The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (22 page)

“Fevah gonna kill me?” Ptolemy asked with no self-pity or regret.

“Could be,” Ruben said. “But you say you feel an electrical sensation inside?”

“In my veins,” Ptolemy replied. “Like a trill played on a flute. It makes me feel like I got butterflies for blood.”

“That’s the medicine,” Ruben said. “It’s working on your chemistry and your body’s electrical system, your wiring. But it should only be in your brain. That’s what we’re trying to work out . . . how to keep the brain alive and functioning well without affecting the other parts of your body. May I take your pulse?”

“The Devil playin’ a healer,” Ptolemy said as he extended his right hand.

After feeling various points on the old man’s arm, Ruben said, “Your blood pressure is elevated.” He reached into his pocket and came out with a small green bottle.

“These pills are very small but potent. There are a hundred of them. Take one when the fever and flute playing bothers you and it should subside for a while.”

Ptolemy took the green bottle and shook it, listening to the beads of medicine tinkle against the glass.

“Tell me sumpin’, Satan. Will I live to finish off this bottle?”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Grey, I thought that you’d have died by now. I came by to make sure that Robyn was keeping your agreement.”

The candor of the demon brought a smile to Ptolemy’s lips.

“Coy told me about you.”

“Who’s that?”

“My uncle. Well, he wasn’t really my blood but just a old man who taught me everything I know—almost. He told me that even though you called evil in the Good Book that I still had to give you respect. Yes he did.”

Ruben leaned forward, clasped his hands, and placed his elbows on his knees. He was looking deeply into Ptolemy’s eyes.

“I ain’t crazy, Dr. Ruben, if that’s what you want me to call ya. I ain’t crazy at all. But I know the Devil when I see him. You don’t need no college degree to see evil in front’a yo’ nose. Man play with life have crossed ovah. That’s a fact.”

“But . . . Mr. Grey, I’m helping you, aren’t I? Didn’t you come to me and ask for my help?”

For a passing moment Ptolemy felt fear. Had he sold his soul and not quite realized it? Had he been tricked as so many before him on the long road to ruin?

“But we traded, right?” Ptolemy asked. “You wanted my body, not my soul.”

Satan smiled on Ptolemy Grey. His whole face was alight with friendliness.

“That’s right, Mr. Grey. I only want your body. I’m trading that light in your mind and that tickle in your veins for your body after you no longer need it.”

“Will you shake on that?” Grey asked, and both men extended their hands and grasped each other, reaffirming an oath that they both wanted and needed.

After a moment or two of silent reverie, Ruben asked, “Where’s your niece?”

“Out with her boyfriend.”

“She leaves you alone and you can take care of yourself?”

“If I had a fifty-gallon drum I could barbecue a pig in the cement yard,” Ptolemy said proudly.

“I bet you could, Mr. Grey. I bet you could.”

 

 

 

For a long time after the Devil had left, Ptolemy considered their conversation. He remembered every word and intonation, every gesture and phrase.

Satan had called the feeling in his body a tickle, meaning that he knew about the Tickle River and Coy and the theft of the gold coins. He was telling him that Coy had sinned but that he would be forgiven if Ptolemy lived up to his side of the bargain over the disposition of the treasure.

It was a delicate transaction, dealing with the Devil, but in Ptolemy’s mind that was his only hope. How else could he save Letisha and Artie, and Robyn too? How else could he make sure that Reggie’s killer did not escape judgment?

Ptolemy was feeling giddy after such a close call with oblivion, because he knew meeting the Devil was always a threat to the immortal soul.

 

 

 

What’s a soul, Coy?” Li’l Pea had asked his mentor and friend.

For a long time the old man sat and puffed on his cherrywood pipe. After a few minutes went by, Ptolemy thought that he wouldn’t get an answer to his question. This wasn’t unusual. Sometimes Coy didn’t answer. Ptolemy knew that sometimes he had to find his own solutions.

“Do you look at your mama sometimes and feel love in your heart for her?” Coy asked.

“Yeah . . . I guess.”

“It’s either yes or no.”

“Yeah. Sometimes when I come home and she’s cookin’ an’ the house smell like chicken and dumplin’s an’ she see me and smile I get the jitters in my legs and start laughin’ an’ she smiles harder and calls me her li’l brown nut.”

“That love in your heart is your soul,” Coy said.

“But . . . but what if I said no?”

“Some people lose they souls along the way. They don’t feel no love or pride or that there’s somethin’ in the world bettah than they lives.”

“How do you lose your soul, Coy?”

“Because,” he said, “it is a delicate thing, a special thing. You can live without it, but you might as well be dead. That’s why heaven an’ hell is always fightin’ over the souls’a men. Our souls, when we got ’em, is so beautiful that angels always lookin’ to take ’em. That’s why when the Devil comes up on you you got to hold tight on the love in your heart.”

 

 

 

Ptolemy picked up the phone and dialed a number that he remembered thanks to the Devil’s medicine.

“Hello?” Niecie Brown said.

“Hey, Niecie. How you doin’?”

“Pitypapa, is that you? You dialin’ the phone by yourself ? I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe it, but it’s still a shock.”

“Hilly there, baby?”

“Uh-huh. He here watchin’ the TV. I told him that he was gonna have to pay you back for what he took. But you know he ain’t a bad boy. He just feel like he been cheated, losin’ his daddy so young and all.”

“Lemme talk to him, honey.”

“Hello?” Hilly said, bringing to mind some big dense creature like a hog, or even a hippopotamus.

“I need some bullets for my pistol.”

“Say what?”

“I need some bullets for my pistol, an’ I don’t want you tellin’ your mama about it neither.”

“What kinda pistol?”

“Twenty-five caliber. You get me that and we even. You won’t owe me a dime.”

“Okay. I’ll bring ’em ovah tomorrow.”

“Put ’em in a can of peanuts.”

“I gotta buy them too?” the brooding boy complained.

“Yeah. You got to buy them too.”

“All right. But we even then, right?”

“Right.”

 

 

 

The evening after that went smoothly for Ptolemy. He found a music station that was playing Fats Waller recordings.

He’d once seen the great Moon Face playing in an after-hours big-city juke joint in Memphis. In those days the music halls only allowed whites, except on special days, and so after a performance in front of an all-white audience there were many famous musicians that went to the black part of town to jam with their people.

Listening to the song “Two Sleepy People,” he was remembering a girl named Talla who turned to kiss him because the romantic lyrics made her. He remembered the smell of beer and the sawdust on the floor, Fats Waller himself winking at the momentary lovers, and a feeling that being Ptolemy Grey was the best thing in the whole world.

“Uncle?” she said, and the vision evaporated. “Uncle, you okay?”

Ptolemy turned his head, feeling pain between each vertebra, but he didn’t wince or curse.

“Is it eleven already?”

“It’s past midnight,” Robyn said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Your boyfriend here?” Ptolemy asked, looking toward the bathroom.

“No. He walked me to the door, but then I heard the music an’ told him to go on.”

“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”

“You my father-like, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah right.”

“A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”

The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”

“We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.

“The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.

“Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”

“He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”

“He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”

“Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.

“To do what?”

“To talk to a man named Mossa.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’ll see.”

 

 

 

That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.

“It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”

Ptolemy thought that Billy had probably bragged about the crime amongst his black brothers. He was used to his neighborhood down in Alabama, where no Negro would ever turn in another. But the U.S. Army had black soldiers from Chicago, San Francisco, and even New York City. Some of them thought it was their responsibility to follow the white man’s law.

Billy probably bragged, and everyone knew that Billy and Ptolemy were close.

“Well, soldier?” the colonel asked.

“I wouldn’t know nuthin’ about anything like that, sir.”

“Are those tears in your eyes, Sergeant Grey?” Riley asked.

“Must be the smoke, sir.”

“Does doing your duty hurt that much?”

Riley was a good man; tall and proud, he never insulted his soldiers because of their race. He respected every man according to one standard. And so when he asked Ptolemy that question, the soldier froze, unable to speak. But in the vision, not a dream but a trancelike memory, Ptolemy inhabited his former self and spoke up.

“Sir, that sergeant said a word to Preston that stung him in his heart. Aftah all we been through, Preston heard in that white man’s one word that he would come back home to the same sorry situation that our mothers and grandmothers and great-great-great-grandmothers suffered under. Preston couldn’t help himself, but still that don’t wash away the blood.”

Ptolemy opened his eyes because the fever was burning his face. He sat up, remembering that Colonel Riley “volunteered” Billy Knight for duty at the front lines when the casualty rate was over ninety percent. He didn’t press charges, because that might have caused a riot among the soldiers.

Billy died a week later. His mother and father received his Purple Heart posthumously.

Ptolemy wondered if his memories were the cause of the fever. Was it hell calling for him?

Running his fingertips along the sheet, he felt a thrill of excitation. He had not experienced so much or so deeply since he was a child. The bottle given to him by Satan, or maybe one of Satan’s agents, sat on the bureau across from his big bed.

His temperature was rising quickly and the strength was draining from his limbs.

He got to his feet and took two quick steps. He had to grab on to the bureau not to fall. He opened the bottle, spilling a dozen tiny pills across the top of the chest of drawers. He had to suck his tongue four times before drawing out enough spit to swallow even one small pill.

Slumping down to the floor, Ptolemy thought about Billy. He was betrayed but did not know it. He was sentenced to death but thought that he was being chosen to fight because of his valor and bravery. He had murdered a man but felt that he was vindicated by his people’s suffering and shame. Ptolemy imagined Knight grinning while he was killing, about to die himself. The executioner’s hand was disguised, and the battlefield substituted for justice.

Ptolemy smiled and opened his eyes. He was on his back on the floor in a room that was once teeming with insects and rodents. A frigid river flowed over his fevered skin and now he was strong and able.

He got to his feet without arthritic pain in his joints. He took a deep breath and went back to his bed, where he could recall history and change it slightly—an old man deified by the whim of evil.

 

 

 

What we doin’ here, Uncle?” Robyn asked after they had gotten off the bus at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive a few minutes after ten the next morning.

“Goin’ t’see see Mr. Mossa. He a Jerusalemite, a Palestinian he calls it, but he was born in Jerusalem, same place that Christ our Lord was born.”

“This place is full’a rich white people,” Robyn argued. “We shouldn’t be up around here.”

The girl was looking about her, a severe frown etching her lovely dark features. Ptolemy smiled. There was a bench across the street, at the foot of a steep cobblestone road that didn’t allow cars. An old white woman was sitting there. Ptolemy brought his adopted daughter across the street and sat her down at the opposite end.

“I been afraid’a white people my entire life,” the old man said, holding the glowering girl’s hands.