Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Come on, Uncle.”

One man wearing a bright-blue suit with a long double-breasted jacket stood there talking to a blond-headed black woman who was smiling and wore no wedding ring. The blue-suited man looked very much like the gangster Sweet Billy Madges, and she, blondie, was familiar too. But it wasn’t anything to do with Madges and his whores. The blond black woman was like Letta Golding, who lived in a room across the courtyard from which a great oak had arisen.

“That oak,” Coydog would say, “is like Christ a’mighty coming up outta the clay, fed by the graves of all the dead souls that believed in him.”

“Do you believe in him?” Li’l Pea asked.

“If things goin’ good,” the wizened old man opined, “not too much. But when I’m in trouble I can pray with the best of ’em.”

If he was small enough, a little boy could climb on the limbs of that tree and clear across the courtyard or up or down to the walkways of any of the eight floors of that Mississippi Negro tenement.

Coydog lived there for a while, and Li’l Pea would visit him whenever he could.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly beseeched.

Letta was beautiful and friendly. Li’l Pea often found himself climbing up to the seventh-floor window of her apartment because she never pulled down the shade; even if she was naked and in the barrel she used for a bathtub, Letta would stand up and smile for Ptolemy and touch his cheek or kiss his forehead.

“You a nasty boy,” she’d say if he came up to her window and she was naked but she’d be smiling and he knew that she wasn’t really mad.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly said again.

“What?”

“Do you have a check to cash?”

He was still standing in the crowded bank and not in Letta’s bathroom. This realization was a surprise for the elder Grey but not a shock. He was used to going places in his mind. More and more he was in the past. Sometimes with his first wife, Bertie, and then later with the woman he truly loved—Sensia Howard. Even when she had been untrue to him with his good friend Ivan, he couldn’t get up the strength to leave Sensia—or to kill her.

The next thing Ptolemy knew he was standing at the counter with the three checks for $211.41 in his hand. Hilly was getting him to sign on the back over some other words that the boy had written.

“You stay here, Papa Grey,” Hilly was saying. “I’ma go over to the teller and get your money.”

Hilly had the checks in his hand but Ptolemy did not remember handing them over. He had signed them and now the boy was on the other side of the dividing table, standing on line at a teller’s window.

“That your son?” a woman asked.

She was old but not nearly as old as Ptolemy. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy, but he had twenty years on her at least.

“No. His name is . . . I forget his name but he’s my nephew, either my sister’s son or her daughter’s son. Somethin’ like that.”

“Oh,” the short woman said. “Mister, can you help me?”

“Um, the boy there does most everything for me,” he replied, thinking that he should go over on line and stand with, with . . . Hilly.

“I need five dollars more to make my telephone bill,” the woman said. She wore blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and a cap with a long transparent green sun visor.

“I don’t take care’a the money,” Ptolemy said. “I let the boy do that. I can’t hardly see the fingers on my hand and so he count the money so I don’t give ya a one instead of a, of a five.”

The woman was the same height as he. She once had clear brown eyes that were now partly occluded with wisps of gray.

“My name’s Shirley,” she said.

“Ptolemy,” he said, “but they call me Li’l Pea.”

“What kinda name is that?”

“It was Cleopatra’s father’s name,” the old man said. He had said the words so often in his life that they came to his lips automatically. He didn’t even know if they were true because it was Coydog told him that and his mother had said, “That Coydog just as soon lie as open his mouf.”

“The queen of Africa?”

“What’s your last name, Shirley?”

“Wring,” she said with a smile. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

“Double-u ara eye en gee,” Li’l Pea, Pity, Petey, Ptolemy Grey repeated.

The woman smiled and lifted her left hand, which held the leather straps of a faded cherry-red purse. She placed the bag on the counter and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took a piece of pink tissue paper, which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large, dome-shaped pale-green stone.

“Emerald,” Shirley Wring said, placing the delicate jewel on his upturned fingers. “You can hold on to it until I get my Social Security an’ then I can buy it back for six dollars.”

Ptolemy stared into the sea-green crystal, admiring the flashes of white and yellow from the inner variations as it tumbled between his fingers.

A treasure, he thought. Glee set off in his chest, like the sunlight through the window ignited the jewel in his hand; he felt delight at the reward that Shirley double-u ara eye en gee delivered to him even though they were strangers. He experienced a deep satisfaction in the pleasure of her trust in him. He thought about Letta carrying him in through the window and tolerating his presence while she dressed and put on the red lipstick that her boyfriends paid for so dearly.

The excitement became a pain in his chest. Ptolemy, now gazing into the cloudy-eyed woman’s brown face, understood that these feelings were strong enough to kill.

He smiled broadly then and said, “Girl, you a beam’a sunshine at the end of a long day of rain.”

He put the ring in his pocket. Shirley stared at him, smiling hopefully.

Hilly came up to them then.

“Okay, Papa Grey,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Gimme my money,” Ptolemy said.

“Later . . . at the sto’.”

“Now,” the old man commanded, “right here in this room.”

Hilly handed his great-uncle a paper envelope filled with bills in small denominations.

“This is Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

He was no longer looking around the room, wondering at the changing faces. Ptolemy spread the envelope open and took out a ten-dollar bill. He gave the money to the woman and then took the emerald ring from his pocket.

“Will you take this gift from me, Shirley double-u ara eye en gee?”

Hilly moved his big, heavy head back and forth with a perplexed twist to his face. Shirley smiled. Ptolemy lifted the ring higher.

“You’re a sweet man, Li’l Pea,” she said, taking her collateral and squeezing it between gnarled fingers.

She put the emerald in its tissue and placed the pink paper in her velvet bag. Then she put the black velvet sack into the faded red-leather purse. Shirley Wring made a movement that was the start of a curtsy and then shuffled off to get on line to pay her phone bill.

“She a friend’a yours?” Hilly asked.

“That’s a woman there, boy,” Ptolemy replied, thinking about Coydog talking to him when he was young and didn’t know a thing.

“Wanna go to the store now?” Hilly suggested, putting his hand on his uncle’s shoulder.

“What’s your hurry?” Ptolemy asked.

“Nuthin’. We just gotta go.”

They went to Big City Food Mart and filled a plastic basket with bologna, store brand Oat Ohs, margarine, sour pickles, a bag of mini peanut butter cups, peanut butter, rye bread, orange juice, Big City brand instant coffee and creamer, and six ripe red apples. The total at the cashier came to $32.37. When they got out of line Ptolemy counted the money he had left: $169.04. He counted it three times and was starting on the fourth when Hilly said, “Come on, Papa Grey, we gotta take these things home.”