Unleashed

There is in Los Angeles a small tear-down that lies between two abandoned furniture stores on an almost always empty street. The person living here stopped paying rent when the owner died, and in this part of town, the city’s not too concerned about late property taxes. The house has no address. Its electricity’s been pulled from the store next door.

Most automobile are nicer than this place. Take a drive down the street and you’ll probably roll up your windows and lock your car doors. You’d never suspect any good could live here. Good is another part of town altogether. This is Watts. The tear-down is Socrates Fortlow’s gap, and this is “Walkin’ the Dog,” Walter Mosley’s reconsideration of the territory he so skillfully mapped out in 1998’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.” Read together or singularly, the narratives are among the smartest, most provocative portraits of America written since homelessness and crack entered the lexicon almost 20 years ago.

When we last saw Socco, he had just left his friend Right Burke at a bus stop on Crenshaw. With enough Scotch and pills inside of him to finish quickly what the cancer had begun, Burke didn’t have much time left, but that was OK for Socco. “He don’t need no police car or hospital,” he muttered as he stepped aboard the bus. “He don’t need none’a that shit. And neither do I.”

A year later we’ve moved beyond the hardened denials of “Outnumbered.” Socrates may still be bagging groceries at the Bounty Market on Venice Boulevard--Darryl’s there too, and Iula’s still serving meatloaf on Tuesdays for that matter--but Socco’s ready for more, and in this tight succession of stories, Mosley carefully draws out how difficult more can be when the distance between denial and desire is measured by the why you can’t have it. The answer, in black and white America, is racism, and the rage (“natural as the sunrise . . more like an instinct”) eats at Socrates’ soul.

“What I wanna know,” he asks at one point, “is if you think that black people have a right to be mad at white folks or are we all just full’a shit an’ don’t have no excuse for the misery down here an’ everywhere else?”

More than the blame, however, is the fear. When Socco goes to visit Iula, they make love for three hours, and you know it’s more than passion that fuels his lust. To admit want in a world filled with inequality is to edge toward the line that separates the lawful and the lawless, and Socco, haunted by the man he killed and the woman he raped and killed back in 1961, is afraid of a reprise.

All of which makes him as haunted a man as he was in “Outnumbered,” but this time the stakes are higher. Marty Gonzales, the manager at the Bounty, asks Socco to be the new produce manager, and at first he can’t answer. He knows it’s a loaded question. Forget the raise. Every time you try to be anything more than an outsider, you have to face everything that’s kept you out to begin with. As his Aunt Bellandra told him when he was a child: “They once made us slaves to the plantation but now they make us slaves to the slaves we was.” It’s an old lesson with an added kick.

Nine years out of the stir, Socco still carries “prison around in his pockets like a passport or a small bible.” It’s in his dreams and in his memories, the cries of men being raped at night, the confined quarters of his cell, the sadistic guards and inmates suffering twice over for their crime. There’s Lydell, whom he meets on the street, an ex-con too, who served time for killing his wife’s boyfriend and is paying the price for it every day: “It’s like I done killed ten thousand Henrys,” he says. “We got to see past bein’ guilty,” Socco tells him.

And there’s Mookie. He and Socco served time together, and now he’s on the phone, bringing Socco up to date on the men they knew in prison: Lionel Heath and George Greenfield are dead from AIDS; Joe Benz is dead too; George Wiles was released to die from his cancer and Mookie himself is the lucky one: He just got out on account of his broken back.

After their conversation, Socco unplugs the phone and makes sure the door is locked. Almost anything, or anyone, could send Socco back--Mookie, the police waiting to question him in the murder of a woman who’d been killed execution-style; the men moving him out of his house for illegal residency; the fools who invited him to an illegally staged rave. “I’m scared’a livin’ in my own skin, I’m scared of all the evil and sad I know,” he tells Darryl. “I mean just ‘cause they let you outta prison that don’t mean you’re free. And if you in jail that don’t mean you’re guilty or bad.” And it is these blurred distinctions that make his world so dangerous.

Yet Socco isn’t about to hide out completely. Burned by the fire, he’s still drawn to the flames, and Mosley is not shy about pushing him closer, testing the degrees of attraction and revulsion. In matters of redemption, it can be no other way--whether it’s among the domino players in a park where a simple question--”What would you do if you seen a dude stand up at that park bench over there an’ then you see that his wallet done fallen to the ground behind?”--reveals the pain of betrayal and the price of shame (“So you gonna mess up some man’s credit and put him all out with his business so that you could have a hangover and a dose of clap?”) or with the mugger in the alley (“his eyes had as much murder in them as Socrates had ever seen”).

*

Nor is Socco the only one who’s been burned. “Only thing wrong is that these here men you got today ain’t worth shit,” Cynthia says at a weekly gathering that takes place Wednesdays at Saint-Paul’s mortuary. “ . . . I don’t know why I wanna be mad at no white man when I got a black man willin’ to burn me to the ground and then stomp on my ashes.”

“We are held back not because of worth but because of prejudice and racism,” says the undertaker.

“I want to be somebody other just some nigger or gang banger,” says Leon.

Mosley’s portrait of the black community, once accustomed to its own invisibility, has shifted. Contentious, angry and struggling, it is less ready to implode than to strike out for a something more. As it was in “Outnumbered,” Mosley’s strength during these moments of polemical refutation is his refusal to let racial or sexual categories divide the world. He cuts to the quick, letting Socrates put words into action, creating a story that is filled with ideas and never wanting for drama. “Walkin’ the Dog” ends with a scene straight out of the Rampart Division with a rogue cop and an angry community, all the more stunning for Mosley’s prescience.

While Mosley does hit a few sour notes--Socrates can at times be less a man than an icon, diminishing in parts the hard-earned resonance of the whole--the pleasures of “Walkin’ the Dog” are abundant. It’s the language (“He had a beautiful wife who had a job, he had kids that were just like butter and brown sugar”), the deft characterizations (“Charlene was born to be a high society woman but her parents were down home Baptists who believed in hell and God with only human beings to separate them. So she paid dearly for every stick of lipstick and glimpse in the mirror. Beauty was wanton in her mother’s eyes and the love of beauty was a sin. Charlene learned to hate her natural elegance and to find men who treated her like trash.”) and, finally, it’s the triumph of Socrates himself, a man whose wisdom is hard won.

“What could you learn from a dog?” Iula asks him one day about the crippled beast, Killer, the dog he rescued in the first book.

“That you can be hungry,” he tells her, nearly choking with emotion, “but you don’t have to be mad. . . . That bravery ain’t no big thing. Bravery is just doin’ what you do wit’ what you got an’ where you find yourself. But it’s, but it’s love that gives life. It’s that that call out for you.”

When popular culture seems content to see the violent as cartoonish, the criminal as a beast and the down-and-out a curiosity, Mosley imagines their humanity, the tangled contradictions that have made them both innocent and responsible for their fate. In “Walkin’ the Dog,” he once again throws light on a part of this city we seldom see and proves that appearances can be deceiving. Perhaps we shouldn’t praise Mosley for the bravery of his vision; we’ve come to expect that from him. Perhaps we should be more grateful for the hope he’s found in Socrates Fortlow’s new and difficult life.