The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,26
in again, dragging more of the gray sheet from the bedroom.
Again and again he dug his fang-shaped hook into the tarp, the plastic hissing like lizard skin against itself and along the floor. Ptolemy, sweating and laughing, his heart beating fast, pulled the entire covering from the bedroom. He fell to the floor under the mist of dust that had been raised. He hacked and laughed, sneezed and chuckled, rubbed his irritated eyes and tittered to himself.
“I did it,” he announced triumphantly. “I pulled that bastard outta there.”
For a while Ptolemy Grey lay there, half on the floor and half on the dusty gray tarp. He was breathing hard and laughing to himself, remembering people and things randomly, haphazardly. There was the time he and Keith Low shoveled coal on a steam train from Jackson to Memphis to pay their fare.
After Coydog had died Pity stayed in bed for two weeks. Sheriff Walters had come to ask Li’l Pea what he knew, but he didn’t say anything except that he didn’t know anything. It was all he could do to keep from crying while looking at the ugly blue veins that crossed back and forth over the sheriff’s nose.
“You know that I’m here to find them that killed your uncle, now, don’t ya, boy?” the middle-aged, portly white man asked.
“Yessuh.”
“You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”
“Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.
“All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”
Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.
“Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”
“Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”
Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.
Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.
A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.
Li’l Pea looked away.
Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.
Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink