The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (31 page)

Ptolemy’s only response was to smile.

Alfred had on black pants and a fuchsia-colored shirt. Across his chest was the medallion that said
Georgie
. Alfred’s strawberry skin was redder than it had been, and his freckles seemed darker. His pretty face was as brutal as ever and his breath was coming hard.

“Sit down, Alfred,” Ptolemy said, pointing to the straight-back chair across from him.

There was a gold coin on the table between the couch and the chair; a twenty-dollar gold piece from before the Civil War. After sitting down, Alfred picked up the coin and caressed it with his thumb.

Ptolemy’s smile broadened.

“Where the rest of ’em, old man?”

“Before I met Robyn, Reggie was the light of my life,” Ptolemy said. “I couldn’t think worf a damn, but you don’t have to think straight to love somebody.”

“You want me to go through your pockets?”

“It nearly killed me when I saw him in his coffin.”

“I will tear this house up.”

“Robyn brought me up to his grave ’bout a month ago.”

“I ain’t foolin’,” Alfred said. “I will hurt you, old man.”

“It was beautiful up there,” Ptolemy remembered. “Big green trees and a breeze. He had a small stone, but it was respectful. You evah been up there?”

This question derailed the younger man’s rage for a moment.

“I took Nina and her kids up but I waited in the car.”

“That coin you put in your pocket was for him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Then it’s for his wife and his chirren.”

“I’m lookin’ aftah Nina.”

“But you ain’t givin’ a care for them kids. Niecie got the kids.”

Alfred’s eyes bulged and he jumped to his feet, gesturing violently. Ptolemy looked up at him, wondering what the Devil could have put in that injection to make him so unafraid of impending death.

“What would you do with them coins if you had ’em?” Ptolemy asked.

“I already got one.”

“Okay,” Ptolemy said. “What you gonna do with that?”

“Take it to the pawn shop on Eighty-sixth Street. Gold is expensive.”

“So he gonna give ya fi’e hunnert dollahs on a coin worf at least twelve thousand.”

Alfred’s rage was extinguished. His eyes took on a crafty slant.

“Maybe three times that,” Ptolemy added.

Alfred sat back down.

“How?” Alfred asked.

“Did you kill Reggie, Al?”

“He was killed in a drive-by.”

“Was it you with the gun in your hand?”

“Reggie’s dead.”

“An’ you got his woman.”

Alfred smiled then. He didn’t mean to, Ptolemy could tell.

“Streets is hard, old man,” Alfred said, still unable to repress the grin. “People die all the time. All the time.”

“Oh, I know that. I prob’ly know it even bettah than you. I’m dyin’ right now while you lookin’ at me. My head is on fire. My bones feel like dust.”

“You
will
be dead you don’t hand ovah Nina’s property. She told me what you said. She told me what you thought.”

“And what did you say to that?” Ptolemy leaned forward, remembering leaning into a kiss with Natasha Kline seventy years before. The young white woman couldn’t pay for the ice and so she kissed him instead. He’d never told anybody about that kiss. Back then, in 1936, a Negro kissing a white woman could get him killed anywhere in the country.

“Never you mind what I said,” Alfred uttered through clenched teeth. “Just hand ovah Nina’s gold an’ tell me how to sell it for her.”

“Did you kill him, Al? Did you kill my Reggie?”

Alfred reached across the table and slapped Ptolemy’s face. The old man realized with the shock of the blow that his mind was beginning to slip. His mind had begun to wander. But when Alfred hit him everything snapped back into place.

“It’s a easy question, man,” Ptolemy said. “I got to know what happened to my boy. I got to know. I’m a old man, Al. I cain’t hurt you. I cain’t say I was there.”

“What about the gold?” Alfred asked after clenching and unclenching his fist.

“If you tell me what I want to know I will go to Nina with you and hand her the gold.”

Ptolemy could hear his own blood pumping. Alfred’s lips twisted as if he had just bit into a bitter fruit.

“He was gonna take her away, you know,” Alfred said. “He was gonna leave you with no one to look aftah you. He was gonna take Nina, but Nina’s mine. She belong to me. I don’t care if she married to him, but when I want that pussy it gotta come to me. I ain’t gonna let no fool take away what’s mine.”

 

 

 

Don’t evah mess with a man,” Coydog McCann was whispering to Li’l Pea deep in the memory of Ptolemy the man. “Don’t nevah give him a chance.”

“But what if,” the child asked, “what if you ain’t sure that he mean you harm?”

“It’s you that mean to harm him,” Coy said, pointing his thumb and forefinger like a pistol. “Life ain’t fair. Life ain’t right. Life ain’t no good or bad. What it is is you, boy. You makin’ up your mind and takin’ your own path. Don’t worry ’bout that cop with the truncheon. Don’t worry ’bout that white man in a suit. Don’t worry ’bout a cracker with his teefs missin’ and a torch in his hand. Ain’t none’a that any of your nevermind. All you got to do is make sure he ain’t got a chance.”

 

 

 

Did you hear me?” Alfred was saying.

“No. I missed it. What did you say?”

“I said hand ovah the coins.”

“But you just said what Reggie done. You didn’t say if you killed him.”

“Don’t play with me, old man.”

“Did you kill Reggie?”

“Y-yes,” Alfred said, the confession snagging on his lip. “I kilt the mothahfuckah. All right? Now, where is the gold?”

“I ain’t gonna give you no gold, fool. You killed my family, my blood. I ain’t gonna pay you for that. You, you must be crazy.”

Alfred reached for Ptolemy as the old man slipped his hand under the cushion beside him. Alfred lifted him into the air with ease, the younger man’s muscles bulging under sweaty brown and strawberry-colored skin.

Ptolemy saw the rage in the killer’s eyes turn to amazement as the pistol jerked twice in his hand.

When Ptolemy fell, he was certain that Alfred would use his last bit of strength to kill him. But the killer was more interested in the blood on his hands than he was in revenge. His breath was loud and fast, intertwined with a crying moan.

“Oh no. Oh no,” Alfred said.

And Ptolemy felt pity for the fact that all men come to that moment in time: Coy, and his own grandfather, and Reggie on a friend’s front porch.

Alfred backed away from Ptolemy, turning and lurching toward the door. He grabbed the green-glass knob but had trouble turning it because of the slick blood on his hands. He finally got the door open and staggered into the hall.

Ptolemy climbed to his feet and followed the murderer. He dropped the gun inside his own door and stayed a few steps behind the hulking man. Blood fell in dollops on the concrete floor but Alfred kept moving. They made it outside. Alfred missed the first step on the stoop and tumbled to the sidewalk. Ptolemy was sure that the big man would die there but Alfred rose up and reeled drunkenly into the street. When he got to the dividing line, he followed that. Ptolemy was a few feet behind him and to the left.

Melinda Hogarth screamed.

Ptolemy stopped and stared at her, perched on the stoop of an old brick apartment building. There was terror in her face and this surprised Ptolemy. He saw Melinda as an evil woman unable to feel for another’s pain. But he was wrong. Her angry fists were in her mouth now. Her eyes were fearful.

When Ptolemy turned he saw that Alfred had made it as far as the intersection. There he fell onto his knees, his chest on his thighs, his forehead on the asphalt. Cars were braking and swerving around the penitent.

Melinda was also on her knees, crying hysterically.

On his way back to his apartment, Ptolemy forgot where he was going.

 

 

 

When he opened his eyes, all that had gone before was behind that locked door again. He was in a yellow room on a high bed. There was classical music playing and a TV tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station.

A white man with a huge mustache was seated there next to him.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Who?”

“You.”

“That’s me. I’m the one you talkin’ to.”

“I’m Dr. Ruben.”

“Do I know you?”

The man smiled and a fear nudged at the back of Ptolemy’s mind. It was an old fear, faded and flaccid like a balloon that had lost most of its air.

“I’m a friend of your niece,” the man, whose name Ptolemy had already forgotten, said.

“Uncle Grey?”

Turning his eyes to the other side of the bed took all of his concentration. He saw and registered and forgot many things on his way. The empty room and the green door and the feeling that he had accomplished an ancient task that had been behind a door and under a floor. There was blood somewhere out in the world, through the window, and then came the girl: eyes like sharp ovals and chocolate skin, she was beautiful but what Ptolemy saw was that she was one of a kind, like the woman who had come to his door and yanked him out of his sad and lonely life.

“Rob, Rob, Robyn?”

Her smile was filled with gratitude. Ptolemy’s heart surged like the, like the soil under his father’s spade at the beginning of the season. There was pain in his chest.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“What’s my name?”

“Ptolemy Usher Grey.”

“That’s a king’s name.”

“Yes it is.”

“And why am I here?”

“You been sick, Uncle. Dr. Ruben come to see if you was still alive, but I told him that you’d outlive the Devil himself.”

Ptolemy knew that the child was making a joke but he forgot what it meant. Still, he smiled for her, pretending he understood.

“Alfred died at the hospital, and the police wanted take you to jail but Moishe Abromovitz got a paper on ’em an’ they said that they’d wait till you got better.”

“Did I kill?”

The girl nodded. When Ptolemy tried to remember her name he was brought back to the yard in front of his childhood home where birds flocked around him, eating stale breadcrumbs and wailing out their songs.

“You was right about Niecie,” she was saying.

“I was?”

“Yeah.”

The man with the mustache rose and departed the hospital room. Ptolemy gave this movement his full attention until the green door had closed.

“What did you say?” he asked the girl-child.

“I said that you was right about Niecie?”

“What, what did I say?”

There was a piano playing on the radio.

“You said that she’d try and get the law on me. I had to move out yo’ apartment. I had to get a place on my own. Beckford tried to stay there wit’ me but he kept gettin’ mad about the money an’ finally he just had to go.”

“Slow down,” Ptolemy said.

“It’s okay now.”

“It is?”

“Yeah,” she said, but he could tell that there was more to the story.

He held out his hand and the girl who reminded him of birds singing took it into hers just like he thought she would. He sighed and maybe she asked a question. The music became a sky and the words the man on the television was saying turned into the ground under his feet. One was blue and the other brown, but he was not sure which was which. Everything glittered and now and again, when he looked around, things were different. Another room. A new taste. The girl always returned. And the door that was shut against his forgotten life was itself forgotten and there were feelings but they were far away.

A coyote that talked like a man whispered in his ear, and then licked his face, and then . . .