The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said when Robyn opened the door to the bathroom.

  “I got to, Mr. Grey,” she said. “If I’ma be comin’ here an’ lookin’ aftah you I got to have a toilet to go to.”

  While Ptolemy tried to think of some other way he could have Robyn’s company and keep her out of the bathroom, she opened the door and went in.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “What is this?”

  A large wad of blackened towels flew out from the doorway and landed with a thump on the small bare area of the crowded floor.

  Ptolemy covered his face with his hands.

  “You got suitcases in the bathtub,” Robyn called out. “An’ there’s black stuff growin’ in the commode. There’s, oh my God, oh no ...”

  Ptolemy went to sit next to his big cabinet radio so that the woman singing opera would drown out the sounds and complaints coming from the girl.

  As the singer professed what sounded like love in her sweet, high voice, Ptolemy allowed himself to drift. He was adrift in a boat in a city in Italy where all the streets were rivers. Coydog had told him about that town.

  “Men stands at the back’a long boats with long sticks they push to the bottom to move ’em down the way,” the old liar told him.

  “You been there, Coydog?” the boy asked. Ptolemy remembered then, so many years later, listening to opera and ignoring Robyn, that he never called Coy Mr. McCann, which was his name. It was just mostly boy for Li’l Pea and Coydog for Coy.

  “I been there in my mind,” Coy McCann told the boy.

  “How you do that?”

  “Read,” he said, stretching out the vowel sound like the singer did with her notes.

  “How you learn that?”

  “A, B, C,” Coy said, wagging his forefinger like the white conductor did on odd Thursdays in the summer when the white people’s marching band stopped in front of the town hall and performed old southern favorites.

  That was the beginning of Li’l Pea’s informal education. From A to L were accomplished that very afternoon.

  After he could say all the letters, Coydog stole some paper from the country store and showed his student how to make the sounds with pencil lines.

  “Ain’t it wrong to be stealin’ that paper from the white man’s sto’?” Li’l Pea asked his aged friend.

  “Wrong?” the wiry little man exclaimed. “Hell, it ain’t wrong, it’s a sin.”

  “But if you do a sin, ain’t you goin’ to hell?”

  “That all depends, boy.” Coy’s long dark face cracked open at his mouth, showing his strong, stained teeth. “The Catholics profess that all you got to do is say you’re sorry and the Lord will forgive. Other peoples say that Saint Peter’s got a scale where they put all the bad you done on one side and all the good on t’other. An’ if the good outweigh the bad they got a cot for you in heaven.

  “So if I steal this here tablet an’ pencils but then I teach you how to read an’ write an’ from there you invent a train that go from here to Venice ...”

  The German alto was warbling about love and Ptolemy remembered the name of the city with rivers for streets. He wanted to go to the bathroom and call the girl out to tell her what he’d accomplished but Coydog wouldn’t stop talking.

  “. . . well, if I do that, then maybe the good beat out the bad.”

  Ptolemy recalled watching his friend study him with a calculating eye.

  “But you know, boy,” Coy said, “I don’t believe any’a that.”

  “What do you believe?” the boy asked, the ABC’s whirling around his head.

  “I think that there’s a long line up there in heaven an’ yo’ place in that line is predicted by what you done wrong. The worser thing you did puts you that much further to the back of the line. The people done the lesser is up toward the front.

  “Now, the line start in downtown heaven and goes all the way to the barracks of hell because the two places is connected, just like good an’ evil in the same man. So anyway, when you die you get a number that stands for what you did wrong. So if you had two mens, a black one and a white one, and the black man stole the white man’s pig to feed his kids and then the white man shot the black man’s son because he couldn’t find the thief . . . well, the white man gonna get a much bigger number for murder than the black man will for stealin’. So, forgettin’ any other misdemeanors, the white man will have a hotfoot at his place on line and the black man will hear harp music comin’ from just up the way.”

  “But what about the boy?” Li’l Pea asked.

  “What boy?”

  “The one that the white man killed.”

  “Him?” Coydog said with a pained grimace. “They ain’t no special numbahs for the victims. Just ’cause they grabbed you and chained you, just ’cause they beat you an’ raped your sister don’t mean a thing when it come to that line. God don’t care what they did to you. What he care about is what you did.”

  Ptolemy was Li’l Pea looking up at the man who had just opened the alphabet for him, the man who stole for him, sacrificing himself to the judgment of the great beyond.

  “Mr. Grey?”

  The newscaster was talking about a criminal in a cornfield somewhere, a woman was singing sweetly, and his name came in between the two.

  “Mr. Grey.”

  Looking up from his place on the floor in Coy’s room, no, in his own apartment, looking up, he saw Robyn, her short skirt hiked up even higher, her hands holding unidentifiable gelatinous masses of blackened rot.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Are you lookin’ at my legs, Mr. Grey?” she asked with surprise but no anger in her tone.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You think I’m pretty?”

  “I think pretty is your ugly little sister,” he said, repeating a compliment that he’d heard Coydog use a thousand times.

  It worked on Robyn just like it had on all the young women that Coy had courted.

  “That’s sweet. You a playah, huh, Mr. Grey?”

  “What’s that in your hands?” he asked.

  “It come out from under the sink an’ in the bathtub. It’s a mess. How do you go to the bathroom at all in there? The toilet don’t even flush.”

  “For number one I use a coffee can and I . . .” He hesitated. “I pour it down the sink.”

  “An’ what about numbah two?” Robyn asked, neither ashamed nor disgusted as far as the old man could tell.

  “I usually wait for Reggie to come by. He usually take me to Frank’s Coffee Shop for breakfast or lunch an’ aftah I get my coffee I go.”

  “So you ain’t been to a toilet since you was at the wake?” she asked.

  “I guess not.”

  The girl was staring at the old man while he inspected the floor.

  “You really let this place fall apart,” Robyn said.

  “I’m sorry ’bout that. It was just that when Sensie passed I stopped doin’ things, movin’ things around, makin’ ’em bettah.”

  “Do the sink work in the kitchen?” Robyn asked.

  “Uh-huh. There’s stuff all around it, but it works.”

  He was having trouble leaving Coydog’s lectures behind him so that he could give the girl and her lovely strong legs the proper attention. He wanted to get up on his feet but there wasn’t enough strength in his arms to lift him.

  While Ptolemy thought about standing up, Robyn went into the kitchen. He began listening to the singing again but there came a loud crash and the old man found the strength to push himself up and grab on to the ledge at the top of his console radio.

  He went through the kitchen door and found the girl throwing piles of pots down from the sink onto the floor. Hundreds of roaches of all sizes and breeds were scuttling madly from the wild woman’s attacks. The black gunk from her hands was coming off on the pots and pans and and even the dishes that she was putting on the floor.

  “Stop,” Ptolemy said, but Robyn didn’t even slow down.

  “I can
’t, Mr. Grey. I gotta wash my hands and clean this house and get rid’a all these roaches an’ shit.”

  “But you the one messin’ it all up.”

  “It’s already a mess, Mr. Grey. It’s already messed up,” Robyn said. “Look at all the junk just piled up and moldin’. Look at all these bugs.”

  “They only out ’cause you th’owin’ everything around,” the old man argued.

  By this time the sink was clear enough that Robyn could turn on the water and wash her hands.

  “Oh no,” Ptolemy said, feeling as if maybe the walls would fall down or a fire would erupt from the stove. “This is bad.”

  Turning to him, smiling, her hands dripping because there was no dry towel, Robyn said, “We have to clean up this place, Mr. Grey. You can’t live like this with a house full’a garbage and bugs.”

  “But it’s too much. Too much stuff. We should just leave it and go to the store. I don’t have to cook.”

  Robyn whipped her hands back and forth through the air to get off the excess water and then came to Ptolemy and put her arms around him. She hugged him to her chest and put her cold hand on the top of his bald head.

  “Shhh,” she whispered.

  He realized then that he was crying.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Robyn said. “I can clean up all’a this mess in a week or two. I could have your whole house set up for you. Don’t you want your house clean and neat? Don’t you want a nice bathroom and a bed to sleep in?”

  “No.”

  Robyn moved back a few inches, still holding on with her face there close to his.

  “Why not?”

  “My things,” he whined.

  “But most of this stuff is just old junk an’ trash.”

  Ptolemy lifted up his hands, resting them on the girl’s chest beseechingly.

  “In between the garbage and the trash is all the things I have. Keys and lockets, pictures and money . . . treasure. One time Reggie tried to clean up but he just took a armful’a stuff an’ th’owed in the thrash. There coulda been anything in the middle’a that.”

  “I won’t do that,” Robyn said with the solemnity of a much older woman. “We will go through every newspaper and rag, lookin’ for all your li’l trinkets. Okay? I won’t th’ow away nuthin’ before we go through it.”

  Ptolemy realized where his hands were and pulled them back to his own chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Grey. I know you don’t mean no harm.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “You a sweet old man. There used to be a man like you lived next do’ to me and my mama before my mama died. He used to give me peaches in the season. He said that I was a smart little girl and I needed peaches to make me smarter. It didn’t mean nuthin’ but it was nice.

  “You still got that money Hilly got you, Mr. Grey?”

  He nodded and smiled, feeling gratitude for no reason he could have explained.

  “Well then, get your wallet and show me where the sto’ is. We gonna get you some soap and steel wool and a mop an’ broom. We gonna get a big box of trash bags an’ shake out ev’ry newspaper, rag, and old shirt until we done emptied out the whole bathroom.”

  On the walk to the market Ptolemy swiveled his head from side to side again and again.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Grey?” Robyn asked him. “You lookin’ for somebody?”

  “Melinda Hogarth.”

  “Who’s that? Your girlfriend?”

  “She the one gonna rob me if she sees me.”

  “Rob you? You mean you think she gonna try an’ take yo’ money?”

  Ptolemy nodded, feeling disgraced by what felt like a lifetime of weakness and fear.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said. “I got me a six-inch knife in my purse and I know to use it. My mama told me that I always had to have a li’l sumpin’ extra ’cause I’m short and a girl. You know I stick a mothahfuckah in a minute they try and mess with either one’a us.”

  It was her grimness that gave Ptolemy confidence. He glanced up at the sky, thinking, This is everybody’s ceiling. This blue roof belongs to me just as much as anyone else. They were words he’d heard along the way somewhere. He remembered them, and they held him like an anchor, like that young girl, that Robyn, held his hand.

  They didn’t see Melinda Hogarth that day. Robyn spent seventy-three dollars of Ptolemy’s retirement check on cleaning supplies. They stopped by a McDonald’s hamburger place and had french fries and chicken salads. After two cups of black coffee Ptolemy spent half an hour in the restaurant’s men’s room.

  All afternoon Robyn cleared out, scrubbed, and rinsed off Ptolemy’s bathroom. She brought out every rag, box, towel, and doodad, showing it to her guardian’s great-uncle before throwing it almost all away in big black garbage bags. There were stains on her little black dress, and her hair was getting wild. But she laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy reporting to Ptolemy.

  “Do you want this old toothbrush, sir?” she asked with a knowing smile.

  He had to study everything she brought to him. At first he didn’t know what it was he was looking at, and then, when he identified the object, he’d get lost trying to remember where it came from.

  “That bresh was Sensie’s, I’m pretty sure,” he said. “She got it at the Woolworth’s . . . No. Maybe not. I don’t know where she got it at.”

  “But do you want to keep it?” Robyn asked again.

  “I guess not. No. You can th’ow it away . . . I guess.”

  Hours and hours Robyn cleaned, taking breaks now and then to discuss bits of detritus found in Ptolemy’s bathroom. She filled five thirty-nine-gallon lawn bags with the debris from just that one room. She scrubbed and swept and mopped, and then scrubbed and swept and mopped again.

  Once she found an old sepia photograph way down under the sink. It was the picture of a huge brown woman holding the hand of a skinny, frowning little boy.

  “Who is this, Mr. Grey?” she asked, coming out to see him.

  Ptolemy had set his folding stool right at the door so that he could see everything the teenager was doing.

  “Oh, don’t throw that away. No, no.”

  He took the crumbling photograph in his hand. It had once been five inches by eight but now the corners and sides had been eaten away by damp rot. The woman’s face was water-stained, as was the bottom half of the boy’s body. He held the picture gently, as if holding a wounded creature.

  “That’s my mother,” he whispered, “and her son . . . me.”

  “Let me put that away someplace safe so we can take it to the drug sto’ copycat to see if they can make a good print of it,” she said, taking the fragile memory from the man’s thick black fingers.

  After a while Ptolemy stopped watching Robyn’s every move. He could see that she knew what was important and that she looked into every corner and fold.

  “Come on in, Mr. Grey,” Robyn called in the early evening.

  The bathroom was sparkling, neat and clean. The blue tile floor was eroded in places, and there were stains and dings on the blue porcelain sink, but the bathtub was glistening white and the walls were a lovely if faded aqua.

  “There’s water damage on the ceiling,” she said, “and I can’t wear no dress the next time I come. And look ...”

  Robyn pushed the white ceramic handle on the toilet and the stained commode flushed for the first time in many years.

  “You fixed the toilet?” he asked. “You must be like a plumber too.”

  “No, I just cleaned it out and turned on the water, that’s all. It worked once it was clean.”

  This made sense to Ptolemy. He went to sit on the edge of the tub and ran his fingers over the smooth white porcelain.

  “There’s some leaks and stuff, but we can get somebody to fix all that.”

  “Landlord won’t fix nuthin’,” Ptolemy said, peering closely enough at the porcelain to see the barest reflection of his da
rk face in the deep whiteness.

  “I gotta go, Mr. Grey. It’s gettin’ late.”

  “I never seen nuthin’ like this,” he said. “I don’t even remembah half of what it looked like in here. How did you know?”

  “I jes’ cleaned. But I gotta go. Now you can go to the bathroom in your own house. I’ll come back day after tomorrow and we’ll start on your bedroom.”

  “Oh no,” Ptolemy said. There was a big black moth fluttering in the center of his heart. “No. Best to leave well enough alone.”

  “You need a bed, baby. A place where you can sleep up off the flo’.”

  “No.”

  “Uh-huh,” she sang. “Day aftah tomorrah I’m’a come back and we gonna tackle the bedroom together. Don’t worry, I won’t th’ow out nuthin’ you don’t want me to.”

  “But this is enough, don’t you think?” Ptolemy asked, still running a hand over the cool ceramic rim.

  “I got to go, Mr. Grey. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  At the open door of the apartment Robyn and Ptolemy stood face-to-face. They both seemed a little confused. Finally she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, after which he put his hands on either side of her face and curled his fingers like clawless paws.

  Ptolemy couldn’t speak because he had more than one thing to say. The first was that he didn’t want her to go into the bedroom. He didn’t need a bed. He didn’t want to be in that room, not ever. But he also wanted Robyn to come back and be there with him. Maybe she could clean the bathroom again.

  She kissed him a second time and then walked away down the hall. When she got to the front door of the building she turned and waved before going out the door. He stood there for long minutes with the news and medieval recorder music behind him. He watched that closed door with many people on his mind: Robyn, and Coydog, and Reggie, who had been coming to his house for more than five years.

  Then Reggie the man was standing next him in the hall but next to them was Reggie the corpse in the whitewashed pine coffin. The children were on the floor. Ptolemy wanted to call to them but couldn’t remember their names.