“How you do that?”

“Read,” he said, stretching out the vowel sound like the singer did with her notes.

“How you learn that?”

“A, B, C,” Coy said, wagging his forefinger like the white conductor did on odd Thursdays in the summer when the white people’s marching band stopped in front of the town hall and performed old southern favorites.

That was the beginning of Li’l Pea’s informal education. From A to L were accomplished that very afternoon.

After he could say all the letters, Coydog stole some paper from the country store and showed his student how to make the sounds with pencil lines.

“Ain’t it wrong to be stealin’ that paper from the white man’s sto’?” Li’l Pea asked his aged friend.

“Wrong?” the wiry little man exclaimed. “Hell, it ain’t wrong, it’s a sin.”

“But if you do a sin, ain’t you goin’ to hell?”

“That all depends, boy.” Coy’s long dark face cracked open at his mouth, showing his strong, stained teeth. “The Catholics profess that all you got to do is say you’re sorry and the Lord will forgive. Other peoples say that Saint Peter’s got a scale where they put all the bad you done on one side and all the good on t’other. An’ if the good outweigh the bad they got a cot for you in heaven.

“So if I steal this here tablet an’ pencils but then I teach you how to read an’ write an’ from there you invent a train that go from here to Venice ...”

The German alto was warbling about love and Ptolemy remembered the name of the city with rivers for streets. He wanted to go to the bathroom and call the girl out to tell her what he’d accomplished but Coydog wouldn’t stop talking.

“. . . well, if I do that, then maybe the good beat out the bad.”

Ptolemy recalled watching his friend study him with a calculating eye.

“But you know, boy,” Coy said, “I don’t believe any’a that.”

“What do you believe?” the boy asked, the ABC’s whirling around his head.