“What is that smell?” Robyn asked him.
“I don’t know. There’s parts’a the house I cain’t get inta anymore. The bathroom, half the kitchen. I ain’t been deep in the bedroom since before what’s-his-name, uh, Reggie, would come.”
“You got a bedroom an’ you sleepin’ under a table?”
Ptolemy pulled his hand away from hers and tried to get up but couldn’t on the first try. Robyn grabbed the corroded metal handles of her chair and moved next to him.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just surprised, that’s all.” She took his hand again. “Niecie axed me to come here an’ be wit’ you.”
“Niecie?” Ptolemy said, remembering as if for the first time in a long time the existence of his grandniece.
“Uh-huh. Because Hilly told her that you wouldn’t let him in an’ he wanted her to come here an’ talk to you. But she’s takin’ care of Arthur an’ Letisha an’ the funeral an’ all. She aksed him why you wouldn’t let him in.” Robyn squeezed Ptolemy’s hand. “I knew why but I didn’t tell her ’bout Hilly takin’ your money ’cause Hilly live in that house too an’ he’s a thug. So I said I’d come ovah an’ see about you an’ she said okay.”
“Niecie send you?”
“Uh-huh.”
Robyn’s face was only inches from Ptolemy’s. Her eyes were asking for something, pleading with him. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how to ask her what she wanted. But he knew that he would have done anything for that child. She was his child, his baby girl. She needed his protection.
“Niecie send you here to me?”
“Yes, Mr. Grey. Hilly said that you get these retirement checks an’ that you would let me an’ him cash ’em but I told him that I was not gonna steal from you.”
“And then Niecie send you?”
“Yeah.” Robyn sat back in her chair still holding his fingers.
“President Bush today said that America was a safer place than it was five years ago, when terrorists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Towers,” a female news anchor said in between the silence of the new friends. “Democratic leaders in Congress disagreed . . .”
Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said when Robyn opened the door to the bathroom.
“I got to, Mr. Grey,” she said. “If I’ma be comin’ here an’ lookin’ aftah you I got to have a toilet to go to.”
While Ptolemy tried to think of some other way he could have Robyn’s company and keep her out of the bathroom, she opened the door and went in.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is this?”
A large wad of blackened towels flew out from the doorway and landed with a thump on the small bare area of the crowded floor.
Ptolemy covered his face with his hands.
“You got suitcases in the bathtub,” Robyn called out. “An’ there’s black stuff growin’ in the commode. There’s, oh my God, oh no ...”
Ptolemy went to sit next to his big cabinet radio so that the woman singing opera would drown out the sounds and complaints coming from the girl.
As the singer professed what sounded like love in her sweet, high voice, Ptolemy allowed himself to drift. He was adrift in a boat in a city in Italy where all the streets were rivers. Coydog had told him about that town.
“Men stands at the back’a long boats with long sticks they push to the bottom to move ’em down the way,” the old liar told him.
“You been there, Coydog?” the boy asked. Ptolemy remembered then, so many years later, listening to opera and ignoring Robyn, that he never called Coy Mr. McCann, which was his name. It was just mostly
“I been there in my mind,” Coy McCann told the boy.
“How you do that?”
“Read,” he said, stretching out the vowel sound like the singer did with her notes.
“How you learn that?”
“A, B, C,” Coy said, wagging his forefinger like the white conductor did on odd Thursdays in the summer when the white people’s marching band stopped in front of the town hall and performed old southern favorites.
That was the beginning of Li’l Pea’s informal education. From A to L were accomplished that very afternoon.
After he could say all the letters, Coydog stole some paper from the country store and showed his student how to make the sounds with pencil lines.
“Ain’t it wrong to be stealin’ that paper from the white man’s sto’?” Li’l Pea asked his aged friend.
“Wrong?” the wiry little man exclaimed. “Hell, it ain’t wrong, it’s a sin.”
“But if you do a sin, ain’t you goin’ to hell?”
“That all depends, boy.” Coy’s long dark face cracked open at his mouth, showing his strong, stained teeth. “The Catholics profess that all you got to do is say you’re sorry and the Lord will forgive. Other peoples say that Saint Peter’s got a scale where they put all the bad you done on one side and all the good on t’other. An’ if the good outweigh the bad they got a cot for you in heaven.
“So if I steal this here tablet an’ pencils but then I teach you how to read an’ write an’ from there you invent a
