Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

At one point he looked up and asked, “Why you run away like that, girl?”

Robyn heard this question and understood its meaning. She brought her hands to her throat and made a sound that had feeling but no meaning.

“I sleep on a sofa, Uncle,” she said. “Hilly try to be gettin’ up in there wit’ me almost ev’ry night he home.”

“That boy’s a thief.”

“Niecie nice,” Robyn said. “She took me in, but nobody evah offered me a bed and open they doors and showed me their money and said take whatevah you want.

“I loved my mama, but she was wit’ just about ev’ry man she met. Sometimes she tell me to go stay wit’ my friends ’cause she didn’t want her boyfriends lookin’ at me an’ thinkin’ she was that old.”

“I don’t know why not,” Ptolemy said. “You a lovely girl. They cain’t help but look at you.”

“I wanna stay here an’ live wit’ you, Uncle.”

“Me too. I wanna stay here wit’ you too.”

“An’ I want you to buy me a bed an’ some sheets an’ pillows and blankets, but I don’t want your money. We gonna start puttin’ your money in a bank account and get you a special bank card so you can buy the bed and then I can sleep in it.”

“But you got to wear clothes so I cain’t like your legs like I did at that other place,” Ptolemy said.

“You don’t like to look at my legs, Uncle?” Robyn said, the sly smile returning to her lips.

“I don’t like to like to look at your legs, child. That was a long time ago, and now is now.”

So, Mr. Grey, you wish to start a debit account along with the accounts you already have?” Andrea Tolliver asked, her smiling black face as insincere as the white sheriff who wanted Li’l Pea to testify against the men who had lynched his uncle. She was a dark-skinned black woman with bronze hair and golden jewelry around her neck and wrists and on at least three fingers.

“Whatevah Robyn say is what I want,” Ptolemy said in a tone that he knew made him sound sure and smart.

“But do you want a debit account?” the banker asked. “You already have an account that automatically pays your bills.” She glanced at the computer screen before her. “It is overdrawn, however.”

“I need to buy a bed, an’ Robyn tell me that you just cain’t take all your money into a sto’ an’ put it down ’cause there’s thieves all around you.”

Ptolemy took a moment to look around the room from his seat at the bank officer’s desk.

“Are you looking for someone, Mr. Grey? Maybe some teller you know?”

“Shirley Wring,” he said, a smile rising to his lips. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

“No . . . no Shirley works here.”

“My uncle been savin’ his extra money in a box in his closet,” Robyn said then. “I told him that that wasn’t safe and that he could maybe get a little bit’a interest if he brought it here. I’m taking care’a him but it’s his money and so I brought him to his bank.”

Ptolemy watched the bank officer’s eyes scrutinize the girl. He’d seen older black women do this to young ones before.

Andrea Tolliver was older now and she didn’t have to lie to young men on the street about her address and telephone numbers anymore. She knew that Robyn could talk an old man out of his money.

“Miss?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yes, Mr. Grey?”

“If this child wanted to steal my money we wouldn’t be here.”

Watching her watching him, Ptolemy knew that he had read her right, that he had said the right words.

“We can put the money in your savings account, Mr. Grey, and issue you a debit card. Do you want your, um, niece to have a card too?”

“No,” Robyn said. “No. I don’t need one. This is for my uncle, not for me.”

Ms. Tolliver smiled at the child then. It was her last test to make sure that the girl was not trying to rob an old man.

Ptolemy gazed paternally at Tolliver, and then he grinned.

“Something funny, Mr. Grey?” the banker asked.

“Here we all are,” he said, repeating word for word something that Coydog McCann had said long ago, “somebody gettin’ on the boat an’ somebody gettin’ off, and a captain in the middle makin’ sure we all get where we goin’ to.”

Robyn took Ptolemy’s hand and smiled for him as Tolliver frowned, wondering what he meant.

Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey.”

Robyn turned quickly on the crowded street. She put her hand in her purse, ready, Ptolemy knew, to protect him with her edge, her six-inch blade.

He heard his name and wondered back through the voices that called him and the things they had to say.

“Mr. Grey,” Felix Franz the German baker would say to him every morning when he came in to buy his coffee and coffee cake on the way to the maintenance office where he and his partners got their orders for the day.

He just said the name and that was the greeting. But this was the voice of a woman, not a German man; not Melinda Hogarth or Sensia or proper Minister Brock.

He turned to see the name-caller and laughed.

“It’s okay, Robyn. That’s my friend. Double-u ara eye en gee.”

She wore tapered black slacks today and a turquoise T-shirt. She still had the green sun visor and the faded cherry-red bag.

“Mr. Grey,” she said again.

“Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said, gleeful to see her and reveling in the fact that he could remember a name, a face, and something he wanted. “Robyn, this is a woman who offered me a treasure.”

“Uh-huh,” Robyn grunted, and he could see in her the suspicion that had shown on Tolliver’s face.

All around them black and brown people were moving. Shirley Wring’s occluded eyes were gazing at Ptolemy.

“This is Robyn, my niece,” Ptolemy said.

“Your uncle is the treasure,” Shirley said. “He helped me out when I couldn’t pay my phone bill and wouldn’t even take my ring for a guarantee.”

“You could pay him back now,” Robyn said rudely.

“She don’t have to pay me,” Ptolemy said. “She offered me a treasure. You know that was on’y the second time in all my life that somebody offered me a true treasure.”

“I could take you two to lunch,” the small, gray-brown colored woman offered.

“We got to go home.”

“No, baby,” Ptolemy said. “Shirley here, she, I mean, I been comin’ ovah here . . . lookin’.”

“Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”

Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.

“I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”

“So we all gonna have lunch, right?” Ptolemy asked, looking into the brown and gray eyes of Shirley Wring.

They had sandwiches at a Subway chain store. Shirley paid for the meal.

She talked about when she moved to Los Angeles from someplace up north. When Ptolemy asked her if she was from California she looked away from him and said, “No. I’m from someplace else.”

“You talk real nice,” Ptolemy said, realizing that he had asked an uncomfortable question. “Did you come here to go to school?”

“My mama wanted me to get a education but I met this high-yellah fellah named Eric and I couldn’t think about nuthin’ else.”

“Robyn gonna go to college in the fall,” Ptolemy said, his voice loud to cover all the things he didn’t know.

“Junior college,” Robyn said.

“Junior college is college too,” Shirley declared.