The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  “I was leavin’,” he said down the long hallway. His expression was dour. It seemed as if he might still leave.

  “Did Reggie send you?” the old man asked, holding the door so that he could slam it shut if he had to.

  “No,” the boy replied. “Niecie did. Mama did.”

  Reluctantly he shambled back toward Ptolemy’s door.

  Old Papa Grey was frightened by the brute’s approach. He considered jumping inside his apartment and slamming the door shut. But he resisted the fear; resisted it because he hated being afraid.

  If you know who you is, then there’s nuthin’ to fear, that’s what Coy used to tell him.

  While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.

  “Can I come in, Papa Grey?”

  “Do I know you?”

  “I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”

  Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.

  That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

  “June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.

  “Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”

  “Sure you can.”

  “You have to move back so I can get by.”

  In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.

  The old man smiled but did not move.

  Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.

  Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.

  “What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.

  “What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”

  “Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.

  “Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”

  But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.

  “The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”

  “I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”

  “You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”

  “Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”

  “You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.

  “It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And the toilet don’t work.”

  “Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What?”

  “It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”

  “I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”

  “What thing, Uncle?”

  “The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”

  “What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.

  “I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three-quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.

  Hilly switched off the radio.

  “Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”

  “All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”

  “But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”

  “But then all you got to do is find your station,” Hilly said, crinkling his nose to keep the foul odor out.

  “Turn it back on, Reggie . . . or Hilly, or whatever . . . just turn it back on.”

  The young man put up his hood and used it to cover his nose and mouth. He turned the radio on at a low volume.

  “Make it have more sound,” Ptolemy demanded.

  “But you not gonna be here, Papa Grey.”

  “Make it more.”

  Hilly turned up the volume and then said, “I’ll be out on the front porch waitin’, Uncle. It stink too much in here.”

  Hilly went out of the door, leaving it ajar. Ptolemy was quick to close the door after his great-grandnephew and throw the bolt. Then he moved quickly so as not to forget what he was doing. He scanned the piles of boxes and stacks of cartons, dishes, clothes, and old tools. He looked under the tables and through a great pile of clothes. He shuffled through old newspapers, letters, and books in the deep closet. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a large gray spider suspended in a corner. For a moment he thought about shooting that spider.

  “No,” he whispered. “You don’t have to shoot a spider. He too small for shootin’. Anyway, he ain’t done nuthin’.” And then Ptolemy remembered what he was looking for. He went to the closet and took out a stack of sheets that his first wife, Bertie, had bought sixty years before. Under the folded bedclothes was an electric steam iron set upon a miniature ironing board. Under the iron lay three unopened envelopes with cellophane windows where Ptolemy’s name and address appeared.

  One by one Ptolemy opened the sealed letters. Each one contained a city retirement check for $211.41. He counted them: one, two, three. He counted the checks three times and then shoved them into his pocket and stood there, wondering what to do next. The radio was on. It was playing opera now. He loved it when people sang in different languages. He felt like he understood them better than the TV newsmen and women who talked way too fast for any normal person to understand.

  There was a plane crash in Kentucky. Forty-nine dead. It was Monday, the twenty-eighth of August. The spider stared down from his invisible webs, waiting for a fly or moth or unwary roach.

  Somebody was waiting for Ptolemy. Reggie. No, not Reggie but, but . . .

  There was a chubby young stranger standing on the concrete stairs of the tenement building when Ptolemy came out into the daylight clutching his outside right front pocket. He squinted from the bright sun and shivered because there was a breeze.

  “What took you, Papa Grey?” the unfamiliar stranger asked.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Hilly,” he said. “Hilda’s son. I’m here to take you shopping. Did you lock the door?”

  “’Course I did,” Ptolemy said. “It’s Monday and you always lock the door on Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, uh, um, Saturday, and, and, and Sunday. You always lock the door on them days and then put the key in your front pocket.”

  “Hey, Pete,” someone yelled from down the street.

  Ptolemy flinched and backed up toward the door, hitting the wood frame with his shoulder
.

  A tall woman, almost as fat as the stranger who called him Papa Grey, was coming quickly up the block.

  “Hold it right there, Pete!” the woman yelled. There was a threat in her voice. “Wait up!”

  Ptolemy reached for the handle of the door with his left hand but he couldn’t grasp it right. The woman climbed the stoop in two big steps and slapped the old man, hitting him hard enough to bump his head against the door.

  “Where my money, bastid?” the woman shouted.

  Ptolemy went down into a squat, putting his hands up to protect his head.

  “Empty yo’ pockets. Gimme my money,” the woman demanded.

  “Help!” Ptolemy shouted.

  When she bent down, trying to reach for the old man’s pocket, he twisted to the side and fell over. The woman was in her fifties and dark-skinned. The once-whites of her eyes were now the color of cloudy amber. She grabbed Ptolemy’s shoulder in an attempt to position him for another slap.

  That was when Hilly grabbed the woman’s striking wrist. He exerted a great deal of strength as he wrenched her away from his uncle.

  “Ow!” she screamed. She tried to slap Hilly with her free hand.

  “Hit me an’ I swear I will break yo’ mothahfuckin’ arm, bitch,” Hilly told her.

  Almost magically the woman transformed, going down into a half crouch, weeping.

  “I jes’ wan’ my money,” she cried. “I jes’ wan’ my money.”

  “What money?” Hilly asked.

  “It’s a lie,” Ptolemy shouted in a hoarse, broken voice.

  “He promised to gimme some money. He said he was gonna give it to me. I need it. I ain’t got nuthin’ an’ everybody knows he’s a rich niggah wit’ a retirement check.”

  “Bitch, you bettah get away from heah,” Hilly warned.

  “I need it,” she begged.

  “Get outta heah now or I’ma go upside your head with my fist,” Hilly warned. He raised a threatening hand and the amber-and-brown-eyed black woman hurried down off the stoop and across the street, wailing as she went.

  One or two denizens of La Jolla Place stopped to watch her. But nobody looked at Hilly or spoke.

  The street was narrow, with three-story structures down both sides of the block. One or two of the commercial buildings were painted dirty white but everything else was brown. Apartment buildings mostly—a few with ground-floor stores that had gone out of business. The only stores that were still operating were Blanche Monroe’s Laundry and Chow Fun’s take-out Chinese restaurant.

  Ptolemy pressed his back against the wall and rose on painful knees. He was trying not to tremble or cry, biting the inside of his lips to gather his courage.

  “Who is she?” Hilly, his savior, asked.

  “Melinda Hogarth,” Ptolemy said, uttering one of the few names he could not forget.

  “Do you owe her money?”

  “No. I don’t owe that woman nuthin’. One day a couple’a years ago she squeezed my arm and said that she needed money for her habit. She just kept on squeezin’ an’ sayin’ that and when I finally gave her ten dollars she squeezed harder and made me say that I’d give her that much money whenevah she needed it. Aftah that she come an’ push in my do’ an’ took my money can. That’s why I nevah go anywhere unless Reggie come. Where is Reggie?”

  “Come on, Papa Grey. Let’s go to the store.”

  Why you shiverin’, Uncle?” Hilly asked when they were walking down Alameda toward the Big City Food Mart.

  “It’s cold out heah. An’ they’s that wind.”

  “It’s just a breeze,” Hilly said. “And it’s ovah eighty degrees. I’m sweatin’ like a pig as it is.”

  “I’m cold. Where we goin’?”

  “To Big City for your groceries. Then aftah that, Mama want me to bring you ovah to her house.”

  “You got money?” Grey asked.

  “No. I mean maybe five dollars. Don’t you have money for your groceries?”

  “I got to go to the place first.”

  “The ATM?”

  Ptolemy stopped walking and considered the word. It sounded like amen, like maybe the big kid was saying, “Amen to that.” But his face looked confused.

  “What’s wrong, Uncle?” Hilly asked.

  Ptolemy looked behind to make sure he knew how far he was from his house. He noticed that Melinda Hogarth wasn’t following him like she once did when she knew that he was going to the place.

  “You really scared him,” Ptolemy said to Hilly, shifting their conversation in his mind. “He slapped me an’ knocked me down an’ you said, ‘Get outta here,’ an’ he run.” Ptolemy giggled and slapped his hip.

  “You mean she ran,” Hilly said. “Not he.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean she. She ran. She sure did.” The old man giggled and patted the big boy’s shoulder.

  “Do you wanna go to Big City?” Hilly asked again.

  “I gotta go to the place first.”

  “What place?”

  “The place for in my pocket.”

  Hilly noticed then that his uncle was holding on to something through the blue fabric of his pants.

  “You got somethin’ in your pocket, Uncle?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Do you want me to help you with that like I helped you with that bitch slapped you?”

  Ptolemy snickered. He would hardly ever use a curse word like that, but he felt it, and the big boy saying it made him happy.

  Laughin’ is the best thing a man can do,” his aunt Henrietta used to say back in the days after the Great War when all the black folks lived together and knew each other and talked the same; back in the days when they had juke joints and white gloves and girls that smiled so pretty that a little boy like Ptolemy (who they called Petey, Pity, and Li’l Pea) would do cartwheels just to get them to look at him.

  “Do you want me to help you with what’s in your pocket, Papa Grey?” Hilly said again. He reached for Ptolemy’s hand but the old man shifted away.

  “Mine!” he said protectively, shaking his head.

  Hilly put his hands up, surrendering to his great-uncle’s vehemence.

  “All right. All right. But if you want me to help you, you have to tell me where you want to go.”

  “The place,” Ptolemy said. “The place.”

  “The ATM?”

  “No, not that. Not where they say amen. The place where, where the lady behind the glass is at.”

  “The bank?”

  When the old man smiled he realized that his tongue was dry. He had to go to the bathroom too.

  “What bank?” his nephew asked.

  This question defeated Ptolemy. How could somebody be so stupid not to know what a bank was? He’d been there a thousand times. And he was thirsty, and he had to urinate. And it was cold too.

  “Do you have a bank card in your wallet, Papa Grey?” Hilly asked.

  “Yes,” Ptolemy answered though he hadn’t really understood the question.

  “Can I see it?”

  “See what?”

  “Your bank card.”

  “I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout.”

  “Can I see your wallet?”

  “What for?”

  “So that I can see your bank card and I can know what bank you want to go to.”

  “Reggie knows,” Ptolemy said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Reggie’s out of town for a minute, Papa Grey. And I don’t know what bank you do business wit’ so I got to see your wallet.”

  Ptolemy tried to decipher what the boy was saying and what he meant. He didn’t understand what there could have been in his wallet that this Reggie, no, this Hilly, needed to know. He did fight off that crazy woman. He did know Reggie. And he had to go to the bathroom and drink from the faucet, Ptolemy did—not Hilly/ Reggie.

  Ptolemy took the wallet from his back pocket and handed it into the young man’s massive hand.

  Hilly, whose skin was melon-brown and
mottled, sifted through the slips of paper and receipts until he came upon a stiff plastic card of blue and green.

  “Is your bank People’s Trust, Papa Grey?”

  “That’s it. Now you finally found out what to do,” the old man said.

  “Hold it right there,” an amplified man’s voice commanded.

  A police car pulled up to the curb and two uniformed officers climbed out, both holding pistols in their hands.

  Hilly put his hands up to the level of his shoulders and Ptolemy did the same.

  “John Bull,” he whispered to Hilly. “They must be lookin’ for robbers—or, or, or black mens they think is robbers.”

  “You can put your hands down,” one of the cops, the dark-brown one, said to Ptolemy.

  “I ain’t done nuthin’, Officer,” the old man replied, raising his arms higher even though it hurt his shoulders.

  “We don’t think you’ve done anything, sir. But is this man bothering you?”

  “No, sir. This my son, I mean my grandson, I mean Reggie my grandson come to take me to the People’s Bank.”

  “He’s your son or your grandson?” the white cop in the black-and-blue uniform asked.

  “He’s my grandson,” Ptolemy said slowly, purposefully. He wasn’t quite sure that what he was saying was true but he knew that he had to protect the young colored man from the cops.

  Don’t let the cops get you in jail, Coydog McCann used to tell him on the porch of his tarpaper house down in Mississippi, in Breland, when Ptolemy was seven and the skies were so blue that they made you laugh. Don’t evah let a niggah go to jail because’a you, Coydog had said. Be bettah to shoot a niggah than turn him ovah to John Bull.

  “My grandson, Reggie, Officer. My grandson. He takin’ me to the People’s Bank an’ to the sto’.”

  “Why does he have your wallet?” the dark-skinned cop asked.

  “He wanted to tell where we was, where it was, you know. Where it was.”

  “Are you his grandson?” the cop asked Hilly.

  “His nephew, Officer,” Hilly said in a respectful voice that he had not used before. “He calls me Reggie, who’s my first cousin, but I’m Hilly Brown, and Reggie the one usually take care of him. I was lookin’ in his wallet because he done forgot the address of his bank.”