Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned Read online

  “I don’t mean to disrespect you, son,” Socrates said in a mild tone. “It’s just that you’re only a little ways up the road from your own house. People who know you go up and down this street. If they see you an’ that girl it’s gonna hurt Angel an’ you know they ain’t no reason for that. Is there?”

  The bus behind Ralphie stopped at a red light.

  “She cain’t be tellin’ me what I could do an’ what I cain’t,” he said at last.

  “Me neither, Ralphie. Me neither. You do what you got to, son. I just mean …” Socrates paused for a moment and wondered what it was exactly that he did mean. “I’m just sayin’ that we got to know what we doin’. Linda got sumpin’ you need? Okay. But you don’t have to rub Angel’s nose in that. It’s just like you did to me….”

  “What I did to you?”

  “You looked right through me, brother.” Socrates felt tears in his eyes. “You across the street gettin’ your nut offa that girl right in front’a me like I was some kinda animal, like I didn’t even matter at all. An’ then you couldn’t even nod to me….”

  The bus rolled up to the shelter.

  It was their bus.

  The brake sighed and the door levered open.

  Ralphie moved toward the door.

  Socrates fought the urge to grab the man’s arm, to keep him there listening to his apologies.

  But he didn’t reach out. Ralphie got on the bus. The doors slammed shut. And the bus glided away on a film of water that shimmered with street light.

  {5.}

  “That’s how I got sick,” Socrates told Right Burke from his foldout sofa bed. He’d been laid up with a bad chest cold for many days after he’d walked three miles in the rain. He’d been alone until Right Burke, a retired WWII veteran, came by to see where he’d been.

  After seeing Socrates prostrate in the cold house, Right went out for aspirin and soup mix. He brought flavored gelatin and apple brandy to ward off the virus.

  The first two days Socrates was too sick to say anything but what he absolutely had to. On the third day he thanked the maimed ex-sergeant and told him the story of Ralphie and Linda.

  “I still don’t see why you had to walk home in the rain,” Right said.

  “I had to let’im go, Right. I had to let’im be.”

  “You mean you was gonna kick his ass if you got on the bus together?”

  “Uh-uh. Naw. I mean …” Socrates was lost for a moment, straining for breath on the thin mattress. “I wasn’t tryin’ t’help him. I wanted him to feel bad because I did. I wanted that girl. I wanted him to pay for ignorin’ me. But I was wrong. That’s why I walked home in the rain.”

  “I don’t get it,” Right said.

  Later that night Right slept on the foldout lawn chair that was Socrates’ guest bed.

  Socrates awoke to the snores of his friend. Ralphie and Linda, and Angel sitting at home with Warren, were on his mind.

  The cold in his chest was breaking up and he was going to live.

  “I ain’t no niggah,” he said to himself.

  He repeated that phrase.

  “And if I ain’t then you ain’t neither,” he said to some imaginary friend. “It’s you and me, brother.”

  Right sat up then. He stared across the small and disheveled room at his friend.

  “You okay?” Right Burke asked.

  “If you is,” Socrates answered.

  The two old men laughed. Later they raised a toast, with apple brandy, to Lindas that they’d known.

  EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

  {1.}

  Bounty Supermarket was on Venice Boulevard, miles and miles from Socrates’ home. He gaped at the glittering palace as he strode across the hot asphalt parking lot. The front wall was made from immense glass panes with steel framing to hold them in place. Through the big windows he could see long lines of customers with baskets full of food. He imagined apples and T-bone steaks, fat hams and the extra-large boxes of cereal that they only sold in supermarkets.

  The checkers were all young women, some of them girls. Most were black. Black women, black girls—taking money and talking back and forth between themselves as they worked; running the packages of food over the computer eye that rang in the price and added it to the total without them having to think a thing.

  In between the checkout counters black boys and brown ones loaded up bags for the customers.

  Socrates walked up to the double glass doors and they slid open moaning some deep machine blues. He came into the cool air and cocked his ear to that peculiar music of supermarkets; steel carts wheeling around, crashing together, resounding with the thuds of heavy packages. Children squealing and yelling. The footsteps and occasional conversation blended together until they made a murmuring sound that lulled the ex-convict.

  There was a definite religious feel to being in the great store. The lofty ceilings, the abundance, the wealth.

  Dozens of tens and twenties, in between credit cards and bank cards, went back and forth over the counters. Very few customers used coupons. The cash seemed to be endless. How much money passed over those counters every day?

  And what would they think if they knew that the man watching them had spent twenty-seven years doing hard time in prison? Socrates barked out a single-syllable laugh. They didn’t have to worry about him. He wasn’t a thief. Or, if he was, the only thing he ever took was life.

  “Sir, can I help you?” Anton Crier asked.

  Socrates knew the name because it was right there, on a big badge on his chest. ANTON CRIER ASST. MGR. He wore tan pants and a blue blazer with the supermarket insignia over the badge.

  “I came for an application,” Socrates said. It was a line that he had spent a whole day thinking about; a week practicing. I came for an application. For a couple days he had practiced saying job application, but after a while he dropped the word job to make his request sound more sure. But when he went to Stony Wile and told him that he planned to say “I came for a application,” Stony said that you had to say an application.

  “If you got a word that starts with a, e, i, o, or u then you got to say an instead of a,” Stony had said.

  Anton Crier’s brow knitted and he stalled a moment before asking, “An application for what?”

  “A job.” There, he’d said it. It was less than a minute and this short white man, just a boy really, had already made him beg.

  “Oh,” said Anton Crier, nodding like a wise elder. “Uh. How old are you, sir?”

  “Ain’t that against the law?” Like many other convicts Socrates was a student of the law.

  “Huh?”

  “Askin’ me my age. That’s against the law. You cain’t discriminate against color or sex or religion or infirmity or against age. That’s the law.”

  “Uh, well, yes, of course it is. I know that. I’m not discriminating against you. It’s just that we don’t have any openings right now. Why don’t you come in the fall when the kids are back at school?”

  Anton leaned to the side, intending to leave Socrates standing there.

  “Hold on,” Socrates said. He held up his hands, loosely as fists, in a nonchalant sort of boxing stance.

  Anton looked, and waited.

  “I came for an application,” Socrates repeated.

  “But I told you …”

  “I know what you said. But first you looked at my clothes and at my bald head. First yo’ eyes said that this is some kinda old hobo and what do he want here when it ain’t bottle redemption time.”

  “I did not …”

  “It don’t matter,” Socrates said quickly. He knew better than to let a white man in uniform finish a sentence. “You got to give me a application. That’s the law too.”

  “Wait here,” young Mr. Crier said. He turned and strode away toward an elevated office that looked down along the line of cash registers.

  Socrates watched him go. So did the checkers and bag boys. He was their boss and they knew when he was unhappy. They stole worried
glances at Socrates.

  Socrates stared back. He wondered if any of those young black women would stand up for him. Would they understand how far he’d come to get there?

  He’d traveled more than fourteen miles from his little apartment down in Watts. They didn’t have any supermarkets or jobs in his neighborhood. And all the stores along Crenshaw and Washington knew him as a bum who collected bottles and cans for a living.

  They wouldn’t hire him.

  Socrates hadn’t held a real job in over thirty-seven years. He’d been unemployed for twenty-five months before the party with Shep, Fogel, and Muriel.

  They’d been out carousing. Three young people, blind drunk.

  Back at Shep’s, Muriel gave Socrates the eye. He danced with her until Shep broke it up. But then Shep fell asleep. When he awoke to find them rolling on the floor the fight broke out in earnest.

  Socrates knocked Shep back to the floor and then he finished his business with Muriel even though she was worried about her man. But when she started to scream and she hit Socrates with that chair he hit her back.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, when he woke up, that he realized that his friends were dead.

  Then he’d spent twenty-seven years in prison. Now, eight years free, fifty-eight years old, he was starting life over again.

  Not one of those girls, nor Anton Crier, was alive when he started his journey. If they were lucky they wouldn’t understand him.

  {2.}

  There was a large electric clock above the office. The sweep hand reared back and then battered up against each second, counting every one like a drummer beating out time on a slave galley.

  Socrates could see the young assistant manager through the window under the clock. He was saying something to an older white woman sitting there. The woman looked down at Socrates and then swiveled in her chair to a file cabinet. She took out a piece of paper and held it while lecturing Anton. He reached for the paper a couple of times but the woman kept it away from him and continued talking. Finally she said something and Crier nodded. He took the paper from her and left the office, coming down the external stairs at a fast clip. Walking past the checkers he managed not to look at Socrates before he was standing there in front of him.

  “Here,” he said, handing the single-sheet application form to Socrates. Crier never stopped moving. As soon as Socrates had the form between his fingers the younger man was walking away.

  Socrates touched the passing elbow and asked, “You got a pencil?”

  “What?”

  “I need a pencil to fill out this form.”

  “You, you, you can just send it in.”

  “I didn’t come all this way for a piece’a paper, man. I come to apply for a job.”

  Anton Crier stormed over to one of the checkers, demanded her pencil, then rushed back to Socrates.

  “Here,” he said.

  Socrates answered, “Thank you,” but the assistant manager was already on his way back to the elevated office.

  Half an hour later Socrates was standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to Anton and his boss. He stood there waiting for one of them to come down. They could see him through the window.

  They knew he was there.

  So Socrates waited, holding the application in one hand and the borrowed pencil in the other.

  After twenty minutes he was wondering if a brick could break the wall of windows at the front of the store.

  After thirty minutes he decided that it might take a shotgun blast.

  Thirty-nine minutes had gone by when the woman, who had bottled red hair, came down to meet him. Anton Crier shadowed her. Socrates saw the anger in the boy’s face.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” Halley Grimes asked. She had a jail-house smile—insincere and crooked.

  “I wanted to ask a couple of things about my application.”

  “All the information is right there at the top of the sheet.”

  “But I had some questions.”

  “We’re very busy, sir.” Ms. Grimes broadened her smile to show that she had a heart, even for the aged and confused. “What do you need to know?”

  “It asks here if I got a car or a regular ride to work.”

  “Yes,” beamed Ms. Grimes. “What is it exactly that you don’t understand?”

  “I understand what it says but I just don’t get what it means.”

  The look of confusion came into Halley Grimes’s face. Socrates welcomed a real emotion.

  He answered her unasked question. “What I mean is that I don’t have a car or a ride but I can take a bus to work.”

  The store manager took his application form and fingered the address.

  “Where is this street?” she asked.

  “Down Watts.”

  “That’s pretty far to go by bus, isn’t it? There are stores closer than this one, you know.”

  “But I could get here.” Socrates noticed that his head wanted to move as if to the rhythm of a song. Then he heard it: “Baby Love,” by Diana Ross and the Supremes. It was being played softly over the loudspeaker. “I could get here.”

  “Well.” Ms. Grimes seemed to brighten. “We’ll send this in to the main office and, if it’s clear with them, we’ll put it in our files. When there’s an opening we’ll give you a call.”

  “A what?”

  “A call. We’ll call you if you’re qualified and if a job opens up.”

  “Uh, well, we got to figure somethin’ else than that out. You see, I don’t have no phone.”

  “Oh, well then.” Ms. Grimes held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t see that there’s anything we can do. The main office demands a phone number. That’s how they check on your address. They call.”

  “How do they know that they got my address just ’cause’ a some phone they call? Wouldn’t it be better if they wrote me?”

  “I’m very busy, sir. I’ve told you that we need a phone number to process this application.” Halley Grimes held out the form toward Socrates. “Without that there really isn’t anything I can do.”

  Socrates kept his big hands down. He didn’t want to take the application back—partly because he didn’t want to break the pudgy white woman’s fingers.

  “Do me a favor and send it in,” he said.

  “I told you …”

  “Just send it in, okay? Send it in. I’ll be back to find out what they said.”

  “You don’t …”

  “Just send it in.” There was violence in this last request.

  Halley Grimes pulled the application away from his face and said, “All right. But it won’t make any difference.”

  {3.}

  Socrates had to transfer on three buses to get back to his apartment.

  And he was especially tired that day. Talking to Crier and Grimes had worn him out.

  He boiled potatoes and eggs in a saucepan on his single hot plate and then cut them together in the pot with two knives, adding mustard and sweet pickle relish. After the meal he had two shots of whiskey and one Camel cigarette.

  He was asleep by nine o’clock.

  His dream blared until dawn.

  It was a realistic sort of dream; no magic, no impossible wish. It was just Socrates in a nine-foot cell with a flickering fluorescent light from the walkway keeping him from sleeping and reading, giving him a headache, hurting his eyes.

  “Mr. Bennett,” the sleeping Socrates called out from his broad sofa. He shouted so loudly that a mouse in the kitchen jumped up and out of the potato pan pinging his tail against the thin tin as he went.

  Socrates heard the sound in his sleep. He turned but then slipped back into the flickering, painful dream.

  “What you want?” the guard asked. He was big and black and meaner than anyone Socrates had ever known.

  “I cain’t read. I cain’t sleep. That light been like that for three days now.”

  “Put the pillow on your head,” the big guard said.

  “I cain’t br
eathe like that,” Socrates answered sensibly.

  “Then don’t,” Mr. Bennett replied.

  As the guard walked away, Socrates knew, for the first time really, why they kept him in that jail. He would have killed Bennett if he could have right then; put his fingers around that fat neck and squeezed until the veins swelled and cartilage popped and snapped. He was so mad that he balled his fists in his sleep twenty-five years after the fact.

  He was a sleeping man wishing that he could sleep. And he was mad, killing mad. He couldn’t rest because of the crackling, buzzing light, and the more it shone the angrier he became. And the angrier he got the more scared he was. Scared that he’d kill Bennett the first chance he got.

  The anger built for days in that dream. The sound of grinding teeth could be heard throughout Socrates’ two rooms.

  Finally, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he took his rubber squeeze ball in his left hand and slipped his right hand through the bars. He passed the ball through to his right hand and gauged its weight in the basket of his fingers. He blinked back at the angry light, felt the weight of his hard rubber ball. The violent jerk started from his belly button, traveled up through his chest and shoulder, and down until his fingers tensed like steel. The ball flew in a straight line that shattered the light, broke it into blackness.

  And in the jet night he heard Bennett say, “That’s the last light you get from the state of Indiana.”

  Socrates woke up in the morning knowing that he had cried. He could feel the strain in the muscles of his throat. He got out of bed thinking about Anton Crier and Halley Grimes.

  {4.}

  “You what?” asked Stony Wile. He’d run into Socrates getting off a bus on Central and offered to buy his friend a beer. They went to Moody’s bar on 109th Street.

  “I been down there ev’ry day for five days. An ev’ry day I go in there I ask’em if they got my okay from the head office yet.”

  “An’ what they say about that?”