The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,7

to shoot a niggah than turn him ovah to John Bull.

“My grandson, Reggie, Officer. My grandson. He takin’ me to the People’s Bank an’ to the sto’.”

“Why does he have your wallet?” the dark-skinned cop asked.

“He wanted to tell where we was, where it was, you know. Where it was.”

“Are you his grandson?” the cop asked Hilly.

“His nephew, Officer,” Hilly said in a respectful voice that he had not used before. “He calls me Reggie, who’s my first cousin, but I’m Hilly Brown, and Reggie the one usually take care of him. I was lookin’ in his wallet because he done forgot the address of his bank.”

Ptolemy studied the police as they watched his nephew.

Hilly was his great-grandnephew, he remembered now. He was smaller the last time they’d seen each other. It was at a party in somebody’s backyard and there was brown smog at the edges of the sky but people were still laughing.

“Are you okay, sir?” the white cop asked Ptolemy.

“Yes, Officer. I’m fine. Reggie here, I mean Hilly here, was protectin’ me from all the thieves in the streets. He takin’ me to the bank and the food store. Yes, sir.”

The four men stood there on the dirty street for half a minute more. Ptolemy caught the smell of maggots from a nearby trash can. There was danger in the air. Ptolemy thought about Lee Minter, whom he saw run down and beaten by a cop name Reese Loman and his partner, Sam. The cops had truncheons. After the beating, Lee lay up in a poor bed in a tin house, where he died talking to his baby, LeRoy, who had passed ten years before. Lee called the cops fools for trying to arrest him for something they knew he didn’t do, and then he ran. The dying man had a fever so hot that you didn’t even need to touch him to feel the heat.

The policemen said something to Hilly. Ptolemy heard the deep voices but could not make out the words.

“Yes, Officer,” Hilly said to the white cop.

Ptolemy remembered that you were always supposed to speak to the white cop. Sometimes they had black men in uniform but it was the white cop that you had to talk to.

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said after the policemen got in their car and drove off. “We got to get to the bank before they close.”

It was a long, crowded room with a high counter down the middle and another one against the window that looked out on the street. Opposite the picture window was a wall of glass-encased booths where women cashed people’s checks and took deposit money for their Christmas clubs. Ptolemy used to keep a Christmas club for Angelina, Reggie’s daughter . . . or maybe it was William’s daughter, yes, William’s daughter, Angelina. And he also kept a holiday account for Pecora, even though she never liked him very much.

There were too many people in there. Ptolemy tried to see them but they began to blend together and no matter how many times he saw somebody when he looked around no one was familiar to him. And so he kept moving his head, trying to see and remember everyone.

“Let’s go to the counter, Papa Grey.” Hilly took his arm but Ptolemy wouldn’t budge. He just kept looking around, trying to make all of those faces make sense.

“Don’t it bother you?” the older man asked the younger.

“What? Come on.”

Ptolemy wasn’t going to be pulled around until he could make sense of that room. It seemed very important, almost as much as protecting that boy from the bulls. Didn’t he know that you weren’t ever supposed to take out your wallet on a street? If the thieves didn’t get you the police certainly would. The young people didn’t seem to have any sense anymore. They didn’t know. All the people on line and at the counters didn’t know what to do, and so it was dangerous on the street.

“Come on, Uncle.”

One man wearing a bright-blue suit with a long double-breasted jacket stood there talking to a blond-headed black woman who was smiling and wore no wedding ring. The blue-suited man looked very much like the gangster Sweet Billy Madges, and she, blondie, was familiar too. But it wasn’t anything to do with Madges and his whores. The blond black woman was like Letta Golding, who lived in a room across the courtyard from which a great oak had arisen.

“That oak,” Coydog would say, “is like