Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Like what?” Robyn demanded.

“Fever, nausea, diarrhea, pain,” the Eastern European said, her face flat and her voice matter-of-fact.

“Uncle, I don’t think that you should be doin’ this,” Robyn said after the nurse had gone.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s the only chance we got.”

“But you old,” the child complained. “You might could get so sick that you might could die.”

“I’ma die anyways,” he said. “But this way I won’t get so lost when I look around the room, I’ll have my double-u ara eye en gee for myself, and then I could turn on the thing, the thing, the thing . . . That thing there,” he said, pointing at the television.

Robyn knew what Ptolemy got like when he spoke too long or got excited. If he went on much longer he’d stop making any sense at all and get frustrated and then sad.

“Okay, Uncle Grey,” she said, “but that doctor said that this medicine would probably kill you.”

Ptolemy was looking at his hands by then. He was wondering once again why words failed him after just a few sentences.

That night the place on his left arm where the nurse had injected him started to burn. He didn’t tell Robyn, though. He knew that the girl could stop the nurse from coming if she really wanted to.

Olga came again the next day, and that night Ptolemy’s arm seethed all the way to his shoulder.

“Did you live on a farm?” he asked her on the third day as she injected the medicine.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “How did you know that?”

“You could see the country in people’s eyes,” he said. “It’s like deep skies and long times’a bein’ quiet.”

Olga Slatkin smiled at her charge and then frowned.

“How haff you been feeling, Mr. Grey?”

Robyn was in the living room, watching the TV, because she didn’t like seeing him given his medicine.

“My arms burn some,” he said.

“Do you vant me to stop?”

“No, baby. I could take the pain. I seen Coy dance on fire, but he never told, never.”

By Thursday the pain was in both arms, his chest, and his head too. On Friday, when Shirley Wring came for a visit, Robyn had to turn her away.

“Uncle Grey got a fever,” Robyn told the older woman. “He says that maybe you could come back next week. He’s real sick and cain’t get out of bed.”

Shirley Wring took in these words as she stood there, staring at the teenager.

“Why don’t you like me, child?” Shirley asked at last.

“He really is sick,” Robyn complained. “I ain’t lyin’ to you.”

“I believe you, but you still don’t like me and I don’t know what it is I done to make you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Miss Wring. I don’t even think about you at all.”

“See? Now that’s just rude. Why you wanna be rude to me? I’m your uncle’s friend.”

“He not my real uncle,” the woman-child said to the woman. “But that’s what it is. He don’t know who he lookin’ at or what he sayin’ half the time. People wanna take his money or his things. He paid your utility bill and now you come by all the time.”

Shirley Wring smiled then and nodded. She walked into the living room, noticing that the door to Ptolemy’s bedroom was closed.

“I told you that he cain’t get outta his bed,” Robyn said, a strain of grief in her young voice.

“I ain’t gonna bother him,” Shirley told the girl.

The older woman sat down on a maple chair in front of a TV tray that Ptolemy sometimes used as a table for intimate teas with his friend.

“It was my phone bill,” Shirley said. “I asked him for five dollars and he gave me ten. But I offered him this to hold.”

She placed her faded cherry-red purse on the TV tray and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took the piece of pink tissue paper which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large green stone. This she handed to Robyn.

The girl could see that the metal was gold and the stone was precious. She had seen nice things in magazines, on TV shows, and through thick, bulletproof glass.

“Cabochon emerald,” Shirley Wring said.

After fondling the stone a moment or two Robyn held it out to Shirley, but the half-blind woman would not take it.

“My great-grandmother stoled it outta her ex-master’s house in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s bluecoats freed the slaves,” Shirley said in a tone of voice that was obviously quoting family lore. “She told her son that even though the ring was worth a whole lifetime for a poor black family that he should keep it as a treasure that stood for our freedom. My grandfather was named Bill Hollyfield, but he changed his name to Wring to honor his mother’s gift to him.

“I want you to give that ring to your uncle and tell him to get bettah and that I want him to be well because he has been like a real man to me when I was down past my last dollar.”

Robyn felt the gravity of the old woman’s gift like a stone in her chest. She wanted to return Shirley’s family name and history but the old woman’s wounded eyes stopped her.

“I cain’t take this from you, Miss Wring.”

“It’s not for you, sugah. It’s for Mr. Ptolemy Grey. It’s me tellin’ him how much that ten dollahs he give me meant.”

“But this precious,” Robyn said. “This is worth much more’n that.”

“No it ain’t, baby.”

Shirley rose and touched the girl’s cheek.

“If he get real sick an’ might die, will you let me see him?”

These words brought Robyn to tears. She sat down on the well-made white bed, crying on the emerald ring in her hand. When she finally raised her head, Shirley had gone and closed the door behind her.

Just after Olga Slatkin gave Ptolemy his final injection Robyn had to help her hold the old man down. He was delirious, shouting unintelligible words and writhing in his big bed.

“Coy! Coy!” the old man shouted.

“What’s he sayin’?” Robyn cried as she held down his surprisingly strong right arm.

“He’s not making sense,” the Eastern European woman said. “Hold him for a moment and he vill calm down.”

A minute later Ptolemy slumped down in his bed, unconscious, hardly breathing.

“It is always like this after last shot,” Olga said. “They go to sleep for three or four days and then they wake up, most of the time.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of the time’?” Robyn cried.

“He is sick. This medicine is supposed to help, but vit some people it does not vork.”

“He wasn’t sick before you give him these shots.”

“But vy vood Dr. Borman tell me to give shots if he vas not sick?”

While the women talked, Ptolemy awoke on a grassy hill above a stream that flowed over big stones and made the sound of children’s laughter. He smiled and stood up without pain or strain. He wasn’t old or young or concerned with being old or young. The sun shone brightly upon his head and there were white clouds here and there. The sunlight was so powerful that it burned his face, but he didn’t care about that. The day was a particular one he remembered from his childhood. The river was the Tickle, and Coydog McCann was just a ways up from where he now stood.

“He wasn’t sick,” Robyn said somewhere beyond the blue, “before you give him the shots.”

“I cannot tell you anything more than vat they told me,” the plain-faced European country girl replied.

When Ptolemy scratched his head his fingers found hair up there. This seemed odd to him, but what difference did hair make anyway?

Coy was sitting on a tree stump by the water, holding a homemade bamboo pole with a twine line.

When the old man (who didn’t look nearly so old anymore) looked up, he frowned for a second and then smiled. Ptolemy had forgotten the two canine teeth that his friend had lost. It made his smile seem deeper than the average man’s grin.