The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,3

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.

While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.

“Can I come in, Papa Grey?”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”

Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

“June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”

“Sure you can.”

“You have to move back so I can get by.”

In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.

The old man smiled but did not move.

Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.

Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.

“What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.

“What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”

“Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.

“Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”

But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.

“The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”

“I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”

“You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”

“Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”

“You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.

“It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And