“What you wanna know from me?”
“Later.”
Ptolemy touched Robyn’s shoulder and they walked out the door and away from the house, moving slowly, like royalty surveying the plight of the poor.
“Why you wanna get Hilly all mad, Uncle?” Robyn said on the bus ride home.
She was wearing the yellow dress that he’d bought her at the women’s clothes store. He knew it was wrong, that the dress reminded him of the day he met Sensia Howard, but he couldn’t stop himself—he loved both women so.
“Yellow’s my favorite color,” he’d told her, “and you my favorite girl.”
But on the bus he just nodded and said, “I need a inroad.”
“What you mean, Uncle Grey?”
“The men just come to you, don’t they, girl?” he asked instead of answering her question directly.
“Huh?”
“Men,” he repeated. “They just come to you—on the street, in the bus, at the movies. They all wanna know you, want you to smile at ’em.”
“Nobody I wanna know.”
“Imagine if nobody evah looked at you twice,” Ptolemy said.
His mind straddled two worlds. He no longer needed a translator to decipher what was going on around him, but he was still sitting by the Tickle River, talking to Coy and making plans for a future eighty years from then.
“What you mean?” Robyn asked.
“Some people got a magnet in ’em,” Ptolemy said, pulling his mind away from the deep-blue past. “No one understands why, but there’s people you just wanna know. You might be quiet and shy, but that someone walk by you and you climb right ovah your fear an’ say, ‘How you doin’?’ just like you was old friends. That’s you, Robyn. I know, ’cause my Sensie was like that. Men, and women too, would come up to her and ask her to be wit’ them. She met this schoolteacher one time, Mrs. Gladys Pine. Gladys told Sensie she loved her and for a week or two they’d meet in the afternoons at a motel on Slauson.”
“When she was married to you?” Robyn asked.
“Sensie told me she liked Gladys’s mind and she didn’t feel like she was cheatin’ ’cause it was a woman and not a man.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Anyway, Gladys finally told her husband that she was leavin’, that she had fount her true love. The next day Sensie told her that they’d have to stop meetin’ at the motel. The day aftah that, Paul Pine put a bullet in his head.”
“Damn.”
“That’s how powerful you are, girl,” Ptolemy said, taking Robyn’s hand in his. “You pretty, but pretty alone’s not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that’s like a mirror. Men an’ women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can’t bear to see you go.”
“Uncle Grey, was you always thinkin’ all these things even when you couldn’t talk so good?”
“When you get old,” he said, and then he paused, thinking about Coy and Lupo, who were known in the colored community as the Dog Brothers. They ran together as young men, and when they got into their forties, old for men back then, they could sit together for hours, never saying a word and never getting tired of the company. “When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin’ ’less somebody else can understand.”
“And nobody was listenin’ to you, Uncle?”
“And nobody understood until you, child.”
“But what’s that got to do with Gladys Pine?”
“She nevah touched anybody outside’a herself. She was like I was when you met me—alone in her mind. And then she seen Sensie and reached out and my girl took her hand and helt it to her breast. You know, I almost cry when I think about it. It was beautiful, even though it was a blues song too. Some people might say it was love on one hand and a fickle heart on the other, but what would have come from them if they didn’t see and say and feel . . . and die?”
“You deep, Uncle,” Robyn said.
“No, baby. I’m just like everybody else—everybody else.”
That night Ptolemy woke from a dream about Coy’s death. He had a fever but didn’t wake Robyn. He thought that he might die if he stayed in the bed, so he got up and went to the bathroom, where he swallowed four aspirin and turned on a lukewarm shower.
The water soothed him.
After a while he hunkered down in the tub and let the cool water cascade over his bony form. He wondered what was in the Devil’s medicine that kept his knees from hurting too much.
In that position, in the tub, he was seventeen again, lugging the heavy bags of coin from out of Coy’s secret cave. He borrowed his cousin’s Terraplane car and drove to Memphis, where he secreted the stolen treasure for three years. Every time he touched those coins he felt the cold of that cave’s water and the chill of death.
When he began to shiver, he rose up under the spray, turned off the water, and dried himself with a big thick towel that Robyn had bought. After he was dry he stared at his head and torso in the water-stained mirror. He probably weighed less than the sleeping child in the next room, but he’d put on weight. His face was not nearly so
