The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  Olga Slatkin smiled at her charge and then frowned.

  “How haff you been feeling, Mr. Grey?”

  Robyn was in the living room, watching the TV, because she didn’t like seeing him given his medicine.

  “My arms burn some,” he said.

  “Do you vant me to stop?”

  “No, baby. I could take the pain. I seen Coy dance on fire, but he never told, never.”

  By Thursday the pain was in both arms, his chest, and his head too. On Friday, when Shirley Wring came for a visit, Robyn had to turn her away.

  “Uncle Grey got a fever,” Robyn told the older woman. “He says that maybe you could come back next week. He’s real sick and cain’t get out of bed.”

  Shirley Wring took in these words as she stood there, staring at the teenager.

  “Why don’t you like me, child?” Shirley asked at last.

  “He really is sick,” Robyn complained. “I ain’t lyin’ to you.”

  “I believe you, but you still don’t like me and I don’t know what it is I done to make you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Miss Wring. I don’t even think about you at all.”

  “See? Now that’s just rude. Why you wanna be rude to me? I’m your uncle’s friend.”

  “He not my real uncle,” the woman-child said to the woman. “But that’s what it is. He don’t know who he lookin’ at or what he sayin’ half the time. People wanna take his money or his things. He paid your utility bill and now you come by all the time.”

  Shirley Wring smiled then and nodded. She walked into the living room, noticing that the door to Ptolemy’s bedroom was closed.

  “I told you that he cain’t get outta his bed,” Robyn said, a strain of grief in her young voice.

  “I ain’t gonna bother him,” Shirley told the girl.

  The older woman sat down on a maple chair in front of a TV tray that Ptolemy sometimes used as a table for intimate teas with his friend.

  “It was my phone bill,” Shirley said. “I asked him for five dollars and he gave me ten. But I offered him this to hold.”

  She placed her faded cherry-red purse on the TV tray and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took the piece of pink tissue paper which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large green stone. This she handed to Robyn.

  The girl could see that the metal was gold and the stone was precious. She had seen nice things in magazines, on TV shows, and through thick, bulletproof glass.

  “Cabochon emerald,” Shirley Wring said.

  After fondling the stone a moment or two Robyn held it out to Shirley, but the half-blind woman would not take it.

  “My great-grandmother stoled it outta her ex-master’s house in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s bluecoats freed the slaves,” Shirley said in a tone of voice that was obviously quoting family lore. “She told her son that even though the ring was worth a whole lifetime for a poor black family that he should keep it as a treasure that stood for our freedom. My grandfather was named Bill Hollyfield, but he changed his name to Wring to honor his mother’s gift to him.

  “I want you to give that ring to your uncle and tell him to get bettah and that I want him to be well because he has been like a real man to me when I was down past my last dollar.”

  Robyn felt the gravity of the old woman’s gift like a stone in her chest. She wanted to return Shirley’s family name and history but the old woman’s wounded eyes stopped her.

  “I cain’t take this from you, Miss Wring.”

  “It’s not for you, sugah. It’s for Mr. Ptolemy Grey. It’s me tellin’ him how much that ten dollahs he give me meant.”

  “But this precious,” Robyn said. “This is worth much more’n that.”

  “No it ain’t, baby.”

  Shirley rose and touched the girl’s cheek.

  “If he get real sick an’ might die, will you let me see him?”

  These words brought Robyn to tears. She sat down on the well-made white bed, crying on the emerald ring in her hand. When she finally raised her head, Shirley had gone and closed the door behind her.

  Just after Olga Slatkin gave Ptolemy his final injection Robyn had to help her hold the old man down. He was delirious, shouting unintelligible words and writhing in his big bed.

  “Coy! Coy!” the old man shouted.

  “What’s he sayin’?” Robyn cried as she held down his surprisingly strong right arm.

  “He’s not making sense,” the Eastern European woman said. “Hold him for a moment and he vill calm down.”

  A minute later Ptolemy slumped down in his bed, unconscious, hardly breathing.

  “It is always like this after last shot,” Olga said. “They go to sleep for three or four days and then they wake up, most of the time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘most of the time’?” Robyn cried.

  “He is sick. This medicine is supposed to help, but vit some people it does not vork.”

  “He wasn’t sick before you give him these shots.”

  “But vy vood Dr. Borman tell me to give shots if he vas not sick?”

  While the women talked, Ptolemy awoke on a grassy hill above a stream that flowed over big stones and made the sound of children’s laughter. He smiled and stood up without pain or strain. He wasn’t old or young or concerned with being old or young. The sun shone brightly upon his head and there were white clouds here and there. The sunlight was so powerful that it burned his face, but he didn’t care about that. The day was a particular one he remembered from his childhood. The river was the Tickle, and Coydog McCann was just a ways up from where he now stood.

  “He wasn’t sick,” Robyn said somewhere beyond the blue, “before you give him the shots.”

  “I cannot tell you anything more than vat they told me,” the plain-faced European country girl replied.

  When Ptolemy scratched his head his fingers found hair up there. This seemed odd to him, but what difference did hair make anyway?

  Coy was sitting on a tree stump by the water, holding a homemade bamboo pole with a twine line.

  When the old man (who didn’t look nearly so old anymore) looked up, he frowned for a second and then smiled. Ptolemy had forgotten the two canine teeth that his friend had lost. It made his smile seem deeper than the average man’s grin.

  “Is that you, L’il Pea?” the old man asked.

  “Yeah, Uncle Coy. Yes, sir.”

  “You come all the way back here just to see me?”

  “I’ont know,” said the old man who was no longer an old man. “I just saw a white nurse from somewhere around Venice an’ she gimme some shots an’ then I woke up on the rise ovah on t’other side’a the hill.”

  “I only got one pole,” Coy McCann said in apology.

  “That’s okay. I could just sit next to ya if you ain’t just wanna be alone.”

  “Hell no. I been waitin’ for ya.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. You owe me a debt, and I been waitin’ till I get released.”

  Ptolemy knew what the old man meant. This knowledge made him silent and so he sat down next to the fisherman and peered into the water.

  The sun was bright but not bright enough to illuminate the shadows that lay between and underneath the large stones in the river. Catfish and crawfish and other creatures hid down under there in darkness, where bears and cougars and coyotes couldn’t get at them; where even the long-necked, elegant gray herons’ beaks could not go.

  But Ptolemy’s mind could climb down there with the fishes and algae. The darkness was cold like night, black and deep . . . sleep . . .

  Wake up, boy, wake up,” he said in a whisper that was both soft and sharp.

  Little Ptolemy opened his eyes and squinted from the pain. He could tell that it was the early hours of the morning, even before the time that his father and mother got out of bed to work in the fields. His brother and sisters were sound asleep as only children could be, and his parents were asleep in the front room of their t
wo-room shack.

  “Daddy?”

  “Shh!” Coy commanded, putting his fingers to the boy’s lips. “Come with me.”

  Coy pulled the boy out of bed and through a flap in the tarpaper wall and all Ptolemy had on was a nightshirt.

  The moon was crescent and an owl passed above them. Crickets chattered and tree frogs chirped. Ptolemy had rarely seen the depth of night. He had never been outside this late, moving along the path behind his family’s shack.

  “Where we goin’, Coydog?”

  The old man stopped and turned, putting his face very close to the boy’s.

  “Shet your mouth or we both be dead. You unnerstand me, boy?”

  And with that he clutched Li’l Pea’s right forearm and dragged him deep into the woods. They traveled for a long time, until they came to Hangman’s Knoll, and climbed up past there through a deep wood until they reached Mourners’ Falls. Ptolemy wouldn’t have been able to find the falls on his own, even in daylight, but Coy’s steps were sure and certain, quick and desperate.

  The falls were forty feet high and constant because all the water that came down from the hills drained here. Coy took Pity on a winding path of big stones that led up to the cascades and then around to the cave hidden behind the blind of water that was barely visible in the weak moonlight.

  Ptolemy’s nightshirt was soaked by the time they got inside the cave. Coy let go of his arm and the boy went to his knees on the stone floor, shivering from cold.

  Coy lit an oil-soaked torch, illuminating a stone space that was about the size of the worship hall at Liberty Baptist.

  “I’m cold,” the boy complained.

  “Come back here,” Coy replied, stalking to the far end of the huge shale and granite chamber.

  Something in the old man’s voice, something that the child had never heard before, made him obey in spite of his own suffering.

  All along the back of the cave were big flat rocks that had fallen from the roof, broken or shattered.

  “This one up next to the north corner,” Coy McCann said, waving his torch over a big flat stone that was black except for a white swath at the right side. “Under here is where I hid the treasure. Under here is what I want you to take just as soon as you strong enough to lift it. Go on now, try an’ lift it away from the wall.”

  Ptolemy grasped the edge of the rock, which was much larger than him, and strained to push it away from the wall. But he couldn’t budge it at all.

  “Good,” Coy said, smiling for the first time that night. “You too young, and this is too soon for you to get at it. But later on, when you get to be a young man, I want you to move that stone or break it and take that treasure and make a difference for poor black folks treated like they do us.”

  Later on they were out under the threads of moonlight that wavered between the branches of pines and oaks.

  “I got to go to my place before I run,” Coy told Ptolemy. “But I’m ascared to do it.”

  “Why you scared, Uncle Coy?”

  The old man knelt down and brought his leathery hands to the sides of the boy’s face.

  “You know Jersey Manheim?”

  Ptolemy knew and hated and feared the evil white man. He was one of the wealthiest men in their whole community and he treated black people like slaves. He owned the land that Ptolemy’s parents worked and kept them so far in debt with his community store and loans for their tools and supplies that they couldn’t ever leave or save one thin dime.

  “One time when he was drunk as a skunk he told me,” Coy said, “that he had a pot’a gold. That him and his fathers before him had put away a gold coin for every week since thirty years before the Civil War. I did my numbers and figgered he had to have nearly five thousand coins. Now, that’s some money right there. You know I been thinkin’ on them coins for years. And finally, just a few hours before I got to you I went in his house and lugged ’em out to his wagon. I brung ’em up here, heaved ’em under that rock I showed ya.”

  “How come he didn’t wake up when you went in his house?” the child asked.

  “’Cause when I came by earlier to give him your daddy’s rent I poured some laudanum in his gin when he wasn’t lookin’. You know he drink that gin ev’ry night. An’ when I was sure that he was paralyzed, I come on in an’ searched the house until I fount the treasure chest under a trapdo’ under his bed.”

  “An’ he was sleep?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So he don’t know you took it.”

  “That don’t mattah to the white man. He don’t have to know. All he got to do is remembah that I was the last niggah he saw. I was the last he saw and so I’ma be the first he go to.”

  “So you gonna run?”

  “Damn right I’ma run. I’ma run all the way to New York City with the twenty coins I took for myself. I’ma go up there an’ I won’t see another cotton plant ever again in my life.”

  At these words Li’l Pea Grey started to cry. Coy was his closest friend.

  “Sometimes we got to make a sacrifice, Pity,” the old man said. “Now, come go wit’ me to my house so I could get my things and make it outta the county before sunup.”

  They moved on back-road paths through the night headed for the lean-to shelter that Coy McCann had called home since the barber took over his room for his new wife and child. Ptolemy didn’t think anymore about his feet or the cold. He didn’t worry about the white people that might be after him or his uncle. He felt as if he were a soldier now, fighting on enemy ground, like in the stories he and Coy read down by the Tickle when the fish weren’t biting.

  “Stay here,” Coy told Ptolemy at a stand of live oaks on a rise that looked down on the old man’s shelter.

  “How come?”

  “I wanna see you every minute I can before I’m gone forever,” Coy replied, “but this is my most dangerous moment. I got all my things in a bag in the house. I couldn’t take it with me because of how heavy the gold was gonna be. And I had to get you and show you where the gold was before I left. So now I just got to hope that old Jersey drunk enough drug to keep him sleepin’ through the night. But if it don’t, I don’t want him to find you down there wit’ me.”

  Ptolemy slipped behind a tree as his uncle spoke, feeling both afraid and ashamed of his fear. He watched as Coydog McCann loped down the hill to his home. Just when he was at the tarp entrance, someone yelled and white men jumped out from all over the place.

  The first white man cuffed Ptolemy’s friend, and the boy shouted, unable to keep the pain out of his mouth. But no one heard him because they were all shouting and hollering and beating Coy mercilessly, throwing him from man to man.

  The sun was a red strip above the farthest hill.

  Shouting loudly, Jersey Manheim asked Coy again and again where he had hidden his money. And for a long time Coy was silent. He was surrounded by thirteen men who meant to kill him, but Coy took the blows. Finally he shouted out something; the only words Ptolemy could make out were “... bottom of the well . . .”

  Mercifully the vision of the lynching passed by the fevered dreamer’s eyes quickly. He only caught a glimpse of the hanging man dancing on fire while the white men laughed and raised their firebrands in the half darkness of dawn.

  Twenty-six-year-old Sensia Howard was married to Ezra Bindle when Ptolemy, a man of forty-five years, met them at a barbecue in Griffith Park. Her yellow dress made its own party, and Ezra’s powerful arm held her so tightly about the waist that they might have been grafted like that.

  Sensia was medium brown with dark hair that shone in the L.A. sunshine. Her eyes were different colors of brown and her smile made Ptolemy happy.

  He mentioned a book he’d been reading and how much he liked going to the library on Avalon.

  “You live near there?” Sensia asked innocently.

  “Across the street. In a big blue boardinghouse,” Ptolemy said. “It’s funny that the house is so big ’cause my room the size of a two-cent postage
stamp.”

  “I own my own house,” Ezra said then. He was twice Ptolemy’s size, the color of aged red brick, and proud. “I keep my woman here in nice clothes, and I feed her steak three times a week.”

  “What kinda book you readin’, Mr. Grey?” Sensia asked.

  “Called Night Man. It’s about a man who live in darkness and who nevah see the light of day.”

  “Nevah?”

  “What you do for a livin’?” Ezra asked Ptolemy.

  “I used to ’liver ice off a truck, but now I do cleanup for the county.”

  “How much they pay you for that?”

  “How does he go to the bank?” Sensia asked, obviously talking about the protagonist of Ptolemy’s book. “How does he go to the post office?”

  “He does all his bankin’ by mail,” Ptolemy said. “An’ he, an’ there’s a twenty-four-hour post office he go to a lot.”

  “That’s so interesting,” the young beauty said. “A man that’s just different from everybody else.”

  “We gotta go, Sensie,” Ezra Bindle said. “Rex an’ them want us to have a drink together.”

  “Can you come with, Mr. Grey?” she asked.

  “They didn’t invite him,” Ezra said before Ptolemy could say yes.

  “Then I’ll stay here an’ talk to Mr. Grey about his book while you go guzzle that beer,” she said, pushing out from the grip as she spoke.

  “You are coming with me,” the big red-brown man said to his young wife. And he dragged her off.

  Ptolemy had been married, started a family, and gotten divorced by that time. His children were almost grown, living with their mother, and he felt like an old man, except for a moment there under the scrutiny of Sensia Howard’s eyes.

  But Ezra dragged her away through the parking lot and out past the baseball field, where uniformed white men in some amateur league played their game.

  Ptolemy watched them go: Ezra pulling on her arm and Sensia struggling to get free. He felt almost as if the brute had pulled out one of his organs and was running away with it, leaving him wounded and sore.