Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Finally he decided that the only thing to do was open the door to see if there was a clue inside.

The bedroom was dark, as it had been years before when he closed it up in order to forget about his life with Sensia. She was dead and buried but that room had been her memorial. She was put to rest in a whitewashed pine coffin like the one Niecie had for Reggie. Niecie’s mother, Ptolemy remembered, had gotten Sensie’s coffin and put her in the same room where they had Reggie for his wake . . .

There was a gray tarp covering the contents of Ptolemy’s abandoned bedroom. It loomed like a shifting desert under a cloudy, moonless night. Ptolemy stared at the fabric, remembering his true love. Thinking about her, he remembered what it was that he needed.

He went back into the kitchen and started pulling out furniture. Two small benches, a stone-top chrome-stalk table, a walnut tabletop and various boxes, bags, satchels, and one Hopalong Cassidy cowboy lunchbox that Reggie’s father had when he was a child.

After dragging all that junk into the living room, Ptolemy went into the closet and got his oldest possession: an oak yardstick that Coydog had given him when he was only five.

“This here yardstick will be the measure of your life, boy,” the old man had said.

“The what?”

“As long as you keep this here span wit’ you, I will be wit’ you.”

Ptolemy had never broken that three-foot rule. The name in red letters, BLUTCHER’S BUTCHER MARKET, had mostly rubbed off. The numbers and most of the increment lines had faded also. There was a chip at one corner of the dark wood and dents and gouges throughout. But Coydog’s gifts to Li’l Pea, both gifts, he had kept through the years.

With his stick in hand Ptolemy yanked open the door under the sink. He stuck the yardstick in there and pulled out the strong spiders’ webs laden with greasy dust. After rubbing the webs off on an old curtain that lay in a forgotten corner, Ptolemy reached in and took out the old steel ice hook he had from seventy years before. It was a vicious-looking device used to hook twenty-pound blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration was available in poor homes. Ptolemy and Peter Brock worked on a truck, driving up and down city streets delivering ice to the customers of Brock’s father, Minister Brock.

“What church your daddy preach at?” Ptolemy asked Peter on their first day.

“He ain’t no preacher,” Peter said. “My grandfather named him that so if you used his first name you had to respect him anyway.”

With his full strength Ptolemy swung down on the big plastic tarp covering Sensia’s room. The triple hook sunk deep. Using both hands, the ninety-one-year-old man began to pull. At first there was no give. It was as if he were pulling on the knob of a locked door. But Ptolemy Grey would not give up. He twisted his shoulders for torque, let his weight work against the heft of the covering. He pulled and yanked and tugged in staccato snatches.

All the while there was a symphony playing and a sports report spouting meaningless numbers and names.

Ptolemy didn’t listen. He went down to his knees, using all the strength in his spindly shoulders. He was about to take a rest when the plastic sheet begin to give. He stood up and away from the door, using both his strength and weight, and the tarp began to flow outward from the long-abandoned room.

The dry plastic gushed into the crowded living room like a huge reptilian tongue. Ptolemy pulled the hook out and sank it in again, dragging more of the gray sheet from the bedroom.

Again and again he dug his fang-shaped hook into the tarp, the plastic hissing like lizard skin against itself and along the floor. Ptolemy, sweating and laughing, his heart beating fast, pulled the entire covering from the bedroom. He fell to the floor under the mist of dust that had been raised. He hacked and laughed, sneezed and chuckled, rubbed his irritated eyes and tittered to himself.

“I did it,” he announced triumphantly. “I pulled that bastard outta there.”

For a while Ptolemy Grey lay there, half on the floor and half on the dusty gray tarp. He was breathing hard and laughing to himself, remembering people and things randomly, haphazardly. There was the time he and Keith Low shoveled coal on a steam train from Jackson to Memphis to pay their fare.

After Coydog had died Pity stayed in bed for two weeks. Sheriff Walters had come to ask Li’l Pea what he knew, but he didn’t say anything except that he didn’t know anything. It was all he could do to keep from crying while looking at the ugly blue veins that crossed back and forth over the sheriff’s nose.

“You know that I’m here to find them that killed your uncle, now, don’t ya, boy?” the middle-aged, portly white man asked.

“Yessuh.”

“You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”

“Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.

“All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”

Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.

“I don’t know nuthin’, Sheriff Walters,” Ptolemy said.

“Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”

“Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”

Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.

Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.

A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.

Li’l Pea looked away.

Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.

Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink to count the time away. He sat on the floor, watching the towels, to be sure that no maggot or worm found its way to him the way his father said that the worms made their ways into Coydog’s eyes after his brother, Lupo, had cut him down and buried him in a pauper’s grave behind the barbershop without even a stone to mark his passage.

He sat upon the tile floor, counting the drips and thinking about Reggie and Coy; both men lynched and buried and made food for bugs.

Whenever Ptolemy got hungry he would drink from the faucet. After a while the hunger went away. Through the door he could hear soft music and voices that he couldn’t understand. Underneath these calming sounds he thought he could make out the scuttling of bugs and the titter of rats. If he paid too much attention to these noises his heart pumped harder and his head got light. Sometimes, when he got too frightened, he’d fall asleep and then wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.

Ptolemy had no idea how much time had passed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The classical music was broken, tinkly. The news reporters made no sense. Reggie and Coydog were dead, and that girl would never find her way to him.

“You ain’t got to be afraid’a nuthin’, boy,” Coydog would tell him. “We all gonna die. We all gonna get some hurt. I mean, when a woman bring a child outta her big belly it hurt like a bastid. But that girl ain’t nevah been happier than when she hurt like that.”

“Why she be so happy?” Li’l Pea asked.

“’Cause she know that baby gonna be the love of her life, and that would be worf ten times the pain.”

At first Ptolemy was soothed when he thought about his old friend and mentor. But then his thoughts drifted back to that last fiery dance, and then to little Maude Petit. And when he thought about his loved ones being lost to fire his heart thundered and he fell asleep to dream the dreams of the dead.

Papa Grey?” a voice called.

Ptolemy was in his coffin. It was pitch black and the worms were wriggling between his fingers and toes. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing, but instead he found himself in the white bathtub under brilliant light. Someone was knocking at the bathroom door.

He remembered draining the tub and lying down in it the way Reggie was laid to rest in his pine box.

“Papa Grey?” she called again.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Robyn, Papa Grey. I took the keys to your front do’ but the bathroom do’ don’t have a key.”

“Robyn?”

“Yeah. Open the do’,” she said.

The old man fumbled with the lock for a minute or more. He panicked once or twice, fearing that he was locked in, but he got the door open at last. Robyn was standing there in dark-blue jeans and a light-blue T-shirt. There was a yellow ribbon in her hair and big bone-white earrings dangled on either side of her jaw.

“I died,” Ptolemy Grey said. “I died and was in my grave with worms and Coydog McCann. I was dead and gone like Sensie and Reggie and other names that I cain’t even remembah no mo’.”

Robyn put her arms around Ptolemy’s neck.

“It was a dream,” she said, cocking her head to the side and humming with the words.

“No, no, no,” he said, pushing his savior away. “It wasn’t no dream. Come on out here in the room and I can prove it to ya.”

“What’s this big plastic sheet out here, Uncle?” she asked. “It’s dirty.”

“It don’t mattah,” he said. “Just push it aside and, and, and pull up some chairs.”

Robyn did as he requested, frowning at the dust rising from the faded tarp. She sneezed and got his stool and her lawn chair set up in front of the door.

“Mr. Grey, can I turn off the TV and the radio so I can hear you?”