The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

by Walter Mosley

  “Children shouldn’t be in the room wit’ dead peoples, Reggie,” he said into the empty corridor but also, in his mind, he was in the small bedroom of Niecie’s house where the dead man lay.

  The front door to the hall came open and a woman the color of dark redwood came in carrying a bundle of envelopes and magazines. She looked familiar.

  “Mr. Grey?” she said, walking toward him.

  He usually slammed the door and threw the locks when someone came in the building but this time Ptolemy hesitated.

  “Miss Dartman?”

  Approaching him, the tall colored woman said, “I haven’t seen your face in almost two years, Mr. Grey. Sometimes I be droppin’ the mail in your slot and I think, ‘Maybe he’s dead in there.’”

  “Not me. Old Man Death done lost my numbah, I think.”

  The phrase was used by Coy McCann when someone hadn’t seen him for a while and assumed that he’d died. Almost all of Ptolemy’s automatic coherent sentences came from his old friend Coydog.

  The tall woman smiled and handed Ptolemy a bundle of mail.

  “I was outta town seein’ my brother for the last few days so I didn’t get the mail. Maybe I should give you back the key so that nice grandnephew of yours could collect it for you.”

  “Reggie got hisself killed.”

  “No!” Miss Falona Dartman cried. “How did that happen?”

  “They lynched him. A mob drived by and kilt him.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Grey. He was ...” she said, and then sighed. “He was such a nice young man. Oh no. What are they doin’ to our young black men?”

  “Killin’ ’em,” Ptolemy said. “What they always done.”

  “Who’s gonna come take care of you now, Mr. Grey? You can’t be here all by yourself.”

  “My great-granddaughter Robyn come from down Alabama, or someplace, to he’p me out. She cleaned up my bafroom today. Worked all day at it. All day long she cleaned and th’ew away garbage. But I’ma miss Reggie.”

  “Was he married?”

  Ptolemy nodded. “An’ they had some kids.”

  “Oh no.”

  Ptolemy placed the mail in a neat stack on Robyn’s lawn chair. Then he went into the bathroom, put the top lid down on the commode, and sat there. Robyn had brought new lightbulbs and screwed them into the seven sockets above the sink. The light was so white in there that it made him laugh. He was happy sitting on the toilet and watching the bathtub.

  Now and then a curious roach would dart in and then scurry away again, daunted by the brightness of the room. Four times he went to the sink and turned the corroded spigots, just to see the water run. There was a leak at the base of the hot-water faucet, but the water dripped into the sink, causing no problem.

  At midnight he took a shower. The nozzle could only muster a few sprays but it was enough to wash his body clean. He used an old T-shirt for a towel and another one for a bathrobe.

  That night when he wrapped himself in the thin blanket under the south table Ptolemy had a feeling of giddiness that kept him up for what seemed to him like hours. He thought about Robyn’s ability to clean and polish and throw out things without hurting him or those things that he needed to keep. She was better than Reggie at understanding what was important.

  A flute was playing on the all-night classical program and the newsmen and -women droned on. Ptolemy had trained himself not to listen when he was in his bed, but this night the background racket was a bother to him.

  On other nights, before Robyn had come, Ptolemy shared space with the music and news. They were as much a part of the room as he was. His mind was like an open field over which these sounds and opinions passed unhindered. But on that night Ptolemy was thinking about the tragedy of Reggie and the blessing of Robyn. She was an orphan taken in and protected by, by, by Niecie. And the boy and baby girl were orphans too.

  The flute scratched at these thoughts. The news commentators seemed to be trying to talk him out of the value of Reggie and Robyn, the boy and his baby sister. In the dimness he cursed the radio and the flittering shadows cast by the TV. Rage opened up in Ptolemy’s breast. The anger took over his mind like a swarm of biting fire ants. And then, when he was angry enough to break something, the passion ebbed away, leaving that old familiar open field.

  It reminded him of a portal at the end of a long corridor behind the pulpit of Liberty Baptist Church. When he was a child and the minister’s sermon went overlong, he’d sneak away from the pews and walk down the long hall to that doorway. It was always ajar, emitting a cool breeze year-round, even in the summer heat. There was almost no light in there, but Li’l Pea could see the dim image of a white cross in the depths of the chamber. It was leaning against something dark and massive.

  The child called Pity would walk up to the threshold of the sacred room and strain his eyes, trying to glean its tale.

  Remembering this important, spiritual moment in his history, Ptolemy Grey drifted off into sleep.

  In the dream he was trying to pull Reggie up out of his coffin, to shake his shoulders until the boy woke up. All around the casket were women seated in white folding chairs and dressed beautifully, mournfully, with hats and handkerchiefs and black gloves. Robyn and Niecie, Letta Golding and Shirley Wring and many others whom he knew but could not remember their names—all of them watched him. They hummed as he beseeched the boy to get up and walk and live. Beyond the casket was a window that looked out on a green lawn where the children Arthur and Letisha played. They laughed and chased each other. “Fall down! Fall down,” they sang.

  In the morning Ptolemy ate one of the small pop-top cans of tuna that Robyn had brought back with the cleaning supplies. He visited his bathroom for over an hour, trying to think of how he could keep Robyn from going into the bedroom. He closed the bathroom door to keep out the sad viola solo and weather report. Then he sat on the commode, rubbing his hands and looking at the aqua walls.

  Sitting there, he experienced what he called eternity. It was whenever he was in one place by himself and didn’t have to go anywhere else or answer to anybody.

  “A moment like that,” Coy McCann had said, “like when you fishin’ or after you done made love with your woman and you smokin’ a cigarette while she sleep . . . that’s the kinda time that’s just so wonderful. That’s when you can think because you ain’t hungry or lustful or in it with somebody wanna waste yo’ time. You could be just sittin’ there by yourself and you see what you need to do, the way God do in eternity.”

  These words came back to Ptolemy decades after Coydog was murdered and gone.

  Ptolemy knew exactly what he had to do.

  On the sink in the kitchen was the flimsy little box that held the plastic lawn bags Robyn used to throw out the detritus of Ptolemy’s bathroom.

  When Ptolemy picked up the box a huge gutter-roach fell out and onto the sink. The black and brown and russet-red insect flipped from his back onto his legs and stood there on an old plate that Ptolemy hadn’t used or cleaned in over a decade. The old man slapped his hand down hard on the bug, but when he pulled back, the roach leaped in the air, spread his beetle-like wings, and flew toward the back of the kitchen.

  Watching the strange bug flapping its way toward the towering boxes on his porch brought about a flutter in Ptolemy’s chest. His breath came quickly and he had to squat down so that he didn’t fall. He could feel the sweat sprouting on his brow and between his fingers. A painful burp brought the strong flavor of tuna up into his throat.

  Ptolemy concentrated on the pain in his left knee.

  “The great man say that life is pain,” Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. “That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit’ it. Now, if that ain’t the blues, I don’t know what is.”

  The ache in Ptolemy’s knee felt deep and bloody. He ignored the quick breath and racing heart. All he knew was the pain and Coydog’s words.

  “Why you always hang around that old man?” Titus Grey had
asked his son on the porch one morning when the boy was going off to meet Coy to go fishing.

  “He teachin’ me my ABC’s.”

  “He don’t know no alphabet.”

  “Yeah, he do.”

  “Are you contradictin’ me, boy?” Titus asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then put down that pole and come on with me up in the woods. This is yam season and you don’t have time to be a fool.”

  Hearing these words in his yester-ear, Ptolemy stood up straight. His knee and chest were fine. The huge roach was still flying, bat-ting its head against the small patch of window that was visible above the big boxes on the back porch. Music played and some man was talking about something far away, and Ptolemy went about searching for what he needed under the sink.

  After a while he forgot what he was looking for. And so he went back to the living room and stood at the bedroom door, trying to remember what was so clear to him in the bathroom, before his war with the cockroach.

  Finally he decided that the only thing to do was open the door to see if there was a clue inside.

  The bedroom was dark, as it had been years before when he closed it up in order to forget about his life with Sensia. She was dead and buried but that room had been her memorial. She was put to rest in a whitewashed pine coffin like the one Niecie had for Reggie. Niecie’s mother, Ptolemy remembered, had gotten Sensie’s coffin and put her in the same room where they had Reggie for his wake . . .

  There was a gray tarp covering the contents of Ptolemy’s abandoned bedroom. It loomed like a shifting desert under a cloudy, moonless night. Ptolemy stared at the fabric, remembering his true love. Thinking about her, he remembered what it was that he needed.

  He went back into the kitchen and started pulling out furniture. Two small benches, a stone-top chrome-stalk table, a walnut tabletop and various boxes, bags, satchels, and one Hopalong Cassidy cowboy lunchbox that Reggie’s father had when he was a child.

  After dragging all that junk into the living room, Ptolemy went into the closet and got his oldest possession: an oak yardstick that Coydog had given him when he was only five.

  “This here yardstick will be the measure of your life, boy,” the old man had said.

  “The what?”

  “As long as you keep this here span wit’ you, I will be wit’ you.”

  Ptolemy had never broken that three-foot rule. The name in red letters, BLUTCHER’S BUTCHER MARKET, had mostly rubbed off. The numbers and most of the increment lines had faded also. There was a chip at one corner of the dark wood and dents and gouges throughout. But Coydog’s gifts to Li’l Pea, both gifts, he had kept through the years.

  With his stick in hand Ptolemy yanked open the door under the sink. He stuck the yardstick in there and pulled out the strong spiders’ webs laden with greasy dust. After rubbing the webs off on an old curtain that lay in a forgotten corner, Ptolemy reached in and took out the old steel ice hook he had from seventy years before. It was a vicious-looking device used to hook twenty-pound blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration was available in poor homes. Ptolemy and Peter Brock worked on a truck, driving up and down city streets delivering ice to the customers of Brock’s father, Minister Brock.

  “What church your daddy preach at?” Ptolemy asked Peter on their first day.

  “He ain’t no preacher,” Peter said. “My grandfather named him that so if you used his first name you had to respect him anyway.”

  With his full strength Ptolemy swung down on the big plastic tarp covering Sensia’s room. The triple hook sunk deep. Using both hands, the ninety-one-year-old man began to pull. At first there was no give. It was as if he were pulling on the knob of a locked door. But Ptolemy Grey would not give up. He twisted his shoulders for torque, let his weight work against the heft of the covering. He pulled and yanked and tugged in staccato snatches.

  All the while there was a symphony playing and a sports report spouting meaningless numbers and names.

  Ptolemy didn’t listen. He went down to his knees, using all the strength in his spindly shoulders. He was about to take a rest when the plastic sheet begin to give. He stood up and away from the door, using both his strength and weight, and the tarp began to flow outward from the long-abandoned room.

  The dry plastic gushed into the crowded living room like a huge reptilian tongue. Ptolemy pulled the hook out and sank it in again, dragging more of the gray sheet from the bedroom.

  Again and again he dug his fang-shaped hook into the tarp, the plastic hissing like lizard skin against itself and along the floor. Ptolemy, sweating and laughing, his heart beating fast, pulled the entire covering from the bedroom. He fell to the floor under the mist of dust that had been raised. He hacked and laughed, sneezed and chuckled, rubbed his irritated eyes and tittered to himself.

  “I did it,” he announced triumphantly. “I pulled that bastard outta there.”

  For a while Ptolemy Grey lay there, half on the floor and half on the dusty gray tarp. He was breathing hard and laughing to himself, remembering people and things randomly, haphazardly. There was the time he and Keith Low shoveled coal on a steam train from Jackson to Memphis to pay their fare.

  After Coydog had died Pity stayed in bed for two weeks. Sheriff Walters had come to ask Li’l Pea what he knew, but he didn’t say anything except that he didn’t know anything. It was all he could do to keep from crying while looking at the ugly blue veins that crossed back and forth over the sheriff’s nose.

  “You know that I’m here to find them that killed your uncle, now, don’t ya, boy?” the middle-aged, portly white man asked.

  “Yessuh.”

  “You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”

  “Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.

  “All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”

  Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.

  “I don’t know nuthin’, Sheriff Walters,” Ptolemy said.

  “Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”

  “Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”

  Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.

  Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.

  A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.

  Li’l Pea looked away.

  Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels
into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.

  Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink to count the time away. He sat on the floor, watching the towels, to be sure that no maggot or worm found its way to him the way his father said that the worms made their ways into Coydog’s eyes after his brother, Lupo, had cut him down and buried him in a pauper’s grave behind the barbershop without even a stone to mark his passage.

  He sat upon the tile floor, counting the drips and thinking about Reggie and Coy; both men lynched and buried and made food for bugs.

  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 titter 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 passed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The classical 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.”