The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

by Walter Mosley

  Ptolemy turned toward his heir and smiled but Shirley gasped and pulled away from him. She disentangled her arms from his and pulled her feet away too.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Robyn asked.

  “Me an’ Shirley talkin’ ’bout our past,” the fevered old man said.

  “I bet you were.”

  “I got to be goin’, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy,” Shirley said.

  She got to her feet and looked around, finally seeing her red purse behind her on the couch. Robyn saw it too. She put down her shopping bags and picked up the cherry-red leather sack.

  “Thank you,” Shirley said.

  Robyn grunted and frowned at her elder.

  “Good-bye,” Shirley said to both of them.

  “You don’t have to go, Shirley,” Ptolemy said, getting to his feet.

  “Oh, no, I mean, yes I do. But I will call you,” she said. “I’ll call.”

  She scuttled out the door, which Robyn had not closed because her hands were full. Shirley didn’t close it either, and so Ptolemy walked to the front. Shirley stopped at the end of the hall and turned back. She smiled across the concrete expanse and Ptolemy waved at her, though he doubted if she could see.

  When he turned away, after Shirley was gone, he met Robyn’s stony stare.

  “Why you got to be rude to my friend?” he asked, unintimidated by the anger in her face.

  “Why you got to be makin’ out with her on my bed?”

  “Girl, I’m ninety-one.”

  “I know what I saw. You was just movin’ back from a kiss when I come in here.”

  “Kiss?”

  “You got your own bed,” Robyn said. “You could take her up in there.”

  He had had this argument many times in his life. Sensia could tell when he was holding back from turning his head to see a fine woman’s gait. Bertie, his first wife, once got mad because he left a fifteen-cent tip instead of a dime for a cute waitress.

  “But, baby,” he’d said to at least a dozen women, “I didn’t mean nuthin’.”

  But he had meant it. He had.

  Robyn’s hands had become fists and her cheek wanted to quiver.

  He turned away, walked into his bedroom, and closed the door on the rippling seas of love.

  He went to the bureau and took out one of the Devil’s tiny pills. His fever was raging. He could hear it boiling in his ears, feel it huffing like a bellows against his rib cage.

  He swallowed the profane medicine and smiled.

  Later on, sitting in Sensie’s wicker chair by a window that looked out on the barren concrete yard, Ptolemy opened his mind.

  A child had come to his door two years after he and Sensia were married. She was eleven years old and her face was his face on a girl-child’s head. Her name was Pecora and she had been living in a foster home with five other girls.

  “I don’t wanna live there no more,” Pecora, who was named for her mother, had said.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause they nasty an’ mean an’ you my real father an’ my mother have died.”

  “I cain’t take you,” Ptolemy said. He didn’t question that she was his, one look at that face and he knew it must be true. He and Pecora Johnson had spent a weekend together a dozen years earlier, but she never said anything about a child.

  Ptolemy and Sensia had discussed children, and Sensia said that she was no mother and so would have no child.

  Ptolemy had girded himself against his own blood frowning at him and Pecora turned away. He watched the child walk down the hall. She got all the way to the door, and he would have let her go into the cold arms of the street except that Sensia came home just then. All she had to do was look into Pecora’s eyes and she knew everything: that this was her husband’s love child, that she had come seeking shelter, and that Ptolemy turned her away because he didn’t want to lose Sensia’s love.

  “Come on in with me, child,” Sensia said.

  Pecora and Ptolemy had two things in common: their faces and their love of Sensia Howard.

  “I started her out on the road,” Ptolemy would say to Sensia, “but you brought her home.”

  Yes?” he said when she knocked.

  “Can I come in?” Robyn asked through the door.

  “Come on.”

  She had been wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when she’d come in from shopping, but now she wore a green dress that made her look younger.

  “I’m sorry, Papa Grey,” Robyn said from the doorway. “I didn’t mean to get all mad. It wasn’t my bed right then but just a couch in the livin’ room and what you do ain’t none’a my business anyway.”

  “Come on in an’ sit down, baby,” Ptolemy said to the girl.

  Robyn slouched into the room and sat at the edge of the bed across from his wicker chair.

  Robyn had her head down while Ptolemy looked at her, thinking that every heartbeat in his chest was like a grain of sand through an hourglass.

  “Every minute I got wit’ you is precious,” he said at last. “I don’t care if you get mad.”

  “You don’t?”

  “You bein’ mad is just that you love me. At least I’m old enough to know that. But I want you to be nice to Shirley. I need you to take care of her after I’m gone.”

  “Why you got to talk about dyin’ so much?”

  “Because I’m dyin’, baby. Dyin’ just as sure as the sun go down.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa Grey.”

  “Sorry ’bout what?”

  “Gettin’ mad. Takin’ you to that doctor.”

  “If I was fifty years younger and you aged twenty years ...”

  Robyn smiled, and then she giggled.

  “And then would you only look at my legs?” she asked. “Or would I find you on the couch with Shirley Wring?”

  “I might be lookin’ but the couch would be all yours.”

  “One’a my mama’s boyfriends used to make me take off my clothes an’ lie up on top’a him,” Robyn said, answering a question he’d asked days before.

  Ptolemy did not reply right away.

  Robyn squirmed, turning her left shoulder toward him and averting her face. Then she twisted the other way, shoving her right shoulder in his direction. Finally she got up from the bed, falling down on her knees at his feet. She put her head in his lap and he placed a hand on the side of her face.

  “When I was a boy I had a friend named Maude. She was so black that even the darkest little children made fun of her.”

  “But you didn’t?” Robyn asked into his fingers.

  “No.”

  “Did you think she was beautiful?”

  “I guess. But even if she wasn’t lovely that wouldn’ta mattered because she was my friend. She was my friend and she died in a fire and nobody could save her.”

  Robyn raised her head to regard him.

  “You are my girl, Robyn. Everything I have is yours. Everything. Do you understand me?”

  She took his hand and squeezed it.

  “How do you feel when I tell you about that man?” she asked.

  “That I would kill him if ever I saw his face.”

  “I only ever told you about it.”

  While they were eating takeout Chinese for dinner a hard knock came on the door.

  “Who is it?” Robyn asked while Ptolemy came up behind her, thinking about his pistol.

  “Police.”

  Robyn opened the door.

  Two Negro policemen stood there, wearing uniforms and stern frowns.

  “Yes, Officer?” Robyn asked.

  “Can we come in?” one of the policemen asked. He was shorter, maybe five ten, and lighter-skinned. A plastic rectangle on the left side of his chest said ARNOLD.

  “What for?” asked Ptolemy. His throat was filled with phlegm and so he coughed twice.

  When the old man spoke up, Robyn moved back, giving him the lead.

  “There was a man attacked in front of your apartment building a few days ago,” Officer Arnold said. “Dar
ryl Pride. He was seriously hurt, hospitalized, and we’re here investigating the assault.”

  That was the first time since his coma receded that Ptolemy felt his mind slip. He was confused for a moment, just a moment. He didn’t understand the words, or where he was, or why people were complaining.

  He tried to speak but the words were caught in his mind, and then these words, his own thoughts, were incomprehensible to him.

  “Sir?” the officer named Arnold said.

  Ptolemy didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.

  “Papa Grey?” Robyn said, and the wheels started turning again.

  “Darryl Pride?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t know the name but do he have a girlfriend name of Melinda Hogarth?”

  “That’s him, sir.”

  “You are a very polite young man. It’s nice when a policeman is civil.”

  Officer Arnold smiled.

  “You young men come on in,” Ptolemy said, once again master of his own mind.

  The officers, Arnold and Thompkins, sat on the couch while Ptolemy took the folding stool and Robyn brought out a chair from the kitchen.

  “Ms. Hogarth says that you were involved in Mr. Pride’s beating,” Arnold was saying.

  “Did she tell ya that she been muggin’ me on the street for three years? Did she tell ya that she pushed her way in this house an’ stoled all the money outta my spendin’ can an’ slapped me to the ground an’ here I’m ninety-one year old?”

  “We’re not here about that,” Officer Thompkins said. He had a baby face and dark skin that was so smooth, it could have been called perfect.

  “When my great-grandniece come to stay wit’ me, she told that heifer that she bettah not be robbin’ me no mo’,” Ptolemy said. “That’s when she turned to this man Pride. Imagine that. A man named for self-respect tellin’ me I got to pay up.”

  The officers looked at each other.

  “He stole from you?”

  “No, sir. No, he did not. He told me that I should pay, but I told him that I would call the cops.”

  “He says that you were involved in his beating,” Arnold repeated.

  “Look at me, Officer. Look at me. How’m I gonna beat up a man the size of a icebox? I might could shoot him if I owned a gun. I might’a would’a shot him if I did. But all I said was that I didn’t have no money and that we was gonna go to the cops if they do anything else. He’s afraid’a the cops. Him and Melinda both dope fiends. Both of ’em.”

  “So you deny that you had anything to do with Pride’s beating?” Thompkins asked.

  Ptolemy did not answer.

  “Did you see him get beaten?” Thompkins pressed.

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you, ma’am?” Thompkins asked, turning to Robyn.

  “I don’t even know who you talkin’ ’bout,” she said. “Papa Grey had some trouble with that bitch, but I gave her the news.”

  “We ...” Arnold said. “We heard that there was another family member taking care of Mr. Grey.”

  “No. Just me.”

  “Ms. Hogarth said that there was a young man,” Arnold said. “She claimed that he beat her and that another man, a heavyset guy, and a young woman had beaten her.”

  “Damn,” Robyn said. “She been beat by just about everybody on the block accordin’ to her.”

  Officer Arnold couldn’t help but smile.

  “Will you please answer the question?”

  “You didn’t ask no question. You just said that somebody said somethin’.”

  “Do you know of anyone else taking care of your uncle?”

  “There’s Reggie Brown.”

  Ptolemy’s heart lurched in his chest when Robyn uttered that name.

  “Where is this Reggie Brown?”

  “Dead.”

  Again the policemen looked at each other.

  “He was killed in a drive-by ’bout nine weeks ago. Killed him on Denker when he was sittin’ out in front’a the house of a friend’a his.”

  Thompkins frowned and Arnold rubbed his fingertips together.

  “Listen,” Robyn said. “Melinda do dope. I’ont know her boyfriend but he prob’ly a dopehead too. My uncle’s a old man. He ain’t in no gang. He ain’t runnin’ down no dopehead, beatin’ him on the street. That’s just stupid.”

  “And what about you?” Officer Arnold asked.

  “What about me?”

  “She said that a young woman beat her with an electric fan.”

  “So? She tell you that she the Virgin Mary when she get enough dope in her blood.”

  “How old are you?” Thompkins asked.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Are you in school?”

  “Got my GED and I’m gonna start LACC in the fall.”

  Ptolemy could see Robyn’s chest heaving.

  The policemen stared a minute, but neither Ptolemy nor Robyn crumbled under the scrutiny.

  Then the policemen looked at each other, nodded, and stood as one.

  “We may have more questions later,” Officer Arnold said.

  “We always here, Your Honor,” Ptolemy told him. “At ninety-one, with dope fiends all ovah the street, I don’t get out too much.”

  You bettah call Billy Strong an’ tell him not to come by here for a while,” Robyn said after the cops were gone.

  “I almost lost my mind when them bull was at that do’,” Ptolemy said.

  “What you mean?”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking ice water from purple plastic tumblers.

  “I saw them uniforms an’ my mind went blank. It didn’t mattah that the cops was both colored, not one bit. It was like, was like I was feebleminded again. If you aksed me my name I wouldn’t been able to say.”

  “But you talked to them, Papa Grey. You talked good too.”

  “But I could feel it, honey. It’s like black curtains comin’ down on me. Like a shroud.”

  They reached across the table at the same time, entwining their fingers. Ptolemy smiled and Robyn understood him.

  “Come on ovah to the closet, baby,” he said. “It’s time I gave you my treasure.”

  In the night Coy came to him.

  “You finally done did sumpin’, huh, boy? What took you so long?”

  “I was scared,” a full-grown Ptolemy Grey said to the man Coy McCann.

  “Scared? What you got to be scared about? Here you got a nice apartment, wit’ two girlfriends, money comin’ in every week, an’ a treasure too.”

  “There’s blood on that gold, Coydog.”

  “My blood. You know, for every grain of gold dust that make up that treasure a black mother have cried and a black son done shed sweat or blood, maybe even life itself. That man was a slave master, only he didn’t have to feed his slaves.”

  “You stole,” Ptolemy said.

  “An’ they stoled an’ they murdered. So who gonna be in front’a who on the line?”

  Ptolemy smiled then. His fever was raging but he didn’t know it. He was with Coydog again, having a brand-new conversation like they did in the old days before fire and blood flooded the chambers of the child’s mind.

  “You right, Coy,” he said in his delirium. “You sure is. I showed Robyn the treasure an’ told her what to do an’ how to do it. She gonna be your heir. She gonna take that gold an’ see my blood outta down here. They all gonna go to college or rest easy in they final days.”

  Coy stood there for a long time at the foot of the bed. The sun was rising behind him, and Africa, from two thousand years before, loomed in those first rays of light.

  Ptolemy remembered the stories Coy told him about Africa; about a land before the gods of the North descended; about kings and crazy men; about wars waged and done with and not a drop of blood drawn or even a bruise suffered by a single warrior.

  How you know all that, Coy?” the boy, Li’l Pea, had asked. “You said that the white man’s history books lie about us all the time.�
��

  “They do.”

  “Then how you know about how it was before the white man? No niggah know all that.”

  “Oh yeah, boy,” Coy McCann said. “We from there. Some of us remembah with our minds. But even more got them stories jammed up in they hearts an’ spirits. They tell white men’s stories but changes ’em. They talkin’ about things they know an’ don’t remembah. I listens an’ tease out the truth that lay underneath.”

  Coy stood at the foot of the bed with the sun rising and the secret memory of Africa emerging out of memories that were forgotten but not lost.

  Ptolemy began to fret that maybe he’d done something wrong. Maybe Coy didn’t want a woman to lay hold to his treasure. Maybe he had waited too long to take action. But after a long time, at least two days by Ptolemy’s reckoning, Coydog smiled, and then, a few hours later, he nodded . . .

  A pain lanced through Ptolemy’s rib cage. It was like a spear that had entered by his left side and went out through the right. He sat up straight in his bed and yelled.

  Robyn was sitting there, and next to her was a man who was holding a syringe, leaning over and frowning.

  “Hello, Satan.”

  “Good to see you, Mr. Grey,” Dr. Ruben said.

  “Am I dead yet?”

  “If it wasn’t for your niece you would have been. I’m surprised you’ve made it so long. I’m glad too.”

  “You ain’t taken no money or nuthin’ from him, have you, girl?” Ptolemy asked.

  “No, sir. Nuthin’.”

  Ptolemy thought he could make out things crawling and bristling in the doctor’s great mustaches. Ruben’s eyes seemed to be blazing: yellowy-green flames on a brown sea.

  “Lemme talk to this man alone a minute, will you, Robyn?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said again, relief at his revival in her tone and her shoulders, and even in the way she stood.

  She closed the door and the doctor pressed a thumb against Ptolemy’s wrist.

  “You have the constitution of a man half your age,” he said.

  “How long have I been in this bed?”