Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ptolemy thought it was funny that a fool like that would try and intimidate him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid hardly at all.

“Yeah,” Alfred said. “I come to take you and the kids back to your house.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “Come on, babies.”

Arthur and his sister started crying. They didn’t say that they didn’t want to go or even shake their heads. They just cried.

For their daddy, Ptolemy thought.

“Why’ont you let the kids stay here with Big Mama Niecie?” Robyn suggested. “She feed ’em an’ stuff.”

“Do you wanna stay here, Artie? Letisha?”

Arthur nodded and Letisha put her head in her brother’s lap.

“You sure?” Nina asked. “Okay. Mama’s gonna go home and sleep now. She’s tired.”

The baby girl whimpered for her mother but would not leave her brother’s lap. Nina kissed them both on their foreheads and then moved as if she wanted to kiss Robyn. But the younger girl leaned away. Nina played it off, putting her hand on Robyn’s shoulder.

All the while Alfred glared at Ptolemy.

The old man stared back, trying to understand what was happening, what had happened.

Nina turned away from her children and left under the protective arm of the handsome Alfred. Nina glanced back at her children as she went through and past the doorframe. Ptolemy listened to their shoes on the hardwood floor of the hallway.

“Where they goin’?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Robyn said. “You hungry, Arthur?”

“Tisha is.”

“What she want?” Robyn asked with a smile.

“Cake.”

“Did you have some dinner?”

“No, but we want some cake.”

“Okay,” Robyn said, “but jes’ this one time now.”

“Okay.”

“You wait here with your sister and I’ll get Big Mama Niecie to bring you some’a the cake Auntie Andrews brought us.”

She held out her hand and Ptolemy took it. They walked down the hall, back into the crowded room where people had come to mourn and laugh, give their condolences and eat and drink. Ptolemy’s skin hurt as he passed through the confused and confusing mob.

When Robyn told Niecie that Nina had left with Alfred Gulla, the older woman sucked her tooth.

“The kids said they want some cake,” Robyn added.

“I get it. Poor angels. Did you get somethin’ to eat, Pitypapa?”

“I have to go to the toilet,” he said.

“I’ll show you. After that you want me t’get Hilly to take you home?”

“I’ll take him,” Robyn said. “I gotta get outta here anyway.”

Niecie kissed the girl and smiled.

“You are a blessing, child.”

They walked down the street together, hand in hand. The sun was hot and Ptolemy had so many thoughts in his head that he couldn’t say very much. But Robyn, once she was out of the house, talked and talked. Ptolemy heard some of what she’d said. She’d come from down south somewhere when her mother died. Robyn’s mother and Niecie were good friends and so Niecie offered to take the orphan in. They weren’t related by law but Niecie felt like they were blood and let her sleep on the couch in the living room.

“Who’s Alfred?” Ptolemy asked after a long spate of listening to the calming words of the child.

“He’s Nina’s boyfriend.”

“But I thought she was Reggie’s . . . I mean, I mean . . . his wife.”

“He did too. But Nina kep’ on seein’ Alfred from back when she went out with him years ago. I think he went to jail or sumpin’ an’ Nina met Reggie an’ got pregnant with Artie an’ so she stayed with Reggie, but when Alfred got outta jail she was still seein’ him too.”

They came to a sidewalk where three blue-and-red taxis were parked.

“Can you tell the driver how to get to your house, Mr. Grey?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I think I remembah.”

They held hands in the back of the cab.

“How old are you, Mr. Grey?”

“Ninety-one year old. Some people don’t think I can keep count, but I’m ninety-one.”

“You don’t look that old. Your skin is so smooth and you stand up straight. It’s like you’re old but just normal old, not no ninety-one.”

She walked Ptolemy to his apartment door and watched him use the key on the topmost of four locks.

“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”

When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.

The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.

Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”

A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.

“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”

Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.

His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana. There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.

“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.

“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”

“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”

“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”

“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”

Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”

Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.

Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.

The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.

“I’m losing money on this place and that’s not why I own it,” he shouted at Reggie one day.

“Get the fuck outta here, man,” Reggie had said, and the white landlord, Mr. Pierpont, got the cops.

The police threatened Reggie, but then Pierpont tried to make them get rid of Ptolemy too.

“You’re trying to evict this old man?” one of the cops had asked.

“I’m losing money on this place,” Pierpont said, as if Ptolemy had stabbed him.

“If I was this young man I would have done more than threaten you,” the cop said. The police left, and potbellied Joseph Pierpont never came back, or answered any calls.

Now the doorbell no longer worked and people had to knock. And when they’d knock, Ptolemy would get up and go to the front and ask, “Who is it?”

But not this time. This time he stayed in his seat, listening to the newsman’s gibberish and music that scratched at his ears.

The knock came again and Ptolemy remembered why he stayed in his chair. That big boy Hilly had been there and knocked and said that he wanted to come in. He’d come three days in a row and each day Ptolemy told him that he didn’t need him and that he would call if he did.

“But you don’t know my numbah, Papa Grey,” Hilly said through the door. “You haven’t called up in years.”

“I know how to phone for a operator. All you have to do is dial oh. I call her if I wanna talk to you.”

“Mama told me to come help you,” Hilly, the thief, beseeched. “She be mad at me if I don’t.”

“I don’t need no help.”

“How can you go to the sto’?”

“I walk there.”

“What about the bank?”

“You stoled my money, boy. You stoled it at the bank.”

“I didn’t.”

“I don’t need yo’ kinda help,” Ptolemy said, and after three days he no longer even asked who it was. He just stared at whoever was giving the news and waited for the caller to go away and for the words to make sense again.

The first time someone knocked on the door after Reggie’s wake it wasn’t Hilly.

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Grey?” a man’s voice said.

“You Mr. Grey too?” Ptolemy asked.

“No,” the man said patiently, “you’re Mr. Grey. Open the door, please.”

Ptolemy almost obeyed; the voice was that certain.

“Who are you?”

“Antoine Church, Mr. Grey. Your nephew, Reginald, applied to the social services office for a doctor for you a while ago. Is Reginald around?”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Is someone else taking care of you?”

“I don’t need no one to take care’a me. Reggie’s dead and now there’s just me.”

The radio was playing a march and someone on the TV was laughing. Ptolemy pressed his ear against the door.

“I’ve found a doctor who wants to see you, Mr. Grey,” Antoine Church said. “He’s a memory specialist, and he has a grant, so his services are free.”

“I’m not sick. I don’t need no doctor.”

“Let me in, Mr. Grey,” the voice said. “Let me in and we can sit down and talk about it.”

“I don’t wanna talk. Go away and leave me alone.”

There came a spate of silence filled in by electronic babble.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Go on now.”

“I’m putting my card under the door. If Reginald or someone else comes by to help you—”

“Reggie’s dead. Drivebee killed him. Now, you go away.”

Again Ptolemy pressed his ear against the door. There came a soft rustling and then a sigh. After that he heard footsteps going away down the hall.

On the floor at the old man’s feet was a bright white card. Using the wall for support, he leaned down and picked it up. Putting Antoine Church’s business card in his pocket was reflex more than anything else.

Hilly kept coming by but after three days Ptolemy never opened up or even asked who it was. Sooner or later they all went away.

The knock came again.

He concentrated on the TV to keep the person on the other side of the door out of his mind.

“. . . the convicted killer was found innocent. The DNA test did not match the blood found at the crime scene,” the woman was saying.