Fortunate Son

18

Kronin Stark sent a private jet — his own personal 767, in which he had never flown — for the boys the next afternoon. Connie didn’t even say good-bye to Eric. She just slammed the door after telling him that he had destroyed her life.

“I don’t see how you did that, Eric,” Thomas said as the jet gained altitude. “I mean, you told her that you were going back to California and that you had a girl. She’s twice your age. I mean, damn — what more did she need?”

“I shouldn’t have led her on.”

“You didn’t.”

“What do you know about it, Tommy? Nobody ever threw herself at you and then fell out of a window instead.”

“Maybe not. But so what? You think that means I’m too stupid to know?”

“No. Not that. But I have problems that you wouldn’t understand. I have to be careful how I treat people. You have to be careful how people treat you. She said that I ruined her life.”

“You didn’t do nuthin’ to her, man. All you did was go along for the ride. You don’t know what you did to her. She don’t know either.”

“She knows how she feels.”

“Maybe. But she broke up with that boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She probably needed to do that. She needed to leave him, and she told herself that she was in love with you to do it. Of course she’s gonna be mad. But she’s mad at her boyfriend, mad at herself for bein’ with him. It don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ you.”

Eric was once again amazed by his brother. During the years that they were separated, Eric often thought that he’d idealized Thomas, that the boy really wasn’t so brilliant as he remembered. But time after time when they talked, Eric was forced to admit the rightness in Thomas’s keen insights.

“How do you know that, Tommy?” Eric asked a long while later.

“What?” Thomas was looking out of the window, holding tight to the armrests of his seat. He had never been in a jet, or any other aircraft. He was elated and petrified.

“About Connie. I mean, you never even slept with anybody before Clea.”

“You ever been to the carnival that come down on Fifty-fourth Place sometimes?” Thomas asked. “Down toward South Central?”

“No.”

“But you ever been in a hall of mirrors like?”

“No, but I know what you mean.”

“It’s like a door you go in and you try to get out the other side,” Thomas said, remembering when he went into that maze. “It’s all glass walls and mirrors, an’ you can see your reflection all ovah the place an’ you see other people too. But if you go in it an’ there’s only you, then you see yourself a thousand times all ovah. You see the front and back, the sides. It’s just you. Just you whatever way you look.”

“So?” Eric said.

“That’s kinda like you,” Thomas told his brother. “You always been special, an’ so all you see is you. Like when we was in school. It was you all the time. Teacher’s helper, spelling champion, the only little boy in our class that could hit a home run.”

“But that’s just sports or schoolwork.”

“Yeah, but everybody always knows you and is always thinkin’ about you. And so it’s like they’re the mirrors and you look at them and see you. But I don’t do that because you’re my brother, and that means I don’t have to care about you like they do. I know you’re my friend already, and I know you feel bad. But Connie and Christie and Mr. Stroud in the first grade wanted you to see them, but you couldn’t see nuthin’ but what they saw — like a mirror. You see yourself makin’ this one happy an’ breakin’ the other one’s heart. I don’t know exactly what I mean, but it’s somethin’ like that though.”

“So you think that people make up how they feel about me?” Eric asked.

“Sometimes. But even if they don’t, even if it’s like your girlfriend who got killed. She’s the one who made that man mad enough to kill her. It was what she wanted from you. I mean, if you thought about it, you’d think that everyone you meet should fall dead the minute they saw you. But you know some girls think you cute but they don’t leave their boyfriends or nuthin’. You can’t help it if somebody fool enough to get in trouble over you.”

“But, Tommy,” Eric said, “things happen with me that never happen to other people. I win games, girls fall in love; one time the sky parted just in time for me to win a game of tennis.”

“That ain’t nuthin’ but magic tricks,” Thomas said. The jet had just entered a patch of turbulence, so he clasped his hands together and closed his eyes.

“What do you mean by that?” Eric asked, not heeding his brother’s fear.

“Win a game, kiss some girl,” Thomas said, his heart in his throat. “That ain’t nuthin’. I got better luck than that.”

“You?”

“Yeah, me.”

“Tommy, you could fall down just sitting in a chair.”

“Maybe so, but I was born, an’ you know all those days I was walkin’ on the streets, I kept thinkin’ how special you got to be to get born. Nobody knows what kinda baby they gonna have or if they’ll have the baby they want. Even if you’re just a fly alive for a few minutes and then you run into a spider’s web — even that fly is one’a the most luckiest creatures in the world. We all lucky, Eric. And the luckiest ones are the ones happy about bein’ alive.”

The plane dipped in the sky, and Thomas yelped.

Eric laughed and told him that there were always a few bumps in flying.

Kronin Stark met the brothers at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California. Thomas had never seen anybody so large or powerful. He was reminded of an even larger version of Tremont, the muscle-bound drug dealer.

“Mr. Stark,” Eric said. He held out his hand. “This is my brother, Thomas.”

“Hello,” Stark said to Thomas.

Thomas nodded but did not return the greeting. Silence gripped his throat.

“You’re the reason my daughter took all her money out of the bank.”

“She did it for me, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “And I plan to pay her back within six months.”

“What about my influence?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I put pressure on the governor’s office for this reprieve. What will you give me for that?”

“What do you want?” Eric asked.

Stark looked closely at Eric and then at his brother.

“Why don’t you two boys come and work for me?” he said. “Work off the debt you owe.”

“Sure,” Eric said without hesitation. “But I thought that Mikey said that you didn’t even have an office, that you just sit at a table in the Cape Hotel all day having meetings.”

“Things change,” Kronin said with a shrug. “I’ve recently been made the CEO of an investment organization — the Drumm Investment Group.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “But we have to figure out how much work we need to do to pay you back.”

“What about you, son?” Stark asked Thomas.

“I didn’t ask you to help me,” Thomas said. He found himself squinting at Stark as if the huge billionaire was the sun.

“That’s a bit ungrateful, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that. As a matter of fact I don’t know much at all. I sure couldn’t be a businessman or a doctor or nuthin’, so how could I work for you an’ pay off gettin’ the governor to let me free? You think I could sweep enough floors to do sumpin’ like that?”

“I’ll work for you, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “I’ll do the work for the two of us.”

“I wanted both of you,” Stark said, eyeing the lame Thomas.

“But why?” Thomas asked. “Why’d you do it in the first place?”

“Raela wouldn’t eat until I obtained your clemency.”

“Is she eatin’ now?”

“Yes.”

“Then you been paid,” Thomas stated bluntly.

Eric was perplexed by his brother’s tough attitude.

“Don’t you feel at all indebted to me?” Kronin asked, still addressing Thomas.

“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”

Stark cocked his head like a man who has just heard a threat being issued.

“I was the one who engineered your clemency.”

“I think it was Raela did that,” Thomas said. “You just did what she made you do.”

It was obvious to both young men that Stark expected to get his way easily. The impediment of Thomas’s refusal was beginning to humor Eric.

“Why don’t you let us talk about it?” Eric suggested. “I’ll talk to Tommy alone.”

“Why don’t we discuss it on the ride back?” Stark suggested.

“We didn’t know that you were coming, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “So we called my dad. He’s coming to get us.”

Stark glared at Thomas, who in turn squinted as if the bright light of an inquisitor was shining into his eyes.

“How’d you boys like New York?” Minas Nolan asked on the ride back to Beverly Hills.

“I really liked it, Dad,” Eric said. He felt outgoing and effusive with his father for the first time that he could remember. “Tommy spent every day in the museum, and I was down on Wall Street. We’d get together every night for dinner though.”

“How did you like it, Tommy?” Minas asked, turning momentarily toward the backseat.

“It was pretty good,” the smaller boy said. “The museum was great, and we met some nice people. A lotta people talked about the World Trade Center. I think they’re worried about it happening again.”

“That was a terrible event,” Dr. Nolan agreed.

“Yeah. There’s people live in the subways, you know.”

“Really?” Eric asked. “When were you in the subway?”

“Sometimes I took the Lexington line downtown, but I heard it from this homeless guy I met in the park. I guess he could tell by the way I said hi that I lived on the street before. He said that my face an’ hands didn’t go wit’ the clothes I was wearin’. He told me that if you go down on the subway rails under Grand Central that you’d find a whole village where homeless people lived. They got everything down there, even electricity.”

“That sounds like a tall tale to me,” Minas Nolan said in his certain tone.

“Could be though,” Thomas said. And then he told Minas about his alley valley and the apartment-building clubhouse he shared with Pedro.

“It’s like when you look at someplace and say that there’s not nuthin’ there,” Thomas concluded. “But when you look closer you see animals an’ birds an’ things. I met a woman who told me that there’s all kindsa millions and millions’a animals too small to be seen walkin’ all ovah everywhere all the time. Her daddy was a scientist, but she was crazy an’ had to live in the street.”

“That’s terrible,” Minas said.

“Yeah,” Thomas replied. “But nobody know it.”

Eric and Mona and Thomas and Minas Nolan all sat in the living room drinking a citrus punch that Ahn had made. Eric explained everything he’d learned from Constance Baker without talking about the way things ended with her. Mona sat on Thomas’s lap, rubbing her hands over his fingers.

“Your fingers like sandpaper, Uncle Tommy.”

“I used to spend all my time out in a park that I had.”

“You had your own park?” The girl was astonished.

“Yeah. But it was real dirty because people were always throwin’ trash in it. That’s why I got such rough hands — throwin’ all the trash away all the time.”

“Oh.”

Raela and her brother, Michael, came over in the afternoon. Michael was accompanied by a scarred woman named Doris. Doris wore an orange dress and had one light- and one dark-blue eye. Raela was thinner than before but just as beautiful as Thomas had remembered. After a while Eric and his friends and daughter decided to go down to the beach.

“You wanna come, Tommy?” Eric asked.

“Not today. I just wanna stay around here.”

Thomas was thinking that he could go up to his mother’s old room and sink to his knees. It had been a long time since he’d been home.

But Dr. Nolan wanted to talk awhile longer. Thomas didn’t mind. It had been many years since he was alone with his mother’s lover. When he was traveling the streets of L.A. he often thought of the talks he’d had with the doctor.

“I’m very sorry about the things that have happened,” Minas said when they were alone.

“It’s not your fault,” Thomas replied. “The law took me away. It took me from you, then it took me from my real father, and then it put me in jail. I don’t really like the law all that much. It’s like no matter what I do there’s some law to tell me I’m wrong.”

“When you put it like that,” Minas said, “it doesn’t seem fair. You’d think that the law would protect young people.”

“But it don’t, doesn’t,” Thomas said, correcting his street language with the way he’d learned to speak in Minas’s house years before. “All the kids I knew were in trouble or makin’ trouble. And when I was livin’ on the street, the cops was the last people you wanted to see.”

“How did you manage to survive living like that?” Minas asked.

Thomas could see by the way the doctor winced that he was afraid of the answer.

“It was pretty much always the same,” Thomas said. “You needed food and shelter mostly, and money to buy stuff like toothpaste or Band-Aids. You’d stay in one place as long as you could, but you had other places in mind in case the cops or somebody moved you out. But once you had what you needed, then you could read a book or talk to somebody or think. I liked to think.”

“What would you think about?” Minas asked.

“You an’ Ahn an’ Eric,” Thomas said, “and my mother. I used to have a blank book and I’d write in that. I wrote mostly about nice things that people did for me and sometimes about why people was so mean. One man once told me that he thought that people were mean to the homeless because we were so poor. He said that people hate poor people in America... Oh, oh, yeah.”

“What?” Minas asked.

“I just remembered what I wanted to tell Eric when I got shot.”

“What’s that?”

“I was lookin’ at a book that had the word America written down on it. And I was lookin’ at it, and then I saw that E-R-I–C was right in the middle of it. Eric was in the middle of America.”

Minas put down his drink and lowered his head, pondering the words from his stepson.

“You want to go to the Rib Joint for dinner?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

In the past six years Thomas had shambled past the restaurant from time to time. Fontanot had bought the buildings on either side of the original eatery and added a second floor to the primary structure — you could smell barbecue smoking for three blocks in any direction. But Thomas never went in to say hello. The place was too big, and he doubted that his mother’s tall friend would remember him. And even if Fontanot did remember, Thomas knew that no one would let him just walk in. People dressed for street living were blocked from entering any place fancy, like restaurants or department stores.

Fontanot knew Thomas at first sight. He folded the young man in his arms and kissed his cheek.

“Boy, you are a sight for sore eyes,” he bellowed. “Look just like your mother. You sure do.”

They crowded into the kitchen and ate catfish and sausages. Thomas couldn’t eat too much, but he was happy at the loud entrepreneur’s special table.

Ira had married a big Texan girl named Coretta.

“Got some meat on her bones,” he told the doctor and his son. “But she ain’t fat. No, no — just bullheaded. When she told me she wanted to live together, I said that I wasn’t ready for that, so the next night when I got home she had all her stuff already moved in. I tried to th’ow her out an’ she rassled me to the floor. I couldn’t break her grip ’cause I was laughin’ so hard. Now, you know if a girl gonna make you laugh like that then it’s all ovah. We got married in Vegas the next weekend.”

Thomas didn’t remember ever feeling so happy or so safe as he did in Fontanot’s kitchen.

“Mr. Fontanot?” Thomas said after many stories.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think you might have a job here that I could do? I have washed dishes for men’s shelters before, and I know how to clean up.”

“I could use a good man on my smokers,” the big man said. “You know, I only put men I could trust out in the backyard.”

“You can trust me.”

“Then you can start tomorrow.”

That night Thomas was sitting on his old bed (Eric had moved back to his original bedroom) thinking about working for Fontanot. At the Rib Joint he felt that he could make a new life and maybe things would be all right. He’d have a job, and no one was looking to put him back in jail; he could get a license to drive and maybe even get a used car. That way he’d have an ID with a picture and an address. And then he could take a train back East and visit Clea at NYU when Fontanot gave him vacation. Maybe even Monique’s husband would shake his hand and smile.

The knocking at his door was very soft.

“Come in,” he said, knowing that it was Ahn.

The nanny-turned-housekeeper had on a boy’s blue jeans and T-shirt. She also wore round wire-rimmed spectacles.

Thomas glanced at the hem of the T-shirt to see if there were old bloodstains there, but all he saw was bright white cotton.

“Hello, Tommy,” she said, leaning forward slightly with just a hint of a bow.

Tommy moved toward the end of the bed, and she sat next to him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m going to work for Mr. Fontanot. I’m gonna be a rib smoker.”

“Dr. Nolan and Eric tell me that you were shot one time before,” she said, frowning.

“A long time ago. I don’t hardly ever even think about that.”

“Was that before you called me?”

“No. I got shot later.”

“I could have saved you, maybe?”

“Prob’ly not, Ahn. I was in trouble, and nobody could have got me out. You know, it’s tough in the streets of L.A. I knew this guy once from down in Mexico, illegal, you know. And he told me that if he was sick he’d be better off at home because down there there was always somebody to give you some beans an’a tortilla, someplace to sleep at least.”

“But I could have fed you then. But I told you not to call.”

“It’s okay, Ahn. Really. I always remembered what you told me about running. No matter what happens you got to keep on movin’. You can’t stop to cry or wonder why or nuthin’. I got that from you, Ahn, and that’s why I stayed alive.”

The small woman and Thomas hugged there on his childhood bed. She was crying. Thomas remembered all the times that he and Eric had run to Ahn with cuts and scrapes and bruises. She would always be there, ready to take care of them.

“It’s okay, Ahn,” Thomas whispered. “We don’t have to run anymore.”

When Ahn left for her room, Thomas went down into the garden. He was barefoot and wore only his black jeans. In that way he remembered his mother and their nocturnal sojourns in the garden when Eric and Dr. Nolan were away. He expected to be alone, but he found Raela there, sitting on the stone bench.

“Hello,” the teenager said.

Thomas liked this girl. She seemed to him to hold herself like ballet dancers that performed in the park in the summer. It was the way she held her head high and how her eyes took a moment to settle on you. He grinned and sat down next to her.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked.

“When Eric falls to sleep sometimes I come down to sit with the flowers,” she said.

Thomas nodded.

“Eric told me that my stepfather wanted you to work for him but you said no.”

He nodded again, breathing in the strong scent of far-off night-blooming jasmine.

“Why did you say no?”

“Because...”

“What?”

“Because he made my eyes hurt when I looked at him.”

It was Raela’s turn to nod.

For long minutes they sat not talking. Now and then the flutter of a nightbird or some large moth broke the silence.

“He loves me too much,” the girl said after a while. “When I was a kid he’d come and watch me play. He would talk to me for hours but never even pay any attention to my brother at all.”

“I knew a woman once who told me that her father made her have sex with him,” Thomas said. “That’s why she ran away and lived in the street. He said he’d kill her if she even went out with a boy. He had killed another daughter and put her in the basement, but she never told no one except us in the street.”

“He never touched me,” Raela said. “And he never made threats. But I think he hates Eric — he hates him because we’re together.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said, nodding again. “Maybe that’s why he hurts my eyes.”

“I told Eric not to work for him. I told him that my stepfather is like a big old stone. He just falls on top of you and stays there until you’re crushed. When I was younger he would tell me about how he would sometimes just sit with a man at lunch, and by teatime the man would have lost everything it took him his whole life to make. I’d ask him why the man didn’t shoot him.”

“What did he say?” Thomas asked, scared as if he were being told a ghost story.

“That the way he got inside the man’s soul made the man happy to be losing just his business.”

Thomas thought about his lost cart then. He wondered if Kronin Stark had ever pushed anybody out of that fancy hotel and into the street.

“Do you love Eric?” Thomas asked, still thinking about pushing that cart.

Raela turned to Thomas, taking a moment for her eyes to settle. Then her brow furrowed.

Thomas liked the way she took her time. It was as if she knew there was no hurry. Sometimes it took a while to say something.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I mean, when I see him I think, ‘There’s Eric. I know him from inside his core to his skin.’ I think, ‘I need his warmth in my bed.’ Is that love?”

“Does he make you want to giggle and laugh out loud?”

“When I see him with you he does,” she said with no hesitation. “Seeing you and him together makes me happy.”