“That was the trick for me. I thought I knew what I was doin’ but I was just workin’ for the men made the rules. Killin’ my own people was just part’a the rules. Makin’ myself a jailbird was just what they wanted.” Socrates saw that Mr. Minette had stopped listening. He was looking into Socrates’ eyes; what he saw was a boat that had busted its rope and was now floating with no captain toward a faraway storm.
But Socrates didn’t care that Minette couldn’t understand him. He was talking now; he had something to say.
“You an’ Winifred broke the rules, Oscar,” Socrates said. “You started that store, made room for black men and women, and didn’t take no collection and didn’t tell’em what to think. You had me here to dinner an’ opened your heart. That’s revolution, brother, rebellion against the rule.
“I don’t know who make the bird fly, man. But I do know who make it shit on my head. I love you, Oscar. Because you the one showed me the truth.”
{3.}
Socrates said good night soon after he’d finished talking. He received the older man’s leathery handshake and then went down Central toward home. He could feel his heart throbbing in his chest as he remembered all the bad things that had happened to him and then the bad that he had done. It was all laid out before him like a feast. He could pick up a memory, look at it, and then put it down again. He was the master, his legs were his to walk on and the street was his to stride.
Each breath was his and every sight was an image in his own eye.
“Hey you!” a harsh voice called from somewhere to his left. “I’m talkin’ to you.”
“What?” Socrates said. When he turned the policemen were climbing out of their car like soldier ants coming out of a hole.
They each carried a baton.
Socrates wished that his blood would stop pounding; that the angry laugh in his throat would subside.
“Take your hands out of your pockets!” The first rule had been made.
“Where you going?” one cop asked, none too kind.
“I’m just here, officer,” Socrates said. He wanted to giggle but held that down.
The two men flanked him, standing a good four feet away. They could see his strength and his size. They had seen what could happen to policemen who got too close to the fire.
“What the fuck’s that s’posed to mean? I asked you a question.”
“Let’s see some ID,” the second cop said.
“It’s in my pocket,” Socrates apologized.
One of the cops made a motion with his baton as if he was about to strike. But Socrates didn’t flinch or dodge, he just stood there waiting for permission, the second rule, to reach into his pocket.
“Don’t be a smartass,” a policeman said. “Take out some ID.”
It was a state registration card for a man who had spent twenty-seven years in prison.
“We got us a jailbird, Simon,” one cop said.
“What you doin’ out here at night?”
And then there was a gun pointing at Socrates’ eye. He regarded the weapon and said nothing. No yes sirs, no fuck yous, no I was just going home, officers.
While Simon pointed his pistol the other white man went through Socrates’ pockets. He found a key to the padlock that secured the ex-convict’s front door, a small pocket knife with two razor-sharp blades, four dollars and twenty-eight cents, a foldedup form that gave the receiving hours for the South Central recycling center, and a small bag of salted nuts, half eaten.
Simon was standing closer than he should have. Socrates figured that if he hit Simon first the other cop would be easy to fell. He knew from experience that he could kill a man with one punch.
“I’m goin’ home,” Socrates said. There was no apology or rancor in his tone.
“What’s the knife for?” Simon asked.
“To cut,” Socrates said, “anything need cuttin’.”
C-plus, Socrates thought to himself when he returned to his back-alley apartment. In those days he was still sleeping on three area rugs piled one on top of the other. He wrote the grade down on a piece of paper. For years he gave himself a grade every day. Anytime he wrote down failure somebody had been hurt by those big rock-breaking hands.
{4.}
The Canyon minimall was burnt black from riot fires. The books were scattered all over the parking lot. The cash register lay shattered on the asphalt. Socrates hadn’t been to the store for years. After his talk with Oscar he didn’t feel the same welcome. Everyone was still nice but the warmth was gone. He dropped by about once a week for a while, just to say hello.
One day he realized that he hadn’t been there in over a year.
There was someone moving around inside, in the back room behind the burnt-out desk. The roof was mostly burned away but pieces of ceiling could still fall; looting a destroyed bookstore seemed like a fool’s enterprise.
But Socrates went in to see who it was. If it was a looter he’d get an F that day.
“Roland? Roland, is that you?”
“Who’re you?” the small, potbellied, strawberry-brown man said. He was thin and frail, and completely bald.
“It’s Socco, Socrates. I met you right here eight years ago.”
“Oh. Oh yeah, yeah. You the one always talkin’ ’bout fightin’. You see what it gets ya?”
“What happened, Roland? Where’s the Minettes?”
“Winifred been dead three years now.”
“Dead?” The sweet smoke took on the odor of death for Socrates. “Dead how?”
“Heart attack. She was right behind her counter. Just keeled over. I was there. Not a thing we could do.”
“What about Oscar?” Socrates asked.
“Alanna Hersey called him an’ told’im ’bout the store. Hour two later he had a stroke.”
Big Bill had died from a heart attack. Minty had been shot dead and nobody ever knew why. Roland had cancer. He had just finished his chemotherapy when the riots broke out.
“Riots?” Roland said to Socrates. They were having breakfast at a McDonald’s outside the ring of fire that was South Central L. A. “I thought you’d call it a rebellion like these folks out here is doin’.”
“I know why too,” Socrates said. “It feels like rebellion. Like a prison riot—men fightin’ for their freedom. That always feels like a revolution. But you know, you burn down your own home in the face’a the enemy an’ it’s just followin’ his rule; doin’ what he want you to. Oscar was a rebel. But burnin’ down his sto’ was just what the man in blue wants. And you know I feel it too. I wanted to loot and burn. I wanted to firebomb a police car an’ then take their guns an’ shoot down helicopters. But them helicopters woulda crashed in my own people’s homes, an’ they woulda killed a hunnert innocent Negroes just to bring me down.”
Roland didn’t argue with Socrates. They became friends in his last days.
Socrates brought Roland groceries from Bounty Supermarket once a week and then stayed to read to the dying man from the Bible.
They didn’t make it through Genesis.
Socrates wrote a speech for Roland’s funeral but because nobody came he never read it. Instead he bought a Bible and took to bringing it up to his grave once a week. He read it out loud, a page at a time.
FIREBUG
{1.}
One Thursday morning Socrates met with Stony Wile while Stony was on his coffee break from Avon Imports.
“Yeah, Folger live out on Winnant Terrace in Compton,” Stony said.
“He still know a lotta cops?” Socrates asked.
“What is this, Socco?”
“What is what? All I wanna know is if Folger know some cops out there in the street.”
“You don’t talk to cops, Socco.” Stony was a stocky man, an ex-ship welder with salt-and-pepper hair and gray-brown skin. “You don’t talk to them.”
Stony glanced down the alley. His boss was looking out of the warehouse loading dock toward the two friends.
“Bono always think someb
ody stealin’ if they meet somebody out here,” Stony said.
“Gimme your cousin’s address,” Socrates insisted.
“Okay,” Stony said. “But …”
“But what?”
“This ain’t gonna be no trouble now is it, Socco?”
“Trouble? What’s that s’posed to mean, Stony? You think I’m the kinda man mess wit’ folks?”
“I think you’re serious, Mr. Fortlow. Damn serious. I don’t want you goin’ out to Folger if you on some kinda campaign.”
“I ain’t on nuthin’, Stony. I need to know sumpin’ an’ maybe Folger could help—that’s all.”
{2.}
“Forty-two years,” Folger Wile was saying, seated with Socrates Fortlow on his rickety front porch. “Forty-two years an’ they put me out in the street. Don’t even let me come back and sit around now and then. Too many rules, too many kids wit’ guns an’ badges, that’s what it is. That’s not how a police department should be run.”
He was sixty-seven but looked fifteen years older. Teeth missing, and wrinkled as a plucked bird. Folger’s eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular.
“You know a good cop I could talk to?” Socrates asked after nearly an hour-long lecture on the faults of the LAPD.
Dispatcher was the only job that Folger ever had. He had fallen apart in his retirement. His lawn was dead and brown, blue paint peeled from the walls of his house.
“You hear ’bout them fires?” Folger asked. “One of ’em went up last night.”
Everyone had been talking about them. The fires. Abandoned stores, abandoned houses.
“They say that dead man was a squatter,” Folger said, a glimmer of glee in his distracted eyes. “Woman was his girlfriend. They was playin’ house just like they had real jobs and a mortgage.”
The first people killed in a dozen fires set.
“Some people sayin’ that it’s the fire department doin’ arson for the white landlords’ insurance policies.” Folger could have talked on forever, all he needed was a warm body with ears to sit by and breathe. “I think it’s the Koreans myself. They wanna own all’a the black folks’ homes. You know it’s really just what they call a, what they call a peacetime invasion. Koreans gonna be all over here.
Korean bosses with Mexican slaves and they won’t be no room for no black people at all.”
“I’ont know about all that, Folger. Some’a the Koreans real nice people. It’s just them damn businessmen wanna steal everything we got. And businessmen come in all colors—even black.”
Folger sneered at Socrates’ weak defense. He wasn’t going to be convinced, but Socrates didn’t care. He was thinking about Ira Giles. About how Ira had all of his privileges taken away in an Indiana jail. They sentenced him to biscuits and water for sixty days.
On day sixty-one they gave him biscuits and water again—as a joke.
Ira cut his mattress open and shoved an open book of matches inside. He lit a single match and ignited the book. The cot caught and four guards came in to put out the fire. Ira stabbed two of them before they could tell what he was doing. He killed the third one, but number four, Harvey Schott, laid him low.
Socrates had always considered fire as an ally since that day; even though they executed Ira. He’d ordered biscuits and water for his last meal.
“You’re wrong, Mr. Fortlow.”
“Say what, Folger?”
“It’s gotta be some kinda conspiracy. Look at me. Look. I worked hard my whole life an’ now I ain’t got a thing. I got eight hunnert dollars in retirement comin’ in and a thousand dollars worf’a bills. You cain’t tell me that’s a couple’a slumlords doin’. Noooo, no. That shit go all the way to the top. The top. You see that, don’t ya?”
“Maybe it go to the heart, Mr. Wile,” Socrates said.
“Say what?”
“Maybe just the whole thing is rotten. Us, them, the other guy too. Maybe somethin’ spoiled was thrown in with the bunch of us a long time ago and now the only way to settle it is to burn it all down, all of it. Like them houses.”
Folger looked closely at Socrates while rubbing his hand up and down the left side of his face.
“I got to take my nap soon,” he said.
“All right then,” Socrates replied. “But tell me, do you know a cop I could talk to? A black man knows he’s black?”
{3.}
Socrates spent the afternoon boxing groceries and making deliveries around West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. It was summer and hot outside but Bounty Supermarket ran from cool at the checkout registers to cold over by the freezer aisles.
Socrates was the oldest employee of the store. His surly appearance and incredible strength delighted the young black girls who worked the electric-eye cash registers. And for some reason the older white ladies preferred him to the younger men to deliver their packages.
Socrates worked extra hard that day, unloading a big shipment of canned goods from General Foods. He threw out double boxes so fast that the young men had a hard time keeping up. “Hey, Socco,” Bruce Tynan whined. “Slow down.” The other boys had slipped away on break and never returned.
The Beverly Hills teenager was a football star at high school. He was a good kid, even though he was white, and Socrates liked him.
Dr. Tynan, a rich surgeon who owned his own hospital, didn’t want his son working in the store but Bruce wanted to earn his money and defied his old man.
“Okay, quarterback, I’ll give ya a rest.” Socrates climbed out of the delivery truck and sat on a stack of boxes. He smiled when he saw that Bruce was trying to hide his heavy breathing.
Socrates waited for a while, until Bruce had caught his breath.
“Hey, Bruce?”
“Yeah, Socco?”
“What would you do if you knew, or you thought you knew, that a man had killed two people?”
Bruce’s face flushed, and his eyes looked away, toward the delivery door.
“Huh?” he grunted.
“You heard me.”
“I’d go to the police. I’d tell.”
“But what if,” Socrates asked, “what if it wasn’t on purpose?”
“Then they’d find him innocent in court.”
“Naw. It was a mistake but he was doin’ somethin’ wrong. They’d still fry his ass.”
Socrates watched the doctor’s son trying to keep up with the problem.
“Would he do it again?” Bruce asked at last.
“What?”
“Whatever he did that got those people killed?”
Socrates stood up and hefted two boxes of fruit cocktail in his arms.
“I’ont know. It was just some magazine article I read,” Socrates said. “Come on. Let’s move some boxes.”
{4.}
Denther’s Bar and Grill was a cop café on Normandie. It had wood frame windows, old-time metal venetian blinds, and a cursive neon sign that said Café in blue and Open in red. Only cops, and the women who desired them, went to Denther’s. You could smoke in there, kick back and relax. Anything you said was among cops, safe.
Nobody robbed Denther’s. Nobody worried about building codes or closing hours—or drugs, or sex.
They had a jukebox that was free and three young waitresses who wore hot pants and thigh-high patent-leather boots. Among the waitresses there was a white girl, a black one, and a Latina.
Denther’s was a cop paradise, or so Folger claimed.
Socrates entered the door at nine-thirty exactly. He was still wearing his Bounty blue-and-green T-shirt but that wasn’t enough to fool those cops.
The jukebox was playing disco but the conversation nearly stopped. Socrates waded through the dense crowd of men. A couple resisted his advance but Socrates was a strong man, he bulled his way through, cautiously, not pushing hard enough to start a row.
At the bar he asked, “Kenneth Shreve in here?”
The bartender, a small man, didn’t answer.
Socrates asked his question again.
“What do you want?” a white man seated at the bar asked Socrates.
“I want Kenneth Shreve.”
“What for?”
“You his mother?” Socrates asked, almost pleasantly.
“You better watch it …” The unspoken word dangled at the end of the white man’s sentence. It was an integrated bar. Black cops and white ones patronized Denther’s. You couldn’t call a man a nigger unless you were a nigger yourself.
The white man didn’t use the word but he would have liked to use his fists.
Socrates wondered why he didn’t feel afraid.
“You know where I can find Kenneth Shreve?”
“I’m Shreve,” a tall black man said. He had come up behind Socrates.
Socrates turned around. “Folger Wile sent me.”
Kenneth Shreve was wide as well as tall. His shoulders could have borne Socrates’ hefty two hundred and sixty-two pounds. His hands were small but so, Socrates remembered, were Joe Louis’s hands.
“What’s that old fool want?” Kenneth asked. He could see the long history of felony trailing in Socrates’ shadow but he didn’t care.
“He want them to extend retirement age at the dispatcher’s so that he could have somethin’ to do,” Socrates said.
That got a laugh out of Shreve.
“Come on,” the cop said. “Let’s sit over at that booth.”
The booth had three black cops and two black women crammed on the bench. One woman had a hand in the lap of the man on either side of her. She was looking back and forth at them—wide-eyed. The men were looking into each other’s eyes.
All that broke up when Sergeant Shreve came by. He didn’t even say anything. He just walked up and the men hustled the women out of the stall.
“Hey,” one of the young women said. “What’s wrong?”
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned Page 16