Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned Read online

  “Well, the first day that boy, that Anton Crier, just said no. So I left. Next day he told me that I had to leave. But I said that I wanted to talk to his boss. She come down an’ tell me that she done already said how I cain’t work there if I don’t have no phone.”

  “Yeah,” asked Stony Wile. “Then what’d you do?”

  “I told’em that they should call downtown and get some kinda answer on me because I was gonna come back ev’ryday till I get some kinda answer.” There was a finality in Socrates’ voice that opened Stony’s eyes wide.

  “You don’t wanna do sumpin’ dumb now, Socco,” he said.

  “An’ what would that be?”

  “They could get you into all kindsa trouble, arrest you for trespassin’ if you keep it up.”

  “Maybe they could. Shit. Cops could come in here an’ blow my head off too, but you think I should kiss they ass?”

  “But that’s different. You got to stand up for yo’ pride, yo’ manhood. But I don’t see it wit’ this supermarket thing.”

  “Well,” Socrates said. “On Thursday Ms. Grimes told me that the office had faxed her to say I wasn’t qualified for the position. She said that she had called the cops and said that I’d been down there harassin’ them. She said that they said that if I ever come over there again that they would come arrest me. Arrest me! Just for tryin’ t’get my rights.”

  “That was the fourth day?” Stony asked to make sure that he was counting right.

  “Uh-huh. That was day number four. I asked her could I see that fax paper but she said that she didn’t have it, that she threw it out. You ever hear’a anything like that? White woman workin’ for a white corporation throwin’ out paperwork?”

  Stony was once a shipbuilder but now worked on a fishing day boat out of San Pedro. He’d been in trouble before but never in jail. He’d never thought about the thousands of papers he’d signed over his life; never wondered where they went.

  “Why wouldn’t they throw them away?” Stony asked.

  “Because they keep ev’ry scrap’a paper they got just as long as it make they case in court.”

  Stony nodded. Maybe he understood.

  “So I called Bounty’s head office,” Socrates said. “Over in Torrence.”

  “You lyin’.”

  “An’ why not? I applied for that job, Stony. I should get my hearin’ wit’ them.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “That they ain’t never heard’a me.”

  “You lyin’,” Stony said again.

  “Grimes an’ Crier the liars. An’ you know I went down there today t’tell’em so. I was up in Anton’s face when he told me that Ms. Grimes was out. I told him that they lied and that I had the right to get me a job.”

  “An’ what he say?”

  “He was scared. He thought I mighta hit’im. And I mighta too except Ms. Grimes comes on down.”

  “She was there?”

  “Said that she was on a lunch break; said that she was gonna call the cops on me. Shit. I called her a liar right to her face. I said that she was a liar and that I had a right to be submitted to the main office.” Socrates jabbed his finger at Stony as if he were the one holding the job hostage. “I told’er that I’d be back on Monday and that I expected some kinda fair treatment.”

  “Well that sounds right,” Stony said. “It ain’t up to her who could apply an’ who couldn’t. She got to be fair.”

  “Yeah,” Socrates answered. “She said that the cops would be waitin’ for me on Monday. Maybe Monday night you could come see me in jail.”

  {5.}

  On Saturday Socrates took his canvas cart full of cans to the Boys Market on Adams. He waited three hours behind Calico, an older black woman who prowled the same streets he did, and two younger black men who worked as team.

  Calico and DJ and Bernard were having a good time waiting. DJ was from Oakland and had come down to L.A. to stay with his grandmother when he was fifteen. She died a year later so he had to live on the streets since then. But DJ didn’t complain. He talked about how good life was and how much he was able to collect on the streets.

  “Man,” DJ said. “I wish they would let me up there in Beverly Hills just one week. Gimme one week with a pickup an’ I could live for a year offa the good trash they got up there. They th’ow out stuff that still work up there.”

  “How the fuck you know, man?” Bernard said. “When you ever been up Beverly Hills?”

  “When I was doin’ day work. I helped a dude build a cinder-block fence up on Hollandale. I saw what they th’owed out. I picked me up a portable TV right out the trash an’ I swear that sucker get ev’ry channel.”

  “I bet it don’t get cable,” Bernard said.

  “It would if I’da had a cable to hook it up wit’.”

  They talked like that for three hours. Calico cooed and laughed with them, happy to be in the company of young men.

  But Socrates was just mad.

  Why the hell did he have to wait for hours? Who were they in that supermarket to make full-grown men and women wait like they were children?

  At two o’clock he got up and walked away from his canvas wagon.

  “Hey,” Bernard called. “You want us t’watch yo’ basket?”

  “You could keep it,” Socrates said. “I ain’t never gonna use the goddam thing again.”

  Calico let out a whoop at Socrates’ back.

  On Sunday Socrates sharpened his pocket knife on a graphite stone. He didn’t keep a gun. If the cops caught him with a gun he would spend the rest of his life in jail. But there was no law against a knife blade three inches or less; and three inches was all a man who knew how to use a knife needed.

  Socrates sharpened his knife but he didn’t know why exactly. Grimes and Crier weren’t going to harm him, at least not with violence. And if they called the cops a knife wouldn’t be any use anyway. If the cops even thought that he had a knife they could shoot him and make a good claim for self-defense.

  But Socrates still practiced whipping out the knife and slashing with the blade sticking out of the back end of his fist.

  “Hah!” he yelled.

  {6.}

  He left the knife on the orange crate by his sofa bed the next morning before leaving for Bounty Supermarket. The RTD bus came right on time and he made his connections quickly, one after the other.

  In forty-five minutes he was back on that parking lot. It was a big building, he thought, but not as big as the penitentiary had been.

  A smart man would have turned around and tried some other store, Socrates knew that. It didn’t take a hero to make a fool out of himself.

  It was before nine-thirty and the air still had the hint of a morning chill. The sky was a pearl gray and the parking lot was almost empty.

  Socrates counted seven breaths and then walked toward the door with no knife in his hand. He cursed himself softly under his breath because he had no woman at home to tell him that he was a fool.

  Nobody met him at the door. There was only one checker on duty while the rest of the workers went up and down the aisles restocking and straightening the shelves.

  With nowhere else to go, Socrates went toward the elevated office. He was half the way there when he saw Halley Grimes coming down the stairs. Seeing him she turned and went, ran actually, back up to the office.

  Socrates was sure that she meant to call the police. He wanted to run but couldn’t. All he could do was take one step after the other; the way he’d done in his cell sometimes, sometimes the way he did at home.

  Two men appeared at the high door when Socrates reached the stairs. Salt and pepper, white and black. The older one, a white man, wore a tan wash-and-wear suit with a cheap maroon tie. The Negro had on black jeans, a black jacket, and a white turtleneck shirt. He was very light-skinned but his nose and lips would always give him away.

  The men came down to meet him. They were followed by Grimes and Crier.

  “Mr. Fortlow?” the white man
inquired.

  Socrates nodded and looked him in the eye.

  “My name is Parker,” he continued. “And this is Mr. Weems.”

  “Uh-huh,” Socrates answered.

  The two men formed a wall behind which the manager and assistant manager slipped away.

  “We work for Bounty,” Mr. Weems said. “Would you like to come upstairs for a moment?”

  “What for?” Socrates wanted to know.

  “We’d like to talk,” Parker answered.

  The platform office was smaller than it looked from the outside. The two cluttered desks that sat back to back took up most of the space. Three sides were windows that gave a full panorama of the store. The back wall had a big blackboard on it with the chalked-in time schedules of everyone who worked there. Beneath the blackboard was a safe door.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Fortlow.” Parker gestured toward one of the two chairs. He sat in the other chair while Weems perched on a desk.

  “Coffee?” asked Parker.

  “What’s this all about, man?” Socrates asked.

  Smiling, Parker said, “We want to know what your problem is with Ms. Grimes. She called the head office on Friday and told us that she was calling the police because she was afraid of you.”

  “I don’t have no problem with Ms. Grimes or Anton Crier or Bounty Supermarket. I need a job and I wanted to make a application. That’s all.”

  “But she told you that you had to have a phone number in order to complete your file,” said Weems.

  “So? Just ’cause I don’t have no phone then I cain’t work? That don’t make no sense at all. If I don’t work I cain’t afford no phone. If I don’t have no phone then I cain’t work. You might as well just put me in the ground.”

  “It’s not Bounty’s problem that you don’t have a phone.” Parker’s face was placid but the threat was in his tone.

  “All I want is to make a job application. All I want is to work,” Socrates said. Really he wanted to fight. He wanted his knife at close quarters with those private cops. But instead he went on, “I ain’t threatened nobody. I ain’t said I was gonna do a thing. All I did was to come back ev’ry day an’ ask if they had my okay from you guys yet. That’s all. On the job application they asked if I had a car or a ride to work—to see if I could get here. Well, I come in ev’ry day for a week at nine-thirty or before. I come in an’ asked if I been cleared yet. I didn’t do nuthin’ wrong. An’ if that woman is scared it must be ’cause she knows she ain’t been right by me. But I didn’t do nuthin’.”

  There was no immediate answer to Socrates’ complaint. The men looked at him but kept silent. There was the hum of machinery coming from somewhere but Socrates couldn’t figure out where. He concentrated on keeping his hands on his knees, on keeping them open.

  “But how do you expect to get a job when you come in every day and treat the people who will be your bosses like they’re doing something wrong?” Weems seemed really to want to know.

  “If I didn’t come in they woulda th’owed out my application, prob’ly did anyway. I ain’t no kid. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’m unemployed an’ nowhere near benefits. If I don’t find me some way t’get some money I’ll starve. So, you see, I had to come. I couldn’t let these people say that I cain’t even apply. If I did that then I might as well die.”

  Parker sighed. Weems scratched the top of his head and then rubbed his nose.

  “You can’t work here,” Parker said at last. “If we tried to push you off on Ms. Grimes she’d go crazy. She really thought that you were going to come in here guns blazing.”

  “So ’cause she thought that I was a killer then I cain’t have no job?” Socrates knew the irony of his words but he also knew their truth. He didn’t care about a job just then. He was happy to talk, happy to say what he felt. Because he knew that he was telling the truth and that those men believed him.

  “What about Rodriguez?” Weems asked of no one in particular.

  “Who’s that?” Socrates asked.

  “He’s the manager of one of our stores up on Santa Monica,” Weems replied.

  “I don’t know,” Parker said.

  “Yeah, sure, Connie Rodriguez.” Weems was getting to like the idea. “He’s always talking about giving guys a chance. We could give him a chance to back it up with Mr. Fortlow here.”

  Parker chewed on his lower lip until it reddened. Weems grinned. It seemed to Socrates that some kind of joke was being played on this Connie Rodriguez. Parker hesitated but he liked the idea.

  Parker reached down under the desk and came out with a briefcase. From this he brought out a sheet of paper; Socrates’ application form.

  “There’s just one question,” Parker said.

  {7.}

  “What he wanna know?” Stony Wile asked at Iula’s grill. They were there with Right Burke, Markham Peal, and Howard Shakur. Iula gave Socrates a party when she heard that he got a job as a general food packager and food delivery person at Bounty Supermarket on Santa Monica Boulervard. She made the food and his friends brought the liquor.

  “He wanted to know why I had left one of the boxes blank.”

  “What box?”

  “The one that asks if I’d ever been arrested for or convicted of a felony.”

  “Damn. What you say?”

  “That I musta overlooked it.”

  “An’ then you lied?”

  “Damn straight. But he knew I was lyin’. He was a cop before he went to work for Bounty. Both of ’em was. He asked me that if they put through a check on me would it come up bad? An’ I told him that he didn’t need to put through no checks.”

  “Mmm!” Stony hummed, shaking his head. “That’s always gonna be over your head, man. Always.”

  Socrates laughed and grabbed his friend by the back of his neck.

  He hugged Stony and then held him by the shoulders. “I done had a lot worse hangin’ over me, brother. At least I get a paycheck till they find out what I am.”

  MARVANE STREET

  {1.}

  Water seeped in under Socrates’ boarded-up door to the street. The rain was hard and he had to put towels down at the cracks where the tiny streams tried to flow across his sleeping room. He listened to the rain pelting down on the tin roof and was happy that he didn’t have to go to work that day. He picked up the throw rugs from the concrete floor and changed towels every hour or two. The couch he slept on was up on wooden blocks and the kitchen floor was elevated by worn linoleum tiles; there’d have to be a downpour to flood out the kitchen.

  The rain seemed to get harder for a moment; the sound of water cascading over the drainpipe and crashing on the old barrel on the other side of his wall. Then it stopped. A gust maybe. But he hadn’t heard the wind. Then the sound again. Not exactly water on the barrel. It was a little too hard.

  The sound came back twice more before Socrates realized that it was knocking at his back door, the only working door.

  He rarely had guests in good weather; never in the rain.

  The boy was standing there, soaking wet.

  “Hey, Darryl,” Socrates said. He moved aside so that the boy could come in.

  “Hey.”

  “What you doin’ out in this rain?”

  “I’ont know. Nuthin’.”

  “You hungry?” Eleven-year-old boys, in Socrates’ experience, were always hungry. Especially if they were black boys; especially if they were poor.

  Socrates brought out a large bowl of chicken-and-rice gumbo from his new squat refrigerator. He heated the stew on the butane camping stove he’d gotten from an army surplus store downtown. Socrates bought everything from that store. His clothes and his shoes, his pocket knife and dishes. Ever since he started working for Bounty Supermarket on Santa Monica, boxing and delivering groceries, Socrates had been shopping, buying necessities that were more like luxuries for the ex-con.

  He cut raw onions into Darryl’s bowl and then sprinkled ground sassafras and thyme leaves over it all. He put D
arryl in the good folding chair and turned over the empty trash can for his own seat.

  Darryl was shivering but didn’t seem to know it. He ate the gumbo with a large spoon and didn’t talk because his mouth was too busy working to fit in any words. Watching the boy’s gluttony, Socrates had to stifle the rage that bloomed in his chest. He wanted to slap the skinny boy out of his chair, to see him sprawled out on the floor. He wanted to pick Darryl up by those bony shoulders and slam him up against the wall.

  He wished that some man had had that kind of love for him before he’d gone wrong.

  He’d told Darryl that he could come over anytime he had a problem but this was the first time that the boy had returned. He was a troubled child with no father; one of those lost souls who did wrong but didn’t know it—or hardly did.

  “Thanks,” Darryl said after finishing his third bowlful. “That was good.”

  “How you doin’, boy?” Socrates asked.

  “M’okay.”

  “How’s yo’ momma?”

  “She fine. She got a boyfriend. Tyrell. He up in the house a lot. But she’s fine. I guess.”

  Socrates took Darryl’s bowl to the sink and filled it with water. He tried to wipe off the ledge behind the basin but the plaster was crumbling and no amount of wiping could get it clean.

  “You get dreams?” Darryl asked the broad-backed murderer.

  “Sometimes.”

  “What you dream about?”

  “Whatever it is I want an’ don’t have. That’s why they call’em dreams.”

  “Oh, uh-huh.”

  “What you dream about?”

  “Nuthin’.”

  Darryl sat in the plastic chair staring at the older man’s chest. He seemed angry. Socrates was mad too. He could see that Darryl was in trouble. And trouble was always close to violence in Socrates’ life. Even this, even his concern for the boy, bunched up in his biceps and played along his shark finlike knuckles.

  “I got some pie up on the top shelf,” Socrates said.