Fortunate Son

11

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.

“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 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, 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 troublemaker. 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 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.”

“Do you know Harold?”

“I know your mother,” the escapee said.

“Mom!” Lily shouted, and then ran into the house.

Monique came lazily to the door wearing a big blue robe. When she saw Thomas her eyes opened wide.

“Lucky?”

“Hi, Monique.”

“Lucky, what you doin’ here?”

“I wanted to see you and Lily. She’s big.”

While Monique and Thomas talked, a shadow came up behind her.

“Who’s this?” a man’s voice said in a tone neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“This is Lucky, Harold,” Monique said.

“What does he want?”

“He’s my friend.”

“He looks like a bum.”

Harold was a tall man with bronze skin, a receding hairline (even though he didn’t look much over thirty), and a large, powerful-looking belly. He had no eyebrows at all, small eyes, and large hands.

“He’s my friend,” Monique said with authority.

“What does he want?”

“Come on in, Lucky, and go have a seat in the living room.”

“Oh, no,” Harold said. “I ain’t havin’ this ratty-lookin’ niggah sittin’ on my new furniture.”

Thomas held back, but Monique said, “Come on in, Lucky. Harold ain’t gonna touch you if he know what’s good for him.”

“Monique,” Harold said. That one word carried a whole chapter of information.

“Don’t you ‘Monique’ me, Harold Portman. I put up with your thievin’ sister, your drunk father, and them three friends’a yours leave my house in a shambles every other Saturday night. Your mother lived with us for six months, so either my one friend is gonna come up in here or you’n me gonna talk.”

Harold turned on his heel and walked from the room.

“Wait for me in the living room, Lucky,” Monique said, and then she went after Harold.

They had nice green furniture on a golden carpet. The TV was tuned to a cartoon show, but Thomas didn’t watch. He sat down on a straight-backed wood chair and clasped his hands on his lap. Looking down, he could see that his hands were dirty and his light-blue pants were stained by alley grease.

The TV tinkled, and Monique’s and Harold’s voices boomed from somewhere in the house.

“Do I know you?” Lily asked. She was standing at a sliding-glass door that led out into the backyard.

“Do you remember me?” Thomas asked.

“How come you don’t sit on the couch?” she asked then. “It’s more comfortable.”

“I’ve been walkin’ so far and sleepin’ outside,” Thomas said. “I wouldn’t want to get your fancy couch all dirty.”

Lily was staring hard at Thomas.

“Did we go to a secret green park once?” she asked.

“You remember that?”

“Was there a big pile of rocks?”

“Cinder blocks,” he said.

“And a secret clubhouse?” Lily’s eyes were open wide at the memory.

“We would go there when your mother was at the supermarket working.”

“I remember,” she said. “I used to think about it, but then I would think that it was a dream.”

“No,” Thomas assured her. “We went there all the time when I took care of you while your mother was gone.”

“An’ we used to all sleep in a big bed, and there was a bathtub in the kitchen.”

“You have a good memory for a little girl,” Thomas said.

“I know.”

Just then there was a loud yell from somewhere in the house.

“Your parents can really fight,” Thomas said.

“Harold’s not my dad,” Lily told him. “Only my mama is my parent.”

“Oh.”

“Go to your room, Lily,” Harold said.

The child and Thomas turned to see Harold standing in the doorway. His voice was now definitely angry.

“But Lucky used to take me to the secret green park.”

“I said, go to your room.”

The big man came in looking around, as if searching the golden floor around Thomas for crumbs or dirt he might have dropped.

While Harold stared, Monique came in wearing a long maroon dress. She was still big-boned and thick, but Thomas thought that she was good-looking. She stared at Harold.

“Well?” she said.

Harold turned his hateful gaze to her, but he soon looked down.

“Monique tells me,” Harold said to the floor, “that you, that you put yo’ life on the line feedin’ her an’ Lily when you was just a boy. She says that you was on the street buyin’ her food an’ payin’ her rent.”

He looked up at the skinny boy. Thomas had seen that hateful stare every day through the bars of the cells at the desert youth facility.

“An’ because you did that you are welcome in this home. You can, you can... You are welcome to stay as long as you need to.”

Lily hadn’t gone to her room. She was staring with amazement at the man who was not her father. Monique had her eyes on him too.

“I’ma go out,” Harold said, no longer able to bear the scrutiny.

And soon it was only Monique, Thomas, and Lily in the house.

They talked about the old days for a long time. Lily had lots of questions about half-remembered adventures she’d had all those long child-years ago.

Monique told Thomas that she met Harold when she was a checkout girl at Ralph’s.

“He’s a plumber an’ he liked it how I worked so hard. An’ I liked him because life was so normal in his world. No shootin’s or drugs or tiny li’l ’partments.”

“No bathtubs in’a kitchen,” Lily said a little wistfully.

Monique served baked beans and white bread in their large eat-in kitchen. She poured lemonade squeezed out of fruit from their own tree.

After a while Monique said, “Do you wanna see your room, Lucky?”

They went out the back door to a pine hut that had a tar-paper roof. Inside there was a very comfortable, if small, room that had a single bed, a maple bureau, and a window that looked out on the green yard. The floor was covered by an eggshell shag carpet, and there was a radio and a door that led to a bathroom with a real bathtub.

“Harold built this for his mother whenever she wanna stay. But she’s in Houston now with her new husband.”

“She lived with us for six months,” Lily said in an exasperated tone that Thomas recognized from his years living with Monique.

“You can stay here as long as you want, Lucky,” Monique said.

She moved near to him and kissed his forehead. She moved back a bit and crinkled up her nose.

“If you put your clothes outside the door I’ll wash ’em,” she added. “Come on, turnip. Let’s leave Lucky to wash up an’ rest.”

He hadn’t taken a bath since the days he lived with Monique and Lily in that one-room apartment on Hooper. Thomas turned on the water and took off his clothes. He was about to step into the tub when he remembered Monique’s offer to clean his soiled pants and shirt. So he went to the front door of his hut and placed the clothes outside in a neat pile. On his way back to the bath, he saw someone moving in the room and he jumped — a natural reflex for a small boy among so many predators in the juvenile criminal system.

But there was no one there. What he had seen was his own reflection in the full-length mirror that hung from the bathroom door.

Thomas couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his naked image in a mirror. He knew that it had been years before, when he lived with Eric and Ahn and his mother.

Thomas was still short among boys his age. At his last visit to the infirmary he’d been told he was five foot five. He was slender and lopsided because of his shorter left leg. His face too had its abnormalities — a twice-broken nose, three scars, and a network of lines around his eyes from wincing at the light. There was the crater of flesh in the center of his chest from being shot in the drug bust, and then the various wounds he’d received in the street and at the facility. Thomas saw that his arms were long and that his hands were strong like Harold’s. His ribs were visible, and his skin was near-black, with ashen patches here and there.

Thomas moved close to the silvered glass and stared deeply into his own eyes. Something about what he saw made him think that those eyes had something to teach him. He touched the mirror, outlined the contours of the face with his fingers. He kissed the cold image of his own lips and placed his hands on top of his head in surrender to a fate not of his own design.

Thomas came to stay at Monique’s house at the beginning of summer. In the morning Thomas would walk Lily to the day-care center where she spent from nine to noon playing with other children and getting exercise.

It was a seven-block walk to the day-care center at Compton Elementary School. On the way, Lily was full of questions and declarations.

“I wanna be a bird when I grow up,” she said to Thomas one morning.

“What kinda bird?”

“A hummingbird or a dragonfly.”

“And where would you go, little bird?” he asked.

“I’d fly to the North Pole to see Santa Claus, and I’d fly to Disneyland right over the fence so I wouldn’t have to pay all that money that Harold don’t wanna throw away.”

“That’a be fun,” Thomas said.

He loved those walks with Lily. When he was in the facility he used to think about her and wonder if they’d ever see each other again.

“Why they call you Lucky, Lucky?” Lily asked. “Is that your real name?”

“No.”

“What is your real name?”

“Thomas, Tommy.”

“Which one is it?”

“Both, really,” Thomas said. “My mother named me Thomas Beerman.”

“Oh. Where would you go if you were a bird, Lucky?”

“I’d fly deep in the woods,” he said without hesitation, “to the tallest tree I could find, and then I’d sit on the very highest branch and look out over the forest until it became the sea.”

“And what would you look for?” the girl asked.

“What I’m always looking for.”

“What’s that?”

“My mother.”

Later that week, when Lily was explaining to Thomas how she made cookies in her lightbulb-powered play oven, the topic again turned to names.

“How come if your real name is Thomas or Tommy do they call you Lucky?” Lily asked.

“Your Uncle Bruno named me that,” he said. “It was the first day we met and I got to go stay at the nurse’s office, and he thought that was lucky.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if it happened to Bruno it would be. But I’m not very lucky at all. Really my name is kinda like a joke — they call me Lucky because I’m not lucky at all.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I think I was born like that. I fall down and lose things. Other people have a nice life, like you with your mother and Harold who love you. And others just end up on the street like me.”

“Could you die from not bein’ lucky?” she asked, worry filling her large brown eyes.

“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The main thing about being unlucky is that bad things happen to you and you feel bad. If you died, other people would feel bad, and then they would be unlucky.”

Harold just didn’t like Thomas; most of the time the plumber ignored his houseguest, even when he sat down to dinner with the family. After the first few weeks Thomas started eating in his room at night. He didn’t mind Harold’s cold shoulder, but the big plumber would also fight with his wife and adopted daughter if Thomas was there.

The final straw was on a day when Thomas was supposed to have cut the lawn. Monique had baked a chicken for dinner, and she was carving it when Harold said to Thomas, “That was a piss-poor job you did on the grass today.”

“I mowed it, Harold,” Thomas replied. “Front lawn and back.”

“But you forgot to do the edges along the path and out on the sidewalk. If you don’t do the edges it’s just a raggedy-ass mess.”

“I thought that it looked nicer to leave the edges,” Thomas said. “You know, it looked more like real grass instead of fake-like.”

“Listen, niggah,” Harold said, “don’t lie to me about bein’ lazy. You didn’t do it ’cause all you want is to lie around an’ live offa me instead’a gettin’ a real job an’ makin’ something outta yourself.”

When Thomas heard this he decided to stay silent. He saw that Harold was mad and found no reason to argue. Harold was a lot like Elton — angry at the world and needing to say so.

The whole thing would have blown over if Monique hadn’t driven her carving knife through the chicken, splitting the plate underneath in two and driving the blade deep into the pine dining table. The two halves of the plate leaped out from under the bird, flying off the table and shattering on the floor.

Monique’s eyes were wide with rage. Only her ragged breathing seemed to be holding back the violence in her breast. When she began to speak her voice was almost a whisper.

“You don’t know a damn thing, Harold Portman. You don’t know how hard and how long this boy worked at a age when you was livin’ up in your mama’s house, eatin’ her cookin’ an’ pickin’ your nose. You never took a knife or a bullet to feed your family and you never would. You get up and go to work and come home thinkin’ you did sumpin’. But you ain’t done a damn thing that anybody else couldn’t do. You ain’t done enough to earn the right to shine Lucky’s shoes.”

Thomas never ate dinner with the family again. He went back to his room realizing that he couldn’t stay around too long. But he didn’t know where to go. The police wouldn’t be looking for him, but if they stopped him and found out who he was he’d be put back in the facility. So he had to have a plan of action. He knelt down on the shag carpet and closed his eyes, hoping to find his answer in the earth.

A while later a heavy knocking came at his door. He could tell by the force of the knock that it was Harold. He didn’t answer, knowing that nothing good could come from their talking.

When the summer was almost over, Thomas was ready to go.

Monique had Wednesdays off from Ralph’s. So, after Harold was gone to work and Lily was at day care, she came out to bring Thomas his breakfast.

“Hi, Lucky,” she said.

“Hey, Mo.”

“What you doin’?”

“Thinkin’,” he said.

“’Bout what?”

She sat on his bed. He was on his knees on the floor.

“’Bout how you an’ me an’ Lily had our own little family way back then.”

“We sure did have some fun, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. And it felt good too. I guess I should’a done somethin’ other than carryin’ for Tremont.”

“You were only a child,” she said. “What else could you do?”

“Yeah. The worst thing at the facility was that I wished every night that we was in that bed together. I used to feel so safe in that bed.”

“Me too,” Monique said with a hum.

“You did?”

“Oh, yeah. You were the onlyest man I evah knew who wanted just t’take care’a me. You went out again after that fat man cut you ’cause’a me an’ Lily. You know, Harold wouldn’t do that. He might figure sumpin’ else out, but he’s a man, a full-grown man. If he was ten he’d’a run home cryin’.”

“I love you, Mo,” Thomas said.

“I love you too, baby.”

They were quiet for a while. Thomas closed his eyes. His mind was drifting when Monique said, “I’ll leave him an’ go off wit’ you if you want, Lucky.”

This brought Thomas out of his trance.

“But he’s your husband.”

“And I love him most the time. He good t’me an’ Lily, an’ he know how to do with money and build stuff too. But nobody evah been there for me like you have, Lucky. I will move out the house today if you tell me that’s what you want.”

“You don’t owe me all that, Mo. I mean, I did that for you because of Bruno an’ because’a the day you saved me from those boys. I didn’t do nuthin’ special. Anyway, nobody’d let a boy rent a ’partment alone. You made it so that I could have a home. No, you don’t owe me nuthin’.”

Monique got down on the floor and hugged Thomas to her breast. He let out a deep sigh and held tight to her. They stayed in that embrace for the rest of the morning — her kissing his head and him remembering the last night in his mother’s bed.

In the afternoon, when Monique and Lily went food shopping, Thomas gathered up his belongings in a backpack Harold had given him. Before leaving he went into Monique’s drawer, taking twenty dollars and Bruno’s old Social Security card.