The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  “You mean when I died.”

  Moishe sat down behind the file and smiled.

  Ptolemy put his left hand on Robyn’s forearm. The girl seemed uncomfortable and he wanted to put her at ease.

  “This child has saved me,” Ptolemy said. “I was sick, very sick and she cleaned my house and brought me to a doctor that made me well, or at least as well as a man my age can be.”

  Moishe’s smile evaporated.

  “I want you to make her my heir,” Ptolemy said. “Put her in that trust your daddy said he made for me, and take care’a her business like you did with mine.”

  Moishe nodded noncommittally and Ptolemy placed a stack of ten one-hundred-dollar bills on the table.

  “This should cover the first part’a the work you got to do.”

  The legal adviser turned to Robyn and asked, “What is your name?”

  “Robyn Small,” Ptolemy said before she could answer. “That’s Robyn like the bird only with a y instead of an i. An’ she got all her information in her bag.”

  “Robyn, would you mind waiting outside for a moment while I talk to Mr. Grey alone?”

  The girl nodded and stood right up. She walked from the room, closing the door behind her without a word or gesture of complaint.

  After she was gone Moishe turned to Ptolemy.

  “How well do you know this girl, Mr. Grey?”

  “That’s not the question you should be askin’ me, young man.”

  Moishe frowned and said, “No?”

  “Uh-uh. No. I know what you thinkin’. You thinkin’ that I’m a old man and this young thing is after anything she can get outta me. But how good I know her ain’t what will tell you what you need to know.”

  Moishe smiled as if he perceived something he recognized in the old man’s words.

  “What should I have asked, Mr. Grey?”

  “What you wanna know is how well I know anybody. Not just Robyn but ev’rybody in my life. You know, a old man don’t have much to go on. He don’t have a big social life. He don’t cut the rug no mo’.”

  “Cut the rug?” the lawyer asked.

  “Dance.”

  “I never danced very much,” Moishe said apologetically. “My father did. He was a wonderful dancer. But I have two left feet.”

  “There’s a lady upstairs from me get my mail two times a week,” Ptolemy continued. “Her name’s Falona Dartman. I’d like to leave her a li’l sumpin’ when I pass. And there’s a woman dope addict across the street try to mug me every time I stick my nose out the door. I don’t wanna give her nuthin’. My grandniece Niecie Brown don’t know what’s goin’ on, and her son stoled money from me because he thought I was too old to notice. My other great-grandnephew, Reggie, took care’a me for years. He had a good heart but he didn’t know what he was doin’ and now he’s dead anyway—shot down in the street.”

  “Oh my God,” the younger Abromovitz declared. “That’s terrible.”

  “Robyn cleaned out my house and took me to a doctor. She beat up that dope fiend and cooks for me twice a day. I offered her all my money and she turned it down. But, you know, Reggie, my great-grandnephew, have left two babies behind him, and my grandniece needs looking after too. Robyn the only one will see my family is taken care of.”

  “But how long have you known her, Mr. Grey?” Moishe insisted.

  “You see that paintin’ on the wall, Moishe?” Ptolemy replied.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s called A Study of Darkness in Light.”

  “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “Your father bought it from a painter friend of his named Max Kahn. I remember Maxie. Him an’ me an’ your daddy used to go to this bar down on the boardwalk and drink beers and talk nonsense.”

  “Max Kahn,” Moishe whispered. “I remember him. My mother never liked Max.”

  “Your father told me that he bought the paintin’ because of the naked woman, said he liked to have a nude to look at all day. Your mother didn’t like the girlie magazines your father bought, but she couldn’t argue with oil paintin’s.”

  Moishe smiled and nodded. It was as if Ptolemy had become a doorway to his lost youth.

  “But as the years went by, Abe found himself looking more at the background, at the people in the town who had a light shined on ’em by the deity but didn’t know it. There’s a old woman leading a young woman toward a doorway. One day your father noticed that the young woman was blind. There’s a poor man leanin’ down to pick up a wallet—”

  “That a wealthy merchant had dropped on the street,” Moishe said, remembering the words of his father for the first time in many years.

  “There’s a watchmaker with no hands explaining to his young assistant how to fix a clock, and a dog headed down a dark alley-way. At the end of that alley is a woman’s face glowing and smilin’ down on the cur.”

  “You remember all that, Mr. Grey?”

  “Your father lost interest in the naked woman, but he saw somethin’ new in that paintin’ almost every week. He realized after Max died that he was a real artist whose work spoke out aftah death.”

  There was benign joy in the face of Moishe Abromovitz. He nodded and smiled at the old man.

  “Okay,” he said. He picked up the phone and pressed a button and said, “Esther, ask Miss Small to join us, will you?”

  You sure it was all right, signin’ all them papers, Uncle Grey?” Robyn asked on the bus ride back to South Central L.A.

  “You mean because he’s a white man and he might cheat us?”

  Robyn nodded and the old man smiled.

  “No, baby. Moishe ain’t gonna cheat us. All you got to do is tell him money you get from Mossa and get him to make out what the taxes ought to be. He’ll charge you maybe thirty dollahs an’ send you the forms to send in your taxes once every three months. That’s the deal me and his father made. I never did it, though. You the one. You the one gonna make Coy’s dream into somethin’ real.”

  “What happened to Coy?” Robyn asked.

  The pain that invaded his chest was sharp and sudden, like a knife stab.

  “What’s wrong, Uncle Grey?”

  “Pain,” he uttered.

  “From what?”

  “I cain’t talk about what happened, Robyn. I cain’t.”

  The girl took his right hand and pressed the thick muscle in the webbing between his index finger and thumb.

  The hurt, and then the release from the girl’s massage, eased his memory of Coydog dancing on feet of fire, being strangled by a white man’s noose.

  “He died,” Ptolemy whispered. “He’s gone.”

  When they got to Ptolemy’s block Robyn took out her knife and held it so that it was hidden by her wrist and forearm.

  “He try an’ mess wit’ us an’ I cut that mothahfuckah like a Christmas goose,” she said to Ptolemy as they walked.

  “You evah et goose?” the old man asked.

  “No,” she said.

  This caused Ptolemy to laugh. He giggled and tittered, and then so did Robyn. They were like childhood friends remembering days long ago and carefree. In this way they made it to Ptolemy’s door with no attacks or retaliations.

  There was a small can on the floor in front of Ptolemy’s door.

  “What’s this?” Robyn said to herself, kneeling down.

  “Is it a peanut can?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a treat Miss Dartman bring down for me sometimes. Hand it here.”

  Ptolemy put out his hand and dutifully his newly adopted daughter complied. He could feel the heft of the ammunition Hilly had left him.

  “It’s heavy, Uncle,” Robyn said. “What is it?”

  “Nuthin’. Nuthin’ at all.”

  The phone rang later that night as Ptolemy watched a comedy show on TV with Robyn. Watching television was the closest thing to revisiting his previous state of dementia. The people spoke too fast and the jokes weren’t funny at all. People dressed
like they were going to fancy parties but instead they were at work or walking down the street in broad daylight. Everybody was in love all the time, and in pain too. The stories never went anywhere, but Robyn laughed and giggled from the first moment to the last. He liked to see the young woman laughing. It was to him like a gift from God, and so he liked watching TV with her, when her hard life let up for a moment and she didn’t need her anger or her knife.

  Ptolemy was just getting ready to get up and say good night when the phone rang. Robyn bounced off the couch and answered.

  “It’s for you, Papa Grey.”

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Ptolemy,” a woman’s voice greeted.

  “Hi. How are ya, Shirley?”

  “Just fine. I was bakin’ me some fudge here and I thought about you. Do you like chocolate?”

  “I like you, and if you make chocolate, then I like that too.”

  “You must’a been a mess when you were a young man, Mr. Grey.”

  “No. Not me. When I was younger I couldn’t take three steps without trippin’. I was quiet and shy, couldn’t put my words together for love or money.”

  “What happened to make you like you are today?”

  I sold my body to the Devil, he thought.

  But he said, “Some people just come into focus wit’ age, I guess.”

  “Would you like me to bring you over some fudge tomorrow?”

  “Please do.”

  “Noon?”

  “Sounds like a date to me.”

  In his room that night Ptolemy cleaned and loaded his pistol. Hilly had put the bullets in with half a can of salted peanuts and so he had to use a chamois cloth to wipe off each cartridge. He enjoyed this process. It made him feel that he was getting ready for some great event. He remembered how it felt on D-Day, when the Allies stormed the Germans in their French strongholds. He was an American that day. He stood side by side with tens of thousands of men, and even though he didn’t die for his country, he felt a part of something big.

  And now, loading his pistol, he was a soldier again, at war again, ready to lay down and die for an idea that was so powerful that it didn’t seem to matter that it was based on a lie.

  That night Ptolemy fell asleep for the first time since the plain-faced European nurse had given him his last shot of the Devil’s medicine. He dreamed about normal things, like the bus ride and Mossa’s lovely flower garden. At one point in his dreaming he was standing in front of a mirror, watching as he grew older. At first he was a child in a light-blue suit that his mother had sewn. The sleeves and pant legs were too short because he had outgrown the dimensions before his mother could finish the job. Then he was a young man, a soldier, an ice deliveryman, and an orange-suited civil servant, cleaning anything from sewers to demolition sites, from municipal buildings to the downtown train station. He wore a black tuxedo for his first wedding, and a white jacket with black pants for his second. Both suits were still in his closet, cut for a bigger frame than the shrunken old man he finally saw in the glass.

  He was withered and naked, with a small fire blazing in his chest. The fire had been loaned to him by Satan, an errant angel who coveted men’s souls.

  Gazing deeply into the fire, he could see his first childhood love, Maude Petit, running around in the blaze looking for succor, for Li’l Pea to save her. He reached out into the reflection and lifted the child from her torment. He placed her on a high shelf and blew on her to extinguish the flames and heal her cracked skin. Then with his hands he covered the fire raging in his breast and the heat began to rise.

  Now that he knew that Maude was safe, Ptolemy reveled in the flames that Satan had given him. The fire grew in the small space of his chest. It went from yellow to red to white-hot intensity. Ptolemy felt the heat coming from Maude and knew that he had saved her somehow by reaching into Hell itself and rescuing her. The flames were licking the back of his throat, leaping up behind his eyes, but he didn’t awaken. Maude was safe at last, after eighty-six years of torment in Ptolemy’s memory. He had saved her, put her out of harm’s way. He had swallowed the flames that burned her, and that made him crazy with joy.

  He opened his eyes to find himself writhing in his fevered bed. He was now in the burning house that consumed the Petit family. His body was that house, the attic of his mind aglow.

  He went to the bureau and opened the green glass bottle. He’d placed a small juice glass filled with water by its side. He held the pill a moment before putting it in his mouth and drinking. He smiled as he swallowed, feeling as close to heaven as he ever had in life before. Somewhere the choir of his church was singing, cheering him on.

  The medicine was fast acting. Ptolemy’s fever began to lower in less than five minutes. As his skin cooled and the fire abated, Ptolemy the old man sat at the foot of the big bed that Sensia had made him buy so many years past.

  We need a big bed, baby, she’d told him. A bed big enough to hold all the love I’ma give ya.

  “I almost threw it all away, Sensie,” Ptolemy told the memory. “I almost failed at my duty. A man only got to do one thing to set him apart. A man only got to do one thing right.”

  Ptolemy realized that the fever wasn’t fully gone, that the medicine was losing the battle against the fire in his mind. He climbed up on the bed and slept on top of the covers. He was a child again and Maude and he were playing down by the Tickle River and nobody else, not even she, knew that she had ever died.

  Robyn got up early and left. She’d put a note on the small table in the kitchen telling Ptolemy that she’d be out all day. At the bottom of the note was the number to a new cell phone that she’d purchased.

  Ptolemy knew what cell phones were. Little radios that acted like phones. This knowledge burned in his mind, wavering, shining brightly. He knew that in some way this understanding in his ancient brain was some sort of abomination. He knew that the Devil would have his due. But that was further up along the trail. He picked up the house phone and dialed a number automatically without even having to recall it.

  “Hello?” the heavy voice of Hilly answered.

  “Hey, boy.”

  “You get my peanut can, Papa Grey?”

  “Yeah, I got it. But tell me sumpin’.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why you wanna leave live ammunition out in the open where any child or fool could pick it up?”

  “I knocked but you wasn’t there,” Hilly complained.

  “You could’a called. You could’a taken the peanut can back home and called me and come ovah when I told you to.”

  The young brute sighed through the line.

  “That don’t make sense to you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

  “I know what you sayin’,” he countered.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah,” Hilly said. “But I didn’t wanna waste my time comin’ all the way ovah there again. You wanted the bullets and now you got ’em. I don’t see why you raggin’ on me.”

  Ptolemy thought about what his great-grandnephew was saying. But it was as if they spoke different languages and came from different peoples far removed from each other by thousands and thousands of miles and many generations. Hilliard was a Catholic and Ptolemy a Hindu, or something else far removed from what his nephew believed in. He tried to think of how he could explain the great expanse of separation to the boy, but even the Devil’s injections had not made him that smart.

  “You got Nina’s phone number somewhere around there?” Ptolemy asked after giving up on the young black man.

  A familiar man’s voice came across the line. “Hello.”

  “That you, Alfred?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Ptolemy.”

  “Who?”

  “The man Reggie used to look aftah. The one you met at Niecie’s house when you took Reggie’s wife away.”

  “What you sayin’, man?” Alfred asked angrily.

  “I’m sayin’, is Nina there?”

 
A few seconds passed before the receiver banged down and Alfred called out, “You bettah tell that mothahfuckah to be respectful.”

  “Hello?” a feminine voice asked. “Who is this?”

  “Ptolemy Grey . . . Reggie’s great-uncle.”

  “Oh . . . Mr. Grey. Why you callin’?”

  “I’m fine and how are you?”

  “Oh, okay. Uh ...”

  “How was the funeral?” Ptolemy asked, trying to repair the broken conversation.

  “Very sad, Mr. Grey. The children were so sad. Reggie’s sistah come down from Oakland with her kids. What is it you wanted?”

  “Did you bring Alfred to the funeral?”

  “No . . . how can I help you, Mr. Grey?”

  “I got everything I want,” he replied. “I don’t need a thing, thank you very much.”

  “But why are you callin’ here?” she asked, beginning to lose patience.

  “That Robyn is a miracle,” he said. “You know that?”

  “She okay.”

  “No . . . no, no, no. She’s a honest-to-God miracle.”

  “I got to go, Mr. Grey.”

  “When she come here to my house,” Ptolemy said, as if he had not heard Nina’s complaint, “she saw the mess and the junk and cleaned it all up from one end to the other. Washed and cleaned and threw out and poisoned the bugs too. And then, when she looked at me and seen that I was a mess, she took me to the doctor and got me the kinda medicine you people got out there today. Strong stuff, the kinda penicillin open up your eyes.”

  “That’s, that’s wonderful,” Nina said. “You go, Mr. Grey.”

  “Get off the phone with that old fool,” Alfred said in the background.

  “I got to be somewhere, Mr. Grey.”

  “So you know,” the old man went on, “when Robyn brung me to that doctor, that handsome Devil with the thick mustaches, I started to remembah things.”