But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.

“The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”

“I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”

“You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”

“Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”

“You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.

“It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And the toilet don’t work.”

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”

“I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”

“What thing?”

“The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”

“What thing, Uncle?”

“The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”

“What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.

“I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three-quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.

Hilly switched off the radio.

“Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”

“All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”

“But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”