The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,6
wanna go to Big City?” Hilly asked again.
“I gotta go to the place first.”
“What place?”
“The place for in my pocket.”
Hilly noticed then that his uncle was holding on to something through the blue fabric of his pants.
“You got somethin’ in your pocket, Uncle?”
“That’s my business.”
“Do you want me to help you with that like I helped you with that bitch slapped you?”
Ptolemy snickered. He would hardly ever use a curse word like that, but he felt it, and the big boy saying it made him happy.
Laughin’ is the best thing a man can do,” his aunt Henrietta used to say back in the days after the Great War when all the black folks lived together and knew each other and talked the same; back in the days when they had juke joints and white gloves and girls that smiled so pretty that a little boy like Ptolemy (who they called Petey, Pity, and Li’l Pea) would do cartwheels just to get them to look at him.
“Do you want me to help you with what’s in your pocket, Papa Grey?” Hilly said again. He reached for Ptolemy’s hand but the old man shifted away.
“Mine!” he said protectively, shaking his head.
Hilly put his hands up, surrendering to his great-uncle’s vehemence.
“All right. All right. But if you want me to help you, you have to tell me where you want to go.”
“The place,” Ptolemy said. “The place.”
“The ATM?”
“No, not that. Not where they say amen. The place where, where the lady behind the glass is at.”
“The bank?”
When the old man smiled he realized that his tongue was dry. He had to go to the bathroom too.
“What bank?” his nephew asked.
This question defeated Ptolemy. How could somebody be so stupid not to know what a bank was? He’d been there a thousand times. And he was thirsty, and he had to urinate. And it was cold too.
“Do you have a bank card in your wallet, Papa Grey?” Hilly asked.
“Yes,” Ptolemy answered though he hadn’t really understood the question.
“Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“Your bank card.”
“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout.”
“Can I see your wallet?”
“What for?”
“So that I can see your bank card and I can know what bank you want to go to.”
“Reggie knows,” Ptolemy said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Reggie’s out of town for a minute, Papa Grey. And I don’t know what bank you do business wit’ so I got to see your wallet.”
Ptolemy tried to decipher what the boy was saying and what he meant. He didn’t understand what there could have been in his wallet that this Reggie, no, this Hilly, needed to know. He did fight off that crazy woman. He did know Reggie. And he had to go to the bathroom and drink from the faucet, Ptolemy did—not Hilly/ Reggie.
Ptolemy took the wallet from his back pocket and handed it into the young man’s massive hand.
Hilly, whose skin was melon-brown and mottled, sifted through the slips of paper and receipts until he came upon a stiff plastic card of blue and green.
“Is your bank People’s Trust, Papa Grey?”
“That’s it. Now you finally found out what to do,” the old man said.
“Hold it right there,” an amplified man’s voice commanded.
A police car pulled up to the curb and two uniformed officers climbed out, both holding pistols in their hands.
Hilly put his hands up to the level of his shoulders and Ptolemy did the same.
“John Bull,” he whispered to Hilly. “They must be lookin’ for robbers—or, or, or black mens they think is robbers.”
“You can put your hands down,” one of the cops, the dark-brown one, said to Ptolemy.
“I ain’t done nuthin’, Officer,” the old man replied, raising his arms higher even though it hurt his shoulders.
“We don’t think you’ve done anything, sir. But is this man bothering you?”
“No, sir. This my son, I mean my grandson, I mean Reggie my grandson come to take me to the People’s Bank.”
“He’s your son or your grandson?” the white cop in the black-and-blue uniform asked.
“He’s my grandson,” Ptolemy said slowly, purposefully. He wasn’t quite sure that what he was saying was true but he knew that he had to protect the young colored man from the cops.
Don’t let the cops get you in jail, Coydog McCann used to tell him on the porch of his tarpaper house down in Mississippi, in Breland, when Ptolemy was seven and the skies were so blue that they made you laugh. Don’t evah let a niggah go to jail because’a you, Coydog had said. Be bettah