Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“No, it’s all right. I actually wanted to sit quiet and read some.”

“Are you tired’a me bein’ here, Uncle?”

“No, baby. You put a fire in my mind and love at my doorstep.” He’d heard the words somewhere before, maybe in a song.

Robyn left at six o’clock and by six-ten Ptolemy was in the living room closet, working his crowbar on the back end floor. There was a slot there made specially by Ptolemy almost five decades before. His apartment was on the ground floor. Below the floor was three feet of concrete. There he had carved out a place for Coydog’s treasure. It took him a while to jimmy the jury-rigged trapdoor but after some work he flipped it over. The ancient hinges screamed and parts of the wood floor splintered and popped.

Ptolemy wondered where all the dust came from. The box he hid from himself was covered with a quarter-inch of thick gray soot.

He used the iron key to open the chest but he didn’t even touch the bag inside. He knew the gold was there, coins that went back all the way to the Civil War and before, some used, some like new. But it wasn’t his treasure. He was just the guardian, obeying a long-ago command from Coy the thief, martyr, and partisan.

He didn’t need to fondle the gold but he took out an oiled cloth that was wrapped around a blue-black .25 pistol—which still gleamed darkly.

The grin on Ptolemy’s lips was not welcomed by him. He had never shot even a rabbit. But he smirked at the gun, turning it over and over in his hand.

Hello?” Hilly Brown said into the receiver.

“That you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“Papa Grey? Hey. Listen . . . I’m sorry for bein’ rude the other day. Mama told me to call you up and apologize.”

“Why haven’t you called, then?”

“I’ont know,” the brooding, bulbous, and brown man-child said. “I mean, I don’t know why I didn’t. I’ma pay you back, okay?”

“Why you take my money in the first place?”

“I didn’t think you would realize. You acted like you was drunk or high or sumpin’. So I thought it would be all right.”

“All right to steal?” Ptolemy asked while he opened and clenched his right hand slowly.

His knuckles hurt every time the fist got tight—but not that bad. His fiery mind was still in an old man’s body. He was weak as a boy and old as a man can get, but not as bad as he was—not half as bad.

You know everything,” Li’l Pea said to Coy one day when Coy had told him about George Washington Carver and the peanut.

“No, child,” Coy said in a surprisingly gentle tone, “it’s you know more’n me.”

Li’l Pea giggled and said, “Me? I’on’t hardly know nuthin’.”

“That might be, but still you know more’n me.”

“Like what?” the child asked, not realizing the impossibility of his question.

“You know how crickets smell and what pebbles sound like when they fall on the ground around yo’ feet. You see deep in the sky without havin’ to look or think about it, and you love your mama an’ yo’ daddy so much that they would die if God took you from them.”

“Don’t you know all them things?” the boy asked, sobered by the seriousness of the older man’s words.

“Like a suit’a clothes,” Coydog said. “I got them things like a new suit just off the rack, but they fit you like skin.”

“I don’t get you, Coy,” the boy said.

“The older you get the more you live in the past,” Coy intoned like a minister introducing his sermon. “Old man like me don’t have no first blue sky or thunderstorm or kiss. Old man like me don’t laugh at the taste of a strawberry or smell his own stink and smile. You right there in the beginnin’ when everything was new and true. My world is made outta ash and memories, broken bones and pain.

“Old man see the same things and walk the same roads he know so well that he don’t even have to open his eyes to make his way. Right and wrong two sides’a the same coin for me, but for you there’s only right. Somebody say sumpin’ an’ you hear ’em just like they say.”

“But what do you hear, Uncle Coy?”

“I hear everybody I evah knew talkin’ ’bout things nobody know no more. I hear preachers an’ judges, white men and black. I hear ’em talkin’ ’bout tomorrow when I know that was a long time ago.”

Ptolemy the old man considered his uncle. Maybe that’s when Coy made up his mind to rob Jersey Manheim. Maybe he was so tired of following the same path that he decided to jump off the road and make it through the wilderness one more time.

Papa Grey?” Hilly was saying through the line. “Papa Grey, you there?”

Ptolemy realized that he was drifting again; but not the way he had when he was feebleminded. Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.

“Was you an’ Reggie friends?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.

“We cousins, man.”

“But was you friends? Did you go out drinkin’ together? Did you talk?”

“Sure, we talked. We lived in the same house until he moved out with Nina.”

“But,” Ptolemy asked, dimly reminded of his first phone conversation with the boneheaded boy, “did you share your secrets wit’ him an’ did he tell you what was what?”

“I ain’t got no secrets, Papa Grey. I’ma man, not no child.”

“Did you tell Niecie why I didn’t wanna let you back in my house?”

After a long, angry silence, Hilly said, “No.”

“We all got secrets, boy. An’ the older we get the more secrets we got. Child tell ya anything, but a man just sip his drink an’ keep his mouf shet. But he might have one friend he talk to. Was you that friend to Reggie?”

“No.”

“Do you know who that friend was?”

The silence no longer shivered with anger. Ptolemy could almost hear his taciturn great-nephew thinking.

“Billy Strong,” Hilly said at last.

“Who’s he?”

“He run the gym on Slauson and Twenty-third.”

“Him an’ Reggie was close?”

“Yes, sir. They’d get together all the time. All the time.”

“An’ he work at the gym?” Ptolemy asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“All day?”

“Every day, Saturday and Sunday too.”

Ptolemy Grey hadn’t really slept after he’d awakened from the coma. He’d close his eyes and enter into a world both new and old to him. There he’d talk to Coy along the Tickle River and carry boxes of medicine in France for soldiers, most of whom were destined to die. He delivered ice and swept streets, made love to Sensia Howard so hard sometimes that he’d limp for a day or two afterward.

One night, with his eyes closed and his mind imagining, he inhabited his old feebleminded self, sitting in front of the TV. The black woman, who looked like a white woman passing for black, was talking about the war.

“More than a hundred Iraqis died in a suicide blast in the city of Tuz Khormato today. The suicide bomber set off his truck bomb in a crowded marketplace at midday.”

“Excuse me, lady,” Ptolemy said.

For a moment it seemed that she’d continue her report, not hearing his interruption, but then she turned and looked at him, into his living room. It was the old living room filled with stacks of moldering and unread newspapers, furniture, and trash.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Mr. Grey,” Ptolemy said formally.

The woman looked as if she wanted to turn away from him but found that she could not. She touched her ear as Ptolemy had often watched her do in the old days when he didn’t understand hardly anything. She touched it, but her ear didn’t help her change the subject or look away.