The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  “Then maybe you wrong,” Billy said.

  “How could he be wrong,” Socrates said, “when we all know that pain is the only way most men learn anything? A dog that bites, a match that burn. You learn right away from sumpin’ like that.”

  “Some men never learn,” the elder Twiner proclaimed.

  “That’s right,” Martin agreed.

  “Don’t mean he didn’t make the right mistake,” Socrates said. “Just that he too stupid to get somethin’ out of it. But there still something there he could’a known.”

  Even as Socrates spoke his mind was far beyond the conversation in that room. He was thinking about Darryl and all the things that the boy had yet to learn. All these years he’d sat at Socrates’ feet trying to feel better about himself.

  Socrates had murdered a man, raped the man’s girlfriend, and then murdered her. He’d been drunk but that was no excuse. He’d spent twenty-seven years in prison but that was not justice. No, he lived by the good graces of his benefactor, who let him stay in this small garden cottage in the middle of SouthCentral L.A. But that wasn’t right either.

  Socrates realized that he’d been acting a fool with his friends; even worse, he was wasting time.

  “Ain’t nuthin’ Fred Bumpus could learn worth the house his granddaddy built,” Comrade said from someplace far away.

  “What you say, CJ?” Socrates asked.

  “That bitch done stole his family house,” Comrade spat. “The lesson is too late.”

  “It ain’t nevah too late,” Socrates said slowly, softly—like a memory. “Not till the last man that knew your name is dead.”

  Socrates looked down at the wood beneath his well-worn shoes.

  Martin Orr said, “Well, I better be gettin’ outta here. I’ma be lookin’ for pickup work in the mornin’ down near Exposition. Sometimes they need a glass man.”

  The other men left soon after that. Socrates nodded when they said good-bye to him but he wasn’t listening. Somehow he knew that this part of his life was over. There would be no more games of dominoes or bull sessions in his home.

  “Socrates . . . Socrates . . .”

  He looked up to see the boy.

  “What?”

  “You okay?”

  “Where is everybody?” the big man asked.

  “They all gone. I’m goin’ over Myrtle Brown’s house,” the boy said. “I’ll see ya later on this week all right?”

  “Myrtle Brown?”

  “Uh-huh.” Darryl ducked his head and turned his chin toward his shoulder.

  “She’s at least forty.”

  The boy had no response.

  Socrates wanted to talk about it, to advise the boy, but he couldn’t find the words. Everything had been sucked out of him. He considered grabbing Darryl by the shoulder but his hands were like heavy weights on his knees.

  “What?” Darryl asked after two minutes of this silence.

  “I was wrong to bully CJ like I did,” Socrates confessed.

  “He a fool,” Darryl said.

  “And the next time you act a fool would I be right to shame you?”

  “If I deserve it.”

  “No, boy.” Socrates sat up and touched Darryl’s elbow. “It’s you and me out there in the world and in here too.”

  “You want me to stay?”

  “Naw. You go on if you want. Go on.”

  2. From the time Darryl left, about four in the afternoon, until sunset Socrates sat in his chair looking at his shoes. He wore size fourteens that were extra wide. Those same black shoes had carried him for years. They walked him out of Indiana and into Watts. They strode with him down block after block when he collected bottles and they brought him home every night when he lived in a gap between the outer walls of two abandoned stores. They’d taken him to the supermarket where he’d worked as a box boy until they had to fire him.

  He’d worn them the day that he killed a powerful young thug in a lonely alley near his old makeshift home. They marched with him in the evil boy’s funeral procession where his mother cried from grief and his grandmother shed tears of joy.

  He’d shined those shoes every week and seven times he had the soles replaced. There were a thousand cracks in the shapeless black leather and fitted and sewn cowhide patches where his baby toes had burst through.

  Socrates stared at his shoes hoping that they would give up some secret. They’d been with him all the years since prison, had been silent accomplices to blood that he’d shed. His shoes were closer to him than any woman, even closer than Darryl. He’d kept them because there was rarely enough money for a new pair and even when he had a few extra dollars there were no shoes made well enough to carry him half as far.

  Socrates sat in his chair until the light failed and his feet merged with the darkness gathering on the floor. The night crowded in around him and the windows took on the weak glow of far away streetlights and a wan quarter moon.

  In the darkness Socrates forgot his shoes. Now his attention fastened onto his breathing. In and out, his lungs working like a bellows, his heart a pounding blacksmith’s hammer. He could feel his broad nostrils flaring and the darkness of his skin.

  Somewhere along the way he’d gone wrong. Before the murders, before his wild youth. By the time Socrates was incarcerated he was already a bad man. He’d earned his imprisonment, paid for it with a score of robberies, beatings, and lies.

  “Some people bad since the day they open their eyes,” his hard-minded Aunt Bellandra used to say. “Some people study evil. They cain’t he’p it.”

  “Mama says I’m bad to the bone,” young Socrates had told his aunt in her kitchen while she cooked and he sat on the high stool.

  “That don’t make you bad,” Bellandra said. She was making corn cakes for her nephew.

  “But what if I am?” the boy asked. “I hit Cindy Rogers ’cause she wouldn’t gimme some’a her candy.”

  “You know what to do about that.”

  “What?”

  “You know,” the powerful ghost spoke in the darkness of the room.

  “Don’t do it again,” the man said.

  “That’s just right,” Bellandra replied over the decades that separated them. “You got the will to do right. Ain’t nobody could stop you if you set your mind to it. Don’t strike that girl again. Don’t let the other boys get to ya. Make up your mind that you would rather die than be a tyrant.”

  “But I don’t wanna die,” the nine-year-old had answered.

  “We all gonna die, child. Ain’t no relief from that. Men an’ women, boys an’ girls, even babies die. They die all the time. An’ poor peoples die most of all. That’s ’cause they’s more of us. We got more than our share of sickness and bullies like you been to that girl.”

  “So I am bad?”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “But I am today.”

  He could see that even now, when he was so far away from the lives he’d shared and shattered, he was still bullying, still using his fists and his hardened will to break down those he disdained.

  “It’s all been wrong,” he said aloud in the empty room that was haunted by a woman who never gave up on him and never gave him a break. “But wrong is all right if you know it.”

  “All you got to do is turn around,” the ghost whispered. “Turn around and you will be the man I know you can be.”

  “And then will the people I hurt forgive me?” the man asked.

  “No.”

  “Will mama love me?”

  “Never.”

  Socrates didn’t sleep that night. He sat in his chair, got up to urinate now and again, drank half a bottle of red wine, and wondered at the strong alchemy it would take to make something right out of something wrong.

  “I thought I wanted forgiveness,” the man whispered in the dark.

  “Man don’t have time for somebody else to say he okay,” Bellandra’s spirit replied just as if she was still alive. “An’ God don’t care. All a man can do is
make a stand.”

  “But I’m just a boy,” the child had said all those years ago.

  “But you can be a man,” Bellandra told him.

  “How?”

  “By knowin’ what’s right, by livin’ by that even though it takes you away from your dreams,” she said. “By puttin’ away your bullyin’ an’ hate. Man can on’y do right. It’s the scared boy do wrong.”

  “But what’s right?”

  Bellandra’s hard face turned to a smile. She held a warm corn cake to the child’s lips. The man bit into the darkness.

  When the sun came up Socrates found himself walking down toward Florence. Three blocks past the wide boulevard he turned right. There he came to First Victory Rooming House—a place where poor men and women could still buy a room for fourteen dollars a night.

  Baths cost sixty cents and there was only a single pay phone. Scott Bontille was the daytime manager.

  Socrates approached his office at the far end of the first floor

  hallway.

  “Mr. Fortlow,” Bontille said. “No rooms to let this mornin’.

  Maybe you could come back in the afternoon.”

  Bontille was a squat specimen with a face shaped like a chisel

  and an advancing hairline that made him resemble pictures of

  certain rattlesnakes that Socrates had seen.

  The house manager got pleasure out of lording his power over

  those that were less fortunate than himself. On the street

  Socrates ignored him but now he felt anger rising in his chest. Between his anger and his mission Socrates was momentarily

  frozen, trapped by his desire to strike Scott.

  “You know I already got a house, Mr. Bontille.”

  “You don’t have no regular job,” the light-skinned manager

  replied, his natural smirk opening into a leer. He was missing

  one upper and two lower teeth. The rest had been stained brown

  from cigarettes and too much coffee. “And the last I heard people still had to pay rent fo’ a place to sleep.”

  “I’m lookin’ for Freddy Bumpus,” Socrates said then. “I hear

  he’s taken up residence with you.”

  As the words came from his lips Socrates blessed his shoes.

  They’d taken him to a new place on that long road. His muscles

  relaxed and he no longer wished to throw Scott Bontille down

  the hall. He smiled.

  “What’s funny?” Bontille asked.

  “Us.”

  “What us?”

  “You’n me, Mr. Bontille. Here we are doin’ our dead masters’

  work an’ here they been in the ground so long their bones have

  turned to dust.”

  “What kinda mess you talkin’, Socrates?” the snake-faced man

  asked.

  “Just mess,” the ex-con agreed. He felt good saying these

  words. “Just mess.”

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice answered when Socrates knocked on door D3 on the second floor of the Victory.

  “Socrates Fortlow.”

  “What you want?”

  “Open the door, Freddy. I wanna talk to ya.”

  “About what?”

  There was a time, an eon and a day before, when Socrates would have been tempted to knock hard enough to shake the door off its hinges. But now he just said, “About your grandfather’s house.”

  There was a moment of quiet then. It was a Saturday and the sun was muted through a small window at the end of the shabby and narrow hallway. Birds were singing their hearts out in a fruitless apple tree that stood just outside the glass.

  Socrates flexed his toes against the tip of his shoes and smiled. The door came open.

  Fred Bumpus was a chocolate colored man built for the long haul but not for strength. He’d been forty-three for six months, though he looked older. Bony but not thin, Bumpus was tall and lean. His pupils were brown and the whites of his eyes were a lighter brown. His face was mature and haggard. He held his head hangdog style telling anyone who bothered to look that he’d been defeated by life.

  “What about my house?” he asked.

  “I wanted to use part of it for this idea I got last night.”

  “Ain’t mine no mo’,” Fred said. He moved as if to close the door on the big man.

  “Yo’ granddaddy built that house,” Socrates said. “His name was Mr. Bumpus too.”

  Bumpus lifted his head to regard his visitor.

  “What you sayin’?”

  “That that’s a nice house,” Socrates replied. “You got them two lots an’ that addition on the side is almost a full home on its own.”

  “Is,” Fred said with wan enthusiasm. “Got its own kitchen and bedrooms an’ a toilet too. Its own doors, front and back. If that ain’t a house I don’t know what is.”

  “I’d like to use that add on,” Socrates said.

  “For what?”

  “Meetins’.”

  “What kinda meetins’?”

  Socrates felt the smile but doubted that it made itself evident. He hunched his shoulders slightly and showed Fred Bumpus his palms.

  “House ain’t mine no mo’,” Fred said again.

  “You signed it ovah to her?”

  “No.”

  “You been to court?”

  “No. Her lawyer just send me the papers. I’m s’posed to sign ’em. Too-Tight tole me he was gonna kick my ass I didn’t sign ’em.”

  “Let me in, Freddy. Let’s sit down an’ talk.”

  3. The hardwood that Albert Bumpus used to build his house was stained to make it look like a mountain retreat and treated to resist the elements. This main house, which was on the north side of the property, was three stories high with a slanted green tile roof and windows bordered in red. A white garage was attached to the main house and then there was the add-on house on the other side of the garage, in the lot that Albert bought when he couldn’t get the buildin’ bug outta his hands and shoulders.

  The second home was slender and only two stories. Socrates had no idea what wood the shorter abode was made from because Albert had completely encased it with hammered and treated tin siding. It was like a small castle gleaming on that street of shabby homes and plaster apartment buildings.

  The street was filled with black people and Chicanos but Socrates only had eyes for the Bumpus compound.

  It was one of the few structures that a solitary man had built for himself and his family in the whole community; certainly the only one that had passed down two generations.

  Socrates walked up to the front door of the big house and knocked even though there was a doorbell.

  He would have liked to have been there with Darryl but he hadn’t seen the boy for a few days.

  He was wondering if he should go see Myrtle Brown and ask after the boy when the door came open. Too-Tight Floyd Grimm stood there bleary eyed, wearing blue boxer shorts and a gray sweater.

  “What?” he asked, none too friendly.

  “Mornin’, Floyd,” Socrates said. “I’ve come to see Van.”

  “What the fuck about?” Floyd leaned forward, holding onto the doorknob. Socrates figured that this pose was supposed to be threatening.

  “I have a message . . . from her husband.”

  “I’m her husband now,” Floyd said, leaning even further.

  “Not unless you wanna get her put away for bigamy you ain’t,” Socrates said. “I knew a few men got put in the joint ovah bigamy.”

  “He s’posed t’sign them papers,” Floyd said in a tone meant to frighten Fred—wherever he was.

  “He left outta here so quick he didn’t have time to pick up a pencil,” Socrates said.

  “That s’posed to be funny?”

  “Lemme talk to Van,” Socrates said again.

  There was no threat in his tone but Floyd let up on the doorknob and swung back into the house.

  “Vanessa!” he shouted. “Socrate
s Fortlow down here.”

  “What he want?”

  “I’on’t know.”

  Floyd turned away from the door and moved out of sight.

  Socrates stood in the doorway looking at the messy sitting room it opened upon. There were clothes and papers, dirty dishes and brown paper bags everywhere. The former box boy wondered what Albert Bumpus’s grandfather would have thought of the mess.

  Socrates noticed a pair of pink slippers at the foot of a yellow padded chair. They looked like tropical fish sleeping under the shadow of a gaudy stone.

  While Socrates stared at the shoes a pair of bare feet appeared and stepped into them.

  Vanessa Tremont was tall and wrapped in a purple gown that had a satin finish. The robe accented her voluptuous figure. She had a lazy eye which made her look both distracted and sexy. Her hair was a mane of brown ringlets but it was too early for her to have put on makeup.

  “What you want?” she asked, firing up a cigarette with a bullet-shaped lighter.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I ain’t dressed.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “What you want?” Vanessa asked again.

  That’s when Socrates’ heart picked up its pace. Up until now it had all been a game. He was just taking steps one after the other with nothing standing in his way. The Legal Assistance Office, the lease Fred Bumpus had signed. All of that was just a list of hollow details like listening to men sit around street corners and barber shops talking about what they would do if only. . . .

  But the next step wasn’t just an empty motion. Socrates was about to do something. The anticipation immobilized him.

  “Well?” Vanessa asked.

  For a moment more Socrates hesitated. He remembered the day that he was released from prison. He wasn’t ready to be out among civilians. He’d gone to prison for murder. He’d killed again in the joint. He’d lived by brutality and violence; that was all he had ever known. And then they opened the door and let him free on the world.

  “Are you slow?” Vanessa Tremont asked.

  Socrates reached into the left pocket of his jeans jacket and came out with a copy of the lease. He handed the paper to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “The lease to this property.”

  “What the fuck you talkin’ about? This is my house.”

  “No,” Socrates said. “This house belongs to your husband. He owned it before you were married and your name doesn’t show up anywhere on its papers.”