Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

For a moment Ptolemy understood that the doctor’s medicine had made him into many men from out of all the lives he had lived through the decades. It was certainly a Devil’s potion, one that could give him the power to relive his mistakes and failures and change, if only slightly, the past events that hounded his dreams.

While thinking these things, Ptolemy’s body was in motion. He was old and without great strength, but his mind was sharp as a razor and he could see Melinda coming up from behind in his visions. As she approached him he turned, raising his arm. As she reached for him he brought down the whole arm as if it had no joints. His wrist and elbow were fused and the steel pipe hit the knuckle of Melinda’s index finger with a whoosh and a snick.

The big woman yelped and jumped backward. She cried out when Ptolemy raised his arm again. This was the dream he’d had for years. This was why he wouldn’t let Robyn throw out his pipe, even though he couldn’t have told her then.

Melinda Hogarth sidled away like a crab with a woman’s voice, hollering for safety. Ptolemy brought down the pipe again through the now-empty space where she had stood. He wanted her to see what he could do even at this age, in this body.

The pain rose in his chest again. A man across the street was watching the incident, weighing the facts that his eyes and ears gave him. For a moment, even in his pain, Ptolemy wondered if he would have to explain to the man why he’d struck the wino drug addict. But this reverie was interrupted by the trilling in his veins and the smell of garlic. He looked around him as Melinda shouted and ran down the street. Nobody was cooking, as far as he could tell. And when he looked back, the man had continued his walk, no longer interested in the years-long drama of the old man and Melinda Hogarth.

Ptolemy took the Central bus up to Twenty-third Street. There he disembarked and looked at the four corners. There was a store-front on the northwest corner of the street that had a display window. Inside the window was a Spanish man jumping rope at a furious pace.

“Can I help you?” another man said to Ptolemy when he walked in the door of the long, sunlit room.

It was a poor gym. A few mats on the concrete floor and a punching bag, a bench for weight lifting, and a bar screwed into a doorway for chin-ups.

The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

“I’m lookin’ for Billy Strong,” Ptolemy said.

“You lookin’ at him.”

The men both smiled and Ptolemy understood why Reggie had called this man friend. He was powerful but there was no anger to him. This was the kind of man that you wanted to know, wanted to work shoulder to shoulder with.

“My name is Ptolemy Grey,” the old man said, continually astonished at his renewed new ability to communicate.

The smile on Billy Strong’s face diminished. It took on a sad aspect but did not disappear.

“You Reggie’s great-granduncle.”

So many children, Ptolemy thought, and children getting children and them doing the same. It seemed to him like some kind of crazy math problem worked out in streets and churches, dance floors and cemeteries. Reggie was his great-grandnephew, now dead. And Ptolemy was his survivor, like the small sum left over at the end of long division, like the few solitary and dumbfounded men who had survived the first wave on D-Day.

“Yes, I am,” he said simply.

“Reggie told me that you was havin’ some problems with your, um, thinkin’.”

“Robyn Small took me to a doctor give me some medicine help me put my words and my thoughts together.”

Strong smiled broadly, saying, “Robyn, huh? That little girl gotta backside on her that’s a crime.”

Ptolemy smiled in response. Even when he was in his confused state he had noted Robyn’s hips.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

“Lemme buy you a drink and ask you a couple’a questions is all.”

“You wanna go to a bar?”

“Someplace quiet an’ upscale, so we don’t have to get in no fights.”

“No place around here like that. We have to drive if you want to go to a nice bar.”

“You drive and I’ll buy,” Ptolemy said with a sly grin.

“Julio,” Billy exclaimed.

“Yeah, Bill?”

“I’ma be gone for a hour or so. Look after the place while I’m out.”

“You got it.”

You know my nephew long?” Ptolemy asked Billy Strong at the Aerie Bar, on top of the Fredda Kline Professional Building on Grand Street in downtown L.A. If they had turned away from the bar they would have seen all the way to the ocean through a blue and amber sky.

“’Bout six years, I guess,” Billy said. He had put on a pale-gray sweater and a pair of dark trousers as formal wear for the bar.

Billy ordered a beer. Ptolemy asked for a double shot of sour-mash whiskey. Billy had convinced the older man to leave his steel pipe in the car.

“Somebody kilt him,” Ptolemy said. “They murdered my boy, shot him down like a dog.”

“I know. I was at the funeral. I didn’t see you there, Mr. Grey.”

“Niecie sent Hilly to get me, but I don’t like that boy, he’s a thief.”

“Yeah. He’s not the kinda son I’d be proud of.”

Ptolemy smiled.

“Why somebody wanna shoot a boy sittin’ on a stoop mindin’ his own business?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy took that opportunity to sip his drink.

“I mean,” Ptolemy continued, “I don’t know much about the streets today. When I was movin’ around, there wasn’t gangs or these drive-bys, but Reggie wasn’t a part’a no gang, was he?”

“No, sir. Reggie stayed outta that.”

“So you think that it was just some mistake, somebody thought he was somebody else?”

Billy finished his beer and Ptolemy raised his hand to catch the bartender’s attention. When the slim, mustachioed white man looked their way, Ptolemy pointed at the empty glass. He was astounded by this simple gesture, aware that only weeks before it would have been beyond him.

“Did Reggie talk to you about moving away to San Diego?” Billy asked.

“Uh-uh. At least I don’t think so. You know, the medicine I took cleared up my mind, but a lotta things I heard when I was, I was confused are still jumbled up. You sayin’ Reggie was gonna move outta town?”

“Yeah.”

The bartender brought Billy’s second beer, along with an outrageous tab. Ptolemy put two twenty-dollar bills down on the bar.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy sipped again.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

“You know Alfred Gulla?”

The image of the brutal man with the name not his own hanging from his chest sidled into Ptolemy’s mind.

“Reggie’s wife’s boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “Reggie found out that Nina was still seein’ Alfred and he decided that he was gonna move with her an’ the kids down to San Diego. He asked me if I could find somebody to look after you, because he didn’t trust Hilly either. But before we could make plans, he got shot.”

Ptolemy tried to slow his mind down, to make himself believe that he didn’t yet know enough to say who had killed his great-grandnephew. He tried to make his mind muddy again so that confusion would wash away the words that Billy was saying. But he could not turn his mind’s eye away from the ugly man that had his arm around Reggie’s woman.

“When did they shoot my boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“Eight weeks ago yesterday.”

“What time?”

“It was four in the afternoon.”

“Bright day?” Ptolemy asked.