Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) (16 page)

“Never been up here before.”

“It’s funny ’cause it’s kinda wild and then it’s like civilized too.” She pointed up toward the edges of the steep canyon walls. At first all Socrates saw was the sky. The blue was darkening toward night. Then he saw the lights; electric lights from houses that perched at the top of the canyon. Houses that seemed to be teetering; on the verge of tumbling down the cliffs. Some of them had already fallen prey to mud slides and erosion. One such disaster had brought a full wall of salmon-pink cinder blocks crashing down to the creek bottom.

“If I could have me a house,” Gordo said, looking up at the canyon walls, “that’s where I’d have mines.”

“Why’s that?” Socrates asked.

“ ’Cause the ground up there just wearin’ away, right out from under them.” Gordo grinned in the fading sunlight.

“But …” Socrates said, thinking again that he should be on his way. “But that don’t make sense.”

“Ground under you an’ me, an’ even Delia there, is wearin’ out. Ground is hungry to be your grave, man. Ev’rybody walkin’ ’round an’ talkin’ like the ground is up solid under them …” Gordo snapped his fingers loudly. “You could be gone just like that. Just like one’a them houses up there.”

Delia moved close to Gordo s side. She picked a dry leaf from his hair.

“Ain’t no use in hurryin’ the process,” Socrates said.

“But,” Gordo said, “at least up there you know for a fact that it’s gonna happen. At least up there you know you got to live.”

Gordo took three of the blocks and laid them flat, their long sides facing in toward each other in a kind of ritualistic circle. Delia piled as much driftwood as she could between the cinder bricks.

From his pack Gordo pulled out a beaten-up tin pot that held three cans of Hormel chili. He also took out a large bag of tortilla chips and an eight-pack of cherry-flavored Coca-Cola in cans.

“It’s my birthday,” Gordo said. “This is my party.”

“You always come out here for your birthday?” Socrates asked.

Gordo looked him straight in the eye, his aging boy’s face grim with concentration.

“No,” he said at last. “Never been here for my birthday before. But I always go someplace special. And this here is the most special one.”

“Why’s that?”

Gordo reached into his bag and came out with a long slender candle. It was tapered and deep red. Gordo held the candle up and smiled. “My birthday candle,” he said.

Delia was busy opening the cans of chili with a pocket can opener that was no larger than a quarter. She dumped the fat-clotted dark brown contents of each can into the pot.

Gordo brought the quart of wine to his lips and finished it in one long draft. Then he took the candle and screwed it into the bottle’s neck.

“For everyone born somebody dies,” Gordo intoned. “For every birthday we celebrate the dead.”

He lit the candle as solemnly as a priest. He was on his knees in front of the flame, his arms hanging helplessly at his sides.

Delia wedged the pot in between the cinder blocks and set the wood on fire with a cigarette lighter. The flames glared brightly and at the same time the sun sank behind the drainage embankment.

It was as if she had called up night with a gesture. Delia, lit by the fire, seemed to be surrounded by darkness while the rest of the canyon was in the early onset of twilight.

Socrates felt the chill of evening. He sat down to put on his socks and shoes.

“Where you from, girl?” he asked to break the spell of Gordo’s silent reverie.

“Ohio.”

“What about your parents?”

She shrugged and smiled, pulled her skirt way up on her thighs, and went down on her knees.

“I killed twenty-six people,” Gordo said. It might have been the only thing that could have dragged Socrates’ eyes away from those legs.

“How many?”

“Twenty-six. The last one was twenty-six years ago. Skinny little slant-eyed mothahfuckah wasn’t no bigger than a hunnert an’ thirty pounds. Here I played football at L.A. High School an’ he nearly kilt me. Nearly did. Nearly did.” Gordo gazed off toward the fire.

“Vietnam?”

“This here is the last candle,” Gordo said. “The last one.”

He took a twig from the ground and lit it on the flaming wick of his blood-colored candle. The crooked stick winked and flickered on the evening breeze, like a butterfly of flame.

“I always come out with a girl and drink and celebrate one of the men I done in. I light’em candles one by one and eat and drink a toast.”

“What you want me for?” Socrates asked.

“We just saw you, man. That’s all. You know, it’s kinda like you pick up what you find on the beach. That’s life on the beach.”

“Uh-huh,” Socrates said.

“You want some?” Delia asked. She’d piled a tin plate with tortilla chips and used an empty can to scoop chili over it.

Socrates took the plate along with a tiny white plastic fork. “Thank you.”

She made another plate for Gordo, who took it gravely, with both hands.

“You eatin’?” Socrates asked the girl.

“I don’t eat meat,” she said and then produced an orange from the inside of her cloak. She bit into the peel, spat out the rind, and then began to squeeze and suck at the hole she’d made.

Socrates tried to control his breath as he watched her cheeks and teeth and tongue working at the fruit.

“You got a car?” Gordo asked.

Socrates felt prickles across his bald scalp. “You sure you ain’t killed nobody in twenty-six years?” he asked.

Gordo’s white smile flashed on his dusky face. He let out a low chortle.

Socrates felt his weight against the soft, giving ground. If he rose up quickly his feet would sink in the sand. The image of a painting that he’d seen in the prison library came into his mind. It was in a book called
The History of European Art
. He didn’t remember the painter’s name.

It was a dark scene. Two men, sunk in the ground up to their knees, were hitting each other with cudgels. They were bloody and tired but they were stuck in the ground and had to keep on fighting forever. They were big men too. Bigger than the mountains that lay behind them.

“That’s it, brother,” Gordo said. “Nineteen sixty-nine, November third. It wasn’t far out from the camp. He jumped at me with a stick knife but I heard him….” Gordo’s eyes glistened in the firelight.

Evening had come.

“Where you comin’ from, brother?” Gordo asked.

“Prison mostly.”

“What you in for?”

“Murder.”

“You killed a man?” Delia asked.

Socrates didn’t answer her.

“How long you in prison?” Gordo asked.

“Twenty-seven years.”

“For killin’ one man?” Gordo was really surprised.

“It was a man and a woman. I raped her too,” Socrates said, wondering at the spell of the ocean. “And then there was three convicts I killed but nobody ever knew it, at least nobody could ever prove it. And then there was all the men I brutalized and molested, robbed and threatened. I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there.”

“You kill anybody hand-to-hand?” Gordo asked. His body was tense, his head still like a predator’s.

“I did it all wit’ my hands. All of ’em. I ain’t never used no weapon. I had’em but I ain’t never used one.”

{6.}

Gordo nodded and relaxed a bit.

“I went from high school to heroin by way of Vietnam,” Gordo said. Delia had her head in his lap, she was looking up into Socrates’ eyes. “Everything was stronger there. The drugs, the rain, the sun, and the enemy. You could put him in the ground but he’d just pop up again. Pop right back up at ya. After a while all you felt was tired. Tired.”

The exhaustion of war descended on Gordo. His shoulders slumped and the plate tilted in his lap. He couldn’t speak or even lift his spoon. The man seemed so tired that Socrates wondered how long he would be able to draw breath.

Then Delia talked about orphanages and shopping malls and how she was nobody and how much she liked that because there wasn’t anybody she wanted to be.

“You wanna come over there and fuck, Socrates?” Delia whispered when Gordo started to nod.

Socrates looked at Gordo first. He was ready to fight but Gordo hadn’t even heard.

“What you say?” Socrates asked.

“You heard me. It’s okay. You like me and it’s a special day. We could go right over there.”

Delia held out a hand and Socrates took it. She pulled at him but there no strength in the girl. She leaned over and kissed his hand, biting it lightly. Socrates glanced at Gordo; now he was staring up at the stars thinking that there were stronger stars in Vietnam—no doubt.

Delia bit Socrates’ lip and pushed her tongue along the line of his teeth. She pulled at his hands again, and he stood up. They walked to the edge of the light and embraced. Delia let her weight go as if she wanted to fall to the soft sand. But Socrates stayed upright, looking at Gordo staring at the stars.

Delia kissed him again and there was the magic of passion, but that passion was in the wind and the moonlight; that passion was perched dangerously at the sides of the canyon. It wasn’t sex that he wanted. All that he needed he already had.

Delia felt it too. She let her arms fall but still leaned against him.

“I’m gonna go,” Socrates said.

“Oh.” Delia sounded honestly disappointed. “Stay. We don’t have to do anything. Come on.”

Socrates waved at Gordo and said, “See ya.”

The vet waved back. “See ya.”

On her tiptoes Delia gave Socrates a girl’s kiss on the lips. It was wet and soft and tasted of ocean salts and orange peel.

{7.}

Socrates staggered back down the way he’d come; down near the water where the sand was firm and wet. The waves followed him, crashing against the shore and breaking into foam that was almost phosphorescent in the moon’s stark light. It was, Socrates felt, the ocean’s laughter.

And it
was
funny. He thought of Delia writhing in the sand with Gordo, her hemplike hair sporting small flames from the cookfire. He thought of Charles Rinnet, grown old before his time, pushing his stolen grocery cart down Hooper and Central and Florence.

He walked a long way and then stopped. His legs felt as if someone had laid a live wire against them. It was all he could do not to fall down. He strode up to where the underbrush and cliffs met the sand. There he found two large cardboard boxes. Abandoned. He fit the boxes together behind a thorny bush. Once inside he tried to keep the thought of coffins out of his mind.

The wind played against the paper walls all night; the hollow sound of rushing air and the slither of gathering sands. The wind was so strong the boxes would have blown away save for Socrates’ weight. The wind pressed the side of the box against him. He leaned into the pressure dreaming of his Aunt Bellandra’s lap.

I
n the morning he saw half-erased paw prints in the sand around his shelter. It made him happy to think of some dog guarding his frail home.

The sun glared down so strong that the sea seemed tame. When he raised his arms, bellowing as he stretched, hundreds of seagulls cried and broke into flight. He could see where they’d been resting in a flooded clearing just past his thorny corner.

He wondered about Delia and Gordo but did not return to their grotto. Instead he wandered back toward the blue buses and home.

Somewhere along the way Charles Rinnett’s voice came to him.

“You think that shit mean sumpin’?” the phantom sneered.

“That talk is over,” Socrates whispered as he imagined Charles Rinnett blowing away on a breeze.

L
ESSONS

{1.}

“What she say?” Darryl asked with little interest. He and his only friend, Socrates Fortlow, were sitting on a redwood bench in Carver Park in Watts.

“She didn’t say nuthin’.” Socrates was remembering his mother and how he was so surprised that she had gotten older even in his dream. Her hair, the little he could see of it under her Sunday hat, had gone white and there was a heaviness to her face.

“That’s why I thought she was real,” he said out loud.

“Say what?” Darryl looked around nervously at the ragged trees.

“I mean,” said the ex-convict, “when she died, when I was in jail, she was only fifty-two. But she was way older than that in the dream. It was like she never died and just grew older and older.”

“Huh,” the boy said. In the few months since he’d left home to come live with Socrates he’d shot up four inches but hadn’t gained a pound. He was long and bony, almost as tall as the hefty, hard-muscled Socrates.

“Ain’t you listenin’ t’me, boy?” Socrates glanced in the direction that Darryl kept looking. “You see’im?”

“Not yet,” Darryl said. “But he always comin’ from over that way.”