Walter Mosley

by Socrates Fortlow 02 - Walkin' the Dog

  “Made from sugarcane by black hands in the Caribbean sun,” Socrates said.

  Everyone had a drink and then they all had another.

  Socrates felt secure in his secluded home with his black friends and smooth liquor. They ate the ham sandwiches and talked about white people and how they felt about them.

  “But do we have the right?” Socrates asked Nelson Saint-Paul.

  “We got reasons,” Nelson answered. “We got reasons. But reasons and rights ain't the same thing.”

  “I don't know what it means really,” Cynthia Lott crooned, her voice calmed by smooth rum. “I mean so what if you don't have the right? You still gonna be mad.”

  Socrates smiled and rested his big hands on his knees. He stood up saying, “Well we can't figure all that out in one night anyway. It was just a question been on my mind.”

  “Oh my it's midnight,” Veronica said. “I better be gettin'.”

  “Damn,” Chip Lowe said. “We usually out by ten. That rum loosen up the tongue.”

  The Wednesday night group gathered themselves up quickly and left Socrates' home. He wondered if Leon drove Cynthia and what it might feel like to kiss Veronica's big lips.

  “Bye,” he said at the front door.

  He noticed a light on in the front house. Maybe tomorrow Mr. Malone would complain about his little party.

  After everyone left Socrates went to fold his collapsible chairs but then he stopped and stood there in his living room. He looked at the chairs, imagining that they still held his guests. Snobby Topper, angry Cynthia Lott, and all the rest. He thought about being angry himself. Somewhere in the night he realized that it wasn't just white people that made him mad. He would be upset even if there weren't any white people.

  “How come they didn't go down in Mexico?” little Socrates might have asked his stern auntie.

  “Because the road wasn't paved,” she would have answered.

  Socrates laughed to himself and poured one last shot of rum. He left the chairs out for the night because they felt friendly.

  rogue

  He stood in an alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill on Normandie. It was drizzling slightly but Socrates wore a canvas hat and a water-repellent army surplus fatigue jacket. His hands were in his pockets, each of them holding a pistol.

  There were two small wood framed windows in the wall of the old stucco building. In one the word Café shone in neon blue. In the other Openburned red. Beyond the lights Socrates could see men and women laughing and talking and touching. The sight of all that happiness and warmth sent angry tremors through Socrates' big hands. He had to release the guns for fear of shooting himself in the legs.

  There was one white woman that he could see at the lower corner of the right window, near the bottom of the n. She had hair that was golden and lips drawn red. She was smiling and moving her head to music that Socrates could not hear. The man she was with was a policeman, Socrates knew that. All the men who went to Denther's were cops. It was, Socrates thought, a world of cops. Your good men, your fools—your killers too.

  The ex-con took a deep breath to keep his nerves down. In each of the fourteen pockets of his jacket there was a clip full of bullets.He was ready to fight through to the end but he would stop shooting when the target he came for was dead. He didn't want to kill any innocent cops that he didn't have to. Only the name Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. was on the hit list in his mind.

  Thin and too tall for his hands or features, Cardwell was a black-haired killer.

  “You see what he done to my boy?” Stony Wile had asked three months earlier. They had just broken a long silence over a woman when Socrates stopped by Stony's house to bring his family a crate of week-old peaches from Bounty.

  Reggie was laid up in a bed, his features swollen and bloody. He was out of his mind with pain and concussion. The emergency room doctors said that he needed a week of observation in a hospital bed but the nurse on the admitting desk didn't see how Stony's insurance could pay for that. They brought Reggie home where at least somebody could pray.

  “They didn't arrest him,” Stony wailed. “If he did some kinda crime bad enough to near kill'im for, then how come they didn't take him to jail?”

  Socrates didn't have an answer for his friend. Tildy, Stony's wife, wilted over the bed, crying.

  “He was out with his friends,” Stony was saying. “He was raisin' some hell an' bein' wild. But he didn't have no gun or no knife. He didn't hurt nobody. Maybe he did somethin' but how can that excuse the law actin' like the lawless? Who can I go to about this?”

  “Nobody,” Socrates said to himself. He repeated the word standing there in the shadows of the alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill.

  Reggie mended quickly. He was out of bed in a week. And the day he got up he enrolled in Los Angeles City College. Maybe, Socrates thought at the time, the beating was just what young Mr. Wile needed to set him straight. After all, Socrates had taken, and given, some horrendous beatings in his life.

  But then there was Inger Lowe, whose features favored the best sides of her black mother and her Swedish father. Inger was raped, that's what Iula said she said. Raped and sodomized by Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. She was stopped on Morrisy, that's what she said.

  Inger didn't tell many people about it. She was too afraid that it would get back to the police. Cardwell had told her what could happen if she complained.

  He'd told her that he'd come visit some time soon at any rate. Inger moved up to Oakland to live with her brother.

  “She left all her furniture and belongings. Hardly even packed a suitcase.” That's what Iula, who gave Inger airfare, had said.

  Socrates was mad even then. But one woman raped and a boy being beaten wasn't much in the eyes of a man who had done worse in his own life.

  Socrates began to hear other tales about the rogue cop. Beatings, molestations, and humiliations. Even the pimps started talking about how their jewelry always disappeared after a bust. And if anybody complained they received a visit, if not from Cardwell then from one of his friends.

  Socrates had heard the stories but they didn't stick. He'd learned to live next to suffering in prison. He awoke in his cell many nights to the sound of some young man being raped for the first time. Once he saw a man hit so hard by a guard that his eye came out of his head. With that kind of pain in his mind there was little that some cop could do to displace it.

  But then Cardwell killed Torrence Johnson. It was in the L.A. Times, on page three. A three-quarters profile of a smiling young boy with the words tragedy and death in the headline. He was only fourteen, just two years older than Darryl. Shot down running from the police, from Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. Socrates read the news report. It was intimated that Johnson was involved with gang activity. There was a turf war or something like that. Torrence was involved. He ran.

  From that point on it was a straight line for Socrates. He went to the Johnson home even though he didn't know them. He brought white flowers that he took from the Saint-Paul Mortuary. He stayed on the front porch to give his condolences but even from there things didn't seem like what the police had said.

  Mr. Johnson was a short man and broad. He didn't like the idea of Socrates at his door.

  “Did you know Torrie?” Mr. Johnson asked.

  “No sir,” Socrates said. “I just read about him. I just read it and wanted to come and say I was sorry.”

  “Sorry about what? Were you there?” There was a hysterical note in the fat man's voice.

  “No sir. I just felt for you and I wanted to say that a lotta people feel it's wrong to have happen what happened to your son.”

  The Johnsons lived in what some people called the jungle, below View Park and above Crenshaw. Socrates found a mother and a father and a well-kept house. The other children weren't gang members. Socrates took the bus home wondering why the article got him so upset.

  The boy was fleeing, the article had said. Fleeing. He was involved in gang a
ctivity. Gang activity, Socrates thought to himself, what's that?

  He didn't sleep that night and the next day he called in sick to work. He was sick too. The words fleeing and gang activity wore on his nerves like some kind of virus that eats away the senses.

  His lips were numb. Colors hurt his eyes.

  Fleeing. Gang activity. Shot down. Tragedy.

  All the suffering he'd witnessed in prison came back and added itself to Torrence Johnson's father's pain. Socrates thought about Inger fleeing to Oakland, about Reggie scared into school.

  “That ain't why people s'posed to do things,” Socrates said to Stony at Stony's house one day.

  The bronze-skinned welder lit a cigarette and nodded.

  When Socrates put his glass down it broke on the red Formica.

  That was the first night he stalked Denther's. He saw Cardwell leaving to go home at one A.M. The rat-faced beanpole wasn't even being charged. The police investigation proved that Torrence wasn't armed but another boy, Aldo Reams, was. They discovered the gun in young Mr. Reams's pocket after Torrence was already dead. There was no evidence. No tattoos or gang colors. Somebody broke a window and the boys made some kind of hand signs. The cops came. The boys ran. Cardwell shot but he wasn't answering fire. The unfired and unseen gun was taken from a scared Aldo Reams, who fell to the ground with his hands outstretched when Torrence was hit. The puzzle pieces did not fit the story. Socrates saw that a boy was slaughtered over a broken window and the finger. All he did was run.

  Socrates was drawn to Denther's every night for two weeks. He learned Cardwell's pattern with no intention except to nurse a feeling of hatred that was so familiar he sometimes wondered if the hate was older than him.

  For hours every night in cold wet weather he stood at absolute attention. He didn't go through the problems at work in his mind. He didn't think about Darryl or Iula. All that existed was Cardwell and his movements. Socrates had become a predator, a hunter. He was a wild thing with a too fast heart.

  “The chains on a black man,” his old aunt Bellandra had said, “go down through the centuries. They once made us slaves to the plantation but now they make us slaves to the slaves we was.”

  “Huh?” the small boy Socrates asked.

  “A good word and a gentle touch is like a cloud that passes on a nice day, Socrates,” she replied. “But pain, real pain last forever. It hurt your son and his son and his. The slave is still cryin' even though his chains ain't nuthin' but rust, even though he's long gone and forgotten.”

  There had been guards who he thought about every day and every night for months, even years. Their names were still in his mind even though sometimes he couldn't remember his mother's face. Craig Kimball was one. Warden Joseph Simon was another one. They were just as much murderers as Socrates. They tortured and broke simple men for no reason. Socrates was sure that he'd hunt both of them down if he ever had the chance. But he never did. Kimball had beaten three men to death in their cells. Simon ordered sick men into the dungeon when any fool could have seen it would kill them.

  But Socrates didn't try to find Simon or Kimball after his release. Now the hatred welled up again. Socrates was still in prison. Cardwell was the new evil screw assigned to his block. Bellandra's words came back to him again. Everything fades except for pain.

  An angry old woman, long dead and forgotten by everyone except one frightened nephew, pronounced Cardwell's death sentence.

  Socrates bought guns and ammunition at Blackbird's bar. You could get anything at Blackbird's if you were brave enough to go there. Fourteen clips of 9mm shells was like an extra-generous baker's dozen from a friendly grocer.

  Cardwell came out of Denther's. If Socrates had looked at his watch he would have known that it was two fifteen. But the wrist-watch was in his pocket with the hand on the gun. The murder in the air came in through his lungs and from there to his blood. Socrates, who knew that he had been prepared for centuries, was finally ready to answer a destiny older than the oldest man in the world.

  Cardwell obliged and walked toward the dark alley. He was smoking a cigarette, moving at an unhurried pace. He was thinking about something. Socrates breathed deeply and tasted the air. It filled him with a sweetness of anticipation that he had not felt since the first time a woman, Netalie Brian, had helped him find his manhood.

  “It was the air, no, no, no, the breath of air,” Socrates told Darryl the next morning on the phone. “It was so good. I mean good, man.You know I almost called out loud. I saw Cardwell walkin' my way an' my hands was tight on them guns. You know he was a dead man an' didn't know it. I pulled them pistols outta my pockets. I was thinking about him dyin' but at the same time I was wonderin' what was goin' on in my mind. You know what I mean, Darryl? How you could think about somethin' an' still be thinkin' 'bout somethin' else?”

  “Uh-huh,” Darryl grunted. Socrates hadn't slept that night. He'd called the Shakurs' house at seven A.M. and gotten Corina to get Darryl out of bed. Darryl was the only human being that Socrates trusted completely. “You mean like when it's almost three but the teacher talkin' 'bout the Civil War but you thinkin' 'bout basketball?”

  “Yeah like that, like that. But I was gonna murder that man. I was gonna kill him. But I was thinkin' that I had never felt nuthin' like that deep breath I just took. An' even though I was gettin' ready to kill I had to take just one second to think about how I felt. You know?”

  “I guess I do,” Darryl said. “But how did you feel?”

  “I felt free,” Socrates said in a soft voice. “All my life I ain't never felt like that. I was ready to die along with that man. My life for his— you cain't get more free than that.”

  “Did you kill him?” Darryl whispered the question so that Howard and Corina wouldn't hear if they were close at hand.

  “I meant to. The guns was out and he passed not three feet from me. But I just stood there—smiling, thinkin' 'bout how good it felt to be in my own skin.”

  Socrates took his newfound freedom to work that day. He smiled at people and asked after their health. He told gentle jokes and paid more attention to the details of the produce department than he ever had before. He was tired from two weeks with little sleep and suffered from a slight cold from all those nights spent in the alley. He detected a whiff of staleness about his person like the smell of old clothes taken out of the bottom drawer after many years.

  It was the finest day of Socrates Fortlow's life. Death held no dominion that day. And if his aunt Bellandra's blue god was in his heaven Socrates had no quarrel with his remoteness.

  The elation lasted deep into the night. Socrates turned off all the lights in his small garden home and walked around in bare feet touching the wood and metal and glass of his house with wonder and joy. He lay down on the new sofa in the living room unaware that he would fall asleep. He just sat down for a moment and then stretched out with a silly glee. Sleep came upon him like a highwayman who had been lying in wait.

  The dream was a variation on an old theme. A small room with a single cot on which the ex-convict slept. The pounding on the door that roused him was like artillery fire in a war film.

  Socrates simply opened the door for the ebony giant who was stripped to the waist and powerful in a way that only wildness can breed. The big man towered over Socrates but there was no more fear in the bald ex-con. Their gazes met and somewhere Socrates knew that he was dreaming. He also knew that he had to go along until the end.

  “What you want from me?” Socrates asked.

  “I only wanna know what you gonna do now. You done the first job. You done dug up all the dead an' set 'em free. Now what you gonna do with all that power?”

  Freedom was old hat in twenty-four hours.

  “You know I couldn't believe it, Darryl,” he told the son of his heart that weekend. “Here I been lookin' to be free for my whole life. Whole life. An' when I get it it's just like a pocket fulla change somebody done give to me 'cause I looked wretched an' poor. Now that change is
just jinglin' in my pockets but there ain't nuthin' I got to buy. Uh-uh. I could just pass it on to somebody else now. Yeah, pass it on to somebody like you.”

  Darryl looked a little stunned into his friend's eyes, his skinny boy's body moving with the rhythm of his breath.

  “I need a favor, Lavant,” Socrates told the self-styled anarchist. They were sitting in the garage where Lavant slept and created the bright yellow broadsides that he hoped would be the clarion call to revolution for the working men and women of L.A.

  “What's that, Socco?” the black zealot asked.

  “I need to know everything I can about somebody and then I need your printin' skills.”

  Two weeks later Socrates took the first paid vacation of his life. He gave short notice and Marty Gonzalez was hard pressed to explain to the main office that it was worth it to give their new produce manager a week off after only six months on a job that had benefits.

  “You know they don't like it, Socco,” his boss said.

  “I don't like it either, Marty. But you know I got to take the time, got to.”

  Saturday he spent with Iula. He went to work with her early in the morning and helped her get ready for the day. He managed the big pots and did some of the little jobs that she never got around to. When he wasn't working he sat at the counter drinking tea with lemon, something he'd always pined for in prison but never drank once he was on the outside.

  That night they made love, speaking hardly at all. Iula could tell that there was something wrong but she kept silent.

  Sunday he went down to Venice Beach to see Darryl with Corina and Howard Shakur. They all went down the beach with the children, Winnie and little Howard.

  “That's a good job you got down at Bounty now.” Howard's statement seemed to contain a question.

  “I guess.” Socrates was distracted by the sound of the waves and the wind. The ocean's power always made his heart race.

  “How you think I'd do in a grocery store?” Howard asked.

  “Better'n me that's for sure.”

  “Why you say that?”