The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

He went back into the kitchen and started pulling out furniture. Two small benches, a stone-top chrome-stalk table, a walnut tabletop and various boxes, bags, satchels, and one Hopalong Cassidy cowboy lunchbox that Reggie’s father had when he was a child.

After dragging all that junk into the living room, Ptolemy went into the closet and got his oldest possession: an oak yardstick that Coydog had given him when he was only five.

“This here yardstick will be the measure of your life, boy,” the old man had said.

“The what?”

“As long as you keep this here span wit’ you, I will be wit’ you.”

Ptolemy had never broken that three-foot rule. The name in red letters, BLUTCHER’S BUTCHER MARKET, had mostly rubbed off. The numbers and most of the increment lines had faded also. There was a chip at one corner of the dark wood and dents and gouges throughout. But Coydog’s gifts to Li’l Pea, both gifts, he had kept through the years.

With his stick in hand Ptolemy yanked open the door under the sink. He stuck the yardstick in there and pulled out the strong spiders’ webs laden with greasy dust. After rubbing the webs off on an old curtain that lay in a forgotten corner, Ptolemy reached in and took out the old steel ice hook he had from seventy years before. It was a vicious-looking device used to hook twenty-pound blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration was available in poor homes. Ptolemy and Peter Brock worked on a truck, driving up and down city streets delivering ice to the customers of Brock’s father, Minister Brock.

“What church your daddy preach at?” Ptolemy asked Peter on their first day.

“He ain’t no preacher,” Peter said. “My grandfather named him that so if you used his first name you had to respect him anyway.”

With his full strength Ptolemy swung down on the big plastic tarp covering Sensia’s room. The triple hook sunk deep. Using both hands, the ninety-one-year-old man began to pull. At first there was no give. It was as if he were pulling on the knob of a locked door. But Ptolemy Grey would not give up. He twisted his shoulders for torque, let his weight work against the heft of the covering. He pulled and yanked and tugged in staccato snatches.

All the while there was a symphony playing and a sports report spouting meaningless numbers and names.

Ptolemy didn’t listen. He went down to his knees, using all the strength in his spindly shoulders. He was about to take a rest when the plastic sheet begin to give. He stood up and away from the door, using both his strength and weight, and the tarp began to flow outward from the long-abandoned room.

The dry plastic gushed into the crowded living room like a huge reptilian tongue. Ptolemy pulled the hook out and sank it in again, dragging more of the gray sheet from the bedroom.

Again and again he dug his fang-shaped hook into the tarp, the plastic hissing like lizard skin against itself and along the floor. Ptolemy, sweating and laughing, his heart beating fast, pulled the entire covering from the bedroom. He fell to the floor under the mist of dust that had been raised. He hacked and laughed, sneezed and chuckled, rubbed his irritated eyes and tittered to himself.

“I did it,” he announced triumphantly. “I pulled that bastard outta there.”

For a while Ptolemy Grey lay there, half on the floor and half on the dusty gray tarp. He was breathing hard and laughing to himself, remembering people and things randomly, haphazardly. There was the time he and Keith Low shoveled coal on a steam train from Jackson to Memphis to pay their fare.

After Coydog had died Pity stayed in bed for two weeks. Sheriff Walters had come to ask Li’l Pea what he knew, but he didn’t say anything except that he didn’t know anything. It was all he could do to keep from crying while looking at the ugly blue veins that crossed back and forth over the sheriff’s nose.

“You know that I’m here to find them that killed your uncle, now, don’t ya, boy?” the middle-aged, portly white man asked.

“Yessuh.”

“You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”

“Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.

“All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”

Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.

“I don’t know nuthin’, Sheriff Walters,” Ptolemy said.

“Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”

“Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”

Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.

Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.

A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.

Li’l Pea looked away.

Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.

Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink to count the time away. He sat on the floor, watching the towels, to be sure that no maggot or worm found its way to him the way his father said that the worms made their ways into Coydog’s eyes after his brother, Lupo, had cut him down and buried him in a pauper’s grave behind the barbershop without even a stone to mark his passage.

He sat upon the tile floor, counting the drips and thinking about Reggie and Coy; both men lynched and buried and made food for bugs.

Whenever Ptolemy got hungry he would drink from the faucet. After a while the hunger went away. Through the door he could hear soft music and voices that he couldn’t understand. Underneath these calming sounds he thought he could make out the scuttling of bugs and the titter of rats. If he paid too much attention to these noises his heart pumped harder and his head got light. Sometimes, when he got too frightened, he’d fall asleep and then wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.

Ptolemy had no idea how much time had passed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The classical music was broken, tinkly. The news reporters made no sense. Reggie and Coydog were dead, and that girl would never find her way to him.

“You ain’t got to be afraid’a nuthin’, boy,” Coydog would tell him. “We all gonna die. We all gonna get some hurt. I mean, when a woman bring a child outta her big belly it hurt like a bastid. But that girl ain’t nevah been happier than when she hurt like that.”

“Why she be so happy?” Li’l Pea asked.

“’Cause she know that baby gonna be the love of her life, and that would be worf ten times the pain.”

At first Ptolemy was soothed when he thought about his old friend and mentor. But then his thoughts drifted back to that last fiery dance, and then to little Maude Petit. And when he thought about his loved ones being lost to fire his heart thundered and he fell asleep to dream the dreams of the dead.

Papa Grey?” a voice called.

Ptolemy was in his coffin. It was pitch black and the worms were wriggling between his fingers and toes. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing, but instead he found himself in the white bathtub under brilliant light. Someone was knocking at the bathroom door.

He remembered draining the tub and lying down in it the way Reggie was laid to rest in his pine box.

“Papa Grey?” she called again.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Robyn, Papa Grey. I took the keys to your front do’ but the bathroom do’ don’t have a key.”

“Robyn?”

“Yeah. Open the do’,” she said.

The old man fumbled with the lock for a minute or more. He panicked once or twice, fearing that he was locked in, but he got the door open at last. Robyn was standing there in dark-blue jeans and a light-blue T-shirt. There was a yellow ribbon in her hair and big bone-white earrings dangled on either side of her jaw.

“I died,” Ptolemy Grey said. “I died and was in my grave with worms and Coydog McCann. I was dead and gone like Sensie and Reggie and other names that I cain’t even remembah no mo’.”

Robyn put her arms around Ptolemy’s neck.

“It was a dream,” she said, cocking her head to the side and humming with the words.

“No, no, no,” he said, pushing his savior away. “It wasn’t no dream. Come on out here in the room and I can prove it to ya.”

“What’s this big plastic sheet out here, Uncle?” she asked. “It’s dirty.”

“It don’t mattah,” he said. “Just push it aside and, and, and pull up some chairs.”

Robyn did as he requested, frowning at the dust rising from the faded tarp. She sneezed and got his stool and her lawn chair set up in front of the door.

“Mr. Grey, can I turn off the TV and the radio so I can hear you?”

“Sure. I don’t care,” he said.

They sat down facing each other. Ptolemy’s eyes were bright. There was a grin on his face. He took the child’s left hand in his and gazed deeply, even thoughtfully, into her eyes.

Robyn stared back, seeing a face that she knew with a different man inside.

“Some things,” Ptolemy said. “Some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”

He went silent, waiting for more words to come, the words and the ideas behind them that were coming slowly but steadily from his mind.

Robyn nodded, her head like a pump priming a well.

“I had a tarp,” Ptolemy said, “this one right here, over all the things in my bedroom. All the books and carpets and clothes and glass jewelry. That was Sensia’s room, the wife that I loved the most ...”

Pitypapa Grey was aware of the silence in the room. The music had been hushed and the men and women talking about crime and killing were quiet at last. It occurred to him that before now, before this moment, the content of his mind was the radio and the TV, that he was just as empty as an old cracked pecan shell—the meat dried up and crumbled away.

“Papa Grey?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah, baby?”

“You just sittin’ there.”

“What was I sayin’?”

“That some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”

He looked at her lovely young face and let the words wash over his parched mind.

“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “That tarp. That tarp was like the pall in my mind.”

“The what?”

“The pall. It’s a shroud what undertakers put over the dead until they get put in the coffin.”

“And this plastic sheet is like that?” Robyn asked.

“It was over that room, and at the same time it was in my head, coverin’ up all the things that I done forgot, or forgot me.”

The idea turned in on itself and Ptolemy lost his way. He brought his hands to his head and tried to remember. It was all there but not quite clear. Things jumbled together: Coydog’s funeral next to Artie and Letisha; the iron-banded oak box with its treasures and promises, its curses and death—hidden but still a danger; Reggie laughing and eating french fries in the sunlight through the restaurant window.

Robyn took his hands from his face.

“Look at me, Mr. Grey,” she said.

There were tears in his eyes.

“I got to get my thoughts straight, girl. I got to do sumpin’ before that damn pall is th’owed ovah me.”

“When’s the last time you et?” she asked.

Ptolemy understood the question but the answer was the white tail of a deer flitting through the trees. He shook his head and wondered.

“First thing we gotta do is get you sumpin’ to eat, Uncle,” she said.

“I had a can’a tuna day before, day before yesterday.”

The cheeseburger tasted good, better than any food he’d had in a very long time. They sat in the window seat at the fast-food restaurant, watching the black people and brown people walking up and down the sidewalk, driving up and down the street. The faces didn’t confuse him anymore but he was still confused. Not so much that he’d get lost in Coydog’s lessons down near the mouth of the Tickle River, where they had alligators that would carry off little boys and girls sometimes. He’d remember the purple skies of fall evenings without getting inside them, but he couldn’t recall where he’d put the treasure; he couldn’t put words to the one lesson that Coydog taught that he needed to know.

“What you do in school?” Ptolemy asked Robyn.

“I’m not in school right now, Uncle.”

“I know. I know that. I mean, what you gonna do when you go back again?”

“Maybe be a nurse or a schoolteacher.”

“Why not a doctor?” the old man asked.

Robyn stared at her newly adopted relative.

“Bein’ a nurse is good,” she said.

“A doctor is a king and the nurse is like the five of hearts. You at least a queen, Reggie, I mean Robyn. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said.

Robyn put her fingers on his forearm. “We got to bomb your house, Uncle,” she said.

That day they went to the bank to cash two checks that Ptolemy had received in the mail. The old man was looking from face to face, examining each one.

“You lookin’ for somebody, Uncle?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee,” he said.

“What?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee. That’s a friend’a mines.”

“If you say so.”

They bought groceries at Big City and insect bombs at Harold and Rod Hardware. There were seven of them like Roman candles held up by Popsicle-stick crosses, which were bonded by rough dabs of white glue.

“You only need one for every one and a half rooms in the house,” the salesman told Robyn.

He was a redheaded young black man with pinkish-brown skin and big brown freckles. Ptolemy wondered how many white men had been that boy’s forefathers. This seemed very important to him, but then the thought got lost in the young people’s conversation.

“How long before we can go back in?” Robyn asked.

“Twenty-four hours, no matter what,” he said. “Then you go in an’ open the windahs, let it air out a hour or two and it’a be fine.”

“You got windahs, Mr. Grey?” the girl asked.

“Out on the back porch. Sensie an’ me’d open the back windahs and the front do’ in summah an’ it was bettah than air conditionin’.”

“What’s your name?” the freckled clerk asked Robyn.

“Chili Norman,” she said easily. “I live in that green house ovah on Morton.”

“You gotta phone?”

“Uh-uh,” she said coyly. Smiling as she did so. “I’ll take two’a those little electric fans you got on sale. And I’ma need some wide tape too.”

“How come you don’t have no phone?” the goofy boy asked.

“Money.”

“Could I come by and knock on the door?”

“Ain’t no law against that,” the lying child said.

From there they went to Baker’s Inn on Crenshaw. It took three busses and more than an hour to get there. They had to walk six blocks at either end of the long ride. At first Ptolemy carried one of the three bags they had, but he started slowing down and Robyn took his load too.

They paid for two nights at the motel in cash up front and left the groceries in the room. There was a small refrigerator for the milk and beer and butter they’d purchased.

“You can stay here if you want, Uncle Grey. I just got one thing to do and then I’ll come back.”

Ptolemy looked around the motel room. It smelled of chemicals, and the two beds looked like the slabs in the undertaker’s room where he swept up the dust that collected around the dead. The ceiling was low and he was again reminded of a coffin.

“How long you be gone?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Couple’a hours at least.”

“I’ll come with ya. No need just to sit in here. I don’t even know how to work the TV.”

Robyn carried the fans and the insect bombs in three white plastic bags. She and Ptolemy didn’t talk much on the walk to the busses or on the rides. Young men talked to her. Older men did too. She smiled at them and told lies about her name and address. She gave them phone numbers but Ptolemy didn’t think that they belonged to Niecie.

On the last bus a young man came to sit opposite them. He was dark-skinned and pretty the way young men can be. He was no more than thirty and could have passed for twenty-two.

“Mr. Grey?” he said after staring for a moment.

Ptolemy looked at the young man. His face was familiar, but that was nothing new; almost all faces looked both familiar and strange to him.

“I’m Beckford,” the man said, “Reggie’s friend.”

“I know you,” Robyn said then. “You used to come by on Thursdays when you worked on that fishin’ boat. You smelled bad.”

“Robyn, right?” Beckford said. “The cute little girl Reggie’s aunt took in.”

As the bus turned, the young man stood up and let the gentle centrifugal pull swing him across the aisle until he was on the seat next to Ptolemy.

“Yeah,” he said as if someone had just asked him a question. “I was up in Oakland for the last two years or so. I remember one time me an’ Reggie went to your house, Mr. Grey, and you bought us a pizza. How is Reggie?”

“He daid,” Robyn said, showing no emotion. “They kilt him in a drive-by not two blocks from his house.”

“No,” Beckford said. “Who did?”

Robyn shook her head.

“Damn.” Beckford sat back in his seat. “Damn. Why anybody wanna kill Reggie? He ain’t in no gang. He ain’t mess wit’ nobody.”

The bus driver hit the brakes and Ptolemy swayed into the young man’s shoulder. In that moment he was back in the little room that Coydog called home behind the colored barbershop. Coydog was talking and through Ptolemy the words came out. “Don’t worry, boy,” he said. “Man do sumpin’ wrong, man pays for it. There ain’t a surer truth on God’s green earth.”

“Niecie still live at the same place?” Beckford asked.

“Uh-huh,” Robyn said, and then she added, “We gettin’ out here.”

She helped Ptolemy to his feet and they went toward the exit.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Grey, Robyn,” Beckford called after them.

The old man waved. Robyn was holding his other hand and watching his feet while negotiating her three bags and so did not speak to Beckford.

That was a nice boy,” Ptolemy said as they walked toward his house.

“Yeah,” Robyn replied, “we’ll see.”

“Pete!” a familiar voice bellowed from across the street.

Melinda Hogarth came at the man and girl like a freight train that had jumped its track at full speed. She had a broad grin on her face and her mannish hands were balled into big hammer-like fists.

“Oh no,” Ptolemy whispered. His sphincter tightened and his chest ached. He didn’t run but he wanted to. He didn’t fall to his knees but his legs shivered.

“That her?” Robyn asked when Melinda was half the way to them, roaring in the middle of the street like a wild beast that just caught the scent of blood.

Ptolemy nodded and Robyn moved to stand between them. The teenager turned so that her left shoulder was pointed at the approaching juggernaut. Melinda was wearing blue jeans under a faded navy-blue dress that came down to her knees. She was two and a half times the size of Robyn, the color of a wild bull, and three sheets to the wind. Robyn could smell the alcohol when the woman got near.

“Move out my way, heifer,” Melinda Hogarth cried, and then Robyn swung, starting from her hip. The bag holding both of the electric fans moved in a small quick arc, slamming the drunken mugger in the center of her forehead. The first blow set Melinda back a step. The second put her right knee on the ground. The big woman was on both knees and an elbow, screaming, by the fourth swing. That was when the bag tore open and the broken fans went flying.

Robyn reached into her shoulder bag. Ptolemy put a hand on her forearm. He didn’t have the strength to stop her, but Robyn stopped anyway. She turned her face to the elder.

At first sight she looked like a demon to the old man. The slants of her eyes were reminiscent of horns, and her teeth showed without making a smile. And then she changed. She was the sweet girl again, a mild worry showing in her eyes and on her mouth.

“Don’t worry, Uncle,” she said. “I know what I’m doin’.”

Ptolemy took a step backward and Robyn pulled out her six-inch knife.

“Look up here at me, bitch!” Robyn commanded.

The pile of quivering womanhood made sounds that were like the snuffling cries of a wounded animal.

Robyn kicked Melinda Hogarth’s fat shoulder.

“Look at me or I’ma stab you up,” Robyn promised.

Melinda threw herself away from the threat, landing on her backside. Her eyes were wide with the fear and the possibility of death.

“What’s your name?” Robyn said, moving closer.

The prostrate woman was too frightened to speak.

“Tell me your name or I’ma cut yo’ th’oat right here.”

“M-m-m-melinda.”

“Linda,” Robyn said. “Linda, if I evah see you talkin’ to my uncle again, if he evah tell me you even said a word to him, I’ma come out heah wit’ my girls an’ we gonna cut yo’ titties right off. You hear me?”

Melinda Hogarth didn’t answer the question. She walked backward on her elbows and heels until somehow she was on her feet. Then she ran down the street, screaming high and loud like a woman miraculously transforming into a fire truck.

After a long minute Robyn put her knife away. She picked up the fans. Now they were just blue and silver plastic pieces.

“Damn,” she said. “Now we got to go back to that hardware sto’ an’ that yellah niggah gonna start slobberin’ on me again.”

“I got a fan on my back porch,” Ptolemy said.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” she said angrily.

“You didn’t aks me, girl. I didn’t know what you was doin’.”

With some effort Robyn smiled again and reached for Ptolemy’s hands. He took a step backward.

“Don’t be scared’a me, Uncle,” Robyn said. “I just wanna make sure you can stand out on the street and not be beat down by that crazy woman.”

Ptolemy’s mind was scattered over nearly a hundred years. His mother and father, Coy’s lynching, the one brief battle he fought in during World War Two. He saw Melvin Torchman fall dead in a barbershop in Memphis, and he was waking up again to Sensia dead in the bed next to him. And then a million bugs swarmed over her . . .

“Uncle?”

Robyn was holding his hands. He looked into her eyes and she was a friendly child again.

“Don’t do that no mo’, okay, baby?” he said.

Robyn kissed his big knuckle and nodded.

After dragging the huge gray tarp out to the curb, Robyn cleared two places in each room and placed an insect bomb candle in each space. She only put one bomb in the bathroom.

“You go wait in the hall, Uncle,” she told Ptolemy, “while I set these bad boys off.”

He stood outside in the dilapidated marble-and-oak hallway. It was once a nice building that people kept up. That was in the old days, when black people came to Los Angeles to make a life away from the Jim Crow South. He hadn’t stood in that dark hall for many years. He’d walked down it ten thousand times; between two and a dozen times a day when he was younger. But he hardly ever just stood there.

Once there was a young man stabbed and killed at the front door of the building. He’d pressed Ptolemy and Sensia’s bell, but when nobody responded to the intercom they went back to bed. He was already old and she was fragile by then. They’d been burglarized and had put up the chain gate on the back window and door.

Hey, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said.

She’d come into the hallway, dragging one of his pine chairs with a small suitcase lying in its seat. The slight scent of sulfur and smoke came with her. She also had a sheet of paper and the roll of masking tape they got from the hardware store. Using the chair to stand on, she put tape all along the cracks of the door. She put many layers of tape, one on top of the other, to make an airtight seal against leaking poisons. Then she taped the paper to the door.

“Insect bomb,” Ptolemy read. “Stay away.”

“You can read, Mr. Grey?” the child asked.

“Sure I can read. Anybody can read an’ write they name.”

“Can you read a book?”

“Hunnert pages, two hunnert pages, two fifty.”

Robyn smiled and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Let’s go to the motel,” she said.

The thought of a new house tickled Ptolemy. He walked briskly toward the front door of the building, happy, unafraid of Melinda Hogarth for the first time in years, and looking forward to the day outside, and a new man in the bathroom mirror.

Are you lookin’ at my legs, Uncle?” Robyn asked coyly.

She took one of the single beds and the old man lay down on the other. He’d gone into the bathroom to change into his sleeping clothes. Robyn had brought his navy-blue sweatpants and a gray T-shirt. When she changed, all the teenager did was tie up her hair and put on a T-shirt over her panties.

The TV was on a show about three young black women who lived together in an apartment and argued all the time. Now and then Ptolemy would swivel his head to catch a glance at Robyn’s strong brown legs.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Are you a dirty old man, Uncle?”

“No, but . . . you sure do remind me of somethin’.”

“What’s that?” Robyn shifted on the bed but she didn’t hide her legs. She was smiling at Ptolemy as if she was telling him something.

“Cover up them things, girl,” he said. “You know I’m a old man but I still remember how much a girl can hurt you. I’m past ninety but that don’t mean you could play wit’ me like that.”

Robyn slipped under the blankets and buried her head in the pillow.

The women on the TV program were screaming and running around a couch where a man sat with a perplexed look on his face. Ptolemy didn’t understand what they were saying.

He got up from the bed and pushed buttons on the side of the box. The first button made the volume go up and then down. The second one changed the channel and suddenly there was a naked couple having loud sex with everything showing.

“Fuck it harder!” the woman cried out, and Ptolemy, his heart thumping in fear, pressed another button, which shut the TV off.

The TV was the only light on and so the room went dark.

He made his way gingerly to the bed and climbed in. The blankets were tangled but he finally got himself mostly covered.

In the dark he lay awake. From time to time he’d forget where he was and fear would thrum in his ears. He’d wanted to jump up but the angry face of Robyn beating Melinda Hogarth would come to him and he’d grab on to his blankets, determined to wait for sunup to go home.

“Uncle?”

“Yeah?” he said, relieved that she sounded like the nice girl he’d met.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“’Bout what?”

“Dancin’ around half naked in front’a you. I know I shouldn’t’a done that.”

“No. I mean. Baby girl, you are my angel. I, uh, I love you, you ...”

“What?”

“God done send you down here to me. He send you to help me save them chirren.”

“Letisha and Artie?”

“Yep.”

“How you gonna do that, Uncle?”

“With your help, baby. With your help.”

“What can I do?”

“You got to, got to . . . help me remembah what it is I’m thinkin’.”

For a while after that they lay in silence.

“Is that true, Uncle?”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

“When I think about you my heart hurts and laughs.”

“That’s why you din’t wanna see my legs?”

“That’s why I don’t even wanna think about your legs.”

The next day they had breakfast at a diner and went to the La Brea Tar Pits park, where Reggie used to take Ptolemy sometimes.

“When Reggie was a boy he loved the dinosaur bones,” Ptolemy told Robyn. “The museum was on’y one buildin’ then and they had dinosaur bones in a buildin’ like a hole. When Reggie grew up he didn’t like this place no mo’ but I wanted to come so’s I could remembah ...” Ptolemy drifted off, staring at the large clouds passing overhead.

“What you remembah, Uncle?”

“What it used to be like in my head before things got confused.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s like they’s a jailhouse in my mind,” he said, “an’ I’m in the prison an’ they’s all these people I know outside yellin’ to me but I cain’t make out what they sayin’.”

“Hey, girl,” a male voice sang.

Ptolemy swiveled his head to see a young black man in a red jumpsuit.

“What you doin’?” he asked. He had a sneer on his lips that had more anger than friendliness to it.

“Niggah, get away from me,” the other, angry, Robyn said. “Cain’t you see I’m takin’ care’a my grandfather?”

“Let me help you guys,” the young man offered, smiling and touching her shoulder.

Robyn jerked away from him and clutched her purse close to her breast.

“You gonna treat me like that?” he said as if he were truly insulted.

“Fuck you, niggah.”

Ptolemy could see that Robyn was ready to grab her long knife. He had known women like this before: wild and violent, sweet and loving. He’d never had a girlfriend like Robyn, but Coy had had more than one.

“A woman like that could turn on a dime,” Coydog McCann used to say.

The young man in the red exercise uniform sneered and took a step forward. Robyn shoved her hand into her purse and he stopped.

“Bitch,” he said, and then he spat on the ground.

Robyn stared death at him and he walked away across the lawn of the park.

“Come on, Uncle,” she said. “We should get back.”

They ate at the small diner again.

Ptolemy was exhausted from his day in the city. He lay down on top of the covers, falling asleep without even undressing. He felt Robyn take off his shoes and socks and fold the blankets over him.

There was no TV announcer, no classical music. He was in a coffin again and the earth was cold. He was dead and couldn’t move. He couldn’t even shiver against the chill.

“What you gonna do wit’ my treasure?” Coydog asked him suddenly, shockingly—out of nowhere.

“I’m cold.”

“I give up my life and my dignity for you,” Coy said.

“I’m dead.”

“You don’t even know what dead is. Dead is havin’ a noose around your neck an’ yo’ feet afire. You just restin’ while my treasure go to waste.”

“I cain’t, Coydog! I cain’t even see. If they catch me they gonna lynch me too. They gonna kill me too.”

The cold settled into Ptolemy’s bones like it must have in the old pharaoh after whom he’d been named. The chill hurt his joints and his marrow. He wasn’t breathing and instead of a heart there was a drum being played by a dimwitted monkey who couldn’t keep the beat any better than a drunkard.

Suddenly warmth enveloped him. It was as if he were lowered into a hot tub of salted, scented water. The heat went through him and Coydog walked away in disgust. Now only his hands and feet and nose were cold. He was floating in the Tickle River in late August.

“When the water runs as hot as the blood of a woman in love,” Coydog said as he walked from the tomb.

Ptolemy woke up held from behind by Robyn. He realized that he must have been shivering in the night and she held him to warm him as his mother had done in the winter months when he was a boy.

Ptolemy sat up and Robyn rolled on her back.

“Mornin’, Uncle.”

“What you doin’ in my bed, girl?”

“You were so cold that you was cryin’ in your sleep,” she said. “I hope it was all right.”

“What we doin’ today?” he asked, unable to condemn or condone her gift of warmth.

“Gettin’ some breakfast and suckin’ the poison out yo’ house.”

“Ain’t Niecie wonder where you are?” Ptolemy asked, realizing as he did that he could connect Robyn and Niecie and Reggie in his mind. He knew that Reggie was dead and not coming back and that he had something that he had to do.

“I told her that I was gonna stay at your place till it was cleaned up. She trust me. Do you trust me, Uncle?”

Trustin’ a woman is like walkin’ in California,” Coydog would say. “You know there’s bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin’ anyways. What else could you do?”

I’m a man dyin’a thirst an’ you the on’y water in a thousand miles,” Ptolemy said, repeating a phrase that had been in his mind for at least seventy-five years.

Robyn crinkled her broad nose and sat up to kiss her faux uncle.

“I trust you,” she said.

While Ptolemy sat on the pine chair outside his door, Robyn made it to the back porch, set up the fan, and opened the back door through the protective gate.

Three hours later she was filling up bags with old newspaper, clothes, bills, and general trash. She swept up thousands of dead insects, some suffocated rodents, and few creatures that neither she nor Ptolemy could identify.

Ptolemy followed her around, looking through every paper and blouse that she threw out. He was very excited by a large iron key that she found between the mattress and box spring.

For four days they filled trash bags, swept, and discarded.

The strong girl also lugged chairs and tables and even the broken bureau out to the street.

At night Robyn slept on the mattress roll under the south table and Ptolemy slept on Sensia’s bed, which Robyn had covered with plastic casing and unused sheets she had found in a closet. Sometimes the girl would come to him and hold him for a while until his teeth stopped chattering and he no longer cried in his sleep.

On the fifth day the apartment was mostly clean. The junk that Ptolemy wanted to hoard was stacked neatly in the deep closet. There were chairs in the living room and laundered blankets on the bed. The kitchen had been swept and scrubbed and disinfected until it almost seemed as if someone might cook in there.

“Uncle?” Robyn asked one day. She had just returned with a basket full of clothes from the laundromat across the street.

“Yeah?”

“What’s this card? It’s got a name and number printed on one side and on the other somebody wrote, ‘For the doctor you requested’ by hand.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t remembah no card. And I ain’t sick, either.”

“It says that this man, this Antoine Church, is a social worker,” Robyn said. “Maybe he gotta doctor help you remembah things like this.”

Grey,” a woman called. “Pee Toll My Grey.”

“That’s us, Uncle,” Robyn said.

“That ain’t my name,” he said, stubbornly anchored to the blue armchair in the hall at social services. “I mean, that’s my last name but she must be callin’ somebody else.”

“Please,” his young guardian whined.

“That’s not my name,” Ptolemy said again.

“Please.”

He allowed the girl he thought of as his child to lift him by the forearms and lead him through the scuffed and stained brown door.

It was a small office with no bookcases or books. The desk was made from pressboard and covered in plastic walnut veneer that had started peeling at the corners.

Mr. Antoine Church was a prissy young black man with straightened hair and a picture of Jesus on the wall. He wore a tan suit and brown calfskin gloves.

“What you got gloves on for on a hot day like this?” Ptolemy asked.

“Germs,” he replied.

“Why’ont you sit down, Uncle?” Robyn said.

He didn’t want to, but the busses and the walks to get to the government office had tired him out. Robyn stood behind the chair.

“How are you two related?” Church asked Robyn.

“My friend Niecie is his grandniece, and she asked me to take care of him.”

“But why call him ‘uncle’ if he’s just a friend?”

“I call my boyfriend ‘honey,’” she said, visibly holding back her anger, “but that don’t mean I’ma put him in my tea.”

“You got germs in here?” Ptolemy asked.

“What?” Church said.

“You got them gloves for germs you say. That mean I’ma get sick in here?”

“No,” Antoine said in an exaggerated, almost yawning, tone.

“Then why you got them gloves on?”

“Why are you here, Mr. Grey?”

“I ...”

It was like falling into a dream for the old man. He wanted Coydog McCann to fish with, and Reggie smiling naturally in his grave. He wanted to show the children how to fly kites and sing songs that Jesus might not want to hear.

Ptolemy sat there in Church’s uncomfortable metal chair, thinking that he’d like to move without his joints aching and to have one full thought all the way through without stumbling over the words and getting distracted by the slightest thing. He didn’t want people to call him old man anymore or for social workers like Antoine Church to have power over him.

He wanted a job and driver’s license and a hard-on with a girlfriend like he was sure that boy Beckford wanted with Robyn.

Before Robyn came to stay with him, before Reggie came and before Sensia died, Ptolemy might have said these things. He might have talked about going to the bathroom and having sex. But now he just sat there, lost in the jumble of ideas. He knew that somebody like Church wouldn’t understand his words.

“Uncle wanna go to the kinda doctor help him remembah how to think,” Robyn said.

She was wearing her charcoal-gray dress with the high hemline and black hose under that. Sporting a hint of makeup, she carried a small red purse that was too small for her fighting knife.

“Your nephew came to see me a few months ago,” the social worker said. “He told me that you were having trouble with your memory and communication skills.”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

The tone of Church’s voice jabbed at Ptolemy’s mind like the cut of a rusty chisel. It made him want to sneer and spit. He wanted to tell that man that he was an idiot, a stupid fool.

“Are you still having trouble thinking?” Church asked.

“No. I think just fine,” Ptolemy said. “It’s just that I got some trouble rememberin’ things I used to know. I mean, I know you got them gloves on ’cause you think there’s a germ in here. I know that this girl here is my granddaughter. But I don’t remembah where I put things a long time ago, an’ I cain’t, I cain’t . . . things I need to find.”

There was so much he couldn’t do. Sometimes he’d stand over the toilet for five minutes waiting to urinate. Sometimes when the phone would ring he’d go to the door and ask, “Who is it?” and when Robyn told him that it was the phone he’d get so embarrassed that he’d go into the bedroom just so he wouldn’t have to see her feeling sorry for him.

“Well,” Antoine Church said, smiling. “The reason I dropped by your house and left that card was because I found out about a man who might have just what you’re looking for.”

“What you laughin’ at, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“I’m not laughing,” the grinning man said.

“Yes you are. Are you laughin’ at me?”

“No,” Church said, managing to approximate a sober look.

“You gonna be old too,” Ptolemy told him. “You gonna be sittin’ in this chair and a young man gonna be tellin’ you sumpin’. I got a family needs me and I cain’t walk down the street wit’out this child here to he’p me. I’m just askin’ for that, for that. That, that thing.”

Church scribbled in tiny script on a small slip of paper, which he handed to Robyn.

“Call this doctor and tell him that I referred you,” the prissy man said. “And if you have any problems you can call me. Maybe we can work together to help your uncle.”

“Thank you, Mr. Church,” Robyn said, smiling.

Mothahfuckah,” she whispered when she and Ptolemy were a few steps down the hall.

Dr. Ruben, who answered his own phone, said that he didn’t have a free appointment for three weeks.

“I’m traveling to India,” he said, “to Mumbai for a conference, but I’d be happy to see Mr. Grey when I return.”

Robyn didn’t argue with him. She made the appointment and then sat in the lawn chair that Ptolemy wouldn’t let her throw out.

“Do you want me to move back to Aunt Niecie’s house now that yo’ place is clean?” she asked her uncle.

“Do you wanna go back?”

“I wanna have a place with a bed up off’a the floor and a chest’a drawers.”

“I could buy you all that.”

“Honey, you only get two hundred and eleven dollahs a week,” she said. “That’s more than you need to live but it ain’t enough for no new bed and chest’a drawers.”

A door opened in Ptolemy’s mind and he smiled, then grinned.

“Wha?” Robyn said.

“Go in the closet an’ pull out that brown suitcase I made you leave in there.”

“That big heavy thing?”

“That’s it.”

The girl went in and dug under the mounds of picture albums and books and shoe boxes filled with letters, small tools, and what Ptolemy called “his remembrances.”

She dragged the heavy leather bag out to the center of the living room.

“Now bring me that jar with all the keys we found in it,” the old man commanded.

“Yes, Uncle.”

As the days had gone by, Ptolemy had gotten more and more bossy. He’d tell Robyn how to cook his eggs and where he wanted his books, even what clothes he’d like her to wear.

Instead of getting angry, the child almost always acquiesced to his demands. In his heart he knew that she was the one who made the important decisions, and she knew that he wanted in the worst way to be in charge.

“Here you go, Uncle,” Robyn said. She was wearing tight red jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her tennis shoes were pink too.

Ptolemy dumped the keys out on the table that once stood at the south wall, the table that he’d slept under for more than twenty years.

The small brass key was for his locker at the Y that they tore down in 1962, or maybe 1963. The big skeleton key that Robyn found under Sensia’s mattress was to the lost treasure. The three master keys on one ring were to various padlocks that he kept in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. The tin key was the one he wanted. He set it aside and placed all the rest, one by one, back in the old mustard jar.

“You could put these back,” he said, pushing the jar toward Robyn.

“Ain’t you gonna want to put that key back after you unlock the bag?” she asked.

Questions like that gave Ptolemy the most problems. When he was alone with his TV and radio, nobody asked him anything and he didn’t have to put together any responses. People talked in his head, and on the TV, but there were no questions that he had to answer.

He blinked and tried to understand all the various things she meant.

“Why don’t I just put it in my pocket and hold it for you, Uncle?”

“I can put it in my own pocket,” he said.

“Should we open it now?” she asked.

“Let’s get it up here on the table,” he said.

Together they lifted the heavy bag until they got one corner of it on the battered ash top. Then Robyn pushed until it was fully on.

Ptolemy had to study the lock. He tried different ways to put the key in. It had been a few months since he’d opened the case but finally he got it right.

“Goddamn, Uncle,” Robyn said, standing up from the aluminum and nylon chair and putting her hands to her face. “Shit!”

“You mad, baby girl?” Ptolemy said, leaning away from her, remembering the way she had looked when she beat Melinda Hogarth until blood flowed from the addict’s forehead.

Robyn was staring at the suitcase filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties. The money was stacked in some places. In others it was piled, just thrown in, and all mixed around. Robyn dug both hands in, lifting a shovelful of cash, and coins rained down from the jumble of bills.

“Uncle,” Robyn said.

“I been savin’ that for years,” he said. “It’s almost ninety-four thousand dollars. Ninety-four thousand . . . almost.”

Robyn sat down again. Her face was indecipherable to her adopted uncle.

“Did Reggie know you had all this?” she asked.

“He knew I didn’t cash but two checks every three weeks. He’d put one in a account that paid my bills and I’d put my leftovers in the trunk. When I wanted to tell him where I put it he said that he didn’t wanna know. He said that he might start borrowin’ and not know when to quit.”

Tears were coming down Robyn’s left cheek. She had dropped the cash and now her hands were picking at each other.

“We could use this money to buy you a bed and a dresser,” Ptolemy said. “An’, an’, an’ if there’s enough, maybe a nice dress.”

Robyn stared at the suitcase full of money and shook her head.

“Is this the treasure you always be talkin’ ’bout?” she asked at last.

“Naw,” he said. “That ain’t treasure. That’s just Social Security an’ retirement money. Nobody died for that. You know a pirate’s treasure have to be cursed with blood.”

Robyn moved as far away from the table as she could get. Ptolemy got to his feet and went over to her. He put his hands on her strong shoulders.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he asked.

“Why you wanna show me that?”

“You my girl. You my blood.”

“No I’m not. You don’t even know me. You don’t know what I did ’fore I got here. I could steal this money from you.”

“You want it?” he asked.

“What?”

“You want it? I could give it to you, baby. You know, I only need ev’ry fourth check an’, an’ once a mont’ or so I get a li’l bit from Social Security. That’s all I need. You could have this. You could, you could take it and buy you a bed.”

Robyn jumped away from her benefactor and ran to the door.

“No!” she yelled as she rushed into the hallway and out to the front door of the building.

By the time Ptolemy got to the threshold she was gone. He stayed there for a while but she didn’t return and so he went back to the ash table. He considered separating out the various denominations. There were a few hundred-dollar bills in there, he remembered. He wanted to stack all the like notes, but there was too much cash and so he closed the suitcase and locked it. Then he went to the TV to turn it on but he couldn’t remember which button did the job.

Finally Ptolemy Grey went to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, trying to remember.

For a long while nothing seemed to work. All he could think about was how angry Robyn was. And she was so pretty in red. He wanted to tell her that by giving her the money. After all, it wasn’t a treasure, just some cash. His rent was set at $185 a month, and the bills, which Reggie had the bank pay, were low.

“Money ain’t the root of all evil,” Coydog had told the boy Li’l Pea, “but it get a hold on some people like vines on a tree or the smell’a fungus on damp sheets. They’s some people need money before love or laughter. All you can do is feel sorry for someone like that.”

“But money is what makes you rich, Uncle Coy,” the child said. “My daddy said that if he had enough money he’d be a rich man.”

“Rich man is the man live in his own skin,” the old thief countered. “Black as oil, white as cane sugah, yellah like gold—that’s riches for ya, boy. All the rest is jes’ wastin’ time.”

Ptolemy felt pain in his joints and weakness in his muscles. Robyn running away the way she did hurt more than seeing Reggie in his coffin. Or maybe it wasn’t more, but added on to Reggie’s death, Robyn’s departure was a weight too great to bear. He didn’t cry but he wanted to. He didn’t run out in the street looking for her but he would have if it wasn’t for Melinda and the fact that he got lost if he wandered beyond his own block.

“I got to think,” Ptolemy said clearly. “I got to get my mind movin’.”

With these words he stood up from the commode and went out into the newly ordered and cleaned living room. He brought his rainbow stool and sat it in front of the TV. Robyn had wanted to throw the stool away, along with a dozen other chairs that she put out on the street on trash day.

“No, no, baby,” he remembered saying. “This here is my move-anywhere chair. I could sit anywhere in the house or outside with this here chair. Whenever I get tired or need to get down and study sumpin’ close to the ground, this chair will work for me.”

“Okay, Uncle,” she’d said.

“You got to understand, this chair is like a extra leg or a tool I can have and carry anywhere. It’s light like a feather, and so it ain’t nuthin’ for a old man like me to pick up.”

“Okay, Uncle,” Robyn said again, “we can keep the chair.”

“Reggie got it for me,” Ptolemy continued as if he hadn’t heard. “An’ the minute I seen it I knew that it was mine and I could use it anywhere, for rest or to study sumpin’ close to the ground . . .”

Robyn took his wrists in her hands and moved her face close to his.

“I hear you, Uncle. You don’t have to keep on explainin’ it. I’m gonna do what you tell me to do.”

That was the clearest evidence to Ptolemy that he was losing his mind. Even though the girl had said yes, he still wanted to explain over and over why he needed that chair. All he could think about was how important that chair was; that and how much he wished he could stop that thought from going again and again through his mind.

So he set the stool up in front of the TV and stared at it—the green screen that bulged out some, and the flat buttons along the side. There was a box on top of it that had a red number in lights: 134. That was his station. That was where the news came from. He didn’t want to change that number, just get the TV to turn on.

He sat there for a long time, or at least what seemed like a long time. He didn’t want to push just any button. And he didn’t want to turn the TV on by mistake—he wanted to know what the right button was so that he knew that it was his mind that made the light. There were four flat, dark buttons. One said vol. and another said I/O. Two others had no letters to describe them, just symbols that made no sense at all.

“A, B, C,” Ptolemy said, “D, E, F, G, H.” He stopped there and wondered a moment. “I, J, K . . .”

The letters didn’t tell him anything. They were just sounds that had nothing to do with slashes or periods or letters that didn’t make words that he knew.

“Double-u, ara, eye, en, gee,” he said, and smiled. He knew those letters. He knew what they meant. But he couldn’t find Shirley Wring. He couldn’t find the bank or even remember the bank’s name to ask somebody how to get there.

“Uncle?”

Seeing Robyn in her red clothes brought an even broader grin to Ptolemy’s lips, brought him to his feet.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, meaning many things that he couldn’t say.

“Sorry for what?” the child replied, tears in her voice.

“For whatevah I did to make you leave. I just wanted . . . wanted you . . . I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

They fell together in an embrace that made them both shudder and cry.

“It’s okay, Uncle.”

“It’s okay, Robyn.”

“I ain’t leavin’,” the girl said.

“You could have my bed and I could sleep under the table again,” he said. “There ain’t no more roaches hardly and the mice is all gone.”

“You want me to turn on the TV for you, Uncle?”

“No, baby. No. I wanna figure it out for myself. I wanna use my mind again. I wanna remembah.”

“Remember what, Uncle?”

“I don’t know exactly, but it got to do with them babies and, and, and you.”

“You remembah me, don’t you?”

“But not what I’m meant to do.”

“Don’t cry, Uncle. You make me sad.”

“You was on’y gone for a hour or sumpin’,” Ptolemy said, “but I felt that I lost you like I lost Maude Petit in that fire.”

“What fire, Uncle?”

Robyn pulled up a chair next to the old man, in front of the silent and dark television set. She listened as he told her the broken story of a child stalked in the flames by a huge shadow and a man, or maybe a coyote, that danced on fire. There was a dead dog and a dead man in a tuxedo, the ABC’s that didn’t work anymore, and Reggie, hanging like an anchor from Robyn’s leg.

She didn’t question nor did she understand exactly what her aged friend had said. She held his hands and nodded now and then. He asked her questions that she had no answers to and told her stories that made him laugh and shake his head.

At one point he looked up and asked, “Why you run away like that, girl?”

Robyn heard this question and understood its meaning. She brought her hands to her throat and made a sound that had feeling but no meaning.

“I sleep on a sofa, Uncle,” she said. “Hilly try to be gettin’ up in there wit’ me almost ev’ry night he home.”

“That boy’s a thief.”

“Niecie nice,” Robyn said. “She took me in, but nobody evah offered me a bed and open they doors and showed me their money and said take whatevah you want.

“I loved my mama, but she was wit’ just about ev’ry man she met. Sometimes she tell me to go stay wit’ my friends ’cause she didn’t want her boyfriends lookin’ at me an’ thinkin’ she was that old.”

“I don’t know why not,” Ptolemy said. “You a lovely girl. They cain’t help but look at you.”

“I wanna stay here an’ live wit’ you, Uncle.”

“Me too. I wanna stay here wit’ you too.”

“An’ I want you to buy me a bed an’ some sheets an’ pillows and blankets, but I don’t want your money. We gonna start puttin’ your money in a bank account and get you a special bank card so you can buy the bed and then I can sleep in it.”

“But you got to wear clothes so I cain’t like your legs like I did at that other place,” Ptolemy said.

“You don’t like to look at my legs, Uncle?” Robyn said, the sly smile returning to her lips.

“I don’t like to like to look at your legs, child. That was a long time ago, and now is now.”

So, Mr. Grey, you wish to start a debit account along with the accounts you already have?” Andrea Tolliver asked, her smiling black face as insincere as the white sheriff who wanted Li’l Pea to testify against the men who had lynched his uncle. She was a dark-skinned black woman with bronze hair and golden jewelry around her neck and wrists and on at least three fingers.

“Whatevah Robyn say is what I want,” Ptolemy said in a tone that he knew made him sound sure and smart.

“But do you want a debit account?” the banker asked. “You already have an account that automatically pays your bills.” She glanced at the computer screen before her. “It is overdrawn, however.”

“I need to buy a bed, an’ Robyn tell me that you just cain’t take all your money into a sto’ an’ put it down ’cause there’s thieves all around you.”

Ptolemy took a moment to look around the room from his seat at the bank officer’s desk.

“Are you looking for someone, Mr. Grey? Maybe some teller you know?”

“Shirley Wring,” he said, a smile rising to his lips. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

“No . . . no Shirley works here.”

“My uncle been savin’ his extra money in a box in his closet,” Robyn said then. “I told him that that wasn’t safe and that he could maybe get a little bit’a interest if he brought it here. I’m taking care’a him but it’s his money and so I brought him to his bank.”

Ptolemy watched the bank officer’s eyes scrutinize the girl. He’d seen older black women do this to young ones before.

Andrea Tolliver was older now and she didn’t have to lie to young men on the street about her address and telephone numbers anymore. She knew that Robyn could talk an old man out of his money.

“Miss?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yes, Mr. Grey?”

“If this child wanted to steal my money we wouldn’t be here.”

Watching her watching him, Ptolemy knew that he had read her right, that he had said the right words.

“We can put the money in your savings account, Mr. Grey, and issue you a debit card. Do you want your, um, niece to have a card too?”

“No,” Robyn said. “No. I don’t need one. This is for my uncle, not for me.”

Ms. Tolliver smiled at the child then. It was her last test to make sure that the girl was not trying to rob an old man.

Ptolemy gazed paternally at Tolliver, and then he grinned.

“Something funny, Mr. Grey?” the banker asked.

“Here we all are,” he said, repeating word for word something that Coydog McCann had said long ago, “somebody gettin’ on the boat an’ somebody gettin’ off, and a captain in the middle makin’ sure we all get where we goin’ to.”

Robyn took Ptolemy’s hand and smiled for him as Tolliver frowned, wondering what he meant.

Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey.”

Robyn turned quickly on the crowded street. She put her hand in her purse, ready, Ptolemy knew, to protect him with her edge, her six-inch blade.

He heard his name and wondered back through the voices that called him and the things they had to say.

“Mr. Grey,” Felix Franz the German baker would say to him every morning when he came in to buy his coffee and coffee cake on the way to the maintenance office where he and his partners got their orders for the day.

He just said the name and that was the greeting. But this was the voice of a woman, not a German man; not Melinda Hogarth or Sensia or proper Minister Brock.

He turned to see the name-caller and laughed.

“It’s okay, Robyn. That’s my friend. Double-u ara eye en gee.”

She wore tapered black slacks today and a turquoise T-shirt. She still had the green sun visor and the faded cherry-red bag.

“Mr. Grey,” she said again.

“Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said, gleeful to see her and reveling in the fact that he could remember a name, a face, and something he wanted. “Robyn, this is a woman who offered me a treasure.”

“Uh-huh,” Robyn grunted, and he could see in her the suspicion that had shown on Tolliver’s face.

All around them black and brown people were moving. Shirley Wring’s occluded eyes were gazing at Ptolemy.

“This is Robyn, my niece,” Ptolemy said.

“Your uncle is the treasure,” Shirley said. “He helped me out when I couldn’t pay my phone bill and wouldn’t even take my ring for a guarantee.”

“You could pay him back now,” Robyn said rudely.

“She don’t have to pay me,” Ptolemy said. “She offered me a treasure. You know that was on’y the second time in all my life that somebody offered me a true treasure.”

“I could take you two to lunch,” the small, gray-brown colored woman offered.

“We got to go home.”

“No, baby,” Ptolemy said. “Shirley here, she, I mean, I been comin’ ovah here . . . lookin’.”

“Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”

Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.

“I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”

“So we all gonna have lunch, right?” Ptolemy asked, looking into the brown and gray eyes of Shirley Wring.

They had sandwiches at a Subway chain store. Shirley paid for the meal.

She talked about when she moved to Los Angeles from someplace up north. When Ptolemy asked her if she was from California she looked away from him and said, “No. I’m from someplace else.”

“You talk real nice,” Ptolemy said, realizing that he had asked an uncomfortable question. “Did you come here to go to school?”

“My mama wanted me to get a education but I met this high-yellah fellah named Eric and I couldn’t think about nuthin’ else.”

“Robyn gonna go to college in the fall,” Ptolemy said, his voice loud to cover all the things he didn’t know.

“Junior college,” Robyn said.

“Junior college is college too,” Shirley declared.

“That’s right,” Ptolemy added. And he and the woman Shirley Wring smiled for each other across the bright-yellow plastic table.

“We got to get back home, Uncle,” Robyn said finally, to fill in and end the silence.

The days passed in a new kind of harmony for the old man. The TV stayed off unless Robyn wanted to watch her shows at night. Ptolemy refused to have her leave it on for him or turn to his news station. He wanted to run the TV himself without any help. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t ever be able to find his treasure and save his family; he would fail the way he failed Maude Petit and Floppy in that tarpaper house on the outskirts of town.

For the same reason the radio stayed off.

Sometimes Robyn would go out with Beckford Ross, Reggie’s old friend. Some nights she didn’t get in until hours after Ptolemy fell asleep. But the old man did not chastise her. Robyn was looking after him, and she needed to be free, like the birds his father didn’t want him to feed.

Twice a week for three weeks Shirley Wring came over in the afternoon to sit with Ptolemy and converse.

The talks always started pretty well. Ptolemy would tell her about his mother and father and their poor sharecropper’s farm; he’d talk about Coy and a treasure that was lost and her green ring. But after a while he could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making sense. She didn’t frown or get bored, but her smile became soft and her dim eyesight focused on something other than what he was saying. At this point he’d offer her tea and she would say that it was time for her to get home, “before the sun goes down and the thugs come out.”

During this time Ptolemy received a letter from his bank. The letter contained a plastic card that had his name printed in gold at the bottom. Robyn took him to a machine that had a TV screen in it in a shopping mall on Crenshaw. There she put the card in the slot and asked him, “What is the favorite name you like to spell, Uncle?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee?”

“Can you press those buttons?”

He did it twice and the card came back out of the slot.

“From now on all you got to do is remember those lettahs and this machine will give you money,” the child told the old man.

“For free?”

“Naw, Uncle. They take it outta that bank account we started.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, not remembering and disgusted with himself for the lapse.

At a store called Merlyn’s, in the same mall, using his new bank card, Ptolemy bought Robyn a white wooden bed that sat atop three big drawers with pink handles. There was a padded board at the back of the bed that could be folded up to make the bed into a couch. They also got new sheets and blankets, pillows, and bright-red cushions for when the bed would be used as a couch.

When the bed was delivered the next day, Robyn grinned at the men assembling it.

After they left she took her uncle by the hand and pulled him until he was sitting next to her on the well-made bed.

“Are you gonna marry Shirley Wring and kick me outta here, Uncle Grey? I don’t care if you do. I mean, it’s your house and you could do what you want, but I nevah had no nice new bed before, and I’d like it if I could take it with me if you told me I had to go.”

“You wanna go and here we just got your bed?”

“No. I thought you loved Shirley Wring.”

“I’m too old for that. At this age I can only love chirren . . . like you. I love you.”

Robyn got down on her knees, took her faux uncle’s hands, and pressed her face against them.

They stayed like that for a long while, the man sitting up straight and the girl on her knees.

“Are you gonna leave me, Robyn?”

“No, not nevah, Uncle Grey. Not nevah.”

Robyn cooked and cleaned and slept in Ptolemy’s living room every night after that. They took walks in the neighborhood and never once saw Melinda Hogarth.

Niecie called twice.

“Pitypapa is sick an’ I got to take him to the doctor and give him his medicine,” Robyn told her guardian. “But I’ma come home when he bettah.”

“Bless you, child,” Niecie said.

Things went along like that for three weeks, until it was time for their appointment with Dr. Ruben.

The office was a block north of Melrose, on the west side of town. They took the bus and Ptolemy hummed to himself while one young man after another tried to get Robyn’s attention. She smiled and lied and sometimes just ignored them while Li’l Pea and Coy McCann fished almost a century before in the old man’s mind.

The doctor had a room in a courtyard of professional offices that surrounded a beautiful rose garden. The roses were white and gold, red and bright yellow. Ptolemy smiled while Robyn led him along.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “What is this place?”

“The doctor’s, remembah?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah.”

There was no nurse or receptionist, just a large room with a desk on one side and an examining table on the other. Robyn and Ptolemy sat in cushioned chairs before the desk.

Bryant Ruben was a white man of medium height, age, and build. He had a great mustache that made Ptolemy smile and beady green eyes that were not at all off-putting. The doctor’s voice was clear and strong. This made Ptolemy think that even if they were across the Tickle River from each other, he would still be able to understand the smiling doctor’s words.

It started with a memory test.

The doctor would recite a list of words, like apple, tomato, pinecone, orange, sparrow, and stone, and then ask Ptolemy to repeat them.

“Orange stone and, and, somethin’,” he answered on the first try.

After eight lists, Dr. Ruben smiled.

“I’m going to ask you to strip down to your shorts and sit on the examining table, Mr. Grey. Would you rather your niece wait in the garden?”

“No. She could see me right here. I don’t mind. I’m too old to be worried about bein’ naked.”

Ruben examined Ptolemy from head to toe with a rubber hammer, a stethoscope, and a pair of magnifying glasses that had double lenses and sat on the end of his nose.

“Ninety-one, eh, Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re in wonderful physical condition for a man your age. You can put on your clothes and we’ll talk at the desk.”

Robyn helped her charge with his pants and shirt and then got down on her knees to tie his brown shoes.

“Those shoes is older than you, girl,” Ptolemy said, and Robyn stood and kissed his cheek.

Your uncle is in the early stages of dementia,” Ruben said to Robyn. “Maybe a little bit further along than that, but not much. He can converse with difficulty and has some trouble with immediate memory. I believe, however, that the damage is not so far along that it can’t be ameliorated.”

Ptolemy didn’t mind the doctor explaining to the child. She was his eyes and ears in a world just out of reach. She deciphered what things meant and then told him like a busboy in a restaurant that runs down to the waiter and then comes back with information for the cook.

“What does that mean, Doctor?”

“He’s losing the ability to use his mind to solve problems, remember things, and to communicate. His language skills are still pretty strong, but his cognitive abilities are weakening.”

“What’s cognitib—?” Robyn asked, frowning, trying to understand what she could do for him.

“It means thinking.”

“I wanna make it so that I could think good for just a couple mont’s, Doc,” Ptolemy said then. “I got some things to remembah, and relatives to look aftah. And, you know, if I . . . if I mess up, then it’s all lost, my whole life.”

“What will be lost?” the mustachioed man asked.

“I, I . . . well, I don’t have the words right now,” Ptolemy said. “You see? That’s the problem.” Ptolemy placed his fingertips on the edge of the doctor’s desk, as if the image of his words were there.

“There are medicines in general use today,” Ruben said, listing five or six names. “None of them are very effective. I mean, something might be able to keep you the way you are without getting worse for a while, but ...”

“Uncle wants his mind back,” Robyn said, a look of surprise and anger on her lovely face.

Ruben smiled.

“And I’m pretty sure he got medical insurance,” the girl said. “We found some insurance papers when I was cleanin’ up his apartment. He’s a veteran and the army will probably be able to pay sumpin’.”

Ruben’s smile extended into time.

“Well?” the girl asked.

“Mr. Grey,” Bryant Ruben said, like the baker that used to greet him.

“Yes sir, Doctor.”

“Do you want to live to see a hundred?”

A hundred years. Ptolemy thought back over all the time that had brought him to that patient’s chair.

“Time is like a river,” Coydog had told the boy. “It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin’. You couldn’t stop it no more than you could fly away.”

Ptolemy’s river had been rough and fast, rushing over stones, throwing him around like a half-dead catfish. More than once he’d opened his eyes on a day he’d wished he’d never seen.

“No, Doctor. I on’y need a few months.”

Ruben smiled again.

“Robyn?” the doctor asked.

“Uh-huh?”

“Medicine isn’t perfect. Many times, especially with new drugs, they cause as many problems as they solve. They only get better by way of trial and error.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what I mean by that?”

“That if I take some new pill that ain’t been tested a lot I might could get sick?”

“You might could die,” the doctor said, managing not to insult the girl.

Robyn nodded. Ptolemy nodded too.

“This is too much for a child,” the old man said.

“She brought you here, Mr. Grey.”

“If we gonna talk about death, she could wait outside.”

Ruben smiled again. “You’re just about half mad,” he said, “not quite. I’m the other half of that.”

“You like the crazy white doctor down in Adamsville used to come down an’ help colored men get shot and stabbed when the hospitals turnt them away?”

“I’m more like the gunshot or the knife wound.”

Ptolemy heard these words clearly, and he understood, even though he could not have explained this knowledge.

“You want my life, Doctor?”

“There’s a drug,” Bryant Ruben said. “They make it in a town in Southeast Asia where there are fewer laws governing research. A group of physicians from all over the world that work there, remotely, are testing a medicine that might be able to help you.”

“A trial-and-mistake medicine?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah. It’s dangerous, and would be illegal if the FDA knew about it. It doesn’t always work, and when it does, it burns bright for just a little while. We need subjects who have not deteriorated so much that they have lost too much, so that we can tell where we went right and where we went wrong . . . after the subject dies.”

“Dies?” Robyn stood up, putting her hand on Ptolemy’s shoulder. “Let’s get outta here, Uncle.”

But Ptolemy Grey didn’t stand. Instead he bowed his head and pressed his fingertips against the bones of his skull. He’d caught a few of the doctor’s words. He’d grasped at them something like when he was a child chasing chicken feathers floating on the breeze.

“Come on, Uncle.”

Ptolemy raised his head; staring into those beady green eyes, he realized with a shock that he was staring into the face of the Devil.

“Devil a angel just like all the rest,” Coydog had told him more than once. “Devil came to the Lord and demanded more. His wings was singed an’ he was th’ow’d down, but he still a angel, and you got to give him his due.”

The two men, Dr. Ruben and Ptolemy, looked at each other across the desk. There was the heavy scent of roses drifting in from the open door. Robyn’s hand was on Ptolemy’s shoulder.

“Do I sign something?” Ptolemy asked the Devil.

“A form willing your body to a university I have a relationship with. It says that upon your death we can examine your remains.”

“Uncle Grey, we don’t have to listen to this man.”

“Do you promise that it woik?” Ptolemy asked, a slight smile on his dark lips.

“Not always. There are three phases ...”

The doctor explained but Ptolemy did not care, or even try, to comprehend. He watched the fallen angel’s expressions and gestures, looking for signs and portents. There was a rushing sound in his ears and his heart ran fast.

“. . . that has been the last phase,” Bryant Ruben was saying. “We’ve changed the cocktail, hopefully to alleviate this symptom, but I’d be lying if I promised you anything.”

Devil the most honest man walk the earth, Coydog had said. He offer you his treasure and take your soul. They call him the Prince of Liars, but he ain’t no different than a bartender: you pays your nickel and drinks your poison.

“Uncle.”

“If I drink yo’ medicine, that will be for you, right?” Ptolemy asked, picking over the words carefully, slowly.

“You’re likely to find relief from your cognitive issues.”

“But you wanna pay me, right?”

“I would give you a sum of cash . . . twenty-five hundred dollars.”

It was Ptolemy’s turn to grin. The back door of his mind was open for a moment. He didn’t understand most of what either of them was saying but he could follow anything the doctor said with an answer that he knew must be true.

“Keep yo’ money, Satan,” he said. “Gimme the poison for you, but I don’t need no money.”

A deal was struck, over Robyn’s protests. Papers were signed, plans were made, and the men shook hands. Ruben saw them both to the door.

“You paid Antoine Church for this?” Robyn asked at the door.

The green-eyed Devil-doctor smiled for her, barely nodding. She sucked her tooth at him.

Ptolemy laughed on the bus ride home.

“Uncle, we cain’t do this,” Robyn said.

“It’s already done, baby.”

“But you don’t have to go through with it.”

“I already done the hard part.”

“What’s that?” the dark child asked.

“I done played the Devil an’ beat him at his own game. On’y way he could take my soul is if he give to me. But I tricked him. I made a fair trade wit’ him. I give ’im my body but not my soul.”

“Uncle, you crazy.”

“Not for long.”

Olga Slatkin, a young woman of Lithuanian origin, came to the apartment the following Monday.

“I vas told by my agency to come here and give Mr. Grey these antibiotic shots for five days,” she said to Robyn.

“That was Dr. Ruben?” the girl asked.

“No. No, I do not know this man. I vork for a voman named Borman.”

Olga was young and unattractive but still Ptolemy liked her face.

She gave him one injection in his left arm and then another in his right.

“Why he got to have two shots?” Robyn asked, hovering behind the nurse.

“One is the medicine, and the other is for what the medicine might do.”

“Like what?” Robyn demanded.

“Fever, nausea, diarrhea, pain,” the Eastern European said, her face flat and her voice matter-of-fact.

“Uncle, I don’t think that you should be doin’ this,” Robyn said after the nurse had gone.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s the only chance we got.”

“But you old,” the child complained. “You might could get so sick that you might could die.”

“I’ma die anyways,” he said. “But this way I won’t get so lost when I look around the room, I’ll have my double-u ara eye en gee for myself, and then I could turn on the thing, the thing, the thing . . . That thing there,” he said, pointing at the television.

Robyn knew what Ptolemy got like when he spoke too long or got excited. If he went on much longer he’d stop making any sense at all and get frustrated and then sad.

“Okay, Uncle Grey,” she said, “but that doctor said that this medicine would probably kill you.”

Ptolemy was looking at his hands by then. He was wondering once again why words failed him after just a few sentences.

That night the place on his left arm where the nurse had injected him started to burn. He didn’t tell Robyn, though. He knew that the girl could stop the nurse from coming if she really wanted to.

Olga came again the next day, and that night Ptolemy’s arm seethed all the way to his shoulder.

“Did you live on a farm?” he asked her on the third day as she injected the medicine.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “How did you know that?”

“You could see the country in people’s eyes,” he said. “It’s like deep skies and long times’a bein’ quiet.”

Olga Slatkin smiled at her charge and then frowned.

“How haff you been feeling, Mr. Grey?”

Robyn was in the living room, watching the TV, because she didn’t like seeing him given his medicine.

“My arms burn some,” he said.

“Do you vant me to stop?”

“No, baby. I could take the pain. I seen Coy dance on fire, but he never told, never.”

By Thursday the pain was in both arms, his chest, and his head too. On Friday, when Shirley Wring came for a visit, Robyn had to turn her away.

“Uncle Grey got a fever,” Robyn told the older woman. “He says that maybe you could come back next week. He’s real sick and cain’t get out of bed.”

Shirley Wring took in these words as she stood there, staring at the teenager.

“Why don’t you like me, child?” Shirley asked at last.

“He really is sick,” Robyn complained. “I ain’t lyin’ to you.”

“I believe you, but you still don’t like me and I don’t know what it is I done to make you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Miss Wring. I don’t even think about you at all.”

“See? Now that’s just rude. Why you wanna be rude to me? I’m your uncle’s friend.”

“He not my real uncle,” the woman-child said to the woman. “But that’s what it is. He don’t know who he lookin’ at or what he sayin’ half the time. People wanna take his money or his things. He paid your utility bill and now you come by all the time.”

Shirley Wring smiled then and nodded. She walked into the living room, noticing that the door to Ptolemy’s bedroom was closed.

“I told you that he cain’t get outta his bed,” Robyn said, a strain of grief in her young voice.

“I ain’t gonna bother him,” Shirley told the girl.

The older woman sat down on a maple chair in front of a TV tray that Ptolemy sometimes used as a table for intimate teas with his friend.

“It was my phone bill,” Shirley said. “I asked him for five dollars and he gave me ten. But I offered him this to hold.”

She placed her faded cherry-red purse on the TV tray and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took the piece of pink tissue paper which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large green stone. This she handed to Robyn.

The girl could see that the metal was gold and the stone was precious. She had seen nice things in magazines, on TV shows, and through thick, bulletproof glass.

“Cabochon emerald,” Shirley Wring said.

After fondling the stone a moment or two Robyn held it out to Shirley, but the half-blind woman would not take it.

“My great-grandmother stoled it outta her ex-master’s house in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s bluecoats freed the slaves,” Shirley said in a tone of voice that was obviously quoting family lore. “She told her son that even though the ring was worth a whole lifetime for a poor black family that he should keep it as a treasure that stood for our freedom. My grandfather was named Bill Hollyfield, but he changed his name to Wring to honor his mother’s gift to him.

“I want you to give that ring to your uncle and tell him to get bettah and that I want him to be well because he has been like a real man to me when I was down past my last dollar.”

Robyn felt the gravity of the old woman’s gift like a stone in her chest. She wanted to return Shirley’s family name and history but the old woman’s wounded eyes stopped her.

“I cain’t take this from you, Miss Wring.”

“It’s not for you, sugah. It’s for Mr. Ptolemy Grey. It’s me tellin’ him how much that ten dollahs he give me meant.”

“But this precious,” Robyn said. “This is worth much more’n that.”

“No it ain’t, baby.”

Shirley rose and touched the girl’s cheek.

“If he get real sick an’ might die, will you let me see him?”

These words brought Robyn to tears. She sat down on the well-made white bed, crying on the emerald ring in her hand. When she finally raised her head, Shirley had gone and closed the door behind her.

Just after Olga Slatkin gave Ptolemy his final injection Robyn had to help her hold the old man down. He was delirious, shouting unintelligible words and writhing in his big bed.

“Coy! Coy!” the old man shouted.

“What’s he sayin’?” Robyn cried as she held down his surprisingly strong right arm.

“He’s not making sense,” the Eastern European woman said. “Hold him for a moment and he vill calm down.”

A minute later Ptolemy slumped down in his bed, unconscious, hardly breathing.

“It is always like this after last shot,” Olga said. “They go to sleep for three or four days and then they wake up, most of the time.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of the time’?” Robyn cried.

“He is sick. This medicine is supposed to help, but vit some people it does not vork.”

“He wasn’t sick before you give him these shots.”

“But vy vood Dr. Borman tell me to give shots if he vas not sick?”

While the women talked, Ptolemy awoke on a grassy hill above a stream that flowed over big stones and made the sound of children’s laughter. He smiled and stood up without pain or strain. He wasn’t old or young or concerned with being old or young. The sun shone brightly upon his head and there were white clouds here and there. The sunlight was so powerful that it burned his face, but he didn’t care about that. The day was a particular one he remembered from his childhood. The river was the Tickle, and Coydog McCann was just a ways up from where he now stood.

“He wasn’t sick,” Robyn said somewhere beyond the blue, “before you give him the shots.”

“I cannot tell you anything more than vat they told me,” the plain-faced European country girl replied.

When Ptolemy scratched his head his fingers found hair up there. This seemed odd to him, but what difference did hair make anyway?

Coy was sitting on a tree stump by the water, holding a homemade bamboo pole with a twine line.

When the old man (who didn’t look nearly so old anymore) looked up, he frowned for a second and then smiled. Ptolemy had forgotten the two canine teeth that his friend had lost. It made his smile seem deeper than the average man’s grin.

“Is that you, L’il Pea?” the old man asked.

“Yeah, Uncle Coy. Yes, sir.”

“You come all the way back here just to see me?”

“I’ont know,” said the old man who was no longer an old man. “I just saw a white nurse from somewhere around Venice an’ she gimme some shots an’ then I woke up on the rise ovah on t’other side’a the hill.”

“I only got one pole,” Coy McCann said in apology.

“That’s okay. I could just sit next to ya if you ain’t just wanna be alone.”

“Hell no. I been waitin’ for ya.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. You owe me a debt, and I been waitin’ till I get released.”

Ptolemy knew what the old man meant. This knowledge made him silent and so he sat down next to the fisherman and peered into the water.

The sun was bright but not bright enough to illuminate the shadows that lay between and underneath the large stones in the river. Catfish and crawfish and other creatures hid down under there in darkness, where bears and cougars and coyotes couldn’t get at them; where even the long-necked, elegant gray herons’ beaks could not go.

But Ptolemy’s mind could climb down there with the fishes and algae. The darkness was cold like night, black and deep . . . sleep . . .

Wake up, boy, wake up,” he said in a whisper that was both soft and sharp.

Little Ptolemy opened his eyes and squinted from the pain. He could tell that it was the early hours of the morning, even before the time that his father and mother got out of bed to work in the fields. His brother and sisters were sound asleep as only children could be, and his parents were asleep in the front room of their two-room shack.

“Daddy?”

“Shh!” Coy commanded, putting his fingers to the boy’s lips. “Come with me.”

Coy pulled the boy out of bed and through a flap in the tarpaper wall and all Ptolemy had on was a nightshirt.

The moon was crescent and an owl passed above them. Crickets chattered and tree frogs chirped. Ptolemy had rarely seen the depth of night. He had never been outside this late, moving along the path behind his family’s shack.

“Where we goin’, Coydog?”

The old man stopped and turned, putting his face very close to the boy’s.

“Shet your mouth or we both be dead. You unnerstand me, boy?”

And with that he clutched Li’l Pea’s right forearm and dragged him deep into the woods. They traveled for a long time, until they came to Hangman’s Knoll, and climbed up past there through a deep wood until they reached Mourners’ Falls. Ptolemy wouldn’t have been able to find the falls on his own, even in daylight, but Coy’s steps were sure and certain, quick and desperate.

The falls were forty feet high and constant because all the water that came down from the hills drained here. Coy took Pity on a winding path of big stones that led up to the cascades and then around to the cave hidden behind the blind of water that was barely visible in the weak moonlight.

Ptolemy’s nightshirt was soaked by the time they got inside the cave. Coy let go of his arm and the boy went to his knees on the stone floor, shivering from cold.

Coy lit an oil-soaked torch, illuminating a stone space that was about the size of the worship hall at Liberty Baptist.

“I’m cold,” the boy complained.

“Come back here,” Coy replied, stalking to the far end of the huge shale and granite chamber.

Something in the old man’s voice, something that the child had never heard before, made him obey in spite of his own suffering.

All along the back of the cave were big flat rocks that had fallen from the roof, broken or shattered.

“This one up next to the north corner,” Coy McCann said, waving his torch over a big flat stone that was black except for a white swath at the right side. “Under here is where I hid the treasure. Under here is what I want you to take just as soon as you strong enough to lift it. Go on now, try an’ lift it away from the wall.”

Ptolemy grasped the edge of the rock, which was much larger than him, and strained to push it away from the wall. But he couldn’t budge it at all.

“Good,” Coy said, smiling for the first time that night. “You too young, and this is too soon for you to get at it. But later on, when you get to be a young man, I want you to move that stone or break it and take that treasure and make a difference for poor black folks treated like they do us.”

Later on they were out under the threads of moonlight that wavered between the branches of pines and oaks.

“I got to go to my place before I run,” Coy told Ptolemy. “But I’m ascared to do it.”

“Why you scared, Uncle Coy?”

The old man knelt down and brought his leathery hands to the sides of the boy’s face.

“You know Jersey Manheim?”

Ptolemy knew and hated and feared the evil white man. He was one of the wealthiest men in their whole community and he treated black people like slaves. He owned the land that Ptolemy’s parents worked and kept them so far in debt with his community store and loans for their tools and supplies that they couldn’t ever leave or save one thin dime.

“One time when he was drunk as a skunk he told me,” Coy said, “that he had a pot’a gold. That him and his fathers before him had put away a gold coin for every week since thirty years before the Civil War. I did my numbers and figgered he had to have nearly five thousand coins. Now, that’s some money right there. You know I been thinkin’ on them coins for years. And finally, just a few hours before I got to you I went in his house and lugged ’em out to his wagon. I brung ’em up here, heaved ’em under that rock I showed ya.”

“How come he didn’t wake up when you went in his house?” the child asked.

“’Cause when I came by earlier to give him your daddy’s rent I poured some laudanum in his gin when he wasn’t lookin’. You know he drink that gin ev’ry night. An’ when I was sure that he was paralyzed, I come on in an’ searched the house until I fount the treasure chest under a trapdo’ under his bed.”

“An’ he was sleep?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yeah.”

“So he don’t know you took it.”

“That don’t mattah to the white man. He don’t have to know. All he got to do is remembah that I was the last niggah he saw. I was the last he saw and so I’ma be the first he go to.”

“So you gonna run?”

“Damn right I’ma run. I’ma run all the way to New York City with the twenty coins I took for myself. I’ma go up there an’ I won’t see another cotton plant ever again in my life.”

At these words Li’l Pea Grey started to cry. Coy was his closest friend.

“Sometimes we got to make a sacrifice, Pity,” the old man said. “Now, come go wit’ me to my house so I could get my things and make it outta the county before sunup.”

They moved on back-road paths through the night headed for the lean-to shelter that Coy McCann had called home since the barber took over his room for his new wife and child. Ptolemy didn’t think anymore about his feet or the cold. He didn’t worry about the white people that might be after him or his uncle. He felt as if he were a soldier now, fighting on enemy ground, like in the stories he and Coy read down by the Tickle when the fish weren’t biting.

“Stay here,” Coy told Ptolemy at a stand of live oaks on a rise that looked down on the old man’s shelter.

“How come?”

“I wanna see you every minute I can before I’m gone forever,” Coy replied, “but this is my most dangerous moment. I got all my things in a bag in the house. I couldn’t take it with me because of how heavy the gold was gonna be. And I had to get you and show you where the gold was before I left. So now I just got to hope that old Jersey drunk enough drug to keep him sleepin’ through the night. But if it don’t, I don’t want him to find you down there wit’ me.”

Ptolemy slipped behind a tree as his uncle spoke, feeling both afraid and ashamed of his fear. He watched as Coydog McCann loped down the hill to his home. Just when he was at the tarp entrance, someone yelled and white men jumped out from all over the place.

The first white man cuffed Ptolemy’s friend, and the boy shouted, unable to keep the pain out of his mouth. But no one heard him because they were all shouting and hollering and beating Coy mercilessly, throwing him from man to man.

The sun was a red strip above the farthest hill.

Shouting loudly, Jersey Manheim asked Coy again and again where he had hidden his money. And for a long time Coy was silent. He was surrounded by thirteen men who meant to kill him, but Coy took the blows. Finally he shouted out something; the only words Ptolemy could make out were “... bottom of the well . . .”

Mercifully the vision of the lynching passed by the fevered dreamer’s eyes quickly. He only caught a glimpse of the hanging man dancing on fire while the white men laughed and raised their firebrands in the half darkness of dawn.

Twenty-six-year-old Sensia Howard was married to Ezra Bindle when Ptolemy, a man of forty-five years, met them at a barbecue in Griffith Park. Her yellow dress made its own party, and Ezra’s powerful arm held her so tightly about the waist that they might have been grafted like that.

Sensia was medium brown with dark hair that shone in the L.A. sunshine. Her eyes were different colors of brown and her smile made Ptolemy happy.

He mentioned a book he’d been reading and how much he liked going to the library on Avalon.

“You live near there?” Sensia asked innocently.

“Across the street. In a big blue boardinghouse,” Ptolemy said. “It’s funny that the house is so big ’cause my room the size of a two-cent postage stamp.”

“I own my own house,” Ezra said then. He was twice Ptolemy’s size, the color of aged red brick, and proud. “I keep my woman here in nice clothes, and I feed her steak three times a week.”

“What kinda book you readin’, Mr. Grey?” Sensia asked.

“Called Night Man. It’s about a man who live in darkness and who nevah see the light of day.”

“Nevah?”

“What you do for a livin’?” Ezra asked Ptolemy.

“I used to ’liver ice off a truck, but now I do cleanup for the county.”

“How much they pay you for that?”

“How does he go to the bank?” Sensia asked, obviously talking about the protagonist of Ptolemy’s book. “How does he go to the post office?”

“He does all his bankin’ by mail,” Ptolemy said. “An’ he, an’ there’s a twenty-four-hour post office he go to a lot.”

“That’s so interesting,” the young beauty said. “A man that’s just different from everybody else.”

“We gotta go, Sensie,” Ezra Bindle said. “Rex an’ them want us to have a drink together.”

“Can you come with, Mr. Grey?” she asked.

“They didn’t invite him,” Ezra said before Ptolemy could say yes.

“Then I’ll stay here an’ talk to Mr. Grey about his book while you go guzzle that beer,” she said, pushing out from the grip as she spoke.

“You are coming with me,” the big red-brown man said to his young wife. And he dragged her off.

Ptolemy had been married, started a family, and gotten divorced by that time. His children were almost grown, living with their mother, and he felt like an old man, except for a moment there under the scrutiny of Sensia Howard’s eyes.

But Ezra dragged her away through the parking lot and out past the baseball field, where uniformed white men in some amateur league played their game.

Ptolemy watched them go: Ezra pulling on her arm and Sensia struggling to get free. He felt almost as if the brute had pulled out one of his organs and was running away with it, leaving him wounded and sore.

Ptolemy was flying above the park then. It was really more like a small forest than a manicured lawn. It gave him a giddy feeling seeing all the various people and hidden animals, paths and clumps of trees.

He was flying above Los Angeles, and every once in a while he’d turn his gaze upward, where the blue was so intense that it made him feel as if he’d burn out his soul with the vision and so he had to look away, back to earth, where life was pedestrian and shabby.

He was flying in his sleep, rising higher and higher until he remembered that men were not made to fly and that sooner or later he would come crashing back down to the ground. The sudden fright woke him and he sat up in the bed in his window-less room in the big blue house across the street from the public library.

Ptolemy considered the dream of flying and fear of the fall. He thought about the picnic he had been to the weekend before with his friends who knew Ezra, who had a wife named Sensia.

It was 6:45 in the morning.

Someone knocked at the door.

There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future,” Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. “When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you’ll never know what might have been.”

“How do I know when it’s time to move quick?” L’il Pea asked.

“When somethin’ big happens and then somethin’ else come up.”

Ptolemy got out of the bed, laughing at the foolishness of his childhood. He’d loved his uncle and cried for days after the old man’s demise but he had come to understand that Coy McCann was a dreamer mostly and that his lessons were either useless or dangerous.

He opened the door, expecting a rooming-house neighbor who needed help of some sort. Everybody in the Blue Bonnet, as they called their home, was up early to go to work at some job cleaning or carrying, cooking or breaking stone.

When he opened the door and saw Sensia Howard standing there, all Ptolemy could think about was Coy and how well he understood even the incomprehensible. Coy became Ptolemy’s religion on that morning, standing in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

Ptolemy gawped at the girl, who now wore a green frock that made her brown skin glow like fire.

“Are you gonna put on some pants, Mr. Grey?” were her first words to him.

He was standing there in boxer shorts, expecting some normal person who shouldn’t expect him to get dressed after being dragged from bed.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Hold on.” And he went back to his closet and pulled out a pair of brown trousers and a yellow shirt.

As he dressed he remembered that he hadn’t asked her in. Maybe she’d think this was an insult and leave. And so he went back to the door without putting on socks and shoes.

Sensia was there, waiting.

“Come on in,” he said.

He only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he’d found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he’d never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while. He wondered what Coy would have said about those pebbles as he removed them, the book, and the water glass from the chair.

“Where do you want me to sit?” Sensia asked.

“What are you doin’ here, Mrs. Howard?”

“Howard’s my maiden name and I’m not married no more. At least not as far as I’m concerned.”

“You not?”

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Thursday.”

“And what day did we meet?”

“Sunday. No, no . . . Saturday.”

She smiled, studied the seating arrangements, and sat on the straight-back pine chair.

“You go sit on the bed, Mr. Grey.”

He did so.

She beamed at him and nodded. “It was Saturday, because I left Ezra on Sunday, the day after he manhandled me.”

Ptolemy felt like a bug fixed in amber, caught forever in brilliance and beauty beyond his understanding.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, Miss Howard?”

“Can I come sit next to you on your bed?”

He gulped, which gave the impression of a nod, and so she moved from chair to bed, putting her hand on his knee.

“My mama always told me,” she said, “that a woman must have at least three days between men. Three whole days or people could say that she was loose.”

Ptolemy said, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” and they kissed lightly.

“Why you shakin’ your head, Mr. Grey?”

“Because I’m almost forty-six, will be in two months and a half, and I have never seen you comin’.”

“I’m twenty-six,” Sensia said, and then kissed his cheek, “and I been waitin’ to find you every day I been alive.”

“Me?”

“I saw you at that barbecue party and I knew that you would read to me and hold me if I had fever. I knew that you would ask me how I was today and hear every word I said. A year later when I had forgot, you’d still be there to remind me. My man.”

“And that’s why you left Ezra?”

“No. I left Ezra because he pushed on me and grabbed at me. But he did that because he knew how much I wanted to be with you.”

With that, Sensia stood up and took off her green dress and Ptolemy knew that Coy was right.

“Are you gonna take off them pants?” she asked him, and the dream shifted while someone in the room moaned, either in ecstasy or pain.

He woke up to find her dead twenty-two years later. She hadn’t put on a pound, smoked, or drunk to excess, but she died of a stroke in her sleep while he dreamed of waking up to her smile. She wasn’t yet forty-nine, would never be. She’d had lovers and times away, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to leave her (except once), nor could he bar her from their door. In the decade before she died she had begun to hoard things: suitcases and clothes, newspapers and books. She’d go to secondhand stores and buy hat racks and jewelry boxes, furniture and musical instruments that she meant to learn to play but never did. The kitchen had fallen into disrepair and they ate take-out food from pizza kitchens and Chinese restaurants that were no more than holes in the wall. Ptolemy would get up every morning and buy them coffee in Styrofoam cups at the diner two blocks down.

And he loved her.

“What do you think about this dress,” she’d ask him, twirling about in something new or used that she’d bought with money he made working for the county maintenance department.

He’d look at her posing, knowing that no man could get between this. She might meet someone now and then that distracted her; like Harlan Norman, who asked her to go to Hawaii with him. They spent a month, and all of Harlan’s money, on the islands, but then she came back, alone, with a big black pearl for Ptolemy.

There were many days that Ptolemy wanted to kill Sensia. He’d bought a short-barreled .25-caliber pistol once when she didn’t come home for the weekend. But then, on Tuesday, she walked through their apartment door and smiled for him. He forgot his mission and they made love and she said she was sorry.

One day she told him, “I will nevah cheat on you again, Papa,” and as far as he knew she hadn’t.

When he woke up that morning next to her corpse he cried for an hour; cried calling emergency; cried while the ambulance drivers tried to resuscitate her.

“Stroke,” the Asian paramedic said.

“She nevah did you right, Pitypapa,” Niecie said.

“Eleven hundred dollars,” the funeral director said.

“Amen,” the preacher said to a room filled with men and women that had been her lovers over the years. Even Ezra Bindle was there. He had a portly wife and seven portly children but he came to say good-bye because Sensia was the kind of woman that lovers pined after even when they no longer felt the love.

Ptolemy was already an old man. He read to Sensia at night and asked her about her day. He made her chicken soup when she was ill—and she was often ill. She was never out of his mind since the first day he’d seen her and she shook off the grip of Ezra Bindle to be his woman.

“Even if I wander, I will always find my way back home to you,” she’d told him.

He’d put those words on her tombstone, sold two of Coy’s doubloons to pay for it and for the flowers to be put on her grave every Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday.

“Wake up, Uncle,” Robyn said from somewhere beyond the blue, blue sky above the graveyard.

Things began to happen quickly after the death and burial of Sensia Howard: Ptolemy saw himself as a young man with a stout lever under the light of an oil-soaked brand, moving the dark stone that hid the double-thick canvas bags filled with old gold coins; he was working, working, working cleaning out buildings set for demolition, or empty lots where the city planned to build, or the sidewalks in front of courts, office buildings, and police stations; he was talking to Coy in life and death, loving Sensia, missing his children (Rayford and Rayetta), who despised him after their mother had taken them away; and wondering what a treasure could do to save black folks who had been crushed down by a whole epoch of restrictions and pain.

Uncle Grey?” Robyn said for maybe the thousandth time.

“Yeah, babe?” he replied with his eyes still closed.

“Are you awake?”

He raised his lids then, like the curtain from a stage at the beginning of a play that he had wanted to see for many, many years. Robyn was sitting next to him, holding his hands in hers.

“Right here,” he said. “How long?”

“Four days,” Robyn said. “I called Dr. Ruben but his phone was disconnected. I wanted to tell somebody but I didn’t know who. Niecie been wantin’ to come ovah, but I told her that the doctor said that you had this bad flu, that anybody breathe yo’ air could get sick.”

“Help me to sit up.”

He looked around the old bedroom, the room where he awoke to find Sensia Howard dead. He no longer felt the pang of loss when thinking of Sensia, whom he had loved unconditionally. She was gone, off in a lovely dream.

“Help me stand up.”

“I thought you was gonna die, Uncle,” Robyn said as she half-supported him into the living room.

He sat down on the rainbow hammock of his stool and stared at the TV. He reached out and pressed the I/O button and smiled as some comedy show came into view. His fingers felt hot, alive. He could sense the old bones beneath his leathered skin. He could feel the air and smell the sour odor rising from his body. He looked around.

It had been decades since that room had been so clean and neat.

“Robyn?”

“Yeah, Uncle?”

“You are a gift from God, you know that?”

“Are you okay?” she replied.