Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Okay, ma’am,” Ptolemy said as he stroked his wife’s hair. “You keep that money. It’s worth every dime.”

It was only then, in the empty concrete lot, that he remembered Sensie’s cousin, who lived in Riverside at that time. She must’ve seen him and called Sensie and, in doing so, saved both their lives—for a time.

“God bless you, Minna Jones,” Ptolemy whispered to himself.

“Uncle?”

Her voice was the constant refrain defining the form of his improvised last days. “Uncle?” Robyn would say, and all the words and thoughts that went before formed into sensible lines, became plain memories that no longer engulfed his mind.

“Yes, child?” he said without turning.

The woman on the bleak patio above looked down at the sound of their voices.

“Why you out here in your robe?” Robyn asked. “It’s cold.”

“Not in my skin,” Ptolemy said. “Dr. Ruben’s medicine lit a fire in me.”

The back of Robyn’s cold fingers pressed against his cheek.

“You are hot.”

The woman’s eyes from above met with Ptolemy’s and locked.

“Come on inside, Uncle. Lemme get you some aspirin.”

Ptolemy wanted to do as the girl said, but he was looking into the face of the smoking black woman. He wondered what she thought up there in her perch above the concrete yard.

The woman stood up, and Ptolemy wished that she would throw something down to him: a cigarette . . . a tattered length of rope. But she turned her back and went into her home.

“Come on,” Robyn insisted.

Do you need me for anything today, Uncle Grey?”

They were sitting at the small table in the kitchen, drinking iced tea that Robyn made. She was right, the cold liquid cooled him.

“No,” he said. “I wanna go see somebody, that’s all.”

“Miss Wring?”

Ptolemy hadn’t thought about that. Robyn had given him the emerald ring and he hadn’t gotten around to thanking her.

This forgetfulness wasn’t like before, when his thoughts were faint and half forgotten. Now he forgot because he was thinking about the moment and how the present was an extension of things that transpired long, long ago.

The ring wasn’t important. It was just a trinket. It was the woman, Shirley, who occupied his mind.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ma go see Shirley. She give me her address. Did you have a good time with Beckford last night?”

Robyn clasped her hands and then unclasped them, got to her feet, and went into the living room. Ptolemy smiled, realizing that he had meant to bother her. He rose, too, barely feeling the pain in his feet and knees, and followed her into the room, the living room that she had cleared out the way the Devil’s medicine had cleared out his mind.

Robyn was sitting on the bed that was a couch at the moment. When Ptolemy came in she turned her back to him.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed by what I say,” Ptolemy said to his keeper.

He sat beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

“I didn’t want you to know, Uncle,” she said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause I didn’t.”

“How can I adopt you as my daughter if you don’t tell me all about you and your life?”

Robyn turned around and peered at him cautiously, suspiciously.

“I’m too old to be adopted,” she said.

Ptolemy felt a humming in his veins like a trilling wire carrying a strong charge of electricity. Somewhere Coy was wanting to give him a lecture but he would not listen.

“No,” Ptolemy said, partly to Coy but mostly to Robyn, “you not too old. You my girl, my child. I love you and I wanna make sure that you have a life, a good life. I know that a young woman like you got to have a man. That goes without sayin’. You want a good-lookin’ man who’s strong but don’t treat you bad.”

Robyn smiled and looked down. She took one of Ptolemy’s hands in both of hers.

“I just want you to be careful, child. I don’t want you to go too fast. Maybe Beckford okay an’ maybe no. It’s hard to tell when you young and hungry.”

“Shut up, Uncle,” Robyn said with a giggle and a grin.

“Young man, all he got to do is see them legs you so proud of an’ he’ll say anything, anything you wanna hear.”

Robyn sucked a tooth and smiled again.

“I’ma die soon, girl,” he said.

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, though. I can feel the poison. It’s good ’cause it makes me see, but I won’t make it too many more weeks. And I got to know before I die that you’ll take care’a Artie an’ Letisha and that you ain’t with no man gonna take what I pass along to you.”

“Maybe we should take you to a new doctor,” Robyn suggested.

“I would marry you if I was fifty years younger,” Ptolemy said. “I would. But as powerful as you are, girl, as much as you done for my mind, you cain’t give me no body like Beckford. You cain’t make me no younger man. So will you be my li’l girl? Will you take me as your father and listen to my advice?”

“I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks, Uncle. I could marry you then.”

Ptolemy’s response to Robyn’s offer was to look up at the ceiling and around at the walls. He was smiling but didn’t know it. He was thinking about the solitude of private rooms where people said things to each other that had no place in the outer world. He thought about LeAnne and how she leaned over on the couch before he suspected their lovemaking and whispered, “My pussy itch, Daddy,” and he gasped and she touched his thigh.

He looked down at his hand in Robyn’s grip and thought, Yes, I could marry this child . But he knew that that was just a moment in a closed room between two people who wanted to break down the walls around them but still be safe from the outside world.

Ptolemy meant to say, “No, child,” but instead he asked, “What about Beckford?”

“I like him but he not there for me like you. An’ I’m not there wit’ him either. You bought me a bed, Uncle, an’ turned all your money ovah into my hands. You the only one I evah know could put your finger on the feelin’ I got.”

“I need a daughter, not a wife. I need you to love me like I love you,” Ptolemy said, tightening his fingers around hers.

“’Kay,” she said. “But how do we do that?”

“The way everybody does what no one can understand,” he said. “We go to a lawyer and let him put it into words.”

After Robyn left, Ptolemy donned his suit and, with an ease he hadn’t felt in many years, tied his new shoelaces. He went to the door, paused for a moment, went back to his kitchen, and pulled a foot-long steel pipe from under the sink.

Don’t th’ow out that pipe,” he had said to Robyn when his mind was still confused.

“Why not, Uncle? It don’t fit nuthin’.”

“It make me feel safe.”

He locked his apartment and walked down the hallway and through the outer door. He was outside on his own for the first time in years.

The sun was dazzling and he was a barefoot child walking along a dirt road, a young man in a Memphis back alley, a soldier walking down a French road with the bodies of dead soldiers stacked along the sides according to their nationality, race, and rank. He was a groom in his forties walking up the aisle with a bride so beautiful that he thought of her like a movie star or a queen that a man like him could only ever see from afar or on the screen. He was an old man following her coffin to the grave, still amazed that he was even in her procession.

“Hold it right there, Pete!” Melinda Hogarth yelled.

He was walking down his own street not quite as old as he was now and a woman with the face of a demon was running him down. This vision was a dream of who he had hoped to be, a wish he’d prayed every night for, for years after Melinda Hogarth had mugged him the first time.