Fortunate Son

6

The morning after Elton and May were arrested, and Thomas was put in the holding cell, Madeline Beerman came to retrieve her grandson. She brought him home to her fourth-floor apartment on Denker and served him cornflakes for lunch. Thomas didn’t mind the breakfast food. He hadn’t eaten since the afternoon before because May and Elton were away at dinnertime and there was nothing he could eat in the refrigerator or the cupboards.

“I don’t want you thinking bad about your father because of what happened last night,” Madeline told him at the pine dining table that was crowded into her tiny studio apartment.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied, gulping down cereal.

“It’s really that May that’s the problem,” Madeline continued. “She’s been a bad seed ever since a long time ago when she was friends with Branwyn. She wants every man she sees.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to visit Elton in jail. He’ll be out in a few days. He says he wants you to come back and live with him and that he’s showing May the door.”

Thomas stopped eating and turned his eyes to Madeline. He wondered what violent act occurred when you were shown the door, and he knew that he didn’t want to go back to live with his brutal father. But he understood that he couldn’t say what he wanted. Whatever he said would cause trouble, and so he kept his mouth shut.

It was just as well that he did so. After three days in Madeline’s house, Thomas would have gone to live anywhere else. There was only that one room besides the kitchen and toilet. Madeline slept on the sofa, and Thomas was given a mat on the floor. Madeline watched television day and night, and the boy couldn’t get to sleep or look for his mother with his eyes closed because there was always somebody talking on the tinny TV speaker.

Madeline even kept the TV on when she was asleep.

“I use it for my sleeping pill,” she told Thomas on the first night. “I leave it on and it drowses me.”

When Elton came on the fourth morning, Thomas was actually happy to see him.

Elton wore his mechanic’s overalls. There was a bump on his right temple, and two fingers on his left hand were bandaged together.

“You ret to go, boy?” Elton asked.

Thomas stood up from his chair and nodded. He’d hardly slept in the past three days, and he hadn’t left the apartment at all because Madeline said the streets were full of hoodlums. So he was ready to go anywhere.

In the car Thomas sat in the passenger’s seat and was barely tall enough to peek out of the window.

“I’m sorry about what happened with that bitch,” Elton said.

Thomas giggled to hear a man say a curse word that the bad kids used on the playground.

“I didn’t mean to get so upset on your first night there. But you know she made me mad goin’ out with her old boyfriend an’ tellin’ me through you. But I got my head together ovah that shit. I was gonna leave May for your mother anyway. I sure was.”

Thomas got up on his knees and looked out at Central Avenue. He liked this street more than Wilshire or Sunset, near to where Dr. Nolan’s house was. The stores looked more inviting, with bright colors and chairs outside. There were children playing on the street too. And almost all of the people were brown or black like him and his mother.

“Watch it!” Elton cried.

A boy on a skateboard had veered out in front of the car. Elton hit the brakes, and Thomas’s face slammed into the dashboard. He felt the pain mainly in his nose. It was like a bright red flame in the center of his face.

His eyes were closed, but he heard Elton open his door and then scream, “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? You almost got killed!”

He yelled for a while, and Thomas held his nose trying to keep the blood from spilling out onto Elton’s car seats. He knew that his father would not want blood in his car.

“What happened to you?” Elton cried when he tired of screaming at the skateboarder and came back to the car. “You bleedin’?”

At the emergency room the nurse asked Thomas if somebody had hit him.

“No, ma’am,” the boy answered. “I wanted to look out the window, so I sat up on my knees instead of putting on my seat belt.”

The nurse’s name was Stella. She was sand-colored and had straight black hair. She had big breasts, and Thomas wished that she would let him sit on her lap so that he could lie back against her and close his eyes.

On the ride home Elton complained about the two hundred thirty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents that the emergency room visit cost.

“Why you got to go an’ break your nose, boy?” he asked. “That was our spendin’ money for the next three weeks.”

By now Thomas knew that Elton didn’t expect an answer. He only wanted to complain about whatever there was in front of him. So the boy simply held the ice pack to his nose and closed his eyes, thinking himself around the pain.

This was another trick Thomas had learned — to concentrate on some part of his body that wasn’t hurting when he was in pain. If his head hurt he thought about his hands and how they worked. He looked at his hands, grabbed things with them, anything to keep his mind off the place that hurt.

At home Elton gave Thomas a pill that made him dizzy. So he went out into the back porch and lay down with the ice pack on his face. He couldn’t sit on his knees, but he could lie on his back and listen to the baby chicks and the murmuring drone of hornets. Every now and then a bird would cry or a dog would bark. Cats in heat battled in the yards, and people talked and laughed, called out to one another and played music.

Thomas felt good about his new home. He wasn’t afraid of Elton anymore. The big car mechanic just needed to be left alone to complain and shout.

That was on a Wednesday.

On Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Thomas stayed in the house mainly and ate peanut butter and tuna fish. He went through the porch screen door into the backyard and found out that there was an abandoned road, an alley really, on the other side of the chain-link fence at the back of the property. Across the alley there were the backyards of other houses and buildings, some of them abandoned.

Thomas didn’t try to go into the alley because there was enough to see in the yard. There were weeds and proper plants, a wild rosebush that had small golden flowers. A gopher had pushed up half a dozen mounds of earth here and there, and a striped red cat passed through now and then, alternately crying and hissing at Thomas.

The boy didn’t try to climb the tree because he often fell. But he did sit underneath it listening to the crying chicks. Hornets hovered above him, but he wasn’t afraid of their stings. He’d been stung many times and had no fear of the pain.

From under the tree he scanned the skies and listened for traces of his mother in the world. He missed Eric, his brother, but he knew that Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan would all be fine. And he was about to go to school.

Elton had enrolled Thomas in Carson Elementary, only a block and a half away from the house. On Monday morning he would walk there with Elton, and then he’d finish the first grade.

Thomas liked school. There were so many people with so many different kinds of voices. And there were books and sometimes pictures of animals, and teachers who wore nice clothes and smelled good.

Thomas wasn’t afraid of the new place. He had not often felt fear. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t run very well, but he’d learned to skirt around pain and bullies and anger.

So he looked forward to the new school.

It was a big salmon-pink building with red and dirty green unglazed tiles for a roof. When he was led into Mr. Meyers’s first-grade class, the children were all laughing at something, and the bald-headed teacher was trying to make them quiet down.

“Everyone be quiet. Back to your seat, Maryanne,” the teacher was saying when Miss Andrews from the Registrar’s Office brought Thomas through the back door of the classroom.

The children got louder.

Miss Andrews waved at Meyers. He pointed at an empty chair, and she said, “Sit here, Tommy. Mr. Meyers will introduce you later.”

And so he entered the first-grade class with no one noticing, no one but the boy who sat in the other chair at the two-student table.

“I’m Bruno,” the husky boy said. He stuck out a chubby hand, and Thomas shook it.

“I’m Tommy. I just moved here last week. Why’s everybody laughing?”

“You talk funny,” Bruno said.

At first Tommy thought Bruno was saying that the class was laughing at him, but, he thought, they couldn’t be because they were laughing before he got there.

“Mr. Meyers farted,” Bruno said then.

He giggled.

Thomas giggled.

Then they were friends.

Thomas gazed around the room filled with laughing black children. One girl jumped up out of her chair and ran from one desk to another while waving her arms in the air, all the time laughing. A boy made a farting sound with his mouth, and the whole class broke down. Several kids rolled out of their chairs and laughed on the floor.

There was a chalkboard with the letters A, B, C, and D written upon it. There was a carpeted corner filled with toys and books.

The children were laughing and the sun was shining in, and for some reason Thomas began to weep. He put his head down into his arms, and the tears flowed onto his hands and then the desk.

If someone had asked him at that moment why he was crying, Thomas wouldn’t have known, not exactly. It had something to do with one new room too many and the sun shining in and all the children laughing at a joke he hadn’t heard.

“Shut up!” Mr. Meyers shouted in a deep, masculine voice.

The children all stopped in an instant. Now that the rest of the class was silent, Thomas’s soft weeping was the only sound.

“Yo, man,” Bruno whispered. “They could hear you.”

“Who’s that?” a girl asked.

“Why he cryin’?” another girl added.

Thomas wanted to stop but he couldn’t.

A shadow fell over Thomas, and the deep voice said, “Stop that.”

Didn’t he know that you can stop laughing but not crying?

“You, boy,” the voice said.

A hand pulled his shoulder, and the sun lanced Thomas’s eyes. The tears ran down, and he cried out from the attempt to stop crying.

“Who are you?” short, pudgy Mr. Meyers asked.

“Thomas Beerman,” the boy said, but nobody understood him because of his sobbing.

“Do you know this boy?” Meyers asked Bruno.

“That’s Tommy, Mr. Meyers,” Bruno said proudly.

“Take him down to the nurse’s office, Mr. Forman.”

Thomas felt Bruno’s hands on his shoulders. He got to his feet and, blinded by tears, allowed his new friend to guide him into the darker hallway.

Thomas breathed in the darkness, and the sadness in his chest subsided.

“I’m okay now,” he told his burly friend.

“Yeh,” Bruno said, “but now we got the hall pass.”

He held up a wooden board that was about a foot long and half that in width. It was painted bright orange, with the number 12 written on it in iridescent blue.

“That means we don’t have to go back to class,” Bruno said. “We could go to the nurse’s office an’ hang out.”

Thomas didn’t want to go back to the room of sunlight and laughter.

“Do we have to go outside?” he asked.

“Naw,” Bruno replied, and then he ran up the hall.

Thomas ran after him. Even though Bruno was big and slow, he got to the end of the hall before Thomas.

“Why you breathin’ so hard?” Bruno asked his new friend.

“I was in a glass bubble when I was a baby. ’Cause of a hole in my chest. Ever since then I get tired easy.”

“And what’s wrong with you?” Mrs. Turner, the school nurse, asked Thomas.

The boy just looked up at her thinking that she had the same skin color as his mother but her voice and face were different.

“Well?” the nurse asked.

“He was cryin’,” Bruno, who stood beside the seated Thomas, said.

“Crying about what?” Mrs. Turner asked Bruno.

“How should I know?” the fat boy replied, folding his arms over his chest.

The nurse smiled instead of getting angry at Bruno’s impudence.

“Why were you crying, Tommy?” she asked.

“They were laughin’ and the sun was too bright — it, it pained me.”

Bruno giggled, and Mrs. Turner cocked her head to the side.

“It hurt?” she asked.

“In my heart,” the boy said, “where I had to heed.”

Thomas touched the center of his chest.

The nurse gasped and touched herself in the same place.

Bruno had stopped his laughing. Now he was staring goggle-eyed and astonished at his new friend.

“Would you like to take a nap, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked in a most gentle voice.

Thomas nodded.

“Can Bruno take one too?”

“No. He has to go back to class.”

“Dog,” Forman complained.

After Bruno left, the nurse led Thomas to a small room that smelled slightly of disinfectant. There were built-in glass-doored cabinets on the right side and there was a small cot against the opposite wall. When she pulled the shade down, Thomas realized that it was made from clear green plastic so the sun still shone in but not so brightly like in Mr. Meyers’s classroom.

Thomas took off his shoes and put them under the cot. Then he got into the bed, and Mrs. Turner pulled the thin blanket over him.

“What happened to your nose?” the school nurse asked.

“My dad put on the brakes so he didn’t hit this kid on a skateboard.” Tommy liked it when she put the flat of her hand on his chest.

“Is this your first day at school, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked the boy.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where is your family from?”

“My dad lives down the street.”

“But then why is this your first day?”

Thomas told the nurse the story about his mother dying and his father coming to take him. He told her about the police and his grandmother’s TV and Eric, his white brother who lived in Beverly Hills.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Mrs. Turner said.

“She looks over me,” Thomas replied, and the nurse gasped again.

Nurse Turner shared her lunch with Thomas. After that he returned to Mr. Meyers’s class. The sun still bothered him, but he kept from crying by looking at the floor.

Toward the end of the day, Mr. Meyers called on a tall black girl named Shauna Jones. He pointed to the letter R, written in dusty yellow on the dark-green chalkboard.

“Are,” Mr. Meyers said clearly.

“Ara,” Shauna repeated.

“Are.”

“Ara.”

“Are.”

“Arar.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones,” Meyers said. “New boy. Your turn.”

Shauna sat down, showing no sign that she had failed the white teacher’s test.

Thomas tried to stand up, but somehow his feet got tangled and he tripped and fell.

The children all laughed, except for Bruno, who helped his new friend to his feet.

“Shut up!”

Thomas turned to face the angry teacher.

“Are,” Meyers said.

“Are,” Thomas repeated, raising his voice and using the same angry tone.

“Are.”

“Are.”

Meyers stared at the boy suspiciously. It was almost as if he thought that this slender black child was pulling a joke on him.

“Constantinople,” the first-grade teacher said, suddenly jutting his head forward like a striking snake.

“Wha’?” Shauna said.

“Constantinople,” Thomas said easily.

“Sit down,” Meyers said.

As Thomas did so he noticed that many of the children were staring at him with the same concentrated frown that the teacher had on his face.

“You talk funny,” Bruno whispered.

After the final bell Bruno showed Thomas where the big front door was. But when the new boy got out in front of the school, he found himself in the midst of a thousand running and shouting children. In all that confusion he didn’t know which way to go.

“Where you live at?” Bruno asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ont know where you live at?”

“My dad walked me here today,” Thomas said. “He was tellin’ me how I shouldn’t be in trouble and I didn’t look.”

“Where you near?” Bruno asked.

Bigger children were pushing by them. They were laughing and yelling, and the sun shone down from the western sky. Thomas felt his heart beating, and he clenched his jaw to stem the onset of tears.

“There’s a gas station that’s closed,” he said. “It’s got a horse with wings in front of a big A.”

“I know where that’s at,” Bruno said with a reassuring smile. “You go on down that street there.”

Thomas looked in the direction that Bruno was pointing. There were dozens of children that they had to get through to get to the crosswalk. There stood an old black man with a red handheld stop sign.

“You sure is lucky,” Bruno was saying.

“What?”

“The nurse let you stay an’ you wasn’t even sick.”

Thomas giggled.

“See ya, Bruno,” he said.

“See ya, Lucky.”

Halfway down the block to Elton’s house, Thomas ran into a knot of four boys. They were all dark-skinned like him but a year or two older. None of them smiled, and they all walked with exaggerated limps.

“Who you, mothahfuckah?” one of the boys asked.

He was moving his head from side to side and wore black jeans and a white T-shirt that was at least three sizes too big.

Hearing the anger in the boy’s tone, Thomas didn’t answer, only stared.

“Don’t you heah me talkin’ to you, mothahfuckah?” the boy said, and then he slapped Thomas — hard.

Thomas tried to run, but after only three steps, he felt a fist in his back. One more step and something hit him in the right calf. Thomas fell and the boys set on him. He put his hands up around his ears, and with nothing else he could do, he counted the blows.

One, two in the back. Three on the ear. Four, five, six on his shoulder. Seven was his head bumping the concrete.

And then it was over. No more hitting or cursing. Thomas looked up and saw the four boys limping away from the battle scene. The smallest one (who was still much larger than Thomas) looked back. Thomas ducked his head, not wanting to make eye contact.

When he got home he had a bloody scrape on the side of his head and pains in his back and leg. His pants were torn at the knees, and his injured nose throbbed.

Elton got home at seven.

“What you mean them boys beat up on you?” he asked his son. “Did you hit’em back? Did you?”

“No.”

“Well then how you evah expect them to respect you if you don’t fight back? An’ look at yo’ pants. I cain’t go out an’ buy you new clothes every time you a coward.”

The whine in Elton’s voice made it seem as if he was pleading with Thomas, begging him not to make him treat him like a coward.

Thomas didn’t want to talk about his day at school or the bullies that beat him. He didn’t want new pants or respect.

Elton brought home pizza, but Thomas had already eaten tuna on slightly moldy whole-wheat bread with Miracle Whip and a glass of Tang.

He got away from his angry father as soon as he could, going out to his bedroom porch. He moved around on the mattress until none of his bruises or scrapes hurt. He had to breathe through his mouth because his nose was stuffy from the swelling, but he didn’t mind. In a short while he was asleep.

And in that rest he finally found what he’d been looking for all the days since his mother had died next to him in the bed.

He was hunkered down in a room that he’d never been in before. There was no furniture at all, no paintings on the white walls or carpeting on the dusty, dark wood floor. There was a doorway with no door in it that revealed nothing but an outer hallway and a real door that Thomas knew somehow opened onto a closet. He was squatting in the middle of the room, but he didn’t know how he got there.

“I’m just sittin’ here,” he said aloud to himself.

Very slowly, the closet door opened. And then Branwyn stuck her head out, smiling at her son. He stayed perfectly still and silent so as not to scare her away. She moved her head around, looking to see if there was anyone else there.

“You alone?” she asked.

She came out of the closet wearing her white slip and the cream-colored satin slippers that Dr. Nolan had bought her in Chinatown.

Smiling broadly, she knelt down in front of her son and ran her fingertips along his brow.

“What have they done to you, baby?” she asked.

Thomas began crying again, as he had in Mr. Meyers’s room. Branwyn sat in the dust and took him on her lap. They rocked there in the middle of the floor, both crying in separate sadness and combined joy. After a long time the mother lifted her boy’s chin and looked deeply into his eyes.

“The birds and crickets and hornets and spiders have all been telling me that they see you looking for me.”

Thomas nodded and kissed her hand.

“You don’t have to look so far, honey,” she said. “I’m right here in your heart whenever you want me. Just whisper my name and then listen and I will be there.”

Thomas raised his head to kiss his mother’s lips and came awake in the bed kissing the air.

Ribbet, came the call of a frog.

Ribbet.

It was late in the night. The house was dark. The neighborhood was dark. And two sociable frogs were talking about their day.

Thomas took their calls for proof that his mother had been there and that she would always be there with him — inside, where no one could ever take her away again.

“No I will not walk you to school,” Elton told him the next morning.

They were sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast. Thomas was eating Frosted Flakes and toasted English muffins with strawberry jam. Elton had instant coffee while he smoked a menthol cigarette.

“It’s not that I don’t have the time neither,” Thomas’s father continued. “I could walk ya if I wanted to, but you got to learn to stand up for yo’self.”

Slowly, Thomas made his way toward the front of the house.

“Tommy,” his father said before he entered the long hallway that led from the kitchen to the front room.

“Yes, Dad?”

“Come here.”

Thomas obeyed. He walked up to his father’s chair and stood before him, looking down at the floor.

“Look at me.”

Thomas raised his head, afraid for a moment that his father was going to hit him.

Elton did reach out, but it was only to put a hand on his boy’s shoulder.

“You don’t have to flinch from me, boy,” he said. “I love you. Do you know that?”

Thomas stared at his father, trying to understand.

“I know you mad that I took you outta that white family’s house. I know you want me to walk you to school. But you have to understand that everything I’m doin,’ I’m doin’ for you. You need to be with your own blood. You got to learn to stand up for yo’self. Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too,” Elton replied.

“You?”

“Scared to death every day I climb out the bed,” he said. “You know, a black man out here in these streets got a thousand enemies. Men want his money, his woman, his life, and he don’t even know who they are. That’s why I took you, Tommy. I want you to learn what I know. Do you understand what I’m sayin’ to you?”

“If a rabbit sees a lion he gets scared and runs,” Thomas said, remembering a story that Ahn had told him.

“What’s that?”

“If a rabbit sees a lion he gets scared and runs,” the boy said again. “But then if a lion sees a elephant he runs ’cause the elephant could step on him an’ break his back.”

“The lion is the king of the jungle,” Elton said, his tone angry and not angry at the same time.

“I know. But he’s still afraid of the elephant.”

Father and son stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. Elton had the feeling that he’d missed something, but he had no idea what that something was.

“Go on to school now, boy,” he said at last.

On the front step of the shabby box-shaped house, Thomas looked both ways, watching for the big boys that he’d run into the day before. He didn’t see anyone except an old woman across the street sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house. Thomas hurried down the pavement, almost running on his way to school.

Three houses down a hidden dog jumped out, lunging at him. The dog growled and snapped, but the chain around its neck stopped him from getting at the boy.

Thomas froze, thinking that the dog would get away somehow and chase him down. But the restraint held.

Thomas sighed. He took three steps toward school.

“Hey you, mothahfuckah,” a familiar voice called from behind.

They surrounded him quickly. Three of them were dressed in signature white T-shirt and jeans. One boy wore a jean jacket and black pants. All of their tennis shoes were white.

Thomas noticed these things, categorizing, listing, and hoping somehow the knowledge would save him from another beating, still knowing that nothing would save him. Nothing ever would.

“You got money in yo’ pocket, suckah?” the tall eight-year-old leader asked.

Thomas breathed in through his mouth and shook his head — no.

The backhand stung his left cheek. He felt a trickle of blood come out of his left nostril.

“Empty yo’ pockets, man,” another boy said.

Thomas looked at all eight eyes staring angrily at him. Years later he would wake up from a nightmare about those eyes, not in fear of violence but from the sad memory of their hatred.

Fight ’em back, he heard his father say. And then he turned to run. But his feet got tangled up, and he fell right there in front of his enemies.

“Kick his ass!” a boy shouted.

Thomas rolled up like the gray-shelled pill bugs he would watch in the garden. He closed his eyes and made ready to count the blows, but instead he heard a girl shouting. He wondered if the boys had attacked somebody else, somebody behind him.

He opened his eyes and raised his head.

A very large black girl (who looked somehow familiar) was punching the ringleader of the gang in the face. The other boys rushed at her, but she slapped one, punched another, and kicked the third, one, two, three times. The first boy she hit was crying. Thomas hadn’t believed that those mean boys could cry. The other three were running.

“Git!” the big girl yelled, and stamped her foot on the concrete.

The crying boy let out howling.

“You show’em, girl,” the old woman from across the street called. “Show them li’l niggahs a thing or two.”

The girl turned her head toward Thomas, and the boy quailed. He thought that she would destroy him now with her fists and feet and loud shouts. But instead Bruno ran up from nowhere and held out his hand.

“Come on, Lucky,” the jolly first-grader said. “Git up.”

The girl reached down too. For a moment Thomas felt weightless, and then he was standing on his feet.

“This Monique,” Bruno said in the way of an introduction. “My sister. She’s twelve, in junior high.”

“Hi,” the big girl said. She smiled. “That li’l Alvin Johnson need somebody to kick his butt ev’ry mornin’. That’s the on’y way he evah gonna do right.”

“I told Monique about you, Lucky. I told her you talked funny but you might get lost on the way to school. So she walked me ovah here.”

Thomas was very happy. He laughed, and big Monique smiled down on him.

“Don’t you know the secret way to school?” she asked him.

He shook his head.

“Com’on,” Monique said, and with a wave of her hand she led them down the driveway of the house with the leashed dog.

When it barked at her, she got down on her knees and held out her hand. The dog growled, then sniffed, then licked her fingers.

Thomas knew that if he tried that the dog would bite his whole hand off.

Behind the house was a fence with a hole in it that led to the blocked-off alley behind Elton’s house. Back there sapling trees grew in profusion and birds sang and small creatures scuttled. There were pools of water with bright-green algae growing over them and an old redbrick incinerator that housed a large rodentlike creature.

“This alley was blocked off a long time ago,” Monique was explaining. “An’ it go all the way to the end of the block. All you got to do is climb through the fence next to the church and cut through the back’a there an’ you across the street from the school. Not so many other kids do it ’cause the hole is too small.”

“Thank you, Monique.”

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

“My name is Tommy, but everybody calls me Lucky.”

“You right, Bruno,” Monique said. “He do talk funny.”