her, but Robyn stopped anyway. She turned her face to the elder.
At first sight she looked like a demon to the old man. The slants of her eyes were reminiscent of horns, and her teeth showed without making a smile. And then she changed. She was the sweet girl again, a mild worry showing in her eyes and on her mouth.
“Don’t worry, Uncle,” she said. “I know what I’m doin’.”
Ptolemy took a step backward and Robyn pulled out her six-inch knife.
“Look up here at me, bitch!” Robyn commanded.
The pile of quivering womanhood made sounds that were like the snuffling cries of a wounded animal.
Robyn kicked Melinda Hogarth’s fat shoulder.
“Look at me or I’ma stab you up,” Robyn promised.
Melinda threw herself away from the threat, landing on her backside. Her eyes were wide with the fear and the possibility of death.
“What’s your name?” Robyn said, moving closer.
The prostrate woman was too frightened to speak.
“Tell me your name or I’ma cut yo’ th’oat right here.”
“M-m-m-melinda.”
“Linda,” Robyn said. “Linda, if I evah see you talkin’ to my uncle again, if he evah tell me you even said a word to him, I’ma come out heah wit’ my girls an’ we gonna cut yo’ titties right off. You hear me?”
Melinda Hogarth didn’t answer the question. She walked backward on her elbows and heels until somehow she was on her feet. Then she ran down the street, screaming high and loud like a woman miraculously transforming into a fire truck.
After a long minute Robyn put her knife away. She picked up the fans. Now they were just blue and silver plastic pieces.
“Damn,” she said. “Now we got to go back to that hardware sto’ an’ that yellah niggah gonna start slobberin’ on me again.”
“I got a fan on my back porch,” Ptolemy said.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” she said angrily.
“You didn’t aks me, girl. I didn’t know what you was doin’.”
With some effort Robyn smiled again and reached for Ptolemy’s hands. He took a step backward.
“Don’t be scared’a me, Uncle,” Robyn said. “I just wanna make sure you can stand out on the street and not be beat down by that crazy woman.”
Ptolemy’s mind was scattered over nearly a hundred years. His mother and father, Coy’s lynching, the one brief battle he fought in during World War Two. He saw Melvin Torchman fall dead in a barbershop in Memphis, and he was waking up again to Sensia dead in the bed next to him. And then a million bugs swarmed over her . . .
“Uncle?”
Robyn was holding his hands. He looked into her eyes and she was a friendly child again.
“Don’t do that no mo’, okay, baby?” he said.
Robyn kissed his big knuckle and nodded.
After dragging the huge gray tarp out to the curb, Robyn cleared two places in each room and placed an insect bomb candle in each space. She only put one bomb in the bathroom.
“You go wait in the hall, Uncle,” she told Ptolemy, “while I set these bad boys off.”
He stood outside in the dilapidated marble-and-oak hallway. It was once a nice building that people kept up. That was in the old days, when black people came to Los Angeles to make a life away from the Jim Crow South. He hadn’t stood in that dark hall for many years. He’d walked down it ten thousand times; between two and a dozen times a day when he was younger. But he hardly ever just stood there.
Once there was a young man stabbed and killed at the front door of the building. He’d pressed Ptolemy and Sensia’s bell, but when nobody responded to the intercom they went back to bed. He was already old and she was fragile by then. They’d been burglarized and had put up the chain gate on the back window and door.
Hey, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said.
She’d come into the hallway, dragging one of his pine chairs with a small suitcase lying in its seat. The slight scent of sulfur and smoke came with her. She also had a sheet of paper and the roll of masking tape they got from the hardware store. Using the chair to stand on, she put tape all along the cracks of the door. She put many layers of tape, one on top of the other, to make an airtight seal against leaking poisons. Then she taped the paper to the door.
“Insect bomb,” Ptolemy read. “Stay away.”
“You can read, Mr. Grey?” the child asked.
“Sure I can read. Anybody can read an’ write they name.”
“Can you read a book?”
“Hunnert pages, two hunnert pages, two fifty.”
Robyn smiled and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s go to the motel,” she said.
