The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

by Walter Mosley

  Instead of getting angry, the child almost always acquiesced to his demands. In his heart he knew that she was the one who made the important decisions, and she knew that he wanted in the worst way to be in charge.

  “Here you go, Uncle,” Robyn said. She was wearing tight red jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her tennis shoes were pink too.

  Ptolemy dumped the keys out on the table that once stood at the south wall, the table that he’d slept under for more than twenty years.

  The small brass key was for his locker at the Y that they tore down in 1962, or maybe 1963. The big skeleton key that Robyn found under Sensia’s mattress was to the lost treasure. The three master keys on one ring were to various padlocks that he kept in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. The tin key was the one he wanted. He set it aside and placed all the rest, one by one, back in the old mustard jar.

  “You could put these back,” he said, pushing the jar toward Robyn.

  “Ain’t you gonna want to put that key back after you unlock the bag?” she asked.

  Questions like that gave Ptolemy the most problems. When he was alone with his TV and radio, nobody asked him anything and he didn’t have to put together any responses. People talked in his head, and on the TV, but there were no questions that he had to answer.

  He blinked and tried to understand all the various things she meant.

  “Why don’t I just put it in my pocket and hold it for you, Uncle?”

  “I can put it in my own pocket,” he said.

  “Should we open it now?” she asked.

  “Let’s get it up here on the table,” he said.

  Together they lifted the heavy bag until they got one corner of it on the battered ash top. Then Robyn pushed until it was fully on.

  Ptolemy had to study the lock. He tried different ways to put the key in. It had been a few months since he’d opened the case but finally he got it right.

  “Goddamn, Uncle,” Robyn said, standing up from the aluminum and nylon chair and putting her hands to her face. “Shit!”

  “You mad, baby girl?” Ptolemy said, leaning away from her, remembering the way she had looked when she beat Melinda Hogarth until blood flowed from the addict’s forehead.

  Robyn was staring at the suitcase filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties. The money was stacked in some places. In others it was piled, just thrown in, and all mixed around. Robyn dug both hands in, lifting a shovelful of cash, and coins rained down from the jumble of bills.

  “Uncle,” Robyn said.

  “I been savin’ that for years,” he said. “It’s almost ninety-four thousand dollars. Ninety-four thousand . . . almost.”

  Robyn sat down again. Her face was indecipherable to her adopted uncle.

  “Did Reggie know you had all this?” she asked.

  “He knew I didn’t cash but two checks every three weeks. He’d put one in a account that paid my bills and I’d put my leftovers in the trunk. When I wanted to tell him where I put it he said that he didn’t wanna know. He said that he might start borrowin’ and not know when to quit.”

  Tears were coming down Robyn’s left cheek. She had dropped the cash and now her hands were picking at each other.

  “We could use this money to buy you a bed and a dresser,” Ptolemy said. “An’, an’, an’ if there’s enough, maybe a nice dress.”

  Robyn stared at the suitcase full of money and shook her head.

  “Is this the treasure you always be talkin’ ’bout?” she asked at last.

  “Naw,” he said. “That ain’t treasure. That’s just Social Security an’ retirement money. Nobody died for that. You know a pirate’s treasure have to be cursed with blood.”

  Robyn moved as far away from the table as she could get. Ptolemy got to his feet and went over to her. He put his hands on her strong shoulders.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked.

  “Why you wanna show me that?”

  “You my girl. You my blood.”

  “No I’m not. You don’t even know me. You don’t know what I did ’fore I got here. I could steal this money from you.”

  “You want it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You want it? I could give it to you, baby. You know, I only need ev’ry fourth check an’, an’ once a mont’ or so I get a li’l bit from Social Security. That’s all I need. You could have this. You could, you could take it and buy you a bed.”

  Robyn jumped away from her benefactor and ran to the door.

  “No!” she yelled as she rushed into the hallway and out to the front door of the building.

  By the time Ptolemy got to the threshold she was gone. He stayed there for a while but she didn’t return and so he went back to the ash table. He considered separating out the various denominations. There were a few hundred-dollar bills in there, he remembered. He wanted to stack all the like notes, but there was too much cash and so he closed the suitcase and locked it. Then he went to the TV to turn it on but he couldn’t remember which button did the job.

  Finally Ptolemy Grey went to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, trying to remember.

  For a long while nothing seemed to work. All he could think about was how angry Robyn was. And she was so pretty in red. He wanted to tell her that by giving her the money. After all, it wasn’t a treasure, just some cash. His rent was set at $185 a month, and the bills, which Reggie had the bank pay, were low.

  “Money ain’t the root of all evil,” Coydog had told the boy Li’l Pea, “but it get a hold on some people like vines on a tree or the smell’a fungus on damp sheets. They’s some people need money before love or laughter. All you can do is feel sorry for someone like that.”

  “But money is what makes you rich, Uncle Coy,” the child said. “My daddy said that if he had enough money he’d be a rich man.”

  “Rich man is the man live in his own skin,” the old thief countered. “Black as oil, white as cane sugah, yellah like gold—that’s riches for ya, boy. All the rest is jes’ wastin’ time.”

  Ptolemy felt pain in his joints and weakness in his muscles. Robyn running away the way she did hurt more than seeing Reggie in his coffin. Or maybe it wasn’t more, but added on to Reggie’s death, Robyn’s departure was a weight too great to bear. He didn’t cry but he wanted to. He didn’t run out in the street looking for her but he would have if it wasn’t for Melinda and the fact that he got lost if he wandered beyond his own block.

  “I got to think,” Ptolemy said clearly. “I got to get my mind movin’.”

  With these words he stood up from the commode and went out into the newly ordered and cleaned living room. He brought his rainbow stool and sat it in front of the TV. Robyn had wanted to throw the stool away, along with a dozen other chairs that she put out on the street on trash day.

  “No, no, baby,” he remembered saying. “This here is my move-anywhere chair. I could sit anywhere in the house or outside with this here chair. Whenever I get tired or need to get down and study sumpin’ close to the ground, this chair will work for me.”

  “Okay, Uncle,” she’d said.

  “You got to understand, this chair is like a extra leg or a tool I can have and carry anywhere. It’s light like a feather, and so it ain’t nuthin’ for a old man like me to pick up.”

  “Okay, Uncle,” Robyn said again, “we can keep the chair.”

  “Reggie got it for me,” Ptolemy continued as if he hadn’t heard. “An’ the minute I seen it I knew that it was mine and I could use it anywhere, for rest or to study sumpin’ close to the ground . . .”

  Robyn took his wrists in her hands and moved her face close to his.

  “I hear you, Uncle. You don’t have to keep on explainin’ it. I’m gonna do what you tell me to do.”

  That was the clearest evidence to Ptolemy that he was losing his mind. Even though the girl had said yes, he still wanted to explain over and over why he needed that chair. All he could think about was how important that chair was; that and how much he wishe
d he could stop that thought from going again and again through his mind.

  So he set the stool up in front of the TV and stared at it—the green screen that bulged out some, and the flat buttons along the side. There was a box on top of it that had a red number in lights: 134. That was his station. That was where the news came from. He didn’t want to change that number, just get the TV to turn on.

  He sat there for a long time, or at least what seemed like a long time. He didn’t want to push just any button. And he didn’t want to turn the TV on by mistake—he wanted to know what the right button was so that he knew that it was his mind that made the light. There were four flat, dark buttons. One said vol. and another said I/O. Two others had no letters to describe them, just symbols that made no sense at all.

  “A, B, C,” Ptolemy said, “D, E, F, G, H.” He stopped there and wondered a moment. “I, J, K . . .”

  The letters didn’t tell him anything. They were just sounds that had nothing to do with slashes or periods or letters that didn’t make words that he knew.

  “Double-u, ara, eye, en, gee,” he said, and smiled. He knew those letters. He knew what they meant. But he couldn’t find Shirley Wring. He couldn’t find the bank or even remember the bank’s name to ask somebody how to get there.

  “Uncle?”

  Seeing Robyn in her red clothes brought an even broader grin to Ptolemy’s lips, brought him to his feet.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, meaning many things that he couldn’t say.

  “Sorry for what?” the child replied, tears in her voice.

  “For whatevah I did to make you leave. I just wanted . . . wanted you . . . I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

  They fell together in an embrace that made them both shudder and cry.

  “It’s okay, Uncle.”

  “It’s okay, Robyn.”

  “I ain’t leavin’,” the girl said.

  “You could have my bed and I could sleep under the table again,” he said. “There ain’t no more roaches hardly and the mice is all gone.”

  “You want me to turn on the TV for you, Uncle?”

  “No, baby. No. I wanna figure it out for myself. I wanna use my mind again. I wanna remembah.”

  “Remember what, Uncle?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but it got to do with them babies and, and, and you.”

  “You remembah me, don’t you?”

  “But not what I’m meant to do.”

  “Don’t cry, Uncle. You make me sad.”

  “You was on’y gone for a hour or sumpin’,” Ptolemy said, “but I felt that I lost you like I lost Maude Petit in that fire.”

  “What fire, Uncle?”

  Robyn pulled up a chair next to the old man, in front of the silent and dark television set. She listened as he told her the broken story of a child stalked in the flames by a huge shadow and a man, or maybe a coyote, that danced on fire. There was a dead dog and a dead man in a tuxedo, the ABC’s that didn’t work anymore, and Reggie, hanging like an anchor from Robyn’s leg.

  She didn’t question nor did she understand exactly what her aged friend had said. She held his hands and nodded now and then. He asked her questions that she had no answers to and told her stories that made him laugh and shake his head.

  At one point he looked up and asked, “Why you run away like that, girl?”

  Robyn heard this question and understood its meaning. She brought her hands to her throat and made a sound that had feeling but no meaning.

  “I sleep on a sofa, Uncle,” she said. “Hilly try to be gettin’ up in there wit’ me almost ev’ry night he home.”

  “That boy’s a thief.”

  “Niecie nice,” Robyn said. “She took me in, but nobody evah offered me a bed and open they doors and showed me their money and said take whatevah you want.

  “I loved my mama, but she was wit’ just about ev’ry man she met. Sometimes she tell me to go stay wit’ my friends ’cause she didn’t want her boyfriends lookin’ at me an’ thinkin’ she was that old.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Ptolemy said. “You a lovely girl. They cain’t help but look at you.”

  “I wanna stay here an’ live wit’ you, Uncle.”

  “Me too. I wanna stay here wit’ you too.”

  “An’ I want you to buy me a bed an’ some sheets an’ pillows and blankets, but I don’t want your money. We gonna start puttin’ your money in a bank account and get you a special bank card so you can buy the bed and then I can sleep in it.”

  “But you got to wear clothes so I cain’t like your legs like I did at that other place,” Ptolemy said.

  “You don’t like to look at my legs, Uncle?” Robyn said, the sly smile returning to her lips.

  “I don’t like to like to look at your legs, child. That was a long time ago, and now is now.”

  So, Mr. Grey, you wish to start a debit account along with the accounts you already have?” Andrea Tolliver asked, her smiling black face as insincere as the white sheriff who wanted Li’l Pea to testify against the men who had lynched his uncle. She was a dark-skinned black woman with bronze hair and golden jewelry around her neck and wrists and on at least three fingers.

  “Whatevah Robyn say is what I want,” Ptolemy said in a tone that he knew made him sound sure and smart.

  “But do you want a debit account?” the banker asked. “You already have an account that automatically pays your bills.” She glanced at the computer screen before her. “It is overdrawn, however.”

  “I need to buy a bed, an’ Robyn tell me that you just cain’t take all your money into a sto’ an’ put it down ’cause there’s thieves all around you.”

  Ptolemy took a moment to look around the room from his seat at the bank officer’s desk.

  “Are you looking for someone, Mr. Grey? Maybe some teller you know?”

  “Shirley Wring,” he said, a smile rising to his lips. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

  “No . . . no Shirley works here.”

  “My uncle been savin’ his extra money in a box in his closet,” Robyn said then. “I told him that that wasn’t safe and that he could maybe get a little bit’a interest if he brought it here. I’m taking care’a him but it’s his money and so I brought him to his bank.”

  Ptolemy watched the bank officer’s eyes scrutinize the girl. He’d seen older black women do this to young ones before.

  Andrea Tolliver was older now and she didn’t have to lie to young men on the street about her address and telephone numbers anymore. She knew that Robyn could talk an old man out of his money.

  “Miss?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Grey?”

  “If this child wanted to steal my money we wouldn’t be here.”

  Watching her watching him, Ptolemy knew that he had read her right, that he had said the right words.

  “We can put the money in your savings account, Mr. Grey, and issue you a debit card. Do you want your, um, niece to have a card too?”

  “No,” Robyn said. “No. I don’t need one. This is for my uncle, not for me.”

  Ms. Tolliver smiled at the child then. It was her last test to make sure that the girl was not trying to rob an old man.

  Ptolemy gazed paternally at Tolliver, and then he grinned.

  “Something funny, Mr. Grey?” the banker asked.

  “Here we all are,” he said, repeating word for word something that Coydog McCann had said long ago, “somebody gettin’ on the boat an’ somebody gettin’ off, and a captain in the middle makin’ sure we all get where we goin’ to.”

  Robyn took Ptolemy’s hand and smiled for him as Tolliver frowned, wondering what he meant.

  Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey.”

  Robyn turned quickly on the crowded street. She put her hand in her purse, ready, Ptolemy knew, to protect him with her edge, her six-inch blade.

  He heard his name and wondered back through the voices that called him and the things they had to say.

  “Mr. Grey,” Felix Franz the Germ
an baker would say to him every morning when he came in to buy his coffee and coffee cake on the way to the maintenance office where he and his partners got their orders for the day.

  He just said the name and that was the greeting. But this was the voice of a woman, not a German man; not Melinda Hogarth or Sensia or proper Minister Brock.

  He turned to see the name-caller and laughed.

  “It’s okay, Robyn. That’s my friend. Double-u ara eye en gee.”

  She wore tapered black slacks today and a turquoise T-shirt. She still had the green sun visor and the faded cherry-red bag.

  “Mr. Grey,” she said again.

  “Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said, gleeful to see her and reveling in the fact that he could remember a name, a face, and something he wanted. “Robyn, this is a woman who offered me a treasure.”

  “Uh-huh,” Robyn grunted, and he could see in her the suspicion that had shown on Tolliver’s face.

  All around them black and brown people were moving. Shirley Wring’s occluded eyes were gazing at Ptolemy.

  “This is Robyn, my niece,” Ptolemy said.

  “Your uncle is the treasure,” Shirley said. “He helped me out when I couldn’t pay my phone bill and wouldn’t even take my ring for a guarantee.”

  “You could pay him back now,” Robyn said rudely.

  “She don’t have to pay me,” Ptolemy said. “She offered me a treasure. You know that was on’y the second time in all my life that somebody offered me a true treasure.”

  “I could take you two to lunch,” the small, gray-brown colored woman offered.

  “We got to go home.”

  “No, baby,” Ptolemy said. “Shirley here, she, I mean, I been comin’ ovah here . . . lookin’.”

  “Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”

  Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.

  “I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”