The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

by Walter Mosley

  “That’s nice but I—”

  “One thing I just remembered was somethin’ Reggie wanted me to give you.”

  “I said get off that phone!” Alfred shouted.

  “Just gimme a minute, Al. I’ll be off in just a few minutes.”

  “I’ma go wit’out you, Nine,” he threatened.

  “Go on, then,” she said. “Go on an’ I’ll meet you there.”

  Errant sounds came through the line for a time. This period was ended by a loud bang that Ptolemy thought was a door slamming.

  “Mr. Grey? Are you still there?”

  “Sure am. I hope I didn’t cause any trouble with your man.”

  “Don’t worry ’bout him. He just get mad sometimes.”

  Suddenly, and without apparent reason, Ptolemy had a startling memory. It was an afternoon that Reggie was visiting with him. It was back in the time when his mind wasn’t working right, but still he had a clear image of the young man showing him a photograph.

  “These my kids, Papa Grey,” the old man remembered the young man saying. “Tish an’ Artie. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “Mr. Grey?” Nina was saying. “Are you there?”

  “I don’t want that man’a yours to know about this,” he said.

  “Okay. I won’t tell him. What is it? What did Reggie have for me?”

  “I wanted him to have it,” Ptolemy said. “But he said that he wanted it for you and them beautiful chirren. Are the kids still stayin’ wit’ Niecie?”

  “For a while longer,” Nina said. “Until I get myself together.”

  “Uh-huh. You go and visit them?”

  “On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, every week. Those are my days off from the department store.”

  “Hm. That’s good. A mother should see her kids. They need to be seen by her. That way they know they okay. They know it by the look in her eye. You know, if your mother look at you an’ smile, then you know you doin’ all right.”

  “What was it that you had for Artie and Letisha?” Nina asked softly.

  “I don’t want that Alfred to know nuthin’ about it,” Ptolemy said again. “Reggie didn’t like him.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Okay, okay, then I’ll tell you what. One day I’ma come by Niecie house when you there with the kids but Alfred ain’t. That way I can talk to you without worryin’ about him hearin’ it.”

  “But what is it?”

  “I’ll tell you that when I see you.”

  “Why don’t you tell me now?”

  “I would if I could but I cain’t ’cause I ain’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just make sure to go to Niecie’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. What time you usually go there?”

  “’Bout eleven in the mornin’.”

  “Keep that up and you will get Reggie’s gift.”

  “But, Mr. Grey, I need to know what it is.”

  Ptolemy hung up the phone and grinned. He chuckled to himself and then laughed out loud.

  Sitting in the living room in the late morning, Ptolemy tried to remember the last time he laughed out loud. He could feel the laughter in his hands and knees. The happiness had replaced his arthritic pain. He never laughed like that when he was with Sensia. She laughed for him. He was already beyond elation and wonder by the time he was a man. It was way back in his childhood, when he would walk around the woods with Coydog and the old thief made crazy faces and sounds and told jokes about things that other adults didn’t think were proper.

  Ptolemy wondered how he could have lived for so long but still the most important moments of his life were back when he was a child with Coy McCann walking at his side. How could the most important moments of his life be Coy’s last dance on fire and Maude’s death in flames? Hadn’t he lived through poverty, war, and old age? Didn’t any of that mean anything?

  The Devil’s fire ignited in him and he was able to laugh again now that he was burning alive.

  He thought about Robyn’s legs, about how firm and brown and strong they were. Many a time, when she was walking around the house in only a T-shirt, he wanted to get on his knees and hug those powerful thighs to his cheek and chest. This desire made him happy. He was as old as Methuselah but a child’s legs made him happy. He could no longer feel sex, but he remembered . . . maybe knowing it better in hindsight than he ever did when he was able.

  “I love her,” he said into the silence of the apartment.

  As the moments passed, Ptolemy thought about stars wheeling through the night sky. They moved past, getting on with their business while men had their feet in clay.

  We born dyin’, Coydog used to say sometimes. But you ask a man an’ he talk like he gonna live forevah. Nevah take no chances. Nevah look up or down.

  “I love you, Robyn,” Ptolemy said as a reply to words spoken so long ago. Death was coming, but Love was there too. Robyn was a far-off descendant, an adopted child, a woman he might have loved as a woman if he were fifty years younger and she twenty years older.

  Pain tittered in his knucklebones and burbled in his knees. His joints were like music, like transistor radios calling out from under his skin. The knock at the door was a new strain, another musician deciding to jam with him. He waited for the knock to come again before getting up, going to the bedroom, pulling the bureau drawer open, and retrieving his .25-caliber pistol.

  He walked to the door purposefully, like a soldier marching into battle.

  “Who is it?” he asked in a mild voice.

  “Shirley Wring,” she answered sweetly.

  Changing his mood as quickly as an infant child distracted by a sudden sound, Ptolemy stuffed the little gun into his pocket, threw the four locks, and opened the door.

  She wore an orange dress and largish, bone-colored beads. Her half-blind eyes glistened behind glittering glasses. Her short hair was done recently, forming a cap that wrapped in arcs down under her ears and got curly over her forehead. Her tennis shoes were white and sensible. And instead of the red bag, she carried a pink paper box in her hands.

  “Can I come in?” the small woman asked.

  Ptolemy reached out to take the box and then backed away for her to enter. As she went past, he could see the red bag hanging from her left shoulder. For some reason this made him happy.

  “Come on in an’ sit,” he said. “Can I get you somethin’? Water? Tea?”

  Shirley Wring set her bag on the couch and took the box from Ptolemy.

  “You sit down and rest and I’ll put together some coffee an’ fudge for us,” she said.

  “I’ll be right with ya,” he promised. “First I’ma get sumpin’ in the bedroom.”

  He put the pistol back in the drawer and took out a smaller item, which he placed in his shirt pocket.

  You okay, Ptolemy?” Shirley asked when he sat down heavily at the kitchen table.

  “Ain’t no way a man could be almost ninety-two an’ okay at the same time,” he answered. “But I’m as good as a man like that can get. That’s for sure.”

  Shirley lit a match to start the burner under the kettle and then she came to sit across the table from him. Her eyes were watery and slightly out of focus, he could tell.

  He must have frowned, because she asked, “What?”

  “Oh . . . nuthin’. I was just thinkin’ ’bout gettin’ old.”

  “Once you get our age,” she said, “I guess that’s what we always be thinkin’ ’bout.”

  “How old are you, Miss Wring?”

  “Seventy-four last March.”

  “I was almost a man when you was born. I got old in these bones make you seem like a wildcat on the prowl.”

  “Old is old,” she said, and smiled, enjoying a moment that she didn’t see coming.

  “No, baby,” Ptolemy said, wondering at the words coming out from his mind. “No. That’s what I was thinkin’ about. You know, I got every tooth I was born with except for one canine that got knocked out when I fell off’a the ice truck one day
when Peter Brock took a turn too fast. That was sumpin’ else. I looked at that bloody tooth in my hand and I knew I was not nevah gonna work on that ice truck again. Not nevah. Damn.

  “But you know, I nevah had a cavity, an’ I nevah needed no glasses.”

  “And here I got nuthin’ but dentures,” Shirley said, “an’ I got to squint just to see you across the table.”

  “Yeah, but just a few weeks ago I didn’t even have half a mind. If you told me the apple was red an’ then you right away asked me what you just said, I wouldn’t remembah. I’d stutter and think about my wallet, or Reggie, or maybe I wouldn’t even’a understood the question.”

  Shirley’s smile slowly faded. Her eyes retained their blind fondness, though.

  “Yeah,” Ptolemy continued. “I sold my body to the Devil an’ I can only hope that he don’t care ’bout no old niggah’s soul.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What?”

  “That word.”

  “That word begins with a n?”

  “Yes. That word.”

  Ptolemy smiled at this genteel black woman. The kettle whistled and she got up to make filtered coffee and arrange her homemade fudge on a white plate.

  When she was through preparing and serving she took her seat again, but now she wouldn’t look her host in the eye.

  “What’s wrong, Miss Wring?”

  “I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said.

  “Snap? Girl, all I got to say is that if you call that snappin’, then you must think kissin’ makes babies an’ a argument makes a war.”

  Shirley smiled and looked up. Ptolemy could see the young girl in her features and for a moment Shirley and Robyn and Sensia came together in one.

  “You’re hot,” she said.

  It was only then that he realized that she’d reached across the table to take his hand.

  “Devil’s medicine,” he explained.

  “Why you keep talkin’ ’bout the Devil, Mr. Grey?”

  “When you met me, I was, was confused, right?”

  “A l’il bit.”

  “A lot. But then I went to this doctor, and now it’s like I’m a whiz kid on the radio. I know everything I ever known. I know things that I didn’t know fifty years ago when they happened. Who else but the Devil gonna give you all that?”

  “The medicine make you hot?”

  “Yeah. It sure does. Tell me sumpin’, Shirley.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at the tabletop.

  “What’s that?”

  “Who are you?” It was a question he had never asked before. Naked and unadorned, it was like something Coy would have asked a young girl he was courting.

  “I ain’t nobody.”

  “Now, I know that ain’t true ’cause I can see you right there in front’a me. I feel your fingers, see your pretty face.”

  “Mr. Grey,” she complained.

  “You know, Shirley, I wouldn’t push you if I was a young man. Back a long time ago we would’a been up in a bed before I asked you ’bout your favorite color or what you do when they ain’t nobody else around.”

  “Please, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy, don’t say them kinda things to me. I’m a shy woman.”

  “Men like me like shy women. We see ’em an’ wanna tickle ’em, you know?”

  “I was born in Tulsa,” Shirley Wring said. She brought out her other hand to hold his. “But there was a depression and so my daddy took us to California. We got to a rich man’s estate outside’a Santa Barbara . . . lookin’ for work. But instead he let us live in a big cabin by the ocean that was on his land.”

  “What your father do for that man?” Ptolemy brought out his other hand.

  “Oh,” Shirley said, “he didn’t do nuthin’. That rich man was a Communist and he just wanted to do somethin’ nice for his fellow man.

  “We lived there for ’leven years. My first memories is the sound of waves and things that washed up from the sea. My first boyfriend was a little blond-headed boy named Leo who lived in the big house with his sister. They were the rich man’s grandson and granddaughter. We’d swim in the ocean every day, almost.”

  Shirley smiled, her eyes gazing backward in time. Ptolemy knew that look. He’d spent many years watching his own youth. He had stared so hard that the vision blurred and the memories were shut away.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “But how did you eat or get the other things you needed?”

  “Mr. Halmont, that was the old white man, he gave us food and anything we asked for. My mother made our clothes and my father drove one of Mr. Halmont’s old cars.”

  “Eleven years,” Ptolemy marveled. “Eleven years livin’ by the ocean an’ you didn’t even have to lift a finger. Did they make you go to school?”

  “Leo and his sister had a tutor, and they let me sit with them. We studied in English and in French, but don’t ask me to speak French. I lost that tongue a long time ago.”

  Ptolemy rubbed his fingertips across the back of Shirley’s left hand. Their skins were wrinkled and brittle, two tones of deep, earthy brown. Ptolemy’s heart stuttered, partly because of a feeling that he’d forgotten, and also because he sensed a tragedy.

  “Why you leave that house on the beach?” he asked.

  Shirley shook her head but said nothing.

  Their hands moved together, tangled, Ptolemy thought, like seals playing in the surf of Shirley Wring’s long-ago ocean yard.

  “My father and Mr. Halmont used to talk about the world of communism. Every night Daddy would come home and tell us about how in Russia men was just men and there wasn’t no difference in the races or anything.”

  “And your father believed that nonsense?”

  “My mother was scared, but finally one day Daddy decided to move to L.A. and get a job in a defense factory and work with Mr. Halmont to organize the workers—black and white.”

  “Did they kill him?” Ptolemy asked.

  Shirley put her forehead against his hand and nodded.

  They left the sour taste of their talk and went into the living room. When they were seated on Robyn’s couch, Ptolemy took Shirley’s hands in his, pressing his fingers against her palm.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  Looking into her hand, she saw the emerald ring she’d left with Robyn.

  “Will you be my friend for the rest of our life, double-u ara eye en gee?”

  She kissed his lips and threw her arms around his neck. It was the embrace he’d always run after. It was his only chance and his downfall. There was nothing like it in the world.

  “You’re hot, Ptolemy.”

  “Woman like you in my arms, it’s a wonder I don’t burn up.”

  “I like it, because I’m always so cold,” she said.

  They sat back, facing each other as well as their ancient bodies would allow. Their arms and hands were tangled up together, their shoes were touching.

  “What about you?” Shirley asked.

  “You mean you wanna know who I am?”

  She nodded and smiled and caressed his cheek with her right hand, the hand that wore their ring.

  “That there’s a hard question,” he said. He kissed her fingers, pretending in his mind that he was a younger man who had the right to do such a thing. “I mean, if you asked me any other time I’da had a answer. That answer might not’a been right or true, but I would’a believed it, and so would you have. But, but now it’s all different.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I nevah been the kinda person go out an’ do sumpin’ first,” he said. “I usually look at somebody else and see what they was doin’ and either I’d join in or walk away. My first wife wanted to get married and so that’s what I did. I didn’t really want it, and she knew it, but we had kids and stuck it out for a while. Kids hated me. My ex-wife did too—before she died. But that was okay.

  “My second wife come to me before her first marriage was ovah. Come right up to my door. We loved each other, an’ she died b
y my side, while I was sleep.”

  Shirley squeezed his wrist.

  “But that’s not what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Ptolemy continued. “I know all that stuff. That’s who I was, but I ain’t like that no more.”

  “What are you like now, Mr. Grey?”

  Ptolemy inhaled, feeling the breath come into him. It felt like a hot wind rushing through a valley of stone. His heart pulsed, which for some reason brought to mind the moon in its sky.

  “First there was you, Shirley Wring,” he said, or maybe Coy said through him.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. I was like a blind man on a clear day. I lived in the dark of my eyes, and then you walked up and spelled your name and I remembered it. That was the first thing I remembered right off for the first time in years. You give me that treasure but what was even better was when I give it back. That was before I fount out that Reggie was dead, before I knew that Hilly stoled from me. That was before Robyn, and before I met the Devil behind his garden of roses and a green door.

  “But it all started out with you. Reggie tried, but now that I look back on it I can see that he was a good boy but he couldn’t see the man in me. I was a chore that he did every couple’a days. That’s what old people turn into, chores for the young.”

  Shirley hummed her agreement and kissed Ptolemy’s hand.

  “And most of ’em don’t even take on that responsibility,” she said.

  “If I coulda thought about it I woulda killed myself,” Ptolemy said. “But instead I met Satan and he injected me with his fire. Here I been runnin’ from fire ever since my childhood friend died in the blaze, and when I stopped runnin’ they put a fire in my blood.”

  “And what you gonna do now?” Shirley asked.

  “Robyn gonna be my heir,” he replied. “I’m gonna ask her to take care’a my estranged children, my family and friends, and, and, and you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You and my great-great-grandnephew and niece and their aunt Niecie.”

  “All them?”

  “That’s what Coy McCann told me to do and I’ma do it.”

  Upon the last word uttered the door to the apartment came open. Robyn, loaded down with four shopping bags, stared at the old folks holding each other on the couch.