The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  Socrates didn’t finish because Luna put her hand over his mouth.

  She crawled up on top of him. They were both naked in the night.

  Luna hugged his big, black, bald head to her chest with all of her considerable strength. He brought his powerful hands to her sides as if holding her in place.

  “You meet all kindsa women now that they know about your place,” she said, her voice muffled by the embrace. “They all want to be wit’ you now.”

  “If I was another kinda man I might give ’em a tumble too,” Socrates admitted. “You know some men need it day and night. But that ain’t me, L.”

  “You gonna be on that TV show and at that breakfast at the mayor’s mansion. What are they gonna think when they find out that yo’ woman’s a ho?”

  “I’ont know what they gonna think, Baby. I’on’t know what they gonna say. But . . . if you gonna be my woman then I don’t care. You gonna have my baby. You gonna hold me an’ want me to be wit’ you. That’s heaven for a man like me don’t even deserve to be free, not really.”

  Luna raised up and brought both her fists down on his chest.

  “Then why you leavin’ me?” she screamed.

  “I’m just goin’ away for a few days with my friend,” he said. “You right about the TV an’ the mayor. I need to get away an’ clear my head. I ain’t runnin’ aftah nobody an’ I sure’n hell ain’t runnin’ away from you.”

  “You leavin’ in just a little bit,” she said. “You leavin’ me alone wit’ my baby inside me.”

  “You got the key to this cottage an’ the key to the Big Nickel. You got most’a my money and all my friends’ numbahs.”

  “But I ain’t got you.” There were tears in her eyes. Socrates had not seen Luna cry before.

  There came a knock on the door of the small garden house. Socrates got up from his bed and went to the door. He cracked it open and spoke in a deep tone. Then he came back and took his pants from the closet.

  “Don’t go,” Luna said.

  “I got to, Baby. I already made plans with Billy.”

  He put on his T-shirt and then a long sleeved blue work shirt.

  He was tying his shoes, shoes that were older than the girl in his bed, when she said, “If you go I won’t be here when you come back.”

  It was the old Luna talking, the girl he had met on the first night of the Thursday meetings, the child who could cut a man’s throat and leave him bleeding in the street with no mercy or guilt.

  “That’s okay, Luna. You could be somewhere else if you wanna be. But believe this—I will come and get you, wherever you are. You can put money on that.”

  2. “Where you get a bright red 1969 Cadillac look like it just come off the showroom floor?” Socrates asked Billy when they were on their way at 3:00 a.m.

  “You,” Billy Psalms said.

  “Me? I’m the one got your money, man.”

  “Yeah,” Billy replied, a conditional tone in his voice. “Yeah

  you do but you still bought me this car. This automobile, these clothes, my new apartment, and even my new job wit’ Sheryl Limon.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” Billy said as if that one word explained everything. They both went silent as Billy drove his big red Caddy toward

  the ocean. They would pick up the Pacific Coast Highway and drive all the way north beside the vast Pacific listening to old soul music and breathing the salt air.

  Two hours later they were a dozen miles north of Santa Barbara and the sun was only a threat behind the coastal mountains to their right. A James Brown compilation of greatest hits was pounding out rhythm on the CD player and the windows were open wide.

  “What you mean me?” Socrates asked as if Billy had only just spoken.

  “It’s hard to say, Brother,” Billy replied.

  He turned down the volume on the Godfather of Soul. “You changed my life but I cain’t put a finger on it. I cain’t point to this or that an’ say this is it.”

  “But this car cost money,” Socrates said. “Hard cash. You could say where that come from.”

  “Oh yeah,” Billy said. “That’s for sure. I got the money in Gardena . . . playin’ cards.”

  “Now how the fuck am I gonna have anything to do wit’ you winnin’ money out in Gardena?”

  “That’s just it, Socco. I don’t know. I mean you the first person evah in my life I trusted. That ain’t no lie. That’s a fact. An’ once I give you that money I made on the trifecta I was free.”

  “Free from what?”

  “Just free. I wasn’t worried ’bout a mothahfuckin’ thing. I haven’t been to the track more’n two three times since then. And then about a month ago I went down wit’ my girlfriend to Gardena ’cause her mother live out there. I sat around wit’ the old girl for a while but they wanted to be alone so I went and found me a bar. There was a casino next door so I sat down to a poker game. You know I don’t like poker but I can play.

  “Shit. I play like a mothahfuckah that day and night and the next day and the next night too. Denise come to take me outta there but when she see that big pile’a chips I had she went back home to her mama to wait and see if I hit it rich or went bust.” “Billy.”

  “What, Socco?”

  “What do I have to do with you plyin’ your trade?”

  “I don’t know but you do. You see I used to get in a sweat when I gambled. I had to win or my heart would sink. But out there in Gardena I didn’t care anymore. I just kept playin’ as long as I was winnin’. When the tide turned I laid them cards down. That’s you right there. You ain’t addicted to money, sex, or alcohol. You don’t even care if you live in a box next to the railroad tracks or a penthouse in the hills. Man shove a gun in your face an’ you shrug. I seen it. An’ if you see sumpin’ then you know sumpin’. That’s God’s honest truth right there.”

  The ocean was beginning to appear under the spreading light of dawn. Socrates was smiling and frowning at the same time.

  “How much you win?”

  “Eighty-six thousand dollars. Paid my taxes, bought this here car, rented me a real apartment, and put the rest in a checking account. Called Sheryl Limon an’ asked if I could be a cook at her caterin’ service. Told her I could work whenevah she want as long as it wasn’t on a Thursday night.”

  For the first time that early morning Socrates thought about Luna. He wondered where she was and how she was feeling.

  “That ain’t me, Billy,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “That’s why I like you, Socco.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you a lotta different men. You could sit in front’a all them people ev’ry Thursday, real people who done lived a lotta life, done seen everything men an’ women could know. They been in wars an’ schools an’ traveled round the world. But you stand up in front’a them an’ they sit up straight like kids in a classroom. They listen to you an’ learn sumpin’ else ev’ry minute.

  “But that’s not what I like most about you.”

  “No?” Socrates asked, the smile winning out over the frown.

  “Naw, man. What I like is that you the smartest man in the room but you push so hard that you could be wrong too. Like when Ron Zeal was talkin’ ’bout fightin’ for what’s ours an’ you gave the flo’ to Wan Tai. He said he could kick anybody’s ass in that room but he believed in passive defense. You knew Wan could say it better.

  “An’ sometimes you get worried an’ sometimes you just wrong.”

  “I nevah said I was perfect,” Socrates said.

  “Naw. But we all act like you are. But even though we do you nevah take the bait. You still talk from your heart and get suckered by life like all the rest of us.”

  “Billy, what are you sayin’, man?” Socrates yawned then. He realized that he had not slept at all.

  “I could see how much you wanted to stay away from Luna Barnet but that girl set her sites on you and you just a man.”

  Socrates raised his hand. Whether th
is was a threat or some kind of agreement he did not know.

  “Or like when you tell me that this Caddy is because’a me,” Billy continued. “You know better but you haven’t worked it out. You seen me before the Big Nickel an’ you see me now. You put me to work, Socco. An’ the more I worked the more I changed. Me an’ Darryl the only two you pulled outta the domino game an’ brought ovah to the nickel.”

  “I don’t have anything against our old friends, Billy.”

  “But why you drag me along? I could see wit’ Darryl, he’s like your son but you nevah even liked me all that much.”

  “But I knew that you brought sumpin’ to the table,” Socrates said. “You gotta sharp eye.”

  “You can say that and you still gonna sit there an’ tell me that you didn’t buy me this Caddy?”

  Socrates wanted to reply, to deny Billy’s claim. He wanted to say that the gambler was his own man and that he couldn’t, he shouldn’t claim that someone else was responsible for what happened to him. He wanted to say these things but sleep came up on him like a huge crocodile coming out from under a daydreaming bather.

  He was asleep but at the same time he was still aware of the world he passed through. He could feel the great, ancient ocean rocking next to them and the wind coming in from Billy’s open window. Sunlight warmed his right arm and music played softly on the car speakers. Speakers. The word, though unspoken, echoed in his chest and mind. The motor was humming to him, pulling him down from a scaffolding of thoughts and ideas. He tumbled peacefully through an air of unconsciousness. The fall would not hurt him, nothing would.

  Luna was crying somewhere, she had to be. She had gone too far and now the pain had gotten to her. She didn’t know how to let go for even a few days. She didn’t know how to trust a man that she also loved.

  “Socco. Cops,” he heard Billy say and was immediately awake, his dreams forgotten.

  The red Caddy swerved to the side of the highway. Socrates squinted in the bright sunlight.

  They were no longer next to the ocean. The landscape around them was comprised of green rolling hills with a cluster of cows here and there, and now and then a solitary oak.

  Through his side-mirror Socrates could see the highway patrolman coming toward his door. The ex-con went cold inside. His mind emptied itself of all contents. There never was a Big Nickel, a Thursday night, a Luna Barnet.

  “Please step out of the car,” the cop on Billy’s side said. “Here we go,” the gambler muttered under his breath.

  Socrates opened his door. When the patrolman saw his size and strength he took a step back and unholstered his gun. His brown eyes opened wide and for a moment he was speechless.

  “What are you doing here?” the cop asked once he had regained his composure.

  “Passin’ through,” Socrates said. He had already shown his state issued identification.

  “Is this your car?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s is it?”

  “My friend’s.”

  “It’s an expensive car.”

  “That’s how Billy rolls.”

  “Are you carrying drugs or guns?”

  “No.”

  “What would I find if I opened up the trunk?”

  “Trunk? I’ont even know what you’d find in the glove compartment, man.”

  They opened the trunk and the glove compartment. They looked under the seats and the white carpet that Billy had specially installed. They used a breathalyzer to make sure that the men weren’t drunk and they had Billy touch his nose and walk a straight line. They checked the men’s pockets and had them take off their shoes. And when they found nothing they arrested Billy and Socrates on suspicion of drug trafficking.

  At the station they separated the gambler and the philosopher. After a long spell in a locked room two men in suits came in to talk to Socrates. One suit was brown and the other green but the men were both white, middle-sized, mid-age, and sour.

  “What are you doing here in Loma Linda?” one cop asked. Socrates was thinking about his head being cradled against Luna’s breasts. He’d used his one call on her but she wasn’t answering.

  “Did you hear my partner?” Brown-suit asked. He had a whitehead pimple on the tip of his nose.

  Socrates made his face into a visage of innocent ignorance.

  “We can be polite or this can turn ugly,” the tow-headed green-suit said.

  Socrates laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Cain’t get no uglier than this, man. Arrested for drivin’ down the highway with no contraband. Damn. I might as well live in Russia.”

  The cop in the brown suit stood up. Socrates wondered if he was about to get slapped. He decided without even an elevation of his blood pressure that he would kill this man if he so much as laid a hand on him.

  The door to the locked room came open and a group of men and one woman walked in.

  There was an officer, maybe captain, in a very neat uniform, two lower ranked officers, a small man in a dapper gray-silk suit, and a tall white blonde wearing a peacock blue dress that was both careless and sexy.

  “Mr. Fortlow,” the dapper man said.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Tinheart. Mason Tinheart.”

  The name was familiar to the ex-con. “You the man Billy wanted me to meet.”

  “Yes.” Tinheart gave him a lawyer’s smile, noncommittal but intense. “Billy called us and we drove down to get you out of here.”

  The captain looked angry when he said, “Let him go Billings,” to the man in the green suit.

  “Okay, Captain,” the inquisitor said.

  It struck Socrates that the cops weren’t bothered; that they were just doing their job. Tomorrow they wouldn’t even be able to remember who it was that they had interrogated.

  The white woman was smiling at Socrates.

  “Mr. Psalms doesn’t want to press charges for wrongful arrest,” Tinheart was saying. He was both short and slight but there was an ease to his bearing that befitted a tall man. “Would you like to file a complaint?”

  Socrates smiled, thinking that Billy was following an unwritten, centuries-old code that said you never challenged a lion in his lair; and that black men in America were always strangers in the lion’s den.

  “Who are you?” Socrates asked the ranking officer.

  “Captain Stillman,” the officer said after a moment’s delay.

  Socrates rose to his feet. He was the biggest man in the room, and the baddest by his own reckoning.

  “Why your men arrest me? Why they take all my belongings and lock me up?”

  The Captain’s frown was meant to be an answer but Socrates wouldn’t let it go.

  “I asked you a question, man. Least you could do is answer me aftah keepin’ me bunged up in this room for the last six hours.”

  “There was a report that two men, two African-Americans, were supplying drugs to underage children in the community.”

  “And?” Socrates nudged.

  “And what?”

  “The only reason you arrested me and Billy was that we was two black men goin’ down the road?”

  “You fit the description.”

  “Can I see that?” Socrates asked.

  Tinheart gave a real smile then.

  “That’s police business. We don’t share that kind of information with suspects.”

  “That’s it? No more explanation?”

  “I’m not answerable to you, Fortlow.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Tinheart,” Socrates said. “I wanna press charges. I wanna know in this man’s court why he can arrest two black men for bein’ black men together.”

  The white woman’s mouth opened into an unanswered kiss.

  Socrates wondered where Luna would be sleeping that night.

  3. “Ron Zeal asked me where was Wan Tai at the seventh Thursday night meeting,” Socrates was saying in answer to Brigitta Brownlevy’s question, “that’s when I knew the Thursday night mee
ting was workin’ and that it was gonna last.”

  “It’s so wonderful,” she said, “like the ideal Athens rising up out of the shit.”

  Their eyes met across a round table at the hotel restaurant. San Francisco was only an hour’s drive from the Loma Linda jailhouse. Socrates took the time to fill out a complaint against the officers that arrested him and also the Captain who supported their actions.

  “What are the plans for your university?” Tinheart asked.

  In private Socrates had thought of the Big Nickel as a kind of college, a place of learning able to make that knowledge something real, but he’d never heard anyone else make this claim; no one except Peter Ford, the temporary boyfriend that Luna had brought by to make Socrates jealous. The boy had spoken about ancient Greek universities but there were other things going on in Socco’s heart that night.

  “Try’n make it a part of the life down there. Maybe make other places like it in Richmond and Oakland, Compton an’ maybe even East New York.”

  “Like a fast food burger joint,” Billy Psalms said.

  He winked at Brigitta but she was watching Socrates.

  And he was looking at her too.

  “We’re having a social justice meeting in Berkeley tomorrow,” Tinheart said. “I had asked Billy to bring you, just for you to see what we’re doing here.”

  Billy had told Socrates that Tinheart was a serious gambler. They had met once years before at a Vegas poker tournament and Billy had kept the lawyer’s card.

  “But after what I saw and heard today,” Tinheart continued, “I was hoping that you could speak a few minutes to our membership. We . . . we need to hear something new, something else.”

  “I ain’t a minister, Mason.”

  “We don’t need a sermon,” the lawyer replied. “Maybe just a few words. A minute.”

  After the dinner Tinheart took Socrates and Billy Psalms to an elevator that led to the forty-first floor of a downtown San Francisco building.

  “They got this many rooms?” Billy asked Mason on the way up.

  “No,” Tinheart said. “The first thirty-six floors are offices. The hotel only uses the top of the building.”

  When they got out Tinheart led them down a hall. Half the way to their rooms the walls on both sides became windows that gave a nearly 360Ú view of the city. There was the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, and faraway mountains in the gathering gloom with almost iridescent fog flowing down like thick slush.