“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.
