After a long, angry silence, Hilly said, “No.”
“We all got secrets, boy. An’ the older we get the more secrets we got. Child tell ya anything, but a man just sip his drink an’ keep his mouf shet. But he might have one friend he talk to. Was you that friend to Reggie?”
“No.”
“Do you know who that friend was?”
The silence no longer shivered with anger. Ptolemy could almost hear his taciturn great-nephew thinking.
“Billy Strong,” Hilly said at last.
“Who’s he?”
“He run the gym on Slauson and Twenty-third.”
“Him an’ Reggie was close?”
“Yes, sir. They’d get together all the time. All the time.”
“An’ he work at the gym?” Ptolemy asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“All day?”
“Every day, Saturday and Sunday too.”
Ptolemy Grey hadn’t really slept after he’d awakened from the coma. He’d close his eyes and enter into a world both new and old to him. There he’d talk to Coy along the Tickle River and carry boxes of medicine in France for soldiers, most of whom were destined to die. He delivered ice and swept streets, made love to Sensia Howard so hard sometimes that he’d limp for a day or two afterward.
One night, with his eyes closed and his mind imagining, he inhabited his old feebleminded self, sitting in front of the TV. The black woman, who looked like a white woman passing for black, was talking about the war.
“More than a hundred Iraqis died in a suicide blast in the city of Tuz Khormato today. The suicide bomber set off his truck bomb in a crowded marketplace at midday.”
“Excuse me, lady,” Ptolemy said.
For a moment it seemed that she’d continue her report, not hearing his interruption, but then she turned and looked at him, into his living room. It was the old living room filled with stacks of moldering and unread newspapers, furniture, and trash.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m Mr. Grey,” Ptolemy said formally.
The woman looked as if she wanted to turn away from him but found that she could not. She touched her ear as Ptolemy had often watched her do in the old days when he didn’t understand hardly anything. She touched it, but her ear didn’t help her change the subject or look away.
“My name is Ginger,” the woman in the vision said.
“Tell me, Ginger, what are you talkin’ about twenty-four hours a day?”
“The news, Mr. Grey. It’s the news.”
“What news?”
“There’s a war going on. People are dying.”
“Who’s the enemy? Is it Hitler again?”
“We aren’t quite sure who the enemy is. That’s what makes this war so hard.”
“If we don’t know who we fightin’, then how can we fight ’em?”
“We . . . ,” she said, and paused. “We . . . we aim our weapons at them and when they become frightened and take out their guns we know who they are.”
“I don’t get it, Ginger.”
“Me neither, Mr. Grey.”
“How can a man have a enemy an’ fight that enemy and still not know who he is?” Ptolemy asked, proud of his ability to string his words together like a necklace of great big black Hawaiian pearls.
“Haven’t you ever heard of Zorro?” Ginger asked.
“The masked man?”
“Yes, he was a man who hid his face and struck against his enemies.”
Ptolemy’s stomach grumbled. It was a deep, hungry sound that surprised him. He opened his eyes in the bed, realizing that sleep was no different than wakefulness and that he hadn’t eaten all day.
A groan and then a whimper scurried at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that it was this sound, and not his stomach, that had pulled him away from Ginger. He climbed out of the bed in the dark room and crept toward the door.
He peeked through the crack and saw that it was Robyn moaning. She was naked, on her back, and the boy was above her, his arms at the side of her head, his middle going up and down like the oil-well derricks in Baldwin Hills pumping the oil out of the ground.
“Oil is the earth’s blood,” Coy had told Li’l Pea one day. “Men cut deep into the world’s skin an’ suck out the blood like it belong to them. That’s why they’s earthquakes and tidal waves, because the earth is our mother, but
