The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Reggie couldn’t come, Papa Grey. Mama sent me to help you go to the store . . . You know, June’s daughter.”

June was a young woman who went out in hussy clothes on Friday nights when she should have been home with her children. And Esther . . . his sister took care of Hilda, George, and Jason.

“Whose boy are you?” Ptolemy asked the door.

“Marley and Hilda’s son,” the voice on the other side of the door replied.

Ptolemy heard the words and he knew that they meant something, though he could not conjure up the pictures in his mind. He wanted to ask another question to make sure that this wasn’t that woman who came in his house and stole his money out of his coffee can.

Ptolemy strained his mind trying to remember another thing that only a friend of Reggie would know. But every time his mind caught on something—it was a broad rise in Mississippi that had blue mist and white clouds all around. The sun was going down and the heat of the day was giving up to a mild breeze. There were birds singing and something about a man that died. A good man who gave everything so that his people could sing, no, not sing but live life like they were singing . . .

“Papa Grey, are you all right?” the voice beyond the door asked.

Ptolemy remembered that he was trying to recall something about Reggie that the young man through the door should know. He was, Reggie was, Ptolemy’s son, or his grandson, or something like that. He was tall and dark, not handsome or slender, but people liked him and he was always nice unless he was drinking and then he got rough.

Don’t drink, boy, Ptolemy would tell him. Drinkin’ is the Devil’s homework for souls lost on the road after dark.

“What did I used to tell Reggie about liquor?” the old man asked.

“What?”

“What did I tell him about liquor?”

“Not to drink it?” the voice replied.

“But what did I say?” Ptolemy asked.

“That drinkin’ was bad?”

“But what did I say?”

“I don’t know exactly. That was a long time ago,” Hilly said.

“But what did I say? To him,” Ptolemy added to help the young man answer the question.

“Uncle Grey, if you don’t open up I can’t help you go shoppin’.”

Ptolemy slapped his hands together and backed away from the door. He laid his palms upon the stack of ancient, disintegrating cardboard boxes piled next to the entrance of his one-bedroom apartment. He brought his hand to his bald head and pressed down hard, feeling the arthritic pain in the first joint of three fingers. One, two, three. Then he reached for the doorknob, gripped it.

Just the feel of the cold green glass on his hand brought back that crazy woman into his mind. The woman who came into his house was named Melinda Hogarth, somebody said. She knocked Ptolemy down and made off with his coffee-can bank. She was fifty. “Too old to be a drug addict,” Ptolemy remembered saying.

“Get outta my way, niggah,” she’d said when Ptolemy got to his feet and tried to pull his bank back from her. “I will cut you like a dog if you try an’ stop me.”

Ptolemy hated how he cringed and cowered before the fat, deep-brown addict. He hated her, hated her, hated her.

And then she did it again.

“Don’t open the door unless it’s for me or someone I send,” Reggie had told him. And he had not opened that door for anyone but Reggie in three and a half, maybe five years, and nobody had stolen his coffee-can money since. And he never went in the streets except if Reggie was with him because one time he met Melinda down on St. Peters Avenue and she had robbed him in broad daylight.

But Reggie hadn’t been there in a week and a half by the old man’s calculation. He would have had to send somebody after that long. Anyway, it was a man’s voice outside, not crazy Melinda Hogarth. Ptolemy turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Down at the end of the long hall a young man was walking away. He was a hefty kid wearing jeans that hung down on his hips.

“Reggie.”

The young man turned around. He had a brooding, boyish face. He looked familiar.

“I was leavin’,” he said down the long hallway. His expression was dour. It seemed as if he might still leave.

“Did Reggie send you?” the old man asked, holding the door so that he could slam it shut if he had to.

“No,” the boy replied. “Niecie did. Mama did.”

Reluctantly he shambled back toward Ptolemy’s door.

Old Papa Grey was frightened by the brute’s approach. He considered jumping inside his apartment and slamming the door shut. But he resisted the fear; resisted it because he hated being afraid.

If you know who you is, then there’s nuthin’ to fear, that’s what Coy used to tell him.