Walter Mosley

by Socrates Fortlow 02 - Walkin' the Dog

  “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.