The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“You know that it’s crime to lynch a man no mattah what color he is?”

“Yessuh,” Ptolemy remembered saying while he caught his breath on the dirty floor, half on and half off the gray tarp.

“All you gots to do is tell me who did it and I won’t tell nobody you did.”

Walters had closed the door to Ptolemy’s back bedroom but the boy knew that his father and mother were on the other side with his sisters and little brother.

“I don’t know nuthin’, Sheriff Walters,” Ptolemy said.

“Then why you snivelin’ an’ lookin’ at the floor?”

“Because my friend is daid, suh. He daid an’ he was the person I loved the most in the whole world.”

Ptolemy got to his feet in his apartment on La Jolla Place across the street from the laundry and Chow Fun’s Chinese restaurant and takeout. The tears falling from his eyes onto the plastic tarp sounded like solitary raindrops on a lonely dark afternoon.

Moving toward the door, he saw the piles of clothes and photo albums, chairs, rolled-up sheets, covers, and carpets; there were broken straw baskets and suitcases, paperback books tied into bundles, bottles, dirty silk flowers, paintings, balls of twine, tape, and packages that had never been opened. Over it all swarmed insects of various kinds. Ants, silverfish, roaches, beetles, spiders, and even a few flying bugs. A mouse or two leaped from box to bed or floor to basket.

A fast piano piece was playing and 111 people had died in Baghdad. Ptolemy remembered Coydog telling about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then he remembered the old man with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoes on a wooden box that wasn’t tall enough to keep him from choking a little; and all the white men and boys standing around, laughing; and then the man pouring kerosene on Coy’s feet and lighting it so that the old man couldn’t stand still to keep from hanging himself; and then Coy dancing in the air, his feet and pants on fire and all the white people laughing. Coy’s head moved from side to side and his tongue stuck out like he had something caught in his throat that he was trying to cough up.

Li’l Pea looked away.

Ptolemy slammed the door on the teeming, swarming insects and rodents. He pressed the edges on the tarp against the gap at the bottom so that the bugs couldn’t get into the rest of the house. Then he went into the bathroom, closed the door, pressed towels into the cracks, and turned the lights on. He filled the tub with hot water and stood at the ready to throw it on bugs or lynchers or ghosts if they should come.

Ptolemy didn’t know how much time had passed. Robyn had wound his clock and it was the kind that you had to prime only once every two weeks. The right time was just on the other side of the bathroom door, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to go out there. All his worst memories were out there: Sensie dead and her grave covered with maggots and worms. Now all he had was the dripping water of the bathroom sink to count the time away. He sat on the floor, watching the towels, to be sure that no maggot or worm found its way to him the way his father said that the worms made their ways into Coydog’s eyes after his brother, Lupo, had cut him down and buried him in a pauper’s grave behind the barbershop without even a stone to mark his passage.

He sat upon the tile floor, counting the drips and thinking about Reggie and Coy; both men lynched and buried and made food for bugs.

Whenever Ptolemy got hungry he would drink from the faucet. After a while the hunger went away. Through the door he could hear soft music and voices that he couldn’t understand. Underneath these calming sounds he thought he could make out the scuttling of bugs and the titter of rats. If he paid too much attention to these noises his heart pumped harder and his head got light. Sometimes, when he got too frightened, he’d fall asleep and then wake up from a dream with imagined worms trying to crawl their way into his tightly shut eyes.

Ptolemy had no idea how much time had passed. He sat in the bright room listening, feeling light-headed now and again, and drinking water to kill his hunger pangs. The classical music was broken, tinkly. The news reporters made no sense. Reggie and Coydog were dead, and that girl would never find her way to him.

“You ain’t got to be afraid’a nuthin’, boy,” Coydog would tell him. “We all gonna die. We all gonna get some hurt. I mean, when a woman bring a child outta her big belly it hurt like a bastid. But that girl ain’t nevah been happier than when she hurt like that.”

“Why she be so happy?” Li’l Pea asked.

“’Cause she know that baby gonna be the love of her life, and that would be worf ten times the pain.”

At first Ptolemy was soothed when he thought about his old friend and mentor. But then his thoughts drifted back to that last fiery dance, and then to little Maude Petit. And when he thought about his loved ones being lost to fire his heart thundered and he fell asleep to dream the dreams of the dead.

Papa Grey?” a voice called.