The Last Days Of Ptolemy Grey Part 21

Ptolemy Grey hadn't really slept after he'd awakened from the coma. He'd close his eyes and enter into a world both new and old to him. There he'd talk to Coy along the Tickle River and carry boxes of medicine in France for soldiers, most of whom were destined to die. He delivered ice and swept streets, made love to Sensia Howard so hard sometimes that he'd limp for a day or two afterward.

One night, with his eyes closed and his mind imagining, he inhabited his old feebleminded self, sitting in front of the TV. The black woman, who looked like a white woman pa.s.sing for black, was talking about the war.

"More than a hundred Iraqis died in a suicide blast in the city of Tuz Khormato today. The suicide bomber set off his truck bomb in a crowded marketplace at midday."

"Excuse me, lady," Ptolemy said.

For a moment it seemed that she'd continue her report, not hearing his interruption, but then she turned and looked at him, into his living room. It was the old living room filled with stacks of moldering and unread newspapers, furniture, and trash.

"Who are you?" the woman asked.

"I'm Mr. Grey," Ptolemy said formally.

The woman looked as if she wanted to turn away from him but found that she could not. She touched her ear as Ptolemy had often watched her do in the old days when he didn't understand hardly anything. She touched it, but her ear didn't help her change the subject or look away.

"My name is Ginger," the woman in the vision said.

"Tell me, Ginger, what are you talkin' about twenty-four hours a day?"

"The news, Mr. Grey. It's the news."

"What news?"

"There's a war going on. People are dying."

"Who's the enemy? Is it Hitler again?"

"We aren't quite sure who the enemy is. That's what makes this war so hard."

"If we don't know who we fightin', then how can we fight 'em?"

"We . . . ," she said, and paused. "We . . . we aim our weapons at them and when they become frightened and take out their guns we know who they are."

"I don't get it, Ginger."

"Me neither, Mr. Grey."

"How can a man have a enemy an' fight that enemy and still not know who he is?" Ptolemy asked, proud of his ability to string his words together like a necklace of great big black Hawaiian pearls.

"Haven't you ever heard of Zorro?" Ginger asked.

"The masked man?"

"Yes, he was a man who hid his face and struck against his enemies."

Ptolemy's stomach grumbled. It was a deep, hungry sound that surprised him. He opened his eyes in the bed, realizing that sleep was no different than wakefulness and that he hadn't eaten all day.

A groan and then a whimper scurried at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that it was this sound, and not his stomach, that had pulled him away from Ginger. He climbed out of the bed in the dark room and crept toward the door.

He peeked through the crack and saw that it was Robyn moaning. She was naked, on her back, and the boy was above her, his arms at the side of her head, his middle going up and down like the oil-well derricks in Baldwin Hills pumping the oil out of the ground.

"Oil is the earth's blood," Coy had told Li'l Pea one day. "Men cut deep into the world's skin an' suck out the blood like it belong to them. That's why they's earthquakes and tidal waves, because the earth is our mother, but she don't like our ways."

Robyn's feet went up straight and trembled and she said something that had no real words. The boy moved faster and grunted, and she took his face in her hands. They gazed at each other in the murky room; a candle set on top of the TV was the only light; then Beckford fell on his side next to the girl and kissed her cheek. They whispered in the darkness, stroking each other's face and head.

Ptolemy watched them as if from a great distance, maybe even through time itself. After a while, when their hands came to rest and he knew that they were asleep he went back to his bed and closed his eyes, finding Ginger there waiting for him, ready to continue their conversation about the invisible, nameless enemy and the war waged against him.

When Ptolemy came out of the bedroom, at six in the morning, Beckford was already gone. Robyn was sprawled in her bed with her mouth agape and left breast exposed. Ptolemy pulled the blankets up to her chin and went into the kitchen to boil water in an old tin saucepan for instant coffee and to think about his last days.

He sat down at the small table, one of the pieces of furniture he wouldn't let Robyn throw out. It was at that table where he and Sensia Howard had their morning visit for so many years. If he looked down, he felt her presence, and then he'd look up, expecting to see her.

"I'll be back later," she'd always say. "Don't wait."

But he did wait for her . . . even after she died and had gone for good. That was the beginning of his descent into confusion. Many a morning he'd awaken, looking for her. Some days he didn't remember that she was dead until afternoon. He could see this all clearly now with the Devil's medicine running in his veins.

"All them years wasted," he said to himself, sipping the hot coffee and wis.h.i.+ng he had a cigarette.

He walked out to his gated porch that opened onto a concrete backyard. It was a large s.p.a.ce, a forty-foot-by-forty-foot square of bleached, synthetic stone. There was a wobbly redwood fence along the back, twelve-foot-high foot-wide slats that leaned and teetered in the slightest breeze. Three apartments opened onto the prison-like yard, but no one ever went there. Ugly red-brick buildings rose on every side. Looking up, he could see small patios jutting out from the upper floors, gated by iron bars and for the most part forgotten. These were used to house bicycles and crates, a place to dry hand-washed laundry and for rusted-out barbecue grills.

A middle-aged woman was sitting outside, six stories up. She was smoking and staring out.

Ptolemy watched her for many minutes, but she didn't look down. The years flashed across his mind's eye while he waited for the mature woman, who was young enough to be his daughter, to look down on him. In that time, women had loved him and men had cursed him. He'd been seduced by his friend Major's wife, LeAnne. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, something LeAnne did all the time. Major never knew, or maybe he didn't care to know.

Sensia saw it the second Ptolemy walked through the door.

"Who is it?" she asked him. He hadn't taken off his coat yet.

"Who is what?"

"Her."

"I don't know what you talkin' 'bout, Sensie. I just been down at the bar with Ralph and them."

"It's LeAnne, ain't it?" Her rage was cold and fierce, not a human fury but that of an animal who knows no fear or reason.

"I don't know what you're talkin' 'bout, Sensia Howard. You the one might flit off with a man at the drop of a hat."

Her silence was worse than her questions or insights. Ptolemy, standing in that concrete yard, could still feel the wrath coming off of his first true love.

He didn't know what to say, so he left. He already felt bad about Major. LeAnne had just offered him a drink, and the next thing he knew they were on the checkered sofa of Major's house, rutting and laughing, stopping to drink wine from time to time.

And now that Sensia was mad, he left L.A. and went out to Riverside, where he took a room and got a job at the gas station. That was Tuesday. He knew Sensia would never love him again. He knew that he broke a pact by sleeping with his friend's wife. Between Tuesday afternoon and Sat.u.r.day morning he downed a pint of sour-mash whiskey each night, sinking into a stupor rather than falling asleep.

Sensia was at his door that Sat.u.r.day morning. She wouldn't say how she'd found him out. The only person he told was George Fixx, who lived in San Francisco, and George swore that he never told anyone.

"What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" Sensia asked at his door.

The landlady was pacing downstairs because she had a strict rule that no women were allowed in her by-the-week rooms. But Sensia had pushed past Mrs. Tinman and gone right to Ptolemy's room, number six.

She looked bad. There were bags under her eyes and her skin was dry. Her hair wasn't even brushed, and she was wearing pants and a blouse that didn't match.

"You didn't want me no mo', Sensie."

"I might not want you here and there, Ptolemy Grey, but I need you. I need you to stay alive. You know that. You know that!"

She wasn't talking normally, like people do. She was preaching or speechifying, addressing an invisible host of dead souls whose job it was to attest to Truth.

"You need me?"

"I'll be dead in a week if you don't come home," she said. "G.o.d is my witness and pain is my choir." She broke down in tears and Ptolemy took her in his arms.

"No women in the rooms, Mr. Grey!" the landlady shouted.

"We leavin' now, Ms. Tinman," Ptolemy said.

"I ain't gonna refund none'a yo' money. The week up front is final."

"Okay, ma'am," Ptolemy said as he stroked his wife's hair. "You keep that money. It's worth every dime."

It was only then, in the empty concrete lot, that he remembered Sensie's cousin, who lived in Riverside at that time. She must've seen him and called Sensie and, in doing so, saved both their lives-for a time.

"G.o.d bless you, Minna Jones," Ptolemy whispered to himself.

"Uncle?"

Her voice was the constant refrain defining the form of his improvised last days. "Uncle?" Robyn would say, and all the words and thoughts that went before formed into sensible lines, became plain memories that no longer engulfed his mind.

"Yes, child?" he said without turning.

The woman on the bleak patio above looked down at the sound of their voices.

"Why you out here in your robe?" Robyn asked. "It's cold."

"Not in my skin," Ptolemy said. "Dr. Ruben's medicine lit a fire in me."

The back of Robyn's cold fingers pressed against his cheek.

"You are are hot." hot."

The woman's eyes from above met with Ptolemy's and locked.

"Come on inside, Uncle. Lemme get you some aspirin."

Ptolemy wanted to do as the girl said, but he was looking into the face of the smoking black woman. He wondered what she thought up there in her perch above the concrete yard.

The woman stood up, and Ptolemy wished that she would throw something down to him: a cigarette . . . a tattered length of rope. But she turned her back and went into her home.

"Come on," Robyn insisted.

Do you need me for anything today, Uncle Grey?"

They were sitting at the small table in the kitchen, drinking iced tea that Robyn made. She was right, the cold liquid cooled him.

"No," he said. "I wanna go see somebody, that's all."

"Miss Wring?"

Ptolemy hadn't thought about that. Robyn had given him the emerald ring and he hadn't gotten around to thanking her.

This forgetfulness wasn't like before, when his thoughts were faint and half forgotten. Now he forgot because he was thinking about the moment and how the present was an extension of things that transpired long, long ago.

The ring wasn't important. It was just a trinket. It was the woman, s.h.i.+rley, who occupied his mind.

"Yeah," he said. "I'ma go see s.h.i.+rley. She give me her address. Did you have a good time with Beckford last night?"

Robyn clasped her hands and then unclasped them, got to her feet, and went into the living room. Ptolemy smiled, realizing that he had meant to bother her. He rose, too, barely feeling the pain in his feet and knees, and followed her into the room, the living room that she had cleared out the way the Devil's medicine had cleared out his mind.

Robyn was sitting on the bed that was a couch at the moment. When Ptolemy came in she turned her back to him.

"You shouldn't be embarra.s.sed by what I say," Ptolemy said to his keeper.

He sat beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

"I didn't want you to know, Uncle," she said.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I didn't."