The Right Mistake (6 page)

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 pressed 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

“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.

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.
“He must’a been high,” she continued. “He come at me fast but sloppy. You know I almost always got me a knife, my mama taught me that. She told me that a girl always need a edge. And so I stuck him in his th’oat an’ he went down. Marianne put her clothes together an’ pulled me ovah to her car. We went to her place up on Westwood Boulevard. She had a man keepin’ her up there back then.”
“What happened to the man?” Socrates asked. “The one you stuck?”
“His name was Reginald. I cut his voice box and hit a nerve in his neck. He cain’t walk at all and he cain’t talk. They asked him who did it but he don’t know my name and he cain’t read or write neither so it ain’t nuthin’.”
“How old are you, Luna?”
Luna got up from the cane chair and sat down next to Socrates on the piano bench before saying, “Twenty-three.” They were looking into each others’ eyes.
“Why you wanna tell me about that?” he asked.
“’Cause you axed me how we got to be friends. Marianne says that she woulda been killed or at least lost her voice if I hadn’t come and stopped him. She done took care’a me since then.”
“But you could be arrested if I told somebody.”
“You ain’t gonna tell nobody,” she said with a sneer, “and I never told nobody else.”
“So what is it you wanted to ask me, Luna?”
“You the first full man I evah met,” she said.
“Say what?”
“You heard me. You the first full man I evah met. I mean they’s other men out here but they ain’t for me. Fancy niggahs and fools, dumb mothahfuckahs think that a woman just waitin’ to lie down and spread her legs open. And then there’s men like Reginald.”
“And so what’s the question?” Socrates asked.
“You know.”
“No, baby. What?”
Just the fact that Luna hesitated ignited a fire in Socrates.
“I want you to be my, my man,” she said with barely a stammer. “I want your baby inside me.”
When she put her left hand on her abdomen Socrates felt muscles in his cheeks that were unfamiliar.
“Luna . . . you’re twenty-three. I’m so close to sixty I could kiss it.”
“You that close to me too.”
Looking into Luna’s eyes Socrates saw what love could be for a man like him. It wasn’t red silk and chocolates, or grins and soft kisses. The passion he now saw ignited in Luna’s eyes was like that knife in Reginald’s throat; that moment where survival is everything.
“Listen, girl,” he said with a tone of confidence that belied his heart, “I’m old and fat.”
“You look good to me. I wanna man, not some weight liftin’ fool like Ron Zeal. You know I hear he take so much body buildin’ drug that he cain’t hardly get it up no more.”
Socrates tried to think of a way to explain himself. She was young and wild but she didn’t understand the darkness he came from.
“I know,” she said as if responding to his thoughts. “I know what you did. Marianne told me. She said that you killed a man an’ raped an’ then killed his girlfriend.”
The words were like every fist that landed on him while the convict Wendell tried to beat him to his knees. But Socrates could fight back against Wendell; he could fight back and win. He put that big ugly killer on
his
knees. He taught him a lesson that everyone in the Indiana State penitentiary learned.
But Luna was different. He couldn’t stand up against her. The violence in his heart ebbed out of him like bad blood after the final fighter in a long-standing feud had passed on.
“I know what you did,” Luna said again. “But here I am. I don’t got my knife in my bag. I don’t got no underwears on neither.”
Socrates couldn’t help but look at those bare legs again.
“You wanna see?” she asked him.
He put out his hands, laying them lightly upon hers.
“Slow down, baby,” he said. “You like to give me a heart attack here.”
This brought a true grin to the hard girl’s lips.
“I bet you nevah said that to nobody before,” she said.
“Luna, you mighta heard what I did but you can’t know no shit like that. I choked the life outta that woman. I had her blood all ovah my hands. I took her and I killed her like I was some kinda wild animal. Animal.”
Luna moved her wrists so that her hands were now on top of his.
“But you ain’t no animal,” she said.
“You cain’t forgive me, girl. Nobody can.”
“I don’t forgive you,” she said behind a steady stare. “I don’t care what you did. I ain’t here to give you nuthin’. I’m here to get sumpin’ from you.”
“What could I possibly have that you need?”
“I might be young, Mr. Fortlow, but I been around. I seen my brothah, my fathah, an’ uncle all die from alcohol an’ drugs. My mama turned to a old woman before I was sixteen. I seen it all. Killin’s, beatin’s . . . I got raped when I was twelve. My daddy killed the mothahfuckah did it.”
Socrates closed his hands around Luna’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’ont have to be sorry. I’m okay.”
“You bettah than that. You a young woman. Smart and fine . . .”
“I ain’t pretty,” she said, “an’ I ain’t fancy. I can read but I don’t know nuthin’. The only thing I know is that I want you. I knew it the minute I walked in that door an’ saw you. I knew it even before when Marianne told me about how you got this place and what you wanted to do with it.”
“I could be your grandfather.”
“You could be my baby’s daddy.”
“Luna,” Socrates said, feeling that he was pleading. “The things I’ve done . . .”
“The worst thing a man can do is not be there,” the young woman said. Now she was squeezing his fingers with surprising strength. “But all somebody got to do is look at you to know that the only way you gonna leave is if you died.”
Socrates wanted to pull his hand away, to stroke her hair and send her off, but Luna would not relinquish her grip. “I’m not lettin’ go’a you, Socco. I’m not playin’ here.” “Baby, please,” he said.
“We both done things,” she said. “I stabbed that man an’ he wasn’t the first one. I done things wit’ men. I done stole and sold drugs. We both been bad. An’ you ain’t that old anyway.”
“Let me go now, Luna.”
She withdrew her hands, clasping them upon her bare knees. Socrates enveloped the tight ball of fingers between his rock breakers.
“I’m not like one’a yo’ teenagers,” he said. “You got to give me a little time on this.”
“You not just sayin’ that so I go away?”
“I feel for you, girl,” Socrates said. “From that first minute you walked in this house I wanted somethin’. But I never saw you comin’. It’s like a dream I used to have in my cell sometimes.”
Their restless hands kept moving. Now Luna took Socrates’ big right hand in both of hers.
“What kinda dream?”
“I’d be in my eight by ten cell,” he said. “There was mold growin’ on the walls and bugs skitterin’ all ovah in the dark, men cried out when they’d get hit and hurt. Killers be laugin’ out loud and when and where it was quiet the convicts was mostly scared.”
Luna was staring straight into his eyes. He could see that she could discern the truth as well as the pain in what he was saying.
“I’d go to sleep,” he continued, “listening to all that sufferin’, smellin’ it too. And then I’d wake up because someone called my name . . .”
“Who?”
“I’d open my eyes and there’d be this li’l girl, no older than you, standing there.”
“A black girl like me?”
“Oh yeah. She’d be naked an’ ask me for my blanket. An’ I’d get up and take that thin army surplus wool they had for us an’ put it on her shoulders . . .” as he spoke Socrates was remembering this recurring reverie from another life. “. . . an’ then she’d say, ‘let’s go outside,’ and the cell do’ would come open . . .”
When the tear fell from Fortlow’s cheek onto Luna’s hand she started slightly. Socrates wondered at his tear. He hadn’t cried in as long as he could remember. That was his first lesson on his first day in the joint: no one would care about his pain or suffering or despair. He would kill himself before he cried because at least in taking his own life he’d be doing something about the pain. Crying was worse than suicide; it was worse than being murdered or raped or put down in the Dungeon for sixty days or a hundred and sixty.
This is what Socrates believed. There was no use in crying, had never been—until now. But now when Luna saw that he was a baby, and not the man she wanted, she would leave, no longer wanting him.
Another tear fell and a knock thumped in his chest like an engine choking on gasoline gone bad.
“Did you go wit’ her?” Luna asked in a sweet voice that had a little music in it.
“She led me through the do’,” he said. “And it was a park outside. A big park wit’ trees and birds. Damn. I was even happy to see the flies buzzin’ around dog shit.”
Luna showed her teeth and let her right shoulder rise in an unconsciously coy fashion.
“If you won’t gimme a baby right now will you at least gimme a kiss?” she asked.
“I ain’t brushed my teeth all day, girl.”
“You think I care about that?”
“I care.”
Luna stood up, releasing his hand. She leaned over and kissed his bald head. The moment her lips touched his skin he shuddered. His hands twitched and his neck pulled back. His left foot picked up off the oak floor and stamped back down.
“I bet I could knock you off your feet if I kissed you on the mouf,” she said with a sensual sneer upon her lips.