This question defeated Ptolemy. How could somebody be so stupid not to know what a bank was? He’d been there a thousand times. And he was thirsty, and he had to urinate. And it was cold too.
“Do you have a bank card in your wallet, Papa Grey?” Hilly asked.
“Yes,” Ptolemy answered though he hadn’t really understood the question.
“Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“Your bank card.”
“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout.”
“Can I see your wallet?”
“What for?”
“So that I can see your bank card and I can know what bank you want to go to.”
“Reggie knows,” Ptolemy said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Reggie’s out of town for a minute, Papa Grey. And I don’t know what bank you do business wit’ so I got to see your wallet.”
Ptolemy tried to decipher what the boy was saying and what he meant. He didn’t understand what there could have been in his wallet that this Reggie, no, this Hilly, needed to know. He did fight off that crazy woman. He did know Reggie. And he had to go to the bathroom and drink from the faucet, Ptolemy did—not Hilly/ Reggie.
Ptolemy took the wallet from his back pocket and handed it into the young man’s massive hand.
Hilly, whose skin was melon-brown and mottled, sifted through the slips of paper and receipts until he came upon a stiff plastic card of blue and green.
“Is your bank People’s Trust, Papa Grey?”
“That’s it. Now you finally found out what to do,” the old man said.
“Hold it right there,” an amplified man’s voice commanded.
A police car pulled up to the curb and two uniformed officers climbed out, both holding pistols in their hands.
Hilly put his hands up to the level of his shoulders and Ptolemy did the same.
“John Bull,” he whispered to Hilly. “They must be lookin’ for robbers—or, or, or black mens they think is robbers.”
“You can put your hands down,” one of the cops, the dark-brown one, said to Ptolemy.
“I ain’t done nuthin’, Officer,” the old man replied, raising his arms higher even though it hurt his shoulders.
“We don’t think you’ve done anything, sir. But is this man bothering you?”
“No, sir. This my son, I mean my grandson, I mean Reggie my grandson come to take me to the People’s Bank.”
“He’s your son or your grandson?” the white cop in the black-and-blue uniform asked.
“He’s my grandson,” Ptolemy said slowly, purposefully. He wasn’t quite sure that what he was saying was true but he knew that he had to protect the young colored man from the cops.
“My grandson, Reggie, Officer. My grandson. He takin’ me to the People’s Bank an’ to the sto’.”
“Why does he have your wallet?” the dark-skinned cop asked.
“He wanted to tell where we was, where it was, you know. Where it was.”
“Are you his grandson?” the cop asked Hilly.
“His nephew, Officer,” Hilly said in a respectful voice that he had not used before. “He calls me Reggie, who’s my first cousin, but I’m Hilly Brown, and Reggie the one usually take care of him. I was lookin’ in his wallet because he done forgot the address of his bank.”
Ptolemy studied the police as they watched his nephew.
Hilly was his great-grandnephew, he remembered now. He was smaller the last time they’d seen each other. It was at a party in somebody’s backyard and there was brown smog at the edges of the sky but people were still laughing.
“Are you okay, sir?” the white cop asked Ptolemy.
“Yes, Officer. I’m fine. Reggie here, I mean Hilly here, was protectin’ me from all the thieves in the streets. He takin’ me to the bank and the food store. Yes, sir.”
The four men stood there on the dirty street for half a minute more. Ptolemy caught the smell of maggots from a nearby trash can. There was danger in the air. Ptolemy thought about Lee Minter, whom he saw run down and beaten by a cop name Reese Loman and his partner, Sam. The cops had truncheons. After the beating, Lee lay up in a poor bed in a tin house, where he died talking to his baby, LeRoy, who had passed ten years before. Lee called the cops fools for trying to arrest him for something they knew he didn’t do, and then he ran. The dying man had a fever so hot that you didn’t even need to touch him to feel the heat.
