Fortunate Son: A Novel (13 page)

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 was 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 implication 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.

“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.

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.”

AFTER THAT THINGS
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 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 operation. 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.

“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.”

THREE DAYS LATER,
Thomas was driven to the Rickerts’ house by the social worker. Thomas’s limp had become permanent 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.

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?”

“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.”

THE FIRST 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. He wanna know that you can be trusted. How old are you?”

“Nine.”

“You look younger.”

Thomas kicked his feet and ate his sandwich.

“How come you limpin’?”

“I fell off a buildin’ an’ broke my hip.”

Thomas smacked his lips after eating the sandwich. He hadn’t had a meal in a few days.

“You’re so cute.” Cilla leaned over and gave Thomas a slow kiss on his mouth.

He closed his eyes and hugged his shoulder with his chin because the kiss both tickled and excited him.

AFTER THAT HE
worked every afternoon for Tremont. Mostly he took white packages, which he kept in his underpants, to people’s houses and apartments between four and seven, after other little kids were out of school. Once a week Tremont would send Thomas to Cilla’s, where the boy would take a bath and wash his clothes in a small washing machine in the kitchen.

Thomas made twenty dollars a day, and nobody molested him on the streets because people had seen him limping down the sidewalks with Chilly, and everybody knew that Chilly was with Tremont. And nobody messed with Tremont’s peeps.

After four weeks Thomas went to Bruno’s house. His friend’s elderly aunt Till answered the door.

“Hello, young man,” she said, with eyes that held no memory of him.

“Is Bruno home, Aunt Till?”

“No,” she said, looking as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. “Bruno died.”

“No. From what?”

“It’s the leukemia got him. He was in so much pain.”

“Hi, Lucky,” Monique said. She had come up from behind the bent-over older woman.

“Hi, Monique,” came Thomas’s joyless greeting.

The older woman turned away, and Thomas could see Monique’s big belly.

“Come on in,” the young woman said.

She took Thomas into the kitchen and served him a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.

“I thought the county took you away, Lucky,” Monique said after lowering herself into the kitchen chair.

“I runned away from them.”

“When?”

“Long time ago.”

“Where you livin’?”

“With a woman named Cilla,” he said. Thomas didn’t want to tell her that the police hadn’t changed the lock to the cellar at the back of his clubhouse. He found the key where he’d left it—under the crate next to Alicia’s hidden tomb.

“An’ what you doin’?” the girl asked.

“Nuthin’. What about you?”

She put her hand on her belly. “I’m havin’ a baby. It’s Tony Williams’s boy, but he got shot. We got a studio ’partment ovah on Hooper, but now I’m there by myself. But I cain’t hardly pay no rent so I guess I’ma be in the street.”

“Why don’t you stay here?”

“I could but they wanna treat me like a baby, an’ here I’m havin’ a child’a my own.”

“I got three hundred dollars,” the boy said to the big girl, now made bigger by her pregnancy.

“You do?”

“I could give it to you,” he said. “I mean, I was gonna go out wit’ Bruno an’ buy a whole lotta Fantastic Fours with it. But I bet he would want me t’give it to you.”

MONIQUE’S APARTMENT WAS
just a room. One wall had a stove against it, and there was a big footed bathtub next to the window on the opposite wall. Between these was the bed. Thomas slept in the bed with Monique that night and every night after for the next three years.

With the money he made from drug dealing, he paid the rent and bought the groceries. During most days he’d leave Monique to stay in his alley and on the roof of his apartment building. There he’d visit with Alicia and commemorate his friend Pedro. In the afternoon he went to work for Tremont delivering ecstasy, cocaine, crack, and sometimes heroin.

TWO MONTHS AFTER
he and Monique had moved in together, Thomas came home to find that Monique’s mother had come over and helped deliver Monique’s daughter—Lily. Thomas loved the little baby girl and thought of her as his baby sister. Now he had two sisters.

ONE NIGHT, TOWARD
the end of his first year working for Tremont, Thomas went to a house where a big, fat black man, wearing only a ratty bathrobe, answered the door.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I brought you sumpin’ from Tremont,” the boy said.

The man looked around and then grabbed the boy, pulling him into the darkened apartment. He shoved Thomas into a big room where the only light came from a giant television set. The scene on the screen was like when Thomas had come in on Wolf and May. There was a laughing black man with a large erection that he was pressing into a white woman who cried out in pain.