Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Where’s Reggie?”

“Reggie couldn’t come, Papa Grey. Mama sent me to help you go to the store . . . You know, June’s daughter.”

June was a young woman who went out in hussy clothes on Friday nights when she should have been home with her children. And Esther . . . his sister took care of Hilda, George, and Jason.

“Whose boy are you?” Ptolemy asked the door.

“Marley and Hilda’s son,” the voice on the other side of the door replied.

Ptolemy heard the words and he knew that they meant something, though he could not conjure up the pictures in his mind. He wanted to ask another question to make sure that this wasn’t that woman who came in his house and stole his money out of his coffee can.

Ptolemy strained his mind trying to remember another thing that only a friend of Reggie would know. But every time his mind caught on something—it was a broad rise in Mississippi that had blue mist and white clouds all around. The sun was going down and the heat of the day was giving up to a mild breeze. There were birds singing and something about a man that died. A good man who gave everything so that his people could sing, no, not sing but live life like they were singing . . .

“Papa Grey, are you all right?” the voice beyond the door asked.

Ptolemy remembered that he was trying to recall something about Reggie that the young man through the door should know. He was, Reggie was, Ptolemy’s son, or his grandson, or something like that. He was tall and dark, not handsome or slender, but people liked him and he was always nice unless he was drinking and then he got rough.

Don’t drink, boy, Ptolemy would tell him. Drinkin’ is the Devil’s homework for souls lost on the road after dark.

“What did I used to tell Reggie about liquor?” the old man asked.

“What?”

“What did I tell him about liquor?”

“Not to drink it?” the voice replied.

“But what did I say?” Ptolemy asked.

“That drinkin’ was bad?”

“But what did I say?”

“I don’t know exactly. That was a long time ago,” Hilly said.

“But what did I say? To him,” Ptolemy added to help the young man answer the question.

“Uncle Grey, if you don’t open up I can’t help you go shoppin’.”

Ptolemy slapped his hands together and backed away from the door. He laid his palms upon the stack of ancient, disintegrating cardboard boxes piled next to the entrance of his one-bedroom apartment. He brought his hand to his bald head and pressed down hard, feeling the arthritic pain in the first joint of three fingers. One, two, three. Then he reached for the doorknob, gripped it.

Just the feel of the cold green glass on his hand brought back that crazy woman into his mind. The woman who came into his house was named Melinda Hogarth, somebody said. She knocked Ptolemy down and made off with his coffee-can bank. She was fifty. “Too old to be a drug addict,” Ptolemy remembered saying.

“Get outta my way, niggah,” she’d said when Ptolemy got to his feet and tried to pull his bank back from her. “I will cut you like a dog if you try an’ stop me.”

Ptolemy hated how he cringed and cowered before the fat, deep-brown addict. He hated her, hated her, hated her.

And then she did it again.

“Don’t open the door unless it’s for me or someone I send,” Reggie had told him. And he had not opened that door for anyone but Reggie in three and a half, maybe five years, and nobody had stolen his coffee-can money since. And he never went in the streets except if Reggie was with him because one time he met Melinda down on St. Peters Avenue and she had robbed him in broad daylight.

But Reggie hadn’t been there in a week and a half by the old man’s calculation. He would have had to send somebody after that long. Anyway, it was a man’s voice outside, not crazy Melinda Hogarth. Ptolemy turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Down at the end of the long hall a young man was walking away. He was a hefty kid wearing jeans that hung down on his hips.

“Reggie.”

The young man turned around. He had a brooding, boyish face. He looked familiar.

“I was leavin’,” he said down the long hallway. His expression was dour. It seemed as if he might still leave.

“Did Reggie send you?” the old man asked, holding the door so that he could slam it shut if he had to.

“No,” the boy replied. “Niecie did. Mama did.”

Reluctantly he shambled back toward Ptolemy’s door.

Old Papa Grey was frightened by the brute’s approach. He considered jumping inside his apartment and slamming the door shut. But he resisted the fear; resisted it because he hated being afraid.

If you know who you is, then there’s nuthin’ to fear, that’s what Coy used to tell him.

While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.

“Can I come in, Papa Grey?”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”

Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

“June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”

“Sure you can.”

“You have to move back so I can get by.”

In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.

The old man smiled but did not move.

Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.

Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.

“What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.

“What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”

“Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.

“Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”

But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.

“The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”

“I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”

“You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”

“Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”

“You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.

“It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And the toilet don’t work.”

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What?”

“It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”

“I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”

“What thing?”

“The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”

“What thing, Uncle?”

“The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”

“What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.

“I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three-quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.

Hilly switched off the radio.

“Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”

“All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”

“But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”

“But then all you got to do is find your station,” Hilly said, crinkling his nose to keep the foul odor out.

“Turn it back on, Reggie . . . or Hilly, or whatever . . . just turn it back on.”

The young man put up his hood and used it to cover his nose and mouth. He turned the radio on at a low volume.

“Make it have more sound,” Ptolemy demanded.

“But you not gonna be here, Papa Grey.”

“Make it more.”

Hilly turned up the volume and then said, “I’ll be out on the front porch waitin’, Uncle. It stink too much in here.”

Hilly went out of the door, leaving it ajar. Ptolemy was quick to close the door after his great-grandnephew and throw the bolt. Then he moved quickly so as not to forget what he was doing. He scanned the piles of boxes and stacks of cartons, dishes, clothes, and old tools. He looked under the tables and through a great pile of clothes. He shuffled through old newspapers, letters, and books in the deep closet. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a large gray spider suspended in a corner. For a moment he thought about shooting that spider.

“No,” he whispered. “You don’t have to shoot a spider. He too small for shootin’. Anyway, he ain’t done nuthin’.” And then Ptolemy remembered what he was looking for. He went to the closet and took out a stack of sheets that his first wife, Bertie, had bought sixty years before. Under the folded bedclothes was an electric steam iron set upon a miniature ironing board. Under the iron lay three unopened envelopes with cellophane windows where Ptolemy’s name and address appeared.

One by one Ptolemy opened the sealed letters. Each one contained a city retirement check for $211.41. He counted them: one, two, three. He counted the checks three times and then shoved them into his pocket and stood there, wondering what to do next. The radio was on. It was playing opera now. He loved it when people sang in different languages. He felt like he understood them better than the TV newsmen and women who talked way too fast for any normal person to understand.

There was a plane crash in Kentucky. Forty-nine dead. It was Monday, the twenty-eighth of August. The spider stared down from his invisible webs, waiting for a fly or moth or unwary roach.

Somebody was waiting for Ptolemy. Reggie. No, not Reggie but, but . . .

There was a chubby young stranger standing on the concrete stairs of the tenement building when Ptolemy came out into the daylight clutching his outside right front pocket. He squinted from the bright sun and shivered because there was a breeze.

“What took you, Papa Grey?” the unfamiliar stranger asked.

“Do I know you?”

“Hilly,” he said. “Hilda’s son. I’m here to take you shopping. Did you lock the door?”

“’Course I did,” Ptolemy said. “It’s Monday and you always lock the door on Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, uh, um, Saturday, and, and, and Sunday. You always lock the door on them days and then put the key in your front pocket.”

“Hey, Pete,” someone yelled from down the street.

Ptolemy flinched and backed up toward the door, hitting the wood frame with his shoulder.

A tall woman, almost as fat as the stranger who called him Papa Grey, was coming quickly up the block.

“Hold it right there, Pete!” the woman yelled. There was a threat in her voice. “Wait up!”

Ptolemy reached for the handle of the door with his left hand but he couldn’t grasp it right. The woman climbed the stoop in two big steps and slapped the old man, hitting him hard enough to bump his head against the door.

“Where my money, bastid?” the woman shouted.

Ptolemy went down into a squat, putting his hands up to protect his head.

“Empty yo’ pockets. Gimme my money,” the woman demanded.

“Help!” Ptolemy shouted.

When she bent down, trying to reach for the old man’s pocket, he twisted to the side and fell over. The woman was in her fifties and dark-skinned. The once-whites of her eyes were now the color of cloudy amber. She grabbed Ptolemy’s shoulder in an attempt to position him for another slap.

That was when Hilly grabbed the woman’s striking wrist. He exerted a great deal of strength as he wrenched her away from his uncle.

“Ow!” she screamed. She tried to slap Hilly with her free hand.

“Hit me an’ I swear I will break yo’ mothahfuckin’ arm, bitch,” Hilly told her.

Almost magically the woman transformed, going down into a half crouch, weeping.

“I jes’ wan’ my money,” she cried. “I jes’ wan’ my money.”

“What money?” Hilly asked.

“It’s a lie,” Ptolemy shouted in a hoarse, broken voice.

“He promised to gimme some money. He said he was gonna give it to me. I need it. I ain’t got nuthin’ an’ everybody knows he’s a rich niggah wit’ a retirement check.”

“Bitch, you bettah get away from heah,” Hilly warned.

“I need it,” she begged.

“Get outta heah now or I’ma go upside your head with my fist,” Hilly warned. He raised a threatening hand and the amber-and-brown-eyed black woman hurried down off the stoop and across the street, wailing as she went.

One or two denizens of La Jolla Place stopped to watch her. But nobody looked at Hilly or spoke.

The street was narrow, with three-story structures down both sides of the block. One or two of the commercial buildings were painted dirty white but everything else was brown. Apartment buildings mostly—a few with ground-floor stores that had gone out of business. The only stores that were still operating were Blanche Monroe’s Laundry and Chow Fun’s take-out Chinese restaurant.

Ptolemy pressed his back against the wall and rose on painful knees. He was trying not to tremble or cry, biting the inside of his lips to gather his courage.

“Who is she?” Hilly, his savior, asked.

“Melinda Hogarth,” Ptolemy said, uttering one of the few names he could not forget.

“Do you owe her money?”

“No. I don’t owe that woman nuthin’. One day a couple’a years ago she squeezed my arm and said that she needed money for her habit. She just kept on squeezin’ an’ sayin’ that and when I finally gave her ten dollars she squeezed harder and made me say that I’d give her that much money whenevah she needed it. Aftah that she come an’ push in my do’ an’ took my money can. That’s why I nevah go anywhere unless Reggie come. Where is Reggie?”