Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“My name is Ginger,” the woman in the vision said.

“Tell me, Ginger, what are you talkin’ about twenty-four hours a day?”

“The news, Mr. Grey. It’s the news.”

“What news?”

“There’s a war going on. People are dying.”

“Who’s the enemy? Is it Hitler again?”

“We aren’t quite sure who the enemy is. That’s what makes this war so hard.”

“If we don’t know who we fightin’, then how can we fight ’em?”

“We . . . ,” she said, and paused. “We . . . we aim our weapons at them and when they become frightened and take out their guns we know who they are.”

“I don’t get it, Ginger.”

“Me neither, Mr. Grey.”

“How can a man have a enemy an’ fight that enemy and still not know who he is?” Ptolemy asked, proud of his ability to string his words together like a necklace of great big black Hawaiian pearls.

“Haven’t you ever heard of Zorro?” Ginger asked.

“The masked man?”

“Yes, he was a man who hid his face and struck against his enemies.”

Ptolemy’s stomach grumbled. It was a deep, hungry sound that surprised him. He opened his eyes in the bed, realizing that sleep was no different than wakefulness and that he hadn’t eaten all day.

A groan and then a whimper scurried at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that it was this sound, and not his stomach, that had pulled him away from Ginger. He climbed out of the bed in the dark room and crept toward the door.

He peeked through the crack and saw that it was Robyn moaning. She was naked, on her back, and the boy was above her, his arms at the side of her head, his middle going up and down like the oil-well derricks in Baldwin Hills pumping the oil out of the ground.

“Oil is the earth’s blood,” Coy had told Li’l Pea one day. “Men cut deep into the world’s skin an’ suck out the blood like it belong to them. That’s why they’s earthquakes and tidal waves, because the earth is our mother, but she don’t like our ways.”

Robyn’s feet went up straight and trembled and she said something that had no real words. The boy moved faster and grunted, and she took his face in her hands. They gazed at each other in the murky room; a candle set on top of the TV was the only light; then Beckford fell on his side next to the girl and kissed her cheek. They whispered in the darkness, stroking each other’s face and head.

Ptolemy watched them as if from a great distance, maybe even through time itself. After a while, when their hands came to rest and he knew that they were asleep he went back to his bed and closed his eyes, finding Ginger there waiting for him, ready to continue their conversation about the invisible, nameless enemy and the war waged against him.

When Ptolemy came out of the bedroom, at six in the morning, Beckford was already gone. Robyn was sprawled in her bed with her mouth agape and left breast exposed. Ptolemy pulled the blankets up to her chin and went into the kitchen to boil water in an old tin saucepan for instant coffee and to think about his last days.

He sat down at the small table, one of the pieces of furniture he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out. It was at that table where he and Sensia Howard had their morning visit for so many years. If he looked down, he felt her presence, and then he’d look up, expecting to see her.

“I’ll be back later,” she’d always say. “Don’t wait.”

But he did wait for her . . . even after she died and had gone for good. That was the beginning of his descent into confusion. Many a morning he’d awaken, looking for her. Some days he didn’t remember that she was dead until afternoon. He could see this all clearly now with the Devil’s medicine running in his veins.

“All them years wasted,” he said to himself, sipping the hot coffee and wishing he had a cigarette.

He walked out to his gated porch that opened onto a concrete backyard. It was a large space, a forty-foot-by-forty-foot square of bleached, synthetic stone. There was a wobbly redwood fence along the back, twelve-foot-high foot-wide slats that leaned and teetered in the slightest breeze. Three apartments opened onto the prison-like yard, but no one ever went there. Ugly red-brick buildings rose on every side. Looking up, he could see small patios jutting out from the upper floors, gated by iron bars and for the most part forgotten. These were used to house bicycles and crates, a place to dry hand-washed laundry and for rusted-out barbecue grills.

A middle-aged woman was sitting outside, six stories up. She was smoking and staring out.

Ptolemy watched her for many minutes, but she didn’t look down. The years flashed across his mind’s eye while he waited for the mature woman, who was young enough to be his daughter, to look down on him. In that time, women had loved him and men had cursed him. He’d been seduced by his friend Major’s wife, LeAnne. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, something LeAnne did all the time. Major never knew, or maybe he didn’t care to know.

Sensia saw it the second Ptolemy walked through the door.

“Who is it?” she asked him. He hadn’t taken off his coat yet.

“Who is what?”

“Her.”

“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, Sensie. I just been down at the bar with Ralph and them.”

“It’s LeAnne, ain’t it?” Her rage was cold and fierce, not a human fury but that of an animal who knows no fear or reason.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Sensia Howard. You the one might flit off with a man at the drop of a hat.”

Her silence was worse than her questions or insights. Ptolemy, standing in that concrete yard, could still feel the wrath coming off of his first true love.

He didn’t know what to say, so he left. He already felt bad about Major. LeAnne had just offered him a drink, and the next thing he knew they were on the checkered sofa of Major’s house, rutting and laughing, stopping to drink wine from time to time.

And now that Sensia was mad, he left L.A. and went out to Riverside, where he took a room and got a job at the gas station. That was Tuesday. He knew Sensia would never love him again. He knew that he broke a pact by sleeping with his friend’s wife. Between Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning he downed a pint of sour-mash whiskey each night, sinking into a stupor rather than falling asleep.

Sensia was at his door that Saturday morning. She wouldn’t say how she’d found him out. The only person he told was George Fixx, who lived in San Francisco, and George swore that he never told anyone.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Sensia asked at his door.

The landlady was pacing downstairs because she had a strict rule that no women were allowed in her by-the-week rooms. But Sensia had pushed past Mrs. Tinman and gone right to Ptolemy’s room, number six.

She looked bad. There were bags under her eyes and her skin was dry. Her hair wasn’t even brushed, and she was wearing pants and a blouse that didn’t match.

“You didn’t want me no mo’, Sensie.”

“I might not want you here and there, Ptolemy Grey, but I need you. I need you to stay alive. You know that. You know that!”

She wasn’t talking normally, like people do. She was preaching or speechifying, addressing an invisible host of dead souls whose job it was to attest to Truth.

“You need me?”

“I’ll be dead in a week if you don’t come home,” she said. “God is my witness and pain is my choir.” She broke down in tears and Ptolemy took her in his arms.

“No women in the rooms, Mr. Grey!” the landlady shouted.

“We leavin’ now, Ms. Tinman,” Ptolemy said.

“I ain’t gonna refund none’a yo’ money. The week up front is final.”