Fortunate Son

by Walter Mosley

  “I’ve never been to New York,” Eric told Thomas. “That means the police won’t think to look for us there.”

  “What about Dad?” Thomas asked.

  “I told him we were going and that I’d get in touch with him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He just looked kinda sad and nodded, and I left.”

  “Why’s he so sad?” Thomas asked.

  They were sitting across from each other on single beds in the Laramie Extended-Stay Hotel and Residence on the outskirts of the city. Their window looked out onto a vast desert of yellows and oranges.

  “He’s been like that ever since Mama Branwyn died and they took you away,” Eric said. “All he does is work and sleep.”

  “You can see it in his eyes,” Thomas added. “He’s got old man’s eyes.”

  “I think it’s because of me,” Eric added. “When I was a kid I always made him do things for me, and I didn’t even see it.

  And then when I got older it was already too late.”

  Thomas rubbed the palms of his hands over his black-cotton trousers. He thought about not being in jail or on trial.

  “Maybe he could come visit after we get to New York,”

  Thomas suggested.

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  *

  *

  *

  Th e ne xt day they were on an eastbound train. They sat across from each other at the front of the car and talked for eighteen hours a day.

  “I took riding lessons . . .”

  “I found a glass-cutter and made drinking glasses from beer bottles for a while. After I’d make’em, I sold’em on the boardwalk in Venice until the police chased me away . . .”

  “After the SATs I went to UCLA to study economics. I like numbers that do things in people’s pockets. It’s funny . . .”

  “I never had sex with a girl yet . . .”

  “I’ve never been in love . . .”

  “ A nd are you sad like Dad?” Thomas asked after three hundred miles were gone.

  “Not like him. I’m not really sad at all. I have everything I want. Especially now.”

  “But you look sad,” Thomas said. “You don’t hardly smile, and your eyes are always movin’ around like you’re looking for something all the time.”

  “Up until now I guess I’ve always been looking for you.

  Dad tried to find you after a few years, but nobody even knew where your real father was. Finally they found him down in Texas, but by then he’d lost track of you.”

  That f i r st n i g h t on the train from Phoenix, Eric slept while Thomas sat and looked at the moon out of his window.

  Thomas felt safe sitting next to his brother. He didn’t care 2 4 2

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  about being on the train or going to New York. He wasn’t afraid of the police finding him. The day Eric came to take him away, Thomas was already planning to leave. He thought he might go down to San Diego, where he’d heard a man could sleep under fruit trees and eat off their limbs for breakfast. But Thomas had a feeling of safety with Eric — between them they made something whole.

  Thomas exhaled, and for a long moment he just sat there without taking air back in. The train lurched at a turn in the tracks, and he found himself breathing again, feeling deeply satisfied. For the first time that he could remember, he didn’t have to worry about who was coming or when his next meal would be or where he was going to sleep.

  But looking out at the lunar-lit plains, Thomas began to think that he might die soon. Death made sense to him. So many people he had known were dead: his mother and Pedro and Alicia and Tremont, Bruno and Chilly and even RayRay.

  He had been so close to Death for so long that he wasn’t afraid of Him. But he didn’t want to die, because he wanted to be with Eric. Having a brother meant he had something to live for.

  “ E ri c,” Th omas wh i spe re d in the darkness.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know what I worry about all the time?”

  “Not having any place to live?”

  “Uh-uh. There’s always a place to stay or hide,” Thomas said. “The thing that always scared me was if one day I went crazy and forgot about back home with you and Mama.”

  “Which one?” Eric asked.

  “Which one what?”

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  “Are you afraid of going crazy or forgetting?”

  “They’re both the same thing.”

  Th e ne xt morn i ng, in Denver, a young black woman got on the train. The two seats next to Thomas and Eric were free, but she went to a single seat four rows down.

  “She’s pretty,” Thomas said to Eric.

  “I guess,” Eric said, not really looking.

  “Did you ever think that we would be together again on a train going to New York?”

  “No,” Eric said. “I thought that I would probably die before seeing you again.”

  “You?” Thomas grinned.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t think about you dying.”

  “I think about it all the time.”

  “Why?” Thomas asked.

  A young white man moved to the seat next to the young black woman. Thomas felt that maybe he should have done that, but then he thought, no.

  “I think about killing myself,” Eric said seriously.

  “What for? You got everything. And you said you’re not that sad.”

  “Sometimes I think that it’s because of me that other people get hurt.”

  “That’s crazy,” Thomas said. “Nobody gets hurt over you.”

  “I met Raela, and three days later Drew killed Christie, shot you, and the police killed him.”

  “And you think that it’s because you wanted her?”

  Sheepishly Eric nodded.

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  Thomas looked away a moment. He noticed the white man talking to the young woman.

  “I was lookin’ at the moon last night,” Thomas said,

  “while you were asleep.”

  “So?”

  “I remembered that I met this guy once who used to be a merchant marine, but he got a blood disease and they let him go. He said that he had enough money that he could have had a house and a car, but he found movin’ around a better life. He said that livin’ in a house was like spendin’ your life in a tomb.”

  “You think he was lying?” Eric asked.

  “I never thought so,” Thomas said. “But I never thought about it. But he said somethin’ else.”

  “What’s that?”

  Thomas thought that he heard the young black woman say something to the man next to her.

  “He said,” Thomas continued, “that the moon has gravity and that the ocean rises up and falls down because of that.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said, “the moon governs the tides.”

  “So if that’s true,” Thomas said, “and if one day somebody said to you that you couldn’t have what you wanted unless the tide didn’t come in, what do you think would happen?”

  “Of course the tide’s gonna come in.”

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise, people will live an’ die, an’ you can’t do a thing about it.”

  “I could kill myself.”

  “But it wouldn’t make no difference except to the people who love you.”

  “Excuse me,” someone said.

  The young men looked up to see the girl who had gotten on earlier.

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  “Can I sit with you guys? That jerk down there started talkin’ shit.”

  “Sure,” Eric said and Thomas wanted to say but didn’t.

  “I’m Eric and this is my brother, Tommy, I mean, Thomas.”

  “They call me Lucky,” Thomas said.

  “They do?” Eric asked.


  “I thought you said you were brothers?” the young woman said, settling next to Thomas. She had a wheeled, silvery suitcase that was meant to look like metal but was made from lightweight plastic. Eric got up and put the bag in the rack above their heads.

  “We were separated when we were young,” the young white man explained.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “We just found each other again.”

  “You don’t look like brothers.”

  Thomas and Eric told their story together, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. As they spoke, the young black woman pictured the two men as little boys and found herself smiling at their graceless affection for each other.

  Her name was Clea Frank. She was a native of Denver and now was on her way to a scholarship at New York University.

  She was a language major and wanted to work at the UN.

  The young white man had tried to “put the moves on her,”

  and she wanted to sit with them so that he’d leave her alone.

  She was happy that Eric and Thomas were going all the way to New York.

  “ D on ’t you f e e l funny calling him brother?” Clea asked Thomas some time after midnight as the train approached Chicago.

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  “That’s what he is. He’s the only brother I’ve ever had.”

  Eric was asleep, and Clea had just come awake after napping through the late afternoon and evening.

  “But he’s not your real brother — he’s white,” Clea said. “I mean, I don’t have anything against white people, but I don’t go around calling them my brother either.”

  Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.

  “But we were raised together and we understand each other. He used to protect me when the big kids would pick on me, and I explain things to him.”

  “But he has three years of college and you don’t have hardly any school. What do you explain to him? The street?”

  Over the previous day and a half the three had changed trains twice and told their stories. Clea’s father was a baker in Denver, and her mother was a part-time nurse in the pediatric ward of the university’s teaching hospital. Clea was their fourth child. Her two brothers were high school dropouts, and her sister was a schizophrenic who lived on the street half the time and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals. Clea was the hope of her family, and she intended to make something of herself.

  Thomas had told her about everything he’d done and about the police being after him. He didn’t think that she would tell anyone, and Eric was asleep by then.

  “I can see things in other things,” Thomas said. “Eric’s real smart, but he doesn’t pay attention to everyday things like I do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Rocks and eyes and making things up.”

  He chose that moment to take her hand.

  “Your skin is so rough,” she said.

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  He pulled away, but she reached out and drew the hand back.

  “I thought that you were making it up about living in the street,” she said. “But your hands are like a workingman’s hands.”

  “I knew a woman that was schizo,” Thomas said. “She saw things too. There was a guy named Benny who would say that she was his ho, an’ he would get money from other homeless guys to have sex with her.”

  “And did you have sex with her?”

  “No. But I’d go sit with her sometimes, and if I was really quiet she’d get still and tell me about the things she saw.”

  “Like what?”

  “There was a big man who sometimes chased her and sometimes killed her, but then he could be nice and take her on his shoulders and show her the sea. It was a light-blue-and-pink ocean with fish that swam on top of the water and talked to the men in boats who sailed out there with them.

  And the moon was very close to the earth, and there wasn’t any cigarettes or alcohol.”

  “She was crazy.”

  “Maybe. But I can tell you what she said and you don’t call me crazy.”

  “What was the woman’s name?” Clea asked.

  “Lana.”

  “Did you get Lana away from Benny?”

  “No. She liked him and called him her husband.”

  “But he was pimpin’ her.”

  “Yeah, but she said that he never let those men hurt her.”

  “That’s crazy. He took those men there in the first place,”

  Clea said.

  “Life’s crazy,” Thomas replied. “When Benny would get 2 4 8

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  money for Lana, he’d go out and buy us all pizza and a quart of root beer.”

  “So you lived off her too?”

  “I only stayed near them for about a week. And I don’t eat cheese or drink sodas. They make me sick.”

  Thomas couldn’t have explained why he kissed Clea then.

  She didn’t know why she let him.

  Clea had her whole life planned out. She would go to college and get her degree and then work at the UN translating French, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages for the sub-Saharan African nations. She would find a young black man who was either a doctor or a lawyer and marry him and move to Montclair, New Jersey, where she would relocate her parents and her sister. Her lazy brothers could fend for themselves.

  But there they were kissing passionately in the early hours, in that hurtling train. Eric awoke once and saw them. Clea had her hand on Thomas’s while he kissed her neck again and again.

  It was then that Eric thought about what his brother had said about the moon and tides. The Golden Boy, Eric, closed his eyes and muffled a sigh — his brother had somehow delivered him from his fear.

  E i g h te e n h our s later the train pulled into Penn Station.

  The boys put Clea into a yellow taxi, and she gave them her cell number.

  “Call me if you want to come down and see NYU,” she’d said.

  The boys met a nun collecting money for homeless children and asked her if there was an inexpensive place they could stay. She told them about a place uptown, and Eric put a twenty dollar bill in her jar.

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  *

  *

  *

  That n i g h t E ri c Tanner Nolan and Thomas “Lucky”

  Beerman were ensconced in the men’s residence at the 92nd Street YM&YWHA.

  After the first few days of exploring together, the brothers started going out separately. Thomas discovered Central Park while Eric plumbed Lower Manhattan.

  For the next three weeks they explored the city. Eric liked the big buildings and the Wall Street crowd. Down among the businessmen and -women he took tours, listened and learned firsthand about how the market was run. He made impromptu appointments with personnel officers, introducing himself as a UCLA senior who was looking for student programs in the stock market. He met a female stockbroker on a tour of Mor-gan Stanley. Her name was Constance Baker. After a fifteen-minute conversation, she took Eric under her wing.

  He had told her pretty much the truth about his coming to New York. After a long separation he and his brother had come east on a holiday to have fun and get to know each other again. They were staying at the Y.

  Constance was thirty-six, handsome, and in charge. She had a boyfriend named Jim Harris, who worked commodities and lived in a big house in Brooklyn. Constance had an apartment that overlooked the Hudson River in the West Village, where she slept during the week. On the weekends she stayed with Jim at his house in Brooklyn Heights.

  Meanwhile, each day Thomas would walk south on Lexington until he got to 59th Street, and then he’d head west until he got to the southernmost side of the park. It was early April, and the cherry trees were filled with the white and 2 5
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  pink blossoms of spring. There were vast lawns and horses and thousands of people wandering in the light of morning.

  He’d walk up the asphalt pathways each day until he got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once there he’d give what money he had and then spend hours among the paintings, sculptures, and jewelry of the ages.

  He walked from ancient Rome and Greece into Africa and South America. He sat for hours one day among the wooden boats of the cannibals of the South Sea Islands. He imagined himself in the cramped canoes carved from whole trees, traveling under canopies of green along rivers and then out on the cobalt sea.

  He spent five days in a row surrounded by the arts of China, India, and Japan. This section of the museum didn’t have many visitors, and often Thomas found himself alone, sitting on a courtesy bench in front of a great stone Buddha or in a re-created shogun’s home.

  Thomas loved the stillness of the paintings. He imagined that this was what his grandmother Madeline saw when she was looking at the television, but the sound and action of the TV was too much for him; just the frozen moment of men and women in motion was enough to imagine a whole world of action and life.

  His favorite tableau was a doorway to the left of the entrance of the museum. It looked upon a re-created room from Pom-peii. There were rose-painted walls drawn upon with pedes-trian scenes and still lifes, intricately tiled floors, and a slender stone bed behind which there was the image of a window.

  Thomas imagined looking down from that window on the people in the street below: men in togas and women in blues and reds with no electricity or cars, no airplanes, televisions, or 2 5 1

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  telephones. People like him, lopsided and broken from just living, happy among one another, next to a sea that, Eric said, was as blue as a blue crayon.

  Sometimes he would have silent dialogues with his mother or Alicia while meandering through the halls of art. But not so much as before, when he was on the streets of Los Angeles. Often he found himself thinking about the afternoons when he would take the subway downtown to Washington Square Park, where every other day or so he would meet Clea Frank for coffee.