The Right Mistake (13 page)
He opened his eyes and was transported from an Egyptian desert to his upstairs bed at the Big Nickel. Luna leaned down over him and handed him the cell phone that Darryl had gotten him months before.
Zeal said. “I’ll be at Denver’s Diner right near there.” Zeal’s phone disconnected and Socrates folded his shut. “Make love to me, Daddy,” Luna whispered.
“I got to meet him.”
The woman-child sneered and sucked her tooth. “He ain’t
Socrates stood up and lurched toward the chair where his clothes were folded and hung.
When he was dressed and headed for the door she said, “I’m pregnant, Daddy.”
He swiveled his head and met her eye.
“Congratulations,” she said and smiled.
As Luna rose to her feet Socrates lowered to his knees. He pulled her naked body into a tender hug and breathed in deeply.
“Ooo,” she moaned, “you bettah no do too much’a that or poor Ronnie gonna have to wait for the twin.”
“I don’t know what to say,” he whispered through her sex.
“Talk is cheap,” the young mother-to-be replied. “You already did the important part.”
“Hey,” Ron Zeal greeted Socrates as came up to the booth.
He sat across from the young killer and grunted.
“You see ovah there across the street?” Zeal said.
A group of young men were standing around smoking and talking loudly, judging by their gestures.
“What can I get you?” a woman asked.
“Coffee and some bread.”
“English muffin, toast, bagel, or cinnamon roll?” she asked with well-worn monotony in her tone.
“Toast.”
She was a brown woman with lots of Negro blood in her, Socrates could tell, but she was most probably from one of the Spanish speaking nations.
“The big one the one shot Darryl,” Ron said when the waitress was gone.
“The one with the gut?”
“The tall one with the gold-plated chains. His name is Tim Hollow, the homeys call’im Hollah.”
“Gang related?”
“No one’ll get mad if you take him down. Darryl ain’t done nuthin’ to nobody an’ this fool is nobody.”
“Where he live at?” Socrates asked, his voice working on its own.
“Two blocks from here.”
The toast came with a tray of jellies and jams. Socrates sipped his coffee and nibbled at his bread.
I’m pregnant, Daddy.
“I got a piece here in a bag on the flo’,” Ron said. “I got a car don’t nobody own up the street. I’ll drive if you want.”
The laughter that came from Socrates surprised him. It was a happy laugh followed by a satisfied hum.
“How long you been workin’ for Chaim?” he asked. “What?”
“How long?”
“Month.”
“How come you decided to do that?”
“Miss Wheaton said it’a be good if I get a job.”
“I bet you yo’ mother told you that every day from the second you turnt sixteen.”
“My mother?”
“I’m just sayin’, Ron, that you didn’t get no job because a woman told you to.”
“So?”
“So why you workin’ for Chaim?”
“He offered me a job pay twenty bucks a hour. He said that I could help him wit’ the kids come from the street. An’, an’ at the same time I could learn the trade myself.”
Socrates smiled broadly.
“What?” Ron asked.
“You still on trial for murder, Ron. Beat them charges and keep your job. You don’t have to be runnin’ these streets killin’. You got a way out.”
“But what about D-boy?”
“You evah go up against a man that was bigger, stronger, an’ meaner than you and you ain’t got no gun or knife?”
Ron’s lip curled but he didn’t answer.
“I have,” Socrates said. “And I’m still here to tell ya that I ain’t scared’a no mothahfuckah on God’s green earth. Not a soul. I went up against the LAPD, got in they face an’ spit in their eye.
“I appreciate the information but don’t evah think that you gotta do my business. I know what to do. Now the only question is do you?”
Ron Zeal was struck silent by the words that could have come from his own lips. He watched Socrates for a moment, then nodded and rose to leave.
“I love you, brother,” Socrates said.
Ron frowned, appeared to be younger for an instant, then walked out of the diner.
Socrates savored his toast and had three refills on his coffee. The waitress was named Lupe and she was born in the Dominican Republic. She’d come to L.A. with her parents when she was seven.
“You the one got that big metal house, huh?” she asked him as he watched the young man nicknamed after a scream through the window.
“Yeah,” he said. “We, some of us, were so smart way back when that we changed the world over and over. But now we don’t know it. People come to the Big Nickel so they can see what they are, remembah where they come from.”
“No, baby. It’s a place where we come together an’ share ideas.
It’s a breeding ground and a last chance.”
Lupe frowned. Socrates could tell that she was groping for the
right question to ask.
At that moment Hollah rose to his feet. He started saying
good-bye, banging fists with and giving faux hugs to his friends. “How much I owe ya, Lupe?”
“Nuthin’, Mr. Fortlow. It’s on the house.”
“Why?”
“You our hero down here,” she said, her eyes glinting with Caribbean light. “Marianne Lodz talked about you in a maga
zine. I saw you in the paper too.”
“Come on by to the meetin’ house sometime, girl. Somebody
there almost every weekday mornin’. So many people want to
come to the Thursday night meetin’s that we got to screen ’em
but there’s somebody there almost every day.
“Excuse me but I just saw somebody I know.”
Lupe touched his arm and smiled at him as he moved past
her.
He was thinking about Lupe’s gift while following Tim Hollow down the street. For a block the young man was accompanied by another guy. The friend went into a doughnut shop and Tim turned off the avenue onto a side street. Two blocks down he came to a salmon pink apartment building and went in.
Standing outside, across the street from the apartment building, Socrates wondered at the fate that brought him to that juncture. There were children playing on the sidewalks, spilling over into the streets. There were mothers and older sisters, sullen teenage boys and girls who somehow seemed much older. Music came out of passing cars and apartment windows, and there was a general drone in the air.
Socrates closed his eyes and tried to imagine forgiving Tim Hollow, of walking down the street and letting sleeping dogs lie. He tried to overcome the spirit of vengeance that lay like a hot blanket over his soul.
In prison you had to hit back and hit back hard; that’s what all young convicts learned. They brought that knowledge back to the streets and turned the hood into a vast prison yard.
But Socrates had a Ph.D. in revenge; he was a master of the art. Most of the young men in the street confused killing with style or importance. They didn’t know how to get to the point and get out. Ron Zeal understood but he was unusual.
He was a regular-looking kind of guy; brown-brown skin and short hair. There was a red tattoo of a Chinese symbol on his left forearm and a faded blue image burned into his neck. Other than the body art he seemed to be an everyday working man. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a few small holes here and there. His cap had a long visor and the brown leather belt cinched tight around his waist had a cowboy buckle of nickel and brass.
“What man?” Socrates asked.
“The one run them Thursday night meetin’s.”
Socrates nodded and wondered if he should wait for later to
exact his justice.
“Yeah. That’s me.”
“I wanna shake your hand, brother,” the everyman said. They
shook and he went on talking, “Pat Simmons my name. You know I been down here for years waitin’ for somebody to start us talkin’. I mean real talk. The kinda talk that sumpin’ gotta come out of. When I told my wife about you and how I was waitin’ for sumpin’ just like that she said, ‘Why din’t you do it yo’self?’ And it hit me that what I been sayin’ bad ’bout people not gettin’ together was true about me too.
“So I went through my phone book an’ called all my friends who know sumpin’. Tanya, that’s my wife, she cooked dinner and we all got together an’ talked. We been doin’ that for six weeks now. Next week my man Bernie gonna have us ovah his place.
“We been talkin’ ’bout gettin’ a place, either buyin’ or rentin’, an’ callin’ it the Safe House; you know like the cops an’ robbers do. Anyway our safe house be for kids to go do their homework and be calm an’ quiet an’ shit.”
“That’s a good idea,” Socrates said sincerely. “It’s a snappy name too.”
“Tanya come up wit’ it. She good about things like that.”
“She sure is.”
“You wanna go grab a drink, Mr. Fortlow?”
“I’m busy right now, Pat, but here.” Socrates took a plain white business card from his wallet. “Call this numbah and tell the answerin’ machine your name and number an’ say I said, light bulb man.”
“Light bulb man,” Pat Simmons repeated.
“Now you got to excuse me, Pat. I got some business to take care of.”
The mailbox gave Hollow’s apartment number. It was on the fourth floor at the far end of the hall. Socrates took the stairs three at a time and strode down the long hall like a screw making his rounds at the Indiana State penitentiary.
At Hollah’s front door he did not hesitate. He knocked, not too loudly, and waited.
“Who is it?” a male voice said with a slight quaver.
“Jim Beam.”
When Tim opened the door Socrates clocked him with a blow that would have killed a smaller man. Tim fell backwards and onto the floor. Socrates strode in swiftly and looked around for friends of the doomed boy.
He kicked open the bathroom door and yanked the curtain from the cheap fiberglass shower stall, making sure that they were alone. When he was back in the main room of the studio apartment Tim Hollow was halfway to his feet. Socrates hit him with an uppercut so vicious that it tore a cry from the young man.
He slammed the front door shut and turned to his kneeling victim. He lifted him and delivered two body shots, let him fall, lifted him, hit him twice more and let him fall again.
Socrates lifted him from the floor a third time.
“Please stop,” the helpless young man wheezed. “Please . . .”
Socrates slammed his hard fist into the side of Tim’s head and the boy went silent, falling to the ground like a two hundred pound sack of grain.
Breathing hard from his effort the ex-con grabbed a piano stool that sat at a single-stalk table obviously salvaged from a dump or demolition site. Socrates sat down hard, catching his breath before executing his final design. He reached into his pants pocket and came out with a folding hunter’s knife.
Unconscious Tim Hollow didn’t seem a day older than his twenty years. He was bulky with masculine muscle but had a child in his face.
Socrates opened his knife, revealing the gray, notched blade.
He got to his feet and searched Hollow’s clothing for a gun. He raised the knife for the killing blow and then retreated to his stool.
He remembered seeing Darryl in the ICU at the emergency room; tubes in his nose and mouth and three needles in his arms. He looked dead.
Socrates went to Tim again, raised his knife again, and then he went back to the stool.
“I’m pregnant,” Luna had said. “Congratulations . . .”
And there was the waitress who’d touched his arm and the man with the tattoos who shook his hand. And there were others; people that stopped him on the street and in the supermarket. For a short while, while he worked at the garage, he was approached every day by men and women who wanted to touch him and ask questions. The garage owner, a man named Gramsci, finally had to let him go because of the number of nonpaying customers who came to see the Watts philosopher.
“Please don’t,” Tim Hollow whispered.
Socrates roused from his reverie.
Tim was looking at him, hugging his ribcage.
“Don’t kill me,” he begged.
“You tried to kill Darryl. You shot my boy down in the street. He ain’t nevah done nuthin’ to you. He laid up right now, cain’t even walk right ’cause’a the way you shot him.”
“It was a mistake, man. I didn’t mean to hit him. It was this other dude I was aftah. He ripped me off, man. I was aftah him.”
The killing fever was already gone; with its departure Socrates was suddenly aware of a foul odor in the room. He didn’t know if it was the boy himself or some piece of rotting food but it was rank. Suddenly Socrates wanted to get away from that smell.
But he didn’t go. He stayed in his seat gripping the knife and staring into Hollah’s eyes.
“I know who you are, boy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t make no mistake about me, Hollah. Don’t be fooled by this big gut or bald head—I will kill you if I have to.”
“It was a mistake.”
When Socrates stood up Tim flinched and then cried in pain from the movement.
“Don’t let me see you again, Tim.”
“I need a doctor, man,” the boy whined. “Call 911.”
“Crawl there,” Socrates said and he left the room unsatisfied and discontented.
That Monday Socrates stared at the cardboard box that Myrtle Brown had left at his private backyard doorstep.
A note was taped to it. It was Myrtle giving Darryl back his clothes and his life.
“’Bout time that ole heifer let up on D-boy,” Luna said. She was holding Socrates by the hand as they sat side by side on matching maple chairs.
“If she a old heifer then what am I?”
“You are my man and the father of my baby.”
Socrates knew better than to argue against those words.
“You love me, Daddy?” Luna asked.
“Love?” he said. “Damn, girl, if you was to leave me it would be worse than if somebody hacked off my good leg.”
Luna smiled and Socrates snorted.
“I’d kill for you, Baby,” she said and someone knocked on the door.
Ron Zeal was standing there in the afternoon sunlight reflecting off of the lush green vegetation.
“Hey, Ron.”
“Talk to you a minute, Socco?”
As Socrates closed the door behind him he noticed that Luna had already turned away; a woman giving her man the space to do his business. In that brief moment, before he turned back to deal with Zeal, Socrates thought of how perfect he and the child were together. He was more than twice her age, he was older than her father would have been if he were alive but he never felt superior to her, not for one moment.
“Tim Hollow’s dead,” Ron said as the door shut.
“Dead how?”
“Somebody beat him up pretty bad an’ his friends come ovah to take him to the hospital. On the way he told ’em that you the one beat him and then he told ’em why. I guess it got out that he shot D-boy an’ you know you got friends all ovah this town. They kilt him comin’ outta his girlfriend’s house last night.”
“You had anything to do with that, Ronnie?”
“Uh-uh. Matter’a fact, when I heard about the trouble, I went ovah to Hollah’s friends an’ told them to tell him to leave. Either they didn’t tell him or he didn’t listen. One way or the othah it ain’t got nuthin’ to do wit’ you or me.”
