“I done played the Devil an’ beat him at his own game. On’y way he could take my soul is if he give to me. But I tricked him. I made a fair trade wit’ him. I give ’im my body but not my soul.”
“Uncle, you crazy.”
“Not for long.”
Olga Slatkin, a young woman of Lithuanian origin, came to the apartment the following Monday.
“I vas told by my agency to come here and give Mr. Grey these antibiotic shots for five days,” she said to Robyn.
“That was Dr. Ruben?” the girl asked.
“No. No, I do not know this man. I vork for a voman named Borman.”
Olga was young and unattractive but still Ptolemy liked her face.
She gave him one injection in his left arm and then another in his right.
“Why he got to have two shots?” Robyn asked, hovering behind the nurse.
“One is the medicine, and the other is for what the medicine might do.”
“Like what?” Robyn demanded.
“Fever, nausea, diarrhea, pain,” the Eastern European said, her face flat and her voice matter-of-fact.
“Uncle, I don’t think that you should be doin’ this,” Robyn said after the nurse had gone.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s the only chance we got.”
“But you old,” the child complained. “You might could get so sick that you might could die.”
“I’ma die anyways,” he said. “But this way I won’t get so lost when I look around the room, I’ll have my double-u ara eye en gee for myself, and then I could turn on the thing, the thing, the thing . . . That thing there,” he said, pointing at the television.
Robyn knew what Ptolemy got like when he spoke too long or got excited. If he went on much longer he’d stop making any sense at all and get frustrated and then sad.
“Okay, Uncle Grey,” she said, “but that doctor said that this medicine would probably kill you.”
Ptolemy was looking at his hands by then. He was wondering once again why words failed him after just a few sentences.
That night the place on his left arm where the nurse had injected him started to burn. He didn’t tell Robyn, though. He knew that the girl could stop the nurse from coming if she really wanted to.
Olga came again the next day, and that night Ptolemy’s arm seethed all the way to his shoulder.
“Did you live on a farm?” he asked her on the third day as she injected the medicine.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “How did you know that?”
“You could see the country in people’s eyes,” he said. “It’s like deep skies and long times’a bein’ quiet.”
Olga Slatkin smiled at her charge and then frowned.
“How haff you been feeling, Mr. Grey?”
Robyn was in the living room, watching the TV, because she didn’t like seeing him given his medicine.
“My arms burn some,” he said.
“Do you vant me to stop?”
“No, baby. I could take the pain. I seen Coy dance on fire, but he never told, never.”
By Thursday the pain was in both arms, his chest, and his head too. On Friday, when Shirley Wring came for a visit, Robyn had to turn her away.
“Uncle Grey got a fever,” Robyn told the older woman. “He says that maybe you could come back next week. He’s real sick and cain’t get out of bed.”
Shirley Wring took in these words as she stood there, staring at the teenager.
“Why don’t you like me, child?” Shirley asked at last.
“He really is sick,” Robyn complained. “I ain’t lyin’ to you.”
“I believe you, but you still don’t like me and I don’t know what it is I done to make you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Miss Wring. I don’t even think about you at all.”
“See? Now that’s just rude. Why you wanna be rude to me? I’m your uncle’s friend.”
“He not my real uncle,” the woman-child said to the woman. “But that’s what it is. He don’t know who he lookin’ at or what he sayin’ half the time. People wanna take his money or his things. He paid your utility bill and now you come by all the time.”
Shirley Wring smiled then and nodded. She walked into the living room, noticing that the door to Ptolemy’s bedroom was closed.
“I told you that he cain’t get outta his bed,” Robyn said, a strain of grief in her young voice.
“I ain’t gonna bother him,” Shirley told the girl.
The older woman sat down on a maple chair in front of a TV tray that Ptolemy sometimes used as a table for
