Fortunate Son

19

Working at the Rib Joint was a joy for Thomas Beerman. Minas gave him a ride to the restaurant every morning, and Thomas took the Wilshire bus back home at night.

Smoking the ribs, sausages, slabs of beef, and other exotic meats was a seven-man job (even though three of those men were women). They had to prepare the meat by cutting it into the proper portions, marinate it for twenty-four hours, and then smoke it in the twelve big metal cans out in the yard. They smoked beef, pork, and chicken, and wild game like venison and boar. They smoked homemade, hand-stuffed sausages. Miranda Braithwaite made the sauce and marinated the meats the way Ira had taught her. Ben Tallman and Parker Todd used brushes to baste the meat and turn it from time to time. Thomas Grant and Penelope Sargent prepared the orders and prepped for the others when they weren’t busy. There was a sixth man, Bishop Ladderman, who carved the meat and carried the orders into the kitchen for Ira to finish off and for the waitresses to deliver.

Three times a week Thomas talked on the phone to Clea in New York. He half expected her to start dating the law student Brad again. She did see him from time to time, she said, but only as a friend.

“He’s got another girlfriend now,” she said. “She’s preparing to study law like him, and they’re very happy.”

Love flourished in the long talks they had via cell phone.

“I never knew anybody who thinks as deeply as you,” she would say. “It’s like you were a thousand years old and had the time to wonder about everything in the world.”

Thomas liked having her to talk to. He even planned to take a flight to New York on his first three-day weekend, which would come in three months. By then he would have saved the money.

Clea had said that she loved him over the phone.

On his days off Thomas visited Raela and Eric at the Tennyson. They had moved in together, and he was back in school. Thomas babysat for Mona when Raela and his brother went out, and he talked late into the night with Eric when the two came home from their date.

“So you’re not gonna work for Stark?” Thomas asked Eric one such late evening.

Raela was asleep with Mona in her bed because the child still had bad dreams about her mother’s murder. That’s why Mona liked to have Thomas babysit for her — the child was convinced that he could always save her if something bad happened.

“No,” Eric said. “Raela doesn’t want me to. She doesn’t trust him, but I think he’s just trying to keep his family together. We go over there at least once a week for dinner.”

“I don’t like him.”

“I know. But I’m not scared. I mean, what could he do to me?”

Thomas gazed at his brother and smiled.

“What are you smilin’ at?” Eric asked.

“For a while there I didn’t think that anything would ever work for me,” Thomas said. “I mean, I couldn’t even get it together to buy a new pair of shoes. I couldn’t even stop my feet from bleedin’ through the holes in my soles.”

“I guess we are lucky like you told me, huh?” Eric said.

“Maybe so.”

One afternoon Thomas put on a pair of black cotton pants and a blue Hawaiian T-shirt that Raela had helped him pick out at a store in West Hollywood. He had on black sandals with no socks and a short-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. Wearing this ensemble, he took four buses down to Compton and knocked on Harold and Monique’s door. Lily answered.

“Uncle Lucky, is that you?”

He picked up the chunky girl and kissed her cheek. Monique came up and kissed her childhood friend on the mouth. Thomas worried that Harold would get mad about that, but he just shook Thomas’s hand and said, “You look good, homeboy. Come on in.”

Thomas started reading books from the shelf at Minas Nolan’s house. It really didn’t matter what he read: science fiction, biography, technical manuals, or general fiction — all of it served the purpose of telling him something, anything. He didn’t retain much of the knowledge he perused; he didn’t expect to collect ideas but merely to be exposed to them.

“What are you reading, son?” Minas would ask when he came upon Thomas in the library hunched over some book.

“Gray’s Anatomy,” he said one day.

“Are you interested in human anatomy?”

“It’s so pretty,” Thomas replied. “I saw this guy cut open once in Tremont’s alley. He stole from Tremont and got his arm cut open. I could see the muscles hangin’ outta his arm. They didn’t look all neat like they do here in this book. In this book it looks nice and, and pretty.”

“Those experiences you had must have been awful,” Minas said.

“It must have been,” Thomas agreed. “But it’s like somebody else’s life when I think about it. I mean, I know that I was there, but it feels like I always been here and those things I did are like a book.”

Thomas held up the anatomy text and shook his head.

Minas wondered if he understood what the boy was saying. Later that night, when he went to bed, he decided that Thomas had become as deep and unfathomable as his mother.

Bishop Ladderman was offered a job as an assistant chef in a fancy Brentwood restaurant, and so he left the Rib Joint. It was quite a surprise. Bishop wasn’t looking for a job, but one day he got a call from Chez Vivienne’s owner, Raoul Mantou. Mr. Mantou said that he’d heard a lot about Bishop and that he wanted him in his kitchen. He offered seventy-five thousand dollars a year, twice what any cook got at Fontanot’s, and so Bishop had to go.

Michael Cotter was hired to take Bishop’s place.

Michael was different from the other smokers. Miranda, Ben, Parker, Penelope, and Thomas Grant were all in their late fifties up to sixty. Bishop was that age too. And even though Thomas was only twenty, he had what Fontanot called an old soul, and because of his scars and limp he seemed more like one of the older workers.

Cotter was young, not quite thirty, and handsome, black as glowing tar and lithe like a panther. He was always laughing and quick to lend a hand. The waitresses from the restaurant would come out to the yard just to look at him when he’d take his shirt off to move the heavy metal smokers or large bundles of meat.

Cotter got along with everybody. He and Thomas became fast friends.

One day, after his first few weeks on the job, Michael offered to drive Thomas home. Thomas took the ride because he liked to hear Michael’s tales about the streets. They were different streets from those Thomas had inhabited. Michael told stories about tough men and fine women that loved and fought in the clubs and bars. Thomas knew what happened outside, and Michael knew what went on indoors.

“So you stayed in that alley and didn’t evah go to school?” Cotter asked on that first day he gave Thomas a ride.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s wild, man. And nobody nevah knew?”

“Not until Pedro killed himself and I tried to stop him and fell off the roof. Then they knew... about me not goin’ to school anyway.”

Michael Cotter loved a good story. He had been in the army for a spell, as a sniper. He told Thomas that they had him “all ovah the niggerlands from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Argentina to North Korea.”

“And you shot people?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, yeah, man. Sometimes, though, they’d put a twist on it.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes,” Michael said, “when they didn’t wanna kill somebody but just shake him up, they’d have me shoot his wife or young child. Sometimes I’d just wound a dude so he’d miss a meetin’.”

Most of the other smokers liked Cotter, but they didn’t believe his stories.

“He just a blowhard,” Parker had said to the other smokers one day before Cotter had arrived. “I mean, he tell a good story all right. And I believe he had some time in the armed services. But the United States government ain’t nevah gonna have no sniper shoot no child.”

“I’ont know,” Miranda said. “Maybe not a white child, but if it was some little black boy or Arab girl they might not care.”

“What do you think, Lucky?” Ben asked Thomas. “You the one he talk to the most.”

“He prob’ly did all that,” Thomas said.

“Why don’t you think he lyin’?” Penelope asked the youngest smoker.

“People lie to impress people,” Thomas said, paying very little heed to the words as they came out of his mouth. “When they lie they sneak a look to see if you’re impressed. But Cotter don’t care. He just talkin’. I think he did alla what he said. All of it and more.”

Eric was happy to have his brother back in his life. He still lamented Christie’s death, still felt guilty about it. But he didn’t feel alone with Raela as he had with Mona’s mother. If he was sick she nursed him and never got a sniffle. When they went skiing together he broke his leg, and she didn’t even sprain an ankle. And she was forever surprising him with her views of the world and her conviction that they were meant to be together.

“But do you love me?” Eric asked her one day.

“Sure,” she said.

“But I mean really, deeply.”

“That’s not the way you and I think,” she replied. “I’d kill for you if I had to. I’d die for you too. Isn’t that enough?”

“When I was in New York I slept with a woman, a stockbroker named Connie.”

“So?”

“Does that make you jealous?”

Raela gazed up at a spot somewhere above Eric’s head.

“If I smelled her on you I might get violent,” she speculated. “Yeah. If I smelled her on you, you might have to hide for a while.”

“But you didn’t smell her?”

Raela pressed her face against his chest and inhaled deeply.

Then she exhaled and said, “All I smell is me.”

Eric was reminded of Ahn’s story about the tiger. Looking upon this girl and remembering that, the young man felt real fear for the first time that he could remember. It exhilarated him, made him shiver. Raela put her arms around him and pressed his head to her breast. From there he could feel the strong beat of her heart and somewhere, far away, the muted thudding of his own blood.

“What we have is what we need,” she said with conviction.

Eric thought that he was directionless in this jungle of a girl, directionless but not lost.

A year passed for the brothers. Thomas went twice to New York and found Clea there waiting for him. In that year he had not cut himself or fallen down, nor was he stopped by the police even once. Every day he woke up early and sat with his stepfather. They read the newspaper and talked about the events in the world. Minas seemed infinitely interested in Thomas’s ideas and point of view.

“You’re so much like your mother that it’s uncanny,” Minas said to Thomas.

“She was the kindest person in the world,” Thomas would say.

“Yes, she was,” Minas agreed, “and as long as you are here she will never be gone.”

Eric relaxed. He experienced a profound love for his daughter now that he wasn’t afraid he’d do her harm. They’d spend hours playing games and going to amusement parks and the zoo.

His feelings for Raela never changed, but this didn’t bother him. She was his sail, he thought, and he was her ship. They were ancient archetypes instead of real people.

Sometimes when thinking this, Eric became terribly sad. He’d see himself like a reflection in a mirror, unable to reach out into the world of flesh and bone. But at those times Raela would come to him, and he realized that even in isolation he wasn’t completely alone.

And he also had Thomas. The brothers saw each other at least three times a week.

“You know, the more I think about what you said,” Eric was telling Thomas at the stone animal park, “the more I think that it’s true.”

“What?”

“That you’re the one who’s lucky. You loving life makes you like that. There’s nowhere you can go where you don’t feel at home.”

“Like a snake,” Thomas said, happy to continue the conversation he’d had so many years ago with Bruno. “A snake can go anywhere he wants to.”

“See that? If somebody called you a snake, even that would make you happy. You can’t get much luckier than that.”

Michael Cotter was driving Thomas every day by the end of the year. Thomas had talked to Michael almost as much as to his brother or Clea. He’d told him about the alley parrot chanting “no man” and Alicia in her cinder-block tomb. He talked about his years as a drug dealer and in the youth facility and as the child husband of Monique and de facto father of Lily.

“I called Clea at lunch, and she told me that she applied to UCLA and that they accepted her,” Thomas said to Michael on their ride home after work one day. “She asked me if I wanted her to come out here and live with me.”

“And what did you say?” Michael asked.

“I said absolutely.”

“Congratulations, my man.”

“Thanks. You know, she says that after she graduates, we’ll figure out whether or not to go back to New York.”

“Hey, man, that’s great. We should celebrate that. I got to see somebody today, but why don’t we have a drink tomorrow to toast you and your girlfriend.”

“Okay. Great.”

That night the whole family got together to celebrate. Eric, Mona, Raela, Ahn, and Minas were all there. Michael came with Doris. Michael had gone to live on a date farm in the desert. He’d grown a beard and dropped out of college. He no longer communicated with Raela’s parents (that’s how he began to think of Kronin and Maya). Doris drank too much sometimes, and when she did she got rowdy. But Michael said that he loved her, and Raela spent weekends with them once a month.

“It’s been a long journey, Tommy,” Minas said, holding up a glass of cognac. “But I think you’ve made it through.”

They all drank and cheered.

Raela played the piano for them, and Ahn sang a Vietnamese song that she remembered from her youth before coming to America.

Sometime late in the evening, Eric took his brother into the garden.

Eric seemed older. There could often be seen a slight smile on his lips. His shoulders sagged slightly, and he paid a lot of attention to people around him.

“You think you’ll marry Clea?” Eric asked.

“She’s too young,” Thomas said. “She just wants to go to school and have some fun.”

“Will you live together?”

“Yeah. Maybe we’ll get a place near Fontanot’s or some kinda student housing thing.”

Eric put his arms around Thomas, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “You’re my brother, Tommy.”

Thomas went to bed happy and fell into a dream.

He was in his alley valley again, and all the trash was gone. No Man and his wife were in the oak tree with a dozen parrot chicks crying for food. Skully was there and so was Pedro. Bruno was sitting on the other side of the fence reading a Fantastic Four comic. Thomas was sitting in the shade of the big oak watching the sun creep across the floor of the alley toward his feet. He was feeling completely relaxed when the surface he was sitting on started to shift.

He jumped up and realized that he was sitting on Alicia’s tomb. The head cinder block fell away, and Alicia sat up. At first Thomas was happy to see his old friend come to life, but then he noticed that the tattoo on her left breast no longer read Ralphie but now said Clea.

“Don’t touch me,” Alicia said in a voice much like his mother’s.

He wanted to obey, but his hands moved forward with a will of their own, and even though she screamed, his fingertips grazed her neck. Instantly she fell back dead. An earthquake shook the alley. Tall buildings that had never been there before began to fall. No Man flew away, and the oak toppled upon Bruno — Thomas came awake unable to breathe, unable to yell, but the shout was in his throat.

“Hello?” Eric said, answering the call. It was 3:27.

“Eric.”

“What, Tommy?”

“If something bad happens I want you to tell Clea that I really love her.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen, Tommy.”

“And I want you to know how grateful I am for you going back East with me and helping me.”

“What’s wrong?” Eric asked.

“I just had a dream. But it was really real. Everything went wrong all at once. The whole world fell apart in a earthquake.”

“You remember what you told me about the moon, don’t you?”

Thomas took a deep breath, another.

“Yeah, but... things have been goin’ so good, Eric. A whole year now and nothin’s wrong.”

“That’s okay, Tommy. You just had it bad, that’s all. Bad things might happen again but not so bad that you won’t be happy.”

“No?”

“It was just a dream. Just a dream.”

“Just a dream,” Thomas echoed. He could feel the sleep returning behind his eyes.

“Go back to bed, man,” Eric said. “It’ll all be fine in the morning.”

But Thomas was upset all day at work. He knocked over a steel smoker filled with chickens. He cut himself in the afternoon, and if it wasn’t for the fast work of Michael Cotter he might have lost a lot of blood.

At the end of the day, when Michael was driving him back, Thomas said, “You should have turned left.”

“Aren’t we gonna have that toast? There’s this great bar I know on Little Santa Monica.”

“I don’t know, Mike,” Thomas said. “I don’t feel much like celebrating.”

“Aw come on, Lucky. It was just a can’a chickens and a slip. You’re gonna be fine.”

Cotter pulled into an almost invisible driveway and up next to a beautiful fountain. A doorman wearing a uniform came out and opened Thomas’s door. Another uniformed man opened Michael’s door and said, “Welcome back, sir.”

“What is this place?” Thomas asked his friend.

In the foyer there were several well-dressed men and women walking, talking, waiting for an elevator.

“It’s a hotel bar,” Cotter was saying. “You know, hotels have the finest bars and restaurants.”

The handsome young smoker led Thomas into a large room filled with small tables. At a table in a far corner sat Kronin Stark.

“What’s goin’ on?” Thomas asked. He stopped walking.

“Mr. Stark has something to tell you... about your brother.”

For a moment Thomas was half back in his dream. He felt as if the hotel floor were buckling under his feet. He pitched forward, but Cotter caught him and helped him to a chair in front of the giant.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Stark rumbled. “Clea Frank is coming to California to be with you.”

“What do you want with me?” Thomas said. “And what about my brother?”

“Your brother is about to go to jail for quite some time,” Stark said.

“You’re crazy. Eric hasn’t done anything.”

“As you will,” Kronin replied with a slight bow. “Take a ride with me and I will explain the details.”

“I’m not goin’ anywhere with you.”

“Fine. Leave then.”

Thomas looked at Michael, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“What’s going to happen to Eric?”

“Come with me and you shall be enlightened,” Stark said.

A Cape Hotel doorman opened the back door of the silver Rolls-Royce, and Stark crawled in like a badger waddling into his hole.

“Get in on the other side,” he said to Thomas. “Terry will drive us.”

“I’m not gettin’ in the back with you,” Thomas said.

“Suit yourself. Sit next to Terry then.”

Thomas got in the front seat next to the man he knew as Michael Cotter.

“Your name is Terry?” Thomas asked.

“Sure,” the sudden stranger replied. “Where to, Mr. S?”

“Let’s go up into the canyons. I like it up there.”

The one-time smoker drove off, turning right on Little Santa Monica.

Stark leaned forward and handed Thomas a large red envelope.

“Take it,” Stark said. “Look through the photographs.”

There was a thick sheaf of eight-by-ten glossy photos. They were pictures of Monique and Madeline, Harold and Clea, Minas Nolan, Ahn, and another half dozen people that Thomas did not recognize. He paused at the photograph of a black woman in a straitjacket who was screaming hideously.

“That’s Nelda Frank,” Stark said. “Your girlfriend’s sister. A nice group, isn’t it? Good-looking people. You would never think that that sweet-looking Vietnamese woman is in the country on forged papers or that stolid Harold Portman has been embezzling funds from his boss for years. Your grandmother’s insurance company doesn’t know that she lied about a preexisting condition when she bought her policy. The doctor that kept her records back then has recently agreed to make amends for his wrongdoing.”

They were crossing Sunset, beginning an ascent into the hills.

“What I do to you, man?” Thomas asked, sitting with his back against the door, looking into the backseat.

“Three nights ago I sat with your brother and my little girl. She smiles at me. She kisses me hello, but her joy in me is over. She’s moved out of my house and chosen her man. My life is empty because of Eric Tanner Nolan.”

Stark brought both hands to his face as if he were about to melt into tears, but he did not cry. Instead his fat hands folded into fists.

“She’s gone from me and is never coming back. If your Eric died tomorrow, she wouldn’t even cry on my shoulder. He has taken her heart from me.”

“You crazy,” Thomas said.

“Yes, I am,” Kronin conceded. “That’s an important fact for you to understand. I am crazy, and I will destroy the lives of everyone you know if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do. That’s just how crazy I am. Your former nanny will be thrown out of the country or into a federal penitentiary, and Harold will be in prison too. Your grandmother will die from the cancer in her stomach. Your stepfather will be sued by half a dozen angry patients, and Clea’s sister will fare far worse.”

Silence settled in on Thomas. All the words he knew dried up and flaked off in his throat.

“You yourself will be tried for the murder of a Jane Doe buried under cinder blocks in an alley inhabited only by you. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, is there, Terry?”

“No, sir,” the man once known as Michael Cotter said.

“The district attorney will soon begin to seek charges against your brother for helping a wanted felon escape from the authorities,” Stark said. “He will be sentenced for that felony and spend quite some time behind bars.”

They’d made it up into the hills. The road looked down on the desertlike slope of the mountain.

“And you, Thomas Beerman, will testify at your brother’s trial that it was he who suggested and financed the escape. It was he who masterminded everything.”

“You crazy.” Thomas found the words even in his silence.

“If you don’t do it,” the billionaire warned, “he will still be convicted, and everyone you know will be destroyed along with him.”

“But why? Why would you do this?”

“Because it will break your brother’s heart to see you turn on him. And I want to do to him what he has done to me.”

When Stark leaned forward, and Thomas was nearly blinded by the light off his skin. He averted his eyes — Kronin thought he was crying — and wondered about the moon.

The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise... He remembered the words he’d spoken to his brother. Now he realized that he was wrong. They were entering a sharp curve over a steep incline. Thomas pushed both his normal and shorter leg against the door, propelling himself against the steering wheel. Terry grunted and tried to keep the steering wheel straight, but Thomas’s hands were too strong for the self-proclaimed assassin. There was no way to stop the car from careering off into free flight. Thomas was weightless. He floated into the backseat. Stark was yelling and so was the man he called Terry. When the Rolls hit the first boulder, Thomas slammed into Kronin’s belly and smelled the acrid stench of the fat man’s belching breath. He also felt a severe pain in his good leg. It felt wet and he thought of blood, but then they hit the second hard rock and then the third. No one was crying out now, and darkness was all around them. Then suddenly there was a wrenching sound of metal tearing, and Thomas was dimly aware of flight and then light. There was a flash of heat across his face, and he remembered the fear in Stark’s face when the big man realized that he was about to die.