The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,53
. . .”
“Where you and Coydog used to fish?”
“How much money we got in the bank now?” he asked.
“All of it. Forty-two thousand in the savings account an’ the rest in that deposit box. Come on, Uncle, you should go back to bed.”
“What’s that boy’s name? The one you seein’.”
“Beckford?”
“Yeah . . . him. You like him?”
“He all right.” Robyn looked away and Ptolemy knew for sure that she had made love to the handsome friend of Reggie.
“You said he live with three other young men?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now that the money’s gone, you could bring him ovah if you want. You can sleep in the bedroom. I don’t care.”
“I don’t wanna talk about this, Uncle.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it makes me feel embarrassed.”
Ptolemy hooked Robyn’s chin with the index finger of his left hand and lifted her face to regard him. She was wearing just a T-shirt, and all that covered him was that towel. Ptolemy thought about that but he wasn’t ashamed.
“I love you, Uncle Grey,” Robyn said.
“’Course you do,” he said. “I’m like family.”
“Uh-uh,” the woman inside the child said. “I got family. I know what that feels like. No, Uncle, I could sit an’ listen to you for days. Even when yo’ mind was confused an’ you was scared, I still looked up to you. And you treat me with respect an’ you still be lookin’ at my legs an’ stuff. I don’t want Beckford in this house wit’ us.”
Both Ptolemys, past and present, heard the love in her voice; neither one had the words to answer back.
Where’d you put my toolbox?” he asked Robyn the next morning as he rummaged through the living room closet.
“I put it under yo’ bed,” Robyn said. She was lying on the couch that was also a bed, watching a show about strange fish in the deep ocean.
“Could you get down there and get it for me, please?”
When she jumped up from the couch, Ptolemy said, “You could finish your show, child. I don’t need you to snap to.”
Instead of sitting back down the girl came up to him and kissed his cheek and hugged him tight. Ptolemy would always get lost in a woman’s hug. His mind still drifted under the spell a soft embrace.
“What’s that for?”
“Would you marry me if I was twenty years older and you was fifty years younger?” she asked.
“You could do bettah than somebody like me.”
“God couldn’t do bettah than you, Uncle Grey.”
It wasn’t the words so much as the hunger in the child’s tone that brought the pain into his chest. It was the same pain he felt when the giant roach flew up in his kitchen. He gripped her shoulders and she gazed at him.
“Are you,” he asked, “are you goin’ out with Beckford tonight?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“No, it’s all right. I actually wanted to sit quiet and read some.”
“Are you tired’a me bein’ here, Uncle?”
“No, baby. You put a fire in my mind and love at my doorstep.” He’d heard the words somewhere before, maybe in a song.
Robyn left at six o’clock and by six-ten Ptolemy was in the living room closet, working his crowbar on the back end floor. There was a slot there made specially by Ptolemy almost five decades before. His apartment was on the ground floor. Below the floor was three feet of concrete. There he had carved out a place for Coydog’s treasure. It took him a while to jimmy the jury-rigged trapdoor but after some work he flipped it over. The ancient hinges screamed and parts of the wood floor splintered and popped.
Ptolemy wondered where all the dust came from. The box he hid from himself was covered with a quarter-inch of thick gray soot.
He used the iron key to open the chest but he didn’t even touch the bag inside. He knew the gold was there, coins that went back all the way to the Civil War and before, some used, some like new. But it wasn’t his treasure. He was just the guardian, obeying a long-ago command from Coy the thief, martyr, and partisan.
He didn’t need to fondle the gold but he took out an oiled cloth that was wrapped around a blue-black .25 pistol—which still gleamed darkly.
The grin on Ptolemy’s lips was not welcomed by him. He had never shot even a rabbit. But he smirked at the gun, turning it over and over in his hand.