Fortunate Son: A Novel (10 page)

“Um . . . I think it would be better if we didn’t. You know, guys get kinda possessive after their first time.”

“Okay,” Eric said.

Christie didn’t reproach him this time.

“Well . . . I guess we should go,” she said.

“All right. Bye.”

FOR THE NEXT
four nights Eric lay on his back in the bed for hours with his heart pounding and his mind on Christie. He’d seen her in school three times. She always turned away when their eyes met. He didn’t know what he wanted more than to hold her again and to feel the release she gave him. He didn’t think he was in love. It was something else. Love for Eric had always been about smiling and swooning, about people who couldn’t live without each other. He lived without his mother and Branwyn too. He survived even when they took his brother away without a word of warning. He didn’t need anybody, but he sure wanted Christie.

That Friday, on the lunch court, Drew Peters confronted Eric.

“I’m not apologizing to that little faggot because you didn’t really win,” the brooding boy said. Drew was a head taller than Eric and twenty pounds heavier, but the sophomore didn’t draw back.

“That’s your decision,” he said.

“It’s true,” Drew yowled. “The sun shined in my eyes.”

Eric noticed Christie on the other side of the court looking at him with a worried expression on her face. It was in that moment that his sleepless nights crystallized into knowledge. He could see that she was worried about him, not Drew. His heart began to race, and Eric took a deep breath to slow it down.

“The dog ate my homework,” Eric said, mimicking Drew’s whining. “My hand slipped. I didn’t do anything.”

The quiver of the senior’s lower lip warned Eric. He was already ducking down when Drew threw the first punch. Missing completely, the senior stumbled. Eric’s blow connected with Drew’s chest. Then Drew hit Eric on top of the head. Eric heard the finger snap and the cry of pain from the upperclassman. Then they fell into each other’s arms, wrestling and punching.

A sudden fear entered Eric’s mind. He didn’t want to be fighting. It wasn’t that he was afraid of being hurt but of the harm that might come from their fight. A moment later, Mr. Lo, the gym teacher, was pulling them apart. Drew clutched his broken finger. Christie was looking directly at Eric.

SHE CALLED HIS
house at four.

“Do you want to get together?” she asked.

“What about your boyfriend?”

“I’m still going to marry him.”

They made love in Branwyn’s old room, which had been left untouched since her death. Ahn was always away on Friday evenings, and Minas got home later every year. So they were alone from five that afternoon until late. Eric kissed Christie everywhere. She complimented his physique and his loving nature.

“No man has ever made me feel like this,” she said.

She confessed that she’d flirted with Mr. Mantel, the fired English teacher. Eric told her that Mantel was a grown man and should have known better than to proposition a student.

“How do you know so much?” she asked him.

“I don’t know a thing compared to you,” the fourteen-year-old said.

Christie put her hands over her breasts and said, “I’m still marrying Drew.”

“Can I still see you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and he kissed her covering hands.

She uncovered one nipple.

“You can’t tell anybody about us,” she said.

“That’s easy. I don’t know anybody.”

“You’re crazy. The whole class carried you off on their shoulders.”

Eric took the free hand and placed it on his erection. They both shuddered.

“Every time you call me I’m here,” he said. “I don’t talk to anybody but Limon, and nobody talks to him either.”

“But why don’t you have friends?” she asked. “You’re really handsome and friendly and smart.”

“I don’t know why,” he lied. “But I’m happy now because I never knew I could feel like this.”

At nine they went to dinner down in Santa Monica.

Over roasted chicken and lasagna, Christie told Eric that Drew had broken his finger and that the school suspended him for picking a fight with a sophomore.

“They said that he’d be expelled unless he apologized to you.”

“Really? What did he say?”

“That he wouldn’t.”

“That’s stupid. He’ll lose his place in all those schools if he doesn’t.”

“His father won’t let him leave the house until he does.”

“That’s why you can be here with me?”

For some reason this embarrassed Christie. She ducked her head.

“You should call Drew and tell him that you talked to me and I said that he could tell the school that he apologized. If they ask me I’ll tell them he did.”

“You’d do that?”

“I don’t want your future husband to be a dishwasher.”

CHRISTIE AND ERIC
saw each other at least twice a week until the end of the semester. All that time she warned him that she was going to marry Drew and live with him in the East. Eric didn’t mind. Now that he had experienced sex, he was aware of all the girls at school who wanted to be with him. When Christie left, he knew he would find somebody else.

And so he was surprised in the late summer when Christie came to his house crying.

They went out in the overgrown flower garden and sat on the marble bench there.

“What’s wrong?” Eric asked.

“I told Drew.”

“About us?”

“No. I told him that I wasn’t going to Yale with him.”

“Really? You’re not going to the East Coast?”

“No. I can’t leave you,” she said.

“But what are you going to do?”

“I’ll get a job at my father’s office and rent an apartment. Then we can spend more time together. I know you’re still in high school and you might not even want me, but I can’t go with Drew. I don’t love him. I haven’t since I saw you on the tennis court that day.”

Christie had on a small cranberry-colored dress. She stood up and took it off, revealing that she wore nothing underneath. It was four in the afternoon on a Friday. The sun was bright, and they were the only ones there. As they made love on the marble bench, Christie moaned and cried, dug her nails deep into Eric’s back, and begged him please, please, please.

“I’m yours,” she said at the door that evening, “if you want me.”

She drove off leaving Eric to think about the past semester. He wondered not about Christie but about Drew. The darkly handsome senior had everything before they tangled over Limon. Eric had borne no animosity toward the older boy. He hadn’t meant to take his girl away. On the school yard the boys had been civil. Drew appreciated Eric not making him apologize.

A week after his first night with Christie, she’d told him that Drew had seen a semen stain that Eric had made on the inside roof of the car.

“I told him that he made it, but you know his never shot out like yours does.”

Eric had felt embarrassed for Drew. He wasn’t competing. He just couldn’t say no to Christie’s surrender. He still couldn’t.

“Mine,” Eric said to himself, watching the red lights of Christie’s Honda recede down the street.

8

F
OR THREE
days six-year-old Thomas made his way to school using the abandoned alleyway. The gang of third-graders didn’t bother him anymore, and he loved the green, dewy wilderness of the walk. Going to school and coming home on the secret path were the highlights of his day.

But school itself was no better than on that first morning. The light in Mr. Meyers’s classroom still made him weep. He managed to keep everybody except Bruno from noticing. But the other children all thought that he was different, that he “talked like white people,” and that he was strange in other ways too.

Thomas had rarely watched television, not even very much with Eric. He never watched at all at his father’s house. He preferred looking at bugs and insects, and he fell a lot and lost his lunch money all the time and never completely understood what people were saying to him. And, worst of all, he seemed to have spells. On the playground at recess, he would sit by himself and close his eyes and talk even though there was nobody there.

“He talks to dead people,” Bruno said, sticking up for his friend.

But this only made the children more wary of the odd new “bug boy” that acted so weird.

The big boys picked on him, and the girls often screamed and ran if he came near. Mr. Meyers was bothered by the way he answered questions in class. The only good thing about school was Bruno and sometimes his sister, Monique, when she came to walk Bruno home after school.

Once in a while at lunchtime and recess, Bruno and Thomas would go to a far corner and talk about comic books. Bruno knew everything about the Fantastic Four. He studied them from old reprints and new comics that came out each month. At the library they had big hardback books that compiled the first issues released in the early sixties.

Bruno knew everything about them. Johnny Storm, the high-flying Human Torch; bashful Benjamin Grimm; Stretcho; and Suzie, the Invisible Woman. Every day he’d tell Thomas another story about their battles with Doctor Doom or the Mole Man. Bruno couldn’t read all the words, but his sister helped him sometimes. He told Thomas that in the old comics you didn’t need the words because the pictures told the story.

The worst thing about school was the sunlight in the first-grade classroom. He told Mr. Meyers that it hurt his eyes, but the teacher didn’t know what to do.

“We can’t put down the shades, Lucky,” he said. “Children need light.”

“You could get those green shades like the nurse has,” Thomas suggested.

“I’m lucky if I get a budget for pencils,” Meyers replied.

The sadness he experienced in that bright room became so unbearable that on Thursday Thomas “Lucky” Beerman made a decision.

“I’m not comin’ to school tomorrow,” he told Bruno.

“How come?”

“I’m not coming back anymore. I don’t like it here.”

“But where you gonna go?”

“Nowhere. Daddy goes to work every morning and doesn’t come back till late. He always goes out, and he doesn’t care ’bout what I’m doing.”

“But what if he stays home sometimes?”

“I’ll just go out in the back alley,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay back there.”

“Okay,” Bruno said as if the final decision was his. “An’ I’ll tell Mr. Meyers that your mother come and took you away. An’ if they send a letter to your house from the school, we could get Monique t’read it and then th’ow it away.”

THE NEXT MORNING
Thomas went out the front door and then through the hole in the fence a few houses down. That’s where his journey both ended and began. He climbed around the broken chunks of concrete in the middle of the road directly behind his house, and then he went through the thick bushes that had grown up along the sides. The alley was lower than the yards that abutted it, and so it was always wet from people watering their gardens and lawns.

On the first day Thomas saw lizards and a garden snake, three mice, one rat, and a family of opossums living in the incinerator. He saw crows, redbirds, one soaring hawk, and a bright-green parrot that had escaped from some cage, no doubt. The parrot made his home in an oak tree half in and half out of Thomas’s little valley.

“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.

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 SMILIN’
’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 is serious, Tommy. You cain’t be goin’ through yo’ day grinnin’ 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 WEEKEND BRUNO
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.

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.

“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.

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.”

ON SUNDAY THOMAS
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 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 THOMAS’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. 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.

THE DAYS WENT
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.