Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“That’s a treat Miss Dartman bring down for me sometimes. Hand it here.”

Ptolemy put out his hand and dutifully his newly adopted daughter complied. He could feel the heft of the ammunition Hilly had left him.

“It’s heavy, Uncle,” Robyn said. “What is it?”

“Nuthin’. Nuthin’ at all.”

The phone rang later that night as Ptolemy watched a comedy show on TV with Robyn. Watching television was the closest thing to revisiting his previous state of dementia. The people spoke too fast and the jokes weren’t funny at all. People dressed like they were going to fancy parties but instead they were at work or walking down the street in broad daylight. Everybody was in love all the time, and in pain too. The stories never went anywhere, but Robyn laughed and giggled from the first moment to the last. He liked to see the young woman laughing. It was to him like a gift from God, and so he liked watching TV with her, when her hard life let up for a moment and she didn’t need her anger or her knife.

Ptolemy was just getting ready to get up and say good night when the phone rang. Robyn bounced off the couch and answered.

“It’s for you, Papa Grey.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, Ptolemy,” a woman’s voice greeted.

“Hi. How are ya, Shirley?”

“Just fine. I was bakin’ me some fudge here and I thought about you. Do you like chocolate?”

“I like you, and if you make chocolate, then I like that too.”

“You must’a been a mess when you were a young man, Mr. Grey.”

“No. Not me. When I was younger I couldn’t take three steps without trippin’. I was quiet and shy, couldn’t put my words together for love or money.”

“What happened to make you like you are today?”

I sold my body to the Devil, he thought.

But he said, “Some people just come into focus wit’ age, I guess.”

“Would you like me to bring you over some fudge tomorrow?”

“Please do.”

“Noon?”

“Sounds like a date to me.”

In his room that night Ptolemy cleaned and loaded his pistol. Hilly had put the bullets in with half a can of salted peanuts and so he had to use a chamois cloth to wipe off each cartridge. He enjoyed this process. It made him feel that he was getting ready for some great event. He remembered how it felt on D-Day, when the Allies stormed the Germans in their French strongholds. He was an American that day. He stood side by side with tens of thousands of men, and even though he didn’t die for his country, he felt a part of something big.

And now, loading his pistol, he was a soldier again, at war again, ready to lay down and die for an idea that was so powerful that it didn’t seem to matter that it was based on a lie.

That night Ptolemy fell asleep for the first time since the plain-faced European nurse had given him his last shot of the Devil’s medicine. He dreamed about normal things, like the bus ride and Mossa’s lovely flower garden. At one point in his dreaming he was standing in front of a mirror, watching as he grew older. At first he was a child in a light-blue suit that his mother had sewn. The sleeves and pant legs were too short because he had outgrown the dimensions before his mother could finish the job. Then he was a young man, a soldier, an ice deliveryman, and an orange-suited civil servant, cleaning anything from sewers to demolition sites, from municipal buildings to the downtown train station. He wore a black tuxedo for his first wedding, and a white jacket with black pants for his second. Both suits were still in his closet, cut for a bigger frame than the shrunken old man he finally saw in the glass.

He was withered and naked, with a small fire blazing in his chest. The fire had been loaned to him by Satan, an errant angel who coveted men’s souls.

Gazing deeply into the fire, he could see his first childhood love, Maude Petit, running around in the blaze looking for succor, for Li’l Pea to save her. He reached out into the reflection and lifted the child from her torment. He placed her on a high shelf and blew on her to extinguish the flames and heal her cracked skin. Then with his hands he covered the fire raging in his breast and the heat began to rise.

Now that he knew that Maude was safe, Ptolemy reveled in the flames that Satan had given him. The fire grew in the small space of his chest. It went from yellow to red to white-hot intensity. Ptolemy felt the heat coming from Maude and knew that he had saved her somehow by reaching into Hell itself and rescuing her. The flames were licking the back of his throat, leaping up behind his eyes, but he didn’t awaken. Maude was safe at last, after eighty-six years of torment in Ptolemy’s memory. He had saved her, put her out of harm’s way. He had swallowed the flames that burned her, and that made him crazy with joy.

He opened his eyes to find himself writhing in his fevered bed. He was now in the burning house that consumed the Petit family. His body was that house, the attic of his mind aglow.

He went to the bureau and opened the green glass bottle. He’d placed a small juice glass filled with water by its side. He held the pill a moment before putting it in his mouth and drinking. He smiled as he swallowed, feeling as close to heaven as he ever had in life before. Somewhere the choir of his church was singing, cheering him on.

The medicine was fast acting. Ptolemy’s fever began to lower in less than five minutes. As his skin cooled and the fire abated, Ptolemy the old man sat at the foot of the big bed that Sensia had made him buy so many years past.

We need a big bed, baby , she’d told him. A bed big enough to hold all the love I’ma give ya.

“I almost threw it all away, Sensie,” Ptolemy told the memory. “I almost failed at my duty. A man only got to do one thing to set him apart. A man only got to do one thing right.”

Ptolemy realized that the fever wasn’t fully gone, that the medicine was losing the battle against the fire in his mind. He climbed up on the bed and slept on top of the covers. He was a child again and Maude and he were playing down by the Tickle River and nobody else, not even she, knew that she had ever died.

Robyn got up early and left. She’d put a note on the small table in the kitchen telling Ptolemy that she’d be out all day. At the bottom of the note was the number to a new cell phone that she’d purchased.

Ptolemy knew what cell phones were. Little radios that acted like phones. This knowledge burned in his mind, wavering, shining brightly. He knew that in some way this understanding in his ancient brain was some sort of abomination. He knew that the Devil would have his due. But that was further up along the trail. He picked up the house phone and dialed a number automatically without even having to recall it.

“Hello?” the heavy voice of Hilly answered.

“Hey, boy.”

“You get my peanut can, Papa Grey?”

“Yeah, I got it. But tell me sumpin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Why you wanna leave live ammunition out in the open where any child or fool could pick it up?”

“I knocked but you wasn’t there,” Hilly complained.

“You could’a called. You could’a taken the peanut can back home and called me and come ovah when I told you to.”

The young brute sighed through the line.

“That don’t make sense to you, boy?” Ptolemy asked.

“I know what you sayin’,” he countered.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” Hilly said. “But I didn’t wanna waste my time comin’ all the way ovah there again. You wanted the bullets and now you got ’em. I don’t see why you raggin’ on me.”

Ptolemy thought about what his great-grandnephew was saying. But it was as if they spoke different languages and came from different peoples far removed from each other by thousands and thousands of miles and many generations. Hilliard was a Catholic and Ptolemy a Hindu, or something else far removed from what his nephew believed in. He tried to think of how he could explain the great expanse of separation to the boy, but even the Devil’s injections had not made him that smart.