Walkin The Dog

Socrates knew that all Brenda Marsh was going to do was get him arrested. He knew how to talk to the cops better than she did. She

knew

the law but LaMett and Leontine

were

the law. Their blood and bones and fists were the letter and the last word.

“Did your client strike Mr. Burris?” LaMett asked patiently.

“In defense of his property.”

“Then I'm going to put him in a cell.”

“You can't do that,” Brenda Marsh said registering deep shock.

“You know what to do, Wayne,” LaMett said to Leontine.

Socrates laughed again. This time it wasn't the good life that made him smile but the presence of an old enemy; somebody he had fought against for so long that he was almost like a friend.

He didn't fight against the handcuffs. And he wasn't angry at Brenda Marsh. She'd tried.

They took him to a room behind the sergeant's desk and chained him to a long line of other prisoners. All of them black or brown. All young too. The chain of men were led from the back door of the police station to a waiting drab green bus. The men were taken to their seats and their chains were threaded through steel eyes in the floor. The windows were laced with metal grating and the way to the exit was obstructed by a door of metal bars.

Two guards and a driver took their posts up front and the bus drove off. The boys and young men began talking in the back. It was the beginning of the pecking order. Socrates had taken that ride before.

“Hey, old man, what they got you for? Stealin' wine?” It was a young Mexican kid. He wore a sleeveless shirt that revealed green and red tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders. The designs spoke of love, gang affiliations, his mother, his nation and a few aesthetics about death and pride.

“Youngsters tried to empty out my house,” Socrates said. “But I guess I was a little too rough. Little bit.”

“Hey, pops can hit,” another young man said. “You mean the cops had to pull you off 'em?”

“They was workin' boys,” Socrates said in a remote tone. “They went to the cops and then the cops come to me.”

“Man that's some chickenshit,” a tubby boy said. He was a Negro with scared green eyes. “You know they shouldn'ta called cop.”

“Shut up, faggot,” a well-built young man said. Socrates sized him up as the would-be leader. “Nobody wanna hear from your fat ass.”

The tubby boy shook, trying to hide his fear.

The well-built young man was seated two rows in front of Socrates. He had hair only on the top of his head. The rest had disappeared in a severe fade. The name Lex was tattooed on the right side of his head. Socrates couldn't see the other side.

“What you lookin' at, mothahfuckah?” Lex dared Socrates.

“When we stop, dog,” Socrates said. “When we stop and you come a little closer I will show you a lesson that your daddy forgot to tell ya. I'ma show you how to roll over an' beg.”

Lex didn't say anything to that. The rest of the prisoners stayed quiet for a second too. The fat boy studied the situation with desperate green eyes.

The bus drove for over two hours to a detention facility in the foothills. It looked like an old abandoned school. A dozen or so reinforced salmon bungalows with bars in the windows and a razor wire fence over eighteen feet high around the perimeter.

The men and boys were hustled into a large room with long tables and made to sit for lunch while still in their manacles.

Lex started giving the fat boy, James, a hard time but he stopped when Socrates said, “Eat your slop and shut up.”

Lex was the oldest of the bunch, except for Socrates. He was maybe twenty-seven and dull eyed. He was big and strong. That counted for something in the street but you needed more than bulk against the desperation of incarceration. In the lockup you needed courage and concentration, you needed friendship and you could never back down even when going ahead meant for sure that you were dead.

Before Socrates finished his meal he palmed a small glass salt-shaker.

“What you in for, James?” Socrates asked the scared fat boy. In two days James had been beaten up twice. The other young men sensed his weakness and ganged up on him. Lex left him alone, however, because Socrates made it clear that he didn't want Lex to mess around.

“Stealin',” James said. “I broke into a Stop n' Save market but they caught me.”

“You don't look like you been starvin', man. Why you stealin'?”

“I'ont know. I wanted some money.”

“What kinda money you gonna get outta some little store?” Socrates asked. “If you get a hundred dollars that would be a lot.”

James pouted and looked away. He tried to hang around Socrates because the other young men left him alone under the older man's gaze.

“You been busted before?”

“Once.”

“Stealin'?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen. I look younger but I'm seventeen.”

Socrates watched the baby-faced green-eyed boy.

“You got to learn how to fight if they put you in jail, James,” he said finally. “ 'Cause they gonna tear you down in here. Tear you up.”

“I know.”

“Uh-uh, boy. You don't know. I know. I been there and there ain't no nothin' like it that you could think of. This here is just a lark compared to what you got in store.”

For two days Socrates and his chain mates had been quartered in a barracks. They had a small recreation yard that was blocked off from other similar barracks and yards. Each compound contained about eighteen prisoners that were being held for trial or something else. Some of the barracks held very tough men who made kissing noises through the razor wire at the young men who were held with Socrates.

“If you was in one'a them other cages, James, they would eat you up.”

James' fearful eyes flashed for a moment and then he clamped down his jaw to crush the fear.

“Get you somethin' sharp, James,” Socrates said. “Some kinda knife or edge. And you stand up. You fight, son. 'Cause you already here an' ain't nobody gonna help you when I'm gone.”

Two hours later Socrates was transferred out of the Trancas detention facility. As a good-bye present he gave James the jagged bottom of the broken saltshaker.

They met in the judge's chambers. It wasn't a trial, just an inquiry, that was what Judge Radell said. He was an older white man with white hair and blue veins at his temples. There was a hint of blue in his washed-out eyes and an air of certainty about him that made Socrates nervous.

“Now is this a property disagreement or a question of assault?” Judge Radell asked.

“A little of both, Your Honor,” Kenneth Brantley, the Cherry Hill Development Company lawyer, said. He was there with Burris and Trapps. The two men were dressed neatly in suits. Burris's jaw was still swollen and there were cuts across Trapps's face from his spill in the alley. “Mr. Fortlow was illegally occupying our property and he assaulted Mr. Trapps and Burris when they were merely executing their job.”

“That's not true, Your Honor,” an unusually subdued Brenda Marsh said.

“What isn't, Brenda?” the judge asked.

“None of it. I've presented Mr. Fortlow's documents. These men were destroying his home and property. My client is gainfully employed and he has tried to pay his rent.”

The judge lifted the cover of a manila folder on his desk. He didn't read much.

“He sent a few money orders nine years ago and that makes him the legal occupant? Sounds rather slim, counselor.”