Fortunate Son

by Walter Mosley

  “What about you?” Christie asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to have this baby with you,” she said.

  “Then we’ll have our baby and raise him to be a man.”

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  “Or a woman,” Christie added. Her voice was now bright and filled with hope.

  Eric wondered what Drew would think when he realized that he was the backup just in case Eric said no.

  “Go to sleep, Christie,” Eric said. “I’ll come over in the morning.”

  “When?”

  “At nine.”

  “What about school?”

  “I’ll skip it for one day. We can go to the doctor together.

  And talk about having our baby.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love both of you.”

  B y that t i m e Minas Nolan was leaving for work at ten to seven every morning. He rarely made it home before eleven.

  He was sleeping four hours a night and did not take vacations or even weekends off. The only time that he and Eric saw each other was between six and ten to seven, when they’d have breakfast together and share the New York Times. It was a day-old paper, but they didn’t mind. Reading together was their ritual; the news had little to do with it.

  Ahn would also get up to make and serve their breakfast.

  Minas had rye toast and marmalade with a poached egg and air-dried German beef. Eric had oatmeal with toasted almonds, golden raisins, brown sugar, and cream. Most of their time together was spent eating and reading. Now and then Minas would mention something he found fascinating in the paper or an anecdote from the previous day at work.

  Eric, for his part, listened or, at most, asked for clarification on a detail or a word. He never tried to have a full-blown 1 3 8

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  conversation because when the clock on the wall said 6:50, Minas Nolan stood up, bussed his dishes, took his brief-case from the floor next to the door, and left no matter what was happening at breakfast or in the world according to the Times.

  But that day was different.

  Eric couldn’t go back to sleep after his talk with Christie.

  He restrung his fiberglass tennis racket in the garage and then looked over his school papers. Eric was an excellent student.

  His comprehension of math was pure and intuitional; his memory for facts was a point of pride for his teachers. He didn’t need to check his work, but he had to do something.

  “Did you love my mother?” Eric asked Minas at six forty-two.

  “Of course I did,” Minas replied. The once-handsome man was now graying and haggard. “I loved her very much.”

  “What about Mama Branwyn?”

  Minas’s throat constricted, and his mind traveled back to the night she asked him for a kiss. He folded his newspaper, reached to place it on the table, but he wasn’t looking and so dropped the Times to the floor.

  “Branwyn,” he said.

  They had not discussed the mother of Eric’s heart since before the day Eric found that green fish on the beach at Malibu.

  Eric placed his hands palms down on the table. All of the manliness and beauty that was once his father’s had now been absorbed into the boy’s features.

  Ahn walked in with their final cup of tea. She could see the confrontation in their eyes, so she silently placed the solid silver platter between them and then left to eavesdrop from the pantry.

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  “Branwyn,” Dr. Nolan said again. “Yes . . . yes, I loved her very, very much. She saved me when your mother died.”

  “Did she love you, Dad?”

  “I . . . I don’t think she loved me the way I loved her,” he said. “But that didn’t ever seem to matter. The way Branwyn felt about people, she could give everything inside her to you even if you weren’t her first choice or even somebody she could love.”

  “Were we people she loved?” Eric asked. He’d forgotten about Christie by then.

  “I think so,” his father said. “It wasn’t hard with Branwyn like it was with other women.”

  “What do you mean?” Eric asked softly.

  “Other women I’d known wanted something you couldn’t see or touch or even say. They called it love, but it was more like a game the way I saw it. One night I asked Branwyn if she loved me, and she said that she fell in love with me every night that I carried her up the stairs to our room. When she said that, I felt like a kid. I kissed her and she laughed at me . . .”

  Minas got lost in the memory.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “I asked her to marry me, but she said no. I asked her all the time, but the answer was always the same.”

  “You think that was because she didn’t love you?”

  “No. It had to do with Tommy,” Minas said. “Tommy’s father was alive, and she didn’t want her boy to feel his loss with our marriage.”

  It was time for Minas to leave.

  “Have I neglected you, Eric?”

  In his mind Eric saw his father rising up and walking toward the door. He was supposed to be leaving, but he was not.

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  Behind the pantry door Ahn was thinking the same thing.

  She feared that something terrible was about to happen.

  “No,” Eric said.

  “It’s just that,” Minas continued as if his son had not spoken at all, “you’ve never seemed to need help. All we ever had to do was contain you, hold you back from eating all the Christmas fruitcake or from jumping off the roof to fly with the sparrows.

  “You never complained about anything. If I told you something, you just listened to me. Children are supposed to fight with their parents. Sons are supposed to want to push their fathers aside. But I always felt that you were trying to protect me instead of the other way around.

  “But now that you’re asking about your mothers, I see that I haven’t been there for you.”

  Eric was staring at his father’s face, imagining that he had his sketch pad before him. He would paint the portrait of his father many years later, but this was the sitting for that canvas.

  The drained blue eyes and graying blond hair, the gaunt jowls and dry lips.

  Mothers, Eric thought. Mothers. Other children only had one mother, but he had two and both of them had died for him to survive.

  “Would you like to go down to Malibu this morning, son?” Minas asked.

  “I have to do something, Dad.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Christie’s going to the doctor. I told her that I’d go with.”

  “You’re still with her?”

  Eric had seen Christie almost every day for a year. “Yeah, Dad.”

  It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.

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  “I could come home early,” the doctor offered.

  “Sure, Dad.”

  A h n cam e out of the storeroom moments after Minas left.

  She stood near the door staring at Eric.

  “Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.

  She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.

  Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of.

  It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.

  “The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me.

  I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.

  “He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love
with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.

  “At night he calls outside my window and asks me to come away with him, the girl said. And when I look out I see him in moonlight. Mother, he is so beautiful and handsome, and his deep voice makes me tremble inside.

  “But, my daughter, the mother said. He is a tiger, a man-eater, a monster.

  “For you, Mother, I know that he is a beast. But for me he has nothing but love. He takes me riding on his back through the jungle under golden moonlight, and all the creatures there bow down to me as consort to their king.

  “It is true, the mother said, that the tiger is a king. He is better 1 4 2

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  than any man you would find in our poor village. But he is still a tiger, something apart. And even if he believes that he loves you, sooner or later you will answer to his claws.

  “The girl said nothing more to her mother about her love.

  That night she disappeared from the house of her parents, taking with her a yellow robe that many generations of her family’s women had worn on their wedding day. Three years passed and nothing was heard about the girl until one morning an infant boy was found in the middle of the village swaddled in a bloody yellow cloth. A beautiful boy with tiger’s eyes and a roar instead of crying. The grandmother took in the child, and he became a great king. But he was always heartbroken and sad because he had no true mother or any father at all.

  “And one day, while he was on a crusade to unite all his people, he was beset by a tiger. His retainers mortally wounded the beast, but before the tiger died the young king looked deeply into his eyes. There he saw the truth: that his father, the tiger, had devoured his mother, but she lived on inside of him. The boy had found both his mother and his father, but in finding them they were slain.”

  Ahn stood up and walked from the room. Eric felt the warning in her words. He even understood the general meaning of the tale. But he didn’t know what role she saw him in.

  Was he the tiger or the boy? Was Christie the village girl? Was Ahn the powerless mother? He sat there for over an hour considering the parable. He went over it again and again.

  He imagined the stately tiger walking through the jungle with the golden apparition of the village girl astride his back.

  In his jaws the tiger carried a bloodied yellow cloth in which the royal baby was wrapped. The image made his breath come fast. It was beautiful and very sad.

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  “The tiger and the village girl had no choice,” Eric declared to an empty kitchen. “They were meant to be. And the boy, the boy can’t help himself either. They’re all just waiting for their parts to play.”

  He took the bus down to Santa Monica, seeing himself as a pawn and satisfied to release himself to fate.

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  10

  For most of those first three years away from the Nolan household, Thomas was more or less happy. He hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since the first week, but he could hear the school bell from the clubhouse /apartment building that he shared with the morose Pedro. Every day at the lunch bell he went to talk to May. She’d make him a hot lunch and talk about her life. May didn’t need any response from the boy, and he loved to hear her talk because she seemed happy to be getting things off her chest. That happiness filled Thomas’s own heart.

  Not that May lived a happy life. Elton was very jealous of her. Sometimes at night he would come home and want to know where she’d been and who she’d been with. He’d slapped her on a few occasions; once he’d even blackened her eye.

  But May, by her own account, never cheated on Elton.

  Twice she had to “do things” with Mr. Sanders, the landlord, because they were short on the rent for more than two months. But she did that to help Elton, even though she could never tell him because he would kill both her and Sanders if he knew. But she didn’t like it with Sanders like she did with Thomas’s father.

  The only times that she had ever been bad were when she was either drunk or high.

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  “You should never do any drugs, Lucky,” May had said.

  “It’s the devil in them.”

  That was what had happened one day when Thomas came home to find May and a man called Wolf wrestling in the nude on the living room floor. When Thomas opened the door, Wolf jumped up and stood there with his big erection standing stiff and straight. The man was breathing hard, and his eyes were wild and very white against his black skin.

  “That’s just Lucky, Wolf,” May said in a deep voice. “Go wait in the kitchen, Tommy. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”

  But she didn’t come in. She and Wolf made noises for a long time, and finally Thomas went out through the back porch to his alley valley.

  The next day when Thomas mentioned the man May was with the day before, she said, “How you know about Wolf ?”

  Somehow she had forgotten even seeing Thomas. He told her about them being naked and wrestling, and asked if his peeny was going to get like Wolf ’s.

  “You can’t ever tell Elton about Wolf,” she said. And then she told him that he should never do drugs.

  “Drugs make you crazy like me an’ Wolf,” she said.

  Wolf brought her drugs, and after she took them they took off their clothes and did that. And the drugs also made her forget about Thomas. She promised not to do drugs anymore, and he said okay and they went on for a long time as if that day with Wolf had never happened.

  But May had other problems too. Elton was the source of many of them. Mostly it was because he never made enough money, and because of that he was mad all the time. And when he got mad he drank. And when he drank he got mean.

  And then he’d go out and get in fights, and when he got home May and Thomas had to hide from him.

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  Thomas listened to his father complain about the money he had to spend on the food that Thomas ate, including the dollar for his school lunch.

  Thomas would have given up the lunch money except for Skully.

  Skully was a mutt puppy that Thomas found on their doorstep one morning on his way to work. (Thomas referred to going to his alley as going to work because he spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned street and fixing up his clubhouse.)

  Skully was a whining, licking ball of fur that Thomas immediately fell in love with. He brought the puppy back into the alley and fed him his peanut butter sandwich. That afternoon he went down to the corner store (after three so as not to be caught by the truant officer) and bought cheap dog food for his pet.

  He named the dog Skully because of his mispronunciation of the foes of the Fantastic Four, the shape-shifting Skrulls.

  Thomas pretended that Skully was a Skrull prince that changed into a puppy and now couldn’t change back, and it was Thomas’s job to feed and protect him until his people came and brought him back home to his castle.

  Over the last three years he had made a home for himself among his family and friends. Besides May and Elton, he had his grandmother, Madeline, whom he stayed with one weekend a month. (He persuaded Madeline to let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen, where the hum of the refrigerator’s motor drowned out the all-night TV.) Then there was Bruno, who had been diagnosed with leukemia and juvenile dia-betes. Bruno had managed to go to school through the second grade, but now he was homebound and the school sent a tutor to visit him on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thomas 1 4 7

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  dropped by to visit Bruno, and his pixilated Aunt Till, at least one day during the week and also on Saturdays, when May and Elton stayed in bed until noon.

  Pedro always talked about going to Seattle to live with his sister, but whenever he got any money, he spent it on pizzas for himself and Thomas — only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much
time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.

  These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother — and then there was Alicia.

  Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys.

  Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.

  One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.

  “Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.

  The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.

  Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her 1 4 8

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  breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name Ralphie written across it.

  Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.

  When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.

  “Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”

  “You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.

  “Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”

  “What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.

  “Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”

  “But what if we hide her?”

  “How?”

  “We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top.