Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) (20 page)

Darryl was growing every day. His voice got deeper and his walk became graceful. He was doing the push ups that Socrates had showed him and his arms grew thicker and firm.

S
ocrates was coming home from work one day when a woman called out to him, “Mr. Fortlow! Socrates! Hey!”

Sylvia Marquette came up to him. The full sun on Central Avenue did not, in any way, dim the brightness of her eyes.

“You ain’t been by in six weeks, Mr. Fortlow,” she said.

“No,” Socrates agreed.

Something about the woman still disturbed him. Her squashed-down face, the hairs that sprouted from a black mole on her right cheek.

“You got that letter,” she said.

Dear Mr. Fortlow
,

It’s been many years since I even thought your name. For a long time I hoped that I would never hear of you again and, God forgive me, sometimes I even hoped that you’d never get out o that jail. But your letter touched my heart and I finally thought to write and answer your questions. I’m sorry that it has taken so long but I’m blind now and I had to wait for my granddaughter, Cova, to come by and read your letter to me.

My daughter, Theresa, married Criston Jones in 1961. They gave me four beautiful grandchildren (including Cova, who is writing this letter) and then moved to Los Angeles. They had four more children out there. Criston worked at McDonnell Douglas for many years and then he died from diabetes. Criston was a healthy eater but his bones and organs just couldn’t take all that weight
.

Theresa saw her last baby, Teju, through college and then she collapsed from all that work. She was admitted to Falana Rest Home on Criston’s health insurance but she never recovered. Theresa Childress-Jones died on November third of last year. She is survived by Malcolm, Cova, Mister, Sandy, Criston Jr., Minnie, Lana, and Teju. All of her children are healthy and well. Most of them have good jobs, though Teju and Lana have become artists
.

I know that you cared for my daughter, Mr. Fortlow, and I’ll tell you that Theresa lived a good life. She was happy and rich in love. I never heard her say a harsh word about you and I know it broke her heart to see you go to jail
.

Theresa Childress-Jones is buried at Valley Rest in Pomona next to her husband. There’s a plot to her left for me, Mr. Fortlow. I’m eighty-four and so I’ll probably be coming out to rest next to my daughter before too long
.

I’m glad that you’ve found some peace, Mr. Fortlow. I know that Theresa would have been glad too
.

Sincerely yours,
Rose Childress

It took three and a half hours by bus to get to Valley Rest. Socrates got there on an overcast and warm afternoon. Her slender marble headstone stood elegant and straight next to Criston’s. His stone was wider and not quite as tall.

On each stone there was merely a name and the dates.

Socrates wanted more.

He wanted an address and a phone number; an invitation to her house when everybody was there for the Fourth of July. He wanted Nat King Cole on the record player playing out of the window and a cold beer on the patio with the both of them. Him and Criston talking about work and where they came from in Indiana; Theresa calling the children over one by one to meet the man who could have been their father.

He would have been standing right there on that spot for Criston’s funeral. Theresa would be vulnerable but he wouldn’t take advantage of her. He’d offer consoling talk, money, or to fix things around the house. He’d hold her hand and tell her that she had eight kids and one old friend who needed her not to die.

He wanted to take her back to Rose on Rose Street.

He wanted, for the first time since he was young, to go back home. He could have walked with her down Rose to Thatcher and down Thatcher to Thirty-Second Street just to see where the streetcars used to run with an old friend who had forgiven him. He wanted to hear that forgiveness.

Socrates stared at the graves for over an hour, wanting; his jaw clenched to keep from shouting at the stones. His heart beat erratically and fast. In prison he had learned to live without desire. And now that he had let desire in he wanted everything.

All that wanting wore on him until the only desire left was to lie down and sleep on Theresa’s grave. But he knew that it was wrong. He knew, beyond that, that it was probably against the rules.

He stood there wavering over the grave.

“Hey, mister,” a voice said.

He was a small black man dressed in a too warm brown suit and wearing a short-brimmed hat. He might have been Socrates’ age but looked older, more resigned.

“Yeah?” Socrates said.

“These your people?” the man asked.

Socrates nodded slightly.

The man peered at the stones mumbling numbers on his lips. Socrates realized that he was figuring out their ages.

“It’s a shame how so many black folks die so young,” the man said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Socrates said loudly. The trees shimmered green and silver under pearl-gray skies. “I think a whole lotta our people put more into a year than some others might do. Sometimes it just takes a hour and you done had a lifetime.”

H
ISTORY

{0.}

Socrates stayed in his house for three days watching the tiny black-and-white TV screen. He turned the volume off after the first few moments of coverage. There were mainly aerial shots of the blocks burning around him. That and the continual video replay of some white man being dragged from a truck and beaten by raging black men.

He stayed in his tiny rooms, eating boiled rice and tuna sandwiches, but Socrates wasn’t afraid of the riot; not, at least, of any harm that might befall him. Any harm in Mr. Fortlow’s vicinity would fall upon somebody else—that’s why he stayed inside.

He’d served up Molotov cocktails every night in his prison dreams. He broke white flesh with his fists and laughed as the cellblock collapsed.

In prison he prayed for his door to spring open and a riot to be waiting outside. He would have been willing to die.

The smoke coming through the cracks in his apartment walls smelled of sweet revenge. Every scar on his body and curse in his ear, every sour stomach and sleepless night, every minute in prison, every white girl on a magazine cover, every image in his mind for twenty-seven years of incarceration wanted out in that street.

But Socrates stayed inside refusing to ball up his fists. He heard the mobs roaming the streets through his thin walls. He watched them, on the mute TV, living out his dreams.

O
n the third day he saw the snowy image of a billboard falling from its high perch. He wasn’t sure but then they replayed the footage on Channel 13 half an hour later. The sign said
HARPO’S BAZAAR
. He knew that sign. He knew that there was only one place for it to fall.

Socrates forgot the TV after that. The images played on but Socrates was remembering back several years, back when he had just gotten out of jail.

T
hose days he spent roaming the streets; a free man after all those years locked away. He was waiting for somebody to give him a look so he could break their face for them. Whenever he’d see a young woman in short pants and halter top he’d taste whatever it was that he’d eaten last. The twisted face from his sour stomach would scare all the women away from him, and somewhere, inside, he was relieved.

He knew that he was on a path to violence.

He knew that he’d die before they got him back in the cage.

He was counting the days so he would know in that final moment how long he’d made it before they cut him down.

And then, on day sixty-two, he walked past Harpo’s Bazaar, a secondhand store on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Next door was the Canyon minimall. There were only two businesses open out of the five stores, Lucky Liquors and the Capricorn Bookshop.

Socrates bought a half pint of Apache Gin and walked into the bookstore because he hoped that they had air conditioning.

Capricorn was on his route then. He was no longer roaming. He had a place to go.

As the riots raged outside his walls, Socrates remembered the little bookstore and the men and women who despised and loved him.

{1.}

“I don’t like you, Socrates Fortlow,” Roland Winters had said. He was pudgy and small, a bespectacled man with strawberry-brown skin. “You, an’ people like you, the whole reason we got so much heartache down here. Always thinkin’ violence; always wantin’ ta beat on, never wantin’ to get on your knees to God.”

Socrates hadn’t been out of prison for very long, sixty-two days and four weeks. He’d come to the bookstore because you could sit around there and nobody asked you to buy anything or to leave. He could read all day and even talk to other
customers
who sat along the reading shelf.

Roland sat in a shaft of green light that shone through the tinted front window of the Capricorn Bookshop. Mrs. Minette, the owner, sat behind her cash register smiling sweetly just as if the men seated at her reading table were trading compliments.

The hot promise of a slap jerked in Socrates’ right palm. He held back though-—not because he thought it was wrong to hit Roland but because he wanted to be welcome at the Capricorn. He liked browsing through the Afro-American literature and talking to Mr. and Mrs. Minette about what he read.

Black cowboys running roughshod in Oklahoma. Black scientists and war heroes and con men. He liked the smell of the Minettes’ incense and the promise of things that he never even suspected were true.

“Oh, Roland, shut up,” Minty Scale said. “Just shet it. All Socco did was ask a question. He ain’t even ask you.”

“I don’t have to be quiet if I don’t wanna be,” Roland complained. “He could ask a question an’ I could speak my mind.”

A lazy smile rippled across Minty’s big lips. He was a long-boned man, thirty-five, a wallpaperer by profession, and unemployed. Socrates thought that Minty was trying to fire Roland up rather than calm him down.

“I’ont need your help, Minty,” the big ex-convict said. “I could take care’a myself.”

“No, Socco,” the fourth man at the long counter said. “It wouldn’ta made no difference if the African people had gunpowder. Africans just wasn’t warlike-not like them Europeans. Chinese neither, they had ignitin’ powder for a thousand years an’ they never done nuthin’ with it like Europe did.”

The last man was only known as Big Bill. He weighed nearly four hundred pounds and had to sit on a box instead of a folding chair. He had a job with a real estate agency on Avalon and drove a 1969 Impala that was pink and chrome—in beautiful condition.

“China!” Roland yelled. “China got guns. They got guns and cannon—an’ the atomic bomb! That’s what men like this one here,” Roland waved dismissively at Socrates, “don’t know about, or don’t care. You start talkin’ guns an’ it all just escalates. From fists to guns, from guns to dynamite, from dynamite to the atomic bomb.”

“The atomic bomb?” Minty said. “The atomic bomb? Don’t tell me them folks down at the federal buildin’ got you fooled, Roland. The atomic bomb? Shoot! That’s just some lie that they tellin’ to keep people in line. They tell you they got some bomb so bad that you better not ever even think about tryin’ to get what’s yours. That’s how they keep people down—wit’lies like the atomic bomb.”

Minty turned his chair around so that he could look down the row of men. When he put his big bare feet up on the table Mrs. Minette frowned. Minty, and everybody else, knew that she didn’t like feet up on her furniture, but she would never interrupt an intellectual conversation to say so.

“Aw, com’on, Minty,” Big Bill said. “You ain’t sayin’ that you don’t believe in nuclear power.”

“I’m not, huh? You used to watch Walter Cronkite back in ’sixty-four, ’sixty-five?” Minty asked Bill.

“Yeah?”

“Me too. Ev’ry night I be sittin’ there lookin’ to see if they’d show a picture of my brother Doren over there in Vietnam. You know I’as only twelve, thirteen but I knew that ole Walt was lyin’ like a motherfucker.”

“What?”

“Lyin’, man. Five hunnert VC killed; one American wounded. Next day—two thousand North Vietnamese regulars routed with only three Americans killed. Shit! You add up all that at the end’a the war an’ we done killed over half’a Asia—forget about Vietnam.”

“But that was war, Minty,” Bill said. “They lie like that durin’ a war to keep up confidence at home.”

“This is a war,” Socrates said. He was angry at himself for talking so softly but he was intimidated by how intelligent the men at Capricorn sounded. They were so confident about their words.

“What, Socco?” Minty asked. There was a big grin on his lips.

“That’s what you sayin’, right, Minty? That we’re in a war against them men own ev’rything. The newspapers, the TV stations, the army, and the police. They tell us what they want us to know. If it’s a lie then it is, but if it’s the truth it don’t matter because they only say it ’cause it helps them out.” Socrates felt a film of sweat form across his bald head. He wasn’t a timid man and he was willing to put his life on the line where most men would have run scared. But he was shy of the men and women at the Capricorn because they were readers. No prison-yard lawyers or bullshitters. These people studied the history of black folks because they loved to learn.