Fortunate Son

10

For most of those first three years away from the Nolan household, Thomas was more or less happy. He hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since the first week, but he could hear the school bell from the clubhouse / apartment building that he shared with the morose Pedro. Every day at the lunch bell he went to talk to May. She’d make him a hot lunch and talk about her life. May didn’t need any response from the boy, and he loved to hear her talk because she seemed happy to be getting things off her chest. That happiness filled Thomas’s own heart.

Not that May lived a happy life. Elton was very jealous of her. Sometimes at night he would come home and want to know where she’d been and who she’d been with. He’d slapped her on a few occasions; once he’d even blackened her eye.

But May, by her own account, never cheated on Elton. Twice she had to “do things” with Mr. Sanders, the landlord, because they were short on the rent for more than two months. But she did that to help Elton, even though she could never tell him because he would kill both her and Sanders if he knew. But she didn’t like it with Sanders like she did with Thomas’s father.

The only times that she had ever been bad were when she was either drunk or high.

“You should never do any drugs, Lucky,” May had said. “It’s the devil in them.”

That was what had happened one day when Thomas came home to find May and a man called Wolf wrestling in the nude on the living room floor. When Thomas opened the door, Wolf jumped up and stood there with his big erection standing stiff and straight. The man was breathing hard, and his eyes were wild and very white against his black skin.

“That’s just Lucky, Wolf,” May said in a deep voice. “Go wait in the kitchen, Tommy. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”

But she didn’t come in. She and Wolf made noises for a long time, and finally Thomas went out through the back porch to his alley valley.

The next day when Thomas mentioned the man May was with the day before, she said, “How you know about Wolf?”

Somehow she had forgotten even seeing Thomas. He told her about them being naked and wrestling, and asked if his peeny was going to get like Wolf’s.

“You can’t ever tell Elton about Wolf,” she said. And then she told him that he should never do drugs.

“Drugs make you crazy like me an’ Wolf,” she said.

Wolf brought her drugs, and after she took them they took off their clothes and did that. And the drugs also made her forget about Thomas. She promised not to do drugs anymore, and he said okay and they went on for a long time as if that day with Wolf had never happened.

But May had other problems too. Elton was the source of many of them. Mostly it was because he never made enough money, and because of that he was mad all the time. And when he got mad he drank. And when he drank he got mean. And then he’d go out and get in fights, and when he got home May and Thomas had to hide from him.

Thomas listened to his father complain about the money he had to spend on the food that Thomas ate, including the dollar for his school lunch.

Thomas would have given up the lunch money except for Skully.

Skully was a mutt puppy that Thomas found on their doorstep one morning on his way to work. (Thomas referred to going to his alley as going to work because he spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned street and fixing up his clubhouse.)

Skully was a whining, licking ball of fur that Thomas immediately fell in love with. He brought the puppy back into the alley and fed him his peanut butter sandwich. That afternoon he went down to the corner store (after three so as not to be caught by the truant officer) and bought cheap dog food for his pet.

He named the dog Skully because of his mispronunciation of the foes of the Fantastic Four, the shape-shifting Skrulls. Thomas pretended that Skully was a Skrull prince that changed into a puppy and now couldn’t change back, and it was Thomas’s job to feed and protect him until his people came and brought him back home to his castle.

Over the last three years he had made a home for himself among his family and friends. Besides May and Elton, he had his grandmother, Madeline, whom he stayed with one weekend a month. (He persuaded Madeline to let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen, where the hum of the refrigerator’s motor drowned out the all-night TV.) Then there was Bruno, who had been diagnosed with leukemia and juvenile diabetes. Bruno had managed to go to school through the second grade, but now he was homebound and the school sent a tutor to visit him on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thomas dropped by to visit Bruno, and his pixilated Aunt Till, at least one day during the week and also on Saturdays, when May and Elton stayed in bed until noon.

Pedro always talked about going to Seattle to live with his sister, but whenever he got any money, he spent it on pizzas for himself and Thomas — only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.

These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother — and then there was Alicia.

Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys. Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.

One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.

“Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.

The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.

Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name Ralphie written across it.

Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.

When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.

“Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”

“You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.

“Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”

“What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.

“Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”

“But what if we hide her?”

“How?”

“We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top. Then it would be like a coffin.”

Thomas was thinking about the casket that sat in front of the church, the casket that held his mother. He’d always been ashamed that he hadn’t looked at her to say good-bye even though she’d told him in his dreams that it was okay.

Pedro spent the next two hours hauling cinder blocks out of the apartment building to the lonely corner where Alicia (Thomas had already named her) lay. Together the boys lined four of the cement bricks down either side of her small and slender body, then placed one at her head and another at her feet. Then they bridged more blocks over her. When they were done, they had constructed a long cement-colored pyramid over the dead girl.

“May you go to heaven and meet your maker,” Thomas said, paraphrasing words he’d heard his grandmother saying about her friends that died.

“Amen,” Pedro chimed. “Man, I’m tired after all that. You think you could get me a peanut butter sandwich?”

Later that day Thomas covered the coffin with leaves and branches so that nobody would see it. He put a small crate near the mound so that he could sit next to Alicia’s makeshift tomb and talk to her. At these times his mother’s voice would come to him, and they would all talk about living and dying.

Thomas doubled his efforts at cleaning up the alley because he didn’t want Alicia’s graveyard to be littered. This was a lot of work because many of the neighbors threw cans and bags of garbage over the fence. For them it was their private junkyard, not a holy place meant to house the dead.

Whenever Thomas filled up a trash bag with garbage, he’d climb up into his “church tree” and drop the bag into their open Dumpster.

Ages six, seven, and eight were good for Thomas, but nine was not so great.

The first thing that happened came out of a conversation he’d had with Pedro. They’d been talking about how Pedro’s family hated him. And he hated them too. Thomas said that he loved his family. He started talking about his mother, and then about Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan. He told Pedro how much he missed them.

“Why don’t you call’em?” the bright-eyed boy suggested. “You know his name is Nolan and that he’s a doctor and he lives in Beverly Hills. All you got to do is call information.”

Thomas tried this when May was out one weekday morning. He got the number and scrawled it on an unopened gas bill.

After many nervous moments, he decided to call.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said cautiously.

“Ahn?” Thomas said, his heart quailing.

“Who this?”

“It’s Tommy.”

Silence.

“It’s Tommy, Ahn. Don’t you remember me?”

“What do you want?” she asked in a slow, metered voice.

Thomas didn’t know what to say. He wanted so much: his mother back alive, his brother living on the floor below, the elementary school where he knew everybody from kindergarten and where the sun wasn’t too bright. He wanted to sit with Dr. Nolan and talk about the heart and blood vessels and muscle and blood. Thomas wanted his room back and the floor where he learned to be quiet and to feel the world become one with him.

“Don’t call here anymore, Tommy,” Ahn said. “It’s not good for you. You stay where you are and things are better.”

Then she hung up.

Thomas cried for the first time since he could remember. He had dreamed for years about being reunited with Eric and Ahn, but now all of that was over. They didn’t want him even to call. He blubbered there on the couch next to the pink phone. He was crying when May came home.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“They don’t love me,” the boy cried. “They told me not to call.”

May thought that he was talking about some friends at school. She took him in her arms and assured him that she and Elton loved him very much. And so did Madeline and lots of other people too.

But Thomas would not be consoled. He had lost something that day that could never be replaced. He was sorry that he’d called. At least if he hadn’t he never would have known the truth.

Ahn was also desolate over Thomas’s call. She sat in her small room, at the back of the big empty house, wringing the blood-spattered T-shirt that she’d kept from childhood. She didn’t want to hurt Thomas — she loved the little boy — but by now she was certain that Eric was cursed. He was a danger to anyone who threatened him or loved him. Thomas was safer where he was.

Three days after the phone call to the Nolan household, Elton came home in the middle of the day. May and Thomas were sitting in the kitchen.

“May!” Elton yelled.

They could tell by the way he slammed the door that he was in a bad mood. His father’s heavy footfalls down the hall brought Thomas to his feet. If he’d had a moment more, the boy would have ducked into the back porch.

“What the hell are you doing here, Lucky?” Elton said when he came in.

“He’s sick, Elton,” May said, thinking quickly. “They send him home.”

“Huh. That’s me too. They send me home too. Said I cracked the block on that fool’s Cadillac. I’idn’t do shit, but now I’m fired wit’ no references. Three years an’ now it’s like I never even had a job. Get me some gotdamn beer.”

Elton was drunk for the next three weeks. Thomas couldn’t come back home at noon anymore, and there were fights every night. Some nights he would sneak out of the house and go to stay with Pedro so he didn’t have to hear the yelling and crying.

One moonlit evening, while Elton broke furniture and called May a whore, Thomas went out to sit by Alicia’s tomb.

There were crickets and frogs singing all around him. He delighted in the moon shining on his hands and feet, and spoke softly to the girl.

“Are you lonely, Alicia?” he asked. “I know you must be, and I’m sorry if I don’t come talk to you enough. But I been real busy tryin’ to keep it cleaned up around here. An’ sometimes it’s better to be alone. Sometimes people jus’ scream an’ watch TV an’ tell you they don’t like you.”

Thomas climbed up on the makeshift tomb and lay down. He slept for a while, and when he awoke the moon filled not only his eyes but all of his senses. He tasted it and heard its rich music. He felt the light on his skin like golden oil soothing him. In his mind the moon was speaking to him, telling him that everything was all right. He fell back to sleep on the rock-rough crypt smiling at his good fortune.

The next day Pedro’s father was killed in a shoot-out on Slauson.

Alfonso Middleman was shot dead on the street. People told Pedro that it was kids trying to take his drug money. No one knew where Pedro’s mother’s family lived, and the father’s family wouldn’t even let him in the door.

“I went to his mother’s house,” the gray-eyed teenager said. “But they said that my mother lied and they were no blood to me. I don’t even know where they’re burying him. I can’t even go to his funeral.”

Pedro got a job selling crack out of an alley six blocks east of Thomas’s Eden. He made enough money and then bought a pistol from the people he dealt for.

“I’m gonna kill them suckahs murdered my dad,” he told Thomas one night. “Kill’em all. And then they can put me in jail. I don’t even care. But I’m not gonna let’em get away with that shit.”

Thomas spent seven nights with Pedro in the clubhouse. The bigger boy was despondent over the death of a father he hadn’t talked to in eight years. He hungered for revenge.

Thomas didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble at home. Elton had a night job at an assembly plant by then, and May was seeing Wolf again. Many nights she wasn’t home, and even when she was there, she was too high to miss Thomas.

It wasn’t until about a month later that everything went completely wrong.

Thomas was asleep in his back-porch bedroom. In his dream his mother was showing him how to fly. Wolf had been arrested the week before for drug dealing and implication in the murder of a man in Compton. That night May had promised Thomas that she wouldn’t see Wolf again and that she’d stop getting high. The boy had not asked her to stop, but he was happy that she wanted to.

He came awake suddenly with fear clutching his heart. He didn’t know why.

He hurried out of the house and across his valley into the clubhouse and up to the roof. There he found Pedro sitting on the rusted-out fire escape with the muzzle of his pistol shoved in his mouth. Pedro was crying. Thomas screamed and ran at his friend.

“Stop!” Thomas shouted as he leaped onto the metal basket.

The gun fired before Thomas could grab his friend. But he couldn’t stop, and when he fell upon Pedro, the metal wrenched away from the wall and crashed the four floors to the ground.

For long moments all Thomas knew was pain.

When he could finally think a bit, he crawled over his wide-eyed dead friend to the hole in the fence and back home. He made it to the street and up to the front door. There he collapsed.

Elton found him in the morning when he was coming home from work.

“Lucky.”

“I fell,” the boy said.

“Don’t worry, boy,” Elton said in an unusually kind voice. Thomas was happy to hear his father’s gentle tone.

He woke up in the hospital with May and Elton standing over him. There was a white woman wearing a brown dress suit standing there too, and a doctor and a nurse and a policeman in uniform.

“I want to speak to him alone,” the white woman in the suit said.

“Why?” Elton complained. “You think we did somethin’ to him? I’m not leavin’. I’m not.”

“I can have you arrested right now, Mr. Trueblood. Right now.”

Thomas didn’t understand what the woman wanted. He was feeling kindly toward Elton because he obviously cared about what happened to him. After all, he had brought him to the hospital even though it was bound to cost a lot of money.

Thomas felt dizzy, and somewhere beyond that his hip hurt. But he wasn’t worried about the pain.

The room cleared out except for the nurse in white and the white woman in the brown suit.

“My name is Mary,” the woman said. “You’re Tommy, right?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get hurt, Tommy?”

“Fell.”

“Did anybody push you?”

“No.”

“Did anybody hit you?”

“No.”

“Were you alone when you fell down?”

“No.”

“Was your father there?”

“No.”

“Was your mother there?”

“My mother’s dead.”

“Oh,” the woman said. Thomas could see the sad kindness in her face even though she wore lots of makeup. “I mean your father’s friend, Miss Fine. Was she there?”

“May wasn’t there either. It was just me an’ Pedro. He was sad about his father, and he had a gun that he was gonna use to shoot the boys that killed his father, but then he was on the roof and he shot the gun and I jumped out to save him but we fell.”

“Where is Pedro now?” The woman was frowning.

“Dead, I think.”

After that things were not the same. Thomas told the woman about the clubhouse but not the alley. She left and he went to sleep. Neither his father nor May ever came back to visit him, and every time he woke up he was in a different room with different nurses talking to him and smiling. One day he woke up feeling lots of pain in his hip. He reached down, finding something hard there instead of flesh.

“It’s in a cast,” a smiling black nurse said. “They operated on your broken bone and now it has to heal.”

“Can I walk?”

“Not now, but later on you’ll be able to.”

Thomas lived in the hospital for six months after his operation. He had to use crutches at first, and later he walked with difficulty. He was told by the doctor that he might have a slight limp afterward but, if he did the right exercises and went to rehabilitation, that it would go away.

May and Elton had been put in jail and held over for trial. That’s what the social worker, Mr. Hardy, said.

“Why didn’t you go to school, Lucky?” he asked.

“Because the light hurt my eyes.”

“Did your parents know that you weren’t there?”

“No.”

“Didn’t they ask for your report cards?”

“I just told them that they didn’t have report cards no more.”

“Did they believe that?”

“No. Daddy said that he was gonna go talk to’em about it, but he was always workin’, and then after they fired him he was asleep all day. How long is he gonna be in jail?”

“Soon you’ll be leaving the hospital,” Mr. Hardy said. “There’s a family that wants you to come stay with them.”

“But what about my dad and May?”

“The Rickerts will make a very nice home for you, Thomas,” Hardy said. He had pink skin, short gray and black hairs on his head and chin, and glistening droplets of sweat across his forehead like a netting of glass beads.

“Do I have to?” Thomas asked.

“It’s what’s best,” the social worker told him. “They’ll send you to school and be home every night. And they have three other boys in their care, so you’ll have brothers to play with.”

Three days later, Thomas was driven to the Rickerts’ house by the social worker. Thomas’s limp had become permanent by then, but he didn’t mind. He was much more worried about the family he had come to live with.

Robert Rickert was thin as a rail and the color of a green olive that’s turning brown. Melba, his wife, was deep brown and as broad as the doorway. The husband was silent and sour, but his wife was mean.

Thomas’s foster brothers had names, but he never learned them. They were all about the same age, and the first night they told him about the gang they were in at school.

“Nobody messes with us,” the biggest boy with the silver tooth said. “’Cause they know that it’s all’a us then.”

“You wit’ us?” the smaller, darker boy asked. “’Cause if you ain’t, we gonna mess you up bad.”

The first night at the Rickert house, Thomas was sent to bed without dessert because he didn’t answer half of the questions Melba asked. He didn’t want the sherbet anyway, but he knew that she wanted to hurt his feelings by depriving him.

The George Washington Carver School classroom for slow third-graders was loud, and the teacher (whose name Thomas also forgot) didn’t teach very much. Thomas got into two fights the first day. Instead of going home he wandered away; then, after asking directions, he headed toward Central. When he got to his old block, he climbed under the fence and into his blessed valley.

Skully was gone. Thomas hoped that the puppy had found a home with children that loved him.

No Man was still there. He had taken a mate to live with, another green parrot, and together they built a nest in the top branches of the oak tree.

After two days, Thomas went to the alley where Pedro had sold drugs. The older boy had told him that little kids like Thomas could make good money delivering for the drug dealers there.

“Li’l kids can’t get into trouble if they get busted by the cops,” Pedro had told him. “So they pay you good money just to walk down the street.”

In the alley Thomas met a boy named Chilly. Chilly was even smaller than Thomas, and he had an oval-shaped head and freckles on his nose. He wore a gray hat with a brim and green sunglasses. Chilly told him about the main man — Tremont. Tremont was a tall man with wide shoulders, big muscles, and a scar that started at the left side of his forehead and went in an arc down the center of his face all the way to the chin.

“You wanna run fo’ me, li’l man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s your mama?”

“Dead.”

“Where’s yo’ daddy?”

“In jail.”

“Where you livin’?”

“With my friend Bruno sometime, an’ with May,” he lied.

Tremont squatted down so that he could look Thomas in the eye.

“How old are you, li’l man?”

“Nine and a half.”

“Who told you about this place?”

“Pedro. He used to work here.”

“If I give you work an’ you tell I will kill you. Do you understand that?”

“I won’t tell. I swear.”

The first job Tremont gave Thomas was to carry a small paper bag to an address four blocks away. A lovely brown woman in a violet dressing gown answered the door.

“Are you Lucky?” she asked.

She knelt down and put her hands on his sides. This tickled, and Thomas giggled.

“Aren’t you cute,” the woman said.

She picked him up and hugged him.

“My name is Cilla,” she said. “I’m Tremont’s girl.”

She carried Thomas down a dark and narrow hallway into a small yellow kitchen. There she sat the boy at a table and fed him half a ham sandwich and part of a pomegranate.

While he ate she took the paper bag and opened it. She took out a wad of money and counted it — twice.

“Tremont send you to me to make sure you could do the job,” Cilla told him. “He told you not to look in the bag, and he put a tape on the inside so that I could see that you didn’t. 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.

“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.

After that he 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.

“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.”

Monique’s apartment was just a room. One wall had a stove against it, and there was a big footed bathtub next to the 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 months after 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.

One night, 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.

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.

“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 biceps 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.

“If you stealin’ from me I’ll kill you,” he said.

Thomas knew the threat was real. Tremont had killed man and boy before.

Tremont banged 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.”

Monique cleaned 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.

“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.”