The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Nevah bettah, nevah once in all my years.”

“Yo’ skin is hot,” she said.

“Burnin’ bright,” he said with depth to his raspy voice.

“Maybe we should see a doctor.”

“We already seen the doctor,” he said. “What we gotta do is make things right, make things right ...” He stalled for a moment, then found the thread of his thoughts again. “Because there’s a lot to do for you and Reggie’s kids, for Niecie and black folks all ovah the world.”

“Like what?”

Instead of answering, Ptolemy looked at his child savior. She didn’t have the magic of Sensia or the deep, crazy accuracy of Coydog, but Robyn was the best of them . . . Ptolemy dawdled over this thought a moment. Here he was, sitting on a folding chair in his home after years of sadness and careless loss. His mind had fallen in on itself like an old barn left unmended and untended through too many seasons.

“What, Uncle?” Robyn asked.

“A gift from God,” he said again. “Without you I wouldn’t even be here.”

“Somebody else woulda come,” Robyn said, bowing her head.

“Yeah. They’da come, but I still wouldn’t be here. It’s me that’s the lump’a clay and you that’s the hand of God.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when Ptolemy and Robyn showed up at her door three days later.

He’d needed twenty-four hours to recover from the weakness four days in bed had put on him. The next day he bathed and pondered, read a book called Real Time, and listened to jazz on the radio. Then he went to a small men’s store on Central and bought a dark-blue suit with a deep-brown shirt and a yellow tie and black shoes.

“That the way you used to dress when you was a playah, Mr. Grey?” Robyn had asked him while he stood before the store’s triple dressing mirror.

“No, baby. That’s Coydog McCann I see in the mirror—the classiest man I evah knew.”

After donning his new clothes Ptolemy took Robyn to the ladies’ shop next door, and then to the taxi stand on Normandie. From there they went to Niecie’s home.

“Hey, Niecie,” the old man said in a tone he hadn’t known for decades. “How you doin’, sugah?”

Niecie stopped there in the desolate living room, cocking her head to try and get a bead on the voice she was hearing.

“I’m all bettah now, Niecie,” Ptolemy said. “Robyn done took me to a doctor near about killed me, but then he pulled me back from the night.”

“You can, you can think bettah now, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked, stumbling on her own tongue. “Like when you was young?”

“Mmmm,” Ptolemy said, smiling and nodding. “But I’m still old in my bones, so you gonna offah me a seat?”

After Robyn got the lemonade from the kitchen, big-bodied Hilliard came back from a run to the store with Letisha and Arthur in tow. The big thief frowned when he saw Ptolemy sitting there with his legs crossed and a glass of lemonade in his hand.

“Boy,” Ptolemy greeted. He wasn’t mad at the young man anymore.

“Name’s Hilly, not boy.”

“Hilliard, you will speak respectfully to elders in my house,” his mother said.

Hilliard glowered.

“Why you wouldn’t let me in your house when I come all the way ovah there to see about you, Papa Grey?”

“You know why.”

“’Cause you old an’, an’, an’ senile.”

“Hilliard!” Niecie said.

“It’s true.”

“Maybe I was a little forgetful,” Ptolemy admitted, “but I could still count up to three with the best of ’em.”

“You see, Mama? He talks crazy.”

The angry young man’s tone was aggressive. Robyn put her hand in her purse as Ptolemy smiled. The children huddled next to their auntie Niecie’s chair, staring at Hilly as if he were some dangerous stranger.

“I ain’t so crazy I don’t know how to make you listen,” Ptolemy said.

He put his hand inside his breast pocket and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

The sight of money hit Hilly like a slap.

“What’s that, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked.

“Yo’ boy took me to the bank with three checks, got my signature, but only gave me money for the one,” Ptolemy said. “That’s why he blusterin’, ’cause he feel guilty. But I had Robyn bring me ovah here to bury the hatchet.”

He leaned over, handing the roll of cash to his grandniece.

“That’s six hunnert dollahs, Niecie. I wanna make sure that these kids is gettin’ what they need. I’ma give you sumpin’ like that ev’ry mont’. Lucky I didn’t give yo’ son my passbook or I might not have nuthin’ left ta give ya.”

“My boy does not steal,” Niecie said, clutching the wad in her lap. “You gettin’ old, Pitypapa. You just made a mistake thinkin’ you give him three checks but it was only one.”

Ptolemy noticed then that she was wearing a maroon dress with pink flowers stitched into it. It was faded and worn.

“Madeline Richards made that dress for you, didn’t she?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn grinned when she saw the surprise on her one-time guardian’s face.

“How did you know that?”

“Sensie introduced you to Maddie. An’ Maddie made clothes for a livin’. She always was partial to flower patterns, an’ when she couldn’t find no cloth with a flower she sewed some on.”

“I remember meetin’ Maddie,” Niecie said. “She made this dress maybe fifteen years ago.”

“When you was a li’l girl your uncle Roger called you Betty Boop because you loved to watch that cartoon on the TV. If you’d sing her boop-boop-pe-doop song he’d give you two nickels.”

Hilda “Niecie” Brown frowned and cocked her head again. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and after a moment or two she nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. Uncle Roger. He died in Vietnam and I cried for what felt like a whole week. He wasn’t really my uncle, though.”

“That’s what yo’ mama said, but he was her brother usin’ another name because he had killed a man in Alabama and then took on another man’s identity. He died under a false name. He really was your uncle, but nobody said it so that he didn’t get put on a Alabama chain gang.”

“You remembah all that, Pitypapa?”

“Doctor cured me, baby,” Ptolemy said as he rose to his feet.

Robyn stood behind him, her hand still in her purse, her eye on Hilliard.

“He opened my mind all the way back to the first day I could remembah as a child. I can think so clear that I could almost remembah what my father’s father was thinkin’ the day he conceived my old man. So you could say what you will but that boy there’s a thief an’ if you don’t tell him sumpin’ he gonna go the way that Roger would’a gone if anybody evah breathed his real name.”

Robyn kept her eyes on Hilly while Niecie stared at her uncle, looking for the man she’d seen little more than a month before.

When she didn’t speak, Ptolemy addressed her again: “I’ma give you that six hunnert dollahs for these kids here ev’ry month. As long as they with you I’ma give it to ’em, but I won’t if you send ’em back to they mama.”

Ptolemy gazed down at the children and they cowered. The boy scrunched up his dark face, trying to understand what the money had to do with him and his sister.

“They wit’ me,” Niecie said, and Ptolemy nodded.

He then turned to the brutish boy. “Hilly, you saved me from that crazy woman and so I forgive you. I’ma call on you sometime soon ’cause I need to know somethin’.”

“What you wanna know from me?”

“Later.”

Ptolemy touched Robyn’s shoulder and they walked out the door and away from the house, moving slowly, like royalty surveying the plight of the poor.

“Why you wanna get Hilly all mad, Uncle?” Robyn said on the bus ride home.

She was wearing the yellow dress that he’d bought her at the women’s clothes store. He knew it was wrong, that the dress reminded him of the day he met Sensia Howard, but he couldn’t stop himself—he loved both women so.

“Yellow’s my favorite color,” he’d told her, “and you my favorite girl.”

But on the bus he just nodded and said, “I need a inroad.”

“What you mean, Uncle Grey?”

“The men just come to you, don’t they, girl?” he asked instead of answering her question directly.

“Huh?”

“Men,” he repeated. “They just come to you—on the street, in the bus, at the movies. They all wanna know you, want you to smile at ’em.”

“Nobody I wanna know.”

“Imagine if nobody evah looked at you twice,” Ptolemy said.

His mind straddled two worlds. He no longer needed a translator to decipher what was going on around him, but he was still sitting by the Tickle River, talking to Coy and making plans for a future eighty years from then.

“What you mean?” Robyn asked.

“Some people got a magnet in ’em,” Ptolemy said, pulling his mind away from the deep-blue past. “No one understands why, but there’s people you just wanna know. You might be quiet and shy, but that someone walk by you and you climb right ovah your fear an’ say, ‘How you doin’?’ just like you was old friends. That’s you, Robyn. I know, ’cause my Sensie was like that. Men, and women too, would come up to her and ask her to be wit’ them. She met this schoolteacher one time, Mrs. Gladys Pine. Gladys told Sensie she loved her and for a week or two they’d meet in the afternoons at a motel on Slauson.”

“When she was married to you?” Robyn asked.

“Sensie told me she liked Gladys’s mind and she didn’t feel like she was cheatin’ ’cause it was a woman and not a man.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Anyway, Gladys finally told her husband that she was leavin’, that she had fount her true love. The next day Sensie told her that they’d have to stop meetin’ at the motel. The day aftah that, Paul Pine put a bullet in his head.”

“Damn.”

“That’s how powerful you are, girl,” Ptolemy said, taking Robyn’s hand in his. “You pretty, but pretty alone’s not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that’s like a mirror. Men an’ women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can’t bear to see you go.”

“Uncle Grey, was you always thinkin’ all these things even when you couldn’t talk so good?”

“When you get old,” he said, and then he paused, thinking about Coy and Lupo, who were known in the colored community as the Dog Brothers. They ran together as young men, and when they got into their forties, old for men back then, they could sit together for hours, never saying a word and never getting tired of the company. “When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin’ ’less somebody else can understand.”

“And nobody was listenin’ to you, Uncle?”

“And nobody understood until you, child.”

“But what’s that got to do with Gladys Pine?”

“She nevah touched anybody outside’a herself. She was like I was when you met me—alone in her mind. And then she seen Sensie and reached out and my girl took her hand and helt it to her breast. You know, I almost cry when I think about it. It was beautiful, even though it was a blues song too. Some people might say it was love on one hand and a fickle heart on the other, but what would have come from them if they didn’t see and say and feel . . . and die?”

“You deep, Uncle,” Robyn said.

“No, baby. I’m just like everybody else—everybody else.”

That night Ptolemy woke from a dream about Coy’s death. He had a fever but didn’t wake Robyn. He thought that he might die if he stayed in the bed, so he got up and went to the bathroom, where he swallowed four aspirin and turned on a lukewarm shower.

The water soothed him.

After a while he hunkered down in the tub and let the cool water cascade over his bony form. He wondered what was in the Devil’s medicine that kept his knees from hurting too much.

In that position, in the tub, he was seventeen again, lugging the heavy bags of coin from out of Coy’s secret cave. He borrowed his cousin’s Terraplane car and drove to Memphis, where he secreted the stolen treasure for three years. Every time he touched those coins he felt the cold of that cave’s water and the chill of death.

When he began to shiver, he rose up under the spray, turned off the water, and dried himself with a big thick towel that Robyn had bought. After he was dry he stared at his head and torso in the water-stained mirror. He probably weighed less than the sleeping child in the next room, but he’d put on weight. His face was not nearly so wrinkled as some old people he’d known, but he could see the ninety-one years in his eyes. He could see the old confusion hovering above his crown, waiting to settle back on him like a venomless smothering snake around its prey.

“Uncle?” Robyn said.

She was standing at the door.

Ptolemy took the towel from the sink and wrapped it around his skinny waist, using his hand as the clasp. He stared at the girl but did not speak.

“You okay, Uncle?”

He nodded.

“What’s wrong?”

“I know how a man could lose his mind, but how do he find it again?” he said as she approached him.

“You’re cold.”

“I was burnin’ up there in my bed. I was thinkin’ about the river . . .”

“Where you and Coydog used to fish?”

“How much money we got in the bank now?” he asked.

“All of it. Forty-two thousand in the savings account an’ the rest in that deposit box. Come on, Uncle, you should go back to bed.”

“What’s that boy’s name? The one you seein’.”

“Beckford?”

“Yeah . . . him. You like him?”

“He all right.” Robyn looked away and Ptolemy knew for sure that she had made love to the handsome friend of Reggie.

“You said he live with three other young men?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now that the money’s gone, you could bring him ovah if you want. You can sleep in the bedroom. I don’t care.”

“I don’t wanna talk about this, Uncle.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it makes me feel embarrassed.”

Ptolemy hooked Robyn’s chin with the index finger of his left hand and lifted her face to regard him. She was wearing just a T-shirt, and all that covered him was that towel. Ptolemy thought about that but he wasn’t ashamed.

“I love you, Uncle Grey,” Robyn said.

“’Course you do,” he said. “I’m like family.”

“Uh-uh,” the woman inside the child said. “I got family. I know what that feels like. No, Uncle, I could sit an’ listen to you for days. Even when yo’ mind was confused an’ you was scared, I still looked up to you. And you treat me with respect an’ you still be lookin’ at my legs an’ stuff. I don’t want Beckford in this house wit’ us.”

Both Ptolemys, past and present, heard the love in her voice; neither one had the words to answer back.

Where’d you put my toolbox?” he asked Robyn the next morning as he rummaged through the living room closet.

“I put it under yo’ bed,” Robyn said. She was lying on the couch that was also a bed, watching a show about strange fish in the deep ocean.

“Could you get down there and get it for me, please?”

When she jumped up from the couch, Ptolemy said, “You could finish your show, child. I don’t need you to snap to.”

Instead of sitting back down the girl came up to him and kissed his cheek and hugged him tight. Ptolemy would always get lost in a woman’s hug. His mind still drifted under the spell a soft embrace.

“What’s that for?”

“Would you marry me if I was twenty years older and you was fifty years younger?” she asked.

“You could do bettah than somebody like me.”

“God couldn’t do bettah than you, Uncle Grey.”

It wasn’t the words so much as the hunger in the child’s tone that brought the pain into his chest. It was the same pain he felt when the giant roach flew up in his kitchen. He gripped her shoulders and she gazed at him.

“Are you,” he asked, “are you goin’ out with Beckford tonight?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“No, it’s all right. I actually wanted to sit quiet and read some.”

“Are you tired’a me bein’ here, Uncle?”

“No, baby. You put a fire in my mind and love at my doorstep.” He’d heard the words somewhere before, maybe in a song.

Robyn left at six o’clock and by six-ten Ptolemy was in the living room closet, working his crowbar on the back end floor. There was a slot there made specially by Ptolemy almost five decades before. His apartment was on the ground floor. Below the floor was three feet of concrete. There he had carved out a place for Coydog’s treasure. It took him a while to jimmy the jury-rigged trapdoor but after some work he flipped it over. The ancient hinges screamed and parts of the wood floor splintered and popped.

Ptolemy wondered where all the dust came from. The box he hid from himself was covered with a quarter-inch of thick gray soot.

He used the iron key to open the chest but he didn’t even touch the bag inside. He knew the gold was there, coins that went back all the way to the Civil War and before, some used, some like new. But it wasn’t his treasure. He was just the guardian, obeying a long-ago command from Coy the thief, martyr, and partisan.

He didn’t need to fondle the gold but he took out an oiled cloth that was wrapped around a blue-black .25 pistol—which still gleamed darkly.

The grin on Ptolemy’s lips was not welcomed by him. He had never shot even a rabbit. But he smirked at the gun, turning it over and over in his hand.

Hello?” Hilly Brown said into the receiver.

“That you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“Papa Grey? Hey. Listen . . . I’m sorry for bein’ rude the other day. Mama told me to call you up and apologize.”

“Why haven’t you called, then?”

“I’ont know,” the brooding, bulbous, and brown man-child said. “I mean, I don’t know why I didn’t. I’ma pay you back, okay?”

“Why you take my money in the first place?”

“I didn’t think you would realize. You acted like you was drunk or high or sumpin’. So I thought it would be all right.”

“All right to steal?” Ptolemy asked while he opened and clenched his right hand slowly.

His knuckles hurt every time the fist got tight—but not that bad. His fiery mind was still in an old man’s body. He was weak as a boy and old as a man can get, but not as bad as he was—not half as bad.

You know everything,” Li’l Pea said to Coy one day when Coy had told him about George Washington Carver and the peanut.

“No, child,” Coy said in a surprisingly gentle tone, “it’s you know more’n me.”

Li’l Pea giggled and said, “Me? I’on’t hardly know nuthin’.”

“That might be, but still you know more’n me.”

“Like what?” the child asked, not realizing the impossibility of his question.

“You know how crickets smell and what pebbles sound like when they fall on the ground around yo’ feet. You see deep in the sky without havin’ to look or think about it, and you love your mama an’ yo’ daddy so much that they would die if God took you from them.”

“Don’t you know all them things?” the boy asked, sobered by the seriousness of the older man’s words.

“Like a suit’a clothes,” Coydog said. “I got them things like a new suit just off the rack, but they fit you like skin.”

“I don’t get you, Coy,” the boy said.

“The older you get the more you live in the past,” Coy intoned like a minister introducing his sermon. “Old man like me don’t have no first blue sky or thunderstorm or kiss. Old man like me don’t laugh at the taste of a strawberry or smell his own stink and smile. You right there in the beginnin’ when everything was new and true. My world is made outta ash and memories, broken bones and pain.

“Old man see the same things and walk the same roads he know so well that he don’t even have to open his eyes to make his way. Right and wrong two sides’a the same coin for me, but for you there’s only right. Somebody say sumpin’ an’ you hear ’em just like they say.”

“But what do you hear, Uncle Coy?”

“I hear everybody I evah knew talkin’ ’bout things nobody know no more. I hear preachers an’ judges, white men and black. I hear ’em talkin’ ’bout tomorrow when I know that was a long time ago.”

Ptolemy the old man considered his uncle. Maybe that’s when Coy made up his mind to rob Jersey Manheim. Maybe he was so tired of following the same path that he decided to jump off the road and make it through the wilderness one more time.

Papa Grey?” Hilly was saying through the line. “Papa Grey, you there?”

Ptolemy realized that he was drifting again; but not the way he had when he was feebleminded. Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.

“Was you an’ Reggie friends?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.

“We cousins, man.”

“But was you friends? Did you go out drinkin’ together? Did you talk?”

“Sure, we talked. We lived in the same house until he moved out with Nina.”

“But,” Ptolemy asked, dimly reminded of his first phone conversation with the boneheaded boy, “did you share your secrets wit’ him an’ did he tell you what was what?”

“I ain’t got no secrets, Papa Grey. I’ma man, not no child.”

“Did you tell Niecie why I didn’t wanna let you back in my house?”

After a long, angry silence, Hilly said, “No.”

“We all got secrets, boy. An’ the older we get the more secrets we got. Child tell ya anything, but a man just sip his drink an’ keep his mouf shet. But he might have one friend he talk to. Was you that friend to Reggie?”

“No.”

“Do you know who that friend was?”

The silence no longer shivered with anger. Ptolemy could almost hear his taciturn great-nephew thinking.

“Billy Strong,” Hilly said at last.

“Who’s he?”

“He run the gym on Slauson and Twenty-third.”

“Him an’ Reggie was close?”

“Yes, sir. They’d get together all the time. All the time.”

“An’ he work at the gym?” Ptolemy asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“All day?”

“Every day, Saturday and Sunday too.”

Ptolemy Grey hadn’t really slept after he’d awakened from the coma. He’d close his eyes and enter into a world both new and old to him. There he’d talk to Coy along the Tickle River and carry boxes of medicine in France for soldiers, most of whom were destined to die. He delivered ice and swept streets, made love to Sensia Howard so hard sometimes that he’d limp for a day or two afterward.

One night, with his eyes closed and his mind imagining, he inhabited his old feebleminded self, sitting in front of the TV. The black woman, who looked like a white woman passing for black, was talking about the war.

“More than a hundred Iraqis died in a suicide blast in the city of Tuz Khormato today. The suicide bomber set off his truck bomb in a crowded marketplace at midday.”

“Excuse me, lady,” Ptolemy said.

For a moment it seemed that she’d continue her report, not hearing his interruption, but then she turned and looked at him, into his living room. It was the old living room filled with stacks of moldering and unread newspapers, furniture, and trash.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Mr. Grey,” Ptolemy said formally.

The woman looked as if she wanted to turn away from him but found that she could not. She touched her ear as Ptolemy had often watched her do in the old days when he didn’t understand hardly anything. She touched it, but her ear didn’t help her change the subject or look away.

“My name is Ginger,” the woman in the vision said.

“Tell me, Ginger, what are you talkin’ about twenty-four hours a day?”

“The news, Mr. Grey. It’s the news.”

“What news?”

“There’s a war going on. People are dying.”

“Who’s the enemy? Is it Hitler again?”

“We aren’t quite sure who the enemy is. That’s what makes this war so hard.”

“If we don’t know who we fightin’, then how can we fight ’em?”

“We . . . ,” she said, and paused. “We . . . we aim our weapons at them and when they become frightened and take out their guns we know who they are.”

“I don’t get it, Ginger.”

“Me neither, Mr. Grey.”

“How can a man have a enemy an’ fight that enemy and still not know who he is?” Ptolemy asked, proud of his ability to string his words together like a necklace of great big black Hawaiian pearls.

“Haven’t you ever heard of Zorro?” Ginger asked.

“The masked man?”

“Yes, he was a man who hid his face and struck against his enemies.”

Ptolemy’s stomach grumbled. It was a deep, hungry sound that surprised him. He opened his eyes in the bed, realizing that sleep was no different than wakefulness and that he hadn’t eaten all day.

A groan and then a whimper scurried at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that it was this sound, and not his stomach, that had pulled him away from Ginger. He climbed out of the bed in the dark room and crept toward the door.

He peeked through the crack and saw that it was Robyn moaning. She was naked, on her back, and the boy was above her, his arms at the side of her head, his middle going up and down like the oil-well derricks in Baldwin Hills pumping the oil out of the ground.

“Oil is the earth’s blood,” Coy had told Li’l Pea one day. “Men cut deep into the world’s skin an’ suck out the blood like it belong to them. That’s why they’s earthquakes and tidal waves, because the earth is our mother, but she don’t like our ways.”

Robyn’s feet went up straight and trembled and she said something that had no real words. The boy moved faster and grunted, and she took his face in her hands. They gazed at each other in the murky room; a candle set on top of the TV was the only light; then Beckford fell on his side next to the girl and kissed her cheek. They whispered in the darkness, stroking each other’s face and head.

Ptolemy watched them as if from a great distance, maybe even through time itself. After a while, when their hands came to rest and he knew that they were asleep he went back to his bed and closed his eyes, finding Ginger there waiting for him, ready to continue their conversation about the invisible, nameless enemy and the war waged against him.

When Ptolemy came out of the bedroom, at six in the morning, Beckford was already gone. Robyn was sprawled in her bed with her mouth agape and left breast exposed. Ptolemy pulled the blankets up to her chin and went into the kitchen to boil water in an old tin saucepan for instant coffee and to think about his last days.

He sat down at the small table, one of the pieces of furniture he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out. It was at that table where he and Sensia Howard had their morning visit for so many years. If he looked down, he felt her presence, and then he’d look up, expecting to see her.

“I’ll be back later,” she’d always say. “Don’t wait.”

But he did wait for her . . . even after she died and had gone for good. That was the beginning of his descent into confusion. Many a morning he’d awaken, looking for her. Some days he didn’t remember that she was dead until afternoon. He could see this all clearly now with the Devil’s medicine running in his veins.

“All them years wasted,” he said to himself, sipping the hot coffee and wishing he had a cigarette.

He walked out to his gated porch that opened onto a concrete backyard. It was a large space, a forty-foot-by-forty-foot square of bleached, synthetic stone. There was a wobbly redwood fence along the back, twelve-foot-high foot-wide slats that leaned and teetered in the slightest breeze. Three apartments opened onto the prison-like yard, but no one ever went there. Ugly red-brick buildings rose on every side. Looking up, he could see small patios jutting out from the upper floors, gated by iron bars and for the most part forgotten. These were used to house bicycles and crates, a place to dry hand-washed laundry and for rusted-out barbecue grills.

A middle-aged woman was sitting outside, six stories up. She was smoking and staring out.

Ptolemy watched her for many minutes, but she didn’t look down. The years flashed across his mind’s eye while he waited for the mature woman, who was young enough to be his daughter, to look down on him. In that time, women had loved him and men had cursed him. He’d been seduced by his friend Major’s wife, LeAnne. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, something LeAnne did all the time. Major never knew, or maybe he didn’t care to know.

Sensia saw it the second Ptolemy walked through the door.

“Who is it?” she asked him. He hadn’t taken off his coat yet.

“Who is what?”

“Her.”

“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, Sensie. I just been down at the bar with Ralph and them.”

“It’s LeAnne, ain’t it?” Her rage was cold and fierce, not a human fury but that of an animal who knows no fear or reason.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Sensia Howard. You the one might flit off with a man at the drop of a hat.”

Her silence was worse than her questions or insights. Ptolemy, standing in that concrete yard, could still feel the wrath coming off of his first true love.

He didn’t know what to say, so he left. He already felt bad about Major. LeAnne had just offered him a drink, and the next thing he knew they were on the checkered sofa of Major’s house, rutting and laughing, stopping to drink wine from time to time.

And now that Sensia was mad, he left L.A. and went out to Riverside, where he took a room and got a job at the gas station. That was Tuesday. He knew Sensia would never love him again. He knew that he broke a pact by sleeping with his friend’s wife. Between Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning he downed a pint of sour-mash whiskey each night, sinking into a stupor rather than falling asleep.

Sensia was at his door that Saturday morning. She wouldn’t say how she’d found him out. The only person he told was George Fixx, who lived in San Francisco, and George swore that he never told anyone.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Sensia asked at his door.

The landlady was pacing downstairs because she had a strict rule that no women were allowed in her by-the-week rooms. But Sensia had pushed past Mrs. Tinman and gone right to Ptolemy’s room, number six.

She looked bad. There were bags under her eyes and her skin was dry. Her hair wasn’t even brushed, and she was wearing pants and a blouse that didn’t match.

“You didn’t want me no mo’, Sensie.”

“I might not want you here and there, Ptolemy Grey, but I need you. I need you to stay alive. You know that. You know that!”

She wasn’t talking normally, like people do. She was preaching or speechifying, addressing an invisible host of dead souls whose job it was to attest to Truth.

“You need me?”

“I’ll be dead in a week if you don’t come home,” she said. “God is my witness and pain is my choir.” She broke down in tears and Ptolemy took her in his arms.

“No women in the rooms, Mr. Grey!” the landlady shouted.

“We leavin’ now, Ms. Tinman,” Ptolemy said.

“I ain’t gonna refund none’a yo’ money. The week up front is final.”

“Okay, ma’am,” Ptolemy said as he stroked his wife’s hair. “You keep that money. It’s worth every dime.”

It was only then, in the empty concrete lot, that he remembered Sensie’s cousin, who lived in Riverside at that time. She must’ve seen him and called Sensie and, in doing so, saved both their lives—for a time.

“God bless you, Minna Jones,” Ptolemy whispered to himself.

“Uncle?”

Her voice was the constant refrain defining the form of his improvised last days. “Uncle?” Robyn would say, and all the words and thoughts that went before formed into sensible lines, became plain memories that no longer engulfed his mind.

“Yes, child?” he said without turning.

The woman on the bleak patio above looked down at the sound of their voices.

“Why you out here in your robe?” Robyn asked. “It’s cold.”

“Not in my skin,” Ptolemy said. “Dr. Ruben’s medicine lit a fire in me.”

The back of Robyn’s cold fingers pressed against his cheek.

“You are hot.”

The woman’s eyes from above met with Ptolemy’s and locked.

“Come on inside, Uncle. Lemme get you some aspirin.”

Ptolemy wanted to do as the girl said, but he was looking into the face of the smoking black woman. He wondered what she thought up there in her perch above the concrete yard.

The woman stood up, and Ptolemy wished that she would throw something down to him: a cigarette . . . a tattered length of rope. But she turned her back and went into her home.

“Come on,” Robyn insisted.

Do you need me for anything today, Uncle Grey?”

They were sitting at the small table in the kitchen, drinking iced tea that Robyn made. She was right, the cold liquid cooled him.

“No,” he said. “I wanna go see somebody, that’s all.”

“Miss Wring?”

Ptolemy hadn’t thought about that. Robyn had given him the emerald ring and he hadn’t gotten around to thanking her.

This forgetfulness wasn’t like before, when his thoughts were faint and half forgotten. Now he forgot because he was thinking about the moment and how the present was an extension of things that transpired long, long ago.

The ring wasn’t important. It was just a trinket. It was the woman, Shirley, who occupied his mind.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ma go see Shirley. She give me her address. Did you have a good time with Beckford last night?”

Robyn clasped her hands and then unclasped them, got to her feet, and went into the living room. Ptolemy smiled, realizing that he had meant to bother her. He rose, too, barely feeling the pain in his feet and knees, and followed her into the room, the living room that she had cleared out the way the Devil’s medicine had cleared out his mind.

Robyn was sitting on the bed that was a couch at the moment. When Ptolemy came in she turned her back to him.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed by what I say,” Ptolemy said to his keeper.

He sat beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

“I didn’t want you to know, Uncle,” she said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause I didn’t.”

“How can I adopt you as my daughter if you don’t tell me all about you and your life?”

Robyn turned around and peered at him cautiously, suspiciously.

“I’m too old to be adopted,” she said.

Ptolemy felt a humming in his veins like a trilling wire carrying a strong charge of electricity. Somewhere Coy was wanting to give him a lecture but he would not listen.

“No,” Ptolemy said, partly to Coy but mostly to Robyn, “you not too old. You my girl, my child. I love you and I wanna make sure that you have a life, a good life. I know that a young woman like you got to have a man. That goes without sayin’. You want a good-lookin’ man who’s strong but don’t treat you bad.”

Robyn smiled and looked down. She took one of Ptolemy’s hands in both of hers.

“I just want you to be careful, child. I don’t want you to go too fast. Maybe Beckford okay an’ maybe no. It’s hard to tell when you young and hungry.”

“Shut up, Uncle,” Robyn said with a giggle and a grin.

“Young man, all he got to do is see them legs you so proud of an’ he’ll say anything, anything you wanna hear.”

Robyn sucked a tooth and smiled again.

“I’ma die soon, girl,” he said.

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, though. I can feel the poison. It’s good ’cause it makes me see, but I won’t make it too many more weeks. And I got to know before I die that you’ll take care’a Artie an’ Letisha and that you ain’t with no man gonna take what I pass along to you.”

“Maybe we should take you to a new doctor,” Robyn suggested.

“I would marry you if I was fifty years younger,” Ptolemy said. “I would. But as powerful as you are, girl, as much as you done for my mind, you cain’t give me no body like Beckford. You cain’t make me no younger man. So will you be my li’l girl? Will you take me as your father and listen to my advice?”

“I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks, Uncle. I could marry you then.”

Ptolemy’s response to Robyn’s offer was to look up at the ceiling and around at the walls. He was smiling but didn’t know it. He was thinking about the solitude of private rooms where people said things to each other that had no place in the outer world. He thought about LeAnne and how she leaned over on the couch before he suspected their lovemaking and whispered, “My pussy itch, Daddy,” and he gasped and she touched his thigh.

He looked down at his hand in Robyn’s grip and thought, Yes, I could marry this child. But he knew that that was just a moment in a closed room between two people who wanted to break down the walls around them but still be safe from the outside world.

Ptolemy meant to say, “No, child,” but instead he asked, “What about Beckford?”

“I like him but he not there for me like you. An’ I’m not there wit’ him either. You bought me a bed, Uncle, an’ turned all your money ovah into my hands. You the only one I evah know could put your finger on the feelin’ I got.”

“I need a daughter, not a wife. I need you to love me like I love you,” Ptolemy said, tightening his fingers around hers.

“’Kay,” she said. “But how do we do that?”

“The way everybody does what no one can understand,” he said. “We go to a lawyer and let him put it into words.”

After Robyn left, Ptolemy donned his suit and, with an ease he hadn’t felt in many years, tied his new shoelaces. He went to the door, paused for a moment, went back to his kitchen, and pulled a foot-long steel pipe from under the sink.

Don’t th’ow out that pipe,” he had said to Robyn when his mind was still confused.

“Why not, Uncle? It don’t fit nuthin’.”

“It make me feel safe.”

He locked his apartment and walked down the hallway and through the outer door. He was outside on his own for the first time in years.

The sun was dazzling and he was a barefoot child walking along a dirt road, a young man in a Memphis back alley, a soldier walking down a French road with the bodies of dead soldiers stacked along the sides according to their nationality, race, and rank. He was a groom in his forties walking up the aisle with a bride so beautiful that he thought of her like a movie star or a queen that a man like him could only ever see from afar or on the screen. He was an old man following her coffin to the grave, still amazed that he was even in her procession.

“Hold it right there, Pete!” Melinda Hogarth yelled.

He was walking down his own street not quite as old as he was now and a woman with the face of a demon was running him down. This vision was a dream of who he had hoped to be, a wish he’d prayed every night for, for years after Melinda Hogarth had mugged him the first time.

For a moment Ptolemy understood that the doctor’s medicine had made him into many men from out of all the lives he had lived through the decades. It was certainly a Devil’s potion, one that could give him the power to relive his mistakes and failures and change, if only slightly, the past events that hounded his dreams.

While thinking these things, Ptolemy’s body was in motion. He was old and without great strength, but his mind was sharp as a razor and he could see Melinda coming up from behind in his visions. As she approached him he turned, raising his arm. As she reached for him he brought down the whole arm as if it had no joints. His wrist and elbow were fused and the steel pipe hit the knuckle of Melinda’s index finger with a whoosh and a snick.

The big woman yelped and jumped backward. She cried out when Ptolemy raised his arm again. This was the dream he’d had for years. This was why he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out his pipe, even though he couldn’t have told her then.

Melinda Hogarth sidled away like a crab with a woman’s voice, hollering for safety. Ptolemy brought down the pipe again through the now-empty space where she had stood. He wanted her to see what he could do even at this age, in this body.

The pain rose in his chest again. A man across the street was watching the incident, weighing the facts that his eyes and ears gave him. For a moment, even in his pain, Ptolemy wondered if he would have to explain to the man why he’d struck the wino drug addict. But this reverie was interrupted by the trilling in his veins and the smell of garlic. He looked around him as Melinda shouted and ran down the street. Nobody was cooking, as far as he could tell. And when he looked back, the man had continued his walk, no longer interested in the years-long drama of the old man and Melinda Hogarth.

Ptolemy took the Central bus up to Twenty-third Street. There he disembarked and looked at the four corners. There was a store-front on the northwest corner of the street that had a display window. Inside the window was a Spanish man jumping rope at a furious pace.

“Can I help you?” another man said to Ptolemy when he walked in the door of the long, sunlit room.

It was a poor gym. A few mats on the concrete floor and a punching bag, a bench for weight lifting, and a bar screwed into a doorway for chin-ups.

The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

“I’m lookin’ for Billy Strong,” Ptolemy said.

“You lookin’ at him.”

The men both smiled and Ptolemy understood why Reggie had called this man friend. He was powerful but there was no anger to him. This was the kind of man that you wanted to know, wanted to work shoulder to shoulder with.

“My name is Ptolemy Grey,” the old man said, continually astonished at his renewed new ability to communicate.

The smile on Billy Strong’s face diminished. It took on a sad aspect but did not disappear.

“You Reggie’s great-granduncle.”

So many children, Ptolemy thought, and children getting children and them doing the same. It seemed to him like some kind of crazy math problem worked out in streets and churches, dance floors and cemeteries. Reggie was his great-grandnephew, now dead. And Ptolemy was his survivor, like the small sum left over at the end of long division, like the few solitary and dumbfounded men who had survived the first wave on D-Day.

“Yes, I am,” he said simply.

“Reggie told me that you was havin’ some problems with your, um, thinkin’.”

“Robyn Small took me to a doctor give me some medicine help me put my words and my thoughts together.”

Strong smiled broadly, saying, “Robyn, huh? That little girl gotta backside on her that’s a crime.”

Ptolemy smiled in response. Even when he was in his confused state he had noted Robyn’s hips.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

“Lemme buy you a drink and ask you a couple’a questions is all.”

“You wanna go to a bar?”

“Someplace quiet an’ upscale, so we don’t have to get in no fights.”

“No place around here like that. We have to drive if you want to go to a nice bar.”

“You drive and I’ll buy,” Ptolemy said with a sly grin.

“Julio,” Billy exclaimed.

“Yeah, Bill?”

“I’ma be gone for a hour or so. Look after the place while I’m out.”

“You got it.”

You know my nephew long?” Ptolemy asked Billy Strong at the Aerie Bar, on top of the Fredda Kline Professional Building on Grand Street in downtown L.A. If they had turned away from the bar they would have seen all the way to the ocean through a blue and amber sky.

“’Bout six years, I guess,” Billy said. He had put on a pale-gray sweater and a pair of dark trousers as formal wear for the bar.

Billy ordered a beer. Ptolemy asked for a double shot of sour-mash whiskey. Billy had convinced the older man to leave his steel pipe in the car.

“Somebody kilt him,” Ptolemy said. “They murdered my boy, shot him down like a dog.”

“I know. I was at the funeral. I didn’t see you there, Mr. Grey.”

“Niecie sent Hilly to get me, but I don’t like that boy, he’s a thief.”

“Yeah. He’s not the kinda son I’d be proud of.”

Ptolemy smiled.

“Why somebody wanna shoot a boy sittin’ on a stoop mindin’ his own business?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy took that opportunity to sip his drink.

“I mean,” Ptolemy continued, “I don’t know much about the streets today. When I was movin’ around, there wasn’t gangs or these drive-bys, but Reggie wasn’t a part’a no gang, was he?”

“No, sir. Reggie stayed outta that.”

“So you think that it was just some mistake, somebody thought he was somebody else?”

Billy finished his beer and Ptolemy raised his hand to catch the bartender’s attention. When the slim, mustachioed white man looked their way, Ptolemy pointed at the empty glass. He was astounded by this simple gesture, aware that only weeks before it would have been beyond him.

“Did Reggie talk to you about moving away to San Diego?” Billy asked.

“Uh-uh. At least I don’t think so. You know, the medicine I took cleared up my mind, but a lotta things I heard when I was, I was confused are still jumbled up. You sayin’ Reggie was gonna move outta town?”

“Yeah.”

The bartender brought Billy’s second beer, along with an outrageous tab. Ptolemy put two twenty-dollar bills down on the bar.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy sipped again.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

“You know Alfred Gulla?”

The image of the brutal man with the name not his own hanging from his chest sidled into Ptolemy’s mind.

“Reggie’s wife’s boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Reggie found out that Nina was still seein’ Alfred and he decided that he was gonna move with her an’ the kids down to San Diego. He asked me if I could find somebody to look after you, because he didn’t trust Hilly either. But before we could make plans, he got shot.”

Ptolemy tried to slow his mind down, to make himself believe that he didn’t yet know enough to say who had killed his great-grandnephew. He tried to make his mind muddy again so that confusion would wash away the words that Billy was saying. But he could not turn his mind’s eye away from the ugly man that had his arm around Reggie’s woman.

“When did they shoot my boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“Eight weeks ago yesterday.”

“What time?”

“It was four in the afternoon.”

“Bright day?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Out in the open?”

“Car drove by and opened fire. Every damn bullet hit Reggie.”

Billy looked up into Ptolemy’s eyes. The truth was there between them, like a child’s corpse after a terrible fire that no one could have prevented.

Billy parked the car in front of Ptolemy’s apartment building. After hearing about Melinda Hogarth, he offered to walk his friend’s great-uncle to his door. A man shouted at them from across the street.

“Hold up!”

It was a big dark-skinned man with bright eyes and a nose that had been broken more than once, a man who wouldn’t be daunted by a ninety-one-year-old man swinging a steel pipe. Behind him was Melinda, her finger wrapped in thick white bandages and gauze.

“You done attack my girlfriend,” the man said to Ptolemy.

The old man wasn’t afraid. His revelation about Reggie had taken up all of his feelings and pain. The blustering man in army surplus pants and purple T-shirt was nothing to him; death was nothing to him. All he wanted to do was remember if Reggie had talked about going to San Diego.

In his oversized gray sweater Billy didn’t look powerful or strong. He was shorter than Melinda’s brute, but he still moved into the space between Ptolemy and the big man, who, on closer inspection, was past fifty and paunchy.

Ptolemy expected Billy to say something, to warn off the thug boyfriend of the woman mugger. But instead Billy threw a straight punch, hitting the man in the throat. After that the bodybuilder kicked and bludgeoned the big man until he was on the ground, crawling away down the sidewalk. There was a streak of blood on the pavement behind the bully, and the only sound was the beaten man coughing, trying to catch a breath through his bruised windpipe.

“Go on in, Mr. Grey,” Billy said in a mild, friendly voice. “I’ll stay out here and watch these mothahfuckers until you inside.”

Ptolemy saw that Melinda had retreated across the street. She wasn’t complaining or even trying to help her boyfriend.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Yeah, Mr. Strong?”

“If you need it, I’ll come by an’ get you anytime, ya hear?”

“Yes sir, I sure do.”

Inside the apartment Ptolemy thought about Robyn, who was so quick to fight, and now Billy, who didn’t even utter a warning. He could see that the world outside his door had become more dangerous than it was when he was a younger man. Poor people had always fought and killed each other, but it wasn’t so fast and unpredictable. People shot out like rattlesnakes on these modern streets. There was no warning anymore.

The phone rang at 7:27 that evening.

“Uncle Grey?”

“Yeah, Robyn.”

“I’ma be home late, okay?”

“Sure it’s okay. But be careful when you come back in. That Melinda got her some boyfriend threatened me.”

“What you do?”

“I was wit’ Billy Strong. He beat the bejesus out that man.”

“Billy? He’s nice.”

“He said the same about you. What time you comin’ home?”

“’Bout eleven.”

“Okay. I’ll prob’ly be up.”

“You don’t have to wait up for me, Uncle.”

“No. I’m just thinkin’ ’bout things.”

“What things?”

“The modern world.”

At 8:30 there came a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” Ptolemy asked.

“Dr. Ruben, Mr. Grey. Can I come in?”

Ptolemy opened the door and said, “Hello, Satan.”

The doctor was wearing a herringbone jacket, black trousers, and a dark-red dress shirt that was open at the collar. He seemed to grimace under the bale of hair that passed for a mustache.

“How are you, Mr. Grey?” the beady- and green-eyed doctor asked, forcing his scowl into a smile.

“Burnin’ up and singin’ in my veins, rememberin’ all the things that went to pass like they was just this mornin’ and not fifty, sixty, seventy . . . eighty years ago.”

The doctor’s smile grew as Ptolemy watched him. This standoff went on for a while, until the doctor asked, “Can I come in, Mr. Grey?”

Ptolemy spent maybe twenty seconds more trying to think if there was some rule against letting Satan in your door.

“Come on, then,” he said when he couldn’t think of any strictures pertaining to the Devil and simple civility.

Ptolemy sat on his lightweight stool and bade his guest sit on Robyn’s couch.

“Your mind is working well?” Ruben asked. “You’re remembering and able to get your words out?”

“Bettah then evah. I could tell you the kinda cake my mama made on my sixth birthday, and what the driver talked about when I took the bus up to Twenty-third and Central this afternoon.”

“By yourself?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you take the bus by yourself?” Ruben asked.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Do you have any problem walking, handling things?”

“Naw. Mattah fact I seem a little more handy than I was.” He was thinking about the pipe he had swung at Melinda. “I seem to be more—what you call it?—coordinated.”

The doctor smiled and nodded.

“And you say you have fever?” he asked.

“I get so hot sometimes I can feel it comin’ off my skin. I take aspirin an’ a cold shower an’ it go away.”

“That’s just right, Mr. Grey. A shower and aspirin will work for a while. Maybe a long while.”

“Fevah gonna kill me?” Ptolemy asked with no self-pity or regret.

“Could be,” Ruben said. “But you say you feel an electrical sensation inside?”

“In my veins,” Ptolemy replied. “Like a trill played on a flute. It makes me feel like I got butterflies for blood.”

“That’s the medicine,” Ruben said. “It’s working on your chemistry and your body’s electrical system, your wiring. But it should only be in your brain. That’s what we’re trying to work out . . . how to keep the brain alive and functioning well without affecting the other parts of your body. May I take your pulse?”

“The Devil playin’ a healer,” Ptolemy said as he extended his right hand.

After feeling various points on the old man’s arm, Ruben said, “Your blood pressure is elevated.” He reached into his pocket and came out with a small green bottle.

“These pills are very small but potent. There are a hundred of them. Take one when the fever and flute playing bothers you and it should subside for a while.”

Ptolemy took the green bottle and shook it, listening to the beads of medicine tinkle against the glass.

“Tell me sumpin’, Satan. Will I live to finish off this bottle?”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Grey, I thought that you’d have died by now. I came by to make sure that Robyn was keeping your agreement.”

The candor of the demon brought a smile to Ptolemy’s lips.

“Coy told me about you.”

“Who’s that?”

“My uncle. Well, he wasn’t really my blood but just a old man who taught me everything I know—almost. He told me that even though you called evil in the Good Book that I still had to give you respect. Yes he did.”

Ruben leaned forward, clasped his hands, and placed his elbows on his knees. He was looking deeply into Ptolemy’s eyes.

“I ain’t crazy, Dr. Ruben, if that’s what you want me to call ya. I ain’t crazy at all. But I know the Devil when I see him. You don’t need no college degree to see evil in front’a yo’ nose. Man play with life have crossed ovah. That’s a fact.”

“But . . . Mr. Grey, I’m helping you, aren’t I? Didn’t you come to me and ask for my help?”

For a passing moment Ptolemy felt fear. Had he sold his soul and not quite realized it? Had he been tricked as so many before him on the long road to ruin?

“But we traded, right?” Ptolemy asked. “You wanted my body, not my soul.”

Satan smiled on Ptolemy Grey. His whole face was alight with friendliness.

“That’s right, Mr. Grey. I only want your body. I’m trading that light in your mind and that tickle in your veins for your body after you no longer need it.”

“Will you shake on that?” Grey asked, and both men extended their hands and grasped each other, reaffirming an oath that they both wanted and needed.

After a moment or two of silent reverie, Ruben asked, “Where’s your niece?”

“Out with her boyfriend.”

“She leaves you alone and you can take care of yourself?”

“If I had a fifty-gallon drum I could barbecue a pig in the cement yard,” Ptolemy said proudly.

“I bet you could, Mr. Grey. I bet you could.”

For a long time after the Devil had left, Ptolemy considered their conversation. He remembered every word and intonation, every gesture and phrase.

Satan had called the feeling in his body a tickle, meaning that he knew about the Tickle River and Coy and the theft of the gold coins. He was telling him that Coy had sinned but that he would be forgiven if Ptolemy lived up to his side of the bargain over the disposition of the treasure.

It was a delicate transaction, dealing with the Devil, but in Ptolemy’s mind that was his only hope. How else could he save Letisha and Artie, and Robyn too? How else could he make sure that Reggie’s killer did not escape judgment?

Ptolemy was feeling giddy after such a close call with oblivion, because he knew meeting the Devil was always a threat to the immortal soul.

What’s a soul, Coy?” Li’l Pea had asked his mentor and friend.

For a long time the old man sat and puffed on his cherrywood pipe. After a few minutes went by, Ptolemy thought that he wouldn’t get an answer to his question. This wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Coy didn’t answer. Ptolemy knew that sometimes he had to find his own solutions.

“Do you look at your mama sometimes and feel love in your heart for her?” Coy asked.

“Yeah . . . I guess.”

“It’s either yes or no.”

“Yeah. Sometimes when I come home and she’s cookin’ an’ the house smell like chicken and dumplin’s an’ she see me and smile I get the jitters in my legs and start laughin’ an’ she smiles harder and calls me her li’l brown nut.”

“That love in your heart is your soul,” Coy said.

“But . . . but what if I said no?”

“Some people lose they souls along the way. They don’t feel no love or pride or that there’s somethin’ in the world bettah than they lives.”

“How do you lose your soul, Coy?”

“Because,” he said, “it is a delicate thing, a special thing. You can live without it, but you might as well be dead. That’s why heaven an’ hell is always fightin’ over the souls’a men. Our souls, when we got ’em, is so beautiful that angels always lookin’ to take ’em. That’s why when the Devil comes up on you you got to hold tight on the love in your heart.”

Ptolemy picked up the phone and dialed a number that he remembered thanks to the Devil’s medicine.

“Hello?” Niecie Brown said.

“Hey, Niecie. How you doin’?”

“Pitypapa, is that you? You dialin’ the phone by yourself ? I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe it, but it’s still a shock.”

“Hilly there, baby?”

“Uh-huh. He here watchin’ the TV. I told him that he was gonna have to pay you back for what he took. But you know he ain’t a bad boy. He just feel like he been cheated, losin’ his daddy so young and all.”

“Lemme talk to him, honey.”

“Hello?” Hilly said, bringing to mind some big dense creature like a hog, or even a hippopotamus.

“I need some bullets for my pistol.”

“Say what?”

“I need some bullets for my pistol, an’ I don’t want you tellin’ your mama about it neither.”

“What kinda pistol?”

“Twenty-five caliber. You get me that and we even. You won’t owe me a dime.”

“Okay. I’ll bring ’em ovah tomorrow.”

“Put ’em in a can of peanuts.”

“I gotta buy them too?” the brooding boy complained.

“Yeah. You got to buy them too.”

“All right. But we even then, right?”

“Right.”

The evening after that went smoothly for Ptolemy. He found a music station that was playing Fats Waller recordings.

He’d once seen the great Moon Face playing in an after-hours big-city juke joint in Memphis. In those days the music halls only allowed whites, except on special days, and so after a performance in front of an all-white audience there were many famous musicians that went to the black part of town to jam with their people.

Listening to the song “Two Sleepy People,” he was remembering a girl named Talla who turned to kiss him because the romantic lyrics made her. He remembered the smell of beer and the sawdust on the floor, Fats Waller himself winking at the momentary lovers, and a feeling that being Ptolemy Grey was the best thing in the whole world.

“Uncle?” she said, and the vision evaporated. “Uncle, you okay?”

Ptolemy turned his head, feeling pain between each vertebra, but he didn’t wince or curse.

“Is it eleven already?”

“It’s past midnight,” Robyn said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Your boyfriend here?” Ptolemy asked, looking toward the bathroom.

“No. He walked me to the door, but then I heard the music an’ told him to go on.”

“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”

“You my father-like, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah right.”

“A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”

The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”

“We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.

“The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.

“Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”

“He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”

“He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”

“Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.

“To do what?”

“To talk to a man named Mossa.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’ll see.”

That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.

“It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”

Ptolemy thought that Billy had probably bragged about the crime amongst his black brothers. He was used to his neighborhood down in Alabama, where no Negro would ever turn in another. But the U.S. Army had black soldiers from Chicago, San Francisco, and even New York City. Some of them thought it was their responsibility to follow the white man’s law.

Billy probably bragged, and everyone knew that Billy and Ptolemy were close.

“Well, soldier?” the colonel asked.

“I wouldn’t know nuthin’ about anything like that, sir.”

“Are those tears in your eyes, Sergeant Grey?” Riley asked.

“Must be the smoke, sir.”

“Does doing your duty hurt that much?”

Riley was a good man; tall and proud, he never insulted his soldiers because of their race. He respected every man according to one standard. And so when he asked Ptolemy that question, the soldier froze, unable to speak. But in the vision, not a dream but a trancelike memory, Ptolemy inhabited his former self and spoke up.

“Sir, that sergeant said a word to Preston that stung him in his heart. Aftah all we been through, Preston heard in that white man’s one word that he would come back home to the same sorry situation that our mothers and grandmothers and great-great-great-grandmothers suffered under. Preston couldn’t help himself, but still that don’t wash away the blood.”

Ptolemy opened his eyes because the fever was burning his face. He sat up, remembering that Colonel Riley “volunteered” Billy Knight for duty at the front lines when the casualty rate was over ninety percent. He didn’t press charges, because that might have caused a riot among the soldiers.

Billy died a week later. His mother and father received his Purple Heart posthumously.

Ptolemy wondered if his memories were the cause of the fever. Was it hell calling for him?

Running his fingertips along the sheet, he felt a thrill of excitation. He had not experienced so much or so deeply since he was a child. The bottle given to him by Satan, or maybe one of Satan’s agents, sat on the bureau across from his big bed.

His temperature was rising quickly and the strength was draining from his limbs.

He got to his feet and took two quick steps. He had to grab on to the bureau not to fall. He opened the bottle, spilling a dozen tiny pills across the top of the chest of drawers. He had to suck his tongue four times before drawing out enough spit to swallow even one small pill.

Slumping down to the floor, Ptolemy thought about Billy. He was betrayed but did not know it. He was sentenced to death but thought that he was being chosen to fight because of his valor and bravery. He had murdered a man but felt that he was vindicated by his people’s suffering and shame. Ptolemy imagined Knight grinning while he was killing, about to die himself. The executioner’s hand was disguised, and the battlefield substituted for justice.

Ptolemy smiled and opened his eyes. He was on his back on the floor in a room that was once teeming with insects and rodents. A frigid river flowed over his fevered skin and now he was strong and able.

He got to his feet without arthritic pain in his joints. He took a deep breath and went back to his bed, where he could recall history and change it slightly—an old man deified by the whim of evil.

What we doin’ here, Uncle?” Robyn asked after they had gotten off the bus at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive a few minutes after ten the next morning.

“Goin’ t’see see Mr. Mossa. He a Jerusalemite, a Palestinian he calls it, but he was born in Jerusalem, same place that Christ our Lord was born.”

“This place is full’a rich white people,” Robyn argued. “We shouldn’t be up around here.”

The girl was looking about her, a severe frown etching her lovely dark features. Ptolemy smiled. There was a bench across the street, at the foot of a steep cobblestone road that didn’t allow cars. An old white woman was sitting there. Ptolemy brought his adopted daughter across the street and sat her down at the opposite end.

“I been afraid’a white people my entire life,” the old man said, holding the glowering girl’s hands.

“I ain’t afraid,” she said. “It’s just that we don’t belong up here. My mama told me that.”

“Your mother made you sleep on the floor behind a couch so that her boyfriends didn’t see you,” Ptolemy said.

“So?”

“She didn’t think she was wrong doin’ that, now, did she?”

“No.”

“But she was wrong, wasn’t she?”

“Papa Grey, I just don’t like it up here. I ain’t scared’a nobody, but I’m scared I’ll do sumpin’ wrong.”

“I know. That’s why we here together. I’m helpin’ you.”

“If you helpin’ me, then take me home.”

“Did you like bein’ a child?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn wanted to look down, but she forced herself to gaze into her guardian’s eyes.

“I was happy when my mama died, Papa Grey.” A tear came down her left cheek. “I wanted to be sad an’ lovin’ but I knew that Mama had worked it out for me to go to Aunt Niecie if she died, and I hoped in my heart, even though I didn’t want to, that my mama would pass and I could come out heah. I’m the one you should call the Devil.”

Ptolemy noticed that even though the right eye filled with water it was only the girl’s left eye that shed tears. He thought this must have been an important sign, but the meaning escaped him.

“Then I come to stay wit’ Niecie an’ she put me on a couch in the livin’ room an’ Hilly was always tryin’ to fuck me—excuse my French.”

“I got you on a couch in the livin’ room,” Ptolemy said gently.

“But that’s my couch, an’ it’s a proper bed too. An’ it have drawers like a dresser, an’ you bought me some clothes. An’ anyway you offered me your room an’ all your money an’ you trusted me to do right. An’ you try an’ protect me too. I love you, Papa Grey. I don’t evah want anything to happen to you.”

“Did some’a the men in yo’ mama’s house mess wit’ you?” he asked.

“I don’t wanna talk about that.”

Ptolemy smiled and said, “Okay. But you gotta know that the money I offered you is only a small part’a what I got an’ that we up here today so that you can know how to take care of what I’ma leave to you. So I won’t aks you no questions hurt your heart, but you got to trust me with the rest.”

Her left eye streaming, lips apout, Robyn nodded just barely and Ptolemy smiled. He pulled her up by her forearms until they were on their feet again, walking up to the top of the pedestrian roadway lined with fancy boutiques and stores.

There they came upon a gleaming white and gold store where, above the entrance, the name Mossa in red letters was inlaid across a band of sky-blue mosaic tiles.

“Mr. Grey!” an older man exclaimed.

At first Robyn assumed that he must be a Mexican.

“Mr. Mossa,” Ptolemy replied with equal enthusiasm, “long time no see.”

“How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

The shop was crowded with glass cases crammed full with jewelry, coins, and small objects that were from other times and other places. The rest of the room was overflowing with rows of statues, sculptures, paintings on wood, wall hangings, ancient carpets, and large items of gold and silver, marble and jade.

The white stone bust of a small child caught Robyn’s attention. The face seemed so innocent and wise.

“Julius Caesar,” Mossa said to the girl.

“Excuse me?”

“That is a bust of Caesar as a boy.”

“How they know how he looked when he was a kid?”

“He sat for the sculptor, of course,” Mossa said, and then he turned to Ptolemy again.

It slowly dawned upon Robyn what the aging Muslim had said.

“You mean, this thing was made when Caesar was just a little boy?” she asked his back.

“Yes,” Mossa said, turning again. “Everything in my shop is very, very old. I have a room filled with treasures from ancient tombs of Kush and Egypt.”

“This is Mr. Mossa, Robyn,” Ptolemy said. “Mossa, this is my adopted daughter, Robyn Small.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mossa said. “Your father is a great man with a long history. He understands beauty and the past. And of course his name has been legend for thousands of years.”

“Thank you,” Robyn said, not quite knowing why. “Your store is very beautiful.”

The Palestinian was short, like Ptolemy, and a bit stooped over, round but not fat; his smile was both beneficent and inviting. He wore a large yellow diamond on the index finger of his right hand and a ruby embedded in onyx on the pinky of his left. Robyn had never met anyone like him, had never been in a place like his shop.

“It has been a long time, Ptolemy,” the store owner said. “Fifteen years?”

“Maybe more,” Ptolemy agreed.

“I’ve never seen you in a suit before.”

“Bought it for a funeral,” Ptolemy said lightly.

“Whose?”

“Mine,” the old man said.

The men stood there for a moment, Ptolemy smiling and Mossa wondering about that smile.

“I think of you on the first day of every year,” Mossa said to break the silence. “I send up a prayer for you and hope that you are alive and well.”

“That must’a been what done it,” Ptolemy replied. “’Cause you know there ain’t a reason in the world a man’s bones should get as old as mine is. I’m ninety-one, be ninety-two soon—maybe.”

“There are trees that don’t live so long.”

Ptolemy took two dull gold coins from his pocket.

“I know you don’t have much interest in things only a hundred or so year old, but I thought . . .”

The antiquarian took the coins from Ptolemy’s hand and held them in his palm. With his other hand he took out a jeweler’s lens and studied the metal disks.

“I belong to a coin guild now,” he said, still staring at his palm. “We trade, back and forth. Sometimes an American dealer will come across ancient treasures that he cannot sell. Sometimes we trade.”

Mossa looked up at Ptolemy and both old men smiled. To Robyn it seemed that they were talking without words, communing like monks being passed messages from God.

“Thirty-six hundred each,” Mossa said.

“Cash,” Ptolemy added.

The antiquarian put the CLOSED sign on the front door and brought Ptolemy and the girl into a yard that was filled with flowering plants that Robyn could not identify. There Mossa made tea and brought out strange-tasting pastries.

Mossa asked Robyn about her college aspirations, and even offered to give her a recommendation for school.

“I’m only goin’ to junior college,” she said.

“But you will transfer one day.”

“Yeah,” she said, surprise coming through in her voice, “I might.”

“This is my daughter, Mossa,” Ptolemy said at one point. “Give her your card and do business wit’ her fair an’ square like you always done wit’ me.”

Mossa did not speak. He smiled, took a business card from his vest pocket, and handed it to the girl. The white card was engraved with golden letters. She placed it in her bag next to the knife—her mother’s only gift.

On the street again, waiting for a westbound bus, Robyn and Ptolemy sat side by side, holding hands.

“How you get to know Mr. Mossa, Uncle?”

“Every once in a blue moon I’d get a part-time job at a restaurant they used to have around here called Trudy’s Steak House. If they had a big weekend and one’a their people got sick they’d call me ’cause I was a friend of a guy worked there called Mike Tinely.

“I always took the early bus because the boss wanted you there on the minute. One time I saw Mossa’s place and I wondered if he could cash my coin. A week aftah my job was ovah I went in the store. It was him there, an’ he walked up to me and said, ‘Can I help you, Father?’

“That was twenty-four years ago. He was in his fifties and I was already retired. We talked for a while and then he put up the CLOSED sign and took me to his garden for some tea. I nevah met anybody like that. My skin didn’t mean nuthin’ to him. I knew what the coins were worth from books, but I didn’t tell him that. He paid me top dollar and we been friends evah since.”

“Where you get them coins?” Robyn asked.

“Later, child. Let’s get out to Santa Monica first.”

An hour later they were walking on a street in Santa Monica. They came to a slender brick building between a women’s clothes store and a shop that sold leather goods in all forms and shapes. Robyn stopped at the window of the clothes store, gazing at a dress that was diaphanous and multicolored. Ptolemy stood back, watching her turn slightly as if she had tried on the frock and was checking her reflection in the glass.

Abromovitz and Son Legal Services was on the fourth floor of the slender building. There was an elevator but it was out of order, and so the young girl and the old man took the stairs, half a flight at a time. Ptolemy counted the steps, seven and then eight three times, with one-minute rests between each.

The door was open and Ptolemy led the way into the dimly lit room.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black woman asked. She was sitting behind an oak desk that blocked the way to a bright-green door that was closed.

Ptolemy smiled at the woman, who was maybe forty-five.

Half my age, he thought, and twice my weight.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’d like to speak with Abraham,” he said, echoes of Coy’s blasphemous Bible lessons resounding in his mind.

“He,” the woman said, and then winced. “Mr. Abromovitz passed away five years ago.”

“Oh,” Ptolemy said, “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. I liked him very much.”

The black woman, whose skin was quite dark and whose name-plate said Esther, nodded and smiled sadly.

“Yes,” she said. “He always asked how I was in the morning, and he would listen too.”

“Moishe still here?” Ptolemy asked.

The receptionist registered surprise at the question.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Mr. Ptolemy Grey.”

Mr. Grey,” a middle-aged, paunchy white man was saying a few moments later, after Esther had made a call on the office line.

Robyn followed her adopted father into the small dark office. There was a window but it only looked out onto a shadowy air-shaft. Bookcases lined every wall. Along with law books, there were novels, piles of magazines, and stacks of typing paper held together by old brittle rubber bands. The room reminded Robyn somewhat of Ptolemy’s home before she had cleaned it out, and a little of Mossa’s rooms filled with ancient treasures.

The only free space on the wall held a painting of a naked white goddess standing in the foreground with a medieval village behind her. The people of the village seemed unaware of the voluptuous maiden passing before them.

“I haven’t seen you since I was a young man,” Moishe Abromovitz was saying. “I think I was still in school.”

His face was young but his hair had gone gray and the backs of his hands were prematurely liver-spotted.

Ptolemy pressed Robyn toward one of the four visitors’ chairs and then took one himself. Moishe remained standing next to a pine desk that was probably older than he was.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father,” Ptolemy said. “I didn’t know.”

“I thought we sent you a notice,” the fortyish man in the aged body said. “I hope we didn’t forget you.”

Ptolemy wondered if the letter had come in and Reggie had read it to him. Remembering himself as a feebleminded old fool was painful and frightening; next to that memory, Death didn’t seem like such a bad fellow.

“You still got that file on me?” Ptolemy asked.

“My father had sixteen clients that he wanted me to take special care of after he was gone. You were one,” Moishe Abromovitz said as he went to a wooden file cabinet behind the elder desk. He drew out an old manila folder, about three inches thick, and placed it on the pine desk. “He said that you were a gentle man with a good heart and that I should handle your estate when the time came.”

“You mean when I died.”

Moishe sat down behind the file and smiled.

Ptolemy put his left hand on Robyn’s forearm. The girl seemed uncomfortable and he wanted to put her at ease.

“This child has saved me,” Ptolemy said. “I was sick, very sick and she cleaned my house and brought me to a doctor that made me well, or at least as well as a man my age can be.”

Moishe’s smile evaporated.

“I want you to make her my heir,” Ptolemy said. “Put her in that trust your daddy said he made for me, and take care’a her business like you did with mine.”

Moishe nodded noncommittally and Ptolemy placed a stack of ten one-hundred-dollar bills on the table.

“This should cover the first part’a the work you got to do.”

The legal adviser turned to Robyn and asked, “What is your name?”

“Robyn Small,” Ptolemy said before she could answer. “That’s Robyn like the bird only with a y instead of an i. An’ she got all her information in her bag.”

“Robyn, would you mind waiting outside for a moment while I talk to Mr. Grey alone?”

The girl nodded and stood right up. She walked from the room, closing the door behind her without a word or gesture of complaint.

After she was gone Moishe turned to Ptolemy.

“How well do you know this girl, Mr. Grey?”

“That’s not the question you should be askin’ me, young man.”

Moishe frowned and said, “No?”

“Uh-uh. No. I know what you thinkin’. You thinkin’ that I’m a old man and this young thing is after anything she can get outta me. But how good I know her ain’t what will tell you what you need to know.”

Moishe smiled as if he perceived something he recognized in the old man’s words.

“What should I have asked, Mr. Grey?”

“What you wanna know is how well I know anybody. Not just Robyn but ev’rybody in my life. You know, a old man don’t have much to go on. He don’t have a big social life. He don’t cut the rug no mo’.”

“Cut the rug?” the lawyer asked.

“Dance.”

“I never danced very much,” Moishe said apologetically. “My father did. He was a wonderful dancer. But I have two left feet.”

“There’s a lady upstairs from me get my mail two times a week,” Ptolemy continued. “Her name’s Falona Dartman. I’d like to leave her a li’l sumpin’ when I pass. And there’s a woman dope addict across the street try to mug me every time I stick my nose out the door. I don’t wanna give her nuthin’. My grandniece Niecie Brown don’t know what’s goin’ on, and her son stoled money from me because he thought I was too old to notice. My other great-grandnephew, Reggie, took care’a me for years. He had a good heart but he didn’t know what he was doin’ and now he’s dead anyway—shot down in the street.”

“Oh my God,” the younger Abromovitz declared. “That’s terrible.”

“Robyn cleaned out my house and took me to a doctor. She beat up that dope fiend and cooks for me twice a day. I offered her all my money and she turned it down. But, you know, Reggie, my great-grandnephew, have left two babies behind him, and my grandniece needs looking after too. Robyn the only one will see my family is taken care of.”

“But how long have you known her, Mr. Grey?” Moishe insisted.

“You see that paintin’ on the wall, Moishe?” Ptolemy replied.

“Yes.”

“It’s called A Study of Darkness in Light.”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“Your father bought it from a painter friend of his named Max Kahn. I remember Maxie. Him an’ me an’ your daddy used to go to this bar down on the boardwalk and drink beers and talk nonsense.”

“Max Kahn,” Moishe whispered. “I remember him. My mother never liked Max.”

“Your father told me that he bought the paintin’ because of the naked woman, said he liked to have a nude to look at all day. Your mother didn’t like the girlie magazines your father bought, but she couldn’t argue with oil paintin’s.”

Moishe smiled and nodded. It was as if Ptolemy had become a doorway to his lost youth.

“But as the years went by, Abe found himself looking more at the background, at the people in the town who had a light shined on ’em by the deity but didn’t know it. There’s a old woman leading a young woman toward a doorway. One day your father noticed that the young woman was blind. There’s a poor man leanin’ down to pick up a wallet—”

“That a wealthy merchant had dropped on the street,” Moishe said, remembering the words of his father for the first time in many years.

“There’s a watchmaker with no hands explaining to his young assistant how to fix a clock, and a dog headed down a dark alley-way. At the end of that alley is a woman’s face glowing and smilin’ down on the cur.”

“You remember all that, Mr. Grey?”

“Your father lost interest in the naked woman, but he saw somethin’ new in that paintin’ almost every week. He realized after Max died that he was a real artist whose work spoke out aftah death.”

There was benign joy in the face of Moishe Abromovitz. He nodded and smiled at the old man.

“Okay,” he said. He picked up the phone and pressed a button and said, “Esther, ask Miss Small to join us, will you?”

You sure it was all right, signin’ all them papers, Uncle Grey?” Robyn asked on the bus ride back to South Central L.A.

“You mean because he’s a white man and he might cheat us?”

Robyn nodded and the old man smiled.

“No, baby. Moishe ain’t gonna cheat us. All you got to do is tell him money you get from Mossa and get him to make out what the taxes ought to be. He’ll charge you maybe thirty dollahs an’ send you the forms to send in your taxes once every three months. That’s the deal me and his father made. I never did it, though. You the one. You the one gonna make Coy’s dream into somethin’ real.”

“What happened to Coy?” Robyn asked.

The pain that invaded his chest was sharp and sudden, like a knife stab.

“What’s wrong, Uncle Grey?”

“Pain,” he uttered.

“From what?”

“I cain’t talk about what happened, Robyn. I cain’t.”

The girl took his right hand and pressed the thick muscle in the webbing between his index finger and thumb.

The hurt, and then the release from the girl’s massage, eased his memory of Coydog dancing on feet of fire, being strangled by a white man’s noose.

“He died,” Ptolemy whispered. “He’s gone.”

When they got to Ptolemy’s block Robyn took out her knife and held it so that it was hidden by her wrist and forearm.

“He try an’ mess wit’ us an’ I cut that mothahfuckah like a Christmas goose,” she said to Ptolemy as they walked.

“You evah et goose?” the old man asked.

“No,” she said.

This caused Ptolemy to laugh. He giggled and tittered, and then so did Robyn. They were like childhood friends remembering days long ago and carefree. In this way they made it to Ptolemy’s door with no attacks or retaliations.

There was a small can on the floor in front of Ptolemy’s door.

“What’s this?” Robyn said to herself, kneeling down.

“Is it a peanut can?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a treat Miss Dartman bring down for me sometimes. Hand it here.”

Ptolemy put out his hand and dutifully his newly adopted daughter complied. He could feel the heft of the ammunition Hilly had left him.

“It’s heavy, Uncle,” Robyn said. “What is it?”

“Nuthin’. Nuthin’ at all.”

The phone rang later that night as Ptolemy watched a comedy show on TV with Robyn. Watching television was the closest thing to revisiting his previous state of dementia. The people spoke too fast and the jokes weren’t funny at all. People dressed like they were going to fancy parties but instead they were at work or walking down the street in broad daylight. Everybody was in love all the time, and in pain too. The stories never went anywhere, but Robyn laughed and giggled from the first moment to the last. He liked to see the young woman laughing. It was to him like a gift from God, and so he liked watching TV with her, when her hard life let up for a moment and she didn’t need her anger or her knife.

Ptolemy was just getting ready to get up and say good night when the phone rang. Robyn bounced off the couch and answered.

“It’s for you, Papa Grey.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, Ptolemy,” a woman’s voice greeted.

“Hi. How are ya, Shirley?”

“Just fine. I was bakin’ me some fudge here and I thought about you. Do you like chocolate?”

“I like you, and if you make chocolate, then I like that too.”

“You must’a been a mess when you were a young man, Mr. Grey.”

“No. Not me. When I was younger I couldn’t take three steps without trippin’. I was quiet and shy, couldn’t put my words together for love or money.”

“What happened to make you like you are today?”

I sold my body to the Devil, he thought.

But he said, “Some people just come into focus wit’ age, I guess.”

“Would you like me to bring you over some fudge tomorrow?”

“Please do.”

“Noon?”

“Sounds like a date to me.”

In his room that night Ptolemy cleaned and loaded his pistol. Hilly had put the bullets in with half a can of salted peanuts and so he had to use a chamois cloth to wipe off each cartridge. He enjoyed this process. It made him feel that he was getting ready for some great event. He remembered how it felt on D-Day, when the Allies stormed the Germans in their French strongholds. He was an American that day. He stood side by side with tens of thousands of men, and even though he didn’t die for his country, he felt a part of something big.

And now, loading his pistol, he was a soldier again, at war again, ready to lay down and die for an idea that was so powerful that it didn’t seem to matter that it was based on a lie.

That night Ptolemy fell asleep for the first time since the plain-faced European nurse had given him his last shot of the Devil’s medicine. He dreamed about normal things, like the bus ride and Mossa’s lovely flower garden. At one point in his dreaming he was standing in front of a mirror, watching as he grew older. At first he was a child in a light-blue suit that his mother had sewn. The sleeves and pant legs were too short because he had outgrown the dimensions before his mother could finish the job. Then he was a young man, a soldier, an ice deliveryman, and an orange-suited civil servant, cleaning anything from sewers to demolition sites, from municipal buildings to the downtown train station. He wore a black tuxedo for his first wedding, and a white jacket with black pants for his second. Both suits were still in his closet, cut for a bigger frame than the shrunken old man he finally saw in the glass.

He was withered and naked, with a small fire blazing in his chest. The fire had been loaned to him by Satan, an errant angel who coveted men’s souls.

Gazing deeply into the fire, he could see his first childhood love, Maude Petit, running around in the blaze looking for succor, for Li’l Pea to save her. He reached out into the reflection and lifted the child from her torment. He placed her on a high shelf and blew on her to extinguish the flames and heal her cracked skin. Then with his hands he covered the fire raging in his breast and the heat began to rise.

Now that he knew that Maude was safe, Ptolemy reveled in the flames that Satan had given him. The fire grew in the small space of his chest. It went from yellow to red to white-hot intensity. Ptolemy felt the heat coming from Maude and knew that he had saved her somehow by reaching into Hell itself and rescuing her. The flames were licking the back of his throat, leaping up behind his eyes, but he didn’t awaken. Maude was safe at last, after eighty-six years of torment in Ptolemy’s memory. He had saved her, put her out of harm’s way. He had swallowed the flames that burned her, and that made him crazy with joy.

He opened his eyes to find himself writhing in his fevered bed. He was now in the burning house that consumed the Petit family. His body was that house, the attic of his mind aglow.

He went to the bureau and opened the green glass bottle. He’d placed a small juice glass filled with water by its side. He held the pill a moment before putting it in his mouth and drinking. He smiled as he swallowed, feeling as close to heaven as he ever had in life before. Somewhere the choir of his church was singing, cheering him on.

The medicine was fast acting. Ptolemy’s fever began to lower in less than five minutes. As his skin cooled and the fire abated, Ptolemy the old man sat at the foot of the big bed that Sensia had made him buy so many years past.

We need a big bed, baby, she’d told him. A bed big enough to hold all the love I’ma give ya.

“I almost threw it all away, Sensie,” Ptolemy told the memory. “I almost failed at my duty. A man only got to do one thing to set him apart. A man only got to do one thing right.”

Ptolemy realized that the fever wasn’t fully gone, that the medicine was losing the battle against the fire in his mind. He climbed up on the bed and slept on top of the covers. He was a child again and Maude and he were playing down by the Tickle River and nobody else, not even she, knew that she had ever died.

Robyn got up early and left. She’d put a note on the small table in the kitchen telling Ptolemy that she’d be out all day. At the bottom of the note was the number to a new cell phone that she’d purchased.

Ptolemy knew what cell phones were. Little radios that acted like phones. This knowledge burned in his mind, wavering, shining brightly. He knew that in some way this understanding in his ancient brain was some sort of abomination. He knew that the Devil would have his due. But that was further up along the trail. He picked up the house phone and dialed a number automatically without even having to recall it.

“Hello?” the heavy voice of Hilly answered.

“Hey, boy.”

“You get my peanut can, Papa Grey?”

“Yeah, I got it. But tell me sumpin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Why you wanna leave live ammunition out in the open where any child or fool could pick it up?”

“I knocked but you wasn’t there,” Hilly complained.

“You could’a called. You could’a taken the peanut can back home and called me and come ovah when I told you to.”

The young brute sighed through the line.

“That don’t make sense to you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“I know what you sayin’,” he countered.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” Hilly said. “But I didn’t wanna waste my time comin’ all the way ovah there again. You wanted the bullets and now you got ’em. I don’t see why you raggin’ on me.”

Ptolemy thought about what his great-grandnephew was saying. But it was as if they spoke different languages and came from different peoples far removed from each other by thousands and thousands of miles and many generations. Hilliard was a Catholic and Ptolemy a Hindu, or something else far removed from what his nephew believed in. He tried to think of how he could explain the great expanse of separation to the boy, but even the Devil’s injections had not made him that smart.

“You got Nina’s phone number somewhere around there?” Ptolemy asked after giving up on the young black man.

A familiar man’s voice came across the line. “Hello.”

“That you, Alfred?” Ptolemy asked.

“Who’s this?”

“Ptolemy.”

“Who?”

“The man Reggie used to look aftah. The one you met at Niecie’s house when you took Reggie’s wife away.”

“What you sayin’, man?” Alfred asked angrily.

“I’m sayin’, is Nina there?”

A few seconds passed before the receiver banged down and Alfred called out, “You bettah tell that mothahfuckah to be respectful.”

“Hello?” a feminine voice asked. “Who is this?”

“Ptolemy Grey . . . Reggie’s great-uncle.”

“Oh . . . Mr. Grey. Why you callin’?”

“I’m fine and how are you?”

“Oh, okay. Uh ...”

“How was the funeral?” Ptolemy asked, trying to repair the broken conversation.

“Very sad, Mr. Grey. The children were so sad. Reggie’s sistah come down from Oakland with her kids. What is it you wanted?”

“Did you bring Alfred to the funeral?”

“No . . . how can I help you, Mr. Grey?”

“I got everything I want,” he replied. “I don’t need a thing, thank you very much.”

“But why are you callin’ here?” she asked, beginning to lose patience.

“That Robyn is a miracle,” he said. “You know that?”

“She okay.”

“No . . . no, no, no. She’s a honest-to-God miracle.”

“I got to go, Mr. Grey.”

“When she come here to my house,” Ptolemy said, as if he had not heard Nina’s complaint, “she saw the mess and the junk and cleaned it all up from one end to the other. Washed and cleaned and threw out and poisoned the bugs too. And then, when she looked at me and seen that I was a mess, she took me to the doctor and got me the kinda medicine you people got out there today. Strong stuff, the kinda penicillin open up your eyes.”

“That’s, that’s wonderful,” Nina said. “You go, Mr. Grey.”

“Get off the phone with that old fool,” Alfred said in the background.

“I got to be somewhere, Mr. Grey.”

“So you know,” the old man went on, “when Robyn brung me to that doctor, that handsome Devil with the thick mustaches, I started to remembah things.”

“That’s nice but I—”

“One thing I just remembered was somethin’ Reggie wanted me to give you.”

“I said get off that phone!” Alfred shouted.

“Just gimme a minute, Al. I’ll be off in just a few minutes.”

“I’ma go wit’out you, Nine,” he threatened.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Go on an’ I’ll meet you there.”

Errant sounds came through the line for a time. This period was ended by a loud bang that Ptolemy thought was a door slamming.

“Mr. Grey? Are you still there?”

“Sure am. I hope I didn’t cause any trouble with your man.”

“Don’t worry ’bout him. He just get mad sometimes.”

Suddenly, and without apparent reason, Ptolemy had a startling memory. It was an afternoon that Reggie was visiting with him. It was back in the time when his mind wasn’t working right, but still he had a clear image of the young man showing him a photograph.

“These my kids, Papa Grey,” the old man remembered the young man saying. “Tish an’ Artie. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Mr. Grey?” Nina was saying. “Are you there?”

“I don’t want that man’a yours to know about this,” he said.

“Okay. I won’t tell him. What is it? What did Reggie have for me?”

“I wanted him to have it,” Ptolemy said. “But he said that he wanted it for you and them beautiful chirren. Are the kids still stayin’ wit’ Niecie?”

“For a while longer,” Nina said. “Until I get myself together.”

“Uh-huh. You go and visit them?”

“On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, every week. Those are my days off from the department store.”

“Hm. That’s good. A mother should see her kids. They need to be seen by her. That way they know they okay. They know it by the look in her eye. You know, if your mother look at you an’ smile, then you know you doin’ all right.”

“What was it that you had for Artie and Letisha?” Nina asked softly.

“I don’t want that Alfred to know nuthin’ about it,” Ptolemy said again. “Reggie didn’t like him.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Okay, okay, then I’ll tell you what. One day I’ma come by Niecie house when you there with the kids but Alfred ain’t. That way I can talk to you without worryin’ about him hearin’ it.”

“But what is it?”

“I’ll tell you that when I see you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now?”

“I would if I could but I cain’t ’cause I ain’t.”

“Why not?”

“You just make sure to go to Niecie’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. What time you usually go there?”

“’Bout eleven in the mornin’.”

“Keep that up and you will get Reggie’s gift.”

“But, Mr. Grey, I need to know what it is.”

Ptolemy hung up the phone and grinned. He chuckled to himself and then laughed out loud.

Sitting in the living room in the late morning, Ptolemy tried to remember the last time he laughed out loud. He could feel the laughter in his hands and knees. The happiness had replaced his arthritic pain. He never laughed like that when he was with Sensia. She laughed for him. He was already beyond elation and wonder by the time he was a man. It was way back in his childhood, when he would walk around the woods with Coydog and the old thief made crazy faces and sounds and told jokes about things that other adults didn’t think were proper.

Ptolemy wondered how he could have lived for so long but still the most important moments of his life were back when he was a child with Coy McCann walking at his side. How could the most important moments of his life be Coy’s last dance on fire and Maude’s death in flames? Hadn’t he lived through poverty, war, and old age? Didn’t any of that mean anything?

The Devil’s fire ignited in him and he was able to laugh again now that he was burning alive.

He thought about Robyn’s legs, about how firm and brown and strong they were. Many a time, when she was walking around the house in only a T-shirt, he wanted to get on his knees and hug those powerful thighs to his cheek and chest. This desire made him happy. He was as old as Methuselah but a child’s legs made him happy. He could no longer feel sex, but he remembered . . . maybe knowing it better in hindsight than he ever did when he was able.

“I love her,” he said into the silence of the apartment.

As the moments passed, Ptolemy thought about stars wheeling through the night sky. They moved past, getting on with their business while men had their feet in clay.

We born dyin’, Coydog used to say sometimes. But you ask a man an’ he talk like he gonna live forevah. Nevah take no chances. Nevah look up or down.

“I love you, Robyn,” Ptolemy said as a reply to words spoken so long ago. Death was coming, but Love was there too. Robyn was a far-off descendant, an adopted child, a woman he might have loved as a woman if he were fifty years younger and she twenty years older.

Pain tittered in his knucklebones and burbled in his knees. His joints were like music, like transistor radios calling out from under his skin. The knock at the door was a new strain, another musician deciding to jam with him. He waited for the knock to come again before getting up, going to the bedroom, pulling the bureau drawer open, and retrieving his .25-caliber pistol.

He walked to the door purposefully, like a soldier marching into battle.

“Who is it?” he asked in a mild voice.

“Shirley Wring,” she answered sweetly.

Changing his mood as quickly as an infant child distracted by a sudden sound, Ptolemy stuffed the little gun into his pocket, threw the four locks, and opened the door.

She wore an orange dress and largish, bone-colored beads. Her half-blind eyes glistened behind glittering glasses. Her short hair was done recently, forming a cap that wrapped in arcs down under her ears and got curly over her forehead. Her tennis shoes were white and sensible. And instead of the red bag, she carried a pink paper box in her hands.

“Can I come in?” the small woman asked.

Ptolemy reached out to take the box and then backed away for her to enter. As she went past, he could see the red bag hanging from her left shoulder. For some reason this made him happy.

“Come on in an’ sit,” he said. “Can I get you somethin’? Water? Tea?”

Shirley Wring set her bag on the couch and took the box from Ptolemy.

“You sit down and rest and I’ll put together some coffee an’ fudge for us,” she said.

“I’ll be right with ya,” he promised. “First I’ma get sumpin’ in the bedroom.”

He put the pistol back in the drawer and took out a smaller item, which he placed in his shirt pocket.

You okay, Ptolemy?” Shirley asked when he sat down heavily at the kitchen table.

“Ain’t no way a man could be almost ninety-two an’ okay at the same time,” he answered. “But I’m as good as a man like that can get. That’s for sure.”

Shirley lit a match to start the burner under the kettle and then she came to sit across the table from him. Her eyes were watery and slightly out of focus, he could tell.

He must have frowned, because she asked, “What?”

“Oh . . . nuthin’. I was just thinkin’ ’bout gettin’ old.”

“Once you get our age,” she said, “I guess that’s what we always be thinkin’ ’bout.”

“How old are you, Miss Wring?”

“Seventy-four last March.”

“I was almost a man when you was born. I got old in these bones make you seem like a wildcat on the prowl.”

“Old is old,” she said, and smiled, enjoying a moment that she didn’t see coming.

“No, baby,” Ptolemy said, wondering at the words coming out from his mind. “No. That’s what I was thinkin’ about. You know, I got every tooth I was born with except for one canine that got knocked out when I fell off’a the ice truck one day when Peter Brock took a turn too fast. That was sumpin’ else. I looked at that bloody tooth in my hand and I knew I was not nevah gonna work on that ice truck again. Not nevah. Damn.

“But you know, I nevah had a cavity, an’ I nevah needed no glasses.”

“And here I got nuthin’ but dentures,” Shirley said, “an’ I got to squint just to see you across the table.”

“Yeah, but just a few weeks ago I didn’t even have half a mind. If you told me the apple was red an’ then you right away asked me what you just said, I wouldn’t remembah. I’d stutter and think about my wallet, or Reggie, or maybe I wouldn’t even’a understood the question.”

Shirley’s smile slowly faded. Her eyes retained their blind fondness, though.

“Yeah,” Ptolemy continued. “I sold my body to the Devil an’ I can only hope that he don’t care ’bout no old niggah’s soul.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“That word.”

“That word begins with a n?”

“Yes. That word.”

Ptolemy smiled at this genteel black woman. The kettle whistled and she got up to make filtered coffee and arrange her homemade fudge on a white plate.

When she was through preparing and serving she took her seat again, but now she wouldn’t look her host in the eye.

“What’s wrong, Miss Wring?”

“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said.

“Snap? Girl, all I got to say is that if you call that snappin’, then you must think kissin’ makes babies an’ a argument makes a war.”

Shirley smiled and looked up. Ptolemy could see the young girl in her features and for a moment Shirley and Robyn and Sensia came together in one.

“You’re hot,” she said.

It was only then that he realized that she’d reached across the table to take his hand.

“Devil’s medicine,” he explained.

“Why you keep talkin’ ’bout the Devil, Mr. Grey?”

“When you met me, I was, was confused, right?”

“A l’il bit.”

“A lot. But then I went to this doctor, and now it’s like I’m a whiz kid on the radio. I know everything I ever known. I know things that I didn’t know fifty years ago when they happened. Who else but the Devil gonna give you all that?”

“The medicine make you hot?”

“Yeah. It sure does. Tell me sumpin’, Shirley.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at the tabletop.

“What’s that?”

“Who are you?” It was a question he had never asked before. Naked and unadorned, it was like something Coy would have asked a young girl he was courting.

“I ain’t nobody.”

“Now, I know that ain’t true ’cause I can see you right there in front’a me. I feel your fingers, see your pretty face.”

“Mr. Grey,” she complained.

“You know, Shirley, I wouldn’t push you if I was a young man. Back a long time ago we would’a been up in a bed before I asked you ’bout your favorite color or what you do when they ain’t nobody else around.”

“Please, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy, don’t say them kinda things to me. I’m a shy woman.”

“Men like me like shy women. We see ’em an’ wanna tickle ’em, you know?”

“I was born in Tulsa,” Shirley Wring said. She brought out her other hand to hold his. “But there was a depression and so my daddy took us to California. We got to a rich man’s estate outside’a Santa Barbara . . . lookin’ for work. But instead he let us live in a big cabin by the ocean that was on his land.”

“What your father do for that man?” Ptolemy brought out his other hand.

“Oh,” Shirley said, “he didn’t do nuthin’. That rich man was a Communist and he just wanted to do somethin’ nice for his fellow man.

“We lived there for ’leven years. My first memories is the sound of waves and things that washed up from the sea. My first boyfriend was a little blond-headed boy named Leo who lived in the big house with his sister. They were the rich man’s grandson and granddaughter. We’d swim in the ocean every day, almost.”

Shirley smiled, her eyes gazing backward in time. Ptolemy knew that look. He’d spent many years watching his own youth. He had stared so hard that the vision blurred and the memories were shut away.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “But how did you eat or get the other things you needed?”

“Mr. Halmont, that was the old white man, he gave us food and anything we asked for. My mother made our clothes and my father drove one of Mr. Halmont’s old cars.”

“Eleven years,” Ptolemy marveled. “Eleven years livin’ by the ocean an’ you didn’t even have to lift a finger. Did they make you go to school?”

“Leo and his sister had a tutor, and they let me sit with them. We studied in English and in French, but don’t ask me to speak French. I lost that tongue a long time ago.”

Ptolemy rubbed his fingertips across the back of Shirley’s left hand. Their skins were wrinkled and brittle, two tones of deep, earthy brown. Ptolemy’s heart stuttered, partly because of a feeling that he’d forgotten, and also because he sensed a tragedy.

“Why you leave that house on the beach?” he asked.

Shirley shook her head but said nothing.

Their hands moved together, tangled, Ptolemy thought, like seals playing in the surf of Shirley Wring’s long-ago ocean yard.

“My father and Mr. Halmont used to talk about the world of communism. Every night Daddy would come home and tell us about how in Russia men was just men and there wasn’t no difference in the races or anything.”

“And your father believed that nonsense?”

“My mother was scared, but finally one day Daddy decided to move to L.A. and get a job in a defense factory and work with Mr. Halmont to organize the workers—black and white.”

“Did they kill him?” Ptolemy asked.

Shirley put her forehead against his hand and nodded.

They left the sour taste of their talk and went into the living room. When they were seated on Robyn’s couch, Ptolemy took Shirley’s hands in his, pressing his fingers against her palm.

“What’s this?” she said.

Looking into her hand, she saw the emerald ring she’d left with Robyn.

“Will you be my friend for the rest of our life, double-u ara eye en gee?”

She kissed his lips and threw her arms around his neck. It was the embrace he’d always run after. It was his only chance and his downfall. There was nothing like it in the world.

“You’re hot, Ptolemy.”

“Woman like you in my arms, it’s a wonder I don’t burn up.”

“I like it, because I’m always so cold,” she said.

They sat back, facing each other as well as their ancient bodies would allow. Their arms and hands were tangled up together, their shoes were touching.

“What about you?” Shirley asked.

“You mean you wanna know who I am?”

She nodded and smiled and caressed his cheek with her right hand, the hand that wore their ring.

“That there’s a hard question,” he said. He kissed her fingers, pretending in his mind that he was a younger man who had the right to do such a thing. “I mean, if you asked me any other time I’da had a answer. That answer might not’a been right or true, but I would’a believed it, and so would you have. But, but now it’s all different.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I nevah been the kinda person go out an’ do sumpin’ first,” he said. “I usually look at somebody else and see what they was doin’ and either I’d join in or walk away. My first wife wanted to get married and so that’s what I did. I didn’t really want it, and she knew it, but we had kids and stuck it out for a while. Kids hated me. My ex-wife did too—before she died. But that was okay.

“My second wife come to me before her first marriage was ovah. Come right up to my door. We loved each other, an’ she died by my side, while I was sleep.”

Shirley squeezed his wrist.

“But that’s not what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Ptolemy continued. “I know all that stuff. That’s who I was, but I ain’t like that no more.”

“What are you like now, Mr. Grey?”

Ptolemy inhaled, feeling the breath come into him. It felt like a hot wind rushing through a valley of stone. His heart pulsed, which for some reason brought to mind the moon in its sky.

“First there was you, Shirley Wring,” he said, or maybe Coy said through him.

“Me?”

“Yeah. I was like a blind man on a clear day. I lived in the dark of my eyes, and then you walked up and spelled your name and I remembered it. That was the first thing I remembered right off for the first time in years. You give me that treasure but what was even better was when I give it back. That was before I fount out that Reggie was dead, before I knew that Hilly stoled from me. That was before Robyn, and before I met the Devil behind his garden of roses and a green door.

“But it all started out with you. Reggie tried, but now that I look back on it I can see that he was a good boy but he couldn’t see the man in me. I was a chore that he did every couple’a days. That’s what old people turn into, chores for the young.”

Shirley hummed her agreement and kissed Ptolemy’s hand.

“And most of ’em don’t even take on that responsibility,” she said.

“If I coulda thought about it I woulda killed myself,” Ptolemy said. “But instead I met Satan and he injected me with his fire. Here I been runnin’ from fire ever since my childhood friend died in the blaze, and when I stopped runnin’ they put a fire in my blood.”

“And what you gonna do now?” Shirley asked.

“Robyn gonna be my heir,” he replied. “I’m gonna ask her to take care’a my estranged children, my family and friends, and, and, and you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You and my great-great-grandnephew and niece and their aunt Niecie.”

“All them?”

“That’s what Coy McCann told me to do and I’ma do it.”

Upon the last word uttered the door to the apartment came open. Robyn, loaded down with four shopping bags, stared at the old folks holding each other on the couch.

Ptolemy turned toward his heir and smiled but Shirley gasped and pulled away from him. She disentangled her arms from his and pulled her feet away too.

“What’s goin’ on?” Robyn asked.

“Me an’ Shirley talkin’ ’bout our past,” the fevered old man said.

“I bet you were.”

“I got to be goin’, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy,” Shirley said.

She got to her feet and looked around, finally seeing her red purse behind her on the couch. Robyn saw it too. She put down her shopping bags and picked up the cherry-red leather sack.

“Thank you,” Shirley said.

Robyn grunted and frowned at her elder.

“Good-bye,” Shirley said to both of them.

“You don’t have to go, Shirley,” Ptolemy said, getting to his feet.

“Oh, no, I mean, yes I do. But I will call you,” she said. “I’ll call.”

She scuttled out the door, which Robyn had not closed because her hands were full. Shirley didn’t close it either, and so Ptolemy walked to the front. Shirley stopped at the end of the hall and turned back. She smiled across the concrete expanse and Ptolemy waved at her, though he doubted if she could see.

When he turned away, after Shirley was gone, he met Robyn’s stony stare.

“Why you got to be rude to my friend?” he asked, unintimidated by the anger in her face.

“Why you got to be makin’ out with her on my bed?”

“Girl, I’m ninety-one.”

“I know what I saw. You was just movin’ back from a kiss when I come in here.”

“Kiss?”

“You got your own bed,” Robyn said. “You could take her up in there.”

He had had this argument many times in his life. Sensia could tell when he was holding back from turning his head to see a fine woman’s gait. Bertie, his first wife, once got mad because he left a fifteen-cent tip instead of a dime for a cute waitress.

“But, baby,” he’d said to at least a dozen women, “I didn’t mean nuthin’.”

But he had meant it. He had.

Robyn’s hands had become fists and her cheek wanted to quiver.

He turned away, walked into his bedroom, and closed the door on the rippling seas of love.

He went to the bureau and took out one of the Devil’s tiny pills. His fever was raging. He could hear it boiling in his ears, feel it huffing like a bellows against his rib cage.

He swallowed the profane medicine and smiled.

Later on, sitting in Sensie’s wicker chair by a window that looked out on the barren concrete yard, Ptolemy opened his mind.

A child had come to his door two years after he and Sensia were married. She was eleven years old and her face was his face on a girl-child’s head. Her name was Pecora and she had been living in a foster home with five other girls.

“I don’t wanna live there no more,” Pecora, who was named for her mother, had said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause they nasty an’ mean an’ you my real father an’ my mother have died.”

“I cain’t take you,” Ptolemy said. He didn’t question that she was his, one look at that face and he knew it must be true. He and Pecora Johnson had spent a weekend together a dozen years earlier, but she never said anything about a child.

Ptolemy and Sensia had discussed children, and Sensia said that she was no mother and so would have no child.

Ptolemy had girded himself against his own blood frowning at him and Pecora turned away. He watched the child walk down the hall. She got all the way to the door, and he would have let her go into the cold arms of the street except that Sensia came home just then. All she had to do was look into Pecora’s eyes and she knew everything: that this was her husband’s love child, that she had come seeking shelter, and that Ptolemy turned her away because he didn’t want to lose Sensia’s love.

“Come on in with me, child,” Sensia said.

Pecora and Ptolemy had two things in common: their faces and their love of Sensia Howard.

“I started her out on the road,” Ptolemy would say to Sensia, “but you brought her home.”

Yes?” he said when she knocked.

“Can I come in?” Robyn asked through the door.

“Come on.”

She had been wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when she’d come in from shopping, but now she wore a green dress that made her look younger.

“I’m sorry, Papa Grey,” Robyn said from the doorway. “I didn’t mean to get all mad. It wasn’t my bed right then but just a couch in the livin’ room and what you do ain’t none’a my business anyway.”

“Come on in an’ sit down, baby,” Ptolemy said to the girl.

Robyn slouched into the room and sat at the edge of the bed across from his wicker chair.

Robyn had her head down while Ptolemy looked at her, thinking that every heartbeat in his chest was like a grain of sand through an hourglass.

“Every minute I got wit’ you is precious,” he said at last. “I don’t care if you get mad.”

“You don’t?”

“You bein’ mad is just that you love me. At least I’m old enough to know that. But I want you to be nice to Shirley. I need you to take care of her after I’m gone.”

“Why you got to talk about dyin’ so much?”

“Because I’m dyin’, baby. Dyin’ just as sure as the sun go down.”

“I’m sorry, Papa Grey.”

“Sorry ’bout what?”

“Gettin’ mad. Takin’ you to that doctor.”

“If I was fifty years younger and you aged twenty years ...”

Robyn smiled, and then she giggled.

“And then would you only look at my legs?” she asked. “Or would I find you on the couch with Shirley Wring?”

“I might be lookin’ but the couch would be all yours.”

“One’a my mama’s boyfriends used to make me take off my clothes an’ lie up on top’a him,” Robyn said, answering a question he’d asked days before.

Ptolemy did not reply right away.

Robyn squirmed, turning her left shoulder toward him and averting her face. Then she twisted the other way, shoving her right shoulder in his direction. Finally she got up from the bed, falling down on her knees at his feet. She put her head in his lap and he placed a hand on the side of her face.

“When I was a boy I had a friend named Maude. She was so black that even the darkest little children made fun of her.”

“But you didn’t?” Robyn asked into his fingers.

“No.”

“Did you think she was beautiful?”

“I guess. But even if she wasn’t lovely that wouldn’ta mattered because she was my friend. She was my friend and she died in a fire and nobody could save her.”

Robyn raised her head to regard him.

“You are my girl, Robyn. Everything I have is yours. Everything. Do you understand me?”

She took his hand and squeezed it.

“How do you feel when I tell you about that man?” she asked.

“That I would kill him if ever I saw his face.”

“I only ever told you about it.”

While they were eating takeout Chinese for dinner a hard knock came on the door.

“Who is it?” Robyn asked while Ptolemy came up behind her, thinking about his pistol.

“Police.”

Robyn opened the door.

Two Negro policemen stood there, wearing uniforms and stern frowns.

“Yes, Officer?” Robyn asked.

“Can we come in?” one of the policemen asked. He was shorter, maybe five ten, and lighter-skinned. A plastic rectangle on the left side of his chest said ARNOLD.

“What for?” asked Ptolemy. His throat was filled with phlegm and so he coughed twice.

When the old man spoke up, Robyn moved back, giving him the lead.

“There was a man attacked in front of your apartment building a few days ago,” Officer Arnold said. “Darryl Pride. He was seriously hurt, hospitalized, and we’re here investigating the assault.”

That was the first time since his coma receded that Ptolemy felt his mind slip. He was confused for a moment, just a moment. He didn’t understand the words, or where he was, or why people were complaining.

He tried to speak but the words were caught in his mind, and then these words, his own thoughts, were incomprehensible to him.

“Sir?” the officer named Arnold said.

Ptolemy didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.

“Papa Grey?” Robyn said, and the wheels started turning again.

“Darryl Pride?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t know the name but do he have a girlfriend name of Melinda Hogarth?”

“That’s him, sir.”

“You are a very polite young man. It’s nice when a policeman is civil.”

Officer Arnold smiled.

“You young men come on in,” Ptolemy said, once again master of his own mind.

The officers, Arnold and Thompkins, sat on the couch while Ptolemy took the folding stool and Robyn brought out a chair from the kitchen.

“Ms. Hogarth says that you were involved in Mr. Pride’s beating,” Arnold was saying.

“Did she tell ya that she been muggin’ me on the street for three years? Did she tell ya that she pushed her way in this house an’ stoled all the money outta my spendin’ can an’ slapped me to the ground an’ here I’m ninety-one year old?”

“We’re not here about that,” Officer Thompkins said. He had a baby face and dark skin that was so smooth, it could have been called perfect.

“When my great-grandniece come to stay wit’ me, she told that heifer that she bettah not be robbin’ me no mo’,” Ptolemy said. “That’s when she turned to this man Pride. Imagine that. A man named for self-respect tellin’ me I got to pay up.”

The officers looked at each other.

“He stole from you?”

“No, sir. No, he did not. He told me that I should pay, but I told him that I would call the cops.”

“He says that you were involved in his beating,” Arnold repeated.

“Look at me, Officer. Look at me. How’m I gonna beat up a man the size of a icebox? I might could shoot him if I owned a gun. I might’a would’a shot him if I did. But all I said was that I didn’t have no money and that we was gonna go to the cops if they do anything else. He’s afraid’a the cops. Him and Melinda both dope fiends. Both of ’em.”

“So you deny that you had anything to do with Pride’s beating?” Thompkins asked.

Ptolemy did not answer.

“Did you see him get beaten?” Thompkins pressed.

“No, sir.”

“Did you, ma’am?” Thompkins asked, turning to Robyn.

“I don’t even know who you talkin’ ’bout,” she said. “Papa Grey had some trouble with that bitch, but I gave her the news.”

“We ...” Arnold said. “We heard that there was another family member taking care of Mr. Grey.”

“No. Just me.”

“Ms. Hogarth said that there was a young man,” Arnold said. “She claimed that he beat her and that another man, a heavyset guy, and a young woman had beaten her.”

“Damn,” Robyn said. “She been beat by just about everybody on the block accordin’ to her.”

Officer Arnold couldn’t help but smile.

“Will you please answer the question?”

“You didn’t ask no question. You just said that somebody said somethin’.”

“Do you know of anyone else taking care of your uncle?”

“There’s Reggie Brown.”

Ptolemy’s heart lurched in his chest when Robyn uttered that name.

“Where is this Reggie Brown?”

“Dead.”

Again the policemen looked at each other.

“He was killed in a drive-by ’bout nine weeks ago. Killed him on Denker when he was sittin’ out in front’a the house of a friend’a his.”

Thompkins frowned and Arnold rubbed his fingertips together.

“Listen,” Robyn said. “Melinda do dope. I’ont know her boyfriend but he prob’ly a dopehead too. My uncle’s a old man. He ain’t in no gang. He ain’t runnin’ down no dopehead, beatin’ him on the street. That’s just stupid.”

“And what about you?” Officer Arnold asked.

“What about me?”

“She said that a young woman beat her with an electric fan.”

“So? She tell you that she the Virgin Mary when she get enough dope in her blood.”

“How old are you?” Thompkins asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Are you in school?”

“Got my GED and I’m gonna start LACC in the fall.”

Ptolemy could see Robyn’s chest heaving.

The policemen stared a minute, but neither Ptolemy nor Robyn crumbled under the scrutiny.

Then the policemen looked at each other, nodded, and stood as one.

“We may have more questions later,” Officer Arnold said.

“We always here, Your Honor,” Ptolemy told him. “At ninety-one, with dope fiends all ovah the street, I don’t get out too much.”

You bettah call Billy Strong an’ tell him not to come by here for a while,” Robyn said after the cops were gone.

“I almost lost my mind when them bull was at that do’,” Ptolemy said.

“What you mean?”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking ice water from purple plastic tumblers.

“I saw them uniforms an’ my mind went blank. It didn’t mattah that the cops was both colored, not one bit. It was like, was like I was feebleminded again. If you aksed me my name I wouldn’t been able to say.”

“But you talked to them, Papa Grey. You talked good too.”

“But I could feel it, honey. It’s like black curtains comin’ down on me. Like a shroud.”

They reached across the table at the same time, entwining their fingers. Ptolemy smiled and Robyn understood him.

“Come on ovah to the closet, baby,” he said. “It’s time I gave you my treasure.”

In the night Coy came to him.

“You finally done did sumpin’, huh, boy? What took you so long?”

“I was scared,” a full-grown Ptolemy Grey said to the man Coy McCann.

“Scared? What you got to be scared about? Here you got a nice apartment, wit’ two girlfriends, money comin’ in every week, an’ a treasure too.”

“There’s blood on that gold, Coydog.”

“My blood. You know, for every grain of gold dust that make up that treasure a black mother have cried and a black son done shed sweat or blood, maybe even life itself. That man was a slave master, only he didn’t have to feed his slaves.”

“You stole,” Ptolemy said.

“An’ they stoled an’ they murdered. So who gonna be in front’a who on the line?”

Ptolemy smiled then. His fever was raging but he didn’t know it. He was with Coydog again, having a brand-new conversation like they did in the old days before fire and blood flooded the chambers of the child’s mind.

“You right, Coy,” he said in his delirium. “You sure is. I showed Robyn the treasure an’ told her what to do an’ how to do it. She gonna be your heir. She gonna take that gold an’ see my blood outta down here. They all gonna go to college or rest easy in they final days.”

Coy stood there for a long time at the foot of the bed. The sun was rising behind him, and Africa, from two thousand years before, loomed in those first rays of light.

Ptolemy remembered the stories Coy told him about Africa; about a land before the gods of the North descended; about kings and crazy men; about wars waged and done with and not a drop of blood drawn or even a bruise suffered by a single warrior.

How you know all that, Coy?” the boy, Li’l Pea, had asked. “You said that the white man’s history books lie about us all the time.”

“They do.”

“Then how you know about how it was before the white man? No niggah know all that.”

“Oh yeah, boy,” Coy McCann said. “We from there. Some of us remembah with our minds. But even more got them stories jammed up in they hearts an’ spirits. They tell white men’s stories but changes ’em. They talkin’ about things they know an’ don’t remembah. I listens an’ tease out the truth that lay underneath.”

Coy stood at the foot of the bed with the sun rising and the secret memory of Africa emerging out of memories that were forgotten but not lost.

Ptolemy began to fret that maybe he’d done something wrong. Maybe Coy didn’t want a woman to lay hold to his treasure. Maybe he had waited too long to take action. But after a long time, at least two days by Ptolemy’s reckoning, Coydog smiled, and then, a few hours later, he nodded . . .

A pain lanced through Ptolemy’s rib cage. It was like a spear that had entered by his left side and went out through the right. He sat up straight in his bed and yelled.

Robyn was sitting there, and next to her was a man who was holding a syringe, leaning over and frowning.

“Hello, Satan.”

“Good to see you, Mr. Grey,” Dr. Ruben said.

“Am I dead yet?”

“If it wasn’t for your niece you would have been. I’m surprised you’ve made it so long. I’m glad too.”

“You ain’t taken no money or nuthin’ from him, have you, girl?” Ptolemy asked.

“No, sir. Nuthin’.”

Ptolemy thought he could make out things crawling and bristling in the doctor’s great mustaches. Ruben’s eyes seemed to be blazing: yellowy-green flames on a brown sea.

“Lemme talk to this man alone a minute, will you, Robyn?”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, relief at his revival in her tone and her shoulders, and even in the way she stood.

She closed the door and the doctor pressed a thumb against Ptolemy’s wrist.

“You have the constitution of a man half your age,” he said.

“How long have I been in this bed?”

“Three days.” Ruben took out a little notebook and started writing. While he did this he continued to talk. “That niece of yours is something else. She went to Antoine Church with two men and they threatened him until he found a way to get in touch with me. I came as soon as she called. I thought you would die, I told her so. But I gave you this concentrated injection and you came to immediately. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“How long?”

“If you were anybody else I’d say two days. But at the outside it’s two weeks.”

“And then you cut me up like a slaughtered calf.”

“Science will benefit from your sacrifice, Mr. Grey. Your niece and her generation will not have to suffer as you have.”

Ptolemy smiled at that.

“I’m leaving you a stronger pill,” Dr. Ruben continued. “And Robyn has my phone number. Whenever you feel hot, take a pill immediately. She will call me if you begin to fail.”

“I went to Africa in my sleep.”

“You did?”

“I saw it. Not today, but two thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Degradation, by Coy McCann’s reckoning.”

Dr. Ruben didn’t say anything to that. Ptolemy closed his eyes, then realized that he must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them again Robyn was sitting there next to him, holding his hands.

Satan was nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, baby,” he said.

“You look like a baby when you sleepin’, Papa Grey.”

“I got two weeks.”

She kissed his fingers.

“What day is it?” Ptolemy asked.

“Tuesday.”

“I got to go to Niecie’s house at noon . . . Alone.”

“Okay.”

“You been takin’ that gold to the safe-deposit box?”

“Yeah. A little bit at a time, like you told me to do. Shirley Wring come by in the mornin’ to sit wit’ you and I went to the bank. And then I got Beckford and Billy Strong an’ we went to talk to Antoine Church.”

“How soon before all that gold in the box?” Ptolemy asked.

“Three days. It’a be done by Thursday.”

“I’ma sleep now, baby.”

“Can I lie down next to you?”

“Will you tell me sumpin’?”

“What?”

“Anything, child.”

When I was a little girl my mama an’ my daddy and me was happy,” she whispered into the old man’s ear. “We lived in a house that was blue and white and had flowers in the front yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Mama took in li’l black children for daycare, and Daddy worked on a farm outside’a town. He coulda had a bettah job but he liked to be outside and to take time off between the seasons.

“Mama had a baby boy, and Daddy was so happy that he went up and down the block tellin’ everybody that he had a son named Alexander and that his son was gonna do what Alexander the Great did. But then, only a few weeks aftah Al was born, he got somethin’ in his chest and he was sick for five months.

“I think if he had just died right off that it wouldn’ta been so hard on Daddy an’ Mama. But he took off’a work and she went wit’ him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.

“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.

“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.

“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.

“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.

“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.

“Papa Grey, are you awake?”

The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.

“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”

While Robyn spoke, Ptolemy could hear himself breathing like a man asleep. He was asleep, but still he heard every word. He imagined the young girl eating peaches and the old man falling in love with her. This seemed natural. Children were there to be loved and looked after and cared for; sometimes you even had to sacrifice your life in order that a child might live.

After a while the girl talked about moving to Los Angeles and about Niecie and Hilliard and Reggie, who was an orphan too. The sleeping man listened with part of his mind, but he was also thinking about Letisha and Arthur and how Reggie was like a son to him.

Now he was an old man and there were children to look after, and one child to avenge.

Ptolemy smiled in his sleep, thinking all the way back to that day the white minister had shaken his hand. He had given that arrogant old white man something, and he had taken something away from him too.

In the morning the sleeping but still-conscious man opened his eyes. Robyn slept next to him, her arm flung over his chest. He rose up on a painful elbow and kissed the child’s forehead. She opened her eyes and hugged him.

“Do you love me, Papa Grey?” she asked.

“More than anything . . . ever.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when he showed up on her doorstep at 12:14 on Tuesday afternoon.

Robyn had hired him a limousine and a driver, a brown man with a Spanish accent named Hernandez. She had wanted to come with Ptolemy, but he told her that she needed to put Coydog’s treasure where nobody could get at it but her.

“But why you got to go see Niecie so bad?” she’d asked him.

“For Reggie.”

“Reggie’s dead, Papa Grey.”

“Ain’t nobody full dead until no one remembah they name. Don’t forget that, girl—as long you remembah me, I’ma be alive in you.”

Robyn crying, it seemed to Ptolemy, was a woman at war with herself. She couldn’t let herself go completely, but the tears rolled down her left eye, and her beautiful lips trembled.

He tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away.

“Robyn.”

“Your car prob’ly outside, Papa Grey. You bettah be goin’.”

This your family we going to?” Hernandez the driver asked Ptolemy on the way to Niecie’s house.

“Yes, sir. Real blood family too. The kind you can’t shake off.”

The driver, a broad-faced man, laughed.

“What’s your name?” Ptolemy asked from the backseat.

“Hernandez.”

“Well, Mr. Hernandez—”

“No, Mr. Grey, not Mr. Hernandez, just Hernandez. I like that name.”

“You from around here, Hernandez?”

“Fifty years here,” he said. “Forty-eight, really. When I was seven my parents came up from a farm in the south of Mexico.”

“You still speak Spanish?”

“No. I just got this accent is all. I know some words.”

“Remembah back in the old days when we all lived together?” Ptolemy asked. “Mexicans, Negroes, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese on the one side—”

“And white people on the other,” Hernandez said, finishing the litany.

Both men laughed.

“What happened to us?” Ptolemy asked.

“White man shined a light on us and we froze like deer in the road. After that we all went crazy and started tearin’ each other apart.”

Ptolemy frowned and sat back in his seat. Even the Devil’s fire couldn’t help him to understand why what both he and Hernandez knew was true.

Hernandez dropped him at Niecie’s door with a business card so that he could call if it was time to go home and the driver was off somewhere. The black man and the brown shook hands over the seat.

“Nobody evah put us on the news, huh, Hernandez?”

“What you mean, Mr. Grey?”

“Us gettin’ along ain’t news.”

Hernandez laughed and got out to open the door for his client.

Niecie cried happily and Ptolemy walked in the house. Nina was there with her children. Hilliard was on a couch in the corner, watching a small TV in a pink plastic case.

“Come ovah here and say hi to Pitypapa,” Niecie said to her son.

“Hey,” Hilly said, going so far as to turn his eyes away from the screen.

“Go on back to your TV, boy,” Ptolemy said, waving dismissively.

Niecie and Nina sat with their elder and talked and drank lemonade. Niecie was nervous, not wanting to ask for the money she had already come to expect, had already planned on.

They talked for a while about relatives that Ptolemy had only recently remembered. Many members of his family and his extended family had died. They stopped bringing him to funerals because he seemed to get upset during the services.

“That’s why I send Reggie ovah to your house in the first place, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “You’d get upset and mad and you didn’t seem to know where you was at.”

Ptolemy appraised his grandniece’s attempt to convince him, and maybe convince herself, that he really owed her something, that she had been there to help him when he couldn’t help himself. He resented her trying to make him feel indebted, but on the other hand he did owe her what she said. She had sent Reggie, and Reggie had tried his best. She had sent Robyn to him.

“You know, one time Reggie lost his job at the supermarket because he wouldn’t come in because he had to take you to the doctor’s,” Niecie was saying. “I told him that blood was thicker than water and that we owed you somethin’. I told him that I’d put him up and feed him and the onlyest thing I expected was that he took care of you.”

“Do you have a checking account at the bank, Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.

“Wha?”

“A bank account. Do you have a bank account?”

“No. I mean, I know I should have one but they need you to maintain a three-hundred-dollar minimum, an’ some months here I cain’t even find three dimes in my coin purse.”

“I’ma get Robyn to go to the bank wit’ you an’ start a account with nine hunnert dollars,” Ptolemy said.

Hilly turned his head away from the TV to look at the old man.

“Then I’ma set it up to put eight hunnert dollars in there ev’ry mont’.”

“You only get two hunnert an’ sumpin’ a week from retirement,” Hilly said.

“That ain’t all I evah got, boy,” Ptolemy replied. “Maybe if you didn’t steal from me right off the bat, you’da learnt sumpin’.”

“How come you let Robyn do your business, Uncle?” Niecie asked. “You know that girl ain’t nuthin’ but trouble. I only took her in outta the goodness’a my heart. But she’s bad news. You cain’t trust her. An’ you know I’m the one sent her ovah there in the first place.”

Ptolemy saw trouble in Niecie’s eyes, trouble he’d lived with all through his life. He saw lawyers and lawsuits, maybe even threats and drive-bys coming from his one slip.

Ptolemy got to his feet, steadying himself by placing a hand on the back of the chair.

“Where you goin’, Pitypapa?”

“I’ma leave.”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh yeah, honey. I’m gone. I can see from talkin’ to you that there ain’t nuthin’ but trouble in the future. I’ma cut that off right here and now. I shoulda known that givin’ you a little sumpin’ would make you want everything.”

“No. I was just warnin’ you ’bout that girl.”

“Not another word, Niecie. Not one more word or I will cut you off without a dime, without evah speakin’ to you evah again.”

Niecie Brown saw the iron and the clarity in her uncle’s eyes. She saw the intelligence surging up in him, the certainty in his words, and even in the way he stood.

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” she said.

“Nina,” Ptolemy said.

“Yes, Mr. Grey.”

“Come on out on the porch with me,” he said. “Hilly.”

“Huh?”

“Bring me an’ Nina two chairs out there.”

The boy frowned.

“Do what your uncle tells you to do, Hilliard,” Niecie commanded.

Letisha and Artie could be heard from the inside of the house, jumping and shouting. The tinny speaker of the pink TV made unintelligible noises while adult footsteps sounded at unexpected intervals. Helicopters roved the skies over South Central L.A. as brown and black folks passed beneath the aerial scrutiny. Ptolemy saw Hernandez leaning against the hood of his car across the way, while little Mexican children played around him on a curbside patch of grass.

Ptolemy thought about the world he lived in. It seemed to him that he had died and was resurrected twenty years later in an old man’s body, but with the sly mind of a fox or a coyote. He was an ancient predator among great-bodied herbivores, under a desert sky filled with metal creatures that had passed down from man.

“Why you smilin’, Mr. Grey?” Nina asked.

“You know, Nina, you are probably the most beautiful woman I have evah seen in ninety years.”

Reggie’s lovely young widow smiled and looked away.

“Mr. Grey!”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I had a wife named Sensia.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“And she was a beautiful girl. But not as beautiful as you.”

Nina turned back to the old man, wondering with her gaze where he wanted to go with this line of flattery. “Really?”

“Oh yeah. And Reggie loved you too. He loved you so much that when he found out that some other man had caught your eye he decided to take you down to San Diego so that he didn’t have to share all that loveliness.”

Nina’s smile froze. Her head moved back an inch.

“What?” she asked.

“I got a trust in the bank,” Ptolemy said. “It’s set aside for my family. There’s money for your chirren’s education and their wed-din’ days.”

Nina’s expression changed again. Ptolemy wouldn’t let her get a bead on his intentions.

“Yeah,” he said. “And I made a gift for Reggie.”

He took an old gold coin from his pocket. The date on the coin read 1821.

“This here twenty-dollar gold piece. It’s worf five thousand dollars or more to a collector. I got twenty’a them for Reggie. He told me to hold them for you.”

Nina brought both hands to her mouth.

Ptolemy put the coin back in his pocket.

“But before I hand them ovah I got to know how my boy died.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I, I don’t know who shot him.”

“What about Alfred?”

“No.”

“Did you tell him that Reggie was takin’ you and the kids away?”

Nina tried to speak but could not.

Sirens blared and suddenly four police cars raced past Niecie’s house and on down the street.

“He couldn’t, Mr. Grey. My Al couldn’t do nuthin’ like that.”

“What was he in prison for?”

“No.”

“Was he wit’ you when Reggie was killed?”

“I’m a good woman, Mr. Grey . . . a mother.”

“Was Alfred wichyou when they opened fire on Reggie on the front steps of his friend’s house?”

“My baby couldn’t do nuthin’ like that,” Nina said, her eyes begging him.

“How long aftah you told Alfred was Reggie killed?”

“A, a, a day and a, a, a day and a half.”

“An’ you didn’t think nuthin’ about that?”

Nina’s hands were back at her mouth again. She shook her head and tears squeezed out from her eyes.

This is the mother of Reggie’s children , Ptolemy thought, the mother of my blood.

“I’m a good woman, Mr. Grey.”

“But did you tell Alfred that you was goin’ away with Reggie?”

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Did he say he wanted you to stay?”

She nodded.

“An’ what else did he say?”

“That I was his woman. That I belonged wit’ him.”

Ptolemy thought about his great-great-grandniece and -nephew again, this woman’s children.

“Why you wanna run around wit’ him, treatin’ Reggie like that?”

Nina looked away.

“Did you know?” he asked.

“No,” she said to the splintery wooden deck.

Ptolemy looked out across the street and saw Hernandez gazing back at him. His heart thudded against his rib cage like the kicks of an angry mule against a barn door. His mind felt as if it might explode. He took out one of the Devil’s pills and swallowed it without water.

He felt the life-preserving, life-taking medicine work its way down his dry gullet. It was a painful journey. Ptolemy thanked Satan for the ache.

“Did you suspect?” he asked.

“Why you wanna bother me ’bout all this?” Nina cried. “Why you doin’ this to me?”

Hilly came out on the porch to see what was wrong.

“Go away, Hilliard,” Ptolemy said. “This ain’t none’a your nevermind.”

The boy snorted and went back in the house.

When Hilly was gone, Ptolemy said, “Reggie took care’a me an’ you did him dirt. I got to ask. I got to find out who killed him.”

Nina stopped crying. Ptolemy thought she finally understood that Reggie’s death didn’t give her a right to blubber and moan.

“I asked him,” she said.

“Who?”

“Al.”

“An’ what he say?”

“He slapped me. He knocked me down. He told me that he wouldn’t nevah have Reggie’s kids in his home.”

“An’ that’s the man you run to when Reggie wanna be wit’ you an’ have his family wit’ you?”

“Al was my first man evah, Mr. Grey. I was wit’ him when I was just thirteen an’ thought I was grown. I just don’t know how to say no to a man like that. I loved Reggie,” she said. “I loved him, but I just couldn’t help myself.”

The pill began to work. The fire in Ptolemy’s mind extinguished, leaving the cold he’d felt in Coydog’s treasure cave. The old man shivered and closed his eyes.

“You murdered my boy,” he said.

Nina shook her head, but it was a weak denial. It was more like she was saying, I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help my feelings.

“So I will make sure that Robyn makes sure that you get enough to live on, to take care’a them babies.”

“But Al won’t take ’em,” she cried.

“I ain’t talkin’ to Al.”

That girl you was with sure was pretty, Mr. Grey,” Hernandez was saying on the drive back to Ptolemy’s home.

They were sitting side by side in the front seat. Ptolemy wore the bright-red seat belt across his chest. He felt that the wide band made him seem small, like a child.

“She told me that her boyfriend mighta murdered my great-grandnephew.”

“Oh.”

“What’s all them tattoos on your arms, Hernandez?”

“Just memories.”

“Back when you was young and wild?”

“Just back when,” the driver said. “Things change, but they don’t get better.”

They drove for a while. When Hernandez came to a stop at a big intersection he said, “She could be lying to you, Mr. Grey.”

“Yeah.”

“You know some crazy kids who lived a few blocks away from my house said that my cousin Hector had got their little sister drunk and pulled a train on her with his boys.”

Ptolemy didn’t know what a train was exactly, but he could guess.

“They come and killed Hector and his main man, Pepe,” Hernandez continued. “I know that Hector didn’t do it ’cause I was wit’ those crazy kids’ sister by myself. And we were gettin’ high, but there wasn’t nobody else there.”

“Yeah,” Ptolemy said again.

The light changed and Hernandez drove on.

“Aren’t you gonna ask me what I did, Mr. Grey?” the driver asked ten blocks further on.

“Why would I?” he replied. “Either you killed them or her or you didn’t do nuthin’. Any way you go, you left with a dead brother and a lie.”

They didn’t talk again until Ptolemy climbed out of the limo in front of his house. He offered Hernandez five dollars as a tip but the Mexican waved it away.

“You all right, Mr. Grey. Watch out, now.”

He came home to an empty apartment. Everything was clean because Robyn cleaned every day. She swept and mopped and dusted and washed. She even ironed Ptolemy’s clothes and hers.

When Robyn did come home he told her that they would have to go see Moishe Abromovitz again.

“All the way down there, Uncle? Why?”

“’Cause I made a mistake an’ told Niecie that you was gonna take care’a my money. You know the minute I drop dead she gonna get some kinda lawyer and try to take that money from you.”

“Niecie wouldn’t do that.”

“Baby, I know that’s what you think. You think Niecie love you and care about you. But all that’s just in yo’ head.” As Ptolemy spoke he realized that Coy had been coming to life in his mind for the past weeks; that his murdered mentor was coming back to see him through this delicate negotiation at the end of his life. “Niecie love you as long as you sleep on the couch and do the things she don’t wanna do. She love you when the old men come around to look at you and you get behind her skirts. But when she find out how much money you gonna get, she won’t love you no more. She won’t ever again. She gonna say you stoled her rightful inheritance.”

“You wrong, Uncle,” Robyn said, “Aunt Niecie wouldn’t evah hate me like that.”

Ptolemy reached across the small kitchen table to take Robyn’s strong hands in his big one.

“I know how you feel and I respect you,” he said. “But do you believe in me?”

“Yes.”

“An’ do you respect me?”

“Yes.”

“So go wit’ me to see Moishe so that I can make sure that your money is yours. And if Niecie come aftah you aftah I’m gone, then I want you to light me a candle on this here table for seven days. Will you do all that for me, baby?”

“I won’t have to light no candle, because Aunt Niecie ain’t nevah gonna think I’d steal from her.”

I have three red apples, two oranges, and a sausage I bought from the market,” Nora Chin said.

They were sitting across from each other at a large conference table of the Terrence P. Laughton Mental Services Center of Santa Monica. Moishe Abromovitz, the old man in the middle-aged man’s body, and Robyn sat at the far end of the table. There was a large tape recorder sitting between Ptolemy and the psychiatrist. The spool of recording tape rolled steady and slow.

A big black fly buzzed past Nora Chin’s face, but she didn’t move or flinch.

“Today’s Robyn’s birthday, Dr. Chin,” Ptolemy said. “She’s eighteen today.”

“How many apples do I have, Mr. Grey?” she responded.

“Two,” he said. “Two apples, three oranges, and a sausage. You know pork sausage an’ applesauce would make my whole day back when I was a boy.”

Chin smiled. She was pretty, though somewhat severe looking. She looked at least twenty years younger than Moishe, but they were almost the same age.

Chin held up an eight-by-ten photograph of a highway scene. There were only four cars evident: three were coming toward the viewer; of these, two were white and one yellow. A blue station wagon, its red brake lights ablaze, was on the other side of the road. After a few seconds Nora Chin put the photograph face down on the table.

“What was the color of the car driving away from you, Mr. Grey?”

“Which way is Toledo from here?” he asked.

“What?” The stern-faced and lovely doctor of the mind was thrown off.

“The road sign said Toledo. I figure you must be askin’ me where am I between that blue car an’ Toledo.”

“I think we’ve done enough testing,” Chin said, her surprise turning into a friendly smile. “Do you know why you’re here today, sir?”

In an instant a dozen thoughts flitted through Ptolemy’s mind: his friends Maude and Coy on fire in the Deep South; Melinda Hogarth, Reggie, the lady newscaster; Sensia, who taught him about love past the age of forty; Robyn, who was sitting there, frowning because the presence of a Chinese woman and a Jewish man made her nervous.

“Because I’m old and for a long time I was confused in my mind,” he said.

“You know that there’s a video camera in the wall behind me, recording our conversation?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And that there’s also a tape recorder running.” She tapped the big box with a slender finger.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And is that all right with you?”

“I want to make it clear that I’m of sound mind so that nobody can argue about my last will and testament.”

Suddenly Nora Chin’s face drew in on itself. It was as if she had heard a sound somewhere and was trying to identify it. Ptolemy decided this was how she looked when she was serious. He also thought that this was the face she put on before a kiss.

Women deadly serious when it come to kissin’, Coy used to say. They laugh all the way there, but when it come down to kissin’ they like a cat when she see sumpin’ shakin’ in the tall grass.

The black fly landed on the big knuckle of Ptolemy’s left hand. He couldn’t help but think that this was Coy coming to visit.

“Why would anyone question your will, Mr. Grey?”

“Because I’ma leave everything to Robyn Small.”

“And why would anyone contest that decision?”

“Because she’s young and not my blood. Because my real family think they deserve my savin’s and property.”

“And you feel that they don’t deserve it?”

“Not exactly that. It’s just that I don’t have no trust in ’em,” Ptolemy said. “Not even a little bit. They good people and I done asted Robyn to take care of ’em. I set up with Mr. Abromovitz to give ’em a little money every month. But Robyn need to be the one in charge.”

“And why is that, Mr. Grey?”

“Because when she had the chance to take my money and use it for herself she didn’t. Because she don’t think that my family will evah be mad with her. Because she the one took me to the doctor an’ got me the vitamins I needed to make me able to be of sound mind.”

Ptolemy gazed at his young friend at the far end of the table. She was smiling and crying.

“But most of all, it’s because when she see a mess she have to clean it up,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” Nora Chin said.

“Robyn is more worried about where she is than where she goin’ to. She want her bed made and the dishes washed. She want to know that ev’ryone’s all right before she go to sleep. She’s a child, but chirren is our future. An’ she have received charity, an’ so she unnerstand how to give it out.”

The black fly had wandered down to Ptolemy’s index fingertip by then. It buzzed its wings, sending a thrill through the old man’s hand.

Nora’s visage had softened. She seemed to have something to say but held it back.

Ptolemy wanted to go and have dinner with her and ask her all kinds of questions about how she saw the minds of white men who came to her for excuses and reasons why they didn’t do right. Did she forgive them like so many brown people had and black people had? Or did she sneak in like Coy would have done and sabotage their wills?

“I think we have enough, Mr. Grey,” she said.

“So is the camera off now?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You like this kinda work, Miss Chin?”

“I do today,” she said slowly and deliberately.

They gazed at each other for a long moment.

“It’s all up in the head for you, isn’t it, Miss Chin,” Ptolemy said at last.

“Not always, sir. Sometimes we find a heart.”

“Yeah. That’s what Robyn know. For the rest’a my family it’s the stomach or the privates or clothes ain’t worf a dime. They don’t know the difference.”

“The difference between what?”

“Between raisin’ a child and lovin’ one.”

Nine days later, Ptolemy woke up in his bed. He felt odd, older. His first thought was of the black fly in the Chinese psychiatrist’s office. He felt the buzz against his finger and giggled.

“Uncle Grey?” Robyn said.

“Hey, baby. What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“How long I been in this bed?”

“Do you know my name?”

“Robyn.”

The child got from the chair and sat next to him on the bed.

“You know me?”

“’Course I know you. You’re my heir.”

The beautiful child leaned over and kissed the old, old man on the lips. He closed his eyes to enjoy that unexpected blessing and then opened them again.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Aftah we got back from the head doctor you started talkin’ like you used to when I first came here . . . only you didn’t recognize nobody an’ you was kinda like outta your head. I didn’t understand most’a the things you said, and you’d be sleepin’ almost all day and all night. I turned on the radio but you said that it hurt your ears, and you would get mad at the TV.

“Aftah two days I called Dr. Ruben. He come an’ told me that you was dyin’ but he’d give you a shot anyways. He said he’d give you a shot an’ either you’d come back to the way you was, stay the way you was, or die.”

“Devil said that?”

Robyn nodded, a serious look on her face, giving her the aspect of a young child.

“How long?” Ptolemy asked.

“Nine days since we come home from Dr. Chin, and one week since the doctor give you the shot.”

“Damn. What kinda world is it we livin’ in where you got to thank the Devil for makin’ house calls?”

“He told me to call him if you passed, Uncle, but, you know, I wanna give you a proper burial.”

“When I die,” he said, “you call Moishe. He and me done made the proper plans for the funeral. He gonna give my body to Ruben, but aftah he finished with it you get it back for cemetery. And I wanna be cremated.”

“No coffin or nuthin’?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I lived a life afraid’a fire,” he said. “In the last I wanna give in to it.”

“How you feel now, Papa Grey?”

“You evah been to the circus?”

“Uh-huh. Mr. Roman used to take me when I was a li’l girl. He take me down early so we could go out back an’ see the lions in the cages and the elephants in their stalls.”

“Did you see the tightrope walker?”

“Yeah. But I’d look away sometimes ’cause I was so afraid that she would fall.”

Ptolemy nodded and smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s like you an’ me was the same,” he said, “like we was born on the same day at the start of everything. We learned to talk from the same teacher, went to the same circus. We ain’t related, but you my twin, and I’m smilin’ ’cause I know that.”

Robyn bit her lower lip and crossed her breasts with her arms.

A fly whizzed past, over her head.

“But why you asked me about the tightrope walker?”

“Because that’s how I feel right now,” Ptolemy said. “Like there’s a rope where there used to be a wide road home. It’s a thousand feet above the ground and it’s so long that you can’t see the beginnin’ or the end. I know I’ma fall off it sooner or later, but I keep on walkin’ because where you fall matters. Do you know what I mean, Robyn?”

She shook her head and took hold of his hand.

“I told you how Coy took them coins and they hung him and burned him, right?”

Robyn nodded.

“In that way he chose the time that he fell. He didn’t plan on it. He wanted to go north and start a new life. But he knew that he could fall right then and that didn’t matter because he had done his important thing in life.”

“Why didn’t he take that gold with him, Uncle?”

“Country boy don’t need no gold,” Coy and Ptolemy said as one. “Sun and soil, whiskey and women all a black farmer need. I’d give away everything I had for the sun on my face and you there next to me, girl.”

Ptolemy hoped the girl would kiss his lips again, but she didn’t. He smiled, though, as if she had.

“Can you go stay with Beckford for two days?” he asked.

“You might need me.”

“Call me every evenin’ at six. If I don’t answer, come on ovah and check on me.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I need to be alone for just two days. I need it.”

“Okay. If you say so. When should I leave?”

“In the mornin’, baby. Tonight I wanna go out with you and Shirley Wring. I want Chinese at a big red restaurant.”

When Ptolemy woke up in the morning, his mind was filled with the sound of dissonant flutes that played over and over at Len Wah’s Mandarin Palace. Shirley wore her emerald ring, and Robyn had on a tight black dress that was short, with spaghetti straps over her shoulders. They laughed and talked and drank cheap red wine with their meal.

For Ptolemy each story they told was a piece in a stone puzzle that made up the ground below his rope. His head was burning but he didn’t take the pill. His mind was soaring but he didn’t worry about a fall.

At their small table he felt that there was seated a multitude. Coy and Sensia flirting at the far end, Reggie and Nina arguing at each other. As he looked around he saw a hundred faces. It was like when he was in the bank with Hilly, only now he felt that he knew every name, every face . . .

Robyn was at the kitchen table, waiting for him in the morning.

“I wanted to say good-bye,” she said, apologizing.

“Me too.”

“I love you, Papa Grey.”

“If I was fifty years younger and you was twenty years older ...”

“I’d marry you and make your children and we’d move to Mississippi and grow peaches and corn.”

They kissed and embraced and kissed again . . . embraced again.

Ptolemy watched as she went down the hall toward the door. The sun was bright through the cracks, and when Robyn pushed it open her shadow threw all the way back to the old man’s toes.

“Bye,” she said.

He tried to reply, choked, and waved. He smiled but doubted that she saw it.

Hilly?” he said into the phone.

“Uh-huh.”

“You know Alfred’s phone number?”

“Yeah,” he said defensively.

“Call him up. Tell him that I got Reggie’s gold here at my house.”

“What gold?”

“Just tell him what I said. An’ if he don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, tell him to ask Nina. Tell him to tell her that I said it was okay.”

Forty-seven minutes passed. Ptolemy sat on Robyn’s couch-bed, looking at the clock and remembering his life.

At some time it come to you that you only thinkin’ ’bout the past, Coy had once said to him. When you young you think about tomorrow, but when you old you turn your eyes and ears to yesterday.

Ptolemy sat at the edge of the couch, aching in his joints and remembering. His life loomed before him like ten thousand TV screens. All he had to do was look at one of them and he’d remember driving the ice truck, moving to Memphis. He saw his father in a coffin, wearing a new suit that Ptolemy bought for the burial. He saw Sensia kissing a man down the street from their apartment. It was a long soul kiss that repeated itself again and again. He hated her when she got home but he didn’t say anything because he couldn’t stand the idea of her leaving.

He took out a yellow No. 2 pencil and a single sheet of paper that was so old that it had turned brown at the edges and was somewhat brittle. On this paper he wrote a note to Robyn, telling her, as best he could, about what he was doing and why.

Ptolemy was finally done with the Devil and his alchemy. He’d lived that life and now he was through.

There was a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” the old, old man said.

Alfred pushed his way in and stormed at Ptolemy.

Ptolemy’s only response was to smile.

Alfred had on black pants and a fuchsia-colored shirt. Across his chest was the medallion that said Georgie. Alfred’s strawberry skin was redder than it had been, and his freckles seemed darker. His pretty face was as brutal as ever and his breath was coming hard.

“Sit down, Alfred,” Ptolemy said, pointing to the straight-back chair across from him.

There was a gold coin on the table between the couch and the chair; a twenty-dollar gold piece from before the Civil War. After sitting down, Alfred picked up the coin and caressed it with his thumb.

Ptolemy’s smile broadened.

“Where the rest of ’em, old man?”

“Before I met Robyn, Reggie was the light of my life,” Ptolemy said. “I couldn’t think worf a damn, but you don’t have to think straight to love somebody.”

“You want me to go through your pockets?”

“It nearly killed me when I saw him in his coffin.”

“I will tear this house up.”

“Robyn brought me up to his grave ’bout a month ago.”

“I ain’t foolin’,” Alfred said. “I will hurt you, old man.”

“It was beautiful up there,” Ptolemy remembered. “Big green trees and a breeze. He had a small stone, but it was respectful. You evah been up there?”

This question derailed the younger man’s rage for a moment.

“I took Nina and her kids up but I waited in the car.”

“That coin you put in your pocket was for him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Then it’s for his wife and his chirren.”

“I’m lookin’ aftah Nina.”

“But you ain’t givin’ a care for them kids. Niecie got the kids.”

Alfred’s eyes bulged and he jumped to his feet, gesturing violently. Ptolemy looked up at him, wondering what the Devil could have put in that injection to make him so unafraid of impending death.

“What would you do with them coins if you had ’em?” Ptolemy asked.

“I already got one.”

“Okay,” Ptolemy said. “What you gonna do with that?”

“Take it to the pawn shop on Eighty-sixth Street. Gold is expensive.”

“So he gonna give ya fi’e hunnert dollahs on a coin worf at least twelve thousand.”

Alfred’s rage was extinguished. His eyes took on a crafty slant.

“Maybe three times that,” Ptolemy added.

Alfred sat back down.

“How?” Alfred asked.

“Did you kill Reggie, Al?”

“He was killed in a drive-by.”

“Was it you with the gun in your hand?”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“An’ you got his woman.”

Alfred smiled then. He didn’t mean to, Ptolemy could tell.

“Streets is hard, old man,” Alfred said, still unable to repress the grin. “People die all the time. All the time.”

“Oh, I know that. I prob’ly know it even bettah than you. I’m dyin’ right now while you lookin’ at me. My head is on fire. My bones feel like dust.”

“You will be dead you don’t hand ovah Nina’s property. She told me what you said. She told me what you thought.”

“And what did you say to that?” Ptolemy leaned forward, remembering leaning into a kiss with Natasha Kline seventy years before. The young white woman couldn’t pay for the ice and so she kissed him instead. He’d never told anybody about that kiss. Back then, in 1936, a Negro kissing a white woman could get him killed anywhere in the country.

“Never you mind what I said,” Alfred uttered through clenched teeth. “Just hand ovah Nina’s gold an’ tell me how to sell it for her.”

“Did you kill him, Al? Did you kill my Reggie?”

Alfred reached across the table and slapped Ptolemy’s face. The old man realized with the shock of the blow that his mind was beginning to slip. His mind had begun to wander. But when Alfred hit him everything snapped back into place.

“It’s a easy question, man,” Ptolemy said. “I got to know what happened to my boy. I got to know. I’m a old man, Al. I cain’t hurt you. I cain’t say I was there.”

“What about the gold?” Alfred asked after clenching and unclenching his fist.

“If you tell me what I want to know I will go to Nina with you and hand her the gold.”

Ptolemy could hear his own blood pumping. Alfred’s lips twisted as if he had just bit into a bitter fruit.

“He was gonna take her away, you know,” Alfred said. “He was gonna leave you with no one to look aftah you. He was gonna take Nina, but Nina’s mine. She belong to me. I don’t care if she married to him, but when I want that pussy it gotta come to me. I ain’t gonna let no fool take away what’s mine.”

Don’t evah mess with a man,” Coydog McCann was whispering to Li’l Pea deep in the memory of Ptolemy the man. “Don’t nevah give him a chance.”

“But what if,” the child asked, “what if you ain’t sure that he mean you harm?”

“It’s you that mean to harm him,” Coy said, pointing his thumb and forefinger like a pistol. “Life ain’t fair. Life ain’t right. Life ain’t no good or bad. What it is is you, boy. You makin’ up your mind and takin’ your own path. Don’t worry ’bout that cop with the truncheon. Don’t worry ’bout that white man in a suit. Don’t worry ’bout a cracker with his teefs missin’ and a torch in his hand. Ain’t none’a that any of your nevermind. All you got to do is make sure he ain’t got a chance.”

Did you hear me?” Alfred was saying.

“No. I missed it. What did you say?”

“I said hand ovah the coins.”

“But you just said what Reggie done. You didn’t say if you killed him.”

“Don’t play with me, old man.”

“Did you kill Reggie?”

“Y-yes,” Alfred said, the confession snagging on his lip. “I kilt the mothahfuckah. All right? Now, where is the gold?”

“I ain’t gonna give you no gold, fool. You killed my family, my blood. I ain’t gonna pay you for that. You, you must be crazy.”

Alfred reached for Ptolemy as the old man slipped his hand under the cushion beside him. Alfred lifted him into the air with ease, the younger man’s muscles bulging under sweaty brown and strawberry-colored skin.

Ptolemy saw the rage in the killer’s eyes turn to amazement as the pistol jerked twice in his hand.

When Ptolemy fell, he was certain that Alfred would use his last bit of strength to kill him. But the killer was more interested in the blood on his hands than he was in revenge. His breath was loud and fast, intertwined with a crying moan.

“Oh no. Oh no,” Alfred said.

And Ptolemy felt pity for the fact that all men come to that moment in time: Coy, and his own grandfather, and Reggie on a friend’s front porch.

Alfred backed away from Ptolemy, turning and lurching toward the door. He grabbed the green-glass knob but had trouble turning it because of the slick blood on his hands. He finally got the door open and staggered into the hall.

Ptolemy climbed to his feet and followed the murderer. He dropped the gun inside his own door and stayed a few steps behind the hulking man. Blood fell in dollops on the concrete floor but Alfred kept moving. They made it outside. Alfred missed the first step on the stoop and tumbled to the sidewalk. Ptolemy was sure that the big man would die there but Alfred rose up and reeled drunkenly into the street. When he got to the dividing line, he followed that. Ptolemy was a few feet behind him and to the left.

Melinda Hogarth screamed.

Ptolemy stopped and stared at her, perched on the stoop of an old brick apartment building. There was terror in her face and this surprised Ptolemy. He saw Melinda as an evil woman unable to feel for another’s pain. But he was wrong. Her angry fists were in her mouth now. Her eyes were fearful.

When Ptolemy turned he saw that Alfred had made it as far as the intersection. There he fell onto his knees, his chest on his thighs, his forehead on the asphalt. Cars were braking and swerving around the penitent.

Melinda was also on her knees, crying hysterically.

On his way back to his apartment, Ptolemy forgot where he was going.

When he opened his eyes, all that had gone before was behind that locked door again. He was in a yellow room on a high bed. There was classical music playing and a TV tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station.

A white man with a huge mustache was seated there next to him.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Who?”

“You.”

“That’s me. I’m the one you talkin’ to.”

“I’m Dr. Ruben.”

“Do I know you?”

The man smiled and a fear nudged at the back of Ptolemy’s mind. It was an old fear, faded and flaccid like a balloon that had lost most of its air.

“I’m a friend of your niece,” the man, whose name Ptolemy had already forgotten, said.

“Uncle Grey?”

Turning his eyes to the other side of the bed took all of his concentration. He saw and registered and forgot many things on his way. The empty room and the green door and the feeling that he had accomplished an ancient task that had been behind a door and under a floor. There was blood somewhere out in the world, through the window, and then came the girl: eyes like sharp ovals and chocolate skin, she was beautiful but what Ptolemy saw was that she was one of a kind, like the woman who had come to his door and yanked him out of his sad and lonely life.

“Rob, Rob, Robyn?”

Her smile was filled with gratitude. Ptolemy’s heart surged like the, like the soil under his father’s spade at the beginning of the season. There was pain in his chest.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“What’s my name?”

“Ptolemy Usher Grey.”

“That’s a king’s name.”

“Yes it is.”

“And why am I here?”

“You been sick, Uncle. Dr. Ruben come to see if you was still alive, but I told him that you’d outlive the Devil himself.”

Ptolemy knew that the child was making a joke but he forgot what it meant. Still, he smiled for her, pretending he understood.

“Alfred died at the hospital, and the police wanted take you to jail but Moishe Abromovitz got a paper on ’em an’ they said that they’d wait till you got better.”

“Did I kill?”

The girl nodded. When Ptolemy tried to remember her name he was brought back to the yard in front of his childhood home where birds flocked around him, eating stale breadcrumbs and wailing out their songs.

“You was right about Niecie,” she was saying.

“I was?”

“Yeah.”

The man with the mustache rose and departed the hospital room. Ptolemy gave this movement his full attention until the green door had closed.

“What did you say?” he asked the girl-child.

“I said that you was right about Niecie?”

“What, what did I say?”

There was a piano playing on the radio.

“You said that she’d try and get the law on me. I had to move out yo’ apartment. I had to get a place on my own. Beckford tried to stay there wit’ me but he kept gettin’ mad about the money an’ finally he just had to go.”

“Slow down,” Ptolemy said.

“It’s okay now.”

“It is?”

“Yeah,” she said, but he could tell that there was more to the story.

He held out his hand and the girl who reminded him of birds singing took it into hers just like he thought she would. He sighed and maybe she asked a question. The music became a sky and the words the man on the television was saying turned into the ground under his feet. One was blue and the other brown, but he was not sure which was which. Everything glittered and now and again, when he looked around, things were different. Another room. A new taste. The girl always returned. And the door that was shut against his forgotten life was itself forgotten and there were feelings but they were far away.

A coyote that talked like a man whispered in his ear, and then licked his face, and then . . .