Whenever Ptolemy got hungry he would drink from the faucet. After a while the hunger went away. Through the door he could hear soft music and voices that he couldn't understand. Underneath these calming sounds he thought he could make out the scuttling of bugs and the t.i.tter of rats. If he paid too much attention to these noises his heart pumped harder and his head got light. Sometimes, when he got too frightened, he'd fall asleep and then wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.

Ptolemy had no idea how much time had pa.s.sed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The cla.s.sical music was broken, tinkly. The news reporters made no sense. Reggie and Coydog were dead, and that girl would never find her way to him.

"You ain't got to be afraid'a nuthin', boy," Coydog would tell him. "We all gonna die. We all gonna get some hurt. I mean, when a woman bring a child outta her big belly it hurt like a bastid. But that girl ain't nevah been happier than when she hurt like that."

"Why she be so happy?" Li'l Pea asked.

"'Cause she know that baby gonna be the love of her life, and that would be worf ten times the pain."

At first Ptolemy was soothed when he thought about his old friend and mentor. But then his thoughts drifted back to that last fiery dance, and then to little Maude Pet.i.t. And when he thought about his loved ones being lost to fire his heart thundered and he fell asleep to dream the dreams of the dead.

Papa Grey?" a voice called.

Ptolemy was in his coffin. It was pitch black and the worms were wriggling between his fingers and toes. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing, but instead he found himself in the white bathtub under brilliant light. Someone was knocking at the bathroom door.

He remembered draining the tub and lying down in it the way Reggie was laid to rest in his pine box.

"Papa Grey?" she called again.

"Who is it?"

"It's Robyn, Papa Grey. I took the keys to your front do' but the bathroom do' don't have a key."

"Robyn?"

"Yeah. Open the do'," she said.

The old man fumbled with the lock for a minute or more. He panicked once or twice, fearing that he was locked in, but he got the door open at last. Robyn was standing there in dark-blue jeans and a light-blue T-shirt. There was a yellow ribbon in her hair and big bone-white earrings dangled on either side of her jaw.

"I died," Ptolemy Grey said. "I died and was in my grave with worms and Coydog McCann. I was dead and gone like Sensie and Reggie and other names that I cain't even remembah no mo'."

Robyn put her arms around Ptolemy's neck.

"It was a dream," she said, c.o.c.king her head to the side and humming with the words.

"No, no, no," he said, pushing his savior away. "It wasn't no dream. Come on out here in the room and I can prove it to ya."

"What's this big plastic sheet out here, Uncle?" she asked. "It's dirty."

"It don't mattah," he said. "Just push it aside and, and, and pull up some chairs."

Robyn did as he requested, frowning at the dust rising from the faded tarp. She sneezed and got his stool and her lawn chair set up in front of the door.

"Mr. Grey, can I turn off the TV and the radio so I can hear you?"

"Sure. I don't care," he said.

They sat down facing each other. Ptolemy's eyes were bright. There was a grin on his face. He took the child's left hand in his and gazed deeply, even thoughtfully, into her eyes.

Robyn stared back, seeing a face that she knew with a different man inside.

"Some things," Ptolemy said. "Some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time."

He went silent, waiting for more words to come, the words and the ideas behind them that were coming slowly but steadily from his mind.

Robyn nodded, her head like a pump priming a well.

"I had a tarp," Ptolemy said, "this one right here, over all the things in my bedroom. All the books and carpets and clothes and gla.s.s jewelry. That was Sensia's room, the wife that I loved the most ..."

Pitypapa Grey was aware of the silence in the room. The music had been hushed and the men and women talking about crime and killing were quiet at last. It occurred to him that before now, before this moment, the content of his mind was the radio and the TV, that he was just as empty as an old cracked pecan sh.e.l.l-the meat dried up and crumbled away.

"Papa Grey?" Robyn asked.

"Yeah, baby?"

"You just sittin' there."

"What was I sayin'?"

"That some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time."

He looked at her lovely young face and let the words wash over his parched mind.

"Yeah," he said with a smile. "That tarp. That tarp was like the pall in my mind."

"The what?"

"The pall. It's a shroud what undertakers put over the dead until they get put in the coffin."

"And this plastic sheet is like that?" Robyn asked.

"It was over that room, and at the same time it was in my head, coverin' up all the things that I done forgot, or forgot me."

The idea turned in on itself and Ptolemy lost his way. He brought his hands to his head and tried to remember. It was all there but not quite clear. Things jumbled together: Coydog's funeral next to Artie and Letisha; the iron-banded oak box with its treasures and promises, its curses and death-hidden but still a danger; Reggie laughing and eating french fries in the sunlight through the restaurant window.

Robyn took his hands from his face.

"Look at me, Mr. Grey," she said.

There were tears in his eyes.

"I got to get my thoughts straight, girl. I got to do sumpin' before that d.a.m.n pall is th'owed ovah me."

"When's the last time you et?" she asked.

Ptolemy understood the question but the answer was the white tail of a deer flitting through the trees. He shook his head and wondered.

"First thing we gotta do is get you sumpin' to eat, Uncle," she said.

"I had a can'a tuna day before, day before yesterday."

The cheeseburger tasted good, better than any food he'd had in a very long time. They sat in the window seat at the fast-food restaurant, watching the black people and brown people walking up and down the sidewalk, driving up and down the street. The faces didn't confuse him anymore but he was still confused. Not so much that he'd get lost in Coydog's lessons down near the mouth of the Tickle River, where they had alligators that would carry off little boys and girls sometimes. He'd remember the purple skies of fall evenings without getting inside them, but he couldn't recall where he'd put the treasure; he couldn't put words to the one lesson that Coydog taught that he needed to know.

"What you do in school?" Ptolemy asked Robyn.

"I'm not in school right now, Uncle."

"I know. I know that. I mean, what you gonna gonna do when you go back again?" do when you go back again?"

"Maybe be a nurse or a schoolteacher."

"Why not a doctor?" the old man asked.

Robyn stared at her newly adopted relative.

"Bein' a nurse is good," she said.

"A doctor is a king and the nurse is like the five of hearts. You at least a queen, Reggie, I mean Robyn. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," she said.

Robyn put her fingers on his forearm. "We got to bomb your house, Uncle," she said.

That day they went to the bank to cash two checks that Ptolemy had received in the mail. The old man was looking from face to face, examining each one.

"You lookin' for somebody, Uncle?"

"Double-u ara eye en gee," he said.

"What?"

"Double-u ara eye en gee. That's a friend'a mines."

"If you say so."

They bought groceries at Big City and insect bombs at Harold and Rod Hardware. There were seven of them like Roman candles held up by Popsicle-stick crosses, which were bonded by rough dabs of white glue.

"You only need one for every one and a half rooms in the house," the salesman told Robyn.

He was a redheaded young black man with pinkish-brown skin and big brown freckles. Ptolemy wondered how many white men had been that boy's forefathers. This seemed very important to him, but then the thought got lost in the young people's conversation.

"How long before we can go back in?" Robyn asked.

"Twenty-four hours, no matter what," he said. "Then you go in an' open the windahs, let it air out a hour or two and it'a be fine."

"You got windahs, Mr. Grey?" the girl asked.

"Out on the back porch. Sensie an' me'd open the back windahs and the front do' in summah an' it was bettah than air conditionin'."

"What's your name?" the freckled clerk asked Robyn.

"Chili Norman," she said easily. "I live in that green house ovah on Morton."

"You gotta phone?"

"Uh-uh," she said coyly. Smiling as she did so. "I'll take two'a those little electric fans you got on sale. And I'ma need some wide tape too."

"How come you don't have no phone?" the goofy boy asked.

"Money."

"Could I come by and knock on the door?"

"Ain't no law against that," the lying child said.

From there they went to Baker's Inn on Crenshaw. It took three busses and more than an hour to get there. They had to walk six blocks at either end of the long ride. At first Ptolemy carried one of the three bags they had, but he started slowing down and Robyn took his load too.

They paid for two nights at the motel in cash up front and left the groceries in the room. There was a small refrigerator for the milk and beer and b.u.t.ter they'd purchased.

"You can stay here if you want, Uncle Grey. I just got one thing to do and then I'll come back."

Ptolemy looked around the motel room. It smelled of chemicals, and the two beds looked like the slabs in the undertaker's room where he swept up the dust that collected around the dead. The ceiling was low and he was again reminded of a coffin.

"How long you be gone?" he asked.

"I don't know. Couple'a hours at least."

"I'll come with ya. No need just to sit in here. I don't even know how to work the TV."

Robyn carried the fans and the insect bombs in three white plastic bags. She and Ptolemy didn't talk much on the walk to the busses or on the rides. Young men talked to her. Older men did too. She smiled at them and told lies about her name and address. She gave them phone numbers but Ptolemy didn't think that they belonged to Niecie.

On the last bus a young man came to sit opposite them. He was dark-skinned and pretty the way young men can be. He was no more than thirty and could have pa.s.sed for twenty-two.