Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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.”

With his full strength Ptolemy swung down on the big plastic tarp covering Sensia’s room. The triple hook sunk deep. Using both hands, the ninety-one-year-old man began to pull. At first there was no give. It was as if he were pulling on the knob of a locked door. But Ptolemy Grey would not give up. He twisted his shoulders for torque, let his weight work against the heft of the covering. He pulled and yanked and tugged in staccato snatches.

All the while there was a symphony playing and a sports report spouting meaningless numbers and names.

Ptolemy didn’t listen. He went down to his knees, using all the strength in his spindly shoulders. He was about to take a rest when the plastic sheet begin to give. He stood up and away from the door, using both his strength and weight, and the tarp began to flow outward from the long-abandoned room.

The dry plastic gushed into the crowded living room like a huge reptilian tongue. Ptolemy pulled the hook out and sank it in again, dragging more of the gray sheet from the bedroom.

Again and again he dug his fang-shaped hook into the tarp, the plastic hissing like lizard skin against itself and along the floor. Ptolemy, sweating and laughing, his heart beating fast, pulled the entire covering from the bedroom. He fell to the floor under the mist of dust that had been raised. He hacked and laughed, sneezed and chuckled, rubbed his irritated eyes and tittered to himself.

“I did it,” he announced triumphantly. “I pulled that bastard outta there.”

For a while Ptolemy Grey lay there, half on the floor and half on the dusty gray tarp. He was breathing hard and laughing to himself, remembering people and things randomly, haphazardly. There was the time he and Keith Low shoveled coal on a steam train from Jackson to Memphis to pay their fare.

After Coydog had died Pity stayed in bed for two weeks. Sheriff Walters had come to ask Li’l Pea what he knew, but he didn’t say anything except that he didn’t know anything. It was all he could do to keep from crying while looking at the ugly blue veins that crossed back and forth over the sheriff’s nose.

“You know that I’m here to find them that killed your uncle, now, don’t ya, boy?” the middle-aged, portly white man asked.

“Yessuh.”

“You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”

“Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.

“All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”

Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.

“I don’t know nuthin’, Sheriff Walters,” Ptolemy said.

“Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”

“Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”

Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.

Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.

A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.

Li’l Pea looked away.

Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.

Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink to count the time away. He sat on the floor, watching the towels, to be sure that no maggot or worm found its way to him the way his father said that the worms made their ways into Coydog’s eyes after his brother, Lupo, had cut him down and buried him in a pauper’s grave behind the barbershop without even a stone to mark his passage.

He sat upon the tile floor, counting the drips and thinking about Reggie and Coy; both men lynched and buried and made food for bugs.

Whenever Ptolemy got hungry he would drink from the faucet. After a while the hunger went away. Through the door he could hear soft music and voices that he couldn’t understand. Underneath these calming sounds he thought he could make out the scuttling of bugs and the titter of rats. If he paid too much attention to these noises his heart pumped harder and his head got light. Sometimes, when he got too frightened, he’d fall asleep and then wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.