Free The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley Page A

fist. I call out, ‘You bettah stop that for I call somebody.’ An’ then he jump up and I see that he had a knife in his hand. The girl was coughin’ like she’d been chokin’ an’ he come at me . . .” Luna looked at Socrates then. She was asking a question with her eyes. He frowned and then nodded.
“He must’a been high,” she continued. “He come at me fast but sloppy. You know I almost always got me a knife, my mama taught me that. She told me that a girl always need a edge. And so I stuck him in his th’oat an’ he went down. Marianne put her clothes together an’ pulled me ovah to her car. We went to her place up on Westwood Boulevard. She had a man keepin’ her up there back then.”
“What happened to the man?” Socrates asked. “The one you stuck?”
“His name was Reginald. I cut his voice box and hit a nerve in his neck. He cain’t walk at all and he cain’t talk. They asked him who did it but he don’t know my name and he cain’t read or write neither so it ain’t nuthin’.”
“How old are you, Luna?”
Luna got up from the cane chair and sat down next to Socrates on the piano bench before saying, “Twenty-three.” They were looking into each others’ eyes.
“Why you wanna tell me about that?” he asked.
“’Cause you axed me how we got to be friends. Marianne says that she woulda been killed or at least lost her voice if I hadn’t come and stopped him. She done took care’a me since then.”
“But you could be arrested if I told somebody.”
“You ain’t gonna tell nobody,” she said with a sneer, “and I never told nobody else.”
“So what is it you wanted to ask me, Luna?”
“You the first full man I evah met,” she said.
“Say what?”
“You heard me. You the first full man I evah met. I mean they’s other men out here but they ain’t for me. Fancy niggahs and fools, dumb mothahfuckahs think that a woman just waitin’ to lie down and spread her legs open. And then there’s men like Reginald.”
“And so what’s the question?” Socrates asked.
“You know.”
“No, baby. What?”
Just the fact that Luna hesitated ignited a fire in Socrates.
“I want you to be my, my man,” she said with barely a stammer. “I want your baby inside me.”
When she put her left hand on her abdomen Socrates felt muscles in his cheeks that were unfamiliar.
“Luna . . . you’re twenty-three. I’m so close to sixty I could kiss it.”
“You that close to me too.”
Looking into Luna’s eyes Socrates saw what love could be for a man like him. It wasn’t red silk and chocolates, or grins and soft kisses. The passion he now saw ignited in Luna’s eyes was like that knife in Reginald’s throat; that moment where survival is everything.
“Listen, girl,” he said with a tone of confidence that belied his heart, “I’m old and fat.”
“You look good to me. I wanna man, not some weight liftin’ fool like Ron Zeal. You know I hear he take so much body buildin’ drug that he cain’t hardly get it up no more.”
Socrates tried to think of a way to explain himself. She was young and wild but she didn’t understand the darkness he came from.
“I know,” she said as if responding to his thoughts. “I know what you did. Marianne told me. She said that you killed a man an’ raped an’ then killed his girlfriend.”
The words were like every fist that landed on him while the convict Wendell tried to beat him to his knees. But Socrates could fight back against Wendell; he could fight back and win. He put that big ugly killer on his knees. He taught him a lesson that everyone in the Indiana State penitentiary learned.
But Luna was different. He couldn’t stand up against her. The violence in his heart ebbed out of him like bad blood after the final fighter in a long-standing feud had passed on.
“I know what you did,” Luna said again. “But here I am. I don’t got my knife in my bag. I don’t got no underwears on neither.”
Socrates couldn’t help but look at