The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,72
me now?”
“I would if I could but I cain’t ’cause I ain’t.”
“Why not?”
“You just make sure to go to Niecie’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. What time you usually go there?”
“’Bout eleven in the mornin’.”
“Keep that up and you will get Reggie’s gift.”
“But, Mr. Grey, I need to know what it is.”
Ptolemy hung up the phone and grinned. He chuckled to himself and then laughed out loud.
Sitting in the living room in the late morning, Ptolemy tried to remember the last time he laughed out loud. He could feel the laughter in his hands and knees. The happiness had replaced his arthritic pain. He never laughed like that when he was with Sensia. She laughed for him. He was already beyond elation and wonder by the time he was a man. It was way back in his childhood, when he would walk around the woods with Coydog and the old thief made crazy faces and sounds and told jokes about things that other adults didn’t think were proper.
Ptolemy wondered how he could have lived for so long but still the most important moments of his life were back when he was a child with Coy McCann walking at his side. How could the most important moments of his life be Coy’s last dance on fire and Maude’s death in flames? Hadn’t he lived through poverty, war, and old age? Didn’t any of that mean anything?
The Devil’s fire ignited in him and he was able to laugh again now that he was burning alive.
He thought about Robyn’s legs, about how firm and brown and strong they were. Many a time, when she was walking around the house in only a T-shirt, he wanted to get on his knees and hug those powerful thighs to his cheek and chest. This desire made him happy. He was as old as Methuselah but a child’s legs made him happy. He could no longer feel sex, but he remembered . . . maybe knowing it better in hindsight than he ever did when he was able.
“I love her,” he said into the silence of the apartment.
As the moments passed, Ptolemy thought about stars wheeling through the night sky. They moved past, getting on with their business while men had their feet in clay.
We born dyin’, Coydog used to say sometimes. But you ask a man an’ he talk like he gonna live forevah. Nevah take no chances. Nevah look up or down.
“I love you, Robyn,” Ptolemy said as a reply to words spoken so long ago. Death was coming, but Love was there too. Robyn was a far-off descendant, an adopted child, a woman he might have loved as a woman if he were fifty years younger and she twenty years older.
Pain tittered in his knucklebones and burbled in his knees. His joints were like music, like transistor radios calling out from under his skin. The knock at the door was a new strain, another musician deciding to jam with him. He waited for the knock to come again before getting up, going to the bedroom, pulling the bureau drawer open, and retrieving his .25-caliber pistol.
He walked to the door purposefully, like a soldier marching into battle.
“Who is it?” he asked in a mild voice.
“Shirley Wring,” she answered sweetly.
Changing his mood as quickly as an infant child distracted by a sudden sound, Ptolemy stuffed the little gun into his pocket, threw the four locks, and opened the door.
She wore an orange dress and largish, bone-colored beads. Her half-blind eyes glistened behind glittering glasses. Her short hair was done recently, forming a cap that wrapped in arcs down under her ears and got curly over her forehead. Her tennis shoes were white and sensible. And instead of the red bag, she carried a pink paper box in her hands.
“Can I come in?” the small woman asked.
Ptolemy reached out to take the box and then backed away for her to enter. As she went past, he could see the red bag hanging from her left shoulder. For some reason this made him happy.
“Come on in an’ sit,” he said. “Can I get you somethin’? Water? Tea?”
Shirley Wring set her bag on the couch and took the box from Ptolemy.
“You sit down and rest and I’ll put together some coffee an’ fudge for us,” she said.
“I’ll be right with ya,” he promised. “First I’ma get sumpin’ in the bedroom.”
He put the pistol back in the drawer and took out a smaller item, which he placed in his shirt pocket.