“Okay. I’ll bring ’em ovah tomorrow.”
“Put ’em in a can of peanuts.”
“I gotta buy them too?” the brooding boy complained.
“Yeah. You got to buy them too.”
“All right. But we even then, right?”
“Right.”
The evening after that went smoothly for Ptolemy. He found a music station that was playing Fats Waller recordings.
He’d once seen the great Moon Face playing in an after-hours big-city juke joint in Memphis. In those days the music halls only allowed whites, except on special days, and so after a performance in front of an all-white audience there were many famous musicians that went to the black part of town to jam with their people.
Listening to the song “Two Sleepy People,” he was remembering a girl named Talla who turned to kiss him because the romantic lyrics made her. He remembered the smell of beer and the sawdust on the floor, Fats Waller himself winking at the momentary lovers, and a feeling that being Ptolemy Grey was the best thing in the whole world.
“Uncle?” she said, and the vision evaporated. “Uncle, you okay?”
Ptolemy turned his head, feeling pain between each vertebra, but he didn’t wince or curse.
“Is it eleven already?”
“It’s past midnight,” Robyn said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Your boyfriend here?” Ptolemy asked, looking toward the bathroom.
“No. He walked me to the door, but then I heard the music an’ told him to go on.”
“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”
“You my father-like, right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah right.”
“A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”
The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.
“Are you okay, Uncle?”
“It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”
“We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.
“The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.
“Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”
“He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”
“He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”
“Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.
“To do what?”
“To talk to a man named Mossa.”
“Who’s that?”
“You’ll see.”
That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.
“It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”
Ptolemy thought that Billy had probably bragged about the crime amongst his black brothers. He was used to his neighborhood down in Alabama, where no Negro would ever turn in another. But the U.S. Army had black soldiers from Chicago, San Francisco, and even New York City. Some of them thought it was their responsibility to follow the white man’s law.
Billy probably bragged, and everyone knew that Billy and Ptolemy were close.
“Well, soldier?” the colonel asked.
“I wouldn’t know nuthin’ about anything like that, sir.”
“Are those tears in your eyes, Sergeant Grey?” Riley asked.
“Must be the smoke, sir.”
“Does doing your duty hurt that much?”
Riley was a good man; tall and proud, he never insulted his soldiers because of their race. He respected every man according to one standard. And so when he asked Ptolemy that question, the soldier froze, unable to speak. But in the vision, not a dream but a trancelike memory, Ptolemy inhabited his former self and spoke up.