wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.
Ptolemy had no idea how much time had passed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The classical music was broken, tinkly. The news reporters made no sense. Reggie and Coydog were dead, and that girl would never find her way to him.
“You ain’t got to be afraid’a nuthin’, boy,” Coydog would tell him. “We all gonna die. We all gonna get some hurt. I mean, when a woman bring a child outta her big belly it hurt like a bastid. But that girl ain’t nevah been happier than when she hurt like that.”
“Why she be so happy?” Li’l Pea asked.
“’Cause she know that baby gonna be the love of her life, and that would be worf ten times the pain.”
At first Ptolemy was soothed when he thought about his old friend and mentor. But then his thoughts drifted back to that last fiery dance, and then to little Maude Petit. And when he thought about his loved ones being lost to fire his heart thundered and he fell asleep to dream the dreams of the dead.
Papa Grey?” a voice called.
Ptolemy was in his coffin. It was pitch black and the worms were wriggling between his fingers and toes. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing, but instead he found himself in the white bathtub under brilliant light. Someone was knocking at the bathroom door.
He remembered draining the tub and lying down in it the way Reggie was laid to rest in his pine box.
“Papa Grey?” she called again.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Robyn, Papa Grey. I took the keys to your front do’ but the bathroom do’ don’t have a key.”
“Robyn?”
“Yeah. Open the do’,” she said.
The old man fumbled with the lock for a minute or more. He panicked once or twice, fearing that he was locked in, but he got the door open at last. Robyn was standing there in dark-blue jeans and a light-blue T-shirt. There was a yellow ribbon in her hair and big bone-white earrings dangled on either side of her jaw.
“I died,” Ptolemy Grey said. “I died and was in my grave with worms and Coydog McCann. I was dead and gone like Sensie and Reggie and other names that I cain’t even remembah no mo’.”
Robyn put her arms around Ptolemy’s neck.
“It was a dream,” she said, cocking her head to the side and humming with the words.
“No, no, no,” he said, pushing his savior away. “It wasn’t no dream. Come on out here in the room and I can prove it to ya.”
“What’s this big plastic sheet out here, Uncle?” she asked. “It’s dirty.”
“It don’t mattah,” he said. “Just push it aside and, and, and pull up some chairs.”
Robyn did as he requested, frowning at the dust rising from the faded tarp. She sneezed and got his stool and her lawn chair set up in front of the door.
“Mr. Grey, can I turn off the TV and the radio so I can hear you?”
“Sure. I don’t care,” he said.
They sat down facing each other. Ptolemy’s eyes were bright. There was a grin on his face. He took the child’s left hand in his and gazed deeply, even thoughtfully, into her eyes.
Robyn stared back, seeing a face that she knew with a different man inside.
“Some things,” Ptolemy said. “Some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”
He went silent, waiting for more words to come, the words and the ideas behind them that were coming slowly but steadily from his mind.
Robyn nodded, her head like a pump priming a well.
“I had a tarp,” Ptolemy said, “this one right here, over all the things in my bedroom. All the books and carpets and clothes and glass jewelry. That was Sensia’s room, the wife that I loved the most ...”
Pitypapa Grey was aware of the silence in the room. The music had been hushed and the men and women talking about crime and killing were quiet at last. It occurred to him that before now, before this moment, the content of his mind was the radio and the TV, that he was just as empty as an old cracked pecan shell—the meat dried up and crumbled away.
“Papa Grey?” Robyn asked.
“Yeah, baby?”
“You just sittin’ there.”
“What was I sayin’?”
“That some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”
He looked at her lovely young face and let the words wash over his parched mind.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “That tarp. That tarp was like the pall in my mind.”
“The what?”
“The pall. It’s a shroud what undertakers put over the dead until they get put in the coffin.”
“And this plastic sheet is like that?” Robyn asked.
