“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”

Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.

His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana. There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.

“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.

“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”

“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”

“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”

“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”

Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”

Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.

Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.

The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.