’s husband, was standing behind her. He stood just like that, like he was posing for a photograph. But that’s the way Charles was: pretty as a picture, and stuffy as a double-starched shirt collar.

“My Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.

“My mama,” Hilly said, nodding.

“Is she in trouble?”

“She need to see you,” the boy said as he put the nonperishable food in the doorless cabinet. “You got cans on these shelves older than me.”

“What fo’?”

“Why you got them cans?”

“Why Niecie wanna see me?”

“She di’n’t say, Papa Grey,” Hilly whined. “She jes’ told me to help you shop and then to bring you ovah. She said to tell you that your Niecie needed to see you.”

“Niecie.”

The number 87b bus moved slowly in afternoon traffic. Ptolemy sat on a turquoise-colored plastic seat facing across the small aisle, while Hilly hovered above him, holding on to the shiny chrome pole.

A middle-aged Chinese woman and a dark Spanish man sat across the way. Both of them smiled at Ptolemy. People were always smiling at him now that he was so old. Even people who looked old to him smiled because, he knew, he looked even older to them.

He could feel the city move by at his back, could imagine the old Timor Cinema and Thrifty’s Drugstore. He thought about jitterbuggers in the juke joints and a small white wooden church that stood on the white side of town.

Sometimes when he’d go by there, on an errand for his mother or a mission for Coydog, he’d stop and gape at the beautiful building with the stained-glass windows of Jesus, John the Baptist, Job, Jonah, and Mary Magdalene. Magdalene was a beautiful name.

One day when he was no more than seven he was standing out in front of that church with a note in his hand. He couldn’t remember on the number 87b bus who that note was for or from but he could feel the dirt under his bare feet and the hot sun on his forehead.

“What you want there, boy?” a man asked in a commanding voice.

Ptolemy was gazing down on the dark Spanish man’s brown leather shoes in the bus but when he looked up he saw that white man standing in front of the white people’s church.

“Lookin’,” he said in a small piping voice.

“Is that note for me?” the man asked.

Li’l Pea thought the word no, but all he did was shake his head.

The white man wore a white suit with a black shirt that sported a small square of stiff white cloth where his Adam’s apple would have shown. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama straw hat and glasses with gold wire frames.

“Speak up, boy,” he said.

“No, suh. This note is from my uncle Coy to his brother Lupo work for the Littletons down on Poinsettia Street,” Ptolemy said, remembering as he did the origins of the note.

“Then why you standin’ in front’a my church?”

The sun was above and behind the church spire so whenever the man in the preacher’s uniform moved his head, bright sabers of light lanced into Ptolemy’s eyes.

“It’s so pretty,” the man, Ptolemy, remembered saying.

The minister paused a moment, his stern visage softened a bit.

“You like this church?” he asked.

“Yes, suh.”

“Did you evah look inside?”

“No, suh. I jes’ seen the whitewashed walls an’ the windahs and the pretty grass lawn.”

The minister squinted as people did sometimes when they were trying to make out words that didn’t make sense to them. Li’l Pea often wondered how narrowing your eyes could make your hearing better.

“You know that you can never, or none of your people can ever, go into this church,” the man said.

“Yes, suh, I know.”

“Is that why you lookin’ at it so hard?”

“No. It’s jes’ when I walk by it, it look so pretty like Letta across the way from Uncle Coy’s windah. You have to look when somethin’s pretty.”

The white man turned his back on the boy and looked at his church. He maintained that position for a few moments, allowing Li’l Pea to admire the building a while longer.

When the white man turned around, his face was completely changed, as if he were a different man inside. He held out a hand to the boy. The child didn’t know what to do, but he was drawn to the gesture. He grabbed the minister’s manicured fingers with his dirty hand and gave them a good shaking.

“Thank you, boy,” the minister said. “You’ve shown me my own life in a new light. It’s like, it’s like I thought it was day but really there was much more to be seen.”

The white man walked away after that.

Ptolemy had often wondered, in the eighty-four years that had passed since that day, what the minister had meant.

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said in a bus a million miles away, “this our stop.”

They walked down a long street of sad houses and apartment buildings. There were few lawns or gardens, mostly weeds and broken concrete. Some of the houses had no paint left on their weathered wood walls; one or two seemed crooked because they were falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot.

Ptolemy thought all these things but he couldn’t remember how to say them.

“Terrible.”

“What, Papa Grey?”

“Terrible.”

“What? You hurt?”

“My knees hurt when I walk.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But it’s not terrible,” Ptolemy said.

“Then what?”

The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and nothing else.

“Her.”

Two blocks away they came to a small house that was once painted bright blue and yellow, Ptolemy remembered, but now the colors were dim and dingy. There were cars parked in the driveway and at the curb at the house across the street. Men and women in their Sunday best were standing on the brown grass and up beyond the cars.

“What’s today?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.

“The fifteenth,” the young man replied.

Four rose bushes had died under the front window. A fifth rose was still alive. It had nine or eleven bright green thorny leaves and a bud that might one day blossom. Ptolemy noticed a spigot behind the struggling plant and realized that it was a leak that made it possible for that rose to survive.

Hilly held Ptolemy’s elbow as they went up the wooden stairs that had worn down into grooves from the heavy foot traffic over the years. As they approached the screen door, Ptolemy could see that there was a party going on. Dozens of people were crowded into the living room, talking and smoking, drinking and posing in their nice clothes.

Hilly reached for the screen door but it flew inward before he touched it.

“Pitypapa!” a woman yelled. “Pitypapa, I ain’t seen you in six and a half years.”

Big, copper-brown, and buxom Hilda “Niecie” Brown folded the frail old man in a powerful yet cushioned embrace. For a brief span that extended into itself Ptolemy was lifted out of his pained elderly confusion. He floated off into the sensation of a woman holding him and humming with satisfaction.

She kissed his forehead and then his lips. When she let him go he held on to her arm.

“Oh, ain’t that sweet?” Niecie said. “You miss me, Pitypapa?”

Ptolemy looked up at her face. Her skin was smooth and tight from fat. Her mouth was smiling, showing two golden teeth, but in spite of the brave front Niecie’s eyes were so sad that he felt her agony. He raised his hands through the pain of his shoulders and placed them on the sides of Niecie’s arms.

“Niecie,” he said. “Niecie.”

“Come on in, Pitypapa. Come on in and sit with me.”

The crowded room smelled of food, cigarettes, and booze. Four children were playing on a green couch but Niecie shooed them away.

“Sit with me, Papa,” she said. “Tell me how you been doin’.”

Ptolemy sat looking around the room, remembering the house. He had come here for Niecie’s wedding and later, when her mother, June, had died. June was his oldest sister’s child, he remembered. She died of pneumonia, the doctor said, but anyone could have told you that she really died because she went wild with drink and dance after Charles had died.

“You remember my house?” Niecie asked.

“I only remembah it bein’ old,” he said. “I was already old when you got married. There ain’t nuthin’ here young or childish.”

Even Niecie’s smile was sad now.

A short girl came up to stand next to Niecie. She was dark-skinned; not as dark as Ptolemy but almost.

“You remember Robyn?” Niecie asked. “But maybe not. Maybe she came here to live wit’ me since the last time I seen you. Her mother died an’ me an’ Hilly took her in.”

Robyn was no more than eighteen and she was beautiful to Ptolemy. Her almond-shaped eyes looked right into his, not making him feel old or like he wasn’t there. And there was something else about her: she didn’t remind him of anyone he had ever met before. Usually, almost always, people looked to him like someone he’d already met along the way. That was why he found it so hard to remember who someone was. Faces usually made him want to remember something that was lost. He felt sometimes that he had met everyone, tasted every food, seen every sky there was to be seen.

“I seen it all,” old Coydog used to say, “but that don’t mean I seen everything.”

Ptolemy understood now because Robyn was someone, something, new to him.

“Hi,” she said with perfect lips that smiled briefly, showing off her strong white teeth.

“You grinnin’, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “All the men here be grinnin’ after Robyn.”

“I have never seen anything like you, girl,” Ptolemy said.

Robyn put out a hand and he took it, staring at her.

He was suddenly aware that somewhere a woman was crying. The faraway, muted sobs were pitiful. For some reason this made Ptolemy remember.

“Where’s Reggie?” he asked Robyn.

With her eyes she indicated someplace behind Ptolemy. He tried to turn his head but his old joints wouldn’t cooperate.

“Why don’t you go with him, Robyn?” Niecie said.

Ptolemy was still holding her hand. She pulled gently and he got up with a minimum of pain in his knees. Robyn was just about his height. He grabbed on to her elbow and she guided him through the mob of guests in the living room. They went into a narrow hallway that made the house seem larger because it was so long.

They passed a room from which came the sad sobbing. He removed his grip from Robyn’s arm. Gently she took the hand in hers.

“Why she’s cryin’?” Ptolemy asked.

“She been like that for hours,” the girl answered.

They came to a brown door that was closed. Robyn opened the door and stood aside for Ptolemy to pass through.

It was a very small chamber, only big enough for the single bed and an open coffin. The pine box fit Reggie’s hefty proportions perfectly. The tall young brown man’s waxy hands were crossed over his chest. His face was calm but the smile that the mortician had placed there was not any expression that Reggie had in life.

Ptolemy turned to Robyn with his mouth open—screaming silently. He forgot how to breathe or even how to stand. Falling forward into the child’s arms, the old man cried, “No.”

“Didn’t Hilly tell you?” Robyn asked.

Ptolemy heard the question but didn’t remember. Maybe the boy had said something. Maybe he wasn’t listening when he did. Maybe if he had listened Reggie wouldn’t be dead.

Ptolemy pushed against Robyn’s shoulders and turned to see the boy. Big oily tears came down his face. He leaned over the low-standing coffin, putting his hands against Reggie’s chest, tears falling upon his own knuckles and Reggie’s. The young man’s chest felt like the hard mattress that Coydog slept on in his room at the back of Jack’s Barber Shop, where he lived after they kicked him out of his apartment for not paying the rent.

Reggie had a long face with a small scar at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were closed. His black suit was new.

“I don’t know why I gotta buy him a new suit t’get buried in,” Ptolemy’s father, Titus Grey, complained when his wife, Aurelia, had demanded they get good clothes to bury Titus’s father in. “He never even came by once when I was growin’ up. Not so much as one hello to his son and now you want me to spend a month’s wages on a new suit he only gonna wear once.”

“It’s not for him,” Aurelia had said. “Look here.”

She touched Titus with one hand and with the other she gestured at Li’l Pea. Ptolemy thought that he was maybe five at that time.

“You see your son?” Aurelia asked.

Titus looked but did not speak.

“When you pass, how do you want him to remember you?” she asked her husband. “He watch you day and night. He practice talkin’ like you an’ walkin’ like you. So what you gonna show him to do when he have to lay you an’ me to rest?”

That night he was lying in his bed with his eyes open, thinking about his grandfather lying on the undertaker’s table. From the darkness came candlelight and the heavy steps of his father. The huge sharecropper sat on the boy’s cot and placed his hand upon Ptolemy’s chest.

“I love you, boy,” he’d said.

There was a whole conversation after that but Ptolemy couldn’t remember it. There was something about his grandfather’s death, about men who love their sons . . .

Ptolemy didn’t remember sitting down on the bed across from Reggie’s coffin, but there he was. Robyn was seated next to him, holding his hands. Maybe he had told her the story of his grandfather’s death or maybe he was just thinking about it. They had been talking; he was pretty sure about that.

He noticed that the yellow wallpaper had slanted red lines that were going opposite ways, almost meeting each other to form unconnected capital T’s. Seeing this, recognizing the pattern, made him smile.

“When did your father die?” Robyn asked.

“A long time ago,” he said. “I seen a lotta people die. Dead in bed, and lynched, but the worst of all is when some stranger come to the do’ an’ tell ya that your father is dead an’ ain’t nevah comin’ home again.”

“You have big hands, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said. She was squeezing the tight muscle between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand. “Strong.”

The pressure hurt and felt good at the same time.

“He stoled my money,” he said.

“Who did?”

“I had three checks at the place but he only give me the money for one. I give ten dollars to this woman had a green ring and then thirty-two dollars and thirty-seven cent fo’ my groceries. But now all I got in my envelope is a hunnert an’ sixty-sumpin’ dollars and a few pennies. That adds up to two eleven, but I had three checks for that much. I know ’cause I save ’em up so Reggie only have to go to the bank with me once ev’ry three weeks. We put one check in a account for my bills to be paid and we spend one on groceries.”

“Reggie stoled your money?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah . . . I mean no. Reggie wouldn’t steal. It’s that big boy, that, that, that ...”

“Hilly?”

“There, you got it.”

So much talking and thinking exhausted Ptolemy. Then remembering that Reggie was dead and that they’d never go to the bank again made him sad.

Robyn squeezed his hand and tilted her head to the side so that he’d have to notice her.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Grey,” she said. “It’s all gonna be all right.”

“How?”

“Reggie gonna go to heaven an’ Hilly gonna go to hell.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I am,” Robyn said, her young features set with grim certainty.

Such serious intentions on a child’s face made Ptolemy smile. His smile infected her and soon they were giggling together, holding hands, sitting next to Reggie’s corpse.

After a while the girl stood up, pulling Ptolemy to his feet. Together they left the dead man and went back down the long hall. When they approached the room where the woman cried, Ptolemy asked, “Is that the girlfriend?”

“They been married for three years.”

“His wife?” Ptolemy remembered that Reggie was gone for four days once because of his wedding. Then he’d gotten a job at a supermarket and would bring him strawberry jam and old-fashioned crunchy peanut butter almost every week.

Robyn nodded. “And their children. She sat down in Niecie’s room on the way back from seein’ Reggie an’ now she cain’t stop cryin’.”

Ptolemy pushed the door open and walked in.

The room was filled with yellow light. The walls and the floor were dark, dark blue. A high-yellow woman was slumped across the blue sheets of the bed, crying, crying. Lying next to her head was a toddler girl in fetal position and sucking her thumb. Next to the girl sat a five-year-old boy who was turning the pages of a book. Both children were much darker than their mother.

The boy looked up when Ptolemy and then Robyn came in.

“You readin’ that book, boy?” Ptolemy asked slowly as if each word was a heavy weight on his tongue.

The boy nodded.

“What’s it say?”

The child shrugged and looked back at the book.

“His name is Arthur,” Robyn whispered.

The boy looked up and said, “It got pictures of people with no skin an’ pictures of hands and feet and other parts.”

“Aunt Niecie was goin’ to nurse school for a while,” Robyn said. “It’s prob’ly one’a her schoolbooks.”

Arthur nodded solemnly and scratched his nose.

“Nina,” Robyn said then. “Nina, this here is Mr. Grey, the one that Reggie helped out.”

The woman raised her head from folded arms. Ptolemy could see that she was young, in her early twenties, no more. Her face was devastated and beautiful; far more lovely, Ptolemy thought, than Robyn. But he still liked Robyn better. He liked her way around him. She knew how to speak when he needed her.

Nina rose up and put her arms around Ptolemy. Again he felt lost in a soft hug. It was like sinking into a warm tub at the end of a hard day.

“He loved you so much, Mr. Grey,” Nina said. She smelled sweet from perfume. Too sweet.

“What happened to him?” the old man asked, pulling away as he spoke.

When Nina fell back on the bed the toddler whined and Arthur put his hand on her cheek. She embraced her brother’s fingers with her head and shoulder. This gentle show of affection seemed to make the room clearer to Ptolemy. It was as if he was seeing something the way that minister had, in front of his white church so long before.

“They shot him down,” Nina said.

“Who shot him?”

“Drive-by.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody knows,” Robyn said. “Somebody jes’ shot him when he was sittin’ on a porch of a friend’a his.”

“But they say his name was Drivebee.”

“No. The men drove by in their car and jes’ shot him.”

The little girl was crying. Arthur lay down behind her and put his arms around her shoulders.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

“Nobody knows.”

Ptolemy squinted, trying to see with his mind’s eye the reasoning behind Reggie’s murder. He remembered his hidden box and a promise he’d made Coydog before the old man was dragged off and killed like some wild animal. It was something that happened to colored men and boys ever since they left the land of Ptolemy, father of Cleopatra.

There came the sound of heavy feet down the hall.

“Nina?” a man’s voice called from outside the room.

Ptolemy turned just in time to see a man come through the door. It was a freckle-faced, strawberry-brown man with straightened, combed-back hair. He was handsome but had a wild look to him as if there were something or someone right behind him, ready to strike. The man was tall and wore a purple shirt that was open down to the bottom of his chest. He wore a thick gold chain that held a pendant which formed the name Georgie, written in slanted letters.

Reggie’s wife rose from the bed like a creature coming up out of the water. Her movements were fluid, graceful. The idea of dancing came into Ptolemy’s wandering mind.

“Alfred,” she said.

They grabbed each other, kissed on the lips, and then pressed their cheeks and bodies together.

“Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked.

“Who’s this?” Alfred asked, looking at Ptolemy.

“This is ...” Nina began saying but she had forgotten the name.

“Mr. Ptolemy Grey,” Robyn said, snipping her words to their shortest possible length. “Reggie’s great-uncle.”

“Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked again.

“Oh,” Alfred said. “Hey, Mr. Grey. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“If your name is Alfred, how come you got a sign sayin’ Georgie hangin’ from your neck?”

A flash of anger crossed the haunted man’s face.

“He don’t mean nuthin’, Alfred,” Robyn said. “It’s just a question.”

“Georgie was my brother,” Alfred said angrily. “They shot him down.”

“They shoot your brother too?”

“What?” Alfred said, jutting his head toward Ptolemy.

Robyn moved between the men.

“He’s a old man, Alfred,” she said. “He sit all day in his house listenin’ to German music and readin’ old papers.”

“He bettah get some news, then,” Alfred said threateningly.

Nina went to Alfred’s side and took his arm.

“We bettah get outta here, Alfie,” the grieving widow and mother said.

But Alfred was not finished staring at the old man.

Ptolemy thought it was funny that a fool like that would try and intimidate him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid hardly at all.

“Yeah,” Alfred said. “I come to take you and the kids back to your house.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “Come on, babies.”

Arthur and his sister started crying. They didn’t say that they didn’t want to go or even shake their heads. They just cried.

For their daddy, Ptolemy thought.

“Why’ont you let the kids stay here with Big Mama Niecie?” Robyn suggested. “She feed ’em an’ stuff.”

“Do you wanna stay here, Artie? Letisha?”

Arthur nodded and Letisha put her head in her brother’s lap.

“You sure?” Nina asked. “Okay. Mama’s gonna go home and sleep now. She’s tired.”

The baby girl whimpered for her mother but would not leave her brother’s lap. Nina kissed them both on their foreheads and then moved as if she wanted to kiss Robyn. But the younger girl leaned away. Nina played it off, putting her hand on Robyn’s shoulder.

All the while Alfred glared at Ptolemy.

The old man stared back, trying to understand what was happening, what had happened.

Nina turned away from her children and left under the protective arm of the handsome Alfred. Nina glanced back at her children as she went through and past the doorframe. Ptolemy listened to their shoes on the hardwood floor of the hallway.

“Where they goin’?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Robyn said. “You hungry, Arthur?”

“Tisha is.”

“What she want?” Robyn asked with a smile.

“Cake.”

“Did you have some dinner?”

“No, but we want some cake.”

“Okay,” Robyn said, “but jes’ this one time now.”

“Okay.”

“You wait here with your sister and I’ll get Big Mama Niecie to bring you some’a the cake Auntie Andrews brought us.”

She held out her hand and Ptolemy took it. They walked down the hall, back into the crowded room where people had come to mourn and laugh, give their condolences and eat and drink. Ptolemy’s skin hurt as he passed through the confused and confusing mob.

When Robyn told Niecie that Nina had left with Alfred Gulla, the older woman sucked her tooth.

“The kids said they want some cake,” Robyn added.

“I get it. Poor angels. Did you get somethin’ to eat, Pitypapa?”

“I have to go to the toilet,” he said.

“I’ll show you. After that you want me t’get Hilly to take you home?”

“I’ll take him,” Robyn said. “I gotta get outta here anyway.”

Niecie kissed the girl and smiled.

“You are a blessing, child.”

They walked down the street together, hand in hand. The sun was hot and Ptolemy had so many thoughts in his head that he couldn’t say very much. But Robyn, once she was out of the house, talked and talked. Ptolemy heard some of what she’d said. She’d come from down south somewhere when her mother died. Robyn’s mother and Niecie were good friends and so Niecie offered to take the orphan in. They weren’t related by law but Niecie felt like they were blood and let her sleep on the couch in the living room.

“Who’s Alfred?” Ptolemy asked after a long spate of listening to the calming words of the child.

“He’s Nina’s boyfriend.”

“But I thought she was Reggie’s . . . I mean, I mean . . . his wife.”

“He did too. But Nina kep’ on seein’ Alfred from back when she went out with him years ago. I think he went to jail or sumpin’ an’ Nina met Reggie an’ got pregnant with Artie an’ so she stayed with Reggie, but when Alfred got outta jail she was still seein’ him too.”

They came to a sidewalk where three blue-and-red taxis were parked.

“Can you tell the driver how to get to your house, Mr. Grey?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I think I remembah.”

They held hands in the back of the cab.

“How old are you, Mr. Grey?”

“Ninety-one year old. Some people don’t think I can keep count, but I’m ninety-one.”

“You don’t look that old. Your skin is so smooth and you stand up straight. It’s like you’re old but just normal old, not no ninety-one.”

She walked Ptolemy to his apartment door and watched him use the key on the topmost of four locks.

“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”

When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.

The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.

Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”

A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.

“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”

Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.

His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana. There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.

“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.

“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”

“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”

“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”

“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”

Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”

Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.

Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.

The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.

“I’m losing money on this place and that’s not why I own it,” he shouted at Reggie one day.

“Get the fuck outta here, man,” Reggie had said, and the white landlord, Mr. Pierpont, got the cops.

The police threatened Reggie, but then Pierpont tried to make them get rid of Ptolemy too.

“You’re trying to evict this old man?” one of the cops had asked.

“I’m losing money on this place,” Pierpont said, as if Ptolemy had stabbed him.

“If I was this young man I would have done more than threaten you,” the cop said. The police left, and potbellied Joseph Pierpont never came back, or answered any calls.

Now the doorbell no longer worked and people had to knock. And when they’d knock, Ptolemy would get up and go to the front and ask, “Who is it?”

But not this time. This time he stayed in his seat, listening to the newsman’s gibberish and music that scratched at his ears.

The knock came again and Ptolemy remembered why he stayed in his chair. That big boy Hilly had been there and knocked and said that he wanted to come in. He’d come three days in a row and each day Ptolemy told him that he didn’t need him and that he would call if he did.

“But you don’t know my numbah, Papa Grey,” Hilly said through the door. “You haven’t called up in years.”

“I know how to phone for a operator. All you have to do is dial oh. I call her if I wanna talk to you.”

“Mama told me to come help you,” Hilly, the thief, beseeched. “She be mad at me if I don’t.”

“I don’t need no help.”

“How can you go to the sto’?”

“I walk there.”

“What about the bank?”

“You stoled my money, boy. You stoled it at the bank.”

“I didn’t.”

“I don’t need yo’ kinda help,” Ptolemy said, and after three days he no longer even asked who it was. He just stared at whoever was giving the news and waited for the caller to go away and for the words to make sense again.

The first time someone knocked on the door after Reggie’s wake it wasn’t Hilly.

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Grey?” a man’s voice said.

“You Mr. Grey too?” Ptolemy asked.

“No,” the man said patiently, “you’re Mr. Grey. Open the door, please.”

Ptolemy almost obeyed; the voice was that certain.

“Who are you?”

“Antoine Church, Mr. Grey. Your nephew, Reginald, applied to the social services office for a doctor for you a while ago. Is Reginald around?”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Is someone else taking care of you?”

“I don’t need no one to take care’a me. Reggie’s dead and now there’s just me.”

The radio was playing a march and someone on the TV was laughing. Ptolemy pressed his ear against the door.

“I’ve found a doctor who wants to see you, Mr. Grey,” Antoine Church said. “He’s a memory specialist, and he has a grant, so his services are free.”

“I’m not sick. I don’t need no doctor.”

“Let me in, Mr. Grey,” the voice said. “Let me in and we can sit down and talk about it.”

“I don’t wanna talk. Go away and leave me alone.”

There came a spate of silence filled in by electronic babble.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Go on now.”

“I’m putting my card under the door. If Reginald or someone else comes by to help you—”

“Reggie’s dead. Drivebee killed him. Now, you go away.”

Again Ptolemy pressed his ear against the door. There came a soft rustling and then a sigh. After that he heard footsteps going away down the hall.

On the floor at the old man’s feet was a bright white card. Using the wall for support, he leaned down and picked it up. Putting Antoine Church’s business card in his pocket was reflex more than anything else.

Hilly kept coming by but after three days Ptolemy never opened up or even asked who it was. Sooner or later they all went away.

The knock came again.

He concentrated on the TV to keep the person on the other side of the door out of his mind.

“. . . the convicted killer was found innocent. The DNA test did not match the blood found at the crime scene,” the woman was saying.

“Mr. Grey,” a girl called.

Ptolemy leaned forward suspiciously, wondering if somehow the TV had learned how to talk to him.

“Mr. Grey, it’s me, Robyn.”

Robins. They gathered in the trees outside his parents’ house in September and October and sang a sweet song to the cool winds that eased the last heat of summer. If Ptolemy sat still enough with week-old breadcrumbs scattered on the ground, the robins and other birds would gather around him in the grass next to the cypress tree.

“That food gonna attract rats,” his father would say, but Li’l Pea didn’t believe him.

The knock came again.

“Mr. Grey, are you all right in there?”

That was the right question. Hilly had never asked how he was. Hilly was a thief and even though he had saved him from Melinda Hogarth he still stole his money and then lied about it.

Ptolemy used to give Reggie money. Reggie wanted to help him. But then Reggie got lynched.

“Mr. Grey, if you don’t talk to me I’ll have to go call the police. I’m afraid that you might be hurt in there.”

Ptolemy opened his mouth to tell the girl that he was okay but he hadn’t spoken in days and his voice was gone. He got up and coughed, took a step, coughed again.

“I’m here,” he rasped.

“What?”

“I’m here.”

“It’s me, Robyn, Mr. Grey. Can I come in?”

“Who?” he wheezed.

“Robyn. You remembah, I took you in to see Reggie’s coffin. Then we took a taxi here.”

The image of Reggie’s body came up out of the floor at Ptolemy’s feet. He gasped and sobbed, remembering the death of his beloved son or nephew or great-grandnephew, yes, great-grandnephew.

He took the chain off its hook and flipped the four locks Reggie had installed. He opened the door and Robyn stood there in a little black dress with an ivory locket hanging from her neck. Her hair was tied back and her eyes saw things that he wanted to see.

“Hi,” she said.

Ptolemy smiled because this was the girl that didn’t look like anybody else he ever knew.

“Robyn,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

He nodded, not moving.

The child swiveled her head and moved toward him; then, just as she came close, she kissed him on the cheek. He moved backward, grinning and touching the place she had kissed.

When Robyn moved around him Ptolemy turned with her, feeling as if he were dancing with Sensia at the big band shell at Pismo Beach.

“Dog!” Robyn said as she came into the congested room. “Where do you sleep, Mr. Grey?”

He pointed at the oak table against the southern wall of the room. It was piled almost to the ceiling with brown boxes.

“In them boxes?”

“No. Under.”

She stooped down, putting her hands on her bare knees and turned her head to see the thin mattress and sheer olive blanket.

“You sleep on the floor under a table?”

He nodded, suddenly shy and ashamed.

“What about rats and roaches?” she asked.

Smiling, he was reminded of red-breasted robins singing brightly, thanking him for their breadcrumbs.

“You wanna sit down, girl?”

“Where?” she asked, her left nostril rising.

“There’s chairs everywhere,” he said. “But I gotta special one for guests that I keep in the kitchen.”

He walked there feeling but not minding the pain in his knees. He’d found the aluminum garden chair set out in front of a house with six cars parked on the lawn.

“They got so many cars, they don’t have room for no outside furniture,” he said to himself as he dragged away the lightweight chair with the threaded seat of sea-green and aqua nylon ribbons.

“You use patio furniture?” Robyn asked when he returned dragging the chair behind him.

“I got them oak chairs over there,” he said, “but they too heavy now, an’ there’s all that stuff stacked on ’em. This here’s a lawn chair, but it’s comfortable, though.”

After the lovely young girl was seated, Ptolemy got his folding wood stool from under the east table. Reggie had brought it for him. It was composed of light pinewood legs held together by rainbow-colored cotton fabric. Ptolemy opened the stool and sat down in front of the black-clad black girl.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen.”

“You should be in school, then.”

“I dropped out when I was fifteen but then I went to night school and got my GED. Now I’m gonna start goin’ to community college in the fall,” she said, adding, “An’ I’m almost eighteen, anyway.”

They were quiet for a while, looking at each other. She cast her eyes about the room while he wondered where someone like her might come from.

In the background a man was talking about Palestinians. This brought the image of Egypt into Ptolemy’s mind. Egypt—where his name came from.

“He had what they say is a Egyptian name,” Coydog had said, “but Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s father, was a Greek—mostly.”

“Is that music German?” Robyn asked.

“It’s from Europe,” he said. “Classical.”

“Oh.”

“How come you here, um, um, Robyn?”

“I came to see you.”

“Why the most beautiful girl at the whole party gonna come to a old man’s house smell like he ain’t clean it in ten, no, no, twenty-three years.”

Robyn sat forward on the lawn chair and took hold of one of Ptolemy’s big fingers. She didn’t say anything.

Ptolemy noticed that her skin was actually as dark as his but it had a younger tone. He wanted to say this but the words fishtailed away, eluding his tongue.

“Niecie wanted me to come and make sure you was okay, Papa Grey.”

He took a deep breath into his large nostrils and smiled.

“What is that smell?” Robyn asked him.

“I don’t know. There’s parts’a the house I cain’t get inta anymore. The bathroom, half the kitchen. I ain’t been deep in the bedroom since before what’s-his-name, uh, Reggie, would come.”

“You got a bedroom an’ you sleepin’ under a table?”

Ptolemy pulled his hand away from hers and tried to get up but couldn’t on the first try. Robyn grabbed the corroded metal handles of her chair and moved next to him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just surprised, that’s all.” She took his hand again. “Niecie axed me to come here an’ be wit’ you.”

“Niecie?” Ptolemy said, remembering as if for the first time in a long time the existence of his grandniece.

“Uh-huh. Because Hilly told her that you wouldn’t let him in an’ he wanted her to come here an’ talk to you. But she’s takin’ care of Arthur an’ Letisha an’ the funeral an’ all. She aksed him why you wouldn’t let him in.” Robyn squeezed Ptolemy’s hand. “I knew why but I didn’t tell her ’bout Hilly takin’ your money ’cause Hilly live in that house too an’ he’s a thug. So I said I’d come ovah an’ see about you an’ she said okay.”

“Niecie send you?”

“Uh-huh.”

Robyn’s face was only inches from Ptolemy’s. Her eyes were asking for something, pleading with him. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how to ask her what she wanted. But he knew that he would have done anything for that child. She was his child, his baby girl. She needed his protection.

“Niecie send you here to me?”

“Yes, Mr. Grey. Hilly said that you get these retirement checks an’ that you would let me an’ him cash ’em but I told him that I was not gonna steal from you.”

“And then Niecie send you?”

“Yeah.” Robyn sat back in her chair still holding his fingers.

“President Bush today said that America was a safer place than it was five years ago, when terrorists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Towers,” a female news anchor said in between the silence of the new friends. “Democratic leaders in Congress disagreed . . .”

Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said when Robyn opened the door to the bathroom.

“I got to, Mr. Grey,” she said. “If I’ma be comin’ here an’ lookin’ aftah you I got to have a toilet to go to.”

While Ptolemy tried to think of some other way he could have Robyn’s company and keep her out of the bathroom, she opened the door and went in.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What is this?”

A large wad of blackened towels flew out from the doorway and landed with a thump on the small bare area of the crowded floor.

Ptolemy covered his face with his hands.

“You got suitcases in the bathtub,” Robyn called out. “An’ there’s black stuff growin’ in the commode. There’s, oh my God, oh no ...”

Ptolemy went to sit next to his big cabinet radio so that the woman singing opera would drown out the sounds and complaints coming from the girl.

As the singer professed what sounded like love in her sweet, high voice, Ptolemy allowed himself to drift. He was adrift in a boat in a city in Italy where all the streets were rivers. Coydog had told him about that town.

“Men stands at the back’a long boats with long sticks they push to the bottom to move ’em down the way,” the old liar told him.

“You been there, Coydog?” the boy asked. Ptolemy remembered then, so many years later, listening to opera and ignoring Robyn, that he never called Coy Mr. McCann, which was his name. It was just mostly boy for Li’l Pea and Coydog for Coy.

“I been there in my mind,” Coy McCann told the boy.

“How you do that?”

“Read,” he said, stretching out the vowel sound like the singer did with her notes.

“How you learn that?”

“A, B, C,” Coy said, wagging his forefinger like the white conductor did on odd Thursdays in the summer when the white people’s marching band stopped in front of the town hall and performed old southern favorites.

That was the beginning of Li’l Pea’s informal education. From A to L were accomplished that very afternoon.

After he could say all the letters, Coydog stole some paper from the country store and showed his student how to make the sounds with pencil lines.

“Ain’t it wrong to be stealin’ that paper from the white man’s sto’?” Li’l Pea asked his aged friend.

“Wrong?” the wiry little man exclaimed. “Hell, it ain’t wrong, it’s a sin.”

“But if you do a sin, ain’t you goin’ to hell?”

“That all depends, boy.” Coy’s long dark face cracked open at his mouth, showing his strong, stained teeth. “The Catholics profess that all you got to do is say you’re sorry and the Lord will forgive. Other peoples say that Saint Peter’s got a scale where they put all the bad you done on one side and all the good on t’other. An’ if the good outweigh the bad they got a cot for you in heaven.

“So if I steal this here tablet an’ pencils but then I teach you how to read an’ write an’ from there you invent a train that go from here to Venice ...”

The German alto was warbling about love and Ptolemy remembered the name of the city with rivers for streets. He wanted to go to the bathroom and call the girl out to tell her what he’d accomplished but Coydog wouldn’t stop talking.

“. . . well, if I do that, then maybe the good beat out the bad.”

Ptolemy recalled watching his friend study him with a calculating eye.

“But you know, boy,” Coy said, “I don’t believe any’a that.”

“What do you believe?” the boy asked, the ABC’s whirling around his head.

“I think that there’s a long line up there in heaven an’ yo’ place in that line is predicted by what you done wrong. The worser thing you did puts you that much further to the back of the line. The people done the lesser is up toward the front.

“Now, the line start in downtown heaven and goes all the way to the barracks of hell because the two places is connected, just like good an’ evil in the same man. So anyway, when you die you get a number that stands for what you did wrong. So if you had two mens, a black one and a white one, and the black man stole the white man’s pig to feed his kids and then the white man shot the black man’s son because he couldn’t find the thief . . . well, the white man gonna get a much bigger number for murder than the black man will for stealin’. So, forgettin’ any other misdemeanors, the white man will have a hotfoot at his place on line and the black man will hear harp music comin’ from just up the way.”

“But what about the boy?” Li’l Pea asked.

“What boy?”

“The one that the white man killed.”

“Him?” Coydog said with a pained grimace. “They ain’t no special numbahs for the victims. Just ’cause they grabbed you and chained you, just ’cause they beat you an’ raped your sister don’t mean a thing when it come to that line. God don’t care what they did to you. What he care about is what you did.”

Ptolemy was Li’l Pea looking up at the man who had just opened the alphabet for him, the man who stole for him, sacrificing himself to the judgment of the great beyond.

“Mr. Grey?”

The newscaster was talking about a criminal in a cornfield somewhere, a woman was singing sweetly, and his name came in between the two.

“Mr. Grey.”

Looking up from his place on the floor in Coy’s room, no, in his own apartment, looking up, he saw Robyn, her short skirt hiked up even higher, her hands holding unidentifiable gelatinous masses of blackened rot.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Are you lookin’ at my legs, Mr. Grey?” she asked with surprise but no anger in her tone.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think I’m pretty?”

“I think pretty is your ugly little sister,” he said, repeating a compliment that he’d heard Coydog use a thousand times.

It worked on Robyn just like it had on all the young women that Coy had courted.

“That’s sweet. You a playah, huh, Mr. Grey?”

“What’s that in your hands?” he asked.

“It come out from under the sink an’ in the bathtub. It’s a mess. How do you go to the bathroom at all in there? The toilet don’t even flush.”

“For number one I use a coffee can and I . . .” He hesitated. “I pour it down the sink.”

“An’ what about numbah two?” Robyn asked, neither ashamed nor disgusted as far as the old man could tell.

“I usually wait for Reggie to come by. He usually take me to Frank’s Coffee Shop for breakfast or lunch an’ aftah I get my coffee I go.”

“So you ain’t been to a toilet since you was at the wake?” she asked.

“I guess not.”

The girl was staring at the old man while he inspected the floor.

“You really let this place fall apart,” Robyn said.

“I’m sorry ’bout that. It was just that when Sensie passed I stopped doin’ things, movin’ things around, makin’ ’em bettah.”

“Do the sink work in the kitchen?” Robyn asked.

“Uh-huh. There’s stuff all around it, but it works.”

He was having trouble leaving Coydog’s lectures behind him so that he could give the girl and her lovely strong legs the proper attention. He wanted to get up on his feet but there wasn’t enough strength in his arms to lift him.

While Ptolemy thought about standing up, Robyn went into the kitchen. He began listening to the singing again but there came a loud crash and the old man found the strength to push himself up and grab on to the ledge at the top of his console radio.

He went through the kitchen door and found the girl throwing piles of pots down from the sink onto the floor. Hundreds of roaches of all sizes and breeds were scuttling madly from the wild woman’s attacks. The black gunk from her hands was coming off on the pots and pans and and even the dishes that she was putting on the floor.

“Stop,” Ptolemy said, but Robyn didn’t even slow down.

“I can’t, Mr. Grey. I gotta wash my hands and clean this house and get rid’a all these roaches an’ shit.”

“But you the one messin’ it all up.”

“It’s already a mess, Mr. Grey. It’s already messed up,” Robyn said. “Look at all the junk just piled up and moldin’. Look at all these bugs.”

“They only out ’cause you th’owin’ everything around,” the old man argued.

By this time the sink was clear enough that Robyn could turn on the water and wash her hands.

“Oh no,” Ptolemy said, feeling as if maybe the walls would fall down or a fire would erupt from the stove. “This is bad.”

Turning to him, smiling, her hands dripping because there was no dry towel, Robyn said, “We have to clean up this place, Mr. Grey. You can’t live like this with a house full’a garbage and bugs.”

“But it’s too much. Too much stuff. We should just leave it and go to the store. I don’t have to cook.”

Robyn whipped her hands back and forth through the air to get off the excess water and then came to Ptolemy and put her arms around him. She hugged him to her chest and put her cold hand on the top of his bald head.

“Shhh,” she whispered.

He realized then that he was crying.

“It’s all right, baby,” Robyn said. “I can clean up all’a this mess in a week or two. I could have your whole house set up for you. Don’t you want your house clean and neat? Don’t you want a nice bathroom and a bed to sleep in?”

“No.”

Robyn moved back a few inches, still holding on with her face there close to his.

“Why not?”

“My things,” he whined.

“But most of this stuff is just old junk an’ trash.”

Ptolemy lifted up his hands, resting them on the girl’s chest beseechingly.

“In between the garbage and the trash is all the things I have. Keys and lockets, pictures and money . . . treasure. One time Reggie tried to clean up but he just took a armful’a stuff an’ th’owed in the thrash. There coulda been anything in the middle’a that.”

“I won’t do that,” Robyn said with the solemnity of a much older woman. “We will go through every newspaper and rag, lookin’ for all your li’l trinkets. Okay? I won’t th’ow away nuthin’ before we go through it.”

Ptolemy realized where his hands were and pulled them back to his own chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Grey. I know you don’t mean no harm.”

“Really?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “You a sweet old man. There used to be a man like you lived next do’ to me and my mama before my mama died. He used to give me peaches in the season. He said that I was a smart little girl and I needed peaches to make me smarter. It didn’t mean nuthin’ but it was nice.

“You still got that money Hilly got you, Mr. Grey?”

He nodded and smiled, feeling gratitude for no reason he could have explained.

“Well then, get your wallet and show me where the sto’ is. We gonna get you some soap and steel wool and a mop an’ broom. We gonna get a big box of trash bags an’ shake out ev’ry newspaper, rag, and old shirt until we done emptied out the whole bathroom.”

On the walk to the market Ptolemy swiveled his head from side to side again and again.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Grey?” Robyn asked him. “You lookin’ for somebody?”

“Melinda Hogarth.”

“Who’s that? Your girlfriend?”

“She the one gonna rob me if she sees me.”

“Rob you? You mean you think she gonna try an’ take yo’ money?”

Ptolemy nodded, feeling disgraced by what felt like a lifetime of weakness and fear.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said. “I got me a six-inch knife in my purse and I know to use it. My mama told me that I always had to have a li’l sumpin’ extra ’cause I’m short and a girl. You know I stick a mothahfuckah in a minute they try and mess with either one’a us.”

It was her grimness that gave Ptolemy confidence. He glanced up at the sky, thinking, This is everybody’s ceiling. This blue roof belongs to me just as much as anyone else. They were words he’d heard along the way somewhere. He remembered them, and they held him like an anchor, like that young girl, that Robyn, held his hand.

They didn’t see Melinda Hogarth that day. Robyn spent seventy-three dollars of Ptolemy’s retirement check on cleaning supplies. They stopped by a McDonald’s hamburger place and had french fries and chicken salads. After two cups of black coffee Ptolemy spent half an hour in the restaurant’s men’s room.

All afternoon Robyn cleared out, scrubbed, and rinsed off Ptolemy’s bathroom. She brought out every rag, box, towel, and doodad, showing it to her guardian’s great-uncle before throwing it almost all away in big black garbage bags. There were stains on her little black dress, and her hair was getting wild. But she laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy reporting to Ptolemy.

“Do you want this old toothbrush, sir?” she asked with a knowing smile.

He had to study everything she brought to him. At first he didn’t know what it was he was looking at, and then, when he identified the object, he’d get lost trying to remember where it came from.

“That bresh was Sensie’s, I’m pretty sure,” he said. “She got it at the Woolworth’s . . . No. Maybe not. I don’t know where she got it at.”

“But do you want to keep it?” Robyn asked again.

“I guess not. No. You can th’ow it away . . . I guess.”

Hours and hours Robyn cleaned, taking breaks now and then to discuss bits of detritus found in Ptolemy’s bathroom. She filled five thirty-nine-gallon lawn bags with the debris from just that one room. She scrubbed and swept and mopped, and then scrubbed and swept and mopped again.

Once she found an old sepia photograph way down under the sink. It was the picture of a huge brown woman holding the hand of a skinny, frowning little boy.

“Who is this, Mr. Grey?” she asked, coming out to see him.

Ptolemy had set his folding stool right at the door so that he could see everything the teenager was doing.

“Oh, don’t throw that away. No, no.”

He took the crumbling photograph in his hand. It had once been five inches by eight but now the corners and sides had been eaten away by damp rot. The woman’s face was water-stained, as was the bottom half of the boy’s body. He held the picture gently, as if holding a wounded creature.

“That’s my mother,” he whispered, “and her son . . . me.”

“Let me put that away someplace safe so we can take it to the drug sto’ copycat to see if they can make a good print of it,” she said, taking the fragile memory from the man’s thick black fingers.

After a while Ptolemy stopped watching Robyn’s every move. He could see that she knew what was important and that she looked into every corner and fold.

“Come on in, Mr. Grey,” Robyn called in the early evening.

The bathroom was sparkling, neat and clean. The blue tile floor was eroded in places, and there were stains and dings on the blue porcelain sink, but the bathtub was glistening white and the walls were a lovely if faded aqua.

“There’s water damage on the ceiling,” she said, “and I can’t wear no dress the next time I come. And look ...”

Robyn pushed the white ceramic handle on the toilet and the stained commode flushed for the first time in many years.

“You fixed the toilet?” he asked. “You must be like a plumber too.”

“No, I just cleaned it out and turned on the water, that’s all. It worked once it was clean.”

This made sense to Ptolemy. He went to sit on the edge of the tub and ran his fingers over the smooth white porcelain.

“There’s some leaks and stuff, but we can get somebody to fix all that.”

“Landlord won’t fix nuthin’,” Ptolemy said, peering closely enough at the porcelain to see the barest reflection of his dark face in the deep whiteness.

“I gotta go, Mr. Grey. It’s gettin’ late.”

“I never seen nuthin’ like this,” he said. “I don’t even remembah half of what it looked like in here. How did you know?”

“I jes’ cleaned. But I gotta go. Now you can go to the bathroom in your own house. I’ll come back day after tomorrow and we’ll start on your bedroom.”

“Oh no,” Ptolemy said. There was a big black moth fluttering in the center of his heart. “No. Best to leave well enough alone.”

“You need a bed, baby. A place where you can sleep up off the flo’.”

“No.”

“Uh-huh,” she sang. “Day aftah tomorrah I’m’a come back and we gonna tackle the bedroom together. Don’t worry, I won’t th’ow out nuthin’ you don’t want me to.”

“But this is enough, don’t you think?” Ptolemy asked, still running a hand over the cool ceramic rim.

“I got to go, Mr. Grey. Okay?”

“Okay.”

At the open door of the apartment Robyn and Ptolemy stood face-to-face. They both seemed a little confused. Finally she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, after which he put his hands on either side of her face and curled his fingers like clawless paws.

Ptolemy couldn’t speak because he had more than one thing to say. The first was that he didn’t want her to go into the bedroom. He didn’t need a bed. He didn’t want to be in that room, not ever. But he also wanted Robyn to come back and be there with him. Maybe she could clean the bathroom again.

She kissed him a second time and then walked away down the hall. When she got to the front door of the building she turned and waved before going out the door. He stood there for long minutes with the news and medieval recorder music behind him. He watched that closed door with many people on his mind: Robyn, and Coydog, and Reggie, who had been coming to his house for more than five years.

Then Reggie the man was standing next him in the hall but next to them was Reggie the corpse in the whitewashed pine coffin. The children were on the floor. Ptolemy wanted to call to them but couldn’t remember their names.

“Children shouldn’t be in the room wit’ dead peoples, Reggie,” he said into the empty corridor but also, in his mind, he was in the small bedroom of Niecie’s house where the dead man lay.

The front door to the hall came open and a woman the color of dark redwood came in carrying a bundle of envelopes and magazines. She looked familiar.

“Mr. Grey?” she said, walking toward him.

He usually slammed the door and threw the locks when someone came in the building but this time Ptolemy hesitated.

“Miss Dartman?”

Approaching him, the tall colored woman said, “I haven’t seen your face in almost two years, Mr. Grey. Sometimes I be droppin’ the mail in your slot and I think, ‘Maybe he’s dead in there.’”

“Not me. Old Man Death done lost my numbah, I think.”

The phrase was used by Coy McCann when someone hadn’t seen him for a while and assumed that he’d died. Almost all of Ptolemy’s automatic coherent sentences came from his old friend Coydog.

The tall woman smiled and handed Ptolemy a bundle of mail.

“I was outta town seein’ my brother for the last few days so I didn’t get the mail. Maybe I should give you back the key so that nice grandnephew of yours could collect it for you.”

“Reggie got hisself killed.”

“No!” Miss Falona Dartman cried. “How did that happen?”

“They lynched him. A mob drived by and kilt him.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Grey. He was ...” she said, and then sighed. “He was such a nice young man. Oh no. What are they doin’ to our young black men?”

“Killin’ ’em,” Ptolemy said. “What they always done.”

“Who’s gonna come take care of you now, Mr. Grey? You can’t be here all by yourself.”

“My great-granddaughter Robyn come from down Alabama, or someplace, to he’p me out. She cleaned up my bafroom today. Worked all day at it. All day long she cleaned and th’ew away garbage. But I’ma miss Reggie.”

“Was he married?”

Ptolemy nodded. “An’ they had some kids.”

“Oh no.”

Ptolemy placed the mail in a neat stack on Robyn’s lawn chair. Then he went into the bathroom, put the top lid down on the commode, and sat there. Robyn had brought new lightbulbs and screwed them into the seven sockets above the sink. The light was so white in there that it made him laugh. He was happy sitting on the toilet and watching the bathtub.

Now and then a curious roach would dart in and then scurry away again, daunted by the brightness of the room. Four times he went to the sink and turned the corroded spigots, just to see the water run. There was a leak at the base of the hot-water faucet, but the water dripped into the sink, causing no problem.

At midnight he took a shower. The nozzle could only muster a few sprays but it was enough to wash his body clean. He used an old T-shirt for a towel and another one for a bathrobe.

That night when he wrapped himself in the thin blanket under the south table Ptolemy had a feeling of giddiness that kept him up for what seemed to him like hours. He thought about Robyn’s ability to clean and polish and throw out things without hurting him or those things that he needed to keep. She was better than Reggie at understanding what was important.

A flute was playing on the all-night classical program and the newsmen and -women droned on. Ptolemy had trained himself not to listen when he was in his bed, but this night the background racket was a bother to him.

On other nights, before Robyn had come, Ptolemy shared space with the music and news. They were as much a part of the room as he was. His mind was like an open field over which these sounds and opinions passed unhindered. But on that night Ptolemy was thinking about the tragedy of Reggie and the blessing of Robyn. She was an orphan taken in and protected by, by, by Niecie. And the boy and baby girl were orphans too.

The flute scratched at these thoughts. The news commentators seemed to be trying to talk him out of the value of Reggie and Robyn, the boy and his baby sister. In the dimness he cursed the radio and the flittering shadows cast by the TV. Rage opened up in Ptolemy’s breast. The anger took over his mind like a swarm of biting fire ants. And then, when he was angry enough to break something, the passion ebbed away, leaving that old familiar open field.

It reminded him of a portal at the end of a long corridor behind the pulpit of Liberty Baptist Church. When he was a child and the minister’s sermon went overlong, he’d sneak away from the pews and walk down the long hall to that doorway. It was always ajar, emitting a cool breeze year-round, even in the summer heat. There was almost no light in there, but Li’l Pea could see the dim image of a white cross in the depths of the chamber. It was leaning against something dark and massive.

The child called Pity would walk up to the threshold of the sacred room and strain his eyes, trying to glean its tale.

Remembering this important, spiritual moment in his history, Ptolemy Grey drifted off into sleep.

In the dream he was trying to pull Reggie up out of his coffin, to shake his shoulders until the boy woke up. All around the casket were women seated in white folding chairs and dressed beautifully, mournfully, with hats and handkerchiefs and black gloves. Robyn and Niecie, Letta Golding and Shirley Wring and many others whom he knew but could not remember their names—all of them watched him. They hummed as he beseeched the boy to get up and walk and live. Beyond the casket was a window that looked out on a green lawn where the children Arthur and Letisha played. They laughed and chased each other. “Fall down! Fall down,” they sang.

In the morning Ptolemy ate one of the small pop-top cans of tuna that Robyn had brought back with the cleaning supplies. He visited his bathroom for over an hour, trying to think of how he could keep Robyn from going into the bedroom. He closed the bathroom door to keep out the sad viola solo and weather report. Then he sat on the commode, rubbing his hands and looking at the aqua walls.

Sitting there, he experienced what he called eternity. It was whenever he was in one place by himself and didn’t have to go anywhere else or answer to anybody.

“A moment like that,” Coy McCann had said, “like when you fishin’ or after you done made love with your woman and you smokin’ a cigarette while she sleep . . . that’s the kinda time that’s just so wonderful. That’s when you can think because you ain’t hungry or lustful or in it with somebody wanna waste yo’ time. You could be just sittin’ there by yourself and you see what you need to do, the way God do in eternity.”

These words came back to Ptolemy decades after Coydog was murdered and gone.

Ptolemy knew exactly what he had to do.

On the sink in the kitchen was the flimsy little box that held the plastic lawn bags Robyn used to throw out the detritus of Ptolemy’s bathroom.

When Ptolemy picked up the box a huge gutter-roach fell out and onto the sink. The black and brown and russet-red insect flipped from his back onto his legs and stood there on an old plate that Ptolemy hadn’t used or cleaned in over a decade. The old man slapped his hand down hard on the bug, but when he pulled back, the roach leaped in the air, spread his beetle-like wings, and flew toward the back of the kitchen.

Watching the strange bug flapping its way toward the towering boxes on his porch brought about a flutter in Ptolemy’s chest. His breath came quickly and he had to squat down so that he didn’t fall. He could feel the sweat sprouting on his brow and between his fingers. A painful burp brought the strong flavor of tuna up into his throat.

Ptolemy concentrated on the pain in his left knee.

“The great man say that life is pain,” Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. “That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit’ it. Now, if that ain’t the blues, I don’t know what is.”

The ache in Ptolemy’s knee felt deep and bloody. He ignored the quick breath and racing heart. All he knew was the pain and Coydog’s words.

“Why you always hang around that old man?” Titus Grey had asked his son on the porch one morning when the boy was going off to meet Coy to go fishing.

“He teachin’ me my ABC’s.”

“He don’t know no alphabet.”

“Yeah, he do.”

“Are you contradictin’ me, boy?” Titus asked.

“No, sir.”

“Then put down that pole and come on with me up in the woods. This is yam season and you don’t have time to be a fool.”

Hearing these words in his yester-ear, Ptolemy stood up straight. His knee and chest were fine. The huge roach was still flying, bat-ting its head against the small patch of window that was visible above the big boxes on the back porch. Music played and some man was talking about something far away, and Ptolemy went about searching for what he needed under the sink.

After a while he forgot what he was looking for. And so he went back to the living room and stood at the bedroom door, trying to remember what was so clear to him in the bathroom, before his war with the cockroach.

Finally he decided that the only thing to do was open the door to see if there was a clue inside.

The bedroom was dark, as it had been years before when he closed it up in order to forget about his life with Sensia. She was dead and buried but that room had been her memorial. She was put to rest in a whitewashed pine coffin like the one Niecie had for Reggie. Niecie’s mother, Ptolemy remembered, had gotten Sensie’s coffin and put her in the same room where they had Reggie for his wake . . .

There was a gray tarp covering the contents of Ptolemy’s abandoned bedroom. It loomed like a shifting desert under a cloudy, moonless night. Ptolemy stared at the fabric, remembering his true love. Thinking about her, he remembered what it was that he needed.