The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  “The masked man?”

  “Yes, he was a man who hid his face and struck against his enemies.”

  Ptolemy’s stomach grumbled. It was a deep, hungry sound that surprised him. He opened his eyes in the bed, realizing that sleep was no different than wakefulness and that he hadn’t eaten all day.

  A groan and then a whimper scurried at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that it was this sound, and not his stomach, that had pulled him away from Ginger. He climbed out of the bed in the dark room and crept toward the door.

  He peeked through the crack and saw that it was Robyn moaning. She was naked, on her back, and the boy was above her, his arms at the side of her head, his middle going up and down like the oil-well derricks in Baldwin Hills pumping the oil out of the ground.

  “Oil is the earth’s blood,” Coy had told Li’l Pea one day. “Men cut deep into the world’s skin an’ suck out the blood like it belong to them. That’s why they’s earthquakes and tidal waves, because the earth is our mother, but she don’t like our ways.”

  Robyn’s feet went up straight and trembled and she said something that had no real words. The boy moved faster and grunted, and she took his face in her hands. They gazed at each other in the murky room; a candle set on top of the TV was the only light; then Beckford fell on his side next to the girl and kissed her cheek. They whispered in the darkness, stroking each other’s face and head.

  Ptolemy watched them as if from a great distance, maybe even through time itself. After a while, when their hands came to rest and he knew that they were asleep he went back to his bed and closed his eyes, finding Ginger there waiting for him, ready to continue their conversation about the invisible, nameless enemy and the war waged against him.

  When Ptolemy came out of the bedroom, at six in the morning, Beckford was already gone. Robyn was sprawled in her bed with her mouth agape and left breast exposed. Ptolemy pulled the blankets up to her chin and went into the kitchen to boil water in an old tin saucepan for instant coffee and to think about his last days.

  He sat down at the small table, one of the pieces of furniture he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out. It was at that table where he and Sensia Howard had their morning visit for so many years. If he looked down, he felt her presence, and then he’d look up, expecting to see her.

  “I’ll be back later,” she’d always say. “Don’t wait.”

  But he did wait for her . . . even after she died and had gone for good. That was the beginning of his descent into confusion. Many a morning he’d awaken, looking for her. Some days he didn’t remember that she was dead until afternoon. He could see this all clearly now with the Devil’s medicine running in his veins.

  “All them years wasted,” he said to himself, sipping the hot coffee and wishing he had a cigarette.

  He walked out to his gated porch that opened onto a concrete backyard. It was a large space, a forty-foot-by-forty-foot square of bleached, synthetic stone. There was a wobbly redwood fence along the back, twelve-foot-high foot-wide slats that leaned and teetered in the slightest breeze. Three apartments opened onto the prison-like yard, but no one ever went there. Ugly red-brick buildings rose on every side. Looking up, he could see small patios jutting out from the upper floors, gated by iron bars and for the most part forgotten. These were used to house bicycles and crates, a place to dry hand-washed laundry and for rusted-out barbecue grills.

  A middle-aged woman was sitting outside, six stories up. She was smoking and staring out.

  Ptolemy watched her for many minutes, but she didn’t look down. The years flashed across his mind’s eye while he waited for the mature woman, who was young enough to be his daughter, to look down on him. In that time, women had loved him and men had cursed him. He’d been seduced by his friend Major’s wife, LeAnne. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, something LeAnne did all the time. Major never knew, or maybe he didn’t care to know.

  Sensia saw it the second Ptolemy walked through the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked him. He hadn’t taken off his coat yet.

  “Who is what?”

  “Her.”

  “I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, Sensie. I just been down at the bar with Ralph and them.”

  “It’s LeAnne, ain’t it?” Her rage was cold and fierce, not a human fury but that of an animal who knows no fear or reason.

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Sensia Howard. You the one might flit off with a man at the drop of a hat.”

  Her silence was worse than her questions or insights. Ptolemy, standing in that concrete yard, could still feel the wrath coming off of his first true love.

  He didn’t know what to say, so he left. He already felt bad about Major. LeAnne had just offered him a drink, and the next thing he knew they were on the checkered sofa of Major’s house, rutting and laughing, stopping to drink wine from time to time.

  And now that Sensia was mad, he left L.A. and went out to Riverside, where he took a room and got a job at the gas station. That was Tuesday. He knew Sensia would never love him again. He knew that he broke a pact by sleeping with his friend’s wife. Between Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning he downed a pint of sour-mash whiskey each night, sinking into a stupor rather than falling asleep.

  Sensia was at his door that Saturday morning. She wouldn’t say how she’d found him out. The only person he told was George Fixx, who lived in San Francisco, and George swore that he never told anyone.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Sensia asked at his door.

  The landlady was pacing downstairs because she had a strict rule that no women were allowed in her by-the-week rooms. But Sensia had pushed past Mrs. Tinman and gone right to Ptolemy’s room, number six.

  She looked bad. There were bags under her eyes and her skin was dry. Her hair wasn’t even brushed, and she was wearing pants and a blouse that didn’t match.

  “You didn’t want me no mo’, Sensie.”

  “I might not want you here and there, Ptolemy Grey, but I need you. I need you to stay alive. You know that. You know that!”

  She wasn’t talking normally, like people do. She was preaching or speechifying, addressing an invisible host of dead souls whose job it was to attest to Truth.

  “You need me?”

  “I’ll be dead in a week if you don’t come home,” she said. “God is my witness and pain is my choir.” She broke down in tears and Ptolemy took her in his arms.

  “No women in the rooms, Mr. Grey!” the landlady shouted.

  “We leavin’ now, Ms. Tinman,” Ptolemy said.

  “I ain’t gonna refund none’a yo’ money. The week up front is final.”

  “Okay, ma’am,” Ptolemy said as he stroked his wife’s hair. “You keep that money. It’s worth every dime.”

  It was only then, in the empty concrete lot, that he remembered Sensie’s cousin, who lived in Riverside at that time. She must’ve seen him and called Sensie and, in doing so, saved both their lives—for a time.

  “God bless you, Minna Jones,” Ptolemy whispered to himself.

  “Uncle?”

  Her voice was the constant refrain defining the form of his improvised last days. “Uncle?” Robyn would say, and all the words and thoughts that went before formed into sensible lines, became plain memories that no longer engulfed his mind.

  “Yes, child?” he said without turning.

  The woman on the bleak patio above looked down at the sound of their voices.

  “Why you out here in your robe?” Robyn asked. “It’s cold.”

  “Not in my skin,” Ptolemy said. “Dr. Ruben’s medicine lit a fire in me.”

  The back of Robyn’s cold fingers pressed against his cheek.

  “You are hot.”

  The woman’s eyes from above met with Ptolemy’s and locked.

  “Come on inside, Uncle. Lemme get you some aspirin.”

  Ptolemy wanted to do as the girl said, but he was looking into the face of the smoking black woman. He w
ondered what she thought up there in her perch above the concrete yard.

  The woman stood up, and Ptolemy wished that she would throw something down to him: a cigarette . . . a tattered length of rope. But she turned her back and went into her home.

  “Come on,” Robyn insisted.

  Do you need me for anything today, Uncle Grey?”

  They were sitting at the small table in the kitchen, drinking iced tea that Robyn made. She was right, the cold liquid cooled him.

  “No,” he said. “I wanna go see somebody, that’s all.”

  “Miss Wring?”

  Ptolemy hadn’t thought about that. Robyn had given him the emerald ring and he hadn’t gotten around to thanking her.

  This forgetfulness wasn’t like before, when his thoughts were faint and half forgotten. Now he forgot because he was thinking about the moment and how the present was an extension of things that transpired long, long ago.

  The ring wasn’t important. It was just a trinket. It was the woman, Shirley, who occupied his mind.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ma go see Shirley. She give me her address. Did you have a good time with Beckford last night?”

  Robyn clasped her hands and then unclasped them, got to her feet, and went into the living room. Ptolemy smiled, realizing that he had meant to bother her. He rose, too, barely feeling the pain in his feet and knees, and followed her into the room, the living room that she had cleared out the way the Devil’s medicine had cleared out his mind.

  Robyn was sitting on the bed that was a couch at the moment. When Ptolemy came in she turned her back to him.

  “You shouldn’t be embarrassed by what I say,” Ptolemy said to his keeper.

  He sat beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “I didn’t want you to know, Uncle,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I didn’t.”

  “How can I adopt you as my daughter if you don’t tell me all about you and your life?”

  Robyn turned around and peered at him cautiously, suspiciously.

  “I’m too old to be adopted,” she said.

  Ptolemy felt a humming in his veins like a trilling wire carrying a strong charge of electricity. Somewhere Coy was wanting to give him a lecture but he would not listen.

  “No,” Ptolemy said, partly to Coy but mostly to Robyn, “you not too old. You my girl, my child. I love you and I wanna make sure that you have a life, a good life. I know that a young woman like you got to have a man. That goes without sayin’. You want a good-lookin’ man who’s strong but don’t treat you bad.”

  Robyn smiled and looked down. She took one of Ptolemy’s hands in both of hers.

  “I just want you to be careful, child. I don’t want you to go too fast. Maybe Beckford okay an’ maybe no. It’s hard to tell when you young and hungry.”

  “Shut up, Uncle,” Robyn said with a giggle and a grin.

  “Young man, all he got to do is see them legs you so proud of an’ he’ll say anything, anything you wanna hear.”

  Robyn sucked a tooth and smiled again.

  “I’ma die soon, girl,” he said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, though. I can feel the poison. It’s good ’cause it makes me see, but I won’t make it too many more weeks. And I got to know before I die that you’ll take care’a Artie an’ Letisha and that you ain’t with no man gonna take what I pass along to you.”

  “Maybe we should take you to a new doctor,” Robyn suggested.

  “I would marry you if I was fifty years younger,” Ptolemy said. “I would. But as powerful as you are, girl, as much as you done for my mind, you cain’t give me no body like Beckford. You cain’t make me no younger man. So will you be my li’l girl? Will you take me as your father and listen to my advice?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks, Uncle. I could marry you then.”

  Ptolemy’s response to Robyn’s offer was to look up at the ceiling and around at the walls. He was smiling but didn’t know it. He was thinking about the solitude of private rooms where people said things to each other that had no place in the outer world. He thought about LeAnne and how she leaned over on the couch before he suspected their lovemaking and whispered, “My pussy itch, Daddy,” and he gasped and she touched his thigh.

  He looked down at his hand in Robyn’s grip and thought, Yes, I could marry this child. But he knew that that was just a moment in a closed room between two people who wanted to break down the walls around them but still be safe from the outside world.

  Ptolemy meant to say, “No, child,” but instead he asked, “What about Beckford?”

  “I like him but he not there for me like you. An’ I’m not there wit’ him either. You bought me a bed, Uncle, an’ turned all your money ovah into my hands. You the only one I evah know could put your finger on the feelin’ I got.”

  “I need a daughter, not a wife. I need you to love me like I love you,” Ptolemy said, tightening his fingers around hers.

  “’Kay,” she said. “But how do we do that?”

  “The way everybody does what no one can understand,” he said. “We go to a lawyer and let him put it into words.”

  After Robyn left, Ptolemy donned his suit and, with an ease he hadn’t felt in many years, tied his new shoelaces. He went to the door, paused for a moment, went back to his kitchen, and pulled a foot-long steel pipe from under the sink.

  Don’t th’ow out that pipe,” he had said to Robyn when his mind was still confused.

  “Why not, Uncle? It don’t fit nuthin’.”

  “It make me feel safe.”

  He locked his apartment and walked down the hallway and through the outer door. He was outside on his own for the first time in years.

  The sun was dazzling and he was a barefoot child walking along a dirt road, a young man in a Memphis back alley, a soldier walking down a French road with the bodies of dead soldiers stacked along the sides according to their nationality, race, and rank. He was a groom in his forties walking up the aisle with a bride so beautiful that he thought of her like a movie star or a queen that a man like him could only ever see from afar or on the screen. He was an old man following her coffin to the grave, still amazed that he was even in her procession.

  “Hold it right there, Pete!” Melinda Hogarth yelled.

  He was walking down his own street not quite as old as he was now and a woman with the face of a demon was running him down. This vision was a dream of who he had hoped to be, a wish he’d prayed every night for, for years after Melinda Hogarth had mugged him the first time.

  For a moment Ptolemy understood that the doctor’s medicine had made him into many men from out of all the lives he had lived through the decades. It was certainly a Devil’s potion, one that could give him the power to relive his mistakes and failures and change, if only slightly, the past events that hounded his dreams.

  While thinking these things, Ptolemy’s body was in motion. He was old and without great strength, but his mind was sharp as a razor and he could see Melinda coming up from behind in his visions. As she approached him he turned, raising his arm. As she reached for him he brought down the whole arm as if it had no joints. His wrist and elbow were fused and the steel pipe hit the knuckle of Melinda’s index finger with a whoosh and a snick.

  The big woman yelped and jumped backward. She cried out when Ptolemy raised his arm again. This was the dream he’d had for years. This was why he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out his pipe, even though he couldn’t have told her then.

  Melinda Hogarth sidled away like a crab with a woman’s voice, hollering for safety. Ptolemy brought down the pipe again through the now-empty space where she had stood. He wanted her to see what he could do even at this age, in this body.

  The pain rose in his chest again. A man across the street was watching the incident, weighing the facts that his eyes and ears gave him. For a moment, even in his pain, Ptolemy wondered if he would have to explain to the man why he’
d struck the wino drug addict. But this reverie was interrupted by the trilling in his veins and the smell of garlic. He looked around him as Melinda shouted and ran down the street. Nobody was cooking, as far as he could tell. And when he looked back, the man had continued his walk, no longer interested in the years-long drama of the old man and Melinda Hogarth.

  Ptolemy took the Central bus up to Twenty-third Street. There he disembarked and looked at the four corners. There was a store-front on the northwest corner of the street that had a display window. Inside the window was a Spanish man jumping rope at a furious pace.

  “Can I help you?” another man said to Ptolemy when he walked in the door of the long, sunlit room.

  It was a poor gym. A few mats on the concrete floor and a punching bag, a bench for weight lifting, and a bar screwed into a doorway for chin-ups.

  The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

  “I’m lookin’ for Billy Strong,” Ptolemy said.

  “You lookin’ at him.”

  The men both smiled and Ptolemy understood why Reggie had called this man friend. He was powerful but there was no anger to him. This was the kind of man that you wanted to know, wanted to work shoulder to shoulder with.

  “My name is Ptolemy Grey,” the old man said, continually astonished at his renewed new ability to communicate.

  The smile on Billy Strong’s face diminished. It took on a sad aspect but did not disappear.

  “You Reggie’s great-granduncle.”

  So many children, Ptolemy thought, and children getting children and them doing the same. It seemed to him like some kind of crazy math problem worked out in streets and churches, dance floors and cemeteries. Reggie was his great-grandnephew, now dead. And Ptolemy was his survivor, like the small sum left over at the end of long division, like the few solitary and dumbfounded men who had survived the first wave on D-Day.