The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  “You got a spy in here wit’ us now?” Ron Zeal asked.

  “Maybe not at this table tonight but they got people watchin’, people comin’ in. They want Socco to go down. Nobody wants the gangs to get together. Nobody wants the peoples down here to unite . . .”

  3. Socrates asked Luna to go back to her place with Marianne Lodz that evening.

  “No,” the young beauty replied. “I’ma stay right here wit’ you.”

  “I thought we had an agreement?”

  “We do. I’ma go home when you need me to. When you need to be alone or wit’ Darryl. When you need to take care of business. But tonight you need your woman wit’ you. I cain’t be leavin’ when I know that there’s police spyin’ on you, tryin’ to bring you down.”

  Socrates didn’t want to laugh but he couldn’t help it. There was no humor or good will to his hilarity but something deeper, something darker but not bad.

  “My woman?” he said, still laughing.

  “What else am I if not yours?”

  The question cut off his humor like a faucet slammed shut.

  Luna stared at him and he looked back, blankly. His heart was gripping like a fist on a tennis ball in the prison yard from early morning until the horn blew.

  “They been tryin’ to kill me for more’n half a century, girl.”

  “An’ now they got to go up against the both of us.”

  Nothing in his years of dark defiance had prepared Socrates to resist this claim. He had thought that it was the flattery of a young woman’s body that broke through his defenses, made him prey to her desires, and his. He thought that she would lay with him awhile and then move on to another man who better suited her needs.

  He thought that this affair was just another way for him to learn what he needed to know to bring out the truth from his soul—but he was wrong on all counts.

  “Socrates,” Luna said.

  “What?”

  “Why you just standin’ there?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Socrates.”

  “What?” he asked, almost shouting.

  “You gonna talk?”

  “Where did you learn how to do that?” he asked.

  “What?” she asked. “I mean how to do what?”

  “How to jerk my head around when I’m tryin’ my best to look the other way.”

  “What you talkin’ about, Socrates?”

  “They separated us, girl.”

  “Who?”

  “Them. The slave masters.”

  “Slaves? Slavery over, Socco.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” he said, recalling the nervous feeling in his toes the first time he wandered to the far end of the public pool. The ground was no longer beneath his feet and suddenly he forgot how to swim. “But that’s like Iraq.”

  “Iraq? What’s Iraq got to do wit’ us?”

  “Everything. The war’s gonna be ovah one day, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “An’, an’, an’ when it is that’s what people gonna say, ‘It’s ovah.’”

  “All right,” Luna said. She reached out gently and touched his bulging forearm with three fingertips.

  “But what if somebody you knew had been walkin’ patrol the day before the pullout? What if he stepped on a mine and lost his left leg and lost his left arm?”

  Luna moved close enough to kiss the fabric of his blue work shirt. She gazed up and his arm came around her shoulder blades.

  “I guess his war wouldn’t evah be ovah,” Luna said.

  “They separated us,” he said again. “They made sure that slaves came from different tribes and spoke different tongues so they couldn’t plot against ’em. That’s how we learned to be black people—alone, even in a crowd.”

  Luna blinked.

  “And then,” Socrates said, “and then you come up just as easy as you please an’ say, ‘now they got to go up against the both of us.’”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see? I only know one way.”

  “Ain’t you nevah had a woman before?” Luna asked. “Not really. I been in prison. They ain’t no women in there.”

  4. Just before he awoke, on some mornings, Socrates got the notion that he was still in prison—locked away and forgotten. When this thought entered his mind his heart would skip and he’d jolt into consciousness with the electric feeling of desperation in his hands and feet.

  That morning Luna Barnet was sound asleep next to him; mouth open and hair wild. She was wrapped up tightly in the sheet.

  Socrates thought that she was like an island that a lost ship found itself next to in the early morning after days of nothing but flat seas and no rations. Not just an island but a great sheer cliff that dwarfed his small ship and its journey.

  He had been lost and now he was somewhere with no idea of how he’d gotten there. There were no breadcrumbs or footprints behind him in the shifting sea; no possibility of any landmark, or footpath, not even any clear memory of passage or arrival.

  Everything seemed far away except for Luna and the Big Nickel and the light coming in through the window. “Why din’t you wake me up?” she asked hours later when he was almost finished making breakfast.

  “I like to watch you sleep.”

  “You wasn’t watchin’ me.” She wore only a T-shirt because she knew how much he liked to look at her legs in the morning. “Oh yes I was,” he said. “I could see you through the ceilin’.”

  She was going to continue the banter, but the woman inside, and the child too, drew her into his arms.

  “Where are you? ” Luna asked in the early afternoon when the sun shone on the other side of the meeting house.

  They were two spoons in the bed.

  “Inside you,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t even consider saying the word.

  “Do you wanna make a baby up inside me, Baby?”

  There was nothing to say; not yes and not no and not that he didn’t know.

  “’Cause if you don’t you bettah move back.”

  “I love you,” he whispered so softly that she did not hear it.

  That evening he made fried chicken and an avocado, onion, and tomato salad. They sat at a small table in the kitchen because Luna didn’t like to eat at the Big Table.

  “I always feel like we got to be talkin’ ’bout sumpin’ important at the Table,” she said. “An’ you know sometimes I just wanna eat.”

  “They prob’ly gonna try’n kill me, girl,” Socrates said at the end of their meal.

  She twisted her lips and shook her head.

  “We ain’t at the meetin’ table,” she said.

  “This is serious, Luna.”

  “I know.”

  “I cain’t be upstairs tryin’ t’make babies when people down here wit’ knives and guns.”

  “Who better’n you?”

  “What if I die?”

  “Ain’t no if to it, honey. We all gonna die one day.”

  Socrates was reminded of the great cliff of his early morning vision. He smiled and shook his head.

  “Don’t die,” she said. “Don’t let ’em do that to you.”

  He didn’t tell her about the note he found shoved under the office door in the early morning. Maxie must have put it there before coming into the meeting the night before.

  Dear Mr. Fortlow,

  I am the one who called you and said about the pistol in

  your office. When they told me about it I knew right away

  that I had to warn you. I came back to L.A. after Robert

  was killed. I pretended to be on their side but I wasn’t. I

  thought that I could watch over you and in that way make

  up for the wrong I had done. But I was wrong.

  The man in charge of your case is named Telford

  Winegarten. He has an office at the municipal building

  on Alvarado. He’s got an office but he’s acting like he’s not
r />   a cop.

  By the time you read this I’ll be gone to Canada. I’d

  appreciate it if you’d tear up this letter.

  Maxie

  Socrates tore the note into tiny pieces and then flushed them down the toilet. Then he waited for the tank to refill and flushed it again.

  The next afternoon he got on a bus that deposited him three blocks from the Alvarado Municipal building. He went through the metal detector and presented his identification to the freckled Hispanic woman at the front desk.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked. “Tell them it’s Socrates Fortlow.”

  “How did you get here?” Telford Winegarten asked as soon as Socrates was admitted to the secret policeman’s office. His outer door had a small removable plate fitted in its nameslot that read: Telford Winegarten—Community Relations.

  Winegarten was of medium height and build, maybe fortyfive and well groomed, if balding.

  “Took the bus,” Socrates replied. “Mind if I sit down?”

  Winegarten nodded with neither fear nor confusion showing on his face. But Socrates knew he had upended the white man’s plots and schemes. He knew that Winegarten had used the fifteen minutes Socrates waited outside, across from the pretty young secretary, to hide the maps and flowcharts he used to decipher the information they had to bring down the Big Nickel.

  Sitting across from each other the two men gathered themselves.

  “What can I do for you?” Winegarten asked.

  “Just answer one question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why you wanna frame me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is that all?” Telford allowed himself a smile that showed no teeth.

  “No . . . I mean in a way it is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m what you call a reformed killer, Mr. Winegarten . . . or should I say Captain Winegarten of the LAPD?”

  The policeman said nothing, made no gesture.

  “I got to get this right now,” Socrates said, pressing two fingers of his left hand against his brow. “Cassie Wheaton is filing papers against the LAPD that name you, Captain Harvey Jamal, and Lieutenant Jerry McCann for violating my rights and the rights of everyone in my organization.”

  “What?” It was the first honest word uttered by the cop.

  “We gonna put it all out on the table,” Socrates said, using the words that had been spoken many times at the Thursday night Thinkers’ Meeting. “Your spies and plants and conspiracies. We gonna put together a petition to get you up off’a us and we gonna bring every one of your secret agents into court.”

  The shadow over the policeman’s face came from inside.

  “You’re threatening me?” he said.

  “No, sir. No threat here. I used to be like that. I used to bully and intimidate. But now I just lay it out. Let the courts and the newspapers know what you doin’ an’ what I’m doin’. Let’em see in the light’a day what’s what.”

  “I could crush you like a bug,” Telford said.

  Socrates could remember using the same words in the prison yard when someone questioned his authority. He smiled, recognizing this affinity with the offensive man.

  “Not right now you couldn’t, boss,” Socrates said. “Later on maybe, when you’re miles away and your hatchet men come up from behind. But right now you couldn’t lay a hand on me.”

  Telford Winegarten sat back in his chair and laced his fingers. He wore a tan suit and a dark green shirt. His tie was golden with a metallic sheen. The shadow lifted from his countenance and he nodded and smiled. Behind his eyes were a general’s calculations. He was weighing his opponent and maybe even enjoying the process.

  “What do you want?” the policeman asked.

  “Nuthin’.”

  “We all want something.”

  “Oh? Tell me, Captain, what do you want?”

  “I’d like to know what the gangs are saying. I’d like to hear about the prostitution ring being run out of Compton.”

  “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that.”

  “What do you know?”

  “What I said, Captain. You are my nemesis, you and all your spies and agents. Like you said, I’m a bug compared to you. But this bug is goin’ to federal court.

  “Now if you wanna talk to gangbangers and street walkers I’ll ask ’em to meet ya. If you wanna come down an’ find out what’s happenin’ I will make the room. There ain’t secrets. The gangs want peace. The street walkers and call girls and call boys want peace. Damn, the whole United States wants peace. It’s you don’t see it, Captain.”

  “I don’t want this court thing, Fortlow.”

  “I know. And believe me I don’t want it either. When it come to me that I was gonna sue a cop I almost shit my pants. My lawyer’s scared and you know Cassie Wheaton ain’t scared’a nuthin’. But we are goin’ to court.”

  “If you’ve already made up your mind then why are you here?”

  “There wasn’t nowhere else to go, Captain. I’m the kinda man wanna stand up to my enemy and say where it is I stand. I ain’t no drive-by shooter, no hit man come up behind your back. I’m a fighter.

  “I come here to tell you that I’m comin’ for you. You could frame me or beat me or have me shot down dead in the street. But I’m still comin’ for you. The papers are in the court’s hands and in the newspapers’ hands. Marianne Lodz talkin’ to a entertainment magazine about it right now and Leanne Northford tellin’ all of her friends down at social services.

  “I come here to tell you that I’ma come down on you like a ton ’a mothahfuckin’ brick. That’s why I’m here. I’m here right in front’a you. I’m here to tell you that I’ll be in my house and at the Big Nickel, with my girlfriend and maybe even I’ma bring a life into this world. And I ain’t runnin’ or hidin’ neither. I come here to let you know that I know and to see if you ready to fight a man who see you as good as you see him.”

  Socrates stood up. He felt the veins pulsing in his temples.

  Telford Winegarten sat back further.

  “You’re making a mistake,” the policeman-in-disguise said as Socrates blundered out the door.

  On the street he took a deep breath and exhaled through a grin. He thought about Luna, about how she would have been proud of him, about how she would love him even though he was frightened and foolish.

  5. “I evah tell you what I always thought the Big Nickel was?” Billy Psalms asked Socrates that evening at the philosopher’s oneroom home behind his patron’s house. His small garden house was more of a retreat than a domicile these days. He spent so much time at the Big Nickel meeting with community people and lawyers that he only made it home a few nights a week.

  Socrates had told Billy everything, even about the revelations he’d had with Luna.

  “No, man,” Socrates said. “What’s that?”

  “That it was like a slave ship only in reverse.”

  “How so?”

  “When they took us off the ship they separated us like you

  said. But now, all these decades and centuries later you done gathered us up and put us back on the boat. We leavin’ an’ the boss man don’t know what to do.”

  Socrates sipped his red wine from a crystal goblet that Leanne Northford had given him. He stared at William Herrington Psalms III and shook his head.

  “Why ain’t you at the track today, Billy?”

  The gambler laughed at that answer to his deep thought. “You know, Socco,” he said, “the more I hang out with you the

  less I feel the need to take a chance.”

  “You a fool, Billy Psalms.”

  “What about you then?”

  “I’m right there with you.”

  BREEDING GROUND

  1.

  “Socrates,” a voice said somewhere up ahead, maybe around the corner at the end of the corridor. He was on his way
down the long hall, flanked by Hennie Brown and Bertrand Sawman, two guards who he’d known longer than any other person-not-a-convict. They hadn’t told him where they were taking him but his hands were shackled and his ankles were chained together. This circumstance filled the convict with glee but he didn’t show it.

  Brown had been nineteen years at the prison. Sawman had seen twenty-one birthdays come and go since donning the graygreen uniform. But Socrates had them both beat. He was at the twenty-seven-year mark and counting.

  He was happy because the chains on his feet meant that he was going to see the warden. That walk unnerved many a hardened con but Socrates wasn’t worried about the punishment he might receive. He only wanted a glance out the window.

  “Socrates.” For eight years Bearclaw, Socrates’ third warden, would call convicts to his office in order to discipline them. The offender would be made to sit in an oak chair before the oak desk where, through the window behind Arnold Bearclaw, he would be able to see a small valley where there was a power line and a stream. For more than half the year the window was open and errant sounds would come in. Birds and the sound of cars from an unseen parking lot below. Terry Blanderman swore he once heard a woman singing—a real woman, he’d said.

  Socrates would have shanked a man if it meant that when he’d go before Bearclaw for discipline he could be sure that the woman would be singing. It would be worth a hundred and eighty days of darkness to hear an actual voice of the opposite sex.

  “Socrates.” According to custom the guards secured the left ankle manacle to an iron eye in the floor before the warden entered. That way the prisoner had no chance of jumping the head man before the guards could club him down.

  This too made sense. A great many cons spent entire days writing letters to the warden or painting pictures of him. They talked about him and loved or hated him like they did the father who abandoned them or beat them or their mothers. The warden, whoever he was at the time, was an unhealthy abscess on the minds of many convicts. But Socrates only cared about that window.

  He was forty-eight years old and had spent more than half of his life in prison. He would never be free, never be free . . .