The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (28 page)

“Am I dead yet?”

“If it wasn’t for your niece you would have been. I’m surprised you’ve made it so long. I’m glad too.”

“You ain’t taken no money or nuthin’ from him, have you, girl?” Ptolemy asked.

“No, sir. Nuthin’.”

Ptolemy thought he could make out things crawling and bristling in the doctor’s great mustaches. Ruben’s eyes seemed to be blazing: yellowy-green flames on a brown sea.

“Lemme talk to this man alone a minute, will you, Robyn?”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, relief at his revival in her tone and her shoulders, and even in the way she stood.

She closed the door and the doctor pressed a thumb against Ptolemy’s wrist.

“You have the constitution of a man half your age,” he said.

“How long have I been in this bed?”

“Three days.” Ruben took out a little notebook and started writing. While he did this he continued to talk. “That niece of yours is something else. She went to Antoine Church with two men and they threatened him until he found a way to get in touch with me. I came as soon as she called. I thought you would die, I told her so. But I gave you this concentrated injection and you came to immediately. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“How long?”

“If you were anybody else I’d say two days. But at the outside it’s two weeks.”

“And then you cut me up like a slaughtered calf.”

“Science will benefit from your sacrifice, Mr. Grey. Your niece and her generation will not have to suffer as you have.”

Ptolemy smiled at that.

“I’m leaving you a stronger pill,” Dr. Ruben continued. “And Robyn has my phone number. Whenever you feel hot, take a pill immediately. She will call me if you begin to fail.”

“I went to Africa in my sleep.”

“You did?”

“I saw it. Not today, but two thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Degradation, by Coy McCann’s reckoning.”

Dr. Ruben didn’t say anything to that. Ptolemy closed his eyes, then realized that he must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them again Robyn was sitting there next to him, holding his hands.

Satan was nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, baby,” he said.

“You look like a baby when you sleepin’, Papa Grey.”

“I got two weeks.”

She kissed his fingers.

“What day is it?” Ptolemy asked.

“Tuesday.”

“I got to go to Niecie’s house at noon . . . Alone.”

“Okay.”

“You been takin’ that gold to the safe-deposit box?”

“Yeah. A little bit at a time, like you told me to do. Shirley Wring come by in the mornin’ to sit wit’ you and I went to the bank. And then I got Beckford and Billy Strong an’ we went to talk to Antoine Church.”

“How soon before all that gold in the box?” Ptolemy asked.

“Three days. It’a be done by Thursday.”

“I’ma sleep now, baby.”

“Can I lie down next to you?”

“Will you tell me sumpin’?”

“What?”

“Anything, child.”

 

 

 

When I was a little girl my mama an’ my daddy and me was happy,” she whispered into the old man’s ear. “We lived in a house that was blue and white and had flowers in the front yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Mama took in li’l black children for daycare, and Daddy worked on a farm outside’a town. He coulda had a bettah job but he liked to be outside and to take time off between the seasons.

“Mama had a baby boy, and Daddy was so happy that he went up and down the block tellin’ everybody that he had a son named Alexander and that his son was gonna do what Alexander the Great did. But then, only a few weeks aftah Al was born, he got somethin’ in his chest and he was sick for five months.

“I think if he had just died right off that it wouldn’ta been so hard on Daddy an’ Mama. But he took off’a work and she went wit’ him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.

“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.

“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.

“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.

“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.

“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.

“Papa Grey, are you awake?”

The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.

“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”

 

 

 

While Robyn spoke, Ptolemy could hear himself breathing like a man asleep. He was asleep, but still he heard every word. He imagined the young girl eating peaches and the old man falling in love with her. This seemed natural. Children were there to be loved and looked after and cared for; sometimes you even had to sacrifice your life in order that a child might live.

After a while the girl talked about moving to Los Angeles and about Niecie and Hilliard and Reggie, who was an orphan too. The sleeping man listened with part of his mind, but he was also thinking about Letisha and Arthur and how Reggie was like a son to him.

Now he was an old man and there were children to look after, and one child to avenge.

Ptolemy smiled in his sleep, thinking all the way back to that day the white minister had shaken his hand. He had given that arrogant old white man something, and he had taken something away from him too.

In the morning the sleeping but still-conscious man opened his eyes. Robyn slept next to him, her arm flung over his chest. He rose up on a painful elbow and kissed the child’s forehead. She opened her eyes and hugged him.

“Do you love me, Papa Grey?” she asked.

“More than anything . . . ever.”

 

 

 

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when he showed up on her doorstep at 12:14 on Tuesday afternoon.

Robyn had hired him a limousine and a driver, a brown man with a Spanish accent named Hernandez. She had wanted to come with Ptolemy, but he told her that she needed to put Coydog’s treasure where nobody could get at it but her.

“But why you got to go see Niecie so bad?” she’d asked him.

“For Reggie.”

“Reggie’s dead, Papa Grey.”

“Ain’t nobody full dead until no one remembah they name. Don’t forget that, girl—as long you remembah me, I’ma be alive in you.”

Robyn crying, it seemed to Ptolemy, was a woman at war with herself. She couldn’t let herself go completely, but the tears rolled down her left eye, and her beautiful lips trembled.

He tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away.

“Robyn.”

“Your car prob’ly outside, Papa Grey. You bettah be goin’.”

This your family we going to?” Hernandez the driver asked Ptolemy on the way to Niecie’s house.

“Yes, sir. Real blood family too. The kind you can’t shake off.”

The driver, a broad-faced man, laughed.

“What’s your name?” Ptolemy asked from the backseat.

“Hernandez.”

“Well, Mr. Hernandez—”

“No, Mr. Grey, not Mr. Hernandez, just Hernandez. I like that name.”

“You from around here, Hernandez?”

“Fifty years here,” he said. “Forty-eight, really. When I was seven my parents came up from a farm in the south of Mexico.”

“You still speak Spanish?”

“No. I just got this accent is all. I know some words.”

“Remembah back in the old days when we all lived together?” Ptolemy asked. “Mexicans, Negroes, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese on the one side—”

“And white people on the other,” Hernandez said, finishing the litany.

Both men laughed.

“What happened to us?” Ptolemy asked.

“White man shined a light on us and we froze like deer in the road. After that we all went crazy and started tearin’ each other apart.”

Ptolemy frowned and sat back in his seat. Even the Devil’s fire couldn’t help him to understand why what both he and Hernandez knew was true.

Hernandez dropped him at Niecie’s door with a business card so that he could call if it was time to go home and the driver was off somewhere. The black man and the brown shook hands over the seat.

“Nobody evah put us on the news, huh, Hernandez?”

“What you mean, Mr. Grey?”

“Us gettin’ along ain’t news.”

Hernandez laughed and got out to open the door for his client.

 

 

 

Niecie cried happily and Ptolemy walked in the house. Nina was there with her children. Hilliard was on a couch in the corner, watching a small TV in a pink plastic case.

“Come ovah here and say hi to Pitypapa,” Niecie said to her son.

“Hey,” Hilly said, going so far as to turn his eyes away from the screen.

“Go on back to your TV, boy,” Ptolemy said, waving dismissively.

Niecie and Nina sat with their elder and talked and drank lemonade. Niecie was nervous, not wanting to ask for the money she had already come to expect, had already planned on.

They talked for a while about relatives that Ptolemy had only recently remembered. Many members of his family and his extended family had died. They stopped bringing him to funerals because he seemed to get upset during the services.

“That’s why I send Reggie ovah to your house in the first place, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “You’d get upset and mad and you didn’t seem to know where you was at.”

Ptolemy appraised his grandniece’s attempt to convince him, and maybe convince herself, that he really owed her something, that she had been there to help him when he couldn’t help himself. He resented her trying to make him feel indebted, but on the other hand he did owe her what she said. She had sent Reggie, and Reggie had tried his best. She had sent Robyn to him.

“You know, one time Reggie lost his job at the supermarket because he wouldn’t come in because he had to take you to the doctor’s,” Niecie was saying. “I told him that blood was thicker than water and that we owed you somethin’. I told him that I’d put him up and feed him and the onlyest thing I expected was that he took care of you.”

“Do you have a checking account at the bank, Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.

“Wha?”

“A bank account. Do you have a bank account?”

“No. I mean, I know I should have one but they need you to maintain a three-hundred-dollar minimum, an’ some months here I cain’t even find three dimes in my coin purse.”