Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [Mosley, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Mystery & Detective, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780671014995
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1998-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE WANDERER

{1.}

When Socrates Fortlow was released from prison he ran just as if he had gone over the wall. There was no family that wanted to take him in. There were no old friends except for other men who had been released from prison and now lived in the shadows of Indianapolis, Gary, and Chicago.

They paid Socrates twelve hundred thirty-two dollars and sixty-three cents for his twenty-seven years behind bars. He put the money in his pocket and took a bus to Los Angeles.

He had three reasons to go there.

The first was that even though he had been born and half raised on a farm he no longer knew the country. He couldn’t live the slow rural life and so he needed a city.

His second reason for escaping west was that the prison he’d come from was drafty and cold. The only cold he wanted from that day on was chill in the one thousand dollars’ worth of beers that he planned to imbibe.

He learned in prison that L.A. was a big rambling bunch of towns and that everybody was in too much of a hurry to remember faces, places, times, and events. An ex-con would need that kind of anonymity.

And so he got on a Greyhound hunched over, sullen, and silent like some kind of fugitive. He ran as far as California and then he burrowed in, hating every policeman, every clerk’s glance, and every footstep behind him.

He ran because he knew that in Indiana the cops would know him. If they knew him they’d try to bring him in every now and then. And if anyone tried to put him in a cell again he would try his best to kill them.

Socrates Fortlow was running for his life.

Within a week of his release from prison, eight years ago, Socrates had his first fight. He was confronted, in the alley that passed his door, by a bulky young man named Charles Rinnett. Charles, trying to impress his grinning friends, had claimed that Socrates was an “old Dumpster-divin’, rag-pickin’, homeless mothahfuckah.”

Socrates was only fifty at that time and even though he was more than twice the age of Charles he convinced the young man by argument, and a strong hand, that he wasn’t homeless and that he had never eaten from the garbage.

“Sometimes a broke nose is all you young boys understand,” Socrates said while standing over the heckler. He’d knocked Charles to the ground three times before the youth got the idea to stay down. The young men around them stopped laughing at Socrates and started making fun of their friend.

Charles never spoke to Socrates after that day. He grew older and more somber and could be seen, now and then, collecting bottles and cans on the streets of Watts. Socrates watched Charles for all those years as he turned meaner and shabbier.

If he could have, Socrates would have told Charles that he was sorry for breaking his nose; that he was just recently out of the penitentiary when they had their fight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.