Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“You got Nina’s phone number somewhere around there?” Ptolemy asked after giving up on the young black man.

A familiar man’s voice came across the line. “Hello.”

“That you, Alfred?” Ptolemy asked.

“Who’s this?”

“Ptolemy.”

“Who?”

“The man Reggie used to look aftah. The one you met at Niecie’s house when you took Reggie’s wife away.”

“What you sayin’, man?” Alfred asked angrily.

“I’m sayin’, is Nina there?”

A few seconds passed before the receiver banged down and Alfred called out, “You bettah tell that mothahfuckah to be respectful.”

“Hello?” a feminine voice asked. “Who is this?”

“Ptolemy Grey . . . Reggie’s great-uncle.”

“Oh . . . Mr. Grey. Why you callin’?”

“I’m fine and how are you?”

“Oh, okay. Uh ...”

“How was the funeral?” Ptolemy asked, trying to repair the broken conversation.

“Very sad, Mr. Grey. The children were so sad. Reggie’s sistah come down from Oakland with her kids. What is it you wanted?”

“Did you bring Alfred to the funeral?”

“No . . . how can I help you, Mr. Grey?”

“I got everything I want,” he replied. “I don’t need a thing, thank you very much.”

“But why are you callin’ here?” she asked, beginning to lose patience.

“That Robyn is a miracle,” he said. “You know that?”

“She okay.”

“No . . . no, no, no. She’s a honest-to-God miracle.”

“I got to go, Mr. Grey.”

“When she come here to my house,” Ptolemy said, as if he had not heard Nina’s complaint, “she saw the mess and the junk and cleaned it all up from one end to the other. Washed and cleaned and threw out and poisoned the bugs too. And then, when she looked at me and seen that I was a mess, she took me to the doctor and got me the kinda medicine you people got out there today. Strong stuff, the kinda penicillin open up your eyes.”

“That’s, that’s wonderful,” Nina said. “You go, Mr. Grey.”

“Get off the phone with that old fool,” Alfred said in the background.

“I got to be somewhere, Mr. Grey.”

“So you know,” the old man went on, “when Robyn brung me to that doctor, that handsome Devil with the thick mustaches, I started to remembah things.”

“That’s nice but I—”

“One thing I just remembered was somethin’ Reggie wanted me to give you.”

“I said get off that phone!” Alfred shouted.

“Just gimme a minute, Al. I’ll be off in just a few minutes.”

“I’ma go wit’out you, Nine,” he threatened.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Go on an’ I’ll meet you there.”

Errant sounds came through the line for a time. This period was ended by a loud bang that Ptolemy thought was a door slamming.

“Mr. Grey? Are you still there?”

“Sure am. I hope I didn’t cause any trouble with your man.”

“Don’t worry ’bout him. He just get mad sometimes.”

Suddenly, and without apparent reason, Ptolemy had a startling memory. It was an afternoon that Reggie was visiting with him. It was back in the time when his mind wasn’t working right, but still he had a clear image of the young man showing him a photograph.

“These my kids, Papa Grey,” the old man remembered the young man saying. “Tish an’ Artie. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Mr. Grey?” Nina was saying. “Are you there?”

“I don’t want that man’a yours to know about this,” he said.

“Okay. I won’t tell him. What is it? What did Reggie have for me?”

“I wanted him to have it,” Ptolemy said. “But he said that he wanted it for you and them beautiful chirren. Are the kids still stayin’ wit’ Niecie?”

“For a while longer,” Nina said. “Until I get myself together.”

“Uh-huh. You go and visit them?”

“On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, every week. Those are my days off from the department store.”

“Hm. That’s good. A mother should see her kids. They need to be seen by her. That way they know they okay. They know it by the look in her eye. You know, if your mother look at you an’ smile, then you know you doin’ all right.”

“What was it that you had for Artie and Letisha?” Nina asked softly.

“I don’t want that Alfred to know nuthin’ about it,” Ptolemy said again. “Reggie didn’t like him.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Okay, okay, then I’ll tell you what. One day I’ma come by Niecie house when you there with the kids but Alfred ain’t. That way I can talk to you without worryin’ about him hearin’ it.”

“But what is it?”

“I’ll tell you that when I see you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now?”

“I would if I could but I cain’t ’cause I ain’t.”

“Why not?”

“You just make sure to go to Niecie’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. What time you usually go there?”

“’Bout eleven in the mornin’.”

“Keep that up and you will get Reggie’s gift.”

“But, Mr. Grey, I need to know what it is.”

Ptolemy hung up the phone and grinned. He chuckled to himself and then laughed out loud.

Sitting in the living room in the late morning, Ptolemy tried to remember the last time he laughed out loud. He could feel the laughter in his hands and knees. The happiness had replaced his arthritic pain. He never laughed like that when he was with Sensia. She laughed for him. He was already beyond elation and wonder by the time he was a man. It was way back in his childhood, when he would walk around the woods with Coydog and the old thief made crazy faces and sounds and told jokes about things that other adults didn’t think were proper.

Ptolemy wondered how he could have lived for so long but still the most important moments of his life were back when he was a child with Coy McCann walking at his side. How could the most important moments of his life be Coy’s last dance on fire and Maude’s death in flames? Hadn’t he lived through poverty, war, and old age? Didn’t any of that mean anything?

The Devil’s fire ignited in him and he was able to laugh again now that he was burning alive.

He thought about Robyn’s legs, about how firm and brown and strong they were. Many a time, when she was walking around the house in only a T-shirt, he wanted to get on his knees and hug those powerful thighs to his cheek and chest. This desire made him happy. He was as old as Methuselah but a child’s legs made him happy. He could no longer feel sex, but he remembered . . . maybe knowing it better in hindsight than he ever did when he was able.

“I love her,” he said into the silence of the apartment.

As the moments passed, Ptolemy thought about stars wheeling through the night sky. They moved past, getting on with their business while men had their feet in clay.

We born dyin’ , Coydog used to say sometimes. But you ask a man an’ he talk like he gonna live forevah. Nevah take no chances. Nevah look up or down.

“I love you, Robyn,” Ptolemy said as a reply to words spoken so long ago. Death was coming, but Love was there too. Robyn was a far-off descendant, an adopted child, a woman he might have loved as a woman if he were fifty years younger and she twenty years older.

Pain tittered in his knucklebones and burbled in his knees. His joints were like music, like transistor radios calling out from under his skin. The knock at the door was a new strain, another musician deciding to jam with him. He waited for the knock to come again before getting up, going to the bedroom, pulling the bureau drawer open, and retrieving his .25-caliber pistol.