Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Let me put that away someplace safe so we can take it to the drug sto’ copycat to see if they can make a good print of it,” she said, taking the fragile memory from the man’s thick black fingers.

After a while Ptolemy stopped watching Robyn’s every move. He could see that she knew what was important and that she looked into every corner and fold.

“Come on in, Mr. Grey,” Robyn called in the early evening.

The bathroom was sparkling, neat and clean. The blue tile floor was eroded in places, and there were stains and dings on the blue porcelain sink, but the bathtub was glistening white and the walls were a lovely if faded aqua.

“There’s water damage on the ceiling,” she said, “and I can’t wear no dress the next time I come. And look ...”

Robyn pushed the white ceramic handle on the toilet and the stained commode flushed for the first time in many years.

“You fixed the toilet?” he asked. “You must be like a plumber too.”

“No, I just cleaned it out and turned on the water, that’s all. It worked once it was clean.”

This made sense to Ptolemy. He went to sit on the edge of the tub and ran his fingers over the smooth white porcelain.

“There’s some leaks and stuff, but we can get somebody to fix all that.”

“Landlord won’t fix nuthin’,” Ptolemy said, peering closely enough at the porcelain to see the barest reflection of his dark face in the deep whiteness.

“I gotta go, Mr. Grey. It’s gettin’ late.”

“I never seen nuthin’ like this,” he said. “I don’t even remembah half of what it looked like in here. How did you know?”

“I jes’ cleaned. But I gotta go. Now you can go to the bathroom in your own house. I’ll come back day after tomorrow and we’ll start on your bedroom.”

“Oh no,” Ptolemy said. There was a big black moth fluttering in the center of his heart. “No. Best to leave well enough alone.”

“You need a bed, baby. A place where you can sleep up off the flo’.”

“No.”

“Uh-huh,” she sang. “Day aftah tomorrah I’m’a come back and we gonna tackle the bedroom together. Don’t worry, I won’t th’ow out nuthin’ you don’t want me to.”

“But this is enough, don’t you think?” Ptolemy asked, still running a hand over the cool ceramic rim.

“I got to go, Mr. Grey. Okay?”

“Okay.”

At the open door of the apartment Robyn and Ptolemy stood face-to-face. They both seemed a little confused. Finally she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, after which he put his hands on either side of her face and curled his fingers like clawless paws.

Ptolemy couldn’t speak because he had more than one thing to say. The first was that he didn’t want her to go into the bedroom. He didn’t need a bed. He didn’t want to be in that room, not ever. But he also wanted Robyn to come back and be there with him. Maybe she could clean the bathroom again.

She kissed him a second time and then walked away down the hall. When she got to the front door of the building she turned and waved before going out the door. He stood there for long minutes with the news and medieval recorder music behind him. He watched that closed door with many people on his mind: Robyn, and Coydog, and Reggie, who had been coming to his house for more than five years.

Then Reggie the man was standing next him in the hall but next to them was Reggie the corpse in the whitewashed pine coffin. The children were on the floor. Ptolemy wanted to call to them but couldn’t remember their names.

“Children shouldn’t be in the room wit’ dead peoples, Reggie,” he said into the empty corridor but also, in his mind, he was in the small bedroom of Niecie’s house where the dead man lay.

The front door to the hall came open and a woman the color of dark redwood came in carrying a bundle of envelopes and magazines. She looked familiar.

“Mr. Grey?” she said, walking toward him.

He usually slammed the door and threw the locks when someone came in the building but this time Ptolemy hesitated.

“Miss Dartman?”

Approaching him, the tall colored woman said, “I haven’t seen your face in almost two years, Mr. Grey. Sometimes I be droppin’ the mail in your slot and I think, ‘Maybe he’s dead in there.’”

“Not me. Old Man Death done lost my numbah, I think.”

The phrase was used by Coy McCann when someone hadn’t seen him for a while and assumed that he’d died. Almost all of Ptolemy’s automatic coherent sentences came from his old friend Coydog.

The tall woman smiled and handed Ptolemy a bundle of mail.

“I was outta town seein’ my brother for the last few days so I didn’t get the mail. Maybe I should give you back the key so that nice grandnephew of yours could collect it for you.”

“Reggie got hisself killed.”

“No!” Miss Falona Dartman cried. “How did that happen?”

“They lynched him. A mob drived by and kilt him.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Grey. He was ...” she said, and then sighed. “He was such a nice young man. Oh no. What are they doin’ to our young black men?”

“Killin’ ’em,” Ptolemy said. “What they always done.”

“Who’s gonna come take care of you now, Mr. Grey? You can’t be here all by yourself.”

“My great-granddaughter Robyn come from down Alabama, or someplace, to he’p me out. She cleaned up my bafroom today. Worked all day at it. All day long she cleaned and th’ew away garbage. But I’ma miss Reggie.”

“Was he married?”

Ptolemy nodded. “An’ they had some kids.”

“Oh no.”

Ptolemy placed the mail in a neat stack on Robyn’s lawn chair. Then he went into the bathroom, put the top lid down on the commode, and sat there. Robyn had brought new lightbulbs and screwed them into the seven sockets above the sink. The light was so white in there that it made him laugh. He was happy sitting on the toilet and watching the bathtub.

Now and then a curious roach would dart in and then scurry away again, daunted by the brightness of the room. Four times he went to the sink and turned the corroded spigots, just to see the water run. There was a leak at the base of the hot-water faucet, but the water dripped into the sink, causing no problem.

At midnight he took a shower. The nozzle could only muster a few sprays but it was enough to wash his body clean. He used an old T-shirt for a towel and another one for a bathrobe.

That night when he wrapped himself in the thin blanket under the south table Ptolemy had a feeling of giddiness that kept him up for what seemed to him like hours. He thought about Robyn’s ability to clean and polish and throw out things without hurting him or those things that he needed to keep. She was better than Reggie at understanding what was important.

A flute was playing on the all-night classical program and the newsmen and -women droned on. Ptolemy had trained himself not to listen when he was in his bed, but this night the background racket was a bother to him.

On other nights, before Robyn had come, Ptolemy shared space with the music and news. They were as much a part of the room as he was. His mind was like an open field over which these sounds and opinions passed unhindered. But on that night Ptolemy was thinking about the tragedy of Reggie and the blessing of Robyn. She was an orphan taken in and protected by, by, by Niecie. And the boy and baby girl were orphans too.

The flute scratched at these thoughts. The news commentators seemed to be trying to talk him out of the value of Reggie and Robyn, the boy and his baby sister. In the dimness he cursed the radio and the flittering shadows cast by the TV. Rage opened up in Ptolemy’s breast. The anger took over his mind like a swarm of biting fire ants. And then, when he was angry enough to break something, the passion ebbed away, leaving that old familiar open field.

It reminded him of a portal at the end of a long corridor behind the pulpit of Liberty Baptist Church. When he was a child and the minister’s sermon went overlong, he’d sneak away from the pews and walk down the long hall to that doorway. It was always ajar, emitting a cool breeze year-round, even in the summer heat. There was almost no light in there, but Li’l Pea could see the dim image of a white cross in the depths of the chamber. It was leaning against something dark and massive.

The child called Pity would walk up to the threshold of the sacred room and strain his eyes, trying to glean its tale.

Remembering this important, spiritual moment in his history, Ptolemy Grey drifted off into sleep.

In the dream he was trying to pull Reggie up out of his coffin, to shake his shoulders until the boy woke up. All around the casket were women seated in white folding chairs and dressed beautifully, mournfully, with hats and handkerchiefs and black gloves. Robyn and Niecie, Letta Golding and Shirley Wring and many others whom he knew but could not remember their names—all of them watched him. They hummed as he beseeched the boy to get up and walk and live. Beyond the casket was a window that looked out on a green lawn where the children Arthur and Letisha played. They laughed and chased each other. “Fall down! Fall down,” they sang.

In the morning Ptolemy ate one of the small pop-top cans of tuna that Robyn had brought back with the cleaning supplies. He visited his bathroom for over an hour, trying to think of how he could keep Robyn from going into the bedroom. He closed the bathroom door to keep out the sad viola solo and weather report. Then he sat on the commode, rubbing his hands and looking at the aqua walls.

Sitting there, he experienced what he called eternity. It was whenever he was in one place by himself and didn’t have to go anywhere else or answer to anybody.

“A moment like that,” Coy McCann had said, “like when you fishin’ or after you done made love with your woman and you smokin’ a cigarette while she sleep . . . that’s the kinda time that’s just so wonderful. That’s when you can think because you ain’t hungry or lustful or in it with somebody wanna waste yo’ time. You could be just sittin’ there by yourself and you see what you need to do, the way God do in eternity.”

These words came back to Ptolemy decades after Coydog was murdered and gone.

Ptolemy knew exactly what he had to do.

On the sink in the kitchen was the flimsy little box that held the plastic lawn bags Robyn used to throw out the detritus of Ptolemy’s bathroom.

When Ptolemy picked up the box a huge gutter-roach fell out and onto the sink. The black and brown and russet-red insect flipped from his back onto his legs and stood there on an old plate that Ptolemy hadn’t used or cleaned in over a decade. The old man slapped his hand down hard on the bug, but when he pulled back, the roach leaped in the air, spread his beetle-like wings, and flew toward the back of the kitchen.

Watching the strange bug flapping its way toward the towering boxes on his porch brought about a flutter in Ptolemy’s chest. His breath came quickly and he had to squat down so that he didn’t fall. He could feel the sweat sprouting on his brow and between his fingers. A painful burp brought the strong flavor of tuna up into his throat.

Ptolemy concentrated on the pain in his left knee.

“The great man say that life is pain,” Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. “That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit’ it. Now, if that ain’t the blues, I don’t know what is.”

The ache in Ptolemy’s knee felt deep and bloody. He ignored the quick breath and racing heart. All he knew was the pain and Coydog’s words.

“Why you always hang around that old man?” Titus Grey had asked his son on the porch one morning when the boy was going off to meet Coy to go fishing.

“He teachin’ me my ABC’s.”

“He don’t know no alphabet.”

“Yeah, he do.”

“Are you contradictin’ me, boy?” Titus asked.

“No, sir.”

“Then put down that pole and come on with me up in the woods. This is yam season and you don’t have time to be a fool.”

Hearing these words in his yester-ear, Ptolemy stood up straight. His knee and chest were fine. The huge roach was still flying, bat-ting its head against the small patch of window that was visible above the big boxes on the back porch. Music played and some man was talking about something far away, and Ptolemy went about searching for what he needed under the sink.

After a while he forgot what he was looking for. And so he went back to the living room and stood at the bedroom door, trying to remember what was so clear to him in the bathroom, before his war with the cockroach.

Finally he decided that the only thing to do was open the door to see if there was a clue inside.

The bedroom was dark, as it had been years before when he closed it up in order to forget about his life with Sensia. She was dead and buried but that room had been her memorial. She was put to rest in a whitewashed pine coffin like the one Niecie had for Reggie. Niecie’s mother, Ptolemy remembered, had gotten Sensie’s coffin and put her in the same room where they had Reggie for his wake . . .

There was a gray tarp covering the contents of Ptolemy’s abandoned bedroom. It loomed like a shifting desert under a cloudy, moonless night. Ptolemy stared at the fabric, remembering his true love. Thinking about her, he remembered what it was that he needed.

He went back into the kitchen and started pulling out furniture. Two small benches, a stone-top chrome-stalk table, a walnut tabletop and various boxes, bags, satchels, and one Hopalong Cassidy cowboy lunchbox that Reggie’s father had when he was a child.

After dragging all that junk into the living room, Ptolemy went into the closet and got his oldest possession: an oak yardstick that Coydog had given him when he was only five.

“This here yardstick will be the measure of your life, boy,” the old man had said.

“The what?”

“As long as you keep this here span wit’ you, I will be wit’ you.”

Ptolemy had never broken that three-foot rule. The name in red letters, BLUTCHER’S BUTCHER MARKET, had mostly rubbed off. The numbers and most of the increment lines had faded also. There was a chip at one corner of the dark wood and dents and gouges throughout. But Coydog’s gifts to Li’l Pea, both gifts, he had kept through the years.

With his stick in hand Ptolemy yanked open the door under the sink. He stuck the yardstick in there and pulled out the strong spiders’ webs laden with greasy dust. After rubbing the webs off on an old curtain that lay in a forgotten corner, Ptolemy reached in and took out the old steel ice hook he had from seventy years before. It was a vicious-looking device used to hook twenty-pound blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration was available in poor homes. Ptolemy and Peter Brock worked on a truck, driving up and down city streets delivering ice to the customers of Brock’s father, Minister Brock.

“What church your daddy preach at?” Ptolemy asked Peter on their first day.

“He ain’t no preacher,” Peter said. “My grandfather named him that so if you used his first name you had to respect him anyway.”