The Right Mistake (12 page)
On the street he took a deep breath and exhaled through a grin. He thought about Luna, about how she would have been proud of him, about how she would love him even though he was frightened and foolish.
“I evah tell you what I always thought the Big Nickel was?” Billy Psalms asked Socrates that evening at the philosopher’s oneroom home behind his patron’s house. His small garden house was more of a retreat than a domicile these days. He spent so much time at the Big Nickel meeting with community people and lawyers that he only made it home a few nights a week.
Socrates had told Billy everything, even about the revelations he’d had with Luna.
“No, man,” Socrates said. “What’s that?”
“That it was like a slave ship only in reverse.”
“How so?”
“When they took us off the ship they separated us like you
said. But now, all these decades and centuries later you done gathered us up and put us back on the boat. We leavin’ an’ the boss man don’t know what to do.”
Socrates sipped his red wine from a crystal goblet that Leanne Northford had given him. He stared at William Herrington Psalms III and shook his head.
“Why ain’t you at the track today, Billy?”
The gambler laughed at that answer to his deep thought. “You know, Socco,” he said, “the more I hang out with you the
less I feel the need to take a chance.”
“You a fool, Billy Psalms.”
“What about you then?”
“I’m right there with you.”
1.
“Socrates,” a voice said somewhere up ahead, maybe around the corner at the end of the corridor.
He was on his way down the long hall, flanked by Hennie Brown and Bertrand Sawman, two guards who he’d known longer than any other person-not-a-convict. They hadn’t told him where they were taking him but his hands were shackled and his ankles were chained together. This circumstance filled the convict with glee but he didn’t show it.
Brown had been nineteen years at the prison. Sawman had seen twenty-one birthdays come and go since donning the graygreen uniform. But Socrates had them both beat. He was at the twenty-seven-year mark and counting.
He was happy because the chains on his feet meant that he was going to see the warden. That walk unnerved many a hardened con but Socrates wasn’t worried about the punishment he might receive. He only wanted a glance out the window.
For eight years Bearclaw, Socrates’ third warden, would call convicts to his office in order to discipline them. The offender would be made to sit in an oak chair before the oak desk where, through the window behind Arnold Bearclaw, he would be able to see a small valley where there was a power line and a stream. For more than half the year the window was open and errant sounds would come in. Birds and the sound of cars from an unseen parking lot below. Terry Blanderman swore he once heard a woman singing—a real woman, he’d said.
Socrates would have shanked a man if it meant that when he’d go before Bearclaw for discipline he could be sure that the woman would be singing. It would be worth a hundred and eighty days of darkness to hear an actual voice of the opposite sex.
According to custom the guards secured the left ankle manacle to an iron eye in the floor before the warden entered. That way the prisoner had no chance of jumping the head man before the guards could club him down.
This too made sense. A great many cons spent entire days writing letters to the warden or painting pictures of him. They talked about him and loved or hated him like they did the father who abandoned them or beat them or their mothers. The warden, whoever he was at the time, was an unhealthy abscess on the minds of many convicts. But Socrates only cared about that window.
He was forty-eight years old and had spent more than half of his life in prison. He would never be free, never be free . . .
“Socrates, wake up.”
“Life,” Judge Arrant had said and life he would spend without complaint or appeal.
He had killed and that was his punishment.
Socrates never claimed he was innocent, never bragged about his crimes. He didn’t hate the warden or his own father but he wanted a look out of that open window and hear a car parking and maybe a woman humming some popular song.
The warden was tall, big boned, and black. He’d been a soldier, a police captain, and now he was boss of seven thousand felons.
Beyond him was the window. It was open maybe a foot and a half. Outside the sun shone between gray clouds. There was rain falling in the distance.
A bird called and Socrates had to concentrate in order to stifle his smile. You could never show a man what made you happy because then that man had full power over you.
Socrates concentrated on his stern expression, exulting on the inside when another jay cried out an answer. He could smell the rain and feel a slight breeze between the various loops of iron and his exposed skin.
It was the only word the convict had heard. He tried to figure out the sentence that it came from but could not and he wasn’t about to ask.
“Did you hear me?” the warden asked.
“Socrates, wake up,” Luna said.
“I said . . . has been granted . . .”
“. . . it’s Darryl,” Luna said.
He opened his eyes. The dream had stopped mid-image not
because of the name but the tone in Luna’s hard young voice. The dream was gone and sleep was too. All that was left was the fear he’d felt when the warden, uncharacteristically, repeated his sentence.
The birds stopped singing and the rain reached the prison. Sawman closed the window and Socrates stopped breathing for a long span of seconds. It had been the most frightening moment in his life.
“He been shot.”
2.
It was 1:06 a.m. but Leanne Northford was already at the emergency room; she and Cassie Wheaton, Ron Zeal, Billy Psalms, and even Chaim Zetel, the septuagenarian Jew from the west side of town.
She came running at Socrates, throwing her arms around him, throbbing with hysteria and sobs.
Myrtle was forty-something, more than twice Darryl’s age, but she was his woman. Socrates had expected the relationship to founder but Darryl kept going back and she did everything in her power to hold onto him.
“What happened, Myrtle?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m the one that called her, man,” Ron Zeal said.
The powerful young killer stared at his elder with less emotion showing in his face than Socrates had offered up to the warden when he was sent there to be punished.
“One’a my boys called me when he heard about it. He knew I had put out the word to let Darryl alone.”
“Who?” Socrates asked.
“I’ont know yet, man. But I will.”
A white man with gray hair and a white smock came through the swinging doors behind Zeal. The man walked up to Socrates. “Are you the guardian?” he asked.
“I have to ask you about the insurance,” the doctor said when they were seated in a tiny, cluttered cubicle away from the bustle of the late night tragedies of the emergency room.
“Why?”
“We have to know how this is being paid for.”
“That gonna change how he get treated in here?” “Doctor,” Chaim Zetel said. He had come up on them silently.
“Darryl has been severely wounded,” the doctor said, business behind him. “He’s been shot twice. In the hip and chest.”
“He gonna make it?”
“Maybe not.”
“But you want to make sure I can pay even before you let him die.”
“Mr. Fortlow,” Chaim said.
“What?”
“Will you, will you let me speak to the good doctor alone for a moment please?”
Billy Psalms had found an all-night coffee shop and bought coffee and plenty enough doughnuts for everyone, even people who had nothing to do with Darryl.
There were three gunshot wounds brought in that night; batterings and car accidents and people suffering from ailments who didn’t belong there but they had no doctors or insurance and so when symptoms flared they came to see some stranger to give them medicine and advise them to find a physician of their own. Myrtle cried on Socrates’ shoulder and more and more members from the Thinkers’ Meeting showed up. Socrates had other friends but the Thinkers had a call sheet and everyone associated with the Thursday night meetings knew how to get in touch with the others.
Socrates was like a dusky spider at the center of a web that went all over the city. He sat patiently at that midpoint thinking about Bearclaw’s window and how lovely it was.
One man had been stabbed but he said that he’d fallen on the knife. A woman who had two swollen eyes swore that she’d tripped because she was drunk.
“Socrates?”
Myrtle was asleep on his shoulder and his people were all around him. Chaim Zetel had put his small and powerful hand on Socrates’ free arm.
“Can I speak to you alone?” the old tinkerer asked. When the ex-con moved Myrtle woke up.
“What is it? What happened?” she cried.
“Nothing, Miss Brown,” Zetel said. “He’s on life-support.
Nothing has changed.”
“Where you goin’ then?” she exclaimed. “I’m comin’ wit’ you.” “Wait here, Myrtle,” Socrates commanded softly. “Just sit here
an’ I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“I’ll sit wit’ her,” Luna said as she lowered into the vacated
chair. She took Myrtle’s hands in hers.
“I have one every day,” the small man said, looking up, smiling. “Benson and Hedges. My wife tells me it will kill me and I tell her that she will kill me with her worries.”
“How is Fanny?”
“She sends her love for Darryl and you.”
“What you got to tell me, Chaim?”
It was nighttime on the street. Few cars passed and there was
no ambulance coming or going at the moment.
“There is a doctor named Laird in West Los Angeles,” the old
man said. “I am told that he is the best for operations like the
one Darryl needs.”
“How much?”
“They are coming for him now. Dr. Laird told me that he has a
busy week but he could do the operation at five.”
“How much?” Socrates asked again.
“I have a grandson who studied under Laird,” Chaim said.
“The doctor knew your name from the court case in the papers.
He thinks like us.”
“You ain’t gonna tell me?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Dreaming again. In chains again. Sitting in that chair with no one in the room and the window open wide. Socrates watched a bank of clouds move excruciatingly slowly over the hills, toward the sun. There were a thousand birds singing and Diana Ross too.
He opened his eyes mid-dream. No one had called his name. This was a tactic he’d developed in prison. He’d wake up now and then—a sneak thief on consciousness.
Chaim was sitting next to him in the pleasant waiting room. The air-conditioning was on. Classical music was playing. There were tasteful magazines, with smiling white women on the covers, strewn across the coffee table before him.
“Up to the shop,” Chaim said. “I have some children coming in this afternoon. He’s seeing to them.”
“Ronnie’s workin’ for you now?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen an’ I didn’t even know it?”
“You are a busy man, Mr. Fortlow. You don’t have time for everything anymore.”
“Busy man? I used to spend all day walkin’ around collectin’ bottles then spent the night drinkin’ wine an’ playin’ dominoes wit’ my friends. ’Fore that I was up in prison countin’ the days, hours, minutes, and sometimes even the seconds.”
A door next to the nurse’s window opened and a white man, colored copper by the sun, came out. He wore a white doctor’s jacket and alligator shoes.
Dr. Laird’s cornflower blue eyes clashed with his tan. His smile was brilliant and his grip strong enough for Socrates to feel.
“He’s going to live, Mr. Fortlow.”
He was back in Warden Bearclaw’s office being given his freedom, only this time he felt the joy rise up in his chest like a big red balloon.
“You know what, Doctor?”
“What’s that, Mr. Fortlow?”
“I need to sit down.”
Chaim Zetel, Dr. Laird, and even the small Asian woman behind the admitting window smiled at his words. Socrates stumbled over to the chair and slumped down. He pressed his left palm hard against his forehead and groaned.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the doctor had been cutting all day.
“He’s breathing on his own and the bullets are out,” Laird was saying. “His lung should heal up just fine. You’re lucky your friend brought him here to me.”
Socrates smiled. “You the best, huh, Doc?”
“I was today.”
“. . . an’ that old white lady come ovah ev’ryday wit’ cakes and’a puddin’ made outta noodles an’ raisins,” Darryl was saying to Socrates from his hospital bed. “She said—”
“Fanny,” Socrates said.
“Huh?”
“That old white lady, her name is Fanny, Mrs. Zetel, Chaim’s
wife.”
“Yeah, yeah right. She Jewish huh?”
Socrates nodded.
“They got funny names.”
“More’n we got?”
“Naw. But different.”
“Chaim an’ Fanny are good people.”
“They wanna take me in for a while till I get bettah.” “What you think about that?”
“That’a be good I think. You know I cain’t even walk yet.” Socrates smiled at the boy’s survival.
“People been comin’ ovah ev’ryday from the Thursday night
meetin’. Miss Wheaton an’ Marianne Lodz come. Luna here ev’ry othah day. I like her. She easy to sit wit’ ’cause you don’t have to be talkin’ the whole time.”
Darryl glanced away at an imagined fly buzzing past. “What about her?” the boy asked.
“She come by?”
The young man rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
Socrates thought that he would have turned his back if it weren’t for the bandages and straps holding him in place.
“I wish I was like you,” Darryl said.
“Old and fat with no children and not a nickel to my name?”
“You got the Big Nickel.”
“Or it’s got me.”
Darryl blinked, thinking about his mentor’s comment. He blinked again.
“When I told her that I was goin’ to stay wit’ Chaim for a while she said that I should come home wit’ her. I told her that she work an’ I couldn’t even get out the bed for at least two weeks.”
“What she say to that?”
“That she get friends to stay wit’ me when she weren’t there. I told her that was stupid an’ that Chaim’s wife was already home an’ she had a lady to help her with the housework. But Myr got all mad an’ left an’ haven’t called me since.”
Socrates’ mind brought him back to the day he crossed the road in front of the prison. He stood there waiting for the bus to come. This was one of those potent moments where he was between one place and the next. Darryl, he thought, was at a moment like that.
“You makin’ the right choice, D-boy.”
“How you know?”
“Somebody shot you three blocks from Myrtle’s house. You don’t know who it was. You cain’t go back there till we get this fixed.”
A shiver went through Darryl’s fragile frame.
“I’ll talk to Myrtle,” Socrates said. “I’ll tell her to leave you be till you can carry the weight.”
“You ain’t gonna tell her I’m scared?” “Naw, man. I’m’a tell her that you smart.”