Fortunate Son

4

For the next week Thomas spent all of his time on his knees in his room when he wasn’t at school or eating with Dr. Nolan, Ahn, and Eric. He’d close his eyes and think about becoming a part of the house, and he’d feel his mother’s presence. He couldn’t speak to her, but somehow he knew that if he kept his eyes closed she’d be standing there next to him, smiling.

One night Eric came into his room after everyone else was asleep.

“Tommy?” the big six-year-old said into the darkness.

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you doin’?” Eric asked as he climbed up onto the bed.

“I was thinkin’ that Mama was standin’ in the corner makin’ sure that I was asleep, and so I had my eyes closed so that she would think that I was.”

“Do you think that she comes into my room too?” Eric asked.

“Of course she does. You’re the one never go to sleep at his bedtime anyway. She’d have to come look at you.”

“But I never see her.”

“That’s because she only comes in after we’re asleep so that she doesn’t wake you and then she can kiss you good night.”

“Did she kiss you tonight?”

“Not yet. She was still seein’ if I was asleep.”

“Do you ever see her?” Eric asked, his big eyes glittering in the nearly lightless room.

“Only if I open my eyes real quick and I see her white dress and then she’s gone.”

“Why doesn’t she stay and talk to you?” Eric asked.

“Because she doesn’t want to scare us,” Thomas told his brother. “She wants to make sure that we’re okay, but she knows that you’re not supposed to see people after they’re dead.”

Eric took this in and put it away. He often didn’t quite understand the things that Thomas told him, but he knew that his brother understood things that he could not and so he always listened and never made fun of him.

When they went on walks in the woods or down at the beach, Thomas would always find the most beautiful shells and stones. Eric could run faster and do almost everything better than Thomas, but the smaller boy paid closer attention to any space they entered. Often, after a day trip, Eric would come to Thomas’s room and ask him about what he had seen.

“I wanted to talk to you about what happened today,” Eric said, broaching the subject he had come to discuss.

“What?” Thomas asked.

“You know... those boys that pushed you.”

Still under the spell of his mother’s watchful gaze, Thomas had to concentrate to remember.

“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh,” he said. “Billy Monzell.”

“You don’t believe what they said, do you?”

Three boys led by Billy — Young William, as Mr. Stroud, the first-grade teacher, called him — had cornered Thomas on the playground and called him nigger and pushed him down. Before Thomas could do anything, Eric had run up and pushed Billy down. Young William got up, but Eric pushed him down again.

“You leave my brother alone,” Billy told all of them. He was the biggest boy in the class, and even the three bullies were afraid to take him on.

“He’s a nigger so he can’t be your brother,” Billy said. “Black and white can’t ever be brothers.”

Eric hit Billy in the mouth, and Dr. Nolan had to come and take him home for the rest of the day.

“No,” Thomas said. “He’s just ignorant. You’re my brother. Mama always said so.”

“Can I stay here in your room?” Eric asked then.

“Uh-uh,” Thomas said, shaking his head in the darkness. “I wanna go to sleep. But I’ll come down and wake you up in the morning.”

Thomas didn’t want to tell him that he was afraid that if they slept in the same bed, Eric might die like their mother did. He had come to believe that he was unlucky for the people he loved.

The next morning Dr. Nolan kept Thomas home when Eric went off to school.

“There’s something we have to do,” Minas told the black child he regarded as his son.

“What, Dad?” Thomas asked.

The doctor took a deep breath and sighed.

“Your grandmother and father are coming at ten,” he said. “They want you to come live with them.”

“But I don’t wanna.”

“I don’t want it either, Tommy. I told them that you want to be here with me and Eric and Ahn but Madeline says that she and your father are your closest relatives... and, well, they are.”

“But I don’t wanna live with Grandma Madeline,” Tommy said again. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Why you makin’ me?”

“I spoke to a man,” Nolan said, his shoulders sagging, his gaze on the floor. “A lawyer. He told me that because your mother and I never married that Madeline and your father have legal guardianship.”

“But why didn’t you get married?”

“I asked her, Tommy. I asked her every month. But she always said no.”

Thomas thought about the lunch he had with his mother and father. Elton had kissed Branwyn on the mouth before they left. At first she seemed to be kissing him back, but then she pushed him away and after that she spent the day crying.

Looking up at Minas Nolan’s sad face, Thomas knew somehow that he was the reason they could not marry. This knowledge was perfectly delineated by the dimness in his eyes.

“That’s okay, Daddy. I know she loved you. She told me so.”

“She did?”

“Uh-huh.”

Dr. Nolan coughed and turned away.

Ahn made tea and hot chocolate and said very little. An hour later the doorbell rang. Madeline Beerman and Elton Trueblood were admitted, and everyone sat together in the downstairs living room drinking coffee and talking.

Thomas perched on the hassock in front of the big chair where Minas Nolan sat.

“Thomas is always welcome to come visit,” the doctor said.

“Maybe after a while,” Madeline replied. “But first he has to get used to livin’ with us.”

“Will you tell Eric where I am?” Thomas asked Nolan.

“Don’t interrupt, Tommy,” Elton told him. “Grown-ups are talkin’.”

“Which one of you will Thomas be staying with?” Minas asked Madeline.

“Where Tommy lives ain’t none of your business, man,” Elton told him. “I should have called the police on you when you took him out of that restaurant. He’s my boy. Maybe I didn’t do right by Brawn, but I intend to be a father to Tommy.”

“I understand how you feel, Mr. Trueblood,” Minas said softly. “I have a son too. But you see, Tommy has lived in this house ever since the day after he came home from the hospital. I know that you’re his father, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel concern.”

“You can be concerned all you want,” Elton said. “But he is my son. Here you talkin’ like you care so much. If you loved them so much how come you a doctor and she died right here undah yo’ roof?”

“She... I, I wanted her to go to the hospital,” Dr. Nolan whispered. “I tried to convince her.”

Elton stood up and so did Madeline. Ahn kissed Thomas and whispered, “You remember what I told you about running, running.”

Dr. Nolan knelt down and hugged Thomas hard.

“I love you, Tommy,” he said for the first time that Thomas could remember.

“That’s enough now,” Elton said, and Thomas found himself being dragged from the house and out to a shiny green car that smelled like cigarettes.

They drove for a long time, with Thomas sitting in the backseat and Elton driving.

“You don’t have to be scared, Tommy,” Madeline said. “Elton’s got a nice house too, and he’s your real father.”

“He don’t have nuthin’ to be scared about anyway,” Elton complained. “He’s lucky he got a real father to come and take him. You know, I don’t have to do this. I could leave you up there with those white people. I didn’t have to take you and make you a real home.”

“The boy’s scared, Elton,” Madeline said. “You don’t have to shout like that. He’s used to that house, and he thinks about those people like family.”

“More than me,” Elton agreed. “Here they got their pet niggah grabbin’ me by the shoulder until it almost break, an’ Tommy didn’t even say to let me go. Here I am his real father, and he don’t even say a word when that man was crushin’ my bones. If I seen somebody do my father like that, I’d run at him with a two-by-four.”

Thomas didn’t know what a “toobifor” was, but he understood that his father thought that he should have fought with Fontanot. He tried to imagine fighting the giant, but all he could think of was Eric running at him. Then he wondered what Eric would do when he found out that he was gone.

“Do you hear me?” Elton said. “Tommy!”

“What?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“I was thinking,” he said.

“Thinkin’? I’m talkin’ to you.”

“What did you say?”

“Goddamn, the boy is retarded.”

“Don’t say that,” Madeline chided. “He was born sick and couldn’t get enough oxygen. And Branwyn was alone and did the best she could.”

“That’s not my fault,” Elton said in a softer tone.

“An’ it’s not Tommy’s fault either.”

After taking Madeline to her apartment on Denker, Elton brought Tommy to his rented house on McKinley. It was a small square building with chipped white paint and a flat green roof. There was an elevated porch and a tattered screen door.

Elton carried Tommy’s little suitcase to the door and pulled the screen open.

“Why the hell is the front do’ unlocked?” he yelled into the house as he stomped inside. Tommy ran up to the threshold, hesitated for a moment, and then followed.

The house smelled of foods and cigarettes, something sweet and something else that made Thomas think of water.

They were standing in a sitting room, where there was a TV turned on in front of an empty black couch and a brown recliner. There was a low white coffee table between the couch and the TV, and a carpet underneath it all that was dark purple.

People on the television chattered away and the sun was bright outside, but this room would never be light. Thomas felt his new darkened vision would fit well in this dim, uneven room.

“Hi, Daddy.” A woman came running out wearing pink cotton pants over a black leotard. She had dark skin and wore a blond wig of thick hair that did a flip in the back.

“Ooooo,” the big curvy woman cried. “Is this li’l Tommy?”

“Why the hell was the do’ open for any thief to come in here?” Elton barked.

The smile on the black blonde’s face shriveled, and suddenly Thomas was afraid.

“I opened the goddamned do’ when I heard yo’ rattletrap car comin’ down the street,” she said through curled lips and bared teeth.

“But you wasn’t at the do’,” Elton said. “You was up in the house someplace where any niggah could’a come up in here an’ steal me blind. Shit. I know people go out for a piss an’ come back to find they TV gone.”

“You think there’s some fool out there gonna break his back for that big pile’a shit you call a TV?” The woman was getting louder. Thomas felt the threat in her voice.

“You’idn’t call it no hunk’a shit when I brought it home now did ya? Did ya?” Elton’s voice was also dangerous.

Thomas had trouble understanding what either one of them was saying. Their voices sounded a little like his mother’s though, and he wondered if she was somehow trying to communicate through them.

“I ain’t got nuthin’ t’say,” the woman said.

“You bettah shut up,” Elton agreed. “An’ as long as I’m payin’ the rent you bettah keep that goddamned do’ shut too.”

“Talkin’ ’bout the rent, Mr. Sanders came down lookin’ fo’ the check this mornin’. He said that if he don’t have it by six they gonna kick our ass out.”

Elton balled up fists and raised them to his chest.

Without thinking, Thomas fell to the floor. His heart was racing, and he thought about running out the door before they could close it.

“Look what you doin’, Elton,” the woman said. “You scarin’ the boy.”

“Get up from the flo’, boy,” Elton told his son. “Get up!”

Thomas tried to comply. He wanted to get up before Elton used those big scarred fists on him. But he was so frightened that he couldn’t move.

“Get up!” Elton took a step toward Thomas, and the boy crawled away.

“Get up!” he cried again.

Then he grabbed Thomas by the arm and heaved him into the air. He tried to put him on his feet, but Thomas’s legs turned to rubber every time his toes touched the ground. There were tears coming from his eyes, and his nose was running.

“Dammit,” Elton said, curling his lip in disgust.

He let go of the boy’s arm and Thomas fell with a thump onto the purple rug.

“Elton!” the blond black woman cried. “The boy’s scared.”

She leaned over and picked Thomas up in her arms.

“What’s he got to be scared about? I’m his father. He bettah not be afraid’a me.”

“If you his father then act like it,” she said. “Tell him you happy to have him here. Buy him some ice cream.”

“I’m his father,” Elton said. “He should know I’m happy. Why the hell I take him away from them people ain’t no blood to him if I didn’t love him? Why I’m’a add his mouth to the ones I’m feedin’ if I didn’t want him?”

The woman sucked on a tooth, making a loud crackling sound.

“Don’t you have sumpin’ to do?” she said. “Me an’ Tommy gonna get acquainted.”

With that she carried the small boy back through the door she’d come from. They went down a long hall and into a large kitchen that was painted gray and lit by a bulb shining through green glass.

They heard the front door slam, and Thomas breathed a sigh of relief that his father had gone.

The woman carried Thomas to a wooden chair at a table in the center of the big room. She sat with him nestled in her lap.

Thomas liked her soft warmth and sweet odor. When she put her hand to the side of his cheek, he pressed his head against her palm.

“You a sweet boy, huh?” she said, hugging him closer. “My name is May. I used to know your mother a long time ago, before you were born.”

“I thought Daddy said that you moved away?” Thomas said then, remembering the conversation at the hotel restaurant.

“He did? When did he say that?”

“When we had lunch.”

“You had lunch with him before today?”

“Uh-huh. Me and my mama did.”

“Elton had lunch wit’ Branwyn and you?”

“Uh-huh.”

For a moment Thomas thought that he’d said something wrong, but then May smiled. She had a beautiful smile, and for the first time in many days the boy forgot that he was sad.

“We don’t have a proper bedroom for you yet, Tommy,” May said. “But there’s a cot out on the back porch, and it’s gonna be pretty warm for the next little while. You wanna see it?”

Thomas nodded and put his hand against May’s cheek. When he did this she swelled up, taking in a deep breath. She put him down on the floor and kissed his cheek before she stood up, and then, hand in hand, they walked through the back door and into the screened-in back porch.

The floor was made of unfinished wood planks, a few of which had spaces between them so that Thomas could see down through to the ground underneath. The porch was about twelve feet long and only five feet wide. Three of the walls were made of corroded metal screening, and the roof was layered with white aluminum slats. There was a broken lawn mower in the corner and three decomposing cardboard boxes spilling out rags and papers along the screen walls. The cot supported a bright blue-and-green vinyl-covered mattress that belonged on a chaise longue near a pool.

“I got a sheet that you can have,” May said. “And there’s some pillows and blankets in the cabinet in our room. An’ don’t you worry about Elton. He ain’t mad at you. Him an’ me just fight sometimes.”

After that May showed Thomas her and Elton’s bedroom and then her “sewing room” at the end of another long hall. They got the sheet and a blanket, a pillow and a lamp — which had a ceramic mermaid as a base — for his back-porch room. Thomas had learned to make his own bed from his mother, and so he told May that he could make up the room on his own.

She went to make a phone call, and when she got off she told Thomas that she was going out and to tell Elton, when he got back, that she was going to have dinner with August Murphy.

Thomas wasn’t worried to be alone. All he could see out of his screen walls were the trees of their yard and the yards of their neighbors. Beyond the trees there was a dark area and then the houses of the people behind.

Thomas threaded the cord for his lamp through a small window that led from the kitchen to the porch. He plugged the cord into a socket near the sink. He found a small transistor radio and turned the dial until he came upon a station playing the violin music that Ahn liked to listen to when she was washing clothes.

The back porch was filled with life and death. There were spiderwebs that had dead and dying moths and flies trapped in them. And there were crawling spiders and flying gnats. There was a hornet’s hive on the other side of the screen. Slow-flying yellow-and-black stingers hovered on the breeze humming their low-pitched songs.

In the crook of a tree’s trunk, not five feet away from his transparent wall, Tommy spied a bird’s nest. The chicks chirped and cried until their mother came with food that she forced down their gullets. Then they cried again. On the ground at the foot of the tree lay a dead chick. Three long lines of black ants led to and from the small, gray feathered corpse.

Thomas was happy with his half room at the back of the dark house. He settled down on his knees on the floor and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it would be like to be that open-eyed, open-mouthed chick on the ground below his peeping brothers and sisters, the soft tickle of tiny ants across his body, the spiky grass growing up from underneath.

After a while Thomas forgot the dead chick. He was just there on his knees slowly becoming one with the floor, searching for his mother again among the timbers and nails and then into the ground below.

As he sat there the sun, which filtered onto the porch bringing sweet green light down, began to fade. He even forgot about his mother, being aware of only the cool evening breezes and the sonorous buzzing of hornets.

Just before it was fully night, a banging sound jarred Thomas from his ruminations. Hard footsteps through the floor made him open his eyes. And the loud “May, where are you?” brought him to his feet.

When the back door to the porch opened, he was looking up, ready to face Elton.

“Where’s May?” the man asked his son.

“She’s having dinner with August Murphy,” the boy said.

“What?” Elton cried, the word sounding more like a threat than a question.

Thomas repeated the answer, thinking that his father must have thought that he was saying something else.

“Did she tell you to tell me that or did you hear her on the phone?”

“She was on the phone, and then she said to say it,” Thomas replied.

“What the hell is this lamp doin’ out here?” Elton asked then. And before Thomas could reply, “What the hell you doin’ here with all the lights in the house out? If you leave the lights out then thieves think you ain’t home an’ come an’ rob you. Didn’t they tell you that at those white people’s house?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you mean you don’t know? You stupid?”

Thomas realized that there was no answer he could give that would keep Elton from getting angrier, so he didn’t say anything.

“She said to tell me that she was going out to dinner with August Murphy?”

Thomas nodded.

This seemed to work. Instead of shouting, Elton went back into the house. He banged around and made noises with what sounded to Thomas like bottles and glasses. He made a phone call and did a lot of loud cursing. Then he went two rooms away to the living room, where he turned the TV up loud.

The night came on as all of this was happening. Thousands of insects fluttered up to the screen and thumped up against it in their attempt to get at the lamplight. Beyond the night bugs were a few stars and the quarter moon. Looking up there, Thomas remembered the nights when Dr. Nolan and Eric were gone to some family party. Branwyn and Thomas would go out into the flower garden in their pajamas and bare feet. Big pale-green moths flew overhead, and the boy and his mother made up stories about the stars.

“It’s like a big coat on the man in the moon,” Branwyn would say, “and all the stars are just the dust that fell off the sun.”

“An’ if he brush it off,” Thomas would add, “all the dust would fall down on us, but it would be yellow diamonds and dimes.”

They’d laugh and run through the garden until way after Thomas’s bedtime. And when he’d go to bed finally, he’d get the giggles so bad that he couldn’t go to sleep for laughing.

Lying across that hard and lumpy mattress, on Elton and May’s back porch, Thomas thought about the flower garden and his mother, and he believed that somewhere she was thinking the same things. This made him very happy, and he fell asleep feeling that he wasn’t alone in that screened-in room.

In his dreams he was drowsing in the big chair in the backyard near the pool. As usual he was tired after only a little while, but Eric was still leaping from the diving board and telling everybody to look. Dr. Nolan and Branwyn were lying side by side on two lounge chairs, and Ahn was sitting near to where Eric was, just in case he got into trouble from playing too hard.

Thomas was perfectly happy and dozy in his chair.

Then a woman’s loud scream brought him wide awake.

“What the fuck you mean ‘out’!” Elton yelled.

Then another scream.

“Get your hands off’a me,” May shouted.

“I’ma see if he been up in there,” Elton said. They were in the kitchen, Thomas realized. “An’ if he have been, then I’ma bust yo’ head.”

There was a scuffle and more screams.

Something crashed to the floor, and May let out a yell that picked Thomas up out of the bed and dragged him to the door to the kitchen. He didn’t want to go into the room, but he couldn’t help himself. He was drawn by the sounds of violence.

When he pushed the door open, he saw that Elton had thrown May up on the kitchen table. Her dress was hiked up to her waist, and Elton had his hand up under her red panties.

“If I feel him up there I’ma make it that you ain’t nevah gonna have no babies,” Elton shouted.

“I ain’t done nuthin’, baby,” May moaned. “I just had dinnah.”

“Till two in the mo’nin’?”

Elton moved his hand with a violent twist, and May screamed again.

Without thinking, Thomas rushed at Elton’s leg and wrapped his arms around it.

“Stop, Daddy!” the little boy screamed. “Stop!”

“What?” Elton cried, surprised by the appearance of his son.

He looked down at Thomas as if he had never seen him before. The man’s eyes were very bloodshot, and there was a crazy curl on his lips.

Just then there was a loud sound at the front of the house.

“Help!” May cried. “Help! He’s tryin’ to kill me!”

Four uniformed policemen rushed into the room.

“What the fuck?” Elton shouted.

“Stand down,” a tall black policeman said, and then, before Elton could move, the policeman hit him across the forehead with a short black stick.

Elton fell to the floor. His arms were flailing and his eyes were wild.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Thomas’s father said. “This my house.”

He got halfway up, but another cop hit him with a nightstick and he went down again. But he wasn’t unconscious. He tried once more to get up while May was gibbering and shouting behind an Asian officer near the door.

Thomas had backed up against the wall. He was more frightened of Elton now than he had ever been. He couldn’t understand how someone could be hit so hard, so many times, in the head and not stay down. He now saw his father like a monster on one of those scary shows that Eric liked to watch — a monster that couldn’t be killed and who came back through bombs and gunfire and killed everyone except the women and children he took to his cave, where later he would eat them.

Two of the officers had jumped on top of Elton. They were pulling his hands behind his back. Thomas was expecting to see the policemen thrown off like on TV, but instead they bound Elton’s hands and dragged him to his feet. He struggled but didn’t get away. He yelled, but the threats didn’t hurt anyone.

“You don’t have to hit him like that,” May cried.

Suddenly the big woman jumped at the Asian officer, knocking him into the men trying to subdue Elton.

“Leave him the fuck alone!” May cried. “Leave him!”

“I will kill you when I get outta here,” Elton warned May even though she was trying to help him. “I will kill you when I get out.” And then he turned his head toward Thomas. “An’ you too, you little bastid. You think you cute tellin’ her about that lunch. Lyin’ like I was after her. Lyin’ ’bout what I said. I’ma get you too.”

Then the policemen dragged Elton off. They handcuffed May and took her along too. Finally there was just Thomas and the Asian policeman left in the house.

His name was Robert Leung, and his grandparents had come from China.

“And so Mr. Trueblood is your father?” Officer Leung was asking Thomas. They were sitting on the black couch in the TV room.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied.

“And Miss Fine is your mother?”

“No. May’s Daddy’s girlfriend.”

“Does she live here with you?”

“I think so.”

Officer Leung frowned. “Don’t you know?”

Thomas explained that his mother had died and that he had just come to live with his father.

“Does your father hit you?” the policeman asked.

“No.”

“Are you afraid that he’s going to hit you?”

Thomas didn’t know the answer and so remained silent.

The policeman took him in the squad car down to the precinct police station. There they put him into a cell and locked the door.

“I’m locking the door so nobody else can hurt you,” Officer Leung said. “Child services has to come to get you, but they’re all asleep and so you’ll have to stay here until they get here.”

“Can’t I go with you?” the boy asked the cop.

“I have to go home.”

Thomas couldn’t understand why the policeman didn’t realize that he wanted to go home with him. He thought that if Eric was there he could make the policeman understand. Eric always makes people understand, Thomas thought.

“Psssst,” Thomas heard, when Officer Leung had left the room full of human cages.

It was a tall, light-colored man across the way, also locked up in a cell.

When Thomas looked the man said, “You ever see a man’s big thing?”

Thomas thought he knew what the man meant, but he wasn’t sure. This uncertainty made him shake his head slightly.

The man, who was clad all in gray, pulled down the zipper of his pants and fished out his penis. It was very long and slender.

The man laughed.

Thomas turned away from him and settled down to the floor on his knees. The man kept talking, but Thomas hummed to himself so that the words the man uttered were unintelligible. After a while the man stopped talking, and all that was left were the sounds of Thomas’s own humming and the hardness of the concrete floor beneath his knees.