The policemen said something to Hilly. Ptolemy heard the deep voices but could not make out the words.
“Yes, Officer,” Hilly said to the white cop.
Ptolemy remembered that you were always supposed to speak to the white cop. Sometimes they had black men in uniform but it was the white cop that you had to talk to.
“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said after the policemen got in their car and drove off. “We got to get to the bank before they close.”
It was a long, crowded room with a high counter down the middle and another one against the window that looked out on the street. Opposite the picture window was a wall of glass-encased booths where women cashed people’s checks and took deposit money for their Christmas clubs. Ptolemy used to keep a Christmas club for Angelina, Reggie’s daughter . . . or maybe it was William’s daughter, yes, William’s daughter, Angelina. And he also kept a holiday account for Pecora, even though she never liked him very much.
There were too many people in there. Ptolemy tried to see them but they began to blend together and no matter how many times he saw somebody when he looked around no one was familiar to him. And so he kept moving his head, trying to see and remember everyone.
“Let’s go to the counter, Papa Grey.” Hilly took his arm but Ptolemy wouldn’t budge. He just kept looking around, trying to make all of those faces make sense.
“Don’t it bother you?” the older man asked the younger.
“What? Come on.”
Ptolemy wasn’t going to be pulled around until he could make sense of that room. It seemed very important, almost as much as protecting that boy from the bulls. Didn’t he know that you weren’t ever supposed to take out your wallet on a street? If the thieves didn’t get you the police certainly would. The young people didn’t seem to have any sense anymore. They didn’t know. All the people on line and at the counters didn’t know what to do, and so it was dangerous on the street.
“Come on, Uncle.”
One man wearing a bright-blue suit with a long double-breasted jacket stood there talking to a blond-headed black woman who was smiling and wore no wedding ring. The blue-suited man looked very much like the gangster Sweet Billy Madges, and she, blondie, was familiar too. But it wasn’t anything to do with Madges and his whores. The blond black woman was like Letta Golding, who lived in a room across the courtyard from which a great oak had arisen.
“That oak,” Coydog would say, “is like Christ a’mighty coming up outta the clay, fed by the graves of all the dead souls that believed in him.”
“Do you believe in him?” Li’l Pea asked.
“If things goin’ good,” the wizened old man opined, “not too much. But when I’m in trouble I can pray with the best of ’em.”
If he was small enough, a little boy could climb on the limbs of that tree and clear across the courtyard or up or down to the walkways of any of the eight floors of that Mississippi Negro tenement.
Coydog lived there for a while, and Li’l Pea would visit him whenever he could.
“Papa Grey,” Hilly beseeched.
Letta was beautiful and friendly. Li’l Pea often found himself climbing up to the seventh-floor window of her apartment because she never pulled down the shade; even if she was naked and in the barrel she used for a bathtub, Letta would stand up and smile for Ptolemy and touch his cheek or kiss his forehead.
“You a nasty boy,” she’d say if he came up to her window and she was naked but she’d be smiling and he knew that she wasn’t really mad.
“Papa Grey,” Hilly said again.
“What?”
“Do you have a check to cash?”
He was still standing in the crowded bank and not in Letta’s bathroom. This realization was a surprise for the elder Grey but not a shock. He was used to going places in his mind. More and more he was in the past. Sometimes with his first wife, Bertie, and then later with the woman he truly loved—Sensia Howard. Even when she had been untrue to him with his good friend Ivan, he couldn’t get up the strength to leave Sensia—or to kill her.
The next thing Ptolemy knew he was standing at the counter with the three checks for $211.41 in his hand. Hilly was getting him to sign on the back over some other words that the boy had written.
“You stay here, Papa Grey,” Hilly was saying. “I’ma go over to the teller and get your money.”
Hilly had the checks in his hand but Ptolemy did not remember handing them over. He had signed them and now the boy was on the other side of the dividing table, standing on line at a teller’s window.
“That your son?” a woman asked.
She was old but not nearly as old as Ptolemy. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy, but he had twenty years on her at least.
“No. His name is . . . I forget his name but he’s my nephew, either my sister’s son or her daughter’s son. Somethin’ like that.”
“Oh,” the short woman said. “Mister, can you help me?”
“Um, the boy there does most everything for me,” he replied, thinking that he should go over on line and stand with, with . . . Hilly.
“I need five dollars more to make my telephone bill,” the woman said. She wore blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and a cap with a long transparent green sun visor.
“I don’t take care’a the money,” Ptolemy said. “I let the boy do that. I can’t hardly see the fingers on my hand and so he count the money so I don’t give ya a one instead of a, of a five.”
