Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“How do you lose your soul, Coy?”

“Because,” he said, “it is a delicate thing, a special thing. You can live without it, but you might as well be dead. That’s why heaven an’ hell is always fightin’ over the souls’a men. Our souls, when we got ’em, is so beautiful that angels always lookin’ to take ’em. That’s why when the Devil comes up on you you got to hold tight on the love in your heart.”

Ptolemy picked up the phone and dialed a number that he remembered thanks to the Devil’s medicine.

“Hello?” Niecie Brown said.

“Hey, Niecie. How you doin’?”

“Pitypapa, is that you? You dialin’ the phone by yourself ? I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe it, but it’s still a shock.”

“Hilly there, baby?”

“Uh-huh. He here watchin’ the TV. I told him that he was gonna have to pay you back for what he took. But you know he ain’t a bad boy. He just feel like he been cheated, losin’ his daddy so young and all.”

“Lemme talk to him, honey.”

“Hello?” Hilly said, bringing to mind some big dense creature like a hog, or even a hippopotamus.

“I need some bullets for my pistol.”

“Say what?”

“I need some bullets for my pistol, an’ I don’t want you tellin’ your mama about it neither.”

“What kinda pistol?”

“Twenty-five caliber. You get me that and we even. You won’t owe me a dime.”

“Okay. I’ll bring ’em ovah tomorrow.”

“Put ’em in a can of peanuts.”

“I gotta buy them too?” the brooding boy complained.

“Yeah. You got to buy them too.”

“All right. But we even then, right?”

“Right.”

The evening after that went smoothly for Ptolemy. He found a music station that was playing Fats Waller recordings.

He’d once seen the great Moon Face playing in an after-hours big-city juke joint in Memphis. In those days the music halls only allowed whites, except on special days, and so after a performance in front of an all-white audience there were many famous musicians that went to the black part of town to jam with their people.

Listening to the song “Two Sleepy People,” he was remembering a girl named Talla who turned to kiss him because the romantic lyrics made her. He remembered the smell of beer and the sawdust on the floor, Fats Waller himself winking at the momentary lovers, and a feeling that being Ptolemy Grey was the best thing in the whole world.

“Uncle?” she said, and the vision evaporated. “Uncle, you okay?”

Ptolemy turned his head, feeling pain between each vertebra, but he didn’t wince or curse.

“Is it eleven already?”

“It’s past midnight,” Robyn said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Your boyfriend here?” Ptolemy asked, looking toward the bathroom.

“No. He walked me to the door, but then I heard the music an’ told him to go on.”

“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”

“You my father-like, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah right.”

“A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”

The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”

“We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.

“The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.

“Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”

“He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”

“He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”

“Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.

“To do what?”

“To talk to a man named Mossa.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’ll see.”

That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.

“It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”

Ptolemy thought that Billy had probably bragged about the crime amongst his black brothers. He was used to his neighborhood down in Alabama, where no Negro would ever turn in another. But the U.S. Army had black soldiers from Chicago, San Francisco, and even New York City. Some of them thought it was their responsibility to follow the white man’s law.

Billy probably bragged, and everyone knew that Billy and Ptolemy were close.

“Well, soldier?” the colonel asked.

“I wouldn’t know nuthin’ about anything like that, sir.”

“Are those tears in your eyes, Sergeant Grey?” Riley asked.

“Must be the smoke, sir.”

“Does doing your duty hurt that much?”

Riley was a good man; tall and proud, he never insulted his soldiers because of their race. He respected every man according to one standard. And so when he asked Ptolemy that question, the soldier froze, unable to speak. But in the vision, not a dream but a trancelike memory, Ptolemy inhabited his former self and spoke up.

“Sir, that sergeant said a word to Preston that stung him in his heart. Aftah all we been through, Preston heard in that white man’s one word that he would come back home to the same sorry situation that our mothers and grandmothers and great-great-great-grandmothers suffered under. Preston couldn’t help himself, but still that don’t wash away the blood.”

Ptolemy opened his eyes because the fever was burning his face. He sat up, remembering that Colonel Riley “volunteered” Billy Knight for duty at the front lines when the casualty rate was over ninety percent. He didn’t press charges, because that might have caused a riot among the soldiers.

Billy died a week later. His mother and father received his Purple Heart posthumously.

Ptolemy wondered if his memories were the cause of the fever. Was it hell calling for him?

Running his fingertips along the sheet, he felt a thrill of excitation. He had not experienced so much or so deeply since he was a child. The bottle given to him by Satan, or maybe one of Satan’s agents, sat on the bureau across from his big bed.

His temperature was rising quickly and the strength was draining from his limbs.

He got to his feet and took two quick steps. He had to grab on to the bureau not to fall. He opened the bottle, spilling a dozen tiny pills across the top of the chest of drawers. He had to suck his tongue four times before drawing out enough spit to swallow even one small pill.

Slumping down to the floor, Ptolemy thought about Billy. He was betrayed but did not know it. He was sentenced to death but thought that he was being chosen to fight because of his valor and bravery. He had murdered a man but felt that he was vindicated by his people’s suffering and shame. Ptolemy imagined Knight grinning while he was killing, about to die himself. The executioner’s hand was disguised, and the battlefield substituted for justice.

Ptolemy smiled and opened his eyes. He was on his back on the floor in a room that was once teeming with insects and rodents. A frigid river flowed over his fevered skin and now he was strong and able.

He got to his feet without arthritic pain in his joints. He took a deep breath and went back to his bed, where he could recall history and change it slightly—an old man deified by the whim of evil.

What we doin’ here, Uncle?” Robyn asked after they had gotten off the bus at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive a few minutes after ten the next morning.

“Goin’ t’see see Mr. Mossa. He a Jerusalemite, a Palestinian he calls it, but he was born in Jerusalem, same place that Christ our Lord was born.”

“This place is full’a rich white people,” Robyn argued. “We shouldn’t be up around here.”

The girl was looking about her, a severe frown etching her lovely dark features. Ptolemy smiled. There was a bench across the street, at the foot of a steep cobblestone road that didn’t allow cars. An old white woman was sitting there. Ptolemy brought his adopted daughter across the street and sat her down at the opposite end.

“I been afraid’a white people my entire life,” the old man said, holding the glowering girl’s hands.

“I ain’t afraid,” she said. “It’s just that we don’t belong up here. My mama told me that.”

“Your mother made you sleep on the floor behind a couch so that her boyfriends didn’t see you,” Ptolemy said.

“So?”

“She didn’t think she was wrong doin’ that, now, did she?”

“No.”

“But she was wrong, wasn’t she?”

“Papa Grey, I just don’t like it up here. I ain’t scared’a nobody, but I’m scared I’ll do sumpin’ wrong.”

“I know. That’s why we here together. I’m helpin’ you.”

“If you helpin’ me, then take me home.”

“Did you like bein’ a child?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn wanted to look down, but she forced herself to gaze into her guardian’s eyes.

“I was happy when my mama died, Papa Grey.” A tear came down her left cheek. “I wanted to be sad an’ lovin’ but I knew that Mama had worked it out for me to go to Aunt Niecie if she died, and I hoped in my heart, even though I didn’t want to, that my mama would pass and I could come out heah. I’m the one you should call the Devil.”

Ptolemy noticed that even though the right eye filled with water it was only the girl’s left eye that shed tears. He thought this must have been an important sign, but the meaning escaped him.

“Then I come to stay wit’ Niecie an’ she put me on a couch in the livin’ room an’ Hilly was always tryin’ to fuck me—excuse my French.”

“I got you on a couch in the livin’ room,” Ptolemy said gently.

“But that’s my couch, an’ it’s a proper bed too. An’ it have drawers like a dresser, an’ you bought me some clothes. An’ anyway you offered me your room an’ all your money an’ you trusted me to do right. An’ you try an’ protect me too. I love you, Papa Grey. I don’t evah want anything to happen to you.”

“Did some’a the men in yo’ mama’s house mess wit’ you?” he asked.

“I don’t wanna talk about that.”

Ptolemy smiled and said, “Okay. But you gotta know that the money I offered you is only a small part’a what I got an’ that we up here today so that you can know how to take care of what I’ma leave to you. So I won’t aks you no questions hurt your heart, but you got to trust me with the rest.”

Her left eye streaming, lips apout, Robyn nodded just barely and Ptolemy smiled. He pulled her up by her forearms until they were on their feet again, walking up to the top of the pedestrian roadway lined with fancy boutiques and stores.

There they came upon a gleaming white and gold store where, above the entrance, the name Mossa in red letters was inlaid across a band of sky-blue mosaic tiles.

“Mr. Grey!” an older man exclaimed.

At first Robyn assumed that he must be a Mexican.

“Mr. Mossa,” Ptolemy replied with equal enthusiasm, “long time no see.”

“How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

The shop was crowded with glass cases crammed full with jewelry, coins, and small objects that were from other times and other places. The rest of the room was overflowing with rows of statues, sculptures, paintings on wood, wall hangings, ancient carpets, and large items of gold and silver, marble and jade.

The white stone bust of a small child caught Robyn’s attention. The face seemed so innocent and wise.

“Julius Caesar,” Mossa said to the girl.

“Excuse me?”

“That is a bust of Caesar as a boy.”

“How they know how he looked when he was a kid?”

“He sat for the sculptor, of course,” Mossa said, and then he turned to Ptolemy again.

It slowly dawned upon Robyn what the aging Muslim had said.

“You mean, this thing was made when Caesar was just a little boy?” she asked his back.

“Yes,” Mossa said, turning again. “Everything in my shop is very, very old. I have a room filled with treasures from ancient tombs of Kush and Egypt.”

“This is Mr. Mossa, Robyn,” Ptolemy said. “Mossa, this is my adopted daughter, Robyn Small.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mossa said. “Your father is a great man with a long history. He understands beauty and the past. And of course his name has been legend for thousands of years.”

“Thank you,” Robyn said, not quite knowing why. “Your store is very beautiful.”

The Palestinian was short, like Ptolemy, and a bit stooped over, round but not fat; his smile was both beneficent and inviting. He wore a large yellow diamond on the index finger of his right hand and a ruby embedded in onyx on the pinky of his left. Robyn had never met anyone like him, had never been in a place like his shop.

“It has been a long time, Ptolemy,” the store owner said. “Fifteen years?”

“Maybe more,” Ptolemy agreed.

“I’ve never seen you in a suit before.”

“Bought it for a funeral,” Ptolemy said lightly.

“Whose?”

“Mine,” the old man said.

The men stood there for a moment, Ptolemy smiling and Mossa wondering about that smile.

“I think of you on the first day of every year,” Mossa said to break the silence. “I send up a prayer for you and hope that you are alive and well.”

“That must’a been what done it,” Ptolemy replied. “’Cause you know there ain’t a reason in the world a man’s bones should get as old as mine is. I’m ninety-one, be ninety-two soon—maybe.”

“There are trees that don’t live so long.”

Ptolemy took two dull gold coins from his pocket.

“I know you don’t have much interest in things only a hundred or so year old, but I thought . . .”

The antiquarian took the coins from Ptolemy’s hand and held them in his palm. With his other hand he took out a jeweler’s lens and studied the metal disks.

“I belong to a coin guild now,” he said, still staring at his palm. “We trade, back and forth. Sometimes an American dealer will come across ancient treasures that he cannot sell. Sometimes we trade.”

Mossa looked up at Ptolemy and both old men smiled. To Robyn it seemed that they were talking without words, communing like monks being passed messages from God.