The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Stay here,” Coy told Ptolemy at a stand of live oaks on a rise that looked down on the old man’s shelter.

“How come?”

“I wanna see you every minute I can before I’m gone forever,” Coy replied, “but this is my most dangerous moment. I got all my things in a bag in the house. I couldn’t take it with me because of how heavy the gold was gonna be. And I had to get you and show you where the gold was before I left. So now I just got to hope that old Jersey drunk enough drug to keep him sleepin’ through the night. But if it don’t, I don’t want him to find you down there wit’ me.”

Ptolemy slipped behind a tree as his uncle spoke, feeling both afraid and ashamed of his fear. He watched as Coydog McCann loped down the hill to his home. Just when he was at the tarp entrance, someone yelled and white men jumped out from all over the place.

The first white man cuffed Ptolemy’s friend, and the boy shouted, unable to keep the pain out of his mouth. But no one heard him because they were all shouting and hollering and beating Coy mercilessly, throwing him from man to man.

The sun was a red strip above the farthest hill.

Shouting loudly, Jersey Manheim asked Coy again and again where he had hidden his money. And for a long time Coy was silent. He was surrounded by thirteen men who meant to kill him, but Coy took the blows. Finally he shouted out something; the only words Ptolemy could make out were “... bottom of the well . . .”

Mercifully the vision of the lynching passed by the fevered dreamer’s eyes quickly. He only caught a glimpse of the hanging man dancing on fire while the white men laughed and raised their firebrands in the half darkness of dawn.

Twenty-six-year-old Sensia Howard was married to Ezra Bindle when Ptolemy, a man of forty-five years, met them at a barbecue in Griffith Park. Her yellow dress made its own party, and Ezra’s powerful arm held her so tightly about the waist that they might have been grafted like that.

Sensia was medium brown with dark hair that shone in the L.A. sunshine. Her eyes were different colors of brown and her smile made Ptolemy happy.

He mentioned a book he’d been reading and how much he liked going to the library on Avalon.

“You live near there?” Sensia asked innocently.

“Across the street. In a big blue boardinghouse,” Ptolemy said. “It’s funny that the house is so big ’cause my room the size of a two-cent postage stamp.”

“I own my own house,” Ezra said then. He was twice Ptolemy’s size, the color of aged red brick, and proud. “I keep my woman here in nice clothes, and I feed her steak three times a week.”

“What kinda book you readin’, Mr. Grey?” Sensia asked.

“Called Night Man. It’s about a man who live in darkness and who nevah see the light of day.”

“Nevah?”

“What you do for a livin’?” Ezra asked Ptolemy.

“I used to ’liver ice off a truck, but now I do cleanup for the county.”

“How much they pay you for that?”

“How does he go to the bank?” Sensia asked, obviously talking about the protagonist of Ptolemy’s book. “How does he go to the post office?”

“He does all his bankin’ by mail,” Ptolemy said. “An’ he, an’ there’s a twenty-four-hour post office he go to a lot.”

“That’s so interesting,” the young beauty said. “A man that’s just different from everybody else.”

“We gotta go, Sensie,” Ezra Bindle said. “Rex an’ them want us to have a drink together.”

“Can you come with, Mr. Grey?” she asked.

“They didn’t invite him,” Ezra said before Ptolemy could say yes.

“Then I’ll stay here an’ talk to Mr. Grey about his book while you go guzzle that beer,” she said, pushing out from the grip as she spoke.

“You are coming with me,” the big red-brown man said to his young wife. And he dragged her off.

Ptolemy had been married, started a family, and gotten divorced by that time. His children were almost grown, living with their mother, and he felt like an old man, except for a moment there under the scrutiny of Sensia Howard’s eyes.

But Ezra dragged her away through the parking lot and out past the baseball field, where uniformed white men in some amateur league played their game.

Ptolemy watched them go: Ezra pulling on her arm and Sensia struggling to get free. He felt almost as if the brute had pulled out one of his organs and was running away with it, leaving him wounded and sore.

Ptolemy was flying above the park then. It was really more like a small forest than a manicured lawn. It gave him a giddy feeling seeing all the various people and hidden animals, paths and clumps of trees.

He was flying above Los Angeles, and every once in a while he’d turn his gaze upward, where the blue was so intense that it made him feel as if he’d burn out his soul with the vision and so he had to look away, back to earth, where life was pedestrian and shabby.