“No man,” the bird would say now and then. “No man.”
Thomas felt that the bird, which he called No Man, was announcing that this was their home and not a place for grown-ups.
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The alley valley was overgrown with sapling trees and other vegetation. Thomas could stay under a roof of leaves that modulated the light and made him calm.
That first day he explored the length and width of his new home. It was a long block, twenty backyards on either side. At its widest it was twenty-eight boy-sized paces from one fence to the other. There was asphalt and concrete and dirt that made up the various terrains, mostly flowerless trees and bushes. There was a lot of trash too: bits of paper, crumbling cardboard pallets that the occasional homeless person had used to sleep on. There were soda and beer cans, plastics of all kinds, and even old machinery and chunks of metal that people had discarded over the years. But there were few other visitors that Thomas saw in those first few months. That was because it was hard for anyone much larger than Thomas to get back there. The stone wall of the church had a chink big enough for only the little boy to squeeze through, and the rest was fenced off from the private backyards of houses.
Many of these yards had dogs that barked and growled at Thomas, but he stayed out of their way and soon they got used to him.
It was his paradise. The only stable respite his childhood would know. He spent that first Friday laughing and thinking that maybe the name Lucky fit him.
“ What you sm i l i n ’ ’bout, boy?” Elton asked at the dinner table that night.
They were eating meat loaf, mustard greens, and watery mashed potatoes from a take-out restaurant three blocks away.
“Here I am workin’ my butt off to pay the rent and for yo’
breakfast, lunch, an’ dinnah, an’ all you could do is smile. Life 1 1 6
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is serious, Tommy. You cain’t be goin’ through yo’ day grin-nin’ like some fool. You got to get serious an’ work hard like me. You think I keep us in house an’ home walkin’ down the street smilin’?”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, even though he wasn’t.
“Damn right you sorry. Now eat your damn meat.”
“It makes my stomach hurt.”
They ate food from the mom-and-pop takeout at least three nights a week. Thomas had trouble digesting meat with a lot of fat in it. Ahn used to trim all the fat from his portions.
“Hurt your stomach. You should try not eatin’. That’s what hurts.”
Thomas took a bite of meat loaf to placate Elton. Then he worked on the mashed potatoes and greens.
The boy didn’t want his piece of lemon meringue pie, and so Elton gobbled it down to teach his spoiled son a lesson, he said.
That we e ke nd B runo came over. Thomas didn’t invite his jolly friend into his valley. He wanted to keep that paradise for himself. Instead he and Bruno walked the four blocks to Bruno’s house, where together they read a very old, very beat-up comic book about the Fantastic Four and their journey to the planet of the Skrulls.
The Skrulls were born shape-shifters who could become any creature or thing they could imagine. They could be birds or monkeys or even giant bugs. They had the ability to make themselves look human and pass among men with no one knowing the difference.
“If you could turn into anything you wanted, what would it be?” Bruno asked his new and best friend.
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Thomas had never thought about being different before that day. It was a novel idea, and he found no words to answer.
“I’d turn into a white man,” Bruno said, impatient with his friend’s deliberation. “No, no, no. First I’d turn into Lana McKinney and look up under my shirt at them fine titties.
Then I’d turn into a white man. You know why?”
Thomas shook his head, still trying to find an answer to the first question.
“ ’Cause if I was a white dude I could be all up there in Beverly Hills and Hollywood and on the cowboy ranches an’
shit like that. An’ they wouldn’t even know that some niggah be all up in they business, so they’d all act natural and then I’d get’em.”
Thomas was lost in Bruno’s sea of words. What would he be? And titties and white men and Hollywood and cowboys.
“I think I’d be a snake,” Thomas said haltingly. “Yeah. A snake.”
“A rattlesnake? Then you could bite Alvin Johnson and kill him, but nobody’d ever know it was you.”
“I don’t care what kind of snake,” Thomas said. “I just wanna be a snake ’cause then I could go all the places I want.”
“Like what?” Bruno asked.
“A snake can climb trees and go real high, and he could go in a hole down in the ground. And he could get through any fence or thornbush and see everything.”
“But a snake don’t have no hands. How would you eat?”
“Like snakes do.”
“Not me. If I was a animal it’a be a tiger or a eagle.”
That afternoon Bruno got tired and had to go to bed.
Monique walked Thomas back home so that Alvin Johnson and his gang didn’t beat him up.
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“How come you’re wearin’ them tore-up pants?” Monique asked as they walked.
“ ’Cause my daddy says that I have to wear’em because I let those boys beat me up.”
“You didn’t let’em. They bigger than you. Don’t he know that?”
“He doesn’t care about that,” little Lucky replied.
“Why you so different from other little boys?” Monique asked.
“I didn’t know that I was different.”
“Yeah you is,” Monique assured him. They were walking down Central Avenue under a too-bright sun. “You talk half like a niggah an’ half like somebody white. An’ you don’t know nuthin’ on TV, an’ you always lookin’ at stuff real close like you crazy or sumpin’. An’ if somebody tell you what to do, you just do it like you they slave, but if you don’t wanna talk you mouth be shet like a clam.”
“I like you, Monique,” Thomas said.
“There you go again bein’ different. I’m tellin’ you how weird you is an’ then you tell me how much you like me.”
“But I do,” the boy said. “You’re nice to me, an’ Bruno too.”
Elton met Thomas and Monique at the front door.
“Where’s the fat boy?” Thomas’s blood-father asked.
“Bruno’s sleep,” Thomas said.
“And who are you?” Elton asked Monique.
“Bruno’s sistah. I walked Lucky heah ’cause I’m going t’see my auntie ovah on Fi’ty-second Street.”
Thomas pulled on Monique’s arm until she bent over enough for him to kiss her cheek.
She grinned at him and said, “Stupid,” in not an angry way at all.
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In the house Elton asked him, “Why you kiss that girl?”
“I don’t know. ’Cause she walked me home.”
“I don’t want her doin’ that no mo’,” Elton said. “No son’a mine’s gonna be protected by a girl.”
O n S unday Th omas left the house because Elton was sleeping and left strict orders that he was not to be awakened for anything or anyone.
So Thomas went into his valley and studied the landscape.
There were a few breaks in the fence. One was the oak tree where the green parrot No Man lived. Another was an old, old brick apartment building that had all of its windows and doors barricaded by cinder blocks. There was a metal cellar door, however, that could be bent up enough for a small boy to squeeze through. Thomas stuck his head inside, but it was too dark in there, even for his eyes, and so he decided to come back during the week with candles and a flashlight.
At the stone fence behind the church, Thomas was looking
for snakes when he heard the organ sound.
A choir began to sing.
Pressing through the chink in the wall, Thomas cut his cheek. He knew from many, many cuts and scrapes that he had to put pressure on the gash. And so he entered the double door of Holy Baptist Congregational pressing his fingers against the bloody cut, with a crooked nose and pants torn at both knees revealing the scabs from his recent falls.
He sat at the back of what seemed to him a huge room.
There he looked up at the black men and women dressed in off-white satin gowns singing about Jesus and his Word. The stained glass and dark woods reminded him of the church where they’d had his mother’s funeral. He felt that the singers 1 2 0
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both in the choir and among the parishioners were offering hymns for his mother, and so he hummed along with them.
He didn’t notice that the well-dressed church members were looking at him sitting there, with his broken nose and bloody face, his sockless feet in muddy shoes, and his torn pants.
A tall, white-gloved deacon came up to him and asked,
“Where are your parents, boy?”
“My dad’s asleep and my mother’s dead,” he said.
“They have to be members of the congregation for you to be here,” the man told him.
It took Thomas a few moments to realize that he was being asked to leave. He went out the front door and sat on the concrete stairs listening to the chants and sermons under the shadow of the eaves.
That was Th omas ’s life for the next few years. He spent his weekdays in the alley valley and Saturdays at Bruno’s house. On Sundays while Elton slept he perched in a tree behind the church where he could listen to the beautiful songs, which were, in his opinion, about his mother.
He made his way into the old brick apartment building.
There he set out candles to use when it was raining or too cold outside.
Mr. Meyers took Bruno at his word and struck Thomas Beerman from the class roll. Somehow the registration office also overlooked Thomas, and so he nearly ceased to exist in the files of the school system. The cut he got on the church wall turned into a scar, and though his body stayed small his hands became large and callused as a result of the work he took on.
Thomas decided that he would clean up his alley valley.
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And so he brought an old broom from the back porch and plastic trash bags from the bathroom to begin that task. He swept and picked up the papers, cans, and man-made items that had been thrown over the fence. The first place he cleaned was directly behind his father’s rented house.
Th e days we nt by peacefully for the next few weeks.
Thomas explored and cleaned his little Eden. He left bread crumbs for the opossums and salvaged discarded furniture from various apartments in the abandoned building. In the dark, on the second floor, Thomas would get on his knees and feel himself sinking into the floor. He loved this feeling and would sometimes stay like that for hours. Once he stayed too long, and Elton was already home and angry that Thomas was so late from school.
“Where were you, boy?”
“I went to play at Bruno’s house.”
“I don’t want you seein’ that fat boy no mo’. Hear me?”
Thomas nodded, but he didn’t worry. Elton had other things on his mind. He wasn’t concerned about Thomas unless he was late for dinner.
The next day, Thomas had a conversation with his mother.
“Why’s Daddy so mad at me, Mama?” Thomas asked in his normal voice.
Then in a deeper, more musical register he replied,
“Because when he was a boy he didn’t have anybody to be nice to him.”
“Like you are to me?”
“That’s right, honey,” Branwyn said. “And now you have to be nice to him and let him be mad. Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you.”
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“Do you mind it that I don’t go to school, Mama?”
“You know I want you to be in school and to get smart like your brother and Dr. Nolan.”
“But I hate it, an’ it hurts my eyes.”
“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, Tommy.”
“I know. But I go to Bruno’s house after school sometimes and on Saturdays, and we do his homework together a little bit.”
“Well, okay,” Branwyn replied after a meditative silence.
“For now. But later on you have to go back to school.”
“I promise.”
Th omas wor ke d hard to clean up his alley paradise.
Along the edges of the fence, he’d come upon small patches of wild strawberry plants. He loved eating them with the peanut butter sandwiches he’d make when he’d sneak into his father’s house in the middle of the day for lunch and other supplies.
When he wasn’t talking to his mother, he’d go to the oak tree and call to No Man. He’d put bread crumbs on the ground at his feet, and after some days the parrot would fly up and eat, croaking “no man” now and again. After a while the parrot would follow Thomas around looking for food and maybe, Thomas thought, a little company.
One late morning when going up to the house, Thomas found May sitting on the porch with her head on her knees, crying.
“Hi, May,” Thomas said.
When she looked up Thomas could see the ruined makeup running down her dark face.
“Hi, baby. What you doin’ here? Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”
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“They let me come home for lunch,” he lied. “Why you cryin’?”
“Because I’m so stupid,” she said, sobbing. “Because I had to go play around and get your father mad at me. Now I’m miserable, and he changed the locks and his phone numbah.
An’ I need to tell him that I’m sorry.”
The tears flowed down, and Thomas felt her pain. He reached out to touch her wet face.
“I could let you in,” Thomas offered. “But . . .”
“But what?”
“You can’t tell Daddy that I come home sometimes. He don’t know I do that, an’ he’d get mad.”
May wiped her eyes and she was beautiful again. Her smile warmed little Thomas, who had been chilled from picking up dirty, wet tin cans all morning.
“How long you gonna be here?” May asked.
“About a hour, I guess.”
“I’ma run to the store an’ get food to make for dinner.”
She ran down the porch stairs, and Thomas went up into the house. Since May had been gone neither Elton nor Thomas had even picked a pair of socks up off the floor.
There were beer cans and dirty dishes scattered everywhere, with roaches sifting in and out of the debris. There were unopened letters and bills strewn across the coffee table, and the kitchen was a total mess. The sink was piled with dishes soaking in cold, gray water. There were clothes all down the hallway, and even May’s sewing room was turned upside down from Elton going in there now and then to look for a pair of scissors or some papers he needed.
The only room that hadn’t suffered was Thomas’s back porch. Elton had offered Thomas May’s room, but the boy demurred. He said he liked his room.
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Sour Elton said, “Suit yourself, fool.”
May came back with three bags of groceries, and Thomas let her in.
“What is that smell?” she asked as soon as she walked in the door.
Thomas hadn’t noticed it.
“You just go on to school,” she said. “And when you get home I will have a good meal for you.”
Th omas we nt up to the roof of his abandoned clubhouse because it was a cloudy day and he wanted to hear the school bell so that he could get home and into his room before Elton returned.
He unlatched the roof door and pushed it open. He’d been up there a few ti
mes to look out over the neighborhood, but he usually stayed inside where he could be sure that nobody would see him.
But that day he found another surprise. Sitting at the edge of the roof smoking a cigarette was an olive-skinned, wavy-haired teenager. Thomas froze when he saw the boy, but it was already too late to run.
The teenager turned and said, “Hey, bro,” with a sing to his voice. “What you doin’?”
Thomas was shocked by the boy’s eyes. They were bright, light gray, like Thomas’s mother’s eyes.
“Nuthin’,” Thomas said. “What you doin’ here?”
“Run away from the foster home they had me in.” The boy slapped the beat-up brown suitcase that sat at his feet. “I climbed up the fire escape. You got the key to that door?”
“It’s just a latch on the inside,” Thomas said. “This is my clubhouse.”
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“You think you could let me stay in your club awhile, little man?”
Thomas realized that the sing in the boy’s voice was close to the accent that he heard when Mexicans spoke to him in English.
“What’s your name?” Thomas asked.
“Pedro.”
“Why you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“My mother’s a beaner,” Pedro said then. “And my father’s a spook. I don’t know where I got the eyes though. All I know is that the kids beat me up an’ down the street.”
“What’s a foster home?” Thomas asked.
“It’s where they put you when you ain’t got no mother and father.”
“But you have.”
“Not no more,” Pedro said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “My mom died, and my dad live down on Figueroa.
He sells smack and some coke down there, and he don’t wanna know about me.”
“If you stay here,” Thomas said, “you can’t tell anybody else, okay?”
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