"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 pa.s.s 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 p.u.s.s.y 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 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 s.p.a.ce 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. n.o.body 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 gla.s.s. 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."