He wanna know that you can be trusted. How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“You look younger.”
Thomas kicked his feet and ate his sandwich.
“How come you limpin’?”
“I fell off a buildin’ an’ broke my hip.”
Thomas smacked his lips after eating the sandwich. He hadn’t had a meal in a few days.
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“You’re so cute.” Cilla leaned over and gave Thomas a slow kiss on his mouth.
He closed his eyes and hugged his shoulder with his chin because the kiss both tickled and excited him.
A f te r that h e worked every afternoon for Tremont.
Mostly he took white packages, which he kept in his underpants, to people’s houses and apartments between four and seven, after other little kids were out of school. Once a week Tremont would send Thomas to Cilla’s, where the boy would take a bath and wash his clothes in a small washing machine in the kitchen.
Thomas made twenty dollars a day, and nobody molested him on the streets because people had seen him limping down the sidewalks with Chilly, and everybody knew that Chilly was with Tremont. And nobody messed with Tremont’s peeps.
After four weeks Thomas went to Bruno’s house. His friend’s elderly aunt Till answered the door.
“Hello, young man,” she said, with eyes that held no memory of him.
“Is Bruno home, Aunt Till?”
“No,” she said, looking as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. “Bruno died.”
“No. From what?”
“It’s the leukemia got him. He was in so much pain.”
“Hi, Lucky,” Monique said. She had come up from behind the bent-over older woman.
“Hi, Monique,” came Thomas’s joyless greeting.
The older woman turned away, and Thomas could see Monique’s big belly.
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“Come on in,” the young woman said.
She took Thomas into the kitchen and served him a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.
“I thought the county took you away, Lucky,” Monique said after lowering herself into the kitchen chair.
“I runned away from them.”
“When?”
“Long time ago.”
“Where you livin’?”
“With a woman named Cilla,” he said. Thomas didn’t want to tell her that the police hadn’t changed the lock to the cellar at the back of his clubhouse. He found the key where he’d left it — under the crate next to Alicia’s hidden tomb.
“An’ what you doin’?” the girl asked.
“Nuthin’. What about you?”
She put her hand on her belly. “I’m havin’ a baby. It’s Tony Williams’s boy, but he got shot. We got a studio ’partment ovah on Hooper, but now I’m there by myself. But I cain’t hardly pay no rent so I guess I’ma be in the street.”
“Why don’t you stay here?”
“I could but they wanna treat me like a baby, an’ here I’m havin’ a child’a my own.”
“I got three hundred dollars,” the boy said to the big girl, now made bigger by her pregnancy.
“You do?”
“I could give it to you,” he said. “I mean, I was gonna go out wit’ Bruno an’ buy a whole lotta Fantastic Fours with it.
But I bet he would want me t’give it to you.”
M on i que ’s apartm e nt was just a room. One wall had a stove against it, and there was a big footed bathtub next to the 1 6 2
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window on the opposite wall. Between these was the bed.
Thomas slept in the bed with Monique that night and every night after for the next three years.
With the money he made from drug dealing, he paid the rent and bought the groceries. During most days he’d leave Monique to stay in his alley and on the roof of his apartment building. There he’d visit with Alicia and commemorate his friend Pedro. In the afternoon he went to work for Tremont delivering ecstasy, cocaine, crack, and sometimes heroin.
Two month s a f te r he and Monique had moved in together, Thomas came home to find that Monique’s mother had come over and helped deliver Monique’s daughter —
Lily. Thomas loved the little baby girl and thought of her as his baby sister. Now he had two sisters.
O ne n i g h t, toward the end of his first year working for Tremont, Thomas went to a house where a big, fat black man, wearing only a ratty bathrobe, answered the door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I brought you sumpin’ from Tremont,” the boy said.
The man looked around and then grabbed the boy, pulling him into the darkened apartment. He shoved Thomas into a big room where the only light came from a giant television set. The scene on the screen was like when Thomas had come in on Wolf and May. There was a laughing black man with a large erection that he was pressing into a white woman who cried out in pain.
“I’ma do you like that man doin’ that woman,” the large man said.
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The big man opened up his bathrobe, and Thomas could see the erection rising up toward his captor’s belly.
“Gimme that rock,” the man said.
Thomas reached down into his underpants and handed over the package.
The man on the screen said, “Take all of it, bitch.”
The woman screamed.
“Take off your pants,” the man told Thomas.
The boy fumbled with the snap while the man tore open the paper.
“I gotta go bafroom,” Thomas said.
“You bettah not have nuthin’ on when you come out.”
The man already had the first rock in his glass pipe. He was lighting the match as Thomas closed the bathroom door. The boy turned the lock and jumped up on the toilet. There was a little window over the commode.
Thomas tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Hurry up in there!” the man yelled.
Thomas could see the doorknob jiggle.
“Unlock this goddamned do’!”
There was a loud thump, and the door shuddered.
“Open up!”
Thomas wondered if he should unlock the door.
The loud thump came again, and the doorjamb buckled and cracked.
Thomas found a thick green bottle of aftershave and threw it into the glass. The window shattered, and the door caved in. Thomas jumped through the window, cutting his left thigh and right forearm as he did. He could hear the man’s heavy footsteps across the floor behind him. He stuck his arm out after Thomas, grabbing the boy by his shoulder.
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“Let me go!” he cried.
Thomas moved from side to side, scraping the fat man’s arm on the jagged glass that lined the window frame. Suddenly he was free and running down the street in his underwear and T-shirt.
When he got to the secret door in Tremont’s alley, Chilly let him in.
“What the fuck you mean you ain’t got my money, niggah?” Tremont bellowed. He surged up out of his chair and lifted Thomas by one arm.
“He made me take off my pants and showed me what he was gonna do to me in a movie,” Thomas whined. “I had to jump out the windah.”
“Where the money, li’l man?”
“He didn’t pay me. He was just naked, an’ his thing was big.”
“I’ont care about that. I want my money.”
“You know Lucky ain’t stealin’, Tree,” Chilly said in a calm, slow voice. “All he do is what you say, man.”
Thomas’s right arm was bleeding, and his left was in pain from the way the powerful drug dealer held him.
“Look at him,” Chilly continued. “He bleedin’. He ain’t got no pants.”
“RayRay cut you like that?” Tremont asked.
Thomas nodded and sniffed. The drug dealer’s bic
eps was bigger than his head.
Tremont put Thomas down and then said, “Com’on wit’
me.”
They got to the door, and Tremont turned to Chilly. “Give the li’l man yo’ pants,” he said.
On the way Tremont promised Thomas that he’d kill him if he was lying.
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“If you stealin’ from me I’ll kill you,” he said.
Thomas knew the threat was real. Tremont had killed man and boy before.
Tre mont bang e d on RayRay’s door with the butt of his pistol. When nobody answered, he knocked the door in with his shoulder.
In the dark room the DVD was still playing. Now it was a scene of two men having sex with each other. A woman was kissing one and then the other while they groaned. When the screen got very bright, it shone on RayRay, who was sitting in a big chair, the glass pipe still in his hand. His other arm hung down at his side. Below it there was a great deal of gelatinous blood.
“Mothahfuckah daid,” Tremont said, amazed. “Got so high he bleed to death an’ didn’t even know it.”
When Tremont turned on the light, Thomas could see that the fat man’s eyes were half open and sightless, as Alicia’s had been.
“Mothahfuckah cut himself tryin’ to grab you, but he was so fucked up that he just did more rock. Damn. I guess you ain’t lyin’, li’l man.”
M on i que c leane d and dressed Thomas’s wounds, but the next day he had a fever. By evening he was talking out of his head.
She brought him to the emergency room with a story about them being brother and sister. He had forgotten his key and locked himself out of the apartment so he broke the window but cut himself climbing in.
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“I tried to clean it up, but then he come down with fever,”
she said.
The nurse saw her with the infant Lily in her arms and admitted Thomas without alerting social services.
The next day Thomas was weak, but Monique couldn’t keep him from going off to work.
“You gotta quit,” she told him.
“But who gonna pay for you an’ Lily?” the ten-year-old replied. “I’m the only one.”
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In the next two years Thomas got stabbed twice and badly beaten once. He’d lost the use of the baby finger of his left hand after being knifed in the arm, but that didn’t bother him much. “Baby finger don’t do much anyway,” he reasoned. He grew, but something about the damage to his hip made his limp worse. Lily was walking and talking and calling him Lucky. Monique had a job at Ralph’s Market as a checkout clerk, but she could only work part-time while Thomas stayed home in the mornings and some evenings with Lily.
They all slept in the same bed, snuggled up and warm, every night. Sometimes in the day, when Monique was working, Thomas would take Lily to the alley valley he loved so much.
He told her about Pedro and introduced her to Alicia’s tomb.
On the morning of Thomas’s twelfth birthday, he got up early to go to the toilet. When he came out, Lily giggled and said, “Look at Lucky’s peepee, Mama. It stickin’ out.”
Thomas was embarrassed. He went back into the toilet and came out wearing a towel around his slender hips.
“You want Frosted Flakes?” Monique asked Lily to stop her from laughing.
Thomas was grateful to his friend.
That evening when he got home from drug dealing, he found Monique there alone.
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“Lily spendin’ the night wit’ her grandmother,” Monique told him.
The apartment felt funny without Lily there to greet him.
But Monique said that the girl needed her grandmother and that they needed time alone sometimes.
“Come here an’ I’ma show you sumpin’,” Monique, now eighteen, said to her partner.
She made him take off his clothes and lie down on the bed.
She took off her top. When he saw her large breasts, he became excited and turned over onto his stomach to hide his stiff thing. But Monique said, “Turn back around.”
When she placed her cold hand on his erection, he giggled and sat up.
“Lay back,” she said.
Bolstering the small erection from behind with her four fingers, she began rubbing the underside with her thumb.
“Wh-what you doin’, Monique?”
“Givin’ you a birthday present.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“You know. I feel you gettin’ hard in the bed when I hug you sometimes at night.”
The boy put his hands to her wrist as if to hold her in place, and she moved her thumb lightly and fast. He came all at once and shouted, “Uh-oh!”
“It’s okay,” she said. “That’s what you supposed to do.
When you have a real girlfriend, you s’posed to do that in her coochy.”
She kept moving her thumb, using the greasy white come as a lubricant.
“That tickle,” he said, squirming now.
“It’a feel good in a minute,” she assured him. “I used to do this for Tony when I was pregnant. I’ma only do it this one 1 6 9
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time for you ’cause it’s your birthday an’ you been so good to me an’ Lily.”
Thomas came three more times. Then they lay together, his head on her naked breast. He didn’t know if he felt good or bad. He couldn’t slow his mind down, and in the middle of the night he went to the restroom and threw up. When he got back to bed he felt calmer. On his way to sleep he thought about Lily and wished that she was home with them.
The next day the bust came down on Tremont’s alley.
Police cars rolled up with their sirens blaring and their bullhorns commanding everyone to put his hands in the air.
When Tremont came out shooting his Uzi, the police opened fire. Tremont went down immediately, and even though he was the only one shooting at them, the police kept firing until there were three dead, including Chilly, and another five wounded.
Thomas was hit in the chest, another hole in his lung. He was kept in the police ward of General Hospital, unconscious and near death, for more than a month. When he regained consciousness he was still very weak. Monique came to visit him only twice because now she had to work full-time and take care of Lily too.
At the trial Thomas’s court-appointed lawyer, a kind old man named Sam Neiman, said that Thomas was a virtual orphan, that he’d lived by his wits since a very early age. He said that the system had failed the boy. He was illiterate and wild. There was no proof that he was firing at the police. He dealt drugs because it was the only way to survive.
The prosecutor was a young white woman, Flora Pride.
“The fact remains, Your Honor,” Flora said, “that Mr.
Beerman was a willing member of the Tremont gang. He has been implicated in at least one homicide, a Raymond Smith, 1 7 0
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also known as RayRay, and he dealt drugs every day for the past three years. He resisted arrest with violence and was wounded by policemen afraid for their lives.”
The judge sentenced Thomas to nine years with the juvenile authority in the hope that they might rehabilitate him.
“I’m sorry, son,” Mr. Neiman told him after the trial. “If you were tried as an adult, the sentence would have probably been less. But as it is, the system was against you.”
Thomas thanked his lawyer for being nice to him, and then he was taken to a prison camp for boys on the outskirts of the eastern desert.
Many things happened to him there. Between the guards and the boy gang leaders and the cramped life of lockdown, Thomas suffered. He was slashed, gang-raped repeatedly, beaten, and then punished by the guards for being a trouble-maker. But he learned to ignore his wounds and humiliations when he wasn’t actually faced with them. At night he would sink to his knees on
the stone floor and feel his mother in the earth.
He was in the worst child prison because he had been convicted of a violent crime. No one thought he belonged there, not even his torturers. After a year or so the punishments and molestations ended. He remembered how to read in the classroom he was brought to three times a week. He spent as many hours as he could in the library and fell under the protection of a bigger boy named Bo.
Bo wasn’t tall, but he was the strongest boy on their floor, maybe in the whole facility. He liked to have Thomas around him on the yard, called him his “bad luck charm.” And when other boys would ask him why he’d want something like that, he’d say, “Without bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”
At the age of fourteen, around the same time that Eric 1 7 1
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faced off with Drew, Thomas was transferred to a minimum-security home in Los Angeles. Three days after he got there, he wandered away.
He was outside on the gray wood porch, and there was no one else there. He hadn’t had a walk down a city street in so long that he said to himself that he’d just go around the block.
But when he got to the end of the block, he took one left and kept on going.
For three days he traveled across the city on foot. At night he slept in alleys behind pizza restaurants that provided his dinner in their overflowing Dumpsters. He couldn’t eat the cheese, but the crusts kept him from starving.
He asked directions in the daytime and finally made it to Monique’s apartment. An old man lived there now so Thomas went to Bruno and Monique’s old house.
Their parents told Thomas that Monique was living in Compton. After some hesitation they gave him her address.
When he made it to her street it was already evening.
She lived in a white house that had a lawn behind a wire fence and toys on the porch.
The door was open, but the screen was closed. When Thomas rang the bell, a chubby little girl came to answer.
“Hi,” she said.
“Lily?”
“Uh-huh. Who are you?”
“I’m Thomas.”
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