The Right Mistake

“Yeah, brothah,” Billy Psalms said before he downed half a paper cup of Blue Angel red wine, “Freddy Bumpus made a
big
mistake when he married Vanessa Tremont.”

“Vanessa Tremont.” Martin Orr repeated the words lustfully, licking his lips and moving his head to silent music.
The other men sitting around Socrates’ card table nodded and raised their paper cups in a toast. Then they went back to their game of dominoes. Psalms was ahead, as usual. He slapped down a four/three tile, closing off the play so that all the men had to give up their bones, affording him a two hundred and sixteen point advantage.
After they paid up (a penny a point) the group returned to the topic of Vanessa Tremont, and her husband Fred Bumpus—a house painter who was born and raised in Watts.
“What kinda mistake could it be to marry somebody like that?” Winston Twiner asked. “Van got a backside derail a train.”
The men laughed. Even Socrates had to smile.
“Ain’t you heard, man?” Billy said. “Vanessa done served Freddy wit’ papers, kicked him outta his own damn house.” “What?” three of the five men cried.
Darryl, a boy of seventeen, sat in the corner watching his elders and adoptive guardian—Socrates Fortlow.
“Damn straight,” Billy said. “Bumpus moved in the room upstairs from mines Thursday last. Said that Vanessa filed for divorce, got her a lawyer, an’ moved his sorry ass out in the street.”
“Took his house?” Martin was astounded. He had a perfectly round head and a face that would have been called pretty if not for the gray hairs that sprouted on his jaw line.
“That’s a goddamned shame,” Winston said.
“It ain’t like they cut off his dick,” Comrade Jeremiah said. “Somebody got to get the house.”
“Excuse me . . . but you’ont know what you talkin’ ’bout, Brother Jeremiah,” Billy declared. “Freddy was born in that house. His father was born there. His grandfather built it with his own two hands back in the forties. That house more important to the Bumpus family than half the male chirren in they clan.”
Billy Psalms and Darryl noticed Socrates leaning forward.
Psalms was a small man who made his living as a gambler mainly. He played cards and pitched pennies, went to the races when he was flush and to Victory Rooming House when the money was gone. He prided himself as a streetwise odds maker and so he watched Socrates closely whenever he got the chance.
Fortlow’s an explosion ready to blow,
he would say.
An’ you know you cain’t nevah get a even bet on a bomb blast.
Billy reached for his Dixie Cup.
“What about the boy?” Socrates asked the gambler.
“What boy?”
“Fred an’ Van had a son,” Socrates said. “Peanut they called him, but his name is Bradford. I think he’s three or maybe four years old.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “They got a boy. I think he’s been livin’ wit’ Vanessa’s mama. She live over on Adams. She come an’ took the boy when Vanessa an’ Fred started fightin’ all the time.”
“What they fightin’ about?” Socrates wanted to know.
“Beats me,” Martin said.
“I think Van’s backside derailed Too-Tight Floyd Grimm,” Comrade Jeremiah announced. He had olive brown skin and generous lips. He was covered by an extra layer of fat that made him seem open and friendly. “Floyd been seein’ Van an’ Freddy didn’t have what it take to break it.”
“What you mean—what it take?” Socrates asked, the question sounding almost like a threat.
“Nuthin’,” Comrade said defensively. “It’s just that if a man gonna be fuckin’ my woman he gonna have to answer t’me.”
“So you kill him?” Socrates asked the middle-aged baker. “Thatta make you a bettah man than Fred?”
“Yes sir,” Comrade replied. “Niggah gotta be a man in this world. He cain’t have his woman givin’ that pussy away like that. Shit—kill the man an’ the bitch too.”
Martin and Winston nodded while Billy and Darryl watched.
“What about Peanut?” Socrates, the big ex-con, asked.
“What about him?” Comrade replied.
Socrates didn’t answer right away. He looked at Darryl and then at Winston. He didn’t waste time with Psalms.
“Well,” Winston said. “I guess Peanut’s with his grandmother anyway. I mean they done give up on him already.”
“An’ you think that’s right?” Socrates asked Winston, the eldest among them.
“No. No it ain’t right but that’s the way it is.”
“But it ain’t got to be,” Socrates said. “An’ you know it would hurt that boy if his mother dies an’ his father ends up in jail. It hurt for a man to lose his blood like that.”
“You right about that,” Martin Orr said with a nod. “I mean a man get mad an’ all, you could understand that, but afterwards a little boy like Bradford just be lost. They got chirren like that all up and down these streets.”
The men were quiet then, nodding, agreeing with the logic that Socrates teased out of Martin’s mouth.
“So I’m s’posed t’sit down an’ let my woman walk on me?” Comrade said. “What kinda father could I be if I cain’t show my son how t’be a man?”
“An’ how do you be a man?” Socrates asked. “By callin’ his mother a bitch?”
“Kill the mothahfuckah fuck yo’ woman. Kill him an’ her too.”
A grin formed on Billy Psalms’ handsome mouth. He liked danger. That’s why he hung around Socrates so much of the time. The convicted rapist and murderer was the most dangerous solitary man Billy had ever met.
Socrates was nearly bald with dark skin and a visage that was stern—even frightening. And though he was nearing sixty he was still a powerful man with bulging shoulders and vise-like hands that were nicknamed the rock breakers while he was doing hard time.
“So let’s say that it was me with your woman,” he said.
“What?” Comrade didn’t like the turn in the conversation. He moved his right shoulder as if he were going to rise and flee.
“I’m fuckin’ yo’ woman,” Socrates said slowly, deliberately. “She come ovah ev’ry day an’ suck my dick.”
The room went from quiet to silent.
“Stop fuckin’ around, man,” Comrade said.
“Ev’ry day she tell you she goin’ out,” Socrates continued, “an’ when you ask her where she goin’ she say, ‘None’a yo’ mothahfuckin’ business.’”
Socrates’ eyes were on Comrade’s. His left nostril lifted in contempt.
“I get that pussy whenever I want it. Ain’t a damn thing you can do to make us stop. So what you gonna do now?” Socrates raised his hands, gesturing for a reply, daring Comrade to come toward him.
“Why you doin’ this, Socco?” Comrade complained.
Suddenly Socrates’ stern face broke into an almost friendly grin.
“Just messin’ wit’ ya,” he said.
The rest of the men and Darryl exhaled in relief.
Comrade let a smile flit across his mouth.
“But it’s a good question, right?” Socrates asked.
“What?”
“I’m a bad man, CJ. I spent twenty-seven years in the penitentiary. All I evah done is study how to survive when anothah man want me dead. You couldn’t stop me from killin’ you if you had ev’ry othah man in this room on yo’ side. I’d kill ya even if it meant losin’ my own life. That’s what you learn in prison.”
“I don’t wanna mess wit’ you, Socco.”
“I know you don’t but what would you do if I was fuckin’ yo’ woman ev’ry day?”
Comrade knew that he couldn’t dodge the question. He had blustered and now he had to back it up.
“I’d kill you,” he whispered.
“Oh shit,” Billy Psalms murmured.
Darryl’s eyes opened wide.
“How?” Socrates asked. “How would you kill me?”
“I dunno. I don’t know how but you know I wouldn’t let you walk on me like that.”
“Stand up,” Socrates commanded as he rose from his chair.
Fortlow was wide in the shoulder and thick in his chest. He stood six feet at least but his dimensions belonged on an even taller man. There was violence shot all through his bearing and he moved with the seamless grace of a man twenty years younger.
He took a step toward Comrade and the frightened baker leaped to his feet. The other men got out of their chairs too. The wooden legs moving behind them cried across the pine floor.
“If you were Fred Bumpus and I was Too-Tight what would you do right now?” Socrates asked.
“I, I, I would . . .”
“What if you had a knife?” said Socrates. “Darryl.”
“Yeah?”
“Get Comrade a knife out the draw. That sharp butcher’s knife.”
Darryl moved to the kitchen side of the one room house. The boy pulled a whining drawer open.
“Don’t do this, Socco,” Comrade begged.
“Why not?”
“I ain’t, ain’t got no quarrel with you.”
“It’s not you’n me, Comrade. You are Fred Bumpus. I’m not Socco—I’m Too-Tight Floyd Grimm.”
“No you not.”
“But what would you do if I was?”
“I’d kill you,” Comrade cried.
“You want the knife?”
“No.”
“I’ll turn my back,” Socrates offered and then he turned around.
Darryl handed Comrade the knife.
The frightened baker took the haft of the blade.
Socrates could see the fear in Martin Orr’s eyes. He could see Comrade’s shadow on the floor to his left. He didn’t know if Comrade would take the bait or not but it didn’t matter. He’d walked among men who wanted him dead day and night for years, decades; desperate men with violent hearts whose only pleasure was the destruction of their enemies. Socrates had been slashed, stabbed, battered, and garroted in the Indiana state penitentiary. Men had plotted his demise countless times. But he was still alive, living in his rent-free one room cottage behind a benefactor’s house, surrounded by evergreens and a lush lawn.
He wasn’t afraid of Comrade Jeremiah or any other man.
“What would you do,” Socrates asked the man behind him, “if I was Too-Tight and you was Freddy B?”
“Why you doin’ this, Socco?” Comrade whined. “I ain’t done a damn thing to you. I said that I’d kill Too-Tight, not you.”
“But what if it was me?” Socrates said as he turned to face the trembling man named for friendship. “What if it was me and your woman? Would you stab me in the back then? Or even if you couldn’t, even if you just tried but I caught your hand and turned your knife, then would you lay in wait with a pistol and shoot me like some coward from behind a door or a corner?”
Comrade dropped the knife on the floor.
“Whatever it take,” he said affecting the hollow semblance of courage.
“So if you shoot me in the back how’s that gonna make you into a man?” Socrates asked then. “How yo’ son gonna learn yo’ last lesson if you sneak around and bushwhack me?”
Socrates sat down heavily. Slowly the other men got their chairs and returned them to the domino table. Darryl picked the knife up from the floor, put it in the sink and returned to his stool on the sidelines watching Socrates with hungry, proud eyes.
Comrade Jeremiah filled his paper cup with red wine. Martin and Winston began turning over dominoes and shuffling them.
“So what you sayin’, Socco?” Billy asked. “Man just s’posed to let his woman walk on him an’ shame him in the street?”
The gambler was smiling because he knew that Socrates wasn’t a true bully. Fortlow wouldn’t threaten Billy for challenging his logic. The ex-con’s actions with Comrade were just his way of showing that bluster doesn’t mean a thing.
Still, Socrates glowered at the smaller Psalms.
“A woman treat a man like shit,” Socrates said, “or the other way round—the only thing a smart person can do is to walk away. If he think he better for the boy then he should go to that grandmother and take him back.”
“It’s hard to swallow that much pain,” Martin speculated. “Woman do you like that and you bound to get mad.”
“Yeah,” the elder Twiner added. “Woman do sumpin’ like that to ya an’ it just eat at ya—mornin’ an’ night.”
Socrates was looking out the window into the idyllic green yard. Under a bush of yellow Sweetheart roses he spied the snow-white cat from the neighbor’s yard. The hairy feline liked to slip through the fence now and then. For hours he’d sit in the foliage and watch the ex-con. But whenever Socrates went to pet it the cat darted away, back into his owner’s yard.
“That’s bein’ a man,” Socco said. “Pain in your heart and your dreams—that’s the test of a man. If you can live life day after day with men treatin’ you like a dog but you never bark or howl, cower or beg—if you can be a human being even when they want you to be a animal—that’s got man all ovah it.”
“So you think Bumpus done right,” Billy said. “Movin’ out, givin’ up the house his granddaddy built . . .”
“Naw, Billy,” Socrates said—he even smiled. “I think
you
right, at least halfway.”
“Me? What I say?”
“That Fred made a big mistake when he married Vanessa.” Socrates chortled and shook his head.
When Billy’s face had a serious caste to it he looked all of his forty-five years. At any other time he could have passed as a man of thirty.
“Shit,” Billy said. “That don’t take no deep thought. Woman do a man the way she did Freddy, that got to be a mistake.”
“But,” Socrates said, holding up an educating finger.
“But what?” Winston Twiner asked.
“What if it’s the right mistake?”
“Right mistake? How gettin’ with a lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’ woman gonna be right?” Comrade asked.
Martin Orr cocked his round head as if he had just heard a strange sound somewhere in the room.
“That’s you, CJ,” the unemployed glazer said.
“Me? You bettah believe that a woman’a mine ain’t gonna do me like Vanessa done Freddy.”
“But you scared about it,” Martin said. “I mean what you care about Fred? An’ why you mad at Van fo’ leavin’ him? It ain’t none’a yo’ nevermind but there you are with the veins standin’ out on your neck you so mad.”
Comrade was tall and thin. His neck was longer than the norm. Everyone in the room could see the pulse in his throat from a swollen artery.
“Who the fuck you think you is, Marty,” Comrade asked, “my mama?”
“Just sayin’,” Marty replied with a shrug.
“But what about this right mistake Socco’s talkin’ ’bout?” Winston asked. He was bald on top and thinner than Comrade. Even though he was midway past his seventieth year he had few wrinkles. The only traits that marked his age were his soft voice and fragile gait.
“Yeah,” Billy added.
All eyes turned to the host.
Socrates glanced out the window. The cat was gone.
“What you think, Darryl?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’on’t even know them peoples.”
“But you heard what happened didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“So why would a man be makin’ the right mistake to be with a woman like that?”
Socrates smiled.
Darryl sat hunched over on his stool. He was lanky and tall, dark-skinned with a perpetual frown on his face. He’d been party to the murder of a retarded boy when he was younger. Socrates divined the crime by just talking to Darryl and had, singlehandedly, offered the lost youth absolution. From that day forward Darryl had been faithful to the severe minded ex-con.
“I’ont know,” Darryl said. “I mean maybe if he was with her and she hurt him then maybe he could learn sumpin’.”
“Learn what?” Billy Psalms said.