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 1 4 9
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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 junk-yard, 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.
Ag e s s i x , seve n, 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.”
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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 1 5 1
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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.
A h n was al s o 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.
Th re e days a f te r 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 1 5 2
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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 sooth-ing 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 1 5 3
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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 wa
s 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 implica-tion 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.
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“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.
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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.”
A f te r that th i ng s 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 1 5 6
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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 opera-tion. 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.
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“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.”
Th re e days late r, Thomas was driven to the Rickerts’
house by the social worker. Thomas’s limp had become per-manent 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.
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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?”
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“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.”
Th e f i r st 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.
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