The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (6 page)

Arthur nodded solemnly and scratched his nose.

“Nina,” Robyn said then. “Nina, this here is Mr. Grey, the one that Reggie helped out.”

The woman raised her head from folded arms. Ptolemy could see that she was young, in her early twenties, no more. Her face was devastated and beautiful; far more lovely, Ptolemy thought, than Robyn. But he still liked Robyn better. He liked her way around him. She knew how to speak when he needed her.

Nina rose up and put her arms around Ptolemy. Again he felt lost in a soft hug. It was like sinking into a warm tub at the end of a hard day.

“He loved you so much, Mr. Grey,” Nina said. She smelled sweet from perfume. Too sweet.

“What happened to him?” the old man asked, pulling away as he spoke.

When Nina fell back on the bed the toddler whined and Arthur put his hand on her cheek. She embraced her brother’s fingers with her head and shoulder. This gentle show of affection seemed to make the room clearer to Ptolemy. It was as if he was seeing something the way that minister had, in front of his white church so long before.

“They shot him down,” Nina said.

“Who shot him?”

“Drive-by.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody knows,” Robyn said. “Somebody jes’ shot him when he was sittin’ on a porch of a friend’a his.”

“But they say his name was Drivebee.”

“No. The men drove by in their car and jes’ shot him.”

The little girl was crying. Arthur lay down behind her and put his arms around her shoulders.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

“Nobody knows.”

Ptolemy squinted, trying to see with his mind’s eye the reasoning behind Reggie’s murder. He remembered his hidden box and a promise he’d made Coydog before the old man was dragged off and killed like some wild animal. It was something that happened to colored men and boys ever since they left the land of Ptolemy, father of Cleopatra.

There came the sound of heavy feet down the hall.

“Nina?” a man’s voice called from outside the room.

Ptolemy turned just in time to see a man come through the door. It was a freckle-faced, strawberry-brown man with straightened, combed-back hair. He was handsome but had a wild look to him as if there were something or someone right behind him, ready to strike. The man was tall and wore a purple shirt that was open down to the bottom of his chest. He wore a thick gold chain that held a pendant which formed the name
Georgie,
written in slanted letters.

Reggie’s wife rose from the bed like a creature coming up out of the water. Her movements were fluid, graceful. The idea of dancing came into Ptolemy’s wandering mind.

“Alfred,” she said.

They grabbed each other, kissed on the lips, and then pressed their cheeks and bodies together.

“Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked.

“Who’s this?” Alfred asked, looking at Ptolemy.

“This is ...” Nina began saying but she had forgotten the name.

“Mr. Ptolemy Grey,” Robyn said, snipping her words to their shortest possible length. “Reggie’s great-uncle.”

“Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked again.

“Oh,” Alfred said. “Hey, Mr. Grey. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“If your name is Alfred, how come you got a sign sayin’ Georgie hangin’ from your neck?”

A flash of anger crossed the haunted man’s face.

“He don’t mean nuthin’, Alfred,” Robyn said. “It’s just a question.”

“Georgie was my brother,” Alfred said angrily. “They shot him down.”

“They shoot your brother too?”

“What?” Alfred said, jutting his head toward Ptolemy.

Robyn moved between the men.

“He’s a old man, Alfred,” she said. “He sit all day in his house listenin’ to German music and readin’ old papers.”

“He bettah get some news, then,” Alfred said threateningly.

Nina went to Alfred’s side and took his arm.

“We bettah get outta here, Alfie,” the grieving widow and mother said.

But Alfred was not finished staring at the old man.

Ptolemy thought it was funny that a fool like that would try and intimidate him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid hardly at all.

“Yeah,” Alfred said. “I come to take you and the kids back to your house.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “Come on, babies.”

Arthur and his sister started crying. They didn’t say that they didn’t want to go or even shake their heads. They just cried.

For their daddy,
Ptolemy thought.

“Why’ont you let the kids stay here with Big Mama Niecie?” Robyn suggested. “She feed ’em an’ stuff.”

“Do you wanna stay here, Artie? Letisha?”

Arthur nodded and Letisha put her head in her brother’s lap.

“You sure?” Nina asked. “Okay. Mama’s gonna go home and sleep now. She’s tired.”

The baby girl whimpered for her mother but would not leave her brother’s lap. Nina kissed them both on their foreheads and then moved as if she wanted to kiss Robyn. But the younger girl leaned away. Nina played it off, putting her hand on Robyn’s shoulder.

All the while Alfred glared at Ptolemy.

The old man stared back, trying to understand what was happening, what had happened.

Nina turned away from her children and left under the protective arm of the handsome Alfred. Nina glanced back at her children as she went through and past the doorframe. Ptolemy listened to their shoes on the hardwood floor of the hallway.

“Where they goin’?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Robyn said. “You hungry, Arthur?”

“Tisha is.”

“What she want?” Robyn asked with a smile.

“Cake.”

“Did you have some dinner?”

“No, but we want some cake.”

“Okay,” Robyn said, “but jes’ this one time now.”

“Okay.”

“You wait here with your sister and I’ll get Big Mama Niecie to bring you some’a the cake Auntie Andrews brought us.”

She held out her hand and Ptolemy took it. They walked down the hall, back into the crowded room where people had come to mourn and laugh, give their condolences and eat and drink. Ptolemy’s skin hurt as he passed through the confused and confusing mob.

When Robyn told Niecie that Nina had left with Alfred Gulla, the older woman sucked her tooth.

“The kids said they want some cake,” Robyn added.

“I get it. Poor angels. Did you get somethin’ to eat, Pitypapa?”

“I have to go to the toilet,” he said.

“I’ll show you. After that you want me t’get Hilly to take you home?”

“I’ll take him,” Robyn said. “I gotta get outta here anyway.”

Niecie kissed the girl and smiled.

“You are a blessing, child.”

 

 

 

They walked down the street together, hand in hand. The sun was hot and Ptolemy had so many thoughts in his head that he couldn’t say very much. But Robyn, once she was out of the house, talked and talked. Ptolemy heard some of what she’d said. She’d come from down south somewhere when her mother died. Robyn’s mother and Niecie were good friends and so Niecie offered to take the orphan in. They weren’t related by law but Niecie felt like they were blood and let her sleep on the couch in the living room.

“Who’s Alfred?” Ptolemy asked after a long spate of listening to the calming words of the child.

“He’s Nina’s boyfriend.”

“But I thought she was Reggie’s . . . I mean, I mean . . . his wife.”

“He did too. But Nina kep’ on seein’ Alfred from back when she went out with him years ago. I think he went to jail or sumpin’ an’ Nina met Reggie an’ got pregnant with Artie an’ so she stayed with Reggie, but when Alfred got outta jail she was still seein’ him too.”

They came to a sidewalk where three blue-and-red taxis were parked.

“Can you tell the driver how to get to your house, Mr. Grey?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I think I remembah.”

 

 

 

They held hands in the back of the cab.

“How old are you, Mr. Grey?”

“Ninety-one year old. Some people don’t think I can keep count, but I’m ninety-one.”

“You don’t look that old. Your skin is so smooth and you stand up straight. It’s like you’re old but just normal old, not no ninety-one.”

 

 

 

She walked Ptolemy to his apartment door and watched him use the key on the topmost of four locks.

“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”

When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.

 

 

 

The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.

Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”

A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.

“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”

Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.

His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana. There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.

“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.

“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”

“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”

“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”

“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”

Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”

 

 

 

Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.

Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.

The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.

“I’m losing money on this place and that’s not why I own it,” he shouted at Reggie one day.

“Get the fuck outta here, man,” Reggie had said, and the white landlord, Mr. Pierpont, got the cops.

The police threatened Reggie, but then Pierpont tried to make them get rid of Ptolemy too.

“You’re trying to evict this old man?” one of the cops had asked.

“I’m losing money on this place,” Pierpont said, as if Ptolemy had stabbed him.

“If I was this young man I would have done more than threaten you,” the cop said. The police left, and potbellied Joseph Pierpont never came back, or answered any calls.

Now the doorbell no longer worked and people had to knock. And when they’d knock, Ptolemy would get up and go to the front and ask, “Who is it?”

But not this time. This time he stayed in his seat, listening to the newsman’s gibberish and music that scratched at his ears.

The knock came again and Ptolemy remembered why he stayed in his chair. That big boy Hilly had been there and knocked and said that he wanted to come in. He’d come three days in a row and each day Ptolemy told him that he didn’t need him and that he would call if he did.

“But you don’t know my numbah, Papa Grey,” Hilly said through the door. “You haven’t called up in years.”