The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  Ptolemy gazed down at the children and they cowered. The boy scrunched up his dark face, trying to understand what the money had to do with him and his sister.

  “They wit’ me,” Niecie said, and Ptolemy nodded.

  He then turned to the brutish boy. “Hilly, you saved me from that crazy woman and so I forgive you. I’ma call on you sometime soon ’cause I need to know somethin’.”

  “What you wanna know from me?”

  “Later.”

  Ptolemy touched Robyn’s shoulder and they walked out the door and away from the house, moving slowly, like royalty surveying the plight of the poor.

  “Why you wanna get Hilly all mad, Uncle?” Robyn said on the bus ride home.

  She was wearing the yellow dress that he’d bought her at the women’s clothes store. He knew it was wrong, that the dress reminded him of the day he met Sensia Howard, but he couldn’t stop himself—he loved both women so.

  “Yellow’s my favorite color,” he’d told her, “and you my favorite girl.”

  But on the bus he just nodded and said, “I need a inroad.”

  “What you mean, Uncle Grey?”

  “The men just come to you, don’t they, girl?” he asked instead of answering her question directly.

  “Huh?”

  “Men,” he repeated. “They just come to you—on the street, in the bus, at the movies. They all wanna know you, want you to smile at ’em.”

  “Nobody I wanna know.”

  “Imagine if nobody evah looked at you twice,” Ptolemy said.

  His mind straddled two worlds. He no longer needed a translator to decipher what was going on around him, but he was still sitting by the Tickle River, talking to Coy and making plans for a future eighty years from then.

  “What you mean?” Robyn asked.

  “Some people got a magnet in ’em,” Ptolemy said, pulling his mind away from the deep-blue past. “No one understands why, but there’s people you just wanna know. You might be quiet and shy, but that someone walk by you and you climb right ovah your fear an’ say, ‘How you doin’?’ just like you was old friends. That’s you, Robyn. I know, ’cause my Sensie was like that. Men, and women too, would come up to her and ask her to be wit’ them. She met this schoolteacher one time, Mrs. Gladys Pine. Gladys told Sensie she loved her and for a week or two they’d meet in the afternoons at a motel on Slauson.”

  “When she was married to you?” Robyn asked.

  “Sensie told me she liked Gladys’s mind and she didn’t feel like she was cheatin’ ’cause it was a woman and not a man.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Anyway, Gladys finally told her husband that she was leavin’, that she had fount her true love. The next day Sensie told her that they’d have to stop meetin’ at the motel. The day aftah that, Paul Pine put a bullet in his head.”

  “Damn.”

  “That’s how powerful you are, girl,” Ptolemy said, taking Robyn’s hand in his. “You pretty, but pretty alone’s not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that’s like a mirror. Men an’ women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can’t bear to see you go.”

  “Uncle Grey, was you always thinkin’ all these things even when you couldn’t talk so good?”

  “When you get old,” he said, and then he paused, thinking about Coy and Lupo, who were known in the colored community as the Dog Brothers. They ran together as young men, and when they got into their forties, old for men back then, they could sit together for hours, never saying a word and never getting tired of the company. “When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin’ ’less somebody else can understand.”

  “And nobody was listenin’ to you, Uncle?”

  “And nobody understood until you, child.”

  “But what’s that got to do with Gladys Pine?”

  “She nevah touched anybody outside’a herself. She was like I was when you met me—alone in her mind. And then she seen Sensie and reached out and my girl took her hand and helt it to her breast. You know, I almost cry when I think about it. It was beautiful, even though it was a blues song too. Some people might say it was love on one hand and a fickle heart on the other, but what would have come from them if they didn’t see and say and feel . . . and die?”

  “You deep, Uncle,” Robyn said.

  “No, baby. I’m just like everybody else—everybody else.”

  That night Ptolemy woke from a dream about Coy’s death. He had a fever but didn’t wake Robyn. He thought that he might die if he stayed in the bed, so he got up and went to the bathroom, where he swallowed four aspirin and turned on a lukewarm shower.

  The water soothed him.

  After a while he hunkered down in the tub and let the cool water cascade over his bony form. He wondered what was in the Devil’s medicine that kept his knees from hurting too much.

  In that position, in the tub, he was seventeen again, lugging the heavy bags of coin from out of Coy’s secret cave. He borrowed his cousin’s Terraplane car and drove to Memphis, where he secreted the stolen treasure for three years. Every time he touched those coins he felt the cold of that cave’s water and the chill of death.

  When he began to shiver, he rose up under the spray, turned off the water, and dried himself with a big thick towel that Robyn had bought. After he was dry he stared at his head and torso in the water-stained mirror. He probably weighed less than the sleeping child in the next room, but he’d put on weight. His face was not nearly so wrinkled as some old people he’d known, but he could see the ninety-one years in his eyes. He could see the old confusion hovering above his crown, waiting to settle back on him like a venomless smothering snake around its prey.

  “Uncle?” Robyn said.

  She was standing at the door.

  Ptolemy took the towel from the sink and wrapped it around his skinny waist, using his hand as the clasp. He stared at the girl but did not speak.

  “You okay, Uncle?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I know how a man could lose his mind, but how do he find it again?” he said as she approached him.

  “You’re cold.”

  “I was burnin’ up there in my bed. I was thinkin’ about the river . . .”

  “Where you and Coydog used to fish?”

  “How much money we got in the bank now?” he asked.

  “All of it. Forty-two thousand in the savings account an’ the rest in that deposit box. Come on, Uncle, you should go back to bed.”

  “What’s that boy’s name? The one you seein’.”

  “Beckford?”

  “Yeah . . . him. You like him?”

  “He all right.” Robyn looked away and Ptolemy knew for sure that she had made love to the handsome friend of Reggie.

  “You said he live with three other young men?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now that the money’s gone, you could bring him ovah if you want. You can sleep in the bedroom. I don’t care.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about this, Uncle.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it makes me feel embarrassed.”

  Ptolemy hooked Robyn’s chin with the index finger of his left hand and lifted her face to regard him. She was wearing just a T-shirt, and all that covered him was that towel. Ptolemy thought about that but he wasn’t ashamed.

  “I love you, Uncle Grey,” Robyn said.

  “’Course you do,” he said. “I’m like family.”

  “Uh-uh,” the woman inside the child said. “I got family. I know what that feels like. No, Uncle, I could sit an’ listen to you for days. Even when yo’ mind was confused an’ you was scared, I still looked up to you. And you treat me with respect an’ you still be lookin’ at my legs an’ stuff. I don’t want Beckford in this house wit’ us.”

  Both Ptolemys, past and present, heard the love in her voice; neither one had the word
s to answer back.

  Where’d you put my toolbox?” he asked Robyn the next morning as he rummaged through the living room closet.

  “I put it under yo’ bed,” Robyn said. She was lying on the couch that was also a bed, watching a show about strange fish in the deep ocean.

  “Could you get down there and get it for me, please?”

  When she jumped up from the couch, Ptolemy said, “You could finish your show, child. I don’t need you to snap to.”

  Instead of sitting back down the girl came up to him and kissed his cheek and hugged him tight. Ptolemy would always get lost in a woman’s hug. His mind still drifted under the spell a soft embrace.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Would you marry me if I was twenty years older and you was fifty years younger?” she asked.

  “You could do bettah than somebody like me.”

  “God couldn’t do bettah than you, Uncle Grey.”

  It wasn’t the words so much as the hunger in the child’s tone that brought the pain into his chest. It was the same pain he felt when the giant roach flew up in his kitchen. He gripped her shoulders and she gazed at him.

  “Are you,” he asked, “are you goin’ out with Beckford tonight?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “No, it’s all right. I actually wanted to sit quiet and read some.”

  “Are you tired’a me bein’ here, Uncle?”

  “No, baby. You put a fire in my mind and love at my doorstep.” He’d heard the words somewhere before, maybe in a song.

  Robyn left at six o’clock and by six-ten Ptolemy was in the living room closet, working his crowbar on the back end floor. There was a slot there made specially by Ptolemy almost five decades before. His apartment was on the ground floor. Below the floor was three feet of concrete. There he had carved out a place for Coydog’s treasure. It took him a while to jimmy the jury-rigged trapdoor but after some work he flipped it over. The ancient hinges screamed and parts of the wood floor splintered and popped.

  Ptolemy wondered where all the dust came from. The box he hid from himself was covered with a quarter-inch of thick gray soot.

  He used the iron key to open the chest but he didn’t even touch the bag inside. He knew the gold was there, coins that went back all the way to the Civil War and before, some used, some like new. But it wasn’t his treasure. He was just the guardian, obeying a long-ago command from Coy the thief, martyr, and partisan.

  He didn’t need to fondle the gold but he took out an oiled cloth that was wrapped around a blue-black .25 pistol—which still gleamed darkly.

  The grin on Ptolemy’s lips was not welcomed by him. He had never shot even a rabbit. But he smirked at the gun, turning it over and over in his hand.

  Hello?” Hilly Brown said into the receiver.

  “That you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Papa Grey? Hey. Listen . . . I’m sorry for bein’ rude the other day. Mama told me to call you up and apologize.”

  “Why haven’t you called, then?”

  “I’ont know,” the brooding, bulbous, and brown man-child said. “I mean, I don’t know why I didn’t. I’ma pay you back, okay?”

  “Why you take my money in the first place?”

  “I didn’t think you would realize. You acted like you was drunk or high or sumpin’. So I thought it would be all right.”

  “All right to steal?” Ptolemy asked while he opened and clenched his right hand slowly.

  His knuckles hurt every time the fist got tight—but not that bad. His fiery mind was still in an old man’s body. He was weak as a boy and old as a man can get, but not as bad as he was—not half as bad.

  You know everything,” Li’l Pea said to Coy one day when Coy had told him about George Washington Carver and the peanut.

  “No, child,” Coy said in a surprisingly gentle tone, “it’s you know more’n me.”

  Li’l Pea giggled and said, “Me? I’on’t hardly know nuthin’.”

  “That might be, but still you know more’n me.”

  “Like what?” the child asked, not realizing the impossibility of his question.

  “You know how crickets smell and what pebbles sound like when they fall on the ground around yo’ feet. You see deep in the sky without havin’ to look or think about it, and you love your mama an’ yo’ daddy so much that they would die if God took you from them.”

  “Don’t you know all them things?” the boy asked, sobered by the seriousness of the older man’s words.

  “Like a suit’a clothes,” Coydog said. “I got them things like a new suit just off the rack, but they fit you like skin.”

  “I don’t get you, Coy,” the boy said.

  “The older you get the more you live in the past,” Coy intoned like a minister introducing his sermon. “Old man like me don’t have no first blue sky or thunderstorm or kiss. Old man like me don’t laugh at the taste of a strawberry or smell his own stink and smile. You right there in the beginnin’ when everything was new and true. My world is made outta ash and memories, broken bones and pain.

  “Old man see the same things and walk the same roads he know so well that he don’t even have to open his eyes to make his way. Right and wrong two sides’a the same coin for me, but for you there’s only right. Somebody say sumpin’ an’ you hear ’em just like they say.”

  “But what do you hear, Uncle Coy?”

  “I hear everybody I evah knew talkin’ ’bout things nobody know no more. I hear preachers an’ judges, white men and black. I hear ’em talkin’ ’bout tomorrow when I know that was a long time ago.”

  Ptolemy the old man considered his uncle. Maybe that’s when Coy made up his mind to rob Jersey Manheim. Maybe he was so tired of following the same path that he decided to jump off the road and make it through the wilderness one more time.

  Papa Grey?” Hilly was saying through the line. “Papa Grey, you there?”

  Ptolemy realized that he was drifting again; but not the way he had when he was feebleminded. Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.

  “Was you an’ Reggie friends?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.

  “We cousins, man.”

  “But was you friends? Did you go out drinkin’ together? Did you talk?”

  “Sure, we talked. We lived in the same house until he moved out with Nina.”

  “But,” Ptolemy asked, dimly reminded of his first phone conversation with the boneheaded boy, “did you share your secrets wit’ him an’ did he tell you what was what?”

  “I ain’t got no secrets, Papa Grey. I’ma man, not no child.”

  “Did you tell Niecie why I didn’t wanna let you back in my house?”

  After a long, angry silence, Hilly said, “No.”

  “We all got secrets, boy. An’ the older we get the more secrets we got. Child tell ya anything, but a man just sip his drink an’ keep his mouf shet. But he might have one friend he talk to. Was you that friend to Reggie?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who that friend was?”

  The silence no longer shivered with anger. Ptolemy could almost hear his taciturn great-nephew thinking.

  “Billy Strong,” Hilly said at last.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He run the gym on Slauson and Twenty-third.”

  “Him an’ Reggie was close?”

  “Yes, sir. They’d get together all the time. All the time.”

  “An’ he work at the gym?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All day?”

  “Every day, Saturday and Sunday too.”

  Ptolemy Grey hadn’t really slept after he’d awakened from the coma. He’d close his eyes and enter into a world both new and old to him. There he’d talk to Coy along the Tickle River and carry boxes of medicine in France for soldiers, most of whom were destined to die. He delivered ice and swept streets, made love to Sensia Howard so hard sometimes that he’d limp for
a day or two afterward.

  One night, with his eyes closed and his mind imagining, he inhabited his old feebleminded self, sitting in front of the TV. The black woman, who looked like a white woman passing for black, was talking about the war.

  “More than a hundred Iraqis died in a suicide blast in the city of Tuz Khormato today. The suicide bomber set off his truck bomb in a crowded marketplace at midday.”

  “Excuse me, lady,” Ptolemy said.

  For a moment it seemed that she’d continue her report, not hearing his interruption, but then she turned and looked at him, into his living room. It was the old living room filled with stacks of moldering and unread newspapers, furniture, and trash.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m Mr. Grey,” Ptolemy said formally.

  The woman looked as if she wanted to turn away from him but found that she could not. She touched her ear as Ptolemy had often watched her do in the old days when he didn’t understand hardly anything. She touched it, but her ear didn’t help her change the subject or look away.

  “My name is Ginger,” the woman in the vision said.

  “Tell me, Ginger, what are you talkin’ about twenty-four hours a day?”

  “The news, Mr. Grey. It’s the news.”

  “What news?”

  “There’s a war going on. People are dying.”

  “Who’s the enemy? Is it Hitler again?”

  “We aren’t quite sure who the enemy is. That’s what makes this war so hard.”

  “If we don’t know who we fightin’, then how can we fight ’em?”

  “We . . . ,” she said, and paused. “We . . . we aim our weapons at them and when they become frightened and take out their guns we know who they are.”

  “I don’t get it, Ginger.”

  “Me neither, Mr. Grey.”

  “How can a man have a enemy an’ fight that enemy and still not know who he is?” Ptolemy asked, proud of his ability to string his words together like a necklace of great big black Hawaiian pearls.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Zorro?” Ginger asked.