Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Mr. Grey,” a girl called.

Ptolemy leaned forward suspiciously, wondering if somehow the TV had learned how to talk to him.

“Mr. Grey, it’s me, Robyn.”

Robins. They gathered in the trees outside his parents’ house in September and October and sang a sweet song to the cool winds that eased the last heat of summer. If Ptolemy sat still enough with week-old breadcrumbs scattered on the ground, the robins and other birds would gather around him in the grass next to the cypress tree.

“That food gonna attract rats,” his father would say, but Li’l Pea didn’t believe him.

The knock came again.

“Mr. Grey, are you all right in there?”

That was the right question. Hilly had never asked how he was. Hilly was a thief and even though he had saved him from Melinda Hogarth he still stole his money and then lied about it.

Ptolemy used to give Reggie money. Reggie wanted to help him. But then Reggie got lynched.

“Mr. Grey, if you don’t talk to me I’ll have to go call the police. I’m afraid that you might be hurt in there.”

Ptolemy opened his mouth to tell the girl that he was okay but he hadn’t spoken in days and his voice was gone. He got up and coughed, took a step, coughed again.

“I’m here,” he rasped.

“What?”

“I’m here.”

“It’s me, Robyn, Mr. Grey. Can I come in?”

“Who?” he wheezed.

“Robyn. You remembah, I took you in to see Reggie’s coffin. Then we took a taxi here.”

The image of Reggie’s body came up out of the floor at Ptolemy’s feet. He gasped and sobbed, remembering the death of his beloved son or nephew or great-grandnephew, yes, great-grandnephew.

He took the chain off its hook and flipped the four locks Reggie had installed. He opened the door and Robyn stood there in a little black dress with an ivory locket hanging from her neck. Her hair was tied back and her eyes saw things that he wanted to see.

“Hi,” she said.

Ptolemy smiled because this was the girl that didn’t look like anybody else he ever knew.

“Robyn,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

He nodded, not moving.

The child swiveled her head and moved toward him; then, just as she came close, she kissed him on the cheek. He moved backward, grinning and touching the place she had kissed.

When Robyn moved around him Ptolemy turned with her, feeling as if he were dancing with Sensia at the big band shell at Pismo Beach.

“Dog!” Robyn said as she came into the congested room. “Where do you sleep, Mr. Grey?”

He pointed at the oak table against the southern wall of the room. It was piled almost to the ceiling with brown boxes.

“In them boxes?”

“No. Under.”

She stooped down, putting her hands on her bare knees and turned her head to see the thin mattress and sheer olive blanket.

“You sleep on the floor under a table?”

He nodded, suddenly shy and ashamed.

“What about rats and roaches?” she asked.

Smiling, he was reminded of red-breasted robins singing brightly, thanking him for their breadcrumbs.

“You wanna sit down, girl?”

“Where?” she asked, her left nostril rising.

“There’s chairs everywhere,” he said. “But I gotta special one for guests that I keep in the kitchen.”

He walked there feeling but not minding the pain in his knees. He’d found the aluminum garden chair set out in front of a house with six cars parked on the lawn.

“They got so many cars, they don’t have room for no outside furniture,” he said to himself as he dragged away the lightweight chair with the threaded seat of sea-green and aqua nylon ribbons.

“You use patio furniture?” Robyn asked when he returned dragging the chair behind him.

“I got them oak chairs over there,” he said, “but they too heavy now, an’ there’s all that stuff stacked on ’em. This here’s a lawn chair, but it’s comfortable, though.”

After the lovely young girl was seated, Ptolemy got his folding wood stool from under the east table. Reggie had brought it for him. It was composed of light pinewood legs held together by rainbow-colored cotton fabric. Ptolemy opened the stool and sat down in front of the black-clad black girl.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen.”

“You should be in school, then.”

“I dropped out when I was fifteen but then I went to night school and got my GED. Now I’m gonna start goin’ to community college in the fall,” she said, adding, “An’ I’m almost eighteen, anyway.”

They were quiet for a while, looking at each other. She cast her eyes about the room while he wondered where someone like her might come from.

In the background a man was talking about Palestinians. This brought the image of Egypt into Ptolemy’s mind. Egypt—where his name came from.

“He had what they say is a Egyptian name,” Coydog had said, “but Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s father, was a Greek—mostly.”

“Is that music German?” Robyn asked.

“It’s from Europe,” he said. “Classical.”

“Oh.”

“How come you here, um, um, Robyn?”

“I came to see you.”

“Why the most beautiful girl at the whole party gonna come to a old man’s house smell like he ain’t clean it in ten, no, no, twenty-three years.”

Robyn sat forward on the lawn chair and took hold of one of Ptolemy’s big fingers. She didn’t say anything.

Ptolemy noticed that her skin was actually as dark as his but it had a younger tone. He wanted to say this but the words fishtailed away, eluding his tongue.

“Niecie wanted me to come and make sure you was okay, Papa Grey.”

He took a deep breath into his large nostrils and smiled.

“What is that smell?” Robyn asked him.

“I don’t know. There’s parts’a the house I cain’t get inta anymore. The bathroom, half the kitchen. I ain’t been deep in the bedroom since before what’s-his-name, uh, Reggie, would come.”

“You got a bedroom an’ you sleepin’ under a table?”

Ptolemy pulled his hand away from hers and tried to get up but couldn’t on the first try. Robyn grabbed the corroded metal handles of her chair and moved next to him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just surprised, that’s all.” She took his hand again. “Niecie axed me to come here an’ be wit’ you.”

“Niecie?” Ptolemy said, remembering as if for the first time in a long time the existence of his grandniece.

“Uh-huh. Because Hilly told her that you wouldn’t let him in an’ he wanted her to come here an’ talk to you. But she’s takin’ care of Arthur an’ Letisha an’ the funeral an’ all. She aksed him why you wouldn’t let him in.” Robyn squeezed Ptolemy’s hand. “I knew why but I didn’t tell her ’bout Hilly takin’ your money ’cause Hilly live in that house too an’ he’s a thug. So I said I’d come ovah an’ see about you an’ she said okay.”

“Niecie send you?”

“Uh-huh.”

Robyn’s face was only inches from Ptolemy’s. Her eyes were asking for something, pleading with him. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how to ask her what she wanted. But he knew that he would have done anything for that child. She was his child, his baby girl. She needed his protection.

“Niecie send you here to me?”

“Yes, Mr. Grey. Hilly said that you get these retirement checks an’ that you would let me an’ him cash ’em but I told him that I was not gonna steal from you.”

“And then Niecie send you?”

“Yeah.” Robyn sat back in her chair still holding his fingers.

“President Bush today said that America was a safer place than it was five years ago, when terrorists crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Towers,” a female news anchor said in between the silence of the new friends. “Democratic leaders in Congress disagreed . . .”

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.