The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Yeah. Sometimes when I come home and she’s cookin’ an’ the house smell like chicken and dumplin’s an’ she see me and smile I get the jitters in my legs and start laughin’ an’ she smiles harder and calls me her li’l brown nut.”

“That love in your heart is your soul,” Coy said.

“But . . . but what if I said no?”

“Some people lose they souls along the way. They don’t feel no love or pride or that there’s somethin’ in the world bettah than they lives.”

“How do you lose your soul, Coy?”

“Because,” he said, “it is a delicate thing, a special thing. You can live without it, but you might as well be dead. That’s why heaven an’ hell is always fightin’ over the souls’a men. Our souls, when we got ’em, is so beautiful that angels always lookin’ to take ’em. That’s why when the Devil comes up on you you got to hold tight on the love in your heart.”

Ptolemy picked up the phone and dialed a number that he remembered thanks to the Devil’s medicine.

“Hello?” Niecie Brown said.

“Hey, Niecie. How you doin’?”

“Pitypapa, is that you? You dialin’ the phone by yourself ? I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe it, but it’s still a shock.”

“Hilly there, baby?”

“Uh-huh. He here watchin’ the TV. I told him that he was gonna have to pay you back for what he took. But you know he ain’t a bad boy. He just feel like he been cheated, losin’ his daddy so young and all.”

“Lemme talk to him, honey.”

“Hello?” Hilly said, bringing to mind some big dense creature like a hog, or even a hippopotamus.

“I need some bullets for my pistol.”

“Say what?”

“I need some bullets for my pistol, an’ I don’t want you tellin’ your mama about it neither.”

“What kinda pistol?”

“Twenty-five caliber. You get me that and we even. You won’t owe me a dime.”

“Okay. I’ll bring ’em ovah tomorrow.”

“Put ’em in a can of peanuts.”

“I gotta buy them too?” the brooding boy complained.

“Yeah. You got to buy them too.”

“All right. But we even then, right?”

“Right.”

The evening after that went smoothly for Ptolemy. He found a music station that was playing Fats Waller recordings.

He’d once seen the great Moon Face playing in an after-hours big-city juke joint in Memphis. In those days the music halls only allowed whites, except on special days, and so after a performance in front of an all-white audience there were many famous musicians that went to the black part of town to jam with their people.

Listening to the song “Two Sleepy People,” he was remembering a girl named Talla who turned to kiss him because the romantic lyrics made her. He remembered the smell of beer and the sawdust on the floor, Fats Waller himself winking at the momentary lovers, and a feeling that being Ptolemy Grey was the best thing in the whole world.

“Uncle?” she said, and the vision evaporated. “Uncle, you okay?”

Ptolemy turned his head, feeling pain between each vertebra, but he didn’t wince or curse.

“Is it eleven already?”

“It’s past midnight,” Robyn said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Your boyfriend here?” Ptolemy asked, looking toward the bathroom.

“No. He walked me to the door, but then I heard the music an’ told him to go on.”

“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”

“You my father-like, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah right.”

“A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”

The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”

“We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.

“The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.

“Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”

“He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”

“He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”

“Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.

“To do what?”

“To talk to a man named Mossa.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’ll see.”

That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.

“It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”