The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,8

Christ a’mighty coming up outta the clay, fed by the graves of all the dead souls that believed in him.”

“Do you believe in him?” Li’l Pea asked.

“If things goin’ good,” the wizened old man opined, “not too much. But when I’m in trouble I can pray with the best of ’em.”

If he was small enough, a little boy could climb on the limbs of that tree and clear across the courtyard or up or down to the walkways of any of the eight floors of that Mississippi Negro tenement.

Coydog lived there for a while, and Li’l Pea would visit him whenever he could.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly beseeched.

Letta was beautiful and friendly. Li’l Pea often found himself climbing up to the seventh-floor window of her apartment because she never pulled down the shade; even if she was naked and in the barrel she used for a bathtub, Letta would stand up and smile for Ptolemy and touch his cheek or kiss his forehead.

“You a nasty boy,” she’d say if he came up to her window and she was naked but she’d be smiling and he knew that she wasn’t really mad.

“Papa Grey,” Hilly said again.

“What?”

“Do you have a check to cash?”

He was still standing in the crowded bank and not in Letta’s bathroom. This realization was a surprise for the elder Grey but not a shock. He was used to going places in his mind. More and more he was in the past. Sometimes with his first wife, Bertie, and then later with the woman he truly loved—Sensia Howard. Even when she had been untrue to him with his good friend Ivan, he couldn’t get up the strength to leave Sensia—or to kill her.

The next thing Ptolemy knew he was standing at the counter with the three checks for $211.41 in his hand. Hilly was getting him to sign on the back over some other words that the boy had written.

“You stay here, Papa Grey,” Hilly was saying. “I’ma go over to the teller and get your money.”

Hilly had the checks in his hand but Ptolemy did not remember handing them over. He had signed them and now the boy was on the other side of the dividing table, standing on line at a teller’s window.

“That your son?” a woman asked.

She was old but not nearly as old as Ptolemy. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy, but he had twenty years on her at least.

“No. His name is . . . I forget his name but he’s my nephew, either my sister’s son or her daughter’s son. Somethin’ like that.”

“Oh,” the short woman said. “Mister, can you help me?”

“Um, the boy there does most everything for me,” he replied, thinking that he should go over on line and stand with, with . . . Hilly.

“I need five dollars more to make my telephone bill,” the woman said. She wore blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and a cap with a long transparent green sun visor.

“I don’t take care’a the money,” Ptolemy said. “I let the boy do that. I can’t hardly see the fingers on my hand and so he count the money so I don’t give ya a one instead of a, of a five.”

The woman was the same height as he. She once had clear brown eyes that were now partly occluded with wisps of gray.

“My name’s Shirley,” she said.

“Ptolemy,” he said, “but they call me Li’l Pea.”

“What kinda name is that?”

“It was Cleopatra’s father’s name,” the old man said. He had said the words so often in his life that they came to his lips automatically. He didn’t even know if they were true because it was Coydog told him that and his mother had said, “That Coydog just as soon lie as open his mouf.”

“The queen of Africa?”

“What’s your last name, Shirley?”

“Wring,” she said with a smile. “Double-u ara eye en gee.”

“Double-u ara eye en gee,” Li’l Pea, Pity, Petey, Ptolemy Grey repeated.

The woman smiled and lifted her left hand, which held the leather straps of a faded cherry-red purse. She placed the bag on the counter and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took a piece of pink tissue paper, which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large, dome-shaped pale-green stone.

“Emerald,” Shirley Wring said, placing the delicate jewel on his upturned fingers. “You can hold on to it until I get my Social Security an’ then I can buy it back for six dollars.”

Ptolemy stared into the sea-green crystal, admiring the