“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”
When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.
The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.
Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”
A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.
“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”
Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.
His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana. There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.
“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.
“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”
“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”
“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”
“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”
Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”
Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.
Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.
The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.
“I’m losing money on this place and that’s not why I own it,” he shouted at Reggie one day.
“Get the fuck outta here, man,” Reggie had said, and the white landlord, Mr. Pierpont, got the cops.
The police threatened Reggie, but then Pierpont tried to make them get rid of Ptolemy too.
“You’re trying to evict this old man?” one of the cops had asked.
“I’m losing money on this place,” Pierpont said, as if Ptolemy had stabbed him.
“If I was this young man I would have done more than threaten you,” the cop said. The police left, and potbellied Joseph Pierpont never came back, or answered any calls.
Now the doorbell no longer worked and people had to knock. And when they’d knock, Ptolemy would get up and go to the front and ask, “Who is it?”
But not this time. This time he stayed in his seat, listening to the newsman’s gibberish and music that scratched at his ears.
The knock came again and Ptolemy remembered why he stayed in his chair. That big boy Hilly had been there and knocked and said that he wanted to come in. He’d come three days in a row and each day Ptolemy told him that he didn’t need him and that he would call if he did.
“But you don’t know my numbah, Papa Grey,” Hilly said through the door. “You haven’t called up in years.”
“I know how to phone for a operator. All you have to do is dial oh. I call her if I wanna talk to you.”
“Mama told me to come help you,” Hilly, the thief, beseeched. “She be mad at me if I don’t.”
“I don’t need no help.”
“How can you go to the sto’?”
“I walk there.”
“What about the bank?”
“You stoled my money, boy. You stoled it at the bank.”
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t need yo’ kinda help,” Ptolemy said, and after three days he no longer even asked who it was. He just stared at whoever was giving the news and waited for the caller to go away and for the words to make sense again.
The first time someone knocked on the door after Reggie’s wake it wasn’t Hilly.
“Who is it?”
