Walkin The Dog

“Hold on,” Socrates said quickly to stop her from hanging up. “Mookie is my nickname for Moorland Kinear.”

There was silence from the other end of the phone. For a moment Socrates wondered if the woman had hung up, leaving the phone line caught in a few seconds of silence before the harsh buzz.

“Who is this?” Her voice had turned cold.

“Tell 'im it's Socrates.”

“I'll go see if he can come to the phone right now.”

There came a hard knock of the phone being put down and then loud voices speaking unintelligible words. One voice, a man's, became louder and louder until Socrates could make out, “… he's just a friend, Delice. Aw come on, honey, don't be like that…”

“Socco,” was the next word that the man's voice said, this time into the receiver, “is that you?”

“Hey, Mookie. Sorry if it's a bad time.”

It was seven fifteen on the Tuesday after Howard and Corina's barbecue. After talking to Monica Socrates decided that he didn't have to be afraid of talking to Mookie. He could make his own decisions and nobody could talk him into going bad. But still he hesitated until Tuesday evening.

“Naw, man. I ain't busy. Delice just get like that sometime. How you doin'? You know I didn't think you was gonna call me. I thought that you had broke it off with the life. You married?”

“Uh-uh.”

“But you gotta good job,” Mookie said. “Good job and your own phone. Hey, who woulda believed it back in the day?”

“Half of 'em still there,” Socrates said.

“Yeah.” Mookie's tone turned somber. “I heard that Joe Benz passed two years ago. He was still locked down. You know it's a shame.”

Socrates felt something snap then. It was in his mind but he felt just the same as when the assistant warden, Blake Riordan, broke his nose while three guards held him down. The break itself was just a snick in his sinuses—the pain came later. And when it came it spread over his whole head.

“He was sixty-seven,” Mookie continued. “And he'd been up there forty-eight years.”

Socrates took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“George Wiles got cancer and they let him go home to die,” Moorland said. “I guess you could call him lucky. He called my brother to get my number out here.”

“How long you been in L.A., Mookie?” Socrates asked to make him talk about something else.

“Seven years,” Mookie replied. “At first I was still up to breakin' in. But after that eighteen months in Folsom I cleaned up. Broke my back, you know. Cain't walk.”

“Broke your back?”

“Had a disagreement and it got outta hand. That's why they let me out. You know, it was too expensive to take care'a me and I cain't ply my trade in no wheelchair anyway.”

“I'm sorry to hear about that, Kid. Shit. A wheelchair.”

“I'm the lucky one, man,” Mookie said. “You know George Greenfield got AIDS like Lionel. Hurly got in a argument broke his head. At least I still know my own name. And my daughter, Delice, come out to live wit' me and see that I eat.”

“She do all that for you?” Socrates was looking for anything good to hang on to.

“Yeah. Her husband went up for larceny. He was beatin' her pretty bad up until he was arrested. Now she here with me and you know I got a gun. If he come out after her I'll pay my debt killin' him for her. You know ain't nobody scared'a no niggah in a wheelchair.”

“I gotta go, Mook,” Socrates said.

“Why? You just called.”

“I'll talk to you later, man.” Socrates hung up the phone and pushed it away. He unplugged it from the wall and set it in a drawer next to the sink. Then he went to the door to check that the latch was secure and the bolt was thrown.

The next day he would call the phone company to change his number for a new, unlisted one. He thought about moving again, about changing his name.

His hands were shaking.

“Twenty-seven years in the Indiana prison and I wasn't never as scared as I was after talkin' to that Mookie,” Socrates told Darryl a few weeks later.

“You scared that he was gonna try an' get you in trouble so you'd have to go back to jail?” Darryl asked.

“No, boy,” the big ex-con said. “I'm scared'a livin' in my own skin, I'm scared of all the evil and sad I know.”

“What you mean?”

“Mookie don't know shit,” Socrates explained. “If a man put a gun to his own head an' pull the trigger Mookie'd a tell ya that the man just died. That's all. He don't see what's happenin'. That's what scares me.”

“How come?” Darryl asked. “It ain't you. If you know then that's all that matters.”

“Yeah. But suppose I don't know? Suppose I'm just as blind and stupid as Mookie Kid? Maybe if I'd just stop and look and listen I'd see that what I'm doin' is fulla shit. That's what scares me. Just like when I didn't know that the phone company list your name if you don't tell 'em not to. Just like when I woke up after killin' my friends and I didn't even know. I mean just 'cause they let you outta prison that don't mean you're free. And if you in jail that don't mean you're guilty or bad.”

Socrates did know that the frown furrowed in the skinny boy's face reflected his own.

“It's okay, Darryl.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. I think so. You see, since then I realized that it's okay to be scared and unsure. Scared teach you sumpin'. Uh-huh. Yeah. Scared make you ask the question. Sometimes it's only a scared man can do what's right.”

Darryl nodded, not quite so sure that he understood what Socrates was saying.

Socrates laughed because he wasn't too sure himself.

moving on

A

s Socrates came home from work that afternoon he was almost completely satisfied with life. He had a good job and friends who he could talk to when he was lonely and a door that he could unlock any time he wanted. He had a girlfriend and a telephone and new shoes that didn't hurt his feet. He was a free man, just as long as the police didn't know about his hidden handgun and no one found out about a fight or two he had had in the streets. There was a young boy who looked up to him and even though they lived under different roofs everyone who knew them thought of Socrates and Darryl as father and son.

But on the way home from the bus stop a dark cloud passed over Socrates' heart. He remembered the deepest lesson a convict ever learns: you never trusted in your own good fortune.

“Anything good they could always take away from you,” old man Cap Richmond used to say in the Indiana slam. “And what's already bad they could always make worse.”

Even at the corner of the alley he knew something was wrong. Killer, his two-legged dog, was barking wildly from the small garden plot in front of Socrates' door. When he got to the gate he found that the padlock had been cut and half of his belongings were strewn in the yard. Two large men were carrying his sofa bed into the alley. They dropped it like it was some kind of garbage and not a man furniture at all. He saw his old radio crushed on the ground next to the sofa.

“Hold up!” Socrates cried running toward the men. “What the fuck you think you doin' here?”

The men were large and black. They had done hard labor for their entire lives but they weren't old like Socrates. Neither one of them had seen his thirtieth birthday.

“What the fuck you think, old man?” one destroyer said. He had close-cropped hair and wore overalls with no shirt underneath. The sweat on his dark brown skin made him glisten with the promise of violence.

His friend wore no shirt at all and had long dreadlocks cascading down on his corded shoulders. The men stood together against the foul-mouthed intruder, as if daring him to speak again.