The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“You been there, Coydog?” the boy asked. Ptolemy remembered then, so many years later, listening to opera and ignoring Robyn, that he never called Coy Mr. McCann, which was his name. It was just mostly boy for Li’l Pea and Coydog for Coy.

“I been there in my mind,” Coy McCann told the boy.

“How you do that?”

“Read,” he said, stretching out the vowel sound like the singer did with her notes.

“How you learn that?”

“A, B, C,” Coy said, wagging his forefinger like the white conductor did on odd Thursdays in the summer when the white people’s marching band stopped in front of the town hall and performed old southern favorites.

That was the beginning of Li’l Pea’s informal education. From A to L were accomplished that very afternoon.

After he could say all the letters, Coydog stole some paper from the country store and showed his student how to make the sounds with pencil lines.

“Ain’t it wrong to be stealin’ that paper from the white man’s sto’?” Li’l Pea asked his aged friend.

“Wrong?” the wiry little man exclaimed. “Hell, it ain’t wrong, it’s a sin.”

“But if you do a sin, ain’t you goin’ to hell?”

“That all depends, boy.” Coy’s long dark face cracked open at his mouth, showing his strong, stained teeth. “The Catholics profess that all you got to do is say you’re sorry and the Lord will forgive. Other peoples say that Saint Peter’s got a scale where they put all the bad you done on one side and all the good on t’other. An’ if the good outweigh the bad they got a cot for you in heaven.

“So if I steal this here tablet an’ pencils but then I teach you how to read an’ write an’ from there you invent a train that go from here to Venice ...”

The German alto was warbling about love and Ptolemy remembered the name of the city with rivers for streets. He wanted to go to the bathroom and call the girl out to tell her what he’d accomplished but Coydog wouldn’t stop talking.

“. . . well, if I do that, then maybe the good beat out the bad.”

Ptolemy recalled watching his friend study him with a calculating eye.

“But you know, boy,” Coy said, “I don’t believe any’a that.”

“What do you believe?” the boy asked, the ABC’s whirling around his head.

“I think that there’s a long line up there in heaven an’ yo’ place in that line is predicted by what you done wrong. The worser thing you did puts you that much further to the back of the line. The people done the lesser is up toward the front.

“Now, the line start in downtown heaven and goes all the way to the barracks of hell because the two places is connected, just like good an’ evil in the same man. So anyway, when you die you get a number that stands for what you did wrong. So if you had two mens, a black one and a white one, and the black man stole the white man’s pig to feed his kids and then the white man shot the black man’s son because he couldn’t find the thief . . . well, the white man gonna get a much bigger number for murder than the black man will for stealin’. So, forgettin’ any other misdemeanors, the white man will have a hotfoot at his place on line and the black man will hear harp music comin’ from just up the way.”

“But what about the boy?” Li’l Pea asked.

“What boy?”

“The one that the white man killed.”

“Him?” Coydog said with a pained grimace. “They ain’t no special numbahs for the victims. Just ’cause they grabbed you and chained you, just ’cause they beat you an’ raped your sister don’t mean a thing when it come to that line. God don’t care what they did to you. What he care about is what you did.”

Ptolemy was Li’l Pea looking up at the man who had just opened the alphabet for him, the man who stole for him, sacrificing himself to the judgment of the great beyond.

“Mr. Grey?”

The newscaster was talking about a criminal in a cornfield somewhere, a woman was singing sweetly, and his name came in between the two.

“Mr. Grey.”

Looking up from his place on the floor in Coy’s room, no, in his own apartment, looking up, he saw Robyn, her short skirt hiked up even higher, her hands holding unidentifiable gelatinous masses of blackened rot.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Are you lookin’ at my legs, Mr. Grey?” she asked with surprise but no anger in her tone.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think I’m pretty?”

“I think pretty is your ugly little sister,” he said, repeating a compliment that he’d heard Coydog use a thousand times.

It worked on Robyn just like it had on all the young women that Coy had courted.

“That’s sweet. You a playah, huh, Mr. Grey?”

“What’s that in your hands?” he asked.

“It come out from under the sink an’ in the bathtub. It’s a mess. How do you go to the bathroom at all in there? The toilet don’t even flush.”

“For number one I use a coffee can and I . . .” He hesitated. “I pour it down the sink.”

“An’ what about numbah two?” Robyn asked, neither ashamed nor disgusted as far as the old man could tell.

“I usually wait for Reggie to come by. He usually take me to Frank’s Coffee Shop for breakfast or lunch an’ aftah I get my coffee I go.”

“So you ain’t been to a toilet since you was at the wake?” she asked.