Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“A woman like that could turn on a dime,” Coydog McCann used to say.

The young man in the red exercise uniform sneered and took a step forward. Robyn shoved her hand into her purse and he stopped.

“Bitch,” he said, and then he spat on the ground.

Robyn stared death at him and he walked away across the lawn of the park.

“Come on, Uncle,” she said. “We should get back.”

They ate at the small diner again.

Ptolemy was exhausted from his day in the city. He lay down on top of the covers, falling asleep without even undressing. He felt Robyn take off his shoes and socks and fold the blankets over him.

There was no TV announcer, no classical music. He was in a coffin again and the earth was cold. He was dead and couldn’t move. He couldn’t even shiver against the chill.

“What you gonna do wit’ my treasure?” Coydog asked him suddenly, shockingly—out of nowhere.

“I’m cold.”

“I give up my life and my dignity for you,” Coy said.

“I’m dead.”

“You don’t even know what dead is. Dead is havin’ a noose around your neck an’ yo’ feet afire. You just restin’ while my treasure go to waste.”

“I cain’t, Coydog! I cain’t even see. If they catch me they gonna lynch me too. They gonna kill me too.”

The cold settled into Ptolemy’s bones like it must have in the old pharaoh after whom he’d been named. The chill hurt his joints and his marrow. He wasn’t breathing and instead of a heart there was a drum being played by a dimwitted monkey who couldn’t keep the beat any better than a drunkard.

Suddenly warmth enveloped him. It was as if he were lowered into a hot tub of salted, scented water. The heat went through him and Coydog walked away in disgust. Now only his hands and feet and nose were cold. He was floating in the Tickle River in late August.

“When the water runs as hot as the blood of a woman in love,” Coydog said as he walked from the tomb.

Ptolemy woke up held from behind by Robyn. He realized that he must have been shivering in the night and she held him to warm him as his mother had done in the winter months when he was a boy.

Ptolemy sat up and Robyn rolled on her back.

“Mornin’, Uncle.”

“What you doin’ in my bed, girl?”

“You were so cold that you was cryin’ in your sleep,” she said. “I hope it was all right.”

“What we doin’ today?” he asked, unable to condemn or condone her gift of warmth.

“Gettin’ some breakfast and suckin’ the poison out yo’ house.”

“Ain’t Niecie wonder where you are?” Ptolemy asked, realizing as he did that he could connect Robyn and Niecie and Reggie in his mind. He knew that Reggie was dead and not coming back and that he had something that he had to do.

“I told her that I was gonna stay at your place till it was cleaned up. She trust me. Do you trust me, Uncle?”

Trustin’ a woman is like walkin’ in California,” Coydog would say. “You know there’s bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin’ anyways. What else could you do?”

I’m a man dyin’a thirst an’ you the on’y water in a thousand miles,” Ptolemy said, repeating a phrase that had been in his mind for at least seventy-five years.

Robyn crinkled her broad nose and sat up to kiss her faux uncle.

“I trust you,” she said.

While Ptolemy sat on the pine chair outside his door, Robyn made it to the back porch, set up the fan, and opened the back door through the protective gate.

Three hours later she was filling up bags with old newspaper, clothes, bills, and general trash. She swept up thousands of dead insects, some suffocated rodents, and few creatures that neither she nor Ptolemy could identify.

Ptolemy followed her around, looking through every paper and blouse that she threw out. He was very excited by a large iron key that she found between the mattress and box spring.

For four days they filled trash bags, swept, and discarded.

The strong girl also lugged chairs and tables and even the broken bureau out to the street.

At night Robyn slept on the mattress roll under the south table and Ptolemy slept on Sensia’s bed, which Robyn had covered with plastic casing and unused sheets she had found in a closet. Sometimes the girl would come to him and hold him for a while until his teeth stopped chattering and he no longer cried in his sleep.

On the fifth day the apartment was mostly clean. The junk that Ptolemy wanted to hoard was stacked neatly in the deep closet. There were chairs in the living room and laundered blankets on the bed. The kitchen had been swept and scrubbed and disinfected until it almost seemed as if someone might cook in there.

“Uncle?” Robyn asked one day. She had just returned with a basket full of clothes from the laundromat across the street.

“Yeah?”

“What’s this card? It’s got a name and number printed on one side and on the other somebody wrote, ‘For the doctor you requested’ by hand.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t remembah no card. And I ain’t sick, either.”

“It says that this man, this Antoine Church, is a social worker,” Robyn said. “Maybe he gotta doctor help you remembah things like this.”

Grey,” a woman called. “Pee Toll My Grey.”

“That’s us, Uncle,” Robyn said.

“That ain’t my name,” he said, stubbornly anchored to the blue armchair in the hall at social services. “I mean, that’s my last name but she must be callin’ somebody else.”

“Please,” his young guardian whined.

“That’s not my name,” Ptolemy said again.

“Please.”

He allowed the girl he thought of as his child to lift him by the forearms and lead him through the scuffed and stained brown door.

It was a small office with no bookcases or books. The desk was made from pressboard and covered in plastic walnut veneer that had started peeling at the corners.

Mr. Antoine Church was a prissy young black man with straightened hair and a picture of Jesus on the wall. He wore a tan suit and brown calfskin gloves.

“What you got gloves on for on a hot day like this?” Ptolemy asked.

“Germs,” he replied.

“Why’ont you sit down, Uncle?” Robyn said.

He didn’t want to, but the busses and the walks to get to the government office had tired him out. Robyn stood behind the chair.

“How are you two related?” Church asked Robyn.

“My friend Niecie is his grandniece, and she asked me to take care of him.”

“But why call him ‘uncle’ if he’s just a friend?”

“I call my boyfriend ‘honey,’” she said, visibly holding back her anger, “but that don’t mean I’ma put him in my tea.”

“You got germs in here?” Ptolemy asked.

“What?” Church said.

“You got them gloves for germs you say. That mean I’ma get sick in here?”

“No,” Antoine said in an exaggerated, almost yawning, tone.

“Then why you got them gloves on?”

“Why are you here, Mr. Grey?”

“I ...”

It was like falling into a dream for the old man. He wanted Coydog McCann to fish with, and Reggie smiling naturally in his grave. He wanted to show the children how to fly kites and sing songs that Jesus might not want to hear.

Ptolemy sat there in Church’s uncomfortable metal chair, thinking that he’d like to move without his joints aching and to have one full thought all the way through without stumbling over the words and getting distracted by the slightest thing. He didn’t want people to call him old man anymore or for social workers like Antoine Church to have power over him.

He wanted a job and driver’s license and a hard-on with a girlfriend like he was sure that boy Beckford wanted with Robyn.

Before Robyn came to stay with him, before Reggie came and before Sensia died, Ptolemy might have said these things. He might have talked about going to the bathroom and having sex. But now he just sat there, lost in the jumble of ideas. He knew that somebody like Church wouldn’t understand his words.

“Uncle wanna go to the kinda doctor help him remembah how to think,” Robyn said.

She was wearing her charcoal-gray dress with the high hemline and black hose under that. Sporting a hint of makeup, she carried a small red purse that was too small for her fighting knife.

“Your nephew came to see me a few months ago,” the social worker said. “He told me that you were having trouble with your memory and communication skills.”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

The tone of Church’s voice jabbed at Ptolemy’s mind like the cut of a rusty chisel. It made him want to sneer and spit. He wanted to tell that man that he was an idiot, a stupid fool.

“Are you still having trouble thinking?” Church asked.

“No. I think just fine,” Ptolemy said. “It’s just that I got some trouble rememberin’ things I used to know. I mean, I know you got them gloves on ’cause you think there’s a germ in here. I know that this girl here is my granddaughter. But I don’t remembah where I put things a long time ago, an’ I cain’t, I cain’t . . . things I need to find.”

There was so much he couldn’t do. Sometimes he’d stand over the toilet for five minutes waiting to urinate. Sometimes when the phone would ring he’d go to the door and ask, “Who is it?” and when Robyn told him that it was the phone he’d get so embarrassed that he’d go into the bedroom just so he wouldn’t have to see her feeling sorry for him.

“Well,” Antoine Church said, smiling. “The reason I dropped by your house and left that card was because I found out about a man who might have just what you’re looking for.”

“What you laughin’ at, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“I’m not laughing,” the grinning man said.

“Yes you are. Are you laughin’ at me?”

“No,” Church said, managing to approximate a sober look.

“You gonna be old too,” Ptolemy told him. “You gonna be sittin’ in this chair and a young man gonna be tellin’ you sumpin’. I got a family needs me and I cain’t walk down the street wit’out this child here to he’p me. I’m just askin’ for that, for that. That, that thing.”

Church scribbled in tiny script on a small slip of paper, which he handed to Robyn.

“Call this doctor and tell him that I referred you,” the prissy man said. “And if you have any problems you can call me. Maybe we can work together to help your uncle.”

“Thank you, Mr. Church,” Robyn said, smiling.

Mothahfuckah,” she whispered when she and Ptolemy were a few steps down the hall.

Dr. Ruben, who answered his own phone, said that he didn’t have a free appointment for three weeks.

“I’m traveling to India,” he said, “to Mumbai for a conference, but I’d be happy to see Mr. Grey when I return.”

Robyn didn’t argue with him. She made the appointment and then sat in the lawn chair that Ptolemy wouldn’t let her throw out.

“Do you want me to move back to Aunt Niecie’s house now that yo’ place is clean?” she asked her uncle.

“Do you wanna go back?”

“I wanna have a place with a bed up off’a the floor and a chest’a drawers.”

“I could buy you all that.”

“Honey, you only get two hundred and eleven dollahs a week,” she said. “That’s more than you need to live but it ain’t enough for no new bed and chest’a drawers.”

A door opened in Ptolemy’s mind and he smiled, then grinned.

“Wha?” Robyn said.

“Go in the closet an’ pull out that brown suitcase I made you leave in there.”

“That big heavy thing?”

“That’s it.”

The girl went in and dug under the mounds of picture albums and books and shoe boxes filled with letters, small tools, and what Ptolemy called “his remembrances.”

She dragged the heavy leather bag out to the center of the living room.

“Now bring me that jar with all the keys we found in it,” the old man commanded.

“Yes, Uncle.”

As the days had gone by, Ptolemy had gotten more and more bossy. He’d tell Robyn how to cook his eggs and where he wanted his books, even what clothes he’d like her to wear.

Instead of getting angry, the child almost always acquiesced to his demands. In his heart he knew that she was the one who made the important decisions, and she knew that he wanted in the worst way to be in charge.

“Here you go, Uncle,” Robyn said. She was wearing tight red jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her tennis shoes were pink too.

Ptolemy dumped the keys out on the table that once stood at the south wall, the table that he’d slept under for more than twenty years.

The small brass key was for his locker at the Y that they tore down in 1962, or maybe 1963. The big skeleton key that Robyn found under Sensia’s mattress was to the lost treasure. The three master keys on one ring were to various padlocks that he kept in the bottom drawer in the kitchen. The tin key was the one he wanted. He set it aside and placed all the rest, one by one, back in the old mustard jar.

“You could put these back,” he said, pushing the jar toward Robyn.

“Ain’t you gonna want to put that key back after you unlock the bag?” she asked.

Questions like that gave Ptolemy the most problems. When he was alone with his TV and radio, nobody asked him anything and he didn’t have to put together any responses. People talked in his head, and on the TV, but there were no questions that he had to answer.

He blinked and tried to understand all the various things she meant.

“Why don’t I just put it in my pocket and hold it for you, Uncle?”

“I can put it in my own pocket,” he said.

“Should we open it now?” she asked.

“Let’s get it up here on the table,” he said.

Together they lifted the heavy bag until they got one corner of it on the battered ash top. Then Robyn pushed until it was fully on.

Ptolemy had to study the lock. He tried different ways to put the key in. It had been a few months since he’d opened the case but finally he got it right.

“Goddamn, Uncle,” Robyn said, standing up from the aluminum and nylon chair and putting her hands to her face. “Shit!”

“You mad, baby girl?” Ptolemy said, leaning away from her, remembering the way she had looked when she beat Melinda Hogarth until blood flowed from the addict’s forehead.

Robyn was staring at the suitcase filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties. The money was stacked in some places. In others it was piled, just thrown in, and all mixed around. Robyn dug both hands in, lifting a shovelful of cash, and coins rained down from the jumble of bills.

“Uncle,” Robyn said.

“I been savin’ that for years,” he said. “It’s almost ninety-four thousand dollars. Ninety-four thousand . . . almost.”