?Bye,? he said at the front door.
He noticed a light on in the front house. Maybe tomorrow Mr. Malone would complain about his little party.
After everyone left Socrates went to fold his collapsible chairs but then he stopped and stood there in his living room. He looked at the chairs, imagining that they still held his guests. Snobby Topper, angry Cynthia Lott, and all the rest. He thought about being angry himself. Somewhere in the night he realized that it wasn't just white people that made him mad. He would be upset even if there weren't any white people.
?How come they didn't go down in Mexico?? little Socrates might have asked his stern auntie.
?Because the road wasn't paved,? she would have answered.
Socrates laughed to himself and poured one last shot of rum. He left the chairs out for the night because they felt friendly.
rogue
H
e stood in an alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill on Normandie. It was drizzling slightly but Socrates wore a canvas hat and a water-repellent army surplus fatigue jacket. His hands were in his pockets, each of them holding a pistol.
There were two small wood framed windows in the wall of the old stucco building. In one the word
shone in neon blue. In the other
burned red. Beyond the lights Socrates could see men and women laughing and talking and touching. The sight of all that happiness and warmth sent angry tremors through Socrates' big hands. He had to release the guns for fear of shooting himself in the legs.
There was one white woman that he could see at the lower corner of the right window, near the bottom of the
She had hair that was golden and lips drawn red. She was smiling and moving her head to music that Socrates could not hear. The man she was with was a policeman, Socrates knew that. All the men who went to Denther's were cops. It was, Socrates thought, a world of cops. Your good men, your fools?your killers too.
The ex-con took a deep breath to keep his nerves down. In each of the fourteen pockets of his jacket there was a clip full of bullets.He was ready to fight through to the end but he would stop shooting when the target he came for was dead. He didn't want to kill any innocent cops that he didn't have to. Only the name Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. was on the hit list in his mind.
Thin and too tall for his hands or features, Cardwell was a black-haired killer.
?You see what he done to my boy?? Stony Wile had asked three months earlier. They had just broken a long silence over a woman when Socrates stopped by Stony's house to bring his family a crate of week-old peaches from Bounty.
Reggie was laid up in a bed, his features swollen and bloody. He was out of his mind with pain and concussion. The emergency room doctors said that he needed a week of observation in a hospital bed but the nurse on the admitting desk didn't see how Stony's insurance could pay for that. They brought Reggie home where at least somebody could pray.
?They didn't arrest him,? Stony wailed. ?If he did some kinda crime bad enough to near kill'im for, then how come they didn't take him to jail??
Socrates didn't have an answer for his friend. Tildy, Stony's wife, wilted over the bed, crying.
?He was out with his friends,? Stony was saying. ?He was raisin' some hell an' bein' wild. But he didn't have no gun or no knife. He didn't hurt nobody. Maybe he did somethin' but how can that excuse the law actin' like the lawless? Who can I go to about this??
?Nobody,? Socrates said to himself. He repeated the word standing there in the shadows of the alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill.
Reggie mended quickly. He was out of bed in a week. And the day he got up he enrolled in Los Angeles City College. Maybe, Socrates thought at the time, the beating was just what young Mr. Wile needed to set him straight. After all, Socrates had taken, and given, some horrendous beatings in his life.
But then there was Inger Lowe, whose features favored the best sides of her black mother and her Swedish father. Inger was raped, that's what Iula said she said. Raped and sodomized by Matthew G. Cardwell Jr. She was stopped on Morrisy, that's what she said.
Inger didn't tell many people about it. She was too afraid that it would get back to the police. Cardwell had told her what could happen if she complained.
