Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned Page 11

  He put his fingers to his lips and concentrated on keeping quiet. But then his mental friend said, “You a niggah just like me, Socrates Fortlow. Your shit stink an’ you down on the bottom of the white man’s ladder—right next to me. I cain’t go nowhere an’ you cain’t neither.”

  “I can too!” Socrates said loudly “I go wherever I damn please!”

  No one turned around to see what Socrates was talking about but they heard him—they could have testified to his vow.

  {2.}

  The very next Saturday morning, Socrates got on a bus headed for Santa Monica. The big blue bus was empty except for him and the driver—a black woman who liked to talk.

  “Yeah, all my kids down Atlanta,” the driver said. “You know colored people always on the move. Always tryin’ to get somewhere fast. I done told’em they might as well stay here. I told’em that what you got to do is to make a stand somewheres. But they don’t listen. They say that they ain’t nobody givin’ no chance for no colored up here. Shoot. I ain’t askin’ nobody to give me a damn thing. Nobody give you nuthin’, now do they, mister?”

  “Well,” Socrates said. “They might give you one thing.”

  “Oh,” said the driver. “What’s that?”

  “A good kick in the pants.”

  That got the driver laughing. She laughed so hard that Socrates was afraid she’d run the red light they were approaching. But she didn’t. The brake trumpeted like a bull elephant and the bus swayed to a halt, giving Socrates the feeling that he was riding inside of a great wave.

  “What you doin’ out here today?” the driver asked. “You work out here?”

  “I come out here ’cause I wanted to,” Socrates answered. “You don’t have to spend yo’ whole life livin’ in a cave like some goddam caveman. I wanna see the ocean. I been in L.A. for eight and a half years an’ I ain’t seen the ocean once.”

  “Hm! Well at least you know it,” the driver said, sneering with the satisfaction of the truth. “That’s what’s wrong wit’ so many people. Here they got the world right out there in front’a them an’ they complainin’ that they ain’t nuthin’ they could do. I’m wit’ you. Pay your fare an’ see what’s what.”

  Socrates got off the bus at Lincoln and Pico. He wandered around that neighborhood until he happened upon the big blue ocean.

  There was a ribbon of sidewalk running down the beach, about a hundred yards from the water. Near-naked men and women with good bodies traveled up and down the pedestrian road by walking and running, by blade skates and bicycle. There were skateboarders and surfers and men and women in wet suits. Everybody seemed hard at work at their recreation.

  Socrates was reminded of the prison yard.

  He had the same feeling he’d get when he was let out of solitary confinement. The yard was a wonderful place after a few weeks in the icebox. There was sunlight and the company of men. There were weights and checkers and magazines and talk. He was still in jail but he had the feeling of freedom after being let out of the punishment box. Even jail could feel good if they let you stretch your legs and squint at the sun once in a while.

  The sun was hard and strong on the beach that day. Socrates took off his shoes and socks and put them in the pockets of his army jacket. Then he took off the jacket and slung it over his shoulder.

  There were hardly any people down near the water. A few joggers; just as many dogs.

  At the shoreline the surf was loud. It boomed and hissed and sang in a chorus of drowning bells. The sound was everything down near the water. The whole world was the blue god’s song.

  “God ain’t nowhere near here, child,” Socrates’ aunt, Bellandra Beaufort, used to say. “He’s a million miles away; out in the middle’a the ocean somewhere. An’ he ain’t white like they say he is neither.”

  “God’s black?” little Socrates asked the tall, skinny woman. He was sitting in her lap, leaning against her bony breast.

  “Naw, baby,” she said sadly. “He ain’t black. If he was there wouldn’t be all this mess down here wit’ us. Naw. God’s blue.”

  “Blue?”

  “Uh-huh. Blue like the ocean. Blue. Sad and cold and far away like the sky is far and blue. You got to go a long long way to get to God. And even if you get there he might not say a thing. Not a damn thing.”

  Socrates walked for miles on the curving beaches. The surface of the sand was hot from the sun but cool when his foot sank to the layer of moisture below. He went north past Malibu and on toward the blue of the water and sky. He stayed close to the ocean remembering his aunt’s sermons about how God was always beyond reach but how people were always trying to get there.

  Men ain’t never satisfied wit’ what is an’ that’s why they’s only one out of a hunnert that’s happy.

  He ate three bananas and a peanut butter and jam sandwich from his pockets. The soft sand, the wind, and the wild seas made him feel as if he were staggering under some angry god’s rage.

  The sun rose high and was hot on his head. But a cold wind tore off the waters and chilled his bones.

  Socrates knew that Charles Rinnett had never been this far—not on his own, not sober, not with his eyes open.

  “Out of the icebox,” he said to himself. “And into the sea.”

  {3.}

  Socrates walked on, freezing and burning and feeling a freedom that he only ever dreamt about when he was a child on his bitter aunt’s lap. The sun arched high above, almost washing out the blue in the sky, and then began to descend.

  Socrates saw seashells and syringes half buried in the surf; he saw a group of gulls rending the corpse of a brown dog; he saw the patterns of high tide rippled in the dry sand. Here and there was salted foam, like dried semen, sketched into sandy depressions.

  Everything was harsh and beautiful the way he’d always known life to be. Socrates felt every breath and wondered if he could leave the life he’d made back down around Charles and his grinning fool friends.

  If he got tired he sat down. There was fruit and sandwiches enough in his pockets. He knew that he should turn around but he had the notion that there might be something waiting for him up ahead. Something that he could take home. Something that would keep him from forgetting what he had seen and felt.

  He passed many people on the way north but never spoke. Sometimes he’d nod and smile; now and then his greeting was returned.

  Toward the later afternoon he saw a couple walking his way from far up the shore. A man in layers of gray and a woman dressed in bright clothes. He was large and she was slight with a youthful gait. She swung one hand back and forth while the other arm was wrapped around her lover’s waist.

  They were certainly lovers, Socrates could tell that. He was older and she was the kind of child that drove older men crazy. There was a double passion in them. His gait was heavy, deliberate; hers so lighthearted that she was almost in flight there next to him.

  Socrates hoped that they would keep walking in his direction. He wanted to see their faces and smile at them.

  From afar Socrates thought the man might have been black, or Mexican, or maybe he was just a very tan white man. The girl had to be white though. Her skin almost shone in the afternoon sun.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing did in the breathlike wind of the blue ocean; the screaming and chiming and hissing of some language that was older than men were, older than life itself. Socrates heard the words of that blue god in the base of his brain.

  It made him feel crazy and struck him dumb.

  Slowly the couple came toward him.

  He trudged on.

  When they were less than a hundred feet distant, Socrates was sure the man was black but he was no longer positive about the girl. Her skin was olive closer up.

  The girl or woman, white or black, whatever she was, waved at Socrates and his heart jumped. He felt like a child again about to meet new friends at the playground sandbox.

  {4.}

  “Hey, man,” said the large Negro, who was dressed
all in gray.

  “What’s happenin’?”

  He took Socrates’ hand in a powerful grip. It was rare that Socrates encountered a man as strong as he was. He might have been aging, he might have lost his wind, but Socrates could still lift a forty-gallon trash can brimming with water and walk it a full city block.

  “Hey,” the young woman said with one quick breath. Her skin was amber and her long hair was everything from blond to brown; from straight to curly. Her eyes might have been green. But it was her face that gave Socrates pause. The features were sparse on a long, horselike skull. The extended bone of her nose came down, broadening a little toward the generous lips. Her cheeks were high but the sloping curve of her forehead diminished their effect.

  She was a beautiful woman-child, not more than seventeen, and strange to look at—almost not human.

  “We were watchin’ you,” the girl said. “Gordo thought that you were a soldier like him but I said no. I said that you weren’t ever in any army. You walk like nobody ever taught you how to march.”

  Socrates smiled and nodded.

  “Well?” the man asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Were you in the army?”

  “Not hardly,” Socrates said.

  The girl socked Gordo in the upper arm and shouted, “Hah! I win!”

  “You want a drink?” Gordo asked Socrates. He slung a large gray backpack from his shoulders and sank to his knees in the sand. “This is Delia.”

  Delia stuck out her hand and when Socrates took it she pulled so that he would sit down with them.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Socrates.”

  “Wow. Far out,” she mouthed. Maybe she was whispering but Socrates couldn’t hear her over the sound of the waves.

  Gordo pulled a quart bottle of cheap red wine from the backpack.

  “We got weed too. You want some smoke?” he asked.

  “Wine’d be fine.”

  Gordo had a boy’s face with hair that had gone more than half gray; salt-and-pepper through his mustache and eyebrows. He unscrewed the bottle top and took a deep swig of the red wine.

  Socrates took the next drink.

  Delia held the bottle to her open mouth and poured the wine in, spilling some down her multicolored patchwork vest. She laughed and handed the bottle back to her man. Gordo twisted the bottle into the sand.

  “What brings you out here?” Gordo asked Socrates.

  “Nothin’ that I could tell,” Socrates answered. “Just out for a walk. I do that about every twenty years or so.”

  Gordo smiled. “You want somethin’ to eat? We got chili and tortilla chips.”

  “And soda,” Delia added.

  “Sure,” Socrates said. He was thinking that he should go home, back to Watts. He was thinking that he was too far out. A voice in his head actually said, “Go home now, Socrates,” but the wind and the water made the voice small and insignificant.

  Delia pulled up her leather skirt and folded her bare legs in the sand.

  “There’s a bunch of driftwood a mile or so back there. Up toward the canyon,” Gordo said. “We could go on up there. Nobody’ll see a fire.”

  Socrates was staring at those long brown legs.

  When Delia looked into his eyes her grin turned into a silent laugh.

  {5.}

  They went back up the beach about a mile, then under Pacific Coast Highway through a concrete drainage ditch. The steep canyon they entered was narrow and nameless. It went about a thousand yards into the Santa Monica Mountains and then came to a halt. Throughout the dry streambed were tangled piles of driftwood, brought in on countless high tides.

  “You come out here much?” Delia asked Socrates as they picked their way through the creek bed.

  “Never been up here before.”

  “It’s funny ’cause it’s kinda wild and then it’s like civilized too.” She pointed up toward the edges of the steep canyon walls. At first all Socrates saw was the sky. The blue was darkening toward night. Then he saw the lights; electric lights from houses that perched at the top of the canyon. Houses that seemed to be teetering; on the verge of tumbling down the cliffs. Some of them had already fallen prey to mud slides and erosion. One such disaster had brought a full wall of salmon-pink cinder blocks crashing down to the creek bottom.

  “If I could have me a house,” Gordo said, looking up at the canyon walls, “that’s where I’d have mines.”

  “Why’s that?” Socrates asked.

  “ ’Cause the ground up there just wearin’ away, right out from under them.” Gordo grinned in the fading sunlight.

  “But …” Socrates said, thinking again that he should be on his way. “But that don’t make sense.”

  “Ground under you an’ me, an’ even Delia there, is wearin’ out. Ground is hungry to be your grave, man. Ev’rybody walkin’ ’round an’ talkin’ like the ground is up solid under them …” Gordo snapped his fingers loudly. “You could be gone just like that. Just like one’a them houses up there.”

  Delia moved close to Gordo s side. She picked a dry leaf from his hair.

  “Ain’t no use in hurryin’ the process,” Socrates said.

  “But,” Gordo said, “at least up there you know for a fact that it’s gonna happen. At least up there you know you got to live.”

  Gordo took three of the blocks and laid them flat, their long sides facing in toward each other in a kind of ritualistic circle. Delia piled as much driftwood as she could between the cinder bricks.

  From his pack Gordo pulled out a beaten-up tin pot that held three cans of Hormel chili. He also took out a large bag of tortilla chips and an eight-pack of cherry-flavored Coca-Cola in cans.

  “It’s my birthday,” Gordo said. “This is my party.”

  “You always come out here for your birthday?” Socrates asked.

  Gordo looked him straight in the eye, his aging boy’s face grim with concentration.

  “No,” he said at last. “Never been here for my birthday before. But I always go someplace special. And this here is the most special one.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Gordo reached into his bag and came out with a long slender candle. It was tapered and deep red. Gordo held the candle up and smiled. “My birthday candle,” he said.

  Delia was busy opening the cans of chili with a pocket can opener that was no larger than a quarter. She dumped the fat-clotted dark brown contents of each can into the pot.

  Gordo brought the quart of wine to his lips and finished it in one long draft. Then he took the candle and screwed it into the bottle’s neck.

  “For everyone born somebody dies,” Gordo intoned. “For every birthday we celebrate the dead.”

  He lit the candle as solemnly as a priest. He was on his knees in front of the flame, his arms hanging helplessly at his sides.

  Delia wedged the pot in between the cinder blocks and set the wood on fire with a cigarette lighter. The flames glared brightly and at the same time the sun sank behind the drainage embankment.

  It was as if she had called up night with a gesture. Delia, lit by the fire, seemed to be surrounded by darkness while the rest of the canyon was in the early onset of twilight.

  Socrates felt the chill of evening. He sat down to put on his socks and shoes.

  “Where you from, girl?” he asked to break the spell of Gordo’s silent reverie.

  “Ohio.”

  “What about your parents?”

  She shrugged and smiled, pulled her skirt way up on her thighs, and went down on her knees.

  “I killed twenty-six people,” Gordo said. It might have been the only thing that could have dragged Socrates’ eyes away from those legs.

  “How many?”

  “Twenty-six. The last one was twenty-six years ago. Skinny little slant-eyed mothahfuckah wasn’t no bigger than a hunnert an’ thirty pounds. Here I played football at L.A. High School an’ he nearly kilt me. Nearly did. Nearly did.” Gordo gazed off
toward the fire.

  “Vietnam?”

  “This here is the last candle,” Gordo said. “The last one.”

  He took a twig from the ground and lit it on the flaming wick of his blood-colored candle. The crooked stick winked and flickered on the evening breeze, like a butterfly of flame.

  “I always come out with a girl and drink and celebrate one of the men I done in. I light’em candles one by one and eat and drink a toast.”

  “What you want me for?” Socrates asked.

  “We just saw you, man. That’s all. You know, it’s kinda like you pick up what you find on the beach. That’s life on the beach.”

  “Uh-huh,” Socrates said.

  “You want some?” Delia asked. She’d piled a tin plate with tortilla chips and used an empty can to scoop chili over it.

  Socrates took the plate along with a tiny white plastic fork. “Thank you.”

  She made another plate for Gordo, who took it gravely, with both hands.

  “You eatin’?” Socrates asked the girl.

  “I don’t eat meat,” she said and then produced an orange from the inside of her cloak. She bit into the peel, spat out the rind, and then began to squeeze and suck at the hole she’d made.

  Socrates tried to control his breath as he watched her cheeks and teeth and tongue working at the fruit.

  “You got a car?” Gordo asked.

  Socrates felt prickles across his bald scalp. “You sure you ain’t killed nobody in twenty-six years?” he asked.

  Gordo’s white smile flashed on his dusky face. He let out a low chortle.

  Socrates felt his weight against the soft, giving ground. If he rose up quickly his feet would sink in the sand. The image of a painting that he’d seen in the prison library came into his mind. It was in a book called The History of European Art. He didn’t remember the painter’s name.

  It was a dark scene. Two men, sunk in the ground up to their knees, were hitting each other with cudgels. They were bloody and tired but they were stuck in the ground and had to keep on fighting forever. They were big men too. Bigger than the mountains that lay behind them.