Walkin The Dog

“Yeah,” Socrates said. “When you start workin' serious, you get to know all kinds.”

“You think that's okay?” Monica asked, but there was another question that lay behind.

“They was nice. I don't care what color you are if you treat me okay.”

“Uh-huh,” Monica agreed. She lowered her head and stuck out her lips. Even though she was in no way pretty, Monica, Socrates realized, was close to beautiful.

“What's wrong, girl?” Socrates asked. “Why you poutin'?”

“I ain't poutin'. I'm thinkin'.”

“Thinkin' about what?”

“Wayne said he goes to Las Vegas almost once a mont',” Monica said. She looked over her shoulder to make sure that there was no one listening from behind.

“Uh-huh,” Socrates grunted to prompt the reluctant woman.

“An' when he said that, I said that I heard it was nice but that I ain't never been. And he said that he was gonna go soon and if I give him my number he'd tell me when, and if I could go he'd drive us out there in his Trans Am.” The words came out clearly and quickly as if she'd been going over them again and again.

“Uh-huh,” Socrates said again.

“What you mean uh-huh?”

“Well, it ain't a surprise that a young man wanna drive you somewhere. Men musta been askin' you t'get in their cars since you was a child.”

The look on Monica's face was an acknowledgment of the truth.

“So,” Socrates continued, “why you surprised that this Wayne wanna take you away?”

“He Japanese.” Monica said the words as if she was explaining to an inexperienced driver that he needed gasoline to run his car.

“Monica, look,” Socrates said. “You like that boy?”

“He nice.”

“You like how he looks, the kinda car he drive. He got a job. And he think you cute enough to see again.” Socrates itemized these facts on four muscular fingers.

“Yeah but—” Monica began.

“Monica.” Socrates held his hands up for her silence. “You spend eight hours a day sleepin', two hours in the bathroom, and at least a hour and a half at the table eatin'. You spend fifty hours every week gettin' to work, comin' home or workin'. Either that or you got kids and that's every hour of every day. You got to wash dishes, get dressed, get mad, go to the store, go to school, go to the doctor. An' every day you on your feet walkin', walkin', walkin'. Except sometimes you're sick an' then you cain't even get up.”

“Word.” Monica smiled and then grinned. She put up a hand to testify to the truth of Socrates' claims.

“Now how many minutes do you think a man spends givin' you what you want? A lotta men spend a whole lotta time tryin' to get what they want from you. But how many'a them gonna get off the dime and do for you?” Socrates found himself reaching out to hold Monica by her elbow. “If that man got yellah skin it don't seem so bad, not if you like that skin. And if he work hard to buy a nice car and then he wanna drive you somewhere, well then maybe you should tell 'im you wanna go some place close by first—-just to see if he's nice.”

Monica ducked her head and smiled. She also leaned into Socrates' hand.

“But suppose somebody see?” she asked.

“Ain't nobody gonna care, honey. And if they do it's only 'cause they jealous or stupid.”

Monica frowned and reared back like a wary kitten.

Socrates imagined her sensual lips kissing the handsome Asian's face.

“Hello,” a woman's voice said.

“Can I speak to Mookie?”

“I think you must have the wrong number,” she replied.

“Hold on,” Socrates said quickly to stop her from hanging up. “Mookie is my nickname for Moorland Kinear.”

There was silence from the other end of the phone. For a moment Socrates wondered if the woman had hung up, leaving the phone line caught in a few seconds of silence before the harsh buzz.

“Who is this?” Her voice had turned cold.

“Tell 'im it's Socrates.”

“I'll go see if he can come to the phone right now.”

There came a hard knock of the phone being put down and then loud voices speaking unintelligible words. One voice, a man's, became louder and louder until Socrates could make out, “… he's just a friend, Delice. Aw come on, honey, don't be like that…”

“Socco,” was the next word that the man's voice said, this time into the receiver, “is that you?”

“Hey, Mookie. Sorry if it's a bad time.”

It was seven fifteen on the Tuesday after Howard and Corina's barbecue. After talking to Monica Socrates decided that he didn't have to be afraid of talking to Mookie. He could make his own decisions and nobody could talk him into going bad. But still he hesitated until Tuesday evening.

“Naw, man. I ain't busy. Delice just get like that sometime. How you doin'? You know I didn't think you was gonna call me. I thought that you had broke it off with the life. You married?”

“Uh-uh.”

“But you gotta good job,” Mookie said. “Good job and your own phone. Hey, who woulda believed it back in the day?”

“Half of 'em still there,” Socrates said.

“Yeah.” Mookie's tone turned somber. “I heard that Joe Benz passed two years ago. He was still locked down. You know it's a shame.”

Socrates felt something snap then. It was in his mind but he felt just the same as when the assistant warden, Blake Riordan, broke his nose while three guards held him down. The break itself was just a snick in his sinuses—the pain came later. And when it came it spread over his whole head.

“He was sixty-seven,” Mookie continued. “And he'd been up there forty-eight years.”

Socrates took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“George Wiles got cancer and they let him go home to die,” Moorland said. “I guess you could call him lucky. He called my brother to get my number out here.”

“How long you been in L.A., Mookie?” Socrates asked to make him talk about something else.

“Seven years,” Mookie replied. “At first I was still up to breakin' in. But after that eighteen months in Folsom I cleaned up. Broke my back, you know. Cain't walk.”

“Broke your back?”

“Had a disagreement and it got outta hand. That's why they let me out. You know, it was too expensive to take care'a me and I cain't ply my trade in no wheelchair anyway.”

“I'm sorry to hear about that, Kid. Shit. A wheelchair.”

“I'm the lucky one, man,” Mookie said. “You know George Greenfield got AIDS like Lionel. Hurly got in a argument broke his head. At least I still know my own name. And my daughter, Delice, come out to live wit' me and see that I eat.”

“She do all that for you?” Socrates was looking for anything good to hang on to.

“Yeah. Her husband went up for larceny. He was beatin' her pretty bad up until he was arrested. Now she here with me and you know I got a gun. If he come out after her I'll pay my debt killin' him for her. You know ain't nobody scared'a no niggah in a wheelchair.”

“I gotta go, Mook,” Socrates said.

“Why? You just called.”

“I'll talk to you later, man.” Socrates hung up the phone and pushed it away. He unplugged it from the wall and set it in a drawer next to the sink. Then he went to the door to check that the latch was secure and the bolt was thrown.

The next day he would call the phone company to change his number for a new, unlisted one. He thought about moving again, about changing his name.

His hands were shaking.

“Twenty-seven years in the Indiana prison and I wasn't never as scared as I was after talkin' to that Mookie,” Socrates told Darryl a few weeks later.

“You scared that he was gonna try an' get you in trouble so you'd have to go back to jail?” Darryl asked.

“No, boy,” the big ex-con said. “I'm scared'a livin' in my own skin, I'm scared of all the evil and sad I know.”

“What you mean?”

“Mookie don't know shit,” Socrates explained. “If a man put a gun to his own head an' pull the trigger Mookie'd a tell ya that the man just died. That's all. He don't see what's happenin'. That's what scares me.”

“How come?” Darryl asked. “It ain't you. If you know then that's all that matters.”

“Yeah. But suppose I don't know? Suppose I'm just as blind and stupid as Mookie Kid? Maybe if I'd just stop and look and listen I'd see that what I'm doin' is fulla shit. That's what scares me. Just like when I didn't know that the phone company list your name if you don't tell 'em not to. Just like when I woke up after killin' my friends and I didn't even know. I mean just 'cause they let you outta prison that don't mean you're free. And if you in jail that don't mean you're guilty or bad.”

Socrates did know that the frown furrowed in the skinny boy's face reflected his own.

“It's okay, Darryl.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. I think so. You see, since then I realized that it's okay to be scared and unsure. Scared teach you sumpin'. Uh-huh. Yeah. Scared make you ask the question. Sometimes it's only a scared man can do what's right.”

Darryl nodded, not quite so sure that he understood what Socrates was saying.

Socrates laughed because he wasn't too sure himself.

moving on

A

s Socrates came home from work that afternoon he was almost completely satisfied with life. He had a good job and friends who he could talk to when he was lonely and a door that he could unlock any time he wanted. He had a girlfriend and a telephone and new shoes that didn't hurt his feet. He was a free man, just as long as the police didn't know about his hidden handgun and no one found out about a fight or two he had had in the streets. There was a young boy who looked up to him and even though they lived under different roofs everyone who knew them thought of Socrates and Darryl as father and son.

But on the way home from the bus stop a dark cloud passed over Socrates' heart. He remembered the deepest lesson a convict ever learns: you never trusted in your own good fortune.

“Anything good they could always take away from you,” old man Cap Richmond used to say in the Indiana slam. “And what's already bad they could always make worse.”

Even at the corner of the alley he knew something was wrong. Killer, his two-legged dog, was barking wildly from the small garden plot in front of Socrates' door. When he got to the gate he found that the padlock had been cut and half of his belongings were strewn in the yard. Two large men were carrying his sofa bed into the alley. They dropped it like it was some kind of garbage and not a man furniture at all. He saw his old radio crushed on the ground next to the sofa.

“Hold up!” Socrates cried running toward the men. “What the fuck you think you doin' here?”

The men were large and black. They had done hard labor for their entire lives but they weren't old like Socrates. Neither one of them had seen his thirtieth birthday.

“What the fuck you think, old man?” one destroyer said. He had close-cropped hair and wore overalls with no shirt underneath. The sweat on his dark brown skin made him glisten with the promise of violence.

His friend wore no shirt at all and had long dreadlocks cascading down on his corded shoulders. The men stood together against the foul-mouthed intruder, as if daring him to speak again.

“I think,” Socrates said slowly. “That you lookin' to be two dead men.”

In his younger days Socrates would have already crushed these men. They might have already been dead, but Socrates was a changed man. He gave his enemies a warning, a five-second window in which to drop what they were doing and run. The man in the overalls had enough sense to put up a protective arm before Socrates hit him. The arm padded the blow enough to save him from a broken jaw or a trip to the morgue. His friend tried to do what was right. He threw some kind of karate chop at Socrates' head. He even connected while grunting loudly to increase the force of his blow. Socrates grabbed the man by his long hair and sent him sliding across the dirt and broken glass of the asphalt alley.

Then Socrates picked up one of the steel pipes that he always left lying around his yard in case he needed a weapon quickly in the middle of the night. The man in the overalls was semiconscious but his friend was aware and on his feet.

“You get the fuck away from here, man,” Socrates warned. “Or the next time I touch you will be last thing you ever feel.”

Dreadlocks knew what Socrates said was true. He wouldn't even cross the alley to help his downed companion.

“It's you in trouble, man,” he yelled at Socrates. “That ain't your place. You in there illegal and they hired us to move your stuff. The cops gonna come after this. The law gonna come down on you now.”

The man in the overalls was trying to rise. Socrates pulled him up by his straps and pushed him toward his friend. Together the house wreckers stumbled away from Socrates' home, down the alley to report their failure. Socrates watched them, willing himself to stay where he was and not go after his hidden handgun.

“You showed 'em, Mr. Fortlow,” Irene Melendez shouted from her own backyard across the alley. “I told 'em they didn't want to mess with the master of that house but they didn't listen. They didn't listen and now they got to go to the clinic an' get all sewed up.”

The small Louisianan woman was so happy that Socrates smiled again.

“Where they say they was from?” he asked his neighbor of nine years.

“First they told me it wasn't none of my business. Told me to go back in my house and shut up. But when I said I was callin' the cops they said it was Mr. Lomax from Cherry Hill Developers. They said that Mr. Lomax owns these here stores and that he wanna sell 'em so you had to go.”

Socrates nodded and gave her an evil grin. “We'll see about all that,” he said.

The police showed up within two hours of the fight but Brenda Marsh had already made it to Socrates' back alley home. The slender, mocha-colored woman had hair that she'd dyed blond and wore a rose-colored two-piece suit with a bright yellow blouse underneath. She had represented Socrates once before when he had been arrested for assault. And even though he didn't like her hairstyle or way of talking Socrates kept her number because a poor man didn't necessarily have to like his friends.

She met the three officers at the door.

“My client is not here at the moment, officers,” the young lawyer said. “He had to go out but I am aware of the events that took place this afternoon.”

“Leon Burris and Almond Trapps have sworn out a complaint against Mr. Fortlow,” Officer Wayne Leontine said. “Where is he?”

“Mr. Fortlow was protecting his property from those men, Officer Leontine. They broke into his home unlawfully and threw his property into the street.”

“That's not for me to judge, Ms. Marsh,” Officer Leontine said. He had come with two other uniforms. Socrates watched them from Mrs. Melendez's house across the alley. He smiled when he saw three cops.

They always send three,

he thought to himself.

That's 'cause they scared'a what they might get.

“I have a witness,” Brenda Marsh was saying, “who can tell you that these men broke into Mr. Fortlow's domicile.”

“They were working for the owner, Ms. Marsh,” Leontine said impatiently. “Your Mr. Fortlow was trespassing.”

A brilliant smile came across the lawyer's face. It was fierce and triumphant. “That's not true. Mr. Fortlow is the rightful tenant of Price Landers, the original owner of this property. I have the rent agreement and the receipt for the first and last months rent that Mr. Fortlow paid over nine years ago. I also have the canceled stubs of twelve money orders that Mr. Fortlow sent to Mr. Landers in 1990. These money orders were returned with no forwarding address being given. The stubs show that Mr. Fortlow intended to pay his rent but could not locate the landlord.”

Leontine stumbled then.

“I don't know anything about that—”

“No, officer,” Brenda Marsh interrupted. “And neither do you know that my client's actions were unprovoked. I have proof that this apartment is my client's legal domicile. I also have a witness saying that she saw your Mr. Burris and Mr. Trapps illegally break into Mr. Fortlow's home. I am willing to make an appointment with your desk sergeant for Mr. Fortlow to come in and face his accusers but first I have to get an injunction against the men who sent Burris and Trapps to vandalize my client's home.”

“Do you know where Mr. Fortlow is?” Leontine asked in a last-ditch attempt to take control.

“Not at this time. But we have an appointment to speak by phone tomorrow morning at ten o'clock. I will contact your desk sergeant after that. But first I am telling you that this property is legally in the possession of my client at this moment in time and that if it is in any way molested by Trapps, Burris or some other agent of their employer it will be a crime. And because you have been informed of this situation and because you have spoken to the vandals and they have admitted their illegal activity, although presenting it as their legal right, I hold you responsible for the protection of Mr. Fortlow's property.”

“I'm just trying to uphold the law, lady,” Officer Leontine said.

“The law,” she replied, “works for the poor man as well as the rich.”

“I didn't say it didn't,” Leontine answered. After that he left with his friends.

At seven that evening four men arrived at the gate of Socrates' apartment. The man in the overalls, Leon Burris, was armed with a baseball bat. Killer was the first to see them but soon Stony Wile, Howard Shakur, and Chip Lowe with four members of his neighborhood watch appeared out of Socrates' home.

“What you want here?” Howard said boldly to the intruders.

“What business it to you, Negro?” Burris growled.

“I could see by that swolled-up jaw that you done got yo' ass whipped once already,” Howard said. “This time we might just have to break it up permanent.”

Socrates watched the demolition thugs back off and retreat. A feeling of power thrummed in his heart. He felt like a Cadillac cruising on a full tank of gas.

The next morning Socrates Fortlow and his lawyer, Brenda Marsh, stood before desk sergeant Tremont LaMett. Sergeant LaMett had to decide whether or not to allow Officer Leontine to execute a warrant issued for the arrest of Socrates.

“Did you hit him?” LaMett asked the burly ex-con.

“My client was protecting his property,” Ms. Marsh responded. She and Socrates had agreed that he would stay silent during the interview with the police.

“Silent is my best thing,” he had told his blond Negro lawyer.

“I was asking him,” LaMett said to Ms. Marsh.

“I am representing Mr. Fortlow, sergeant. I have here an affidavit from Mrs. Irene Melendez who says that she had warned the accusers that they were trespassing and that when Mr. Fortlow confronted them that they approached him in a threatening manner. I also have photocopies of Mr. Fortlow's lease with Price Landers and his canceled money order stubs. I have been granted an injunction against the Cherry Hill Development Company and Mr. Ira Lomax preventing them from taking any further action against Mr. Fortlow or his property until this matter can be settled in front of a judge.”

Socrates knew that all Brenda Marsh was going to do was get him arrested. He knew how to talk to the cops better than she did. She

knew

the law but LaMett and Leontine

were

the law. Their blood and bones and fists were the letter and the last word.

“Did your client strike Mr. Burris?” LaMett asked patiently.

“In defense of his property.”

“Then I'm going to put him in a cell.”

“You can't do that,” Brenda Marsh said registering deep shock.

“You know what to do, Wayne,” LaMett said to Leontine.

Socrates laughed again. This time it wasn't the good life that made him smile but the presence of an old enemy; somebody he had fought against for so long that he was almost like a friend.

He didn't fight against the handcuffs. And he wasn't angry at Brenda Marsh. She'd tried.

They took him to a room behind the sergeant's desk and chained him to a long line of other prisoners. All of them black or brown. All young too. The chain of men were led from the back door of the police station to a waiting drab green bus. The men were taken to their seats and their chains were threaded through steel eyes in the floor. The windows were laced with metal grating and the way to the exit was obstructed by a door of metal bars.

Two guards and a driver took their posts up front and the bus drove off. The boys and young men began talking in the back. It was the beginning of the pecking order. Socrates had taken that ride before.

“Hey, old man, what they got you for? Stealin' wine?” It was a young Mexican kid. He wore a sleeveless shirt that revealed green and red tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders. The designs spoke of love, gang affiliations, his mother, his nation and a few aesthetics about death and pride.

“Youngsters tried to empty out my house,” Socrates said. “But I guess I was a little too rough. Little bit.”

“Hey, pops can hit,” another young man said. “You mean the cops had to pull you off 'em?”

“They was workin' boys,” Socrates said in a remote tone. “They went to the cops and then the cops come to me.”

“Man that's some chickenshit,” a tubby boy said. He was a Negro with scared green eyes. “You know they shouldn'ta called cop.”

“Shut up, faggot,” a well-built young man said. Socrates sized him up as the would-be leader. “Nobody wanna hear from your fat ass.”

The tubby boy shook, trying to hide his fear.

The well-built young man was seated two rows in front of Socrates. He had hair only on the top of his head. The rest had disappeared in a severe fade. The name Lex was tattooed on the right side of his head. Socrates couldn't see the other side.

“What you lookin' at, mothahfuckah?” Lex dared Socrates.

“When we stop, dog,” Socrates said. “When we stop and you come a little closer I will show you a lesson that your daddy forgot to tell ya. I'ma show you how to roll over an' beg.”

Lex didn't say anything to that. The rest of the prisoners stayed quiet for a second too. The fat boy studied the situation with desperate green eyes.

The bus drove for over two hours to a detention facility in the foothills. It looked like an old abandoned school. A dozen or so reinforced salmon bungalows with bars in the windows and a razor wire fence over eighteen feet high around the perimeter.

The men and boys were hustled into a large room with long tables and made to sit for lunch while still in their manacles.

Lex started giving the fat boy, James, a hard time but he stopped when Socrates said, “Eat your slop and shut up.”

Lex was the oldest of the bunch, except for Socrates. He was maybe twenty-seven and dull eyed. He was big and strong. That counted for something in the street but you needed more than bulk against the desperation of incarceration. In the lockup you needed courage and concentration, you needed friendship and you could never back down even when going ahead meant for sure that you were dead.

Before Socrates finished his meal he palmed a small glass salt-shaker.

“What you in for, James?” Socrates asked the scared fat boy. In two days James had been beaten up twice. The other young men sensed his weakness and ganged up on him. Lex left him alone, however, because Socrates made it clear that he didn't want Lex to mess around.

“Stealin',” James said. “I broke into a Stop n' Save market but they caught me.”

“You don't look like you been starvin', man. Why you stealin'?”

“I'ont know. I wanted some money.”

“What kinda money you gonna get outta some little store?” Socrates asked. “If you get a hundred dollars that would be a lot.”

James pouted and looked away. He tried to hang around Socrates because the other young men left him alone under the older man's gaze.

“You been busted before?”

“Once.”

“Stealin'?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen. I look younger but I'm seventeen.”

Socrates watched the baby-faced green-eyed boy.

“You got to learn how to fight if they put you in jail, James,” he said finally. “ 'Cause they gonna tear you down in here. Tear you up.”

“I know.”

“Uh-uh, boy. You don't know. I know. I been there and there ain't no nothin' like it that you could think of. This here is just a lark compared to what you got in store.”

For two days Socrates and his chain mates had been quartered in a barracks. They had a small recreation yard that was blocked off from other similar barracks and yards. Each compound contained about eighteen prisoners that were being held for trial or something else. Some of the barracks held very tough men who made kissing noises through the razor wire at the young men who were held with Socrates.

“If you was in one'a them other cages, James, they would eat you up.”

James' fearful eyes flashed for a moment and then he clamped down his jaw to crush the fear.

“Get you somethin' sharp, James,” Socrates said. “Some kinda knife or edge. And you stand up. You fight, son. 'Cause you already here an' ain't nobody gonna help you when I'm gone.”

Two hours later Socrates was transferred out of the Trancas detention facility. As a good-bye present he gave James the jagged bottom of the broken saltshaker.

They met in the judge's chambers. It wasn't a trial, just an inquiry, that was what Judge Radell said. He was an older white man with white hair and blue veins at his temples. There was a hint of blue in his washed-out eyes and an air of certainty about him that made Socrates nervous.

“Now is this a property disagreement or a question of assault?” Judge Radell asked.

“A little of both, Your Honor,” Kenneth Brantley, the Cherry Hill Development Company lawyer, said. He was there with Burris and Trapps. The two men were dressed neatly in suits. Burris's jaw was still swollen and there were cuts across Trapps's face from his spill in the alley. “Mr. Fortlow was illegally occupying our property and he assaulted Mr. Trapps and Burris when they were merely executing their job.”

“That's not true, Your Honor,” an unusually subdued Brenda Marsh said.

“What isn't, Brenda?” the judge asked.

“None of it. I've presented Mr. Fortlow's documents. These men were destroying his home and property. My client is gainfully employed and he has tried to pay his rent.”

The judge lifted the cover of a manila folder on his desk. He didn't read much.

“He sent a few money orders nine years ago and that makes him the legal occupant? Sounds rather slim, counselor.”

“He paid first and last month's rent, Your Honor. No one ever tried to evict.” All of her brash tone was gone. Socrates thought that maybe Brenda Marsh had learned something even if James had not.

“Okay.” Judge Radell smiled and put up his hands. “Why no eviction procedure, Mr. Brantley?”

“We have no legal relationship with Mr. Fortlow. I don't know whether that document is real or not but Price Landers died almost ten years ago. He owed back taxes and Cherry Hill bought the estate. The fact that the property went through government hands absolves us from any responsibility.”

“Absolution?” The judge's eyebrows rose and the question seemed more like an accusation. “You throw a man's bed into the street and call that absolution?”

“It was our property, Your Honor. Mr. Fortlow had to know—”

“Where was he going to sleep that night?” the judge asked. And before Brantley could reply, “Why couldn't you just knock on the door and say that he needed to move? Was your company going to lose money? Were you planning to build something next week?”

“There is no law compelling us to take such an action.” Brantley, Socrates could see, was used to better treatment by the law. “Mr. Fortlow was trespassing.”

“Oh. Huh,” Judge Radell said. “And here I thought it was the court's job to make those kinds of decisions.”

Kenneth Brantley's left eye closed of its own accord. There was no apology or courtroom wisdom there.

“And this court says that Mr. Fortlow is the rightful tenant of the property in question, that he will be exonerated from paying the past rent because it is an unreasonable expectation for the current landlords to expect remuneration. And I further stipulate that no development can be made upon any section of that property until Mr. Fortlow has vacated his residence. As far as assault charges are concerned I am willing to hear Mr. Fortlow's charges against Burris, Trapps, Lomax, and Cherry Hill. That will be all.”

The last four words silenced Brantley.

Socrates remembered to keep his smile to himself.

“Thank you, Ms. Marsh,” Socrates said to his lawyer outside of the downtown courthouse.

“You shouldn't thank me, Mr. Fortlow. If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have spent forty-eight hours in jail.”

“Don't you worry about that,” Socrates said with real warmth. “I seen a lotta jail in my life. Two more days ain't nuthin'.”

“What do you want to do now?” Brenda asked.

“What is it you wanna do?”

“Cherry Hill isn't going to let this drop. Radell put a hold on a multimillion project. They aren't going to let that alone for long.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We can take Cherry Hill back to court and seek a settlement,” the young lawyer said. “I think that they'd be happy to see you in court. That way they'd have an opportunity to settle, to pay you.”

“To pay me off, you mean.”

“Yes.”

To anyone looking, Socrates might have been staring off into space. But really he was appreciating the swell of Ms. Marsh's buttocks and breasts. They seemed to him in perfect balance. Not large but firm.

“Mr. Fortlow?” Brenda Marsh said. “What do you want to do?”

“I think I'ma go see Iula down at her diner and have a home-cooked meal,” he replied. “Yeah. Some home cookin'.”

“But what about Cherry Hill.”

“I'll call ya on Friday, Ms. Marsh.” Socrates touched her forearm with two big fingers and inhaled deeply the scent of her perfume.

“Four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, Mr. Fortlow,” King Malone said in a rumbling bass voice. “That includes utilities.”

It was a small garden house in the middle of a green lawn. Killer hopped up and down on his forepaws. Socrates held up the dog's legless hindquarters with a harness attached to a bright yellow nylon rope.

“The dog likes it,” Socrates said. “What you think, boy?”

“Cool,” Darryl crooned. “It's bad.”

There was a large lemon bush in the center of the lawn. Five feet high and wider still. Golden bees buzzed around the tiny white flowers. A snow white cat flitted in among the leaves of the roses that lined the high redwood fence circling the yard. The sun was hot on Socrates' bald head. He did his best to suppress a grin.

“All I ask is that you keep the lawn mowed and that you rake up after your dog,” King said.

The air was sweet with lemon blossoms. Socrates feared that the image in his eyes would somehow disappear if he blinked or sneezed.

“Topper says that you'd be a good tenant. He said I wouldn't have to worry 'bout you messin' up or havin' them wild parties,” King said.

“Don't party. No,” Socrates said. “And I put all my trash in a big plastic bag.”

“They pick up on Tuesday afternoons,” King said.

“Say what?”

“The trash. They come pick it up in front of the house at about four but you'd do best to have it out there by noon. I got the new rubber cans that the dogs can't knock over.”

Socrates stared at the small crippled man before him. He was trying to decipher the words he just heard. He remembered the smell of the trash fires when he was a boy living outside Indianapolis. He remembered the brown paper bags they gave him for trash in his prison cell. It would take two months to fill that bag.

Inside, the house had real oak floors made from wide planks of cured and stained wood. The walls were painted white with a deep green trim and the windowpanes were so old that they presented a mild distortion of the outside yard. There was a kitchen with a gas stove and a built-in sink. The bedroom was large and surrounded by windows. And the living room was big enough to contain three single cells.

“Whyn't you take it?” Darryl asked later that day when they returned to Socrates' home.

“I'm thinkin' 'bout it, Darryl. You know four hundred and twenty-five dollars is a whole lotta money for a man ain't paid a dime in nine years.”

“You get paid. They pay you at Bounty.”

Socrates loved Darryl and he trusted the boy above anyone else. But he didn't know how to express the fear he had of moving on to some place as beautiful as King Malone's garden home. He'd never lived anywhere that he couldn't leave without a backward look. “Home is where I hang my hat,” he used to say.

“… or where they hang your neck,” Joe Benz, a fellow inmate, would always add.

“Lemme think about it a couple'a days.”

“But s'pose Mr. Malone rent it before you make up your mind?”

“Then I guess I just have to stay here.”

“But I thought you said that Ms. Marsh said that they gonna kick you out?”

“Yeah.” Socrates had no desire to stifle his grin. “Yeah, I'd like to see 'em try.”

The Cherry Hill Development Company was on the twelfth floor of the Astor building on Crenshaw. It had glass doors and a beautiful black receptionist who wore African cloths cut in a western style. When she looked up at Socrates to ask his business, his heart skipped once and he forgot everything that he had come there to say.

“Yes?” the child asked.

“Has anybody told you how beautiful you are yet today, uh, Malva?” Socrates asked looking at the nameplate on her desk.

Her smile was a gift that only a man who'd spent half of his life in prison could appreciate.

“Not yet,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Socrates Fortlow.”

The frown that came across Malva's face brought back the business at hand.

“Oh,” Malva said. “Please sit down. I'll call Mr. Lomax.”

“Come in, Fortlow,” Ira Lomax said. His office had a glass wall that looked out over the Hollywood Hills. His desk, which was shaped like the body of a guitar, was made from white ash.

Lomax was tall and well dressed, black and a little greasy. He stood taller than Socrates but lacked the bulk to reinforce his height.

“Sit down, why don't you?”

Socrates took a seat. Lomax remained standing.

“I'm surprised to see you, Fortlow. But I'm glad that you're here. Maybe we can get a few problems ironed out without any more difficulty.” Lomax was a crook. Socrates knew that from the moment he walked into the room. A man who was too smart to rob a Stop n' Save but too stupid to fly right.

“You see,” Lomax said when Socrates stayed quiet, “you're costing this company money. You attacked my employees. And just because some foolish judge doesn't know the law that doesn't mean you can hold us up.”

The silence that followed Lomax's declaration didn't bother Socrates. He looked the sleek land developer up and down and sucked on a tooth.

“Heavy fists won't stand up to my kind of power, Fortlow. All I have to do is make a quick phone call and your apartment will disappear. If I stay on the line a minute more you could be gone too.”

When James came into his mind Socrates knew that he was experiencing fear. James, he thought, was afraid of getting beaten or raped or killed. Socrates wondered if the boy had used his saltshaker on Lex.

With that thought Socrates stood straight up from his chair. Ira Lomax stumbled backward and took in a gasp of air.

“Listen to me, Ira,” Socrates said. “I know that you know people. I probably even know some'a the people you do. I been to Blackbird's bar an' I'm sure you have too. But I'm not like they are. I don't do it for money, brother. I ain't a thief or a leg-breaker, I ain't a robber or con man. I'm a killer plain and simple. A killer.”

Socrates paused to allow his words to have their meaning then he continued, “I lived in that place for nine years. If you added up the money I owed it's probably ten, twelve thousand dollars. So if I turn that around then it would be you owe me instead'a I owe you. I'm sure your banker bosses would think that was a good price.”

“I ain't payin' you shit, niggah.” Lomax's voice was harsh but his eyes were like James's.

“Then you better not miss,” Socrates said before he turned and walked out of the door.

For a week or so there was talk about Lomax around the hood. Iula heard a few things in the diner and Chip Lowe got the word through members of the watch. There were men willing to inflict pain for money but Socrates was nowhere to be found. He rarely showed up at his alley home. Killer moved across the street to stay with Mrs. Melendez for a while.

One evening Socrates showed up at Blackbird's bar. He took the new owner, Craig Hatter, to the side for a powwow.

Late the next morning Socrates showed up at Lomax's big home in View Park. He wasn't admitted by the housekeeper and so he merely left the expensive box of chocolates he brought as a gift. The box was big, red and velvet, in the form of a Valentine's heart.

In the next week Socrates spoke to Brenda Marsh three times. Lomax had called her, the police did too. The cops wanted to know if her client had delivered a box of chocolates to Lomax's address. Brenda asked them if delivering chocolates was a crime.

Craig Hatter met with Socrates at Bebe's bar and said, “Lomax is a pussy, man. He asked me who I could get to kick your ass.”

“What you tell'im?” Socrates asked.

“Last I heard Mike Tyson was in jail.”

The money exchanged hands in Brenda Marsh's office on Pico and Rimpau at the end of that week. Lomax looked scared and tired.He handed over the cash and Socrates signed the letter Brenda had drafted that said he no longer contested the apartment between the furniture store walls.

The only things Socrates took from his home of nine years were a suitcase full of clothes, a few cooking utensils and the photograph of a painting of a disapproving woman dressed in red.

He bought a king-sized bed, and twelve folding chairs that he put in his closet with a fancy folding table. He also bought a folding cot that he kept in a corner for when Darryl stayed with him. He had a phone installed. Other than that his house was bare and pristine.

He walked around the rooms smiling. He had a home that he loved but still he could disappear leaving nothing behind.

rascals in the cane

W

hat I wanna know is if you think that black people have a right to be mad at white folks or are we all just fulla shit an' don't have no excuse for the misery down here an' everywhere else?” The speaker, Socrates Fortlow, sat back in his folding chair. It creaked loudly under his brawny weight.

Nelson Saint-Paul, the undertaker known as Topper, cleared his throat and looked to his right. There sat the skinny and bespectacled Leon Spellman. The youth was taking off his glasses to wipe his irritated eyes. The irritation came from Veronica Ashanti's sweet-smelling cigar.

“Is that why you had us come to your new house this week?” Veronica asked.

“It sure is a pretty house, Mr. Fortlow,” Cynthia Lott cried in shrill tones.

Chip Lowe sat back in his chair glowering, his light gray mustache glowing like a nightlight against the ebony skin of his upper lip. His hands were clasped before him. They had turned almost completely white with the creeping vitiligo skin disease that was slowly turning the skin of his hands and the right side of his face to white.

“How long you been here?” Leon asked.

“ 'Bout two months.” Socrates took a deep breath to keep down the nervous passion that had built up before he asked his question.

“You need somebody to help you pick out some more furniture,” Veronica Ashanti said. Her eyelids lowered and her hand moved to cover her small bosom. Almost everything Veronica said seemed to contain a romantic suggestion.

But she was right. Socrates' living room was empty except for six folding chairs and a folding table, all of which had been stored in a closet before the Wednesday night discussion group had arrived.

“I like it spare, Ronnie,” Socrates said. “I like it clean.”

“But you need some kinda sofa,” Cynthia Lott screeched, her stubby legs dangling from the sharp-angled wooden chair. “Some place soft for a woman to sit comfortably.”

“I use these same kind of chairs at the funeral home,” Nelson Saint-Paul said. “We meet there all the time and you never complained.”

“But that's not a house, Topper,” Veronica explained. “You expect more comfort in a house. Here Mr. Fortlow got this nice new place and a yard with flowers and fruit. He should have a nice big sofa and a chair and maybe some kinda rug. That's what you expect to see in a house.”

“I like the yard, man,” Leon said. “It's fat.”

“And if you had some lawn chairs … ,” Veronica began to say.

“What kinda shit you mean by that, man?” Chip Lowe, head of the local neighborhood watch, blurted out.

“Excuse me?” Veronica did not like the interruption.

“I said what the hell does he mean by that question? Do black people have the right? Do I have the right? Who is he to question me?” The anger rolling off Lowe's voice was like a gentle breeze across Socrates' face.

“I was talking about lawn furniture,” Veronica said icily.

“I don't care 'bout no damn furniture,” Chip said. “What I wanna know is what he mean questioning me?”

“He didn't say nobody in particular, Mr. Lowe,” Leon quailed. “He just said black people.”

“And what the hell you think I am?” Lowe said.

“That's why I asked you, brother,” Socrates said. “I asked you 'cause you the one know. If you don't know then who does? I mean you read the paper an' you got white people writin' about it. You got white people on the TV talkin', on the radio, they vote on it too. You got white people askin' black people but then they wanna argue wit' what those black people say. Everybody act like what we feel got to go to a white vote or TV or newspaper. I say fuck that. Fuck it. All that matters is what you'n me think. That's all. I don't care what Mr. Newscaster wanna report. All I wanna know is what we think right here in this room. Right here. Us. Just talkin'. It ain't goin' on the midnight report or the early edition or no shit like that.”

Silence followed Socrates' declaration. A police helicopter passed overhead but it could not have suspected the conversation unfolding below. And even if the policemen knew what was about to be said they wouldn't have wondered or worried about mere words.

“Wh-wh-what do you mean, Mr. Fortlow?” Nelson asked after the loud rush of the helicopter passed on. “I mean we all know what's been done to us that's wrong. We all know what we got to do to make our lives better.”

“We do?” Socrates stared hard at the middle-class mortician. “We don't all look the same. We don't all talk alike. We ain't related. The only things we got in common is what's on the TV an' in the papers. And ain't nuthin' like that made from black hands or minds.”

“But we know,” young Mr. Spellman said.

“What is it you know?” Cynthia Lott asked the boy.

“I know I'm a black man in a white world that had me as a slave; that keeps me from my history and my birthright.” Leon spoke proudly and loud.

Tiny Cynthia waggled her dangling feet angrily. “First off you ain't a man you're a boy. You wasn't never a slave. And as far as any birthright you live wit' your momma and play at like you tryin' to go to school. As far as I see it you ain't got nuthin' to complain about at all. I mean if you cain't make somethin' outta yourself with all that you got then all they could blame is you.”

Cynthia sucked a tooth and looked away from the young man.

Leon was trying to think of something to say but he was trembling, too furious to put words together.

“But I didn't ask if he could blame somebody, Cyn,” Socrates said. “I asked if we got the right to be mad. All of us is mad. Almost every black man, woman or child you meet is mad. Damn mad. Every day we talk about what some white man did or what some black man actin' like a white man did. Even if you blame Leon for his problems you still sayin' that there's somethin' wrong. Ain't you?”

“Only thing wrong is that these here men you got today ain't worth shit.” Cynthia curled her lip, revealing a sharp white tooth. “Black men puffin' up an' blamin' anybody they can. He say, ‘I cain't get a job 'cause'a the white man,’ or ‘I cain't stay home 'cause Mr. Charlie on my butt.’ But the woman is home. The woman got a job and a child and a pain in her heart that don't ever stop. I don't know why I wanna be mad at no white man when I got a black man willin' to burn me down to the ground and then stomp on my ashes.”

Cynthia's high-pitched voice always made Socrates wince. He swallowed once and then prepared to speak.

But before he could start Leon opened up again. “I don't know why you wanna be like that, Miss Lott. Some man musta hurt you. But I'm doin' what I can. I am. I got a job….”

“What kinda job you got?” Cynthia demanded.

“I work at the drugstore on Kinkaid on the weekends.”

“That's a child's job,” the tiny woman shrilled. “Come talk to me when you doin' man's work.”

“Come on now, Cyn,” Veronica Ashanti chided. “You know Leon's a good boy and he tryin'. And you know ain't no man start out perfect. No woman neither. I know a lotta black women out here mess up just as quick as a man. Quicker sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Chip Lowe said. “Leave Leon alone. I got a job and a family. I live at home with my wife and my daughters. I work hard. Harder'n any white man do the same job. That's why I got the right to be mad. I come in early an' leave late and they still pass me over for some lazy motherfucker don't know how to tie his shoelaces.”

“No need to curse, Chip,” Topper said. “But you are right. We all have difficulties that are incurred by our skins. We all know that we have to work harder and longer hours to be recognized. We have to be extra careful and honest not to be fired or even arrested. And if one black man commits a crime then we are all seen as criminals. All of us share that legacy.”

“But do you have the right to be mad?” Cynthia Lott asked. It was rare that Cynthia would dare to question Topper and she seemed to take pleasure in the grilling.

“Certainly,” Saint-Paul said. “We are held back not because of worth but because of prejudice and racism. That is reason enough.”

Socrates looked at his friends with harsh satisfaction. He had been thinking about the question for months. It had been on his mind for years. Every time he saw a white man he'd get mad. Sometimes he had to leave the room so as not to yell or even attack some man who was just standing there. His ire was as natural as the sunrise. It was more like an instinct than like the higher faculty of reason that supposedly separates people from other creatures.

Socrates had long wanted to ask the question but he couldn't get out the words in the Saint-Paul Mortuary. He was afraid of the big room and the many doors all around. Somebody might be listening; he knew that it wasn't true and even if it was that it didn't matter. But Socrates' throat was clamped shut. So he had decided to invite the group to his new home in King Malone's backyard, next to the sweet-smelling lemon bush. If anyone came around, the two-legged dog Killer would bark.

In the nearly empty rooms of Socrates' home he felt his heart beating and the air coming into his lungs. There he could believe that he was the master.

He had made lemonade and ham sandwiches, bought two fifths of Barbancourt Haitian rum. He had put the small bounty on his folding table and set up chairs for his friends as they arrived at the door. But even with all of that he could barely get the words out. When he started to put his question into words his face had flushed with fever and the room seemed to shake.

“But I know what you mean, Miss Lott,” Leon said in a voice that was devoid of feeling. “ 'cause when it come to tearin' down a black man it's a black woman the first one on line. Like when I come here to talk. You always be ridin' me even though I ain't never done nuthin' to you. Even though I give you a ride home every week an' you never say thank you or offer me somethin' like a drink of water or maybe a dollar for all that gas. There's a white woman work at the pharmacy speaks nice to me every day. She treat me better than half the black women I ever meet.”

“Well if you so hurt then why you come here?” Cynthia Lott said. Her voice was less angry than it was strained. “Why you give me a ride? I don't ever ask you. I don't ever ask you for nuthin'. I don't ever ask no man for nuthin'.”

There were tears in Leon's eyes but he didn't seem to notice. The muscle and bone at the hinges of his jaw bulged out. “I come here 'cause I wanna be around black people who talk about stuff other than just complainin' or lyin'. I want to be somebody other just some nigger or gangbanger.”

Cynthia almost said something but then she held back. Socrates thought that this silence was an answer to the boy's hurt feelings but that he would never know it.

“My aunt Bellandra,” Socrates began, “used to tell me a story

.

”

Everybody in the room seemed to understand immediately that this was the real beginning of the Wednesday night talk, that everything up until then was just like an introduction.

“It was a story,” Socrates continued, “about slaves that were set free by a freak storm down on a Louisiana sugar plantation a long time before the Civil War. She said that it was a big wind …”

“… that blew out of the Gulf of Mexico.”

Bellandra's words came back to him. He was a scrawny child again rapt in the frightening tales of his severe auntie. “And it tore down the ramshackle slave quarters and tore out the timbers that their chains was bound to. Many of the slaves died from the crash but some of them lived. They cut away the corpses from the long chain that bound them all together and then moved like a serpent toward the overseer's hut.

“This overseer was a man named Drummond and he was evil down to the bone. He heard the slave quarters crash but he didn't do nuthin' to help because the wind scared him and so he stayed in his hut. He didn't know that the chain gang was movin' toward him. He just laid up with Rose, a slave girl that he took to his bed sometimes. Outside the wind was howlin' and the trees were scratchin' at his roof. It was like hell outside his do' an' he wasn't goin' nowhere.” Bellandra, Socrates remembered, paused then and glared down at the boy. He felt as if he had done something wrong but didn't know what it was.

“An' then the knockin' started on his do'. It was a loud thump and then the drag of chain and then another loud thump. Rose called out in fear and her master cringed. But the knocking got louder and the chain sounded everywhere all around the house. Then there was the angry cry of men. If it wasn't for the storm that cry would have reached the plantation owner's ears. He would have called out his men and his dogs but the wind ate up the slaves' voices. Only Drummond could hear them men and he wasn't even sure that it was men. He was afraid that ghosts from some shipwreck had blown in on the winds of that storm. He was tryin' to remember a prayer to send them ghosts away when the do' shattered and so did the shutters on his windows. And then four men came into his shack one after another, manacled hand and foot and chained in a line. There were two empty shackles that were bloody from where the dead men had been cut away.

“ ‘Carden, is that you?’ the overseer cried. ‘'Cause if it is, you had better get ret ta die. Ain't no slave gonna come in on me in my home!’ The overseer stood up to thrash Carden the slave but another slave, Alfred, raised his chain and laid the overseer low. Drummond lay on the ground bleedin' while Rose cried from his bed. ‘Give us the keys, man,’ Alfred said. He held the chain above the overseer's head and that broke him down. He took the key to the fetters from a string on his neck. And when he freed them they set on him with the loose chains and while they beat him, do you know what he said?”

“Uh-uh,” little boy Socrates said to his auntie.

“He said, ‘Why you killin’ me? I freed your bonds.' But the slave Alfred said, ‘You just dead, white man.’ And he was dead even before he could hear those last words.

“And they took Rose and freed whatever slaves there was left alive in the wreck. And then they set fire to the master's home and ran out into the sugarcane fields and hid. There was twenty-two escaped slaves. Man, woman, and child. They went up into the swamplands and laid low. And after a day or two they got strong on fish and birds they slew. Small groups of white men came looking for the escaped slaves but they died and their weapons went into the hands of Alfred Africa, the leader of the runaways.

“Everywhere in the parish white folks was scared of them slaves. Bounties was put on their heads, but after the first search parties disappeared most folks were too scared to go after Alfred and his gang. But the runaways was scared too. Scared that if they ever left the swamplands and the cane they would be hunted down and killed for their sins. Because they knew that killin' was wrong. They knew that they had murdered old Drummond and Langley Whitehall, the plantation owner, and his family and men. So they stayed in the wild and went kinda crazy. They attacked white people that traveled alone and burnt down houses and fields of cane. Nobody was safe and they started to call Alfred and his gang the rascals in the cane. And it wasn't only white people that was scared. Because if Alfred's crew came up on a slave and he was too scared to go with'em then they would say that that slave was their enemy and they would kill him too.

“They called the state militia finally but they never found Alfred's crew. After a while that whole section of farmlands was abandoned because nobody felt safe. Nobody would brave the rascals in that cane. Every once in a while one of 'em would get caught though. If one of 'em got tired of the mosquitoes and gators and he wanted to leave. And if one of Alfred Africa's men was caught they'd torture him for days to find the secret of where the runaways hid. But they never found out. After a long time the attacks stopped and the plantation owners came back. But they still went with armed guards. And they set out sentries at night who had to stay at their posts even in the worst storms. Because everybody said that the soul of Alfred Africa lived in the eye of the storm and that one day he would return and burn down all the plantations everywhere in the south.”

Socrates looked up and saw the faces of Cynthia, Veronica and Chip Lowe. He was surprised because he half hoped to see his long-dead auntie Bellandra. He wondered if he had really told the story that he'd only just remembered after more than fifty years.

“It sounds like a true story, Mr. Fortlow,” Nelson Saint-Paul said.

“Yeah,” Socrates said, still partly in the trance of his memory. “Rose, the woman that the overseer raped, was my aunt's great-grandmother. She was the only one of the escaped slaves to survive. She caught a fever and wandered away. Indians took her in and she wound up in Texas. She had a child and became an Indian but the army massacred the tribe she traveled with and she and her baby were sold as slaves. After the war she came to Indiana with her son. That's where my family is from.”

“So what you tryin' to say, Socrates?” Chip Lowe asked. “What's that story supposed to mean?”

“Depends on what part you're talking about,” Veronica Ashanti said on a cloud of blue smoke.

“What you mean by that, Ronnie?” Chip asked.

“Could be the storm or the killin', could be that they thought the killin' was sin even though they killed a sinner.” Veronica counted out each point on a different finger.

“Yeah,” Leon added. “Or maybe that they stayed around and fought against the people who persecuted them.”

“They should'a run,” Cynthia said. “But no doubt that Alfred Africa wanted to fight instead'a doin' somethin' right.”

“Maybe they couldn't help it,” Leon argued. “Maybe it was like Mr. Fortlow's aunt said and they couldn't escape. That's like us. We cain't escape. We here in this land where they took our ancestors. How could you run from that?”

“I don't know,” Veronica said sadly. “But maybe Miss Lott is right when she says about men always wantin' to fight. Our men always on the edge of some kind'a war. All proud'a their muscles. I mean I like me a strong man but what good is he if he's all bleedin' an' dead.”

“Sometimes it's better to fight,” Chip Lowe put in. “That's why we got the neighborhood watch. Sometimes you got to stand up.”

“But not like no fool,” Cynthia said. “Not like them, uh, what you called 'em, Mr. Fortlow?”

“Rascals in the cane. That's what they were called.” Socrates was happy to hear his question discussed. He didn't need to say much because everybody else was alive with words.

“Yeah,” Cynthia said. “Rascals. That's just like a man. So busy fightin' that he gets killed and his woman and child go back into slavery.”

“But what is the storm?” Topper asked Socrates. “What does it mean?”

“Why's it got to mean anything?” Cynthia screeched. “It's just what happened.”

“No,” Topper disagreed. “No. Every story, everything that happens has a meaning. A purpose. That's why Mr. Fortlow asked that question and then told his auntie's story. The story is the answer. The answer to his question.”

“Is that right?” Veronica asked. “Is what Topper say true?”

Socrates looked at the beautiful, black, pear-shaped woman. It was the first time he ever heard her ask something without the twist of sex in her tone.

“I'm not sure,” Socrates said. “I mean I been thinkin' about bein' mad at white folks lately. I mean I'm always mad. But bein' mad don't help. Even if I say somethin' or get in a fight, I'm still mad when it's all over. One day I realized that I couldn't stop bein' mad. Bein' mad was like havin' a extra finger. I don't like it, everybody always make fun of it but I cain't get rid of it. It's mine just like my blood.

“But I didn't remember Bellandra's story until we were already talkin'. It just came to me and I said it. And now that Topper says that the answer is in the story I think he might be right. Maybe not the whole answer but there's somethin' there. Somethin'.”

“But why you wanna ask the question?” Chip Lowe asked.

“Because I'm tired'a bein' mad, man. Tired. I see all these white people walkin' 'round and I'm pissed off just that they're there. And they don't care. They ain't worried. They thinkin' 'bout what they saw on TV last night. They thinkin' about some joke they heard. An' here I am 'bout to bust a gut.”

“Maybe they should have left the cane fields,” Leon said. “Maybe they should have forgotten all about all that fear and guilt.”

“Yeah,” Cynthia added in an almost sweet voice. “And they sure shouldn't'a killed those black folks that was too scared to run with 'em. Sure shouldn't.”

“Uh-huh,” Veronica agreed. “And Alfred should have taken Rose and gone north or south or west. If he ain't had a home to go back to he should have made a new home rather than stayed in the cane fields with them mosquitoes and alligators.”

“Maybe that's what Mr. Fortlow's aunt was saying,” Nelson Saint-Paul said. “Maybe they couldn't leave the plantation. Maybe they were stuck with those white folks that put'em in chains and the blacks who stayed slaves.”

“This sure is some good rum, Socrates,” Cynthia Lott exclaimed. She had taken a small paper cup and filled it. “That's just about the best liquor I ever tasted.”

“Made from sugarcane by black hands in the Caribbean sun,” Socrates said.

Everyone had a drink and then they all had another.

Socrates felt secure in his secluded home with his black friends and smooth liquor. They ate the ham sandwiches and talked about white people and how they felt about them.

“But do we have the right?” Socrates asked Nelson Saint-Paul.

“We got reasons,” Nelson answered. “We got reasons. But reasons and rights ain't the same thing.”

“I don't know what it means really,” Cynthia Lott crooned, her voice calmed by smooth rum. “I mean so what if you don't have the right? You still gonna be mad.”

Socrates smiled and rested his big hands on his knees. He stood up saying, “Well we can't figure all that out in one night anyway. It was just a question been on my mind.”

“Oh my it's midnight,” Veronica said. “I better be gettin'.”

“Damn,” Chip Lowe said. “We usually out by ten. That rum loosen up the tongue.”

The Wednesday night group gathered themselves up quickly and left Socrates' home. He wondered if Leon drove Cynthia and what it might feel like to kiss Veronica's big lips.

“Bye,” he said at the front door.

He noticed a light on in the front house. Maybe tomorrow Mr. Malone would complain about his little party.

After everyone left Socrates went to fold his collapsible chairs but then he stopped and stood there in his living room. He looked at the chairs, imagining that they still held his guests. Snobby Topper, angry Cynthia Lott, and all the rest. He thought about being angry himself. Somewhere in the night he realized that it wasn't just white people that made him mad. He would be upset even if there weren't any white people.

“How come they didn't go down in Mexico?” little Socrates might have asked his stern auntie.

“Because the road wasn't paved,” she would have answered.

Socrates laughed to himself and poured one last shot of rum. He left the chairs out for the night because they felt friendly.

rogue

H

e stood in an alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill on Normandie. It was drizzling slightly but Socrates wore a canvas hat and a water-repellent army surplus fatigue jacket. His hands were in his pockets, each of them holding a pistol.

There were two small wood framed windows in the wall of the old stucco building. In one the word

Café

shone in neon blue. In the other

Open

burned red. Beyond the lights Socrates could see men and women laughing and talking and touching. The sight of all that happiness and warmth sent angry tremors through Socrates' big hands. He had to release the guns for fear of shooting himself in the legs.

There was one white woman that he could see at the lower corner of the right window, near the bottom of the

n.

She had hair that was golden and lips drawn red. She was smiling and moving her head to music that Socrates could not hear. The man she was with was a policeman, Socrates knew that. All the men who went to Denther's were cops. It was, Socrates thought, a world of cops. Your good men, your fools—your killers too.

The ex-con took a deep breath to keep his nerves down. In each of the fourteen pockets of his jacket there was a clip full of bullets.He was ready to fight through to the end but he would stop shooting when the target he came for was dead. He didn't want to kill any innocent cops that he didn't have to. Only the name Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. was on the hit list in his mind.

Thin and too tall for his hands or features, Cardwell was a black-haired killer.

“You see what he done to my boy?” Stony Wile had asked three months earlier. They had just broken a long silence over a woman when Socrates stopped by Stony's house to bring his family a crate of week-old peaches from Bounty.

Reggie was laid up in a bed, his features swollen and bloody. He was out of his mind with pain and concussion. The emergency room doctors said that he needed a week of observation in a hospital bed but the nurse on the admitting desk didn't see how Stony's insurance could pay for that. They brought Reggie home where at least somebody could pray.

“They didn't arrest him,” Stony wailed. “If he did some kinda crime bad enough to near kill'im for, then how come they didn't take him to jail?”

Socrates didn't have an answer for his friend. Tildy, Stony's wife, wilted over the bed, crying.

“He was out with his friends,” Stony was saying. “He was raisin' some hell an' bein' wild. But he didn't have no gun or no knife. He didn't hurt nobody. Maybe he did somethin' but how can that excuse the law actin' like the lawless? Who can I go to about this?”

“Nobody,” Socrates said to himself. He repeated the word standing there in the shadows of the alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill.

Reggie mended quickly. He was out of bed in a week. And the day he got up he enrolled in Los Angeles City College. Maybe, Socrates thought at the time, the beating was just what young Mr. Wile needed to set him straight. After all, Socrates had taken, and given, some horrendous beatings in his life.

But then there was Inger Lowe, whose features favored the best sides of her black mother and her Swedish father. Inger was raped, that's what Iula said she said. Raped and sodomized by Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. She was stopped on Morrisy, that's what she said.

Inger didn't tell many people about it. She was too afraid that it would get back to the police. Cardwell had told her what could happen if she complained.

He'd told her that he'd come visit some time soon at any rate. Inger moved up to Oakland to live with her brother.

“She left all her furniture and belongings. Hardly even packed a suitcase.” That's what Iula, who gave Inger airfare, had said.

Socrates was mad even then. But one woman raped and a boy being beaten wasn't much in the eyes of a man who had done worse in his own life.

Socrates began to hear other tales about the rogue cop. Beatings, molestations, and humiliations. Even the pimps started talking about how their jewelry always disappeared after a bust. And if anybody complained they received a visit, if not from Cardwell then from one of his friends.

Socrates had heard the stories but they didn't stick. He'd learned to live next to suffering in prison. He awoke in his cell many nights to the sound of some young man being raped for the first time. Once he saw a man hit so hard by a guard that his eye came out of his head. With that kind of pain in his mind there was little that some cop could do to displace it.

But then Cardwell killed Torrence Johnson. It was in the

L.A. Times,

on page three. A three-quarters profile of a smiling young boy with the words

tragedy

and

death

in the headline. He was only fourteen, just two years older than Darryl. Shot down running from the police, from Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. Socrates read the news report. It was intimated that Johnson was involved with gang activity. There was a turf war or something like that. Torrence was involved. He ran.

From that point on it was a straight line for Socrates. He went to the Johnson home even though he didn't know them. He brought white flowers that he took from the Saint-Paul Mortuary. He stayed on the front porch to give his condolences but even from there things didn't seem like what the police had said.

Mr. Johnson was a short man and broad. He didn't like the idea of Socrates at his door.

“Did you know Torrie?” Mr. Johnson asked.

“No sir,” Socrates said. “I just read about him. I just read it and wanted to come and say I was sorry.”

“Sorry about what? Were you there?” There was a hysterical note in the fat man's voice.

“No sir. I just felt for you and I wanted to say that a lotta people feel it's wrong to have happen what happened to your son.”

The Johnsons lived in what some people called

the jungle,

below View Park and above Crenshaw. Socrates found a mother and a father and a well-kept house. The other children weren't gang members. Socrates took the bus home wondering why the article got him so upset.

The boy was fleeing,

the article had said.

Fleeing.

He was involved in gang activity.

Gang activity,

Socrates thought to himself,

what's that?

He didn't sleep that night and the next day he called in sick to work. He was sick too. The words fleeing and gang activity wore on his nerves like some kind of virus that eats away the senses.

His lips were numb. Colors hurt his eyes.

Fleeing. Gang activity. Shot down. Tragedy.

All the suffering he'd witnessed in prison came back and added itself to Torrence Johnson's father's pain. Socrates thought about Inger fleeing to Oakland, about Reggie scared into school.

“That ain't why people s'posed to do things,” Socrates said to Stony at Stony's house one day.

The bronze-skinned welder lit a cigarette and nodded.

When Socrates put his glass down it broke on the red Formica.

That was the first night he stalked Denther's. He saw Cardwell leaving to go home at one A.M. The rat-faced beanpole wasn't even being charged. The police investigation proved that Torrence wasn't armed but another boy, Aldo Reams, was. They discovered the gun in young Mr. Reams's pocket after Torrence was already dead. There was no evidence. No tattoos or gang colors. Somebody broke a window and the boys made some kind of hand signs. The cops came. The boys ran. Cardwell shot but he wasn't answering fire. The unfired and unseen gun was taken from a scared Aldo Reams, who fell to the ground with his hands outstretched when Torrence was hit. The puzzle pieces did not fit the story. Socrates saw that a boy was slaughtered over a broken window and the finger. All he did was run.

Socrates was drawn to Denther's every night for two weeks. He learned Cardwell's pattern with no intention except to nurse a feeling of hatred that was so familiar he sometimes wondered if the hate was older than him.

For hours every night in cold wet weather he stood at absolute attention. He didn't go through the problems at work in his mind. He didn't think about Darryl or Iula. All that existed was Cardwell and his movements. Socrates had become a predator, a hunter. He was a wild thing with a too fast heart.

“The chains on a black man,” his old aunt Bellandra had said, “go down through the centuries. They once made us slaves to the plantation but now they make us slaves to the slaves we was.”

“Huh?” the small boy Socrates asked.

“A good word and a gentle touch is like a cloud that passes on a nice day, Socrates,” she replied. “But pain, real pain last forever. It hurt your son and his son and his. The slave is still cryin' even though his chains ain't nuthin' but rust, even though he's long gone and forgotten.”

There had been guards who he thought about every day and every night for months, even years. Their names were still in his mind even though sometimes he couldn't remember his mother's face. Craig Kimball was one. Warden Joseph Simon was another one. They were just as much murderers as Socrates. They tortured and broke simple men for no reason. Socrates was sure that he'd hunt both of them down if he ever had the chance. But he never did. Kimball had beaten three men to death in their cells. Simon ordered sick men into the dungeon when any fool could have seen it would kill them.

But Socrates didn't try to find Simon or Kimball after his release. Now the hatred welled up again. Socrates was still in prison. Cardwell was the new evil screw assigned to his block. Bellandra's words came back to him again.

Everything fades except for pain.

An angry old woman, long dead and forgotten by everyone except one frightened nephew, pronounced Cardwell's death sentence.

Socrates bought guns and ammunition at Blackbird's bar. You could get anything at Blackbird's if you were brave enough to go there. Fourteen clips of 9mm shells was like an extra-generous baker's dozen from a friendly grocer.

Cardwell came out of Denther's. If Socrates had looked at his watch he would have known that it was two fifteen. But the wrist-watch was in his pocket with the hand on the gun. The murder in the air came in through his lungs and from there to his blood. Socrates, who knew that he had been prepared for centuries, was finally ready to answer a destiny older than the oldest man in the world.

Cardwell obliged and walked toward the dark alley. He was smoking a cigarette, moving at an unhurried pace. He was thinking about something. Socrates breathed deeply and tasted the air. It filled him with a sweetness of anticipation that he had not felt since the first time a woman, Netalie Brian, had helped him find his manhood.

“It was the air, no, no, no, the breath of air,” Socrates told Darryl the next morning on the phone. “It was so good. I mean good, man.You know I almost called out loud. I saw Cardwell walkin' my way an' my hands was tight on them guns. You know he was a dead man an' didn't know it. I pulled them pistols outta my pockets. I was thinking about him dyin' but at the same time I was wonderin' what was goin' on in my mind. You know what I mean, Darryl? How you could think about somethin' an' still be thinkin' 'bout somethin' else?”

“Uh-huh,” Darryl grunted. Socrates hadn't slept that night. He'd called the Shakurs' house at seven A.M. and gotten Corina to get Darryl out of bed. Darryl was the only human being that Socrates trusted completely. “You mean like when it's almost three but the teacher talkin' 'bout the Civil War but you thinkin' 'bout basketball?”

“Yeah like that, like that. But I was gonna murder that man. I was gonna kill him. But I was thinkin' that I had never felt nuthin' like that deep breath I just took. An' even though I was gettin' ready to kill I had to take just one second to think about how I felt. You know?”

“I guess I do,” Darryl said. “But how did you feel?”

“I felt free,” Socrates said in a soft voice. “All my life I ain't never felt like that. I was ready to die along with that man. My life for his— you cain't get more free than that.”

“Did you kill him?” Darryl whispered the question so that Howard and Corina wouldn't hear if they were close at hand.

“I meant to. The guns was out and he passed not three feet from me. But I just stood there—smiling, thinkin' 'bout how good it felt to be in my own skin.”

Socrates took his newfound freedom to work that day. He smiled at people and asked after their health. He told gentle jokes and paid more attention to the details of the produce department than he ever had before. He was tired from two weeks with little sleep and suffered from a slight cold from all those nights spent in the alley. He detected a whiff of staleness about his person like the smell of old clothes taken out of the bottom drawer after many years.

It was the finest day of Socrates Fortlow's life. Death held no dominion that day. And if his aunt Bellandra's blue god was in his heaven Socrates had no quarrel with his remoteness.

The elation lasted deep into the night. Socrates turned off all the lights in his small garden home and walked around in bare feet touching the wood and metal and glass of his house with wonder and joy. He lay down on the new sofa in the living room unaware that he would fall asleep. He just sat down for a moment and then stretched out with a silly glee. Sleep came upon him like a highwayman who had been lying in wait.

The dream was a variation on an old theme. A small room with a single cot on which the ex-convict slept. The pounding on the door that roused him was like artillery fire in a war film.

Socrates simply opened the door for the ebony giant who was stripped to the waist and powerful in a way that only wildness can breed. The big man towered over Socrates but there was no more fear in the bald ex-con. Their gazes met and somewhere Socrates knew that he was dreaming. He also knew that he had to go along until the end.

“What you want from me?” Socrates asked.

“I only wanna know what you gonna do now. You done the first job. You done dug up all the dead an' set 'em free. Now what you gonna do with all that power?”

Freedom was old hat in twenty-four hours.

“You know I couldn't believe it, Darryl,” he told the son of his heart that weekend. “Here I been lookin' to be free for my whole life. Whole life. An' when I get it it's just like a pocket fulla change somebody done give to me 'cause I looked wretched an' poor. Now that change is just jinglin' in my pockets but there ain't nuthin' I got to buy. Uh-uh. I could just pass it on to somebody else now. Yeah, pass it on to somebody like you.”

Darryl looked a little stunned into his friend's eyes, his skinny boy's body moving with the rhythm of his breath.

“I need a favor, Lavant,” Socrates told the self-styled anarchist. They were sitting in the garage where Lavant slept and created the bright yellow broadsides that he hoped would be the clarion call to revolution for the working men and women of L.A.

“What's that, Socco?” the black zealot asked.

“I need to know everything I can about somebody and then I need your printin' skills.”

Two weeks later Socrates took the first paid vacation of his life. He gave short notice and Marty Gonzalez was hard pressed to explain to the main office that it was worth it to give their new produce manager a week off after only six months on a job that had benefits.

“You know they don't like it, Socco,” his boss said.

“I don't like it either, Marty. But you know I got to take the time, got to.”

Saturday he spent with Iula. He went to work with her early in the morning and helped her get ready for the day. He managed the big pots and did some of the little jobs that she never got around to. When he wasn't working he sat at the counter drinking tea with lemon, something he'd always pined for in prison but never drank once he was on the outside.

That night they made love, speaking hardly at all. Iula could tell that there was something wrong but she kept silent.

Sunday he went down to Venice Beach to see Darryl with Corina and Howard Shakur. They all went down the beach with the children, Winnie and little Howard.

“That's a good job you got down at Bounty now.” Howard's statement seemed to contain a question.

“I guess.” Socrates was distracted by the sound of the waves and the wind. The ocean's power always made his heart race.

“How you think I'd do in a grocery store?” Howard asked.

“Better'n me that's for sure.”

“Why you say that?”

“You young, Howard. Strong too. Bounty got stores all over the West Coast. You could work all the way up the top ranks if you tried. Add that to the computers you know and you could make it big.”

“You think so?” Howard puffed up with pride.

Socrates looked at Howard. He really couldn't call the man his friend. All Howard did was brag and gloat over others who had less than him. He was jealous of his own children where Corina's affections were concerned. But Socrates felt generous that day on the beach.

“Yeah, Howard. But you got to remember, man.”

“Remember what?”

“All that money don't mean a thing if you want to see your momma smile but your momma's dead.”

Howard frowned and almost said something but instead he raised his bulk out of the aluminum strap chair and walked over to his wife.

Socrates set his alarm for five A.M. but he didn't get out of bed until seven fifteen. He made tea with lemon and had wheat toast with eggs. He ate standing at the kitchen sink, looking out of his window at his landlord's backyard. Fuzzy bees hovered around the lemon bush, eyed by the white cat that sometimes came from next door. The ear of the teacup was too small for Socrates' finger to fit through. He pinched the small handle though and that worked all right.

He hadn't yet bought a radio or television. Now he thought that he never would. He liked the idea of a radio, voices that he could spy on and then turn off when he got bored or annoyed. But that morning all he had was sunlight and that lemon bush, bees and a white cat.

Against the front door lay two stiff yellow boards connected by purple straps spaced for a head to fit between them. Each board was filled with red lettering and illustrated by laminated photographs.

But Socrates wasn't looking at the board right then. He was savoring his hot tea and breathing the still air and silence.

At ten thirty he showed up across the street from the rogue cop's police precinct. He stood there in his camouflage army surplus coveralls wearing the sandwich board that detailed the crimes of Matthew G. Cardwell Jr.,

POLICE OFFICER and KILLER,

the homemade poster board read.

A five-by-seven photograph of Cardwell, seen laughing and smoking a cigarette, was at the center of each board. Below that was a copy of the list of allegations of police brutality brought against the cop. This list was an enlarged photocopy of the public record. Above his photo and to each side were the names and photographs of his victims. Reggie Wile was there, his face battered and swollen. A picture of Inger Lowe was accompanied by the question

Where is she now?

The photograph of Torrence Johnson was from the newspaper. Its caption read simply,

Killed by Officer Cardwell.

Socrates stood for a while facing the station. Policemen came in and out without paying him any heed. Now and then a car would slow down but the words on the sign were too small and no one stopped to get out of their cars. A few rare walkers stopped and read the words, avoiding the sandwich man's eyes. But they needn't have worried, Socrates wasn't there to talk.

There was a Pick-an'-Save drugstore on the corner of the block and Brother Joe's Coffee n' Cake across the street from the station. Both of these stores were patronized by black and brown people who did stop to look for a moment before getting on with their day.

Socrates began to pace the block across the street from the station after an hour or so. He walked solemnly and slow as if to the beat of a single military drum. As the day went on, more and more people came to read his sandwich board. Children ran after him laughing, then fleeing gleefully when he turned to walk in their direction. Men passed by seemingly oblivious but reading every word with sideways glances.

By noon the police had noticed him too. Most of the cops went to a small diner next door to the station but one or two black officers got their coffee from Brother Joe. They stopped to read Socrates' sign and then went away to work.

Finally, at a little after twelve, two uniformed cops approached him.

“All right now,” a burly white sergeant said. “You had your fun, now move along.”

Socrates kept walking.

The second officer, who was also white and large, stood in front of Socrates pressing the five fingertips of his left hand against the hard sign. “It's time for you to leave.”

Socrates showed no concern. He took two steps backward and turned to walk in the opposite direction.

“Halt!”

Socrates stopped. He didn't turn around though.

The policemen flanked him.

“It's time for you to leave,” the sergeant said again. He had a small purple scar underneath his right eye. Socrates tried to pick out some recognizable shape in the mark but there was none.

“If you don't go,” the other cop said, “you're going to spend some special time with us across the street.”

Socrates began walking again. He'd taken two steps when the sergeant's hand tried to close around his right biceps. There weren't many human hands that could encompass Socrates' muscle.

“Show me some ID,” the policeman said.

It was a direct order. Socrates didn't want to talk to the cops. All he wanted was to stand there in silent testimony to the crimes of the man named Cardwell.

When he reached into his back pocket the officers came out with their guns.

“Stop what you're doing,” the sergeant commanded.

“But you asked for my ID,” Socrates said.

“Put your hands where I can see them.”

Socrates put out his arms like a Christian accepting the cross. There were policemen coming out from the station from across the street. The other cop grabbed Socrates by the wrist. He had a pair of handcuffs in his other hand but he couldn't figure out how to put the big man's wrists together.

“Hey, what you doin'?” a man complained. It was one of the men who had read Socrates' sign. “This is a free country ain't it? A man could tell the truth if he want to.”

“This isn't any of your business,” the police sergeant said. “Clear out.”

“I'ma stay right here!” the man yelled. “I ain't leavin' my brother for no pig to shit on.”

The second policeman, not the sergeant, released Socrates and approached the new man threateningly.

“You better get the fuck outta here if you know what's good for you.”

But by then men and women had begun to come out of the diner and from out of the Pick-an'-Save down the street. One car full of young men blasting loud music parked at the curb and the men piled out of the black Buick.

“What's goin' on?” people were asking.

“They tryin' to arrest a man just 'cause he wanna protest.”

“I know that Matthew Cardwell.”

“He the one murdered that boy.”

The police from across the street advanced. They pulled truncheons and canisters of Mace from their belts.

“Why you wanna arrest this man?” a woman demanded. “It's that cop oughtta be arrested. It's him did all them things the sign says.”

Socrates felt the handcuff clamp down around his left wrist. Before the policeman could grab the other wrist a man in a lime green shirt and dark green pants ran up from the crowd and pushed the policeman hard in the chest. The cop fell down at his sergeant's feet. The sergeant helped his partner up and they both started moving back toward the precinct.

There were twenty or so black men and women surrounding Socrates and yelling at the cops. There were just as many policemen, most of them white, but there were Mexicans and black men in uniform too.

“He just carryin' a sign!” yelled the small man who first came to Socrates' aid. “Cain't we even say what we thinkin'? Is that what the police supposed to do? Keep a man from speakin' his mind?”

The policemen had gathered into a group that stood there in the middle of the street. Their numbers grew only slightly where Socrates' protectors seem to appear from nowhere. Men and women and boys and girls came out of buildings and from around corners as if they had just been waiting for this moment.

It had taken no more than ten minutes. Before that Socrates was alone. Now he was on the front line of a battle.

The policemen moved back toward their headquarters. They were pushed and yelled at and reviled.

Socrates watched them, the chain dangling from his left wrist. All around him men and women were shouting and waving their fists. A glass broke somewhere.

More missiles were hurled and the doors to the station closed. The picture window of the Pick-an'-Save shattered. Three car alarms went off. One of them was a magnified voice that kept repeating “Stand away from the vehicle!” in a threatening tone.

The street was blocked off with angry women and men. Traffic stopped at the intersections and more and more people came. Socrates was at their center but he didn't wave his fists or shout. He didn't do anything but watch and maybe wonder a little at all those people so ready to break out in violence.

A police car was turned over. A trash can was set on fire at the precinct building's front door. Socrates, who had left home that day ready for death, worried for the first time that he might not die alone.

The police doors flew open after a few minutes of the fire. Cops in plastic-visored helmets and see-through shields came pouring out of those double doors. Three trails of smoke came out over the advancing army's head and the familiar burn of tear gas raked against Socrates' eyes and gouged into his nose and lungs.

Forty-seven policemen plowed into the crowd of hundreds, firing rubber bullets and hurling canisters of gas. They sent nine people to the hospital and arrested twenty-seven more. One policeman had a broken jaw. No one died. The worst injury was Lou Henry, the proprietor of the Pick-an'-Save, who had a heart attack trying to drive a handful of looters from his store.

Socrates saw very little of what happened after that first whiff of gas. He fell back from the fumes and the advancing army of lawmen. Whatever else he saw was on the faces of black people and brown folks who were too angry and tired to be scared.

Socrates called Iula at her diner from his backyard home. He asked her for a metal saw and a transistor radio. She brought them both, temporarily closing down her restaurant for the first time in over fourteen years of business. She told Socrates that she'd stay with him but he told her to go.

“I just need to think,” he explained.

It took four hours to hack through the metal cuff. While he worked at it the scratch radio reported on the violence.

The miniriot flared up sporadically through the day. There was a curfew set anywhere within eight blocks of the police station. There were four cops assigned to a cruiser, each one armed with a shotgun. They looked like space invaders, one eyewitness claimed, because of their helmets and heavy gloves.

By the time morning had come there was a sense of fear spread over Los Angeles. The schools were closed and store owners from all over town had taken up posts at the doors of their establishments, fearing looters but not, it seemed, death. News vans representing every TV station, and many radio stations, were parked on the street in front of the precinct headquarters where the violence had flared.

Late that night Iula brought him a baked chicken dinner with beer and half a blueberry pie.

“You want me to stay with you?” she asked while he picked at the meal.

“Yeah.”

She held him through the night, but in the morning he pulled away. He donned his overalls and his sandwich board.

“I'm afraid they might kill you, baby,” Iula said as he went out the door.

“I hope not,” he replied. “But if somethin' does happen will you tell Darryl to look after my dog?”

Men and women in heavy makeup stood before video cameras talking about the debacle. It was six o'clock but the morning traffic was lighter than usual. It was a holiday of violence which most people stayed home to observe.

Everything from a certain point of view seemed ordinary, almost orchestrated. The policemen in their fancy war dress, the anchors and their cameramen, a day to stay home from school.

But then Socrates Fortlow, in his sandwich board, came through an alley into the street across from the police and their chroniclers. He planted his feet defiantly and stood with his message still intact. The bloodred letters seeming prophetic now; the questions and accusations a bit more serious.

Katy Moran of

The Pulse,

a TV news program that Socrates had never seen or even heard of, was the first to notice him and register his potential to her career.

“Excuse me, sir,” she asked. She had run up to him followed by a cameraman and someone else who held a microphone on a pole. “Were you here yesterday morning when the violence began?”

She was a beautiful white woman dressed in a tan two-piece suit. Her lips were a deep peach hue. Her blouse was brown silk and there was a green jeweled pin on the lapel that folded over her heart. Socrates wondered about the pin while other news broadcasters came his way. He wondered if she had decided to wear that pin because somebody would see it on TV and like it. He wondered who that somebody was.

The microphone was hovering over his head.

“Were you the one who was here yesterday?” Katy Moran asked.

“It's right here on my sandwich board,” Socrates said.

“What does it say?” Katy Moran asked. Five microphones were jammed in front of his face.

“All you got to do is read it,” Socrates said.

The newscasters and reporters stood back to allow their cameras to record the document. Then the police broke through. They pushed the reporters aside and grabbed Socrates, throwing him to the ground. They ripped the sandwich boards from him and put on a new pair of handcuffs and dragged him toward the station.

“Are you arresting him for starting the riot?” Katy Moran's voice asked.

“Does this man have rights?” a man's voice shouted. Socrates thought it was the voice of a black man but he wasn't quite sure.

He was dragged into the station and thrown into a room. He was surrounded by at least a dozen angry cops. All of them pushing and swearing.

For a moment Socrates thought that he was going to die. He could tell when there was murder in the air.

“All right, back off!” a plainclothes black police officer shouted.

The white sergeant from the day before pressed his chest up against the detective. “Who the hell are you?”

“Sergeant Biggers. They called me from Watts because I know this man.”

“This nigger's mine,” the burly sergeant replied.

Instead of answering, Biggers slammed a beefy fist against the sergeant's jaw. The man went down and out.

Socrates had never been so surprised in his adult life. The men yelling, blood coming from the mouth of the downed sergeant. Biggers shouting, “Back off!”

Another man entered the room then. His uniform was that of some high rank. Maybe a commander, Socrates thought. This man didn't say anything, but his presence brought silence to the angry men in the room.

“Biggers,” the commander said. “Bring him down the hall, to alpha room.”

“He hit Sergeant Taylor,” a uniform complained to his commander.

“Somebody had to one day,” the commander replied.

Socrates' hands were freed and he was sitting in a fancy wooden chair. Detectives Biggers and Beryl stood around him while the captain sat behind a simple table before a window that looked out on a brick wall.

“What are we going to do now, Fortlow?” the commander asked.

Socrates, who felt like he was dreaming, said nothing.

“Answer the man,” Inspector Beryl, another old aquaintance, demanded.

“Where's my sign?” Socrates asked.

“It was destroyed during recovery,” Beryl said. “Now answer the commander.”

“Commander,” Socrates repeated the word.

“You in some serious shit, Fortlow,” Biggers said. “You better fly right.”

“What you want?” Socrates was looking directly into the black policeman's eyes.

“Have you ever been arrested by Officer Cardwell?” the commander asked.

“What's your name?” Socrates asked the man in charge.

“DeWitt,” the man said after a moment's silence. “Commander DeWitt.”

“Your officer Cardwell killed a boy. He done raped, beat, stole from an' threatened black men and women all over your precinct. I ain't never had nuthin' to do with him, though I considered killin' 'im at one time.”

Beryl asked, “But you didn't know him?” The short but well-built white man had his thumbs in his belt loops, which held back his jacket and revealed his shoulder holster and gun.

Socrates did not reply.

DeWitt stared at Socrates while Beryl and Biggers stared at him. Socrates wondered what they were doing when DeWitt said, “Book him on inciting to riot. Tell Mackie to put him in the special vault on three.”

Socrates stayed in a cell called the vault on the third floor of the police station for three days without seeing anyone. He had a commode and a sink. There was a cot to sleep on and pizza three times a day.

He didn't mind. He'd known from the day he was let out of prison that he'd be back in a lockup somewhere. It was nice to be alone without responsibility or noise. It was a real vacation, just like he told Marty he'd take.

For the first time in his life Socrates had leisure time. There was light and food and there were no guards or fellow prisoners to negotiate. There was no job to go to, no cans to collect. There was no booze to get him hungover. And if there were screams in the night, they were too far away for him to hear them.

He didn't eat the pizza.

All he did was sit and think about what had happened.

“All them men and women, white and black, police and civilian ready to go to war,” he said to Darryl a few weeks later. “It was so much power, like fire out of nowhere. There was somethin' to that. Somethin' I always knew was there but I never really thought about it.”

But he had three days to think and remember. Three days to reflect on the fire he'd sparked. Socrates never expected anything to change. All he thought was that he had to stand up without killing. Because killing, even killing someone like Cardwell, was a mark on your soul. And not only on you but on all the black men and women who were alive, and those who were to come after, and those who were to come after that too.

But there was power in his standing up. Power in words and pictures just like the crazy self-centered Lavant Hall had said. And he had swung that power like a baseball bat.

At night Socrates attended his dreams almost as if he were awake and watching a movie screen. He saw the images of his mind and questioned them or laughed at them. He never lost the strand of his investigations during the whole three days he was the guest of John Law.

And then the police came to the room and took him to another room where he found Marty Gonzalez's cousin, the lawyer Ernesto Chavez.

“Mr. Fortlow,” the well-dressed lawyer said. His smile was perfect and his mustache was a razor's edge. “Looks like you're in the fire again.”

“I still cain't pay you, man,” Socrates said. He had to sit down because he was weak after walking down the stairs.

“You okay, bro?” the lawyer asked.

“Food ain't too good here,” Socrates said. “I want some'a Iula's corn bread. Yeah, that's what I need.”

“Well we'll see what we can do about that,” Ernesto said with an irrepressible smile. “And as far as money, I should be paying you for a chance like this.”

“Huh?”

“You're famous all over the world, Mr. Fortlow. China, France, everywhere. They got your picture holding up that sign on

Time

magazine and in the

New York Times.

Cardwell's history. And it was you wrote the book. You don't really need a lawyer. It's them who need the lawyers, man. You got them on the run.”

The video cameras that captured the image of the testimony against Cardwell had played on every TV station though they must have known it would cause violent tension in the black community. There had been demonstrations at the police station. Sporadic violence had broken out over the three days. The mayor himself had called Ernesto because he was the only lawyer on record to have represented Socrates in L.A.

“They shit on your rights and that Cardwell is a bad dude. Even the Republicans like you, man. You could run for office after some shit like that.” Ernesto smiled at his client, checked over his shoulder and then winked. “But I say you should go for the money, Mr. Fortlow. You could clean up after a mess like they made.”

“Can I get outta here?”

Ernesto snapped his fingers and cocked his head to indicate that it was already done.

Commander DeWitt apologized to Socrates on behalf of the police chief and the mayor.

“They have suspended Officer Cardwell,” he informed his recent prisoner. “I guess we never put together all of the information like you did on that sandwich board.”

If Socrates were to go by the tone of the commander's voice, instead of his words, he would have been looking for a fist rather than the handshake offered.

They removed Socrates by a side entrance and took him to the Saint-Paul Mortuary where his friend Topper had offered a place to stay.

“Reporters been callin',” the mortician said to his friend. “What are you going to tell them?”

“I ain't got nuthin' to tell the papers, man,” Socrates replied. “They can make up their own lies without me helpin'.”

“But, Mr. Fortlow. You got power now. You got the ear of the press. You could make a difference out here.”

“I know what you sayin', Nelson,” Socrates told his prosperous black friend. “But it ain't nuthin' I could say that they don't already know. Them reporters know all about Cardwell an' cops like him.They know all about men who been in prison. They already know. It's us who don't know.”

“Us?” Nelson Saint-Paul said. “Every black man, woman and child knows what it's like to be poor and mistreated and held back. Even me. You know they didn't wanna know about me at the funeral directors' society. I had to make all kindsa stink just to belong.”

Socrates looked at his small friend and shook his head. It wasn't a conscious move and he was sorry when he saw the pain in Saint-Paul's eyes.

“What do you mean that we're the ones who don't know?” Nelson asked again.

“We had the whole city scared, Nelson. But nuthin' changed. No one said, ‘Hey, lets get together an' vote or strike or just get together and say somethin' true.’ Me complainin' to some newspaper is like me tellin' the warden that I don't like his jail.”

“But this is different…” Nelson Saint-Paul began.

“Ain't nuthin' different. Just look out here in the street. No, Nelson. Me talkin' to the newspaper or the TV is just like if they made me into a cartoon. A goddamned cartoon.”

“They fired you,” Marty Gonzalez said on the phone. Socrates had called to see if there was any fallout from his being in the papers. “Mr. Ricci himself read the article that said you were a murderer and a produce manager in his store. Shit. I almost lost my own job. I'm sorry, Socco.”

“You don't have to be sorry, Marty,” Socrates consoled. “I knew it couldn't last. You know some men just born to be fools. And they signt me up when I was only a child.”

Socrates moved in with Luvia Prine for a while after his incarceration. She shooed away reporters and served his meals at eight, one, and six thirty. He didn't ask her for the respite. She called Howard Shakur and told him to pass the offer on.

Their relationship was cold because Luvia would never approve of a man like him.

“But you did what you could and they treatin' you hard,” she told him on the first day he moved in. “And Right would'a asked me to shelter you I know. And even if he's dead I will still respect his wishes in my home.”

Socrates was looking out of his window on Marvane Street while Hoagland Mars played his trumpet across the hall. The music was so loud that Socrates barely heard the weak knock at his door.

“Yeah?”

“It's me. Darryl.”

“Come on in.”

He was an inch taller than the last time Socrates had seen him. His chest was wider too.

“Hey,” the boy said.

Socrates nodded.

“What you lookin' at?”

“Just outside,” the ex-convict said.

“I went over your house to feed Killer and Mr. Malone said that you went here.”

“Yeah.” Socrates nodded again.

“Mr. Malone said that you could come back though. He said that you'n him could work sumpin' out on the rent if you ain't got a job.”

“He said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Damn.”

“What you gonna do now?” Darryl asked. Socrates could see that he was worried.

“I lost my job.”

“I know. You gonna try'n work someplace else?”

“Got to eat,” Socrates said. “An' if you wanna eat then you got to work.”

“How you gonna get a job?”

“Sit down, boy. Sit in that chair.”

Darryl obeyed and Socrates sat on the sill of the open window.

“I got some money put away. I got enough for a year or so if I don't eat too many steaks. You know, it was the money they give me for movin'.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I'll go back home, back to King Malone's place. Maybe if I take enough time I can figure out a business or sumpin'.”

“Like what?”

“I'ont know. But not where I'm workin' for somebody who if they find out who I am they gonna let me go. 'Cause you know there ain't nuthin' wrong with me.”

“But you ain't gonna leave?” Darryl asked nervously.

“Leave where?”

“Howard said that the best thing for you to do is to get out of California. He said that they know who you are now and once they know that about a black man he got to go.”

“A smart man maybe,” Socrates agreed. “But I ain't all that smart.”

“You smart. You the smartest man I know,” Darryl said. “Not like in a book maybe but books cain't make you smart anyways.”

“I'm not leavin', Darryl. I'ma stay right here or maybe down at King Malone's. Some place. And I'm gonna do sumpin' too.”

“What?”

“Ever since I saw all those people jump up to save me from the cops I knew that there was sumpin' goin' on. Not like Lavant says. Not like Nelson Saint-Paul says neither. Poster board don't get it. Goin' on TV with white people don't get it neither. You cain't see it or show it, not yet.”

“Then what if you cain't say it or see it?”

“You got to dream it. You got to make it up. And when you get it right then it'll be there.”

Luvia brought up lemonade and ginger snaps for the man and boy. After a little coaxing Darryl started to talk about his grades and his new girlfriend. Socrates listened happily.

After the boy had gone Socrates laid back on the bed and listened to Hoagland Mars practicing across the hall. It was a sweet sound from a sour man but it was better than any radio.

“It's just that one sweet note,” his aunt Bellandra said in his dreams. “Just that one sweet note and everything is sometimes turnt around.”