Walter Mosley - Socrates Fortlow 03 by The Right Mistake

Author:The Right Mistake [Mistake, The Right]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-05-15T13:25:57+00:00

BREEDING GROUND

1.

“Socrates,” a voice said somewhere up ahead, maybe around the corner at the end of the corridor. He was on his way down the long hall, flanked by Hennie Brown and Bertrand Sawman, two guards who he’d known longer than any other person-not-a-convict. They hadn’t told him where they were taking him but his hands were shackled and his ankles were chained together. This circumstance filled the convict with glee but he didn’t show it.

Brown had been nineteen years at the prison. Sawman had seen twenty-one birthdays come and go since donning the graygreen uniform. But Socrates had them both beat. He was at the twenty-seven-year mark and counting.

He was happy because the chains on his feet meant that he was going to see the warden. That walk unnerved many a hardened con but Socrates wasn’t worried about the punishment he might receive. He only wanted a glance out the window.

“Socrates.” For eight years Bearclaw, Socrates’ third warden, would call convicts to his office in order to discipline them. The offender would be made to sit in an oak chair before the oak desk where, through the window behind Arnold Bearclaw, he would be able to see a small valley where there was a power line and a stream. For more than half the year the window was open and errant sounds would come in. Birds and the sound of cars from an unseen parking lot below. Terry Blanderman swore he once heard a woman singing—a real woman, he’d said.

Socrates would have shanked a man if it meant that when he’d go before Bearclaw for discipline he could be sure that the woman would be singing. It would be worth a hundred and eighty days of darkness to hear an actual voice of the opposite sex.

“Socrates.” According to custom the guards secured the left ankle manacle to an iron eye in the floor before the warden entered. That way the prisoner had no chance of jumping the head man before the guards could club him down.

This too made sense. A great many cons spent entire days writing letters to the warden or painting pictures of him. They talked about him and loved or hated him like they did the father who abandoned them or beat them or their mothers. The warden, whoever he was at the time, was an unhealthy abscess on the minds of many convicts. But Socrates only cared about that window.

He was forty-eight years old and had spent more than half of his life in prison. He would never be free, never be free . . .

“Socrates, wake up.”

“Life,” Judge Arrant had said and life he would spend without complaint or appeal.

He had killed and that was his punishment.

Socrates never claimed he was innocent, never bragged about his crimes. He didn’t hate the warden or his own father but he wanted a look out of that open window and hear a car parking and maybe a woman humming some popular song.

The warden was tall, big boned, and black.

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