Fortunate Son: A Novel (12 page)

Ahn would also get up to make and serve their breakfast. Minas had rye toast and marmalade with a poached egg and air-dried German beef. Eric had oatmeal with toasted almonds, golden raisins, brown sugar, and cream. Most of their time together was spent eating and reading. Now and then Minas would mention something he found fascinating in the paper or an anecdote from the previous day at work. Eric, for his part, listened or, at most, asked for clarification on a detail or a word. He never tried to have a full-blown conversation because when the clock on the wall said 6:50, Minas Nolan stood up, bussed his dishes, took his briefcase from the floor next to the door, and left no matter what was happening at breakfast or in the world according to the
Times.

But that day was different.

Eric couldn’t go back to sleep after his talk with Christie. He restrung his fiberglass tennis racket in the garage and then looked over his school papers. Eric was an excellent student. His comprehension of math was pure and intuitional; his memory for facts was a point of pride for his teachers. He didn’t need to check his work, but he had to do something.

“Did you love my mother?” Eric asked Minas at six forty-two.

“Of course I did,” Minas replied. The once-handsome man was now graying and haggard. “I loved her very much.”

“What about Mama Branwyn?”

Minas’s throat constricted, and his mind traveled back to the night she asked him for a kiss. He folded his newspaper, reached to place it on the table, but he wasn’t looking and so dropped the
Times
to the floor.

“Branwyn,” he said.

They had not discussed the mother of Eric’s heart since before the day Eric found that green fish on the beach at Malibu.

Eric placed his hands palms down on the table. All of the manliness and beauty that was once his father’s had now been absorbed into the boy’s features.

Ahn walked in with their final cup of tea. She could see the confrontation in their eyes, so she silently placed the solid silver platter between them and then left to eavesdrop from the pantry.

“Branwyn,” Dr. Nolan said again. “Yes . . . yes, I loved her very, very much. She saved me when your mother died.”

“Did she love you, Dad?”

“I . . . I don’t think she loved me the way I loved her,” he said. “But that didn’t ever seem to matter. The way Branwyn felt about people, she could give everything inside her to you even if you weren’t her first choice or even somebody she could love.”

“Were we people she loved?” Eric asked. He’d forgotten about Christie by then.

“I think so,” his father said. “It wasn’t hard with Branwyn like it was with other women.”

“What do you mean?” Eric asked softly.

“Other women I’d known wanted something you couldn’t see or touch or even say. They called it love, but it was more like a game the way I saw it. One night I asked Branwyn if she loved me, and she said that she fell in love with me every night that I carried her up the stairs to our room. When she said that, I felt like a kid. I kissed her and she laughed at me . . .” Minas got lost in the memory.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I asked her to marry me, but she said no. I asked her all the time, but the answer was always the same.”

“You think that was because she didn’t love you?”

“No. It had to do with Tommy,” Minas said. “Tommy’s father was alive, and she didn’t want her boy to feel his loss with our marriage.”

It was time for Minas to leave.

“Have I neglected you, Eric?”

In his mind Eric saw his father rising up and walking toward the door. He was supposed to be leaving, but he was not.

Behind the pantry door Ahn was thinking the same thing. She feared that something terrible was about to happen.

“No,” Eric said.

“It’s just that,” Minas continued as if his son had not spoken at all, “you’ve never seemed to need help. All we ever had to do was contain you, hold you back from eating all the Christmas fruitcake or from jumping off the roof to fly with the sparrows.

“You never complained about anything. If I told you something, you just listened to me. Children are supposed to fight with their parents. Sons are supposed to want to push their fathers aside. But I always felt that you were trying to protect me instead of the other way around.

“But now that you’re asking about your mothers, I see that I haven’t been there for you.”

Eric was staring at his father’s face, imagining that he had his sketch pad before him. He would paint the portrait of his father many years later, but this was the sitting for that canvas. The drained blue eyes and graying blond hair, the gaunt jowls and dry lips.

Mothers,
Eric thought.
Mothers.
Other children only had one mother, but he had two and both of them had died for him to survive.

“Would you like to go down to Malibu this morning, son?” Minas asked.

“I have to do something, Dad.”

“What’s that?”

“Christie’s going to the doctor. I told her that I’d go with.”

“You’re still with her?”

Eric had seen Christie almost every day for a year. “Yeah, Dad.”

It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.

“I could come home early,” the doctor offered.

“Sure, Dad.”

AHN CAME OUT
of the storeroom moments after Minas left. She stood near the door staring at Eric.

“Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.

She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.

Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of. It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.

“The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me. I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.

“He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.

“At night he calls outside my window and asks me to come away with him,
the girl said.
And when I look out I see him in moonlight. Mother, he is so beautiful and handsome, and his deep voice makes me tremble inside.

“But, my daughter,
the mother said.
He is a tiger, a man-eater, a monster.

“For you, Mother, I know that he is a beast. But for me he has nothing but love. He takes me riding on his back through the jungle under golden moonlight, and all the creatures there bow down to me as consort to their king.

“It is true,
the mother said,
that the tiger is a king. He is better than any man you would find in our poor village. But he is still a tiger, something apart. And even if he believes that he loves you, sooner or later you will answer to his claws.

“The girl said nothing more to her mother about her love. That night she disappeared from the house of her parents, taking with her a yellow robe that many generations of her family’s women had worn on their wedding day. Three years passed and nothing was heard about the girl until one morning an infant boy was found in the middle of the village swaddled in a bloody yellow cloth. A beautiful boy with tiger’s eyes and a roar instead of crying. The grandmother took in the child, and he became a great king. But he was always heartbroken and sad because he had no true mother or any father at all.

“And one day, while he was on a crusade to unite all his people, he was beset by a tiger. His retainers mortally wounded the beast, but before the tiger died the young king looked deeply into his eyes. There he saw the truth: that his father, the tiger, had devoured his mother, but she lived on inside of him. The boy had found both his mother and his father, but in finding them they were slain.”

Ahn stood up and walked from the room. Eric felt the warning in her words. He even understood the general meaning of the tale. But he didn’t know what role she saw him in. Was he the tiger or the boy? Was Christie the village girl? Was Ahn the powerless mother? He sat there for over an hour considering the parable. He went over it again and again.

He imagined the stately tiger walking through the jungle with the golden apparition of the village girl astride his back. In his jaws the tiger carried a bloodied yellow cloth in which the royal baby was wrapped. The image made his breath come fast. It was beautiful and very sad.

“The tiger and the village girl had no choice,” Eric declared to an empty kitchen. “They were meant to be. And the boy, the boy can’t help himself either. They’re all just waiting for their parts to play.”

He took the bus down to Santa Monica, seeing himself as a pawn and satisfied to release himself to fate.

10

F
OR MOST
of those first three years away from the Nolan household, Thomas was more or less happy. He hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since the first week, but he could hear the school bell from the clubhouse / apartment building that he shared with the morose Pedro. Every day at the lunch bell he went to talk to May. She’d make him a hot lunch and talk about her life. May didn’t need any response from the boy, and he loved to hear her talk because she seemed happy to be getting things off her chest. That happiness filled Thomas’s own heart.

Not that May lived a happy life. Elton was very jealous of her. Sometimes at night he would come home and want to know where she’d been and who she’d been with. He’d slapped her on a few occasions; once he’d even blackened her eye.

But May, by her own account, never cheated on Elton. Twice she had to “do things” with Mr. Sanders, the landlord, because they were short on the rent for more than two months. But she did that to help Elton, even though she could never tell him because he would kill both her and Sanders if he knew. But she didn’t like it with Sanders like she did with Thomas’s father.

The only times that she had ever been bad were when she was either drunk or high.

“You should never do any drugs, Lucky,” May had said. “It’s the devil in them.”

That was what had happened one day when Thomas came home to find May and a man called Wolf wrestling in the nude on the living room floor. When Thomas opened the door, Wolf jumped up and stood there with his big erection standing stiff and straight. The man was breathing hard, and his eyes were wild and very white against his black skin.

“That’s just Lucky, Wolf,” May said in a deep voice. “Go wait in the kitchen, Tommy. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”

But she didn’t come in. She and Wolf made noises for a long time, and finally Thomas went out through the back porch to his alley valley.

The next day when Thomas mentioned the man May was with the day before, she said, “How you know about Wolf?”

Somehow she had forgotten even seeing Thomas. He told her about them being naked and wrestling, and asked if his peeny was going to get like Wolf’s.

“You can’t ever tell Elton about Wolf,” she said. And then she told him that he should never do drugs.

“Drugs make you crazy like me an’ Wolf,” she said.

Wolf brought her drugs, and after she took them they took off their clothes and did that. And the drugs also made her forget about Thomas. She promised not to do drugs anymore, and he said okay and they went on for a long time as if that day with Wolf had never happened.

But May had other problems too. Elton was the source of many of them. Mostly it was because he never made enough money, and because of that he was mad all the time. And when he got mad he drank. And when he drank he got mean. And then he’d go out and get in fights, and when he got home May and Thomas had to hide from him.

Thomas listened to his father complain about the money he had to spend on the food that Thomas ate, including the dollar for his school lunch.

Thomas would have given up the lunch money except for Skully.

Skully was a mutt puppy that Thomas found on their doorstep one morning on his way to work. (Thomas referred to going to his alley as going to work because he spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned street and fixing up his clubhouse.)

Skully was a whining, licking ball of fur that Thomas immediately fell in love with. He brought the puppy back into the alley and fed him his peanut butter sandwich. That afternoon he went down to the corner store (after three so as not to be caught by the truant officer) and bought cheap dog food for his pet.

He named the dog Skully because of his mispronunciation of the foes of the Fantastic Four, the shape-shifting Skrulls. Thomas pretended that Skully was a Skrull prince that changed into a puppy and now couldn’t change back, and it was Thomas’s job to feed and protect him until his people came and brought him back home to his castle.

Over the last three years he had made a home for himself among his family and friends. Besides May and Elton, he had his grandmother, Madeline, whom he stayed with one weekend a month. (He persuaded Madeline to let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen, where the hum of the refrigerator’s motor drowned out the all-night TV.) Then there was Bruno, who had been diagnosed with leukemia and juvenile diabetes. Bruno had managed to go to school through the second grade, but now he was homebound and the school sent a tutor to visit him on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thomas dropped by to visit Bruno, and his pixilated Aunt Till, at least one day during the week and also on Saturdays, when May and Elton stayed in bed until noon.

Pedro always talked about going to Seattle to live with his sister, but whenever he got any money, he spent it on pizzas for himself and Thomas—only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.

These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother—and then there was Alicia.

Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys. Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.

One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.

“Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.

The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.

Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name
Ralphie
written across it.

Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.

When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.

“Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”

“You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.

“Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”

“What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.

“Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”

“But what if we hide her?”

“How?”

“We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top. 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 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 junkyard, 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.

AGES SIX, SEVEN,
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.”

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 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.

AHN WAS ALSO
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.

THREE DAYS AFTER
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 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 soothing 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 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.”