The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  “Oh no,” Myrtle whispered.

  “I got it,” Darryl said excitedly. “Here it is.”

  He stood up grinning, holding out a drab green army bag.

  “That’s brown,” Myrtle said.

  “Nuh-uh. It’s green. Right, Socco?”

  “You got my phone, boy?” the elder asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Right here.”

  Darryl rummaged through the rucksack, coming out with an open bag of potato chips and a handheld electronic game machine. Then he pulled out a clear plastic box over a bright orange carton. There was a small silvery phone and a power plug fit snugly into indentations in the carton.

  “The numbah is on a strip’a paper on the back’a the phone,” the boy was saying. “It’s got a hundred dollars on it now and you can go into the sto’ at Central an’ 69th to put more money on it.”

  “Is it listed?” Socrates asked.

  “Uh-uh. Cain’t list a cell phone numbah. An’ when they ask for your code for your messages or addin’ on minutes all you got to say is 635-992.”

  “What kind’a password is that?” Myrtle asked. “How you expect somebody to remembah a numbah don’t make no sense?”

  Socrates was holding the box in his big hands. He grinned for the first time that day.

  “That was my numbah in the penitentiary, Miss Brown,” he said. “When I’m old an’ forgot the color green I’ll still know those numbers. Oh yeah. You’d have to shoot them digits out my head.”

  “Why’ont you sit down, Socco?” Darryl said. “We could have some lemonade.”

  “Yeah,” Myrtle added, “sit.”

  “Naw,” Socrates replied. “You guys don’t need me around . . .” The ex-con looked at Myrtle, who was still covering herself with both hands; he had a sudden vision of the young woman he raped, bludgeoned, and strangled decades before.

  “No,” he said. “I got to get goin’.”

  He turned around, struggling to keep his equilibrium. It had been many months since he’d thought deeply about his personal damnation, his crimes that could never be washed away.

  Darryl said something but Socrates didn’t take the words in. He lurched out past the brown door into the smoggy sunlight. He lumbered down the stairway stiff-kneed, needing to hold onto the banister.

  He was almost to the street. Someone was calling out somewhere. In the back of Socrates’ mind it was a woman lecturing her child. But then a hand pulled against his shoulder. Myrtle Brown was standing there still clad only in peach colored satin; her hands no longer covering up.

  When Socrates looked at her he felt a wave of nausea that was both sexual and a symptom of deep despair.

  “Don’t you do this to me, Socrates Fortlow,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “You know what,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “Darryl talk about you all the time. Socco did this. Socco did that. Socrates told somebody sumpin’ an’ he back down an’ run. He’d do anything for you.”

  Socrates took off his army jacket and draped it around the woman’s shoulders. She took the collars and crossed her hands to cover her near nakedness.

  “He’ll leave me if you won’t even sit in my house.”

  “Baby, I ain’t said a word against you to Darryl. He sleep where he want to. I cain’t stop that.”

  “I love him,” she said, the tears now rolling down her face.

  “He’s a child, Myrtle. You almost old enough to be his grandmother.”

  “I love him,” she said again. “There ain’t a man out here twice his age treat me like he do.”

  “That’s yo’ ass talkin’, honey,” Socrates said with surprising gentleness. “We both know how sweet a child can be.”

  “No. It’s somethin’ else,” she said. “I can see the man in him, the man you helped to make. He gonna be somebody.”

  “What’s that got to do wit’ you?”

  Myrtle’s head went back as if Socrates had slapped her.

  “He’s my man,” she cried, shivering under the coarse material of the army jacket.

  “He’s a boy,” Socrates said.

  “He’s man enough for me.”

  “He’s a child, Ms. Brown. An’ you know what a child will do. The first li’l girl out here flip her skirt at him and he’ll be gone. You know that.”

  “He loves me.”

  “Ev’ry man up an’ down this street been in love like that . . . a hunnert times.”

  “You ’ont understand, Mr. Fortlow. It ain’t like that wit’ us.”

  Socrates took in her words. She was right, he didn’t know. He hadn’t asked Darryl about the days and nights he’d spent on Piney with Myrtle. He hadn’t wanted to know.

  He was distracted by the meetings held at the Big Nickel, his meeting house. He’d leased the house for a dollar a year for five years and then opened it to all comers. There were treaty meetings between gang members that had complaints against each other, and the regular Thursday night meeting where his friends from all over discussed the world and what would be the right thing to do.

  With all that talk and organization Socrates had ignored Darryl and his girlfriend.

  “You right, Myrtle,” he said at length. “You right.”

  “So you gonna come up and have a drink wit’us?”

  “Not right now, baby. Have Darryl invite me and I’ll come ovah. Maybe we’ll go out to dinnah or sumpin’ like that.”

  “I got lemonade right now,” she offered.

  Socrates saw her lips move but all he could hear was the pleading whine of the woman he’d raped and then murdered.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  2. Walking down Central Avenue Socrates turned left toward The Big Nickel. He was trying to sort out the feelings that Darryl and Myrtle had unearthed in him. Seeing her nearly naked like that, with her lips all swollen and the room smelling of days of sex, had aroused his dark side. He hadn’t been with a woman for two years. He wanted feminine company but the memories of his past were too strong. Sexual attraction always brought out feelings of violence and pain.

  He stopped in the Bottle and Keg liquor store seven blocks from Myrtle’s room. There he bought two beers with money made from his new cleaning job at Morningside Garage on 119th Street.

  He was working a regular job to pay for the dinners served at the Thursday night Thinkers’ Meeting.

  When he was on the street again the phone rang from its wrapper. It didn’t ring exactly but made a cry of escalating notes. Through the plastic covering on the box Socrates could see a number that had the area code ‘310’ in front of it. That was a prefix for the west side of town where Chaim Zetel, the wealthy junk man, lived.

  Socrates tried to pull the plastic covering off the box but it wouldn’t come loose. Finally the phone stopped sounding and the words missed call appeared on the small gray screen.

  By the time he reached the tin-plated addition to Fred Bumpus’s lot Socrates was deep inside the question of Darryl and Myrtle. She was a shapely, sexy woman and Darryl needed some kind of love in his life. He didn’t have parents or anyone else to show him the right way. Socrates was the only one there to help guide him.

  The phone, which was still in its plastic container on the dining table, let out a loud chirp.

  Socrates thought that Myrtle was too old for the boy but what did he know about love? In his entire life he’d only had one girlfriend and now they were just friends. She’d married the baker that supplied the diner she owned.

  How could he give the boy advice?

  The phone chirped again.

  The screen now read—message waiting.

  Again Socrates turned his attention to the thick plastic box. He searched for some kind of release mechanism but there was none. He tried the tear the container but even his great strength couldn’t rip that material. Finally he got a knife from the cutlery drawer and hacked the clear covering open wide.

  Below the message and the ‘enter’ button was the word VIEW. He press
ed the button and the words voice mail appeared. He pressed the button again and the phone began to work. A mechanical voice asked him for his password. He entered his convict number and after a moment he heard Luna Barnet’s voice.

  “I was told that this was Mr. Fortlow’s cell phone numbah,” she said in her flat almost emotionless tone. “If it is, this is Luna. You should call me at my home numbah an’ tell me when I could come by.”

  The mechanical voice told Socrates that if he wanted to hear her message again all he had to do was enter 1. He did this seven times, listening for some kind of answer in Luna’s words. Finally he entered a 2 to save the message and pressed the red key to hang up.

  He had her number on the sign-up sheet that Darryl passed around at the seventh Thinkers’ Meeting held on Thursday nights. That was the evening that Ron Zeal brought a pistol to the gathering, which he took out and handed to Leanne Northford.

  Zeal had told Socrates after the first meeting that he would not be back but he came again, and again.

  “Why he still comin’ if he so mad?” Billy Psalms had asked Socrates. “Man hate as much as he do cain’t get nuthin’ outta sumpin’ like this.”

  “You wrong about that Billy,” Socrates said. “I mean he was a long way out from acceptin’ a place at this table. He was ten thousand miles from us but he traveled nine-thousand ninehundred and ninety-nine a them miles just steppin’ ’cross the threshold.”

  They had spent six weeks talking about black men who shot down their brothers in the street. Each week there had been a different issue. The first was about disrespect, when a man felt insulted by another’s actions. After that came theft, infidelity, group (or gang) affiliation, revenge, and finally self-defense in all of its many incarnations.

  The discussions went deep into the night and almost everyone had a strong opinion.

  Most of the group had at least one experience to share. Even Chaim Zetel had a story about a cousin that had murdered a Nazi who’d escaped after WW II and smuggled himself down to Paraguay.

  “Moishe had light in his eyes before he left to avenge his parents and sister,” the elderly Jewish junk man had said. “But after he never smiled. I often thought that he was already dead but didn’t know it.”

  Every week Ron Zeal argued that the rest of the people were fools.

  “A man disrespect you an’ you don’t do sumpin’ then you ain’t nuthin’,” he said.

  Socrates wondered out loud if children in the elementary school should be allowed to slaughter those that made fun of them. What about comedians, someone had asked, who make jokes about the audience?

  “And what if they are right?” Wan Tai asked.

  “What you say, Chinaman?” Ron Zeal asked the martial arts expert.

  “What if you lie,” Tai asked, “and then someone calls you a liar? Is that disrespect?”

  Ron returned every Thursday. Billy Psalms made a feast each week cooking everything from fried chicken to oxtails and gravy. Leanne Northford showed Zeal enough disrespect to get a whole neighborhood slaughtered but still Ron was there for every meeting. Cassie Wheaton and Antonio Peron started showing up at the same time and sitting together at the far end of the Big Table. And Ron sat across from them, never once questioning the growing relationship between his black lawyer and the Mexican carpenter.

  And then finally, a week after most of the room admitted that self-defense sometimes required deadly force, Ron came in late, pulled out a small .32 caliber pistol and handed it to Leanne.

  “Take it,” he said sullenly.

  “What for?”

  “Take it.”

  She took the gun from the young man’s hand.

  “Don’t you hate me for killin’ them boys?” he asked. “You they mama’s friend right?”

  “Yes,” Leanne said.

  “I ain’t sayin’ I did it. But you know I did. So here—kill me.”

  Darryl moved away from Ron’s side where he’d sat at every meeting.

  Leanne looked up into the killer’s face, her lips twisted with dark passion.

  Socrates realized then how remarkable it was that Leanne had continued to come to the meetings with Ron, the murderer of young men she’d known since they were born.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because maybe you right,” he said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be doin’ what we doin’. Nobody could help it. Nobody could stop it. But maybe it’s wrong anyway. Maybe so.”

  Leanne placed the pistol on the table and sat down, turning her back on Zeal.

  That was the moment that the Thinkers’ Meeting was set. Socrates looked down both sides of his asymmetrical table; everyone was looking at Leanne and Ron—everyone except for Luna Barnet, whose eyes were fastened on him.

  “Hello?”

  “Luna? That you?” “Oh hi. You called.” “Didn’t you ask me to?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t think you would.” Luna’s voice was slow, almost lazy.

  “Why not?” Socrates could feel his heart beating. This vulnerability embarrassed him, causing his pulse rate to increase even further.

  “I’ont know. You never say nuthin’ to me at that place.” “You’re the one that never talks,” Socrates said.

  It was true. Luna had not once participated in the discussions

  about killing in the hood. She just sat there next to Marianne Lodz, the singer, and watched the people, especially Socrates. “I don’t have nuthin’ to say them people wanna hear,” she said. “You know that.”

  “What do you have to say, Luna?”

  “Are you at the tin house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I come ovah?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What for? The meetin’ ain’t till day after tomorrow.”

  “I wanna talk to you.”

  Socrates remembered his first day in prison. A man, a big man named Wendell had told Socrates that he would be on his knees to him by sunset or the dawn would find him dead.

  “Yeah,” Socrates said. “Yeah. Come on.”

  “Okay.”

  He was sitting on the piano bench on the left side of the Big Table when the knock came. It was Luna, he was sure of that. He felt her presence through the door and down into his bones. It was a fleshy, heavy feeling that weighed on Socrates’ arms and legs. He felt as if he couldn’t rise, that Luna was holding him down and calling him forth at the same time.

  He took a deep breath and lurched up from his seat, toppling the bench as he did so. He walked slowly, not quite staggering as he approached the red door. He breathed in deeply as he pulled it open.

  Like a promise Luna Barnet was standing there. She wore a coal gray dress that was approximately the same color as her skin. Her hair was teased out into five forms that appeared to be various sizes of dark flame. Two of these licks were tied with yellow ribbon. The rest stood on their own; wild and, at once, suggestive and forbidding.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, neither smiling nor frowning. Socrates stepped back and she entered the philosophers’ fortress.

  As he closed the door she said, “Cops out there across the street.”

  “Yeah. They been out there regular ever since we had them two clubs have that meetin’ here.”

  “Why you want all them rough men ’round here anyway?” Luna asked.

  Socrates smiled.

  “Why you grinnin’?”

  “That’s just about the most words I heard you say all at once,” he said.

  That was one of the few times that Socrates saw Luna’s friendly smile. It was a quivering at the corners of her mouth and a momentary easement from the pressure of her eyes.

  “You want a beer?” he asked her.

  “Naw.”

  “Don’t drink?” he asked, trying to remember if she had ever had wine at their weekly meetings.

  “Don’t want to right now,” she said as she strolled into the meeting room.

  Socrates righted the piano bench and sat down.
Luna settled into the cane chair that sat next to it.

  “What can I do for you, Luna?”

  “Slide down here next to me.”

  He did and she said, “I wanna ask you sumpin’.”

  “What’s that?”

  Luna was the second person to ever make Socrates this uncomfortable. Her quiet ways and flat, almost expressionless eyes made him feel that his innermost secrets were up for grabs. The only other person who made him feel like that was his Aunt Bellandra, the woman whose parents were born slaves; the woman who haunted his dreams for more than fifty years.

  “It’s kinda serious,” Luna said. “Maybe you could ask me sumpin’ first and then I could kinda get used to talkin’ wit’ you.”

  “All right,” Socrates said, relieved that he didn’t have to hear her question right off. “How come you and Marianne are friends?”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t work together and you don’t seem like you come from the same part of town. She’s all fancy and particular. You look like you could live just about anywhere.”

  Luna chose that moment to cross her legs. The gray dress was short and so the hem rode high on her dark thigh.

  “Why you lookin’ at my legs?” she asked.

  “You have very nice legs, Luna. Legs and thighs and eyes. You got it all, girl, and you know it too.”

  Luna twisted her lips, gauging Socrates’ reply.

  “I met Marianne after a party up in Baldwin Hills,” she said. “I went up there wit’ some’a my girlfriends but they hooked up and I was lookin’ for a ride back down here. I was outside an’ I hear this kinda like scream. You know it was like she was yellin’ but someone either had their hand ovah her mouth or maybe they was squeezin’ her throat.”

  Socrates had a familiar feeling in his shoulders and in the palms of his hands. It was the feeling of being incarcerated. He understood then that Luna’s deep emptiness reminded him of himself.

  “I went ovah to the side of the house an’ I see this big dude tryin’ to get in between this yellah girl’s legs. I might’a thought it was some couple gettin’ it on but he was just too rough. She was fightin’ him an’ he hit her wit’ his fist. I call out, ‘You bettah stop that for I call somebody.’ An’ then he jump up and I see that he had a knife in his hand. The girl was coughin’ like she’d been chokin’ an’ he come at me . . .” Luna looked at Socrates then. She was asking a question with her eyes. He frowned and then nodded.