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.”