The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,4
the toilet don’t work.”
“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What?”
“It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”
“I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”
“What thing?”
“The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”
“What thing, Uncle?”
“The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”
“What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.
“I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three-quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.
Hilly switched off the radio.
“Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”
“All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”
“But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”
“But then all you got to do is find your station,” Hilly said, crinkling his nose to keep the foul odor out.
“Turn it back on, Reggie . . . or Hilly, or whatever . . . just turn it back on.”
The young man put up his hood and used it to cover his nose and mouth. He turned the radio on at a low volume.
“Make it have more sound,” Ptolemy demanded.
“But you not gonna be here, Papa Grey.”
“Make it more.”
Hilly turned up the volume and then said, “I’ll be out on the front porch waitin’, Uncle. It stink too much in here.”
Hilly went out of the door, leaving it ajar. Ptolemy was quick to close the door after his great-grandnephew and throw the bolt. Then he moved quickly so as not to forget what he was doing. He scanned the piles of boxes and stacks of cartons, dishes, clothes, and old tools. He looked under the tables and through a great pile of clothes. He shuffled through old newspapers, letters, and books in the deep closet. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a large gray spider suspended in a corner. For a moment he thought about shooting that spider.
“No,” he whispered. “You don’t have to shoot a spider. He too small for shootin’. Anyway, he ain’t done nuthin’.” And then Ptolemy remembered what he was looking for. He went to the closet and took out a stack of sheets that his first wife, Bertie, had bought sixty years before. Under the folded bedclothes was an electric steam iron set upon a miniature ironing board. Under the iron lay three unopened envelopes with cellophane windows where Ptolemy’s name and address appeared.
One by one Ptolemy opened the sealed letters. Each one contained a city retirement check for $211.41. He counted them: one, two, three. He counted the checks three times and then shoved them into his pocket and stood there, wondering what to do next. The radio was on. It was playing opera now. He loved it when people sang in different languages. He felt like he understood them better than the TV newsmen and women who talked way too fast for any normal person to understand.
There was a plane crash in Kentucky. Forty-nine dead. It was Monday, the twenty-eighth of August. The spider stared down from his invisible webs, waiting for a fly or moth or unwary roach.
Somebody was waiting for Ptolemy. Reggie. No, not Reggie but, but . . .
There was a chubby young stranger standing on the concrete stairs of the tenement building when Ptolemy came out into the daylight clutching his outside right front pocket. He squinted from the bright sun and shivered because there was a breeze.
“What took you, Papa Grey?” the unfamiliar stranger asked.
“Do I know you?”
“Hilly,” he said. “Hilda’s son. I’m here to take you shopping. Did you lock the door?”
“’Course I did,” Ptolemy said. “It’s Monday and you always lock the door on Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, uh, um, Saturday, and, and, and Sunday. You always lock the door on them days and then put the key in your front pocket.”
“Hey, Pete,” someone yelled from down the street.
Ptolemy flinched and backed up toward the door, hitting the wood frame with his shoulder.