Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) (8 page)

It was hearing his son’s name that put real fear into Ralphie.

“Hey, man,” he said. “This ain’t none’a your fuckin’ business.”

“It ain’t?”

“Not one bit. So you just better shet yo’ trap an’ forget what you think you know. ’Cause you don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“Oh yeah I do,” Socrates said. “I know you. I know you front and back.”

“Hey!” Ralphie pushed his hands out and to the side in a mock breaststroke. “I’ll kick holy shit outta you you wanna fuck wit’ me!”

“Touch me.” Socrates pointed down at the dark cement under their feet. “And I will leave you cold an’ dead on this here flo’.”

Ralphie saw the hand slip into the khaki pocket, he saw the flat mud luster in the older man’s eyes. He drew back into silence except for a hiccough that he couldn’t stifle.

Just then a police car cruised slowly by. The two white faces peered through the glass and rain at the two black men. A light flashed out and the patrol car slowed almost to a stop—but then it went on.

The rain
, Socrates thought.
Boys don’t wanna get wet
.

{4.}

“You gonna answer my question, boy?”

“What you want, man? You want a couple’a dollars?”

“I wanna know what you got against yo’ wife, um, uh … Angel.”

Socrates saw the name sink into Ralphie’s shoulders. The young man slumped down and shook his head.

“I’ont even know you, man,” Ralphie said.

“That’s right. You cain’t even see me when I’m standin’ here right next to you. Cain’t even say,
Hey, brother, what’s happenin’
. You cain’t see me but I could see you.”

“So what do you want?”

It wasn’t so much the question but the pain in Ralphie’s voice that stopped Socrates cold. He thought about those imaginary workers in the bakery that might have stood there. He thought about thinking about what he’d do if they ever let him out of jail. He thought about the cold in his chest and the fact that the wiring in his apartment couldn’t take the strain of an extra electric space heater.

A hundred needs went through Socrates’ mind but nowhere could he find Ralphie. Maybe Linda. Maybe her bare brown legs wrapped around his waist. Maybe her.

“Yeah?” Ralphie demanded. “You just gonna stand there an’ look at the rain?”

Socrates considered the young man again. He wore black pants with a white shirt that had an off-white T-shirt showing at the open collar. His trench coat was drab green, darkened by the rain.

The shirt meant that he had a job in some store or office.

A workingman.

“Well?” Ralphie asked.

Socrates thought about a promise he’d made. A murky pledge. He swore to himself that he’d never hurt another person—except if he had to for self-preservation. He swore to try and do good if the chance came before him. That way he could ease the evil deeds that he had perpetrated in the long evil life that he’d lived.

The sound of the rain filled the air and he got the urge to tear off his own ears.

“I’m sorry,” Socrates said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He tried to remember the last time he’d apologized. He’d regretted the crimes of his youth; blubbered like a child over the couple he’d slaughtered. But they were dead. He had never, in his memory, apologized to a living soul.

“What the fuck is that s’posed t’mean? You sorry?”

“I was just mad, that’s all,” Socrates said. “Mad that you an’ yo’ girlfriend din’t even see me. Yeah, yeah. That’s it.”

Ralphie was lost. He tried to stay angry but all that showed on his face was confusion. He didn’t know whether to speak or to stand back.

Socrates saw a bus coming from many blocks away.

“You see,” Socrates said, “I was talkin’ about Angel and Warren. About how you was hurtin’ them. But really it wasn’t that. At least not just that.”

“How the fuck you know ’bout what I’m doin’ t’my wife and son?” Ralphie said.

Socrates watched the bus coming over Ralphie’s shoulder. He could make out the bright lights of the big windows up front. It was like a chariot burning in the rain.

“I don’t mean to disrespect you, son,” Socrates said in a mild tone. “It’s just that you’re only a little ways up the road from your own house. People who know you go up and down this street. If they see you an’ that girl it’s gonna hurt Angel an’ you know they ain’t no reason for that. Is there?”

The bus behind Ralphie stopped at a red light.

“She cain’t be tellin’ me what I could do an’ what I cain’t,” he said at last.

“Me neither, Ralphie. Me neither. You do what you got to, son. I just mean …” Socrates paused for a moment and wondered what it was exactly that he did mean. “I’m just sayin’ that we got to know what we doin’. Linda got sumpin’ you need? Okay. But you don’t have to rub Angel’s nose in that. It’s just like you did to me….”

“What I did to you?”

“You looked right through me, brother.” Socrates felt tears in his eyes. “You across the street gettin’ your nut offa that girl right in front’a me like I was some kinda animal, like I didn’t even matter at all. An’ then you couldn’t even nod to me….”

The bus rolled up to the shelter.

It was their bus.

The brake sighed and the door levered open.

Ralphie moved toward the door.

Socrates fought the urge to grab the man’s arm, to keep him there listening to his apologies.

But he didn’t reach out. Ralphie got on the bus. The doors slammed shut. And the bus glided away on a film of water that shimmered with street light.

{5.}

“That’s how I got sick,” Socrates told Right Burke from his foldout sofa bed. He’d been laid up with a bad chest cold for many days after he’d walked three miles in the rain. He’d been alone until Right Burke, a retired WWII veteran, came by to see where he’d been.

After seeing Socrates prostrate in the cold house, Right went out for aspirin and soup mix. He brought flavored gelatin and apple brandy to ward off the virus.

The first two days Socrates was too sick to say anything but what he absolutely had to. On the third day he thanked the maimed ex-sergeant and told him the story of Ralphie and Linda.

“
I
still don’t see why you had to walk home in the rain,” Right said.

“I had to let’im go, Right. I had to let’im be.”

“You mean you was gonna kick his ass if you got on the bus together?”

“Uh-uh. Naw. I mean …” Socrates was lost for a moment, straining for breath on the thin mattress. “I wasn’t tryin’ t’help him. I wanted him to feel bad because I did. I wanted that girl. I wanted him to pay for ignorin’ me. But I was wrong. That’s why I walked home in the rain.”

“I don’t get it,” Right said.

L
ater that night Right slept on the foldout lawn chair that was Socrates’ guest bed.

Socrates awoke to the snores of his friend. Ralphie and Linda, and Angel sitting at home with Warren, were on his mind.

The cold in his chest was breaking up and he was going to live.

“I ain’t no niggah,” he said to himself.

He repeated that phrase.

“And if I ain’t then you ain’t neither,” he said to some imaginary friend. “It’s you and me, brother.”

Right sat up then. He stared across the small and disheveled room at his friend.

“You okay?” Right Burke asked.

“If you is,” Socrates answered.

The two old men laughed. Later they raised a toast, with apple brandy, to Lindas that they’d known.

E
QUAL
O
PPORTUNITY

{1.}

Bounty Supermarket was on Venice Boulevard, miles and miles from Socrates’ home. He gaped at the glittering palace as he strode across the hot asphalt parking lot. The front wall was made from immense glass panes with steel framing to hold them in place. Through the big windows he could see long lines of customers with baskets full of food. He imagined apples and T-bone steaks, fat hams and the extra-large boxes of cereal that they only sold in supermarkets.

The checkers were all young women, some of them girls. Most were black. Black women, black girls—taking money and talking back and forth between themselves as they worked; running the packages of food over the computer eye that rang in the price and added it to the total without them having to think a thing.

In between the checkout counters black boys and brown ones loaded up bags for the customers.

Socrates walked up to the double glass doors and they slid open moaning some deep machine blues. He came into the cool air and cocked his ear to that peculiar music of supermarkets; steel carts wheeling around, crashing together, resounding with the thuds of heavy packages. Children squealing and yelling. The footsteps and occasional conversation blended together until they made a murmuring sound that lulled the ex-convict.

There was a definite religious feel to being in the great store. The lofty ceilings, the abundance, the wealth.

Dozens of tens and twenties, in between credit cards and bank cards, went back and forth over the counters. Very few customers used coupons. The cash seemed to be endless. How much money passed over those counters every day?

And what would they think if they knew that the man watching them had spent twenty-seven years doing hard time in prison? Socrates barked out a single-syllable laugh. They didn’t have to worry about him. He wasn’t a thief. Or, if he was, the only thing he ever took was life.

“Sir, can I help you?” Anton Crier asked.

Socrates knew the name because it was right there, on a big badge on his chest.
ANTON CRIER ASST. MGR.
He wore tan pants and a blue blazer with the supermarket insignia over the badge.

“I came for an application,” Socrates said. It was a line that he had spent a whole day thinking about; a week practicing.
I came for an application
. For a couple days he had practiced saying
job application
, but after a while he dropped the word
job
to make his request sound more sure. But when he went to Stony Wile and told him that he planned to say “I came for a application,” Stony said that you had to say
an application
.

“If you got a word that starts with
a, e, i, o,
or
u
then you got to say
an
instead of
a
,” Stony had said.

Anton Crier’s brow knitted and he stalled a moment before asking, “An application for what?”

“A job.” There, he’d said it. It was less than a minute and this short white man, just a boy really, had already made him beg.

“Oh,” said Anton Crier, nodding like a wise elder. “Uh. How old are you, sir?”

“Ain’t that against the law?” Like many other convicts Socrates was a student of the law.

“Huh?”

“Askin’ me my age. That’s against the law. You cain’t discriminate against color or sex or religion or infirmity or against age. That’s the law.”

“Uh, well, yes, of course it is. I know that. I’m not discriminating against you. It’s just that we don’t have any openings right now. Why don’t you come in the fall when the kids are back at school?”

Anton leaned to the side, intending to leave Socrates standing there.

“Hold on,” Socrates said. He held up his hands, loosely as fists, in a nonchalant sort of boxing stance.

Anton looked, and waited.

“I came for an application,” Socrates repeated.

“But I told you …”

“I know what you said. But first you looked at my clothes and at my bald head. First yo’ eyes said that this is some kinda old hobo and what do he want here when it ain’t bottle redemption time.”

“I did not …”

“It don’t matter,” Socrates said quickly. He knew better than to let a white man in uniform finish a sentence. “You got to give me a application. That’s the law too.”

“Wait here,” young Mr. Crier said. He turned and strode away toward an elevated office that looked down along the line of cash registers.

Socrates watched him go. So did the checkers and bag boys. He was their boss and they knew when he was unhappy. They stole worried glances at Socrates.

Socrates stared back. He wondered if any of those young black women would stand up for him. Would they understand how far he’d come to get there?

He’d traveled more than fourteen miles from his little apartment down in Watts. They didn’t have any supermarkets or jobs in his neighborhood. And all the stores along Crenshaw and Washington knew him as a bum who collected bottles and cans for a living.

They wouldn’t hire him.

Socrates hadn’t held a real job in over thirty-seven years. He’d been unemployed for twenty-five months before the party with Shep, Fogel, and Muriel.