The Right Mistake (7 page)

Socrates sat in the right front aisle seat of a scarlet and gold colored Crenshaw bus, almost next to the driver. Someone in the seat directly behind had just taken a swig of gin. The woman sitting next to him had the smell of cigarettes coming off of her clothes.

And there were other odors.
Faint vapors of urine wafted from an elderly woman dressed in rags that seemed almost as old as she. She was seated a few rows back, across the aisle from a man with a Rastafarian hairdo who was listening to earphones with the volume set so high that everyone in the front third of the bus could sing along to the repetitive rants of the hip-hop selections he played.
The contained atmosphere of the one quarter-full bus also carried the smells of a fresh cheeseburger, lemon scented disinfectant, various perfume oils, and the clean scent of a baby suckling at the breast of a brown skinned Hispanic woman two rows toward the rear.
Socrates wondered what to make of it all. In his imagination he became a dog that could detect scents a hundred times better than a human being. But it wasn’t just that the dog had the more powerful nose but that the creature was smart about what he detected.
“We smell trouble every day,” the ex-convict imagined saying to the people that sat around the Big Table on Thursday nights. “But we close our eyes an’ hold a handkerchief over our noses, we laugh out loud to cover the screams, we buy Egyptian incense off people in the streets to mask the smell of garbage and rot.”
“What?” the cigarette smelling woman next to him asked.
“Yes, ma’am? Did you say somethin’?”
“I thought I heard you say sumpin’,” she replied.
The bus driver had engaged the brakes. The hydrolics were crying out as they struggled against the hurtling behemoth.
“I was thinkin’,” Socrates said. “Musta slipped outta my mouth.”
“Oh,” she said with a smile.
She had one tooth missing and smelled like an ashtray but her dark features were lovely, her skin so black that it probably didn’t come from American ancestry.
Looking at the forty-something smoker Socrates thought about the young Luna Barnet.
“You can call me any time of night and I would come down there,” she’d told him via cell phone the evening before. “I will come to you whenever you want me.”
“What you think about Maxie Fadiman?” Socrates asked, partly to deflect the young woman’s intensity but also because he wanted to know.
“He okay,” she’d said.
“He try’n hit on you?”
“You jealous?”
“Not one bit.”
“Why?” Luna asked, her quick temper rising in the early hours. “You don’t think men wanna get wit’ me?”
“’Course they do, girl,” he said. “But I know right now I’m the one you got on the hot seat.”
“Maybe I want a man let me be wit’ him,” she suggested. “Has Maxie asked you anything?”
“He wanted to know if the people at the meetin’ evah
did
anything about what we talked about,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I’ont know. I told him all we evah did was talk, talk, talk.”

Socrates looked up to see an elderly brown woman holding herself upright on the bars of an aluminum walker.
“Oh,” he said. The bus must have stopped, he thought, and this woman climbed up step by step while his mind was wandering. He was in the handicap seat.
“Excuse me, ma’am.” He got to his feet holding the canvas bag that Myrtle Brown had given Darryl to give to him: a peace offering. Before moving away from the seat he nodded to the cigarette smoker. She smiled sadly, telling him with her eyes that she would have welcomed more conversation.
Socrates took the hand of the older woman, holding the walker as he did so. When he was in the penitentiary he was once responsible for an older convict who’d lost the use of his legs and so he knew the right moves to help this woman into her seat.
“Thank you, sir,” the woman said as he folded her collapsible walker. “God bless.”
The bus lurched into motion. Socrates moved toward the less populated rear section. He staggered and then righted himself, tottered on his left foot and grabbed the cold chromium rod that ran overhead for support.
The metal chill on his fingers took him back over the past few moments: the sense of a dog and the scent of urine, a womanchild on the phone making him into a man, a black-skinned woman smelling of tobacco; a drunk, an infirmed woman, and music playing for a dreadlock-sporting wild man; a baby taking it all in while not having words to describe what it was feeling.
Socrates took a corner seat at the very back of the bus. From there he stared out into the passing street. It was mid-afternoon and sunny. People were walking and cars were weaving in and out. The children moved in swarms, where adults were mostly alone or in pairs.
Socrates looked at his big hands. A killer’s hands, hands that had taken more than one life. He could count the deaths on five fingers, leaving one hand innocent. “Innocent of murder,” he whispered to himself. “But not from brutality and just bein’ mean.”

“All I gotta say,” Billy Psalms had said two nights before, at the Thinker’s Meeting held at the Big Nickel, a house that Socrates used for anything from gang summits to prostitute barbeques, from poetry workshops to the meeting of the minds, “is that if we listen to the white man’s words we will nevah be anything but slaves.”

“We aren’t slaves,” the criminal lawyer, Cassie Wheaton, argued. “We have all the rights of any other American. We vote. We pay taxes.”

Mustafa Ali added. “You sayin’ that we shouldn’t listen to him?” “He ain’t white,” Leanne Northford, the retired social worker,
argued.
“He’s not black,” Tony Peron, the Mexican, said.
“I agree with Billy,” Maxie Fadiman, one of their new members, said. “White people the cause of all this shit. We got to do
somethin’ about them.”
There was passion in Maxie’s words but, Socrates thought,
Billy hadn’t issued a call to arms. The diminutive gambler said
that Black people shouldn’t
listen
to the white man.
Mustafa Ali had told the Thinkers that Maxie was a poor man
who was down on his luck. He had frequented Ali’s soup kitchen
for the past six months. He had a high school degree and six semesters of college, but selling marijuana, a short prison sentence, and then a bout with heroin pushed him off the road. “It’s not the white man,” Wan Tai, the slender Chinese, said.
“It is any man or woman who teaches history or reports the
news.”
Tai was a Buddhist karate instructor who spoke little. His
voice was strong, however, and most of the Thinkers respected
him.
“That’s right,” Leanne Northford added. “Our enemy is the lie
first and the liar second . . .”
The conversation was going along just fine. The men and
women at his table were learning faster than they could in any
classroom. They had good food and passable wine, a private residence in which to speak their minds and the sense of a community that was most of the time anchored in SouthCentral but
that drifted into many different waters.

In the back of that bus Socrates remembered what it felt like to be incarcerated. Every day you had only one thing at the front of your mind and senses—survival. There were men who wanted to kill you waiting right down the hall. They were looking for weakness in you: an injury or just a twenty-four hour bug. Every one of your possessions was up for grabs and at any moment the prison guards might come and drag you down to the Dungeon for the rules that you broke in order to survive.

Sitting on that bus life was easy. The smells and sounds, smiles and memories came on like a waterfall on a summer’s day. Socrates took a deep, satisfied breath but he didn’t let down his vigilance. The lessons he learned in prison served him well on the outside. He knew what to look for. He could smell the sweat on a homemade steel knife in a man’s pocket—in his sleep.

On the street he took a slip of paper out of his worn wallet and looked at the address he’d scrawled.
“You sure you want this?” Cassie Wheaton had asked him over the phone.
“Why wouldn’t I?” the philosopher replied. “I just wanna talk. It ain’t illegal for you to gimme this is it?”
“No, Mr. Fortlow. I just . . . I just don’t want you to get in trouble. You’re too important to throw your life away.”

The house was small and white. There was no razor-wire fence or video camera monitoring the grass yard. There were no gangs of convicts gathering to protect their turf.

Socrates wore a suit for the first time since the last funeral he’d attended. That was Maura Conrad, the mother of Darryl’s friend Bright. The cloth was dark green. His shirt was white but not brightly so. He wore no tie and his shoes had seen every alleyway from Watts to Compton. And though much of the anger that had propelled him through life was gone there were still the vestiges of rage in his face; scars and winces, lips that hardly remembered how to smile.

“Martin Truman here?” Socrates asked. He felt that his voice was too rough for such a genteel and fragile woman.
“Who are you?”
“Socrates.”
“Mr. Socrates?”
“No. Fortlow’s my last name. I come to ask Marty somethin’.”
The woman glanced at Socrates’ big hands. They were hanging loosely at his side but he couldn’t do anything to disguise their size and strength.
“Are you a friend of Marty’s?” she asked.
“We know each other.”
“Oh. Do you work together?”
“Not exactly, but we met on the job.”
“Oh.”
The woman hesitated a moment longer and then closed the door. Socrates stood there wondering what the chances were of him being shot through that door as he listened to sparrows squabble and the engine of a passing car with the hot sun on the back of his neck.
A baby was crying somewhere and a butterfly had gotten trapped in a garden spider’s web in a poinsettia bush growing to the right of the front door.
As the big yellow and black spider bobbed gracefully down for the kill the front door opened again. A brown-skinned middleweight stood there in black trousers and a faded blue T-shirt. The man was holding a revolver down at his left side.
“I didn’t know you were left-handed, Maxie.”
“What you want here, Socco?” Maxie was looking around to make sure that the killer was alone.
“I didn’t know you were left-handed,” Socrates said again, “but I knew you was a cop the second night you came to the Big Nickel.”
“What are you doing here?”
“It was the shoes told me first,” Socrates said. “They wasn’t new and they wasn’t old. A junkie’s shoes either fallin’ apart or they brand new. You had shoes like a workin’ man—older than he wants but still up to the job.”
“I will shoot you, niggah,” Maxie/Marty told Socrates.
“Shoot me? Why?”
“You come up to
my
house and threaten my family and you wonder why I’ma shoot you?”
“You came to my house an’ spied on me,” the ex-con in the funeral suit said. “You took whateveah you heard to the police. Why can’t I come to yo’ house an’ say sumpin’ to you? I’m not tryin’ trick you. You see exactly who I am.”
“Hold your voice down, man,” the police agent said.
“Hold my voice down? Here you spy on me an’ threaten t’kill me an’ then you want me to be quiet? What is wrong wit’ you, Negro? Cain’t you see that I’m the one been molested, lied to, and cheated?”
The man Socrates had known as Maxie tightened the grip on his pistol and glanced behind him. It was a quick gesture but it gave enough of a window for Socrates to have disarmed and killed the undercover cop. He considered the action and rejected it before Maxie turned back and stepped over the threshold, pulling the door shut behind him.
“What do you want, Socrates Fortlow?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“What you mean you don’t know? What the fuck you doin’ here at my house?”
“What was you doin’ at my place, Officer Truman?”
“That’s police business.”
Socrates smiled. There weren’t many times that he could stand on equal footing with a cop.
“Is your address police business too?”
“How did you find it?”
“Do you care if I tell the people at the Nickel that Maxie is really a cop live ovah in the Crenshaw district?” Socrates asked. “Could I be arrested for exposin’ a spy?”
“Are you threatenin’ me?” the man with the gun asked.
“Are you threatenin’ me?” Socrates replied.
“No threat, mothafuckah,” Maxie said. “I will kill you.”
“Maybe. Maybe you will. But that don’t have to be. I ain’t done nuthin’ but what you did. All I’m askin’ is for you to tell me why you was up in my house with my friends lyin’ about who you are and reportin’ what you heard to the law.”
Brown veins stood out on the smaller man’s neck. His gun hand began to quiver.
Socrates understood that he had never been closer to his own death. The prospect didn’t scare him though. He himself was a murderer and could expect no better from life.
The door came open and the sand colored woman came out with a tiny light brown baby in her arms.
“Martin,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“Go back inside, Linda.”
“Should I call somebody?”
“Go back inside.”
The baby started crying. Linda took a step backwards and stopped.
“Let me help you, Maxie,” Socrates said then. “You worried that I will tell where you live and that you’d have to run to stay from losin’ all you got. You worried that there’s gonna be a bull’seye on you an’ your family. That’s a real fear there. But you know I ain’t told nobody a thing about you. I did give somebody a sealed envelope sayin’ what I know about you and where I went today.”
“What’s he talking about, Martin?” Linda asked. “Why is he calling you Maxie?”
Marty/Maxie turned, screaming incoherently at his wife. The baby yowled as the enraged cop slammed the door on them. Then he turned to Socrates, holding his gun up toward the excon’s chest.
Socrates smiled and held his hands out to his side.
“There’s a diner ovah on Avalon called Benny’s Red Beans and Rice,” Socrates told him. “Come ovah there tomorrow at three. Let’s see if we can talk this shit out.”
Socrates walked away from the man known as Maxie aware of the possibility of being shot down in the street. He was mindful of Maxie’s gun and his rage while thinking about the sights and smells and sounds of the people who, for a short while, inhabited the Crenshaw bus.

Socrates got to Benny’s twenty minutes early but Officer Truman was already there. He was wearing his signature stained army jacket and drab green gardener’s pants. Socrates had on a dark green T-shirt and white cotton pants. Los Angeles was experiencing a hot spell and he had been sweating in his bed, under just a thin sheet, the night before.