Chill put the bag down next to his nephew, who was already halfway through the children’s chemistry primer.
“Look,” Hazel said, pointing. “He almost finished with that book already.”
“Naw. He just read the words. He have to go through it five or six times ’fore he be through with it. It’a be more than a week ’fore he gets through all those experiments.”
“And you gonna buy him a chemistry set or whatever every week? Where you gonna get money like that? Do you even have a job?”
“I’m workin’ for the catfish farms and doin’ some work around here and there.”
“That’s gonna pay for a boy like Popo’s education?”
“I got other plans.”
“Like the plans put you on Angola Farm?”
“Prison,” Popo said even as he turned a page.
Chill stared at Hazel. He clenched his fists hard enough to make his sinewy forearms tremble.
“Thtop!” Misty Bent commanded.
Popo sat up in his Buddha position and Hazel flinched.
Misty had pulled herself to her feet by holding on to her plastic walker.
“Aunt Misty, sit down,” Hazel said.
“You go,” the elder woman replied. “You go and don’t meth with uth. Thilly want to do right. Popo jutht lotht hith mama an’ he never knew hith daddy. That Johnny Delight wath juth a hit’n run with hith mama. We ain’t thendin’ him nowhere.”
2
“M Bill Bent?” the white man asked. He was standing at the front door, tam in hand.
Chill had been doing push-ups and wore only a pair of sweatpants. His muscular chest was heaving and sweat poured down his face.
“No,” Chill said.
“Oh.” The white man hesitated. “Then is M Misty Bent here?”
“She in the bed.”
“Oh, I see,” the small white man said. There was a hint of Mississippi in his voice but in spite of that he spoke like a Northerner. “Well, you see, I’m Andrew Russell from the state board of education. I’ve come to speak to someone about Ptolemy Bent.”
In the background Chill could hear the radio receiver that Popo was experimenting with in his grandmother’s room. The high-pitched wavering reminded Chill of the sound effects from the old science fiction movies that they showed on Saturdays at the juvenile delinquent detention center.
“What you want wit’ Popo?”
“Popo. Is that what you call Ptolemy? We have been informed by various interested parties that the child is exceptional, bright. There’s a state law that we must test exceptionally bright children to make sure that they’re getting the proper education. You know IQ is our greatest resource.” Andrew Russell smiled and nodded a little. He wore the popular andro-suit — green jacket and pants with a loose tan blouse and a brown tam.
“State law is you can’t touch ’im till he sixty-one mont’s,” Chill said.
“But with his guardian’s approval we can test as early as twenty-foah,” Russell said in what was probably his friendliest tone.
Chill closed the door slowly, controlling his rage. He knew that he couldn’t lose his temper, not while Popo was his responsibility.
“Popo,” Chill called.
“Wit’ Gramma,” the child shouted.
She was surrounded by colored lights that Ptolemy had wired around the room. Yellow and blue and green and pink paper shades that had been colored with food dyes, lit by forty-watt bulbs. Four-year-old Ptolemy sat at his grandmother’s vanity working on six disemboweled antique radios that he had dismantled and rewired. He turned the various knobs, roaming the electronic sighs, momentarily chancing upon talking or music now and then. Six bright green wires connected the radios to an archaic laptop computer on the floor. Waves of color crossed the old-fashioned backlit screen. Now and then an image would rise out of the haze of pixels.
His hair had never been cut but Popo brushed it out as well as he could every morning. In the afternoon Kai Lin would come over and comb out the tangles that Popo missed at the back of his neck.
Misty had cranked her Craftmatic bed to the full seated position. She smiled at her little mad scientist while he searched for something, a secret that he wanted to surprise her with.
“Popo,” Chill said.
The boy glanced over at the screen and giggled.
“... former Soviet Union today gave up its last vestige of sovereignty, much less socialism, when it entered into a partnership with MacroCode Management International in a joint venture to return order to Russian society...”
A long pure note wailed between stations.
“... born to be wi-i-i-ld...”
Static came after the song, but the volume rose.
“Popo!” Chill called again, but the static drowned out his words.
An almost imperceptible clicking blended in with the white noise. The volume dropped. The clicking became clearer. Popo brought his hands to the sides of his head and pulled both ears.
“Popo,” Misty Bent said as loud as she could.
“Yea, Gramma?”
“Thill ith talkin’ to you.”
The boy turned around and stood on the white satin vanity chair. He was naked and smiling.
“Chilly.”
“They wanna take you to get tested an’ sen’ you to Houston, Po,” Chill said.
Ptolemy automatically put his hands in the air when the man came near. The child loved the feel of his skin against the muscular man’s bare chest.
“No,” Popo said. “I don’ wanna go.”
“I don’t want you to go neither. But we got to figger sumpin’ out.”
“We could run,” the boy suggested. “We could go in the swamps like them slave men you said about.”
Almost every night Chill told Popo stories of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. He said that it was because he wanted Popo to know African-American history, “like them white kids know their history. From stories at home.” But escape was the real story he wanted to tell. He had been obsessed with escape ever since the day he was convicted of armed robbery. The only way he could fall asleep in his cell at night was by imagining himself a slave who had slipped his chains, pried open the bars, and outrun the dogs. Even after his release Chill needed this fantasy to drop off most nights.
For a moment he considered his nephew’s innocent suggestion.
The desire for flight burned perpetually in his chest. He owned an illegal ember gun. With that he never needed a reload, one LX battery could last a year.
But then his eyes fell upon his mother, Misty. She only walked for exercise now — fifteen minutes in the morning and five at night. Ptolemy loved his grandmother more than anything.
“No, baby boy,” Chill said. “No.”
“Then, what?”
“If we had money we could prove to the state that we could afford to get you hooked up to the EEG’s Prime Com Link. If they could give you tests and we could get you into that Jesse Jackson Gymnasium that they got for city kids, then maybe you could stay.”
“I could get money,” Ptolemy said.
“It’s gonna take more than your dollar allowance, honey.”
“How much, then?”
“Just to pay for the computer link is a hundred fi’ty thousand a year. And then there’s forty thousand for the JJ Gym, ’cause you not in the city limits. Three million prob’ly do it with costs goin’ up like they do.”
“I could get that,” Ptolemy said.
“Where at?”
“On the computer.”
“Naw, man,” Chill said. “Computer’s all linked up. They got identity cards along with your PBC on every computer.”
“Nuh-uh,” Ptolemy said, shaking his head and grinning. “My Personal Bar Code ain’t on my computer.”