The Right Mistake Read Free Page B

blocks past the wide boulevard he turned right. There he came to First Victory Rooming House—a place where poor men and women could still buy a room for fourteen dollars a night.
    Baths cost sixty cents and there was only a single pay phone. Scott Bontille was the daytime manager.
Socrates approached his office at the far end of the first floor
    hallway.
“Mr. Fortlow,” Bontille said. “No rooms to let this mornin’.
Maybe you could come back in the afternoon.”
Bontille was a squat specimen with a face shaped like a chisel
and an advancing hairline that made him resemble pictures of
certain rattlesnakes that Socrates had seen.
The house manager got pleasure out of lording his power over
those that were less fortunate than himself. On the street
Socrates ignored him but now he felt anger rising in his chest. Between his anger and his mission Socrates was momentarily
frozen, trapped by his desire to strike Scott.
“You know I already got a house, Mr. Bontille.”
“You don’t have no regular job,” the light-skinned manager
replied, his natural smirk opening into a leer. He was missing
one upper and two lower teeth. The rest had been stained brown
from cigarettes and too much coffee. “And the last I heard people still had to pay rent fo’ a place to sleep.”
“I’m lookin’ for Freddy Bumpus,” Socrates said then. “I hear
he’s taken up residence with you.”
As the words came from his lips Socrates blessed his shoes.
They’d taken him to a new place on that long road. His muscles
relaxed and he no longer wished to throw Scott Bontille down
the hall. He smiled.
“What’s funny?” Bontille asked.
“Us.”
“What us?”
“You’n me, Mr. Bontille. Here we are doin’ our dead masters’
work an’ here they been in the ground so long their bones have
turned to dust.”
“What kinda mess you talkin’, Socrates?” the snake-faced man
asked.
“Just mess,” the ex-con agreed. He felt good saying these
words. “Just mess.”
    “Who is it?” a man’s voice answered when Socrates knocked on door D3 on the second floor of the Victory.
“Socrates Fortlow.”
“What you want?”
“Open the door, Freddy. I wanna talk to ya.”
“About what?”
There was a time, an eon and a day before, when Socrates would have been tempted to knock hard enough to shake the door off its hinges. But now he just said, “About your grandfather’s house.”
There was a moment of quiet then. It was a Saturday and the sun was muted through a small window at the end of the shabby and narrow hallway. Birds were singing their hearts out in a fruitless apple tree that stood just outside the glass.
Socrates flexed his toes against the tip of his shoes and smiled. The door came open.
Fred Bumpus was a chocolate colored man built for the long haul but not for strength. He’d been forty-three for six months, though he looked older. Bony but not thin, Bumpus was tall and lean. His pupils were brown and the whites of his eyes were a lighter brown. His face was mature and haggard. He held his head hangdog style telling anyone who bothered to look that he’d been defeated by life.
“What about my house?” he asked.
“I wanted to use part of it for this idea I got last night.”
“Ain’t mine no mo’,” Fred said. He moved as if to close the door on the big man.
“Yo’ granddaddy built that house,” Socrates said. “His name was Mr. Bumpus too.”
Bumpus lifted his head to regard his visitor.
“What you sayin’?”
“That that’s a nice house,” Socrates replied. “You got them two lots an’ that addition on the side is almost a full home on its own.”
“Is,” Fred said with wan enthusiasm. “Got its own kitchen and bedrooms an’ a toilet too. Its own doors, front and back. If that ain’t a house I don’t know what is.”
“I’d like to use that add on,” Socrates said.
“For what?”
“Meetins’.”
“What kinda meetins’?”
Socrates felt the smile but doubted that it made itself evident. He