Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“So you deny that you had anything to do with Pride’s beating?” Thompkins asked.

Ptolemy did not answer.

“Did you see him get beaten?” Thompkins pressed.

“No, sir.”

“Did you, ma’am?” Thompkins asked, turning to Robyn.

“I don’t even know who you talkin’ ’bout,” she said. “Papa Grey had some trouble with that bitch, but I gave her the news.”

“We ...” Arnold said. “We heard that there was another family member taking care of Mr. Grey.”

“No. Just me.”

“Ms. Hogarth said that there was a young man,” Arnold said. “She claimed that he beat her and that another man, a heavyset guy, and a young woman had beaten her.”

“Damn,” Robyn said. “She been beat by just about everybody on the block accordin’ to her.”

Officer Arnold couldn’t help but smile.

“Will you please answer the question?”

“You didn’t ask no question. You just said that somebody said somethin’.”

“Do you know of anyone else taking care of your uncle?”

“There’s Reggie Brown.”

Ptolemy’s heart lurched in his chest when Robyn uttered that name.

“Where is this Reggie Brown?”

“Dead.”

Again the policemen looked at each other.

“He was killed in a drive-by ’bout nine weeks ago. Killed him on Denker when he was sittin’ out in front’a the house of a friend’a his.”

Thompkins frowned and Arnold rubbed his fingertips together.

“Listen,” Robyn said. “Melinda do dope. I’ont know her boyfriend but he prob’ly a dopehead too. My uncle’s a old man. He ain’t in no gang. He ain’t runnin’ down no dopehead, beatin’ him on the street. That’s just stupid.”

“And what about you?” Officer Arnold asked.

“What about me?”

“She said that a young woman beat her with an electric fan.”

“So? She tell you that she the Virgin Mary when she get enough dope in her blood.”

“How old are you?” Thompkins asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Are you in school?”

“Got my GED and I’m gonna start LACC in the fall.”

Ptolemy could see Robyn’s chest heaving.

The policemen stared a minute, but neither Ptolemy nor Robyn crumbled under the scrutiny.

Then the policemen looked at each other, nodded, and stood as one.

“We may have more questions later,” Officer Arnold said.

“We always here, Your Honor,” Ptolemy told him. “At ninety-one, with dope fiends all ovah the street, I don’t get out too much.”

You bettah call Billy Strong an’ tell him not to come by here for a while,” Robyn said after the cops were gone.

“I almost lost my mind when them bull was at that do’,” Ptolemy said.

“What you mean?”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking ice water from purple plastic tumblers.

“I saw them uniforms an’ my mind went blank. It didn’t mattah that the cops was both colored, not one bit. It was like, was like I was feebleminded again. If you aksed me my name I wouldn’t been able to say.”

“But you talked to them, Papa Grey. You talked good too.”

“But I could feel it, honey. It’s like black curtains comin’ down on me. Like a shroud.”

They reached across the table at the same time, entwining their fingers. Ptolemy smiled and Robyn understood him.

“Come on ovah to the closet, baby,” he said. “It’s time I gave you my treasure.”

In the night Coy came to him.

“You finally done did sumpin’, huh, boy? What took you so long?”

“I was scared,” a full-grown Ptolemy Grey said to the man Coy McCann.

“Scared? What you got to be scared about? Here you got a nice apartment, wit’ two girlfriends, money comin’ in every week, an’ a treasure too.”

“There’s blood on that gold, Coydog.”

“My blood. You know, for every grain of gold dust that make up that treasure a black mother have cried and a black son done shed sweat or blood, maybe even life itself. That man was a slave master, only he didn’t have to feed his slaves.”

“You stole,” Ptolemy said.

“An’ they stoled an’ they murdered. So who gonna be in front’a who on the line?”

Ptolemy smiled then. His fever was raging but he didn’t know it. He was with Coydog again, having a brand-new conversation like they did in the old days before fire and blood flooded the chambers of the child’s mind.

“You right, Coy,” he said in his delirium. “You sure is. I showed Robyn the treasure an’ told her what to do an’ how to do it. She gonna be your heir. She gonna take that gold an’ see my blood outta down here. They all gonna go to college or rest easy in they final days.”

Coy stood there for a long time at the foot of the bed. The sun was rising behind him, and Africa, from two thousand years before, loomed in those first rays of light.

Ptolemy remembered the stories Coy told him about Africa; about a land before the gods of the North descended; about kings and crazy men; about wars waged and done with and not a drop of blood drawn or even a bruise suffered by a single warrior.

How you know all that, Coy?” the boy, Li’l Pea, had asked. “You said that the white man’s history books lie about us all the time.”

“They do.”

“Then how you know about how it was before the white man? No niggah know all that.”

“Oh yeah, boy,” Coy McCann said. “We from there. Some of us remembah with our minds. But even more got them stories jammed up in they hearts an’ spirits. They tell white men’s stories but changes ’em. They talkin’ about things they know an’ don’t remembah. I listens an’ tease out the truth that lay underneath.”

Coy stood at the foot of the bed with the sun rising and the secret memory of Africa emerging out of memories that were forgotten but not lost.

Ptolemy began to fret that maybe he’d done something wrong. Maybe Coy didn’t want a woman to lay hold to his treasure. Maybe he had waited too long to take action. But after a long time, at least two days by Ptolemy’s reckoning, Coydog smiled, and then, a few hours later, he nodded . . .

A pain lanced through Ptolemy’s rib cage. It was like a spear that had entered by his left side and went out through the right. He sat up straight in his bed and yelled.

Robyn was sitting there, and next to her was a man who was holding a syringe, leaning over and frowning.

“Hello, Satan.”

“Good to see you, Mr. Grey,” Dr. Ruben said.

“Am I dead yet?”

“If it wasn’t for your niece you would have been. I’m surprised you’ve made it so long. I’m glad too.”

“You ain’t taken no money or nuthin’ from him, have you, girl?” Ptolemy asked.

“No, sir. Nuthin’.”

Ptolemy thought he could make out things crawling and bristling in the doctor’s great mustaches. Ruben’s eyes seemed to be blazing: yellowy-green flames on a brown sea.

“Lemme talk to this man alone a minute, will you, Robyn?”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, relief at his revival in her tone and her shoulders, and even in the way she stood.

She closed the door and the doctor pressed a thumb against Ptolemy’s wrist.

“You have the constitution of a man half your age,” he said.

“How long have I been in this bed?”

“Three days.” Ruben took out a little notebook and started writing. While he did this he continued to talk. “That niece of yours is something else. She went to Antoine Church with two men and they threatened him until he found a way to get in touch with me. I came as soon as she called. I thought you would die, I told her so. But I gave you this concentrated injection and you came to immediately. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“How long?”

“If you were anybody else I’d say two days. But at the outside it’s two weeks.”

“And then you cut me up like a slaughtered calf.”

“Science will benefit from your sacrifice, Mr. Grey. Your niece and her generation will not have to suffer as you have.”

Ptolemy smiled at that.

“I’m leaving you a stronger pill,” Dr. Ruben continued. “And Robyn has my phone number. Whenever you feel hot, take a pill immediately. She will call me if you begin to fail.”

“I went to Africa in my sleep.”

“You did?”

“I saw it. Not today, but two thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Degradation, by Coy McCann’s reckoning.”

Dr. Ruben didn’t say anything to that. Ptolemy closed his eyes, then realized that he must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them again Robyn was sitting there next to him, holding his hands.

Satan was nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, baby,” he said.

“You look like a baby when you sleepin’, Papa Grey.”

“I got two weeks.”

She kissed his fingers.

“What day is it?” Ptolemy asked.

“Tuesday.”

“I got to go to Niecie’s house at noon . . . Alone.”

“Okay.”

“You been takin’ that gold to the safe-deposit box?”

“Yeah. A little bit at a time, like you told me to do. Shirley Wring come by in the mornin’ to sit wit’ you and I went to the bank. And then I got Beckford and Billy Strong an’ we went to talk to Antoine Church.”

“How soon before all that gold in the box?” Ptolemy asked.

“Three days. It’a be done by Thursday.”

“I’ma sleep now, baby.”

“Can I lie down next to you?”

“Will you tell me sumpin’?”

“What?”

“Anything, child.”

When I was a little girl my mama an’ my daddy and me was happy,” she whispered into the old man’s ear. “We lived in a house that was blue and white and had flowers in the front yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Mama took in li’l black children for daycare, and Daddy worked on a farm outside’a town. He coulda had a bettah job but he liked to be outside and to take time off between the seasons.

“Mama had a baby boy, and Daddy was so happy that he went up and down the block tellin’ everybody that he had a son named Alexander and that his son was gonna do what Alexander the Great did. But then, only a few weeks aftah Al was born, he got somethin’ in his chest and he was sick for five months.

“I think if he had just died right off that it wouldn’ta been so hard on Daddy an’ Mama. But he took off’a work and she went wit’ him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.

“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.

“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.

“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.