Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“How long?”

“If you were anybody else I’d say two days. But at the outside it’s two weeks.”

“And then you cut me up like a slaughtered calf.”

“Science will benefit from your sacrifice, Mr. Grey. Your niece and her generation will not have to suffer as you have.”

Ptolemy smiled at that.

“I’m leaving you a stronger pill,” Dr. Ruben continued. “And Robyn has my phone number. Whenever you feel hot, take a pill immediately. She will call me if you begin to fail.”

“I went to Africa in my sleep.”

“You did?”

“I saw it. Not today, but two thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Degradation, by Coy McCann’s reckoning.”

Dr. Ruben didn’t say anything to that. Ptolemy closed his eyes, then realized that he must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them again Robyn was sitting there next to him, holding his hands.

Satan was nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, baby,” he said.

“You look like a baby when you sleepin’, Papa Grey.”

“I got two weeks.”

She kissed his fingers.

“What day is it?” Ptolemy asked.

“Tuesday.”

“I got to go to Niecie’s house at noon . . . Alone.”

“Okay.”

“You been takin’ that gold to the safe-deposit box?”

“Yeah. A little bit at a time, like you told me to do. Shirley Wring come by in the mornin’ to sit wit’ you and I went to the bank. And then I got Beckford and Billy Strong an’ we went to talk to Antoine Church.”

“How soon before all that gold in the box?” Ptolemy asked.

“Three days. It’a be done by Thursday.”

“I’ma sleep now, baby.”

“Can I lie down next to you?”

“Will you tell me sumpin’?”

“What?”

“Anything, child.”

When I was a little girl my mama an’ my daddy and me was happy,” she whispered into the old man’s ear. “We lived in a house that was blue and white and had flowers in the front yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Mama took in li’l black children for daycare, and Daddy worked on a farm outside’a town. He coulda had a bettah job but he liked to be outside and to take time off between the seasons.

“Mama had a baby boy, and Daddy was so happy that he went up and down the block tellin’ everybody that he had a son named Alexander and that his son was gonna do what Alexander the Great did. But then, only a few weeks aftah Al was born, he got somethin’ in his chest and he was sick for five months.

“I think if he had just died right off that it wouldn’ta been so hard on Daddy an’ Mama. But he took off’a work and she went wit’ him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.

“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.

“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.

“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.

“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.

“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.

“Papa Grey, are you awake?”

The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.

“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”

While Robyn spoke, Ptolemy could hear himself breathing like a man asleep. He was asleep, but still he heard every word. He imagined the young girl eating peaches and the old man falling in love with her. This seemed natural. Children were there to be loved and looked after and cared for; sometimes you even had to sacrifice your life in order that a child might live.

After a while the girl talked about moving to Los Angeles and about Niecie and Hilliard and Reggie, who was an orphan too. The sleeping man listened with part of his mind, but he was also thinking about Letisha and Arthur and how Reggie was like a son to him.

Now he was an old man and there were children to look after, and one child to avenge.

Ptolemy smiled in his sleep, thinking all the way back to that day the white minister had shaken his hand. He had given that arrogant old white man something, and he had taken something away from him too.

In the morning the sleeping but still-conscious man opened his eyes. Robyn slept next to him, her arm flung over his chest. He rose up on a painful elbow and kissed the child’s forehead. She opened her eyes and hugged him.

“Do you love me, Papa Grey?” she asked.

“More than anything . . . ever.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when he showed up on her doorstep at 12:14 on Tuesday afternoon.

Robyn had hired him a limousine and a driver, a brown man with a Spanish accent named Hernandez. She had wanted to come with Ptolemy, but he told her that she needed to put Coydog’s treasure where nobody could get at it but her.

“But why you got to go see Niecie so bad?” she’d asked him.

“For Reggie.”

“Reggie’s dead, Papa Grey.”

“Ain’t nobody full dead until no one remembah they name. Don’t forget that, girl—as long you remembah me, I’ma be alive in you.”

Robyn crying, it seemed to Ptolemy, was a woman at war with herself. She couldn’t let herself go completely, but the tears rolled down her left eye, and her beautiful lips trembled.

He tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away.

“Robyn.”

“Your car prob’ly outside, Papa Grey. You bettah be goin’.”

This your family we going to?” Hernandez the driver asked Ptolemy on the way to Niecie’s house.

“Yes, sir. Real blood family too. The kind you can’t shake off.”

The driver, a broad-faced man, laughed.

“What’s your name?” Ptolemy asked from the backseat.

“Hernandez.”

“Well, Mr. Hernandez—”

“No, Mr. Grey, not Mr. Hernandez, just Hernandez. I like that name.”

“You from around here, Hernandez?”

“Fifty years here,” he said. “Forty-eight, really. When I was seven my parents came up from a farm in the south of Mexico.”

“You still speak Spanish?”

“No. I just got this accent is all. I know some words.”

“Remembah back in the old days when we all lived together?” Ptolemy asked. “Mexicans, Negroes, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese on the one side—”

“And white people on the other,” Hernandez said, finishing the litany.

Both men laughed.

“What happened to us?” Ptolemy asked.

“White man shined a light on us and we froze like deer in the road. After that we all went crazy and started tearin’ each other apart.”

Ptolemy frowned and sat back in his seat. Even the Devil’s fire couldn’t help him to understand why what both he and Hernandez knew was true.

Hernandez dropped him at Niecie’s door with a business card so that he could call if it was time to go home and the driver was off somewhere. The black man and the brown shook hands over the seat.

“Nobody evah put us on the news, huh, Hernandez?”

“What you mean, Mr. Grey?”

“Us gettin’ along ain’t news.”

Hernandez laughed and got out to open the door for his client.

Niecie cried happily and Ptolemy walked in the house. Nina was there with her children. Hilliard was on a couch in the corner, watching a small TV in a pink plastic case.

“Come ovah here and say hi to Pitypapa,” Niecie said to her son.

“Hey,” Hilly said, going so far as to turn his eyes away from the screen.

“Go on back to your TV, boy,” Ptolemy said, waving dismissively.

Niecie and Nina sat with their elder and talked and drank lemonade. Niecie was nervous, not wanting to ask for the money she had already come to expect, had already planned on.

They talked for a while about relatives that Ptolemy had only recently remembered. Many members of his family and his extended family had died. They stopped bringing him to funerals because he seemed to get upset during the services.

“That’s why I send Reggie ovah to your house in the first place, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “You’d get upset and mad and you didn’t seem to know where you was at.”

Ptolemy appraised his grandniece’s attempt to convince him, and maybe convince herself, that he really owed her something, that she had been there to help him when he couldn’t help himself. He resented her trying to make him feel indebted, but on the other hand he did owe her what she said. She had sent Reggie, and Reggie had tried his best. She had sent Robyn to him.

“You know, one time Reggie lost his job at the supermarket because he wouldn’t come in because he had to take you to the doctor’s,” Niecie was saying. “I told him that blood was thicker than water and that we owed you somethin’. I told him that I’d put him up and feed him and the onlyest thing I expected was that he took care of you.”

“Do you have a checking account at the bank, Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.

“Wha?”

“A bank account. Do you have a bank account?”

“No. I mean, I know I should have one but they need you to maintain a three-hundred-dollar minimum, an’ some months here I cain’t even find three dimes in my coin purse.”

“I’ma get Robyn to go to the bank wit’ you an’ start a account with nine hunnert dollars,” Ptolemy said.

Hilly turned his head away from the TV to look at the old man.

“Then I’ma set it up to put eight hunnert dollars in there ev’ry mont’.”

“You only get two hunnert an’ sumpin’ a week from retirement,” Hilly said.

“That ain’t all I evah got, boy,” Ptolemy replied. “Maybe if you didn’t steal from me right off the bat, you’da learnt sumpin’.”

“How come you let Robyn do your business, Uncle?” Niecie asked. “You know that girl ain’t nuthin’ but trouble. I only took her in outta the goodness’a my heart. But she’s bad news. You cain’t trust her. An’ you know I’m the one sent her ovah there in the first place.”

Ptolemy saw trouble in Niecie’s eyes, trouble he’d lived with all through his life. He saw lawyers and lawsuits, maybe even threats and drive-bys coming from his one slip.

Ptolemy got to his feet, steadying himself by placing a hand on the back of the chair.

“Where you goin’, Pitypapa?”

“I’ma leave.”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh yeah, honey. I’m gone. I can see from talkin’ to you that there ain’t nuthin’ but trouble in the future. I’ma cut that off right here and now. I shoulda known that givin’ you a little sumpin’ would make you want everything.”

“No. I was just warnin’ you ’bout that girl.”

“Not another word, Niecie. Not one more word or I will cut you off without a dime, without evah speakin’ to you evah again.”

Niecie Brown saw the iron and the clarity in her uncle’s eyes. She saw the intelligence surging up in him, the certainty in his words, and even in the way he stood.

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” she said.

“Nina,” Ptolemy said.

“Yes, Mr. Grey.”

“Come on out on the porch with me,” he said. “Hilly.”

“Huh?”

“Bring me an’ Nina two chairs out there.”

The boy frowned.

“Do what your uncle tells you to do, Hilliard,” Niecie commanded.

Letisha and Artie could be heard from the inside of the house, jumping and shouting. The tinny speaker of the pink TV made unintelligible noises while adult footsteps sounded at unexpected intervals. Helicopters roved the skies over South Central L.A. as brown and black folks passed beneath the aerial scrutiny. Ptolemy saw Hernandez leaning against the hood of his car across the way, while little Mexican children played around him on a curbside patch of grass.

Ptolemy thought about the world he lived in. It seemed to him that he had died and was resurrected twenty years later in an old man’s body, but with the sly mind of a fox or a coyote. He was an ancient predator among great-bodied herbivores, under a desert sky filled with metal creatures that had passed down from man.

“Why you smilin’, Mr. Grey?” Nina asked.

“You know, Nina, you are probably the most beautiful woman I have evah seen in ninety years.”

Reggie’s lovely young widow smiled and looked away.

“Mr. Grey!”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I had a wife named Sensia.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“And she was a beautiful girl. But not as beautiful as you.”

Nina turned back to the old man, wondering with her gaze where he wanted to go with this line of flattery. “Really?”

“Oh yeah. And Reggie loved you too. He loved you so much that when he found out that some other man had caught your eye he decided to take you down to San Diego so that he didn’t have to share all that loveliness.”

Nina’s smile froze. Her head moved back an inch.

“What?” she asked.

“I got a trust in the bank,” Ptolemy said. “It’s set aside for my family. There’s money for your chirren’s education and their wed-din’ days.”

Nina’s expression changed again. Ptolemy wouldn’t let her get a bead on his intentions.

“Yeah,” he said. “And I made a gift for Reggie.”

He took an old gold coin from his pocket. The date on the coin read 1821.

“This here twenty-dollar gold piece. It’s worf five thousand dollars or more to a collector. I got twenty’a them for Reggie. He told me to hold them for you.”

Nina brought both hands to her mouth.