Fortunate Son

by Walter Mosley

  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 5 9

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  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 6 0

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  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 6 1

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  the cord into a socket near the sink. He found a small transis-tor 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 6 2

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  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 El
ton 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 6 3

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  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.

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  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.

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  “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 night-stick 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!”

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  “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.”

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  “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.

  “ P s s s st,” Th omas h eard, 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 hi
s 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.

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  But where’d he go?” Eric asked his father when he got home from school and was told that Tommy had moved away for good.

  Ahn and Minas were both afraid to have Eric there when Tommy left. They knew that he would react loudly and violently, and it would have been harder on both children.

  “Tommy’s father came to take him,” Minas told his son.

  “But you’re his father,” Eric argued.

  “No.”

  “Mama Branwyn was my mother, and she’s his mother too. So you have to be his father.”

  “I love Tommy like a son, but Elton Trueblood is his real father. He never married Branwyn, but Tommy is his blood and the law says that he has to go live with him or with his grandmother.”

  Eric felt the color red in his head and in his fists and feet. He stormed out of the downstairs den, stomped up to his room, and systematically broke every toy that he owned. He broke the soldier action figures, the rocking horse, the colored lamp that turned slowly, showing horses and circus clowns on his wall at night. He shattered the screen of his television and crushed the clay drum his father had brought back from Alge-ria. He slung his mattress on the floor and threw his baseball 6 9

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  through the closed window. Then he picked up his aluminum baseball bat and beat it against the wall and furniture with the intention of breaking the bat in two. But it wouldn’t break.

  Instead he dented his maple desk, put holes in the plaster of the wall, and made deep notches in the oak floor.

  All the while Eric screamed his brother’s name and shouted obscenities he’d learned from the older kids on the playground.