Fortunate Son: A Novel (19 page)

When she left, Thomas thought about his books and the look in the doctor’s eye when she complimented his bravery.

The room was very quiet and white. Painfully, he pulled himself to a seated position at the head of the bed. This made him a little dizzy, but it was manageable. He realized, a little sadly, that his travels in the valley were a dream.

“Maybe this is a dream too,” he whispered. “Maybe everything is. Maybe it’s not even me dreaming.”

With these thoughts he fell into a light doze.

As he slept he tumbled down mountainsides, was attacked by feral dogs, and was raped unmercifully by boys from the desert facility whose names he had forgotten. But none of this pained him. His mother died, but she came back to console him. His brother got lost in a wilderness but still made it home in time for dinner. He found himself adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, floating in circles and being laughed at by cruel dolphins. In this last ordeal Thomas thought that it might be time to fall over the side, allowing himself to sink under the waves. He wanted to die and be with his mother and Alicia, Chilly, Bruno, and Pedro. He could look for Eric’s wife.

Eric.

When he opened his eyes again he was still sitting upright. The sun through the window had moved a good six feet across the wall. The door was open, and a moment later Eric was standing there.

“Are you a dream, Eric?” he asked.

The blue-eyed Titan came up to the bed and cupped his brother’s face with both hands.

“I’m sorry I let them take you, Tommy. And for making Mama Branwyn sick.”

“Ahn said that she thought you would hurt me,” Thomas replied. “But I told her that you always saved me.”

Eric pulled up the visitor’s chair, and the brothers talked for hours. In a haphazard, rambling manner, Thomas told his story. He started out with drug dealing and Monique and Lily. Then he talked about his alley and his father’s arrests.

“He isn’t really a bad guy,” Thomas said. “But he was just mad all the time because people were always trying to take things from him.”

When Eric told his story, it started with the beached green fish that he caught with his hands and unfolded event by event until Raela came to his house and said that they were meant to be.

In the middle of his story, a nurse popped her head in to tell Eric that visiting hours were over.

“This is my brother,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other since we were six. I can’t leave him.”

The nurse, a middle-aged Chicano woman, smiled and nodded, then quietly closed the door.

Eric confessed his crimes against the people he should have loved. He killed his mother and Branwyn and Drew and Christie. He won every game he ever played that was important. He failed to bring happiness into his father’s life.

“But Dad doesn’t think that,” Thomas stated with certainty. “All that stuff is just in your head.”

Eric thought about his self-portrait and the worried look on his art teacher’s face. Something fell together for him. He wasn’t complaining or distraught—just feeling empty.

Thomas took Eric’s hand and asked, “What about that girl? Do you love her?”

“No. I mean, she’s the only one other than you or Mama Branwyn that ever made me feel something. But it’s a little like I’m afraid of her, the way I used to feel about Ahn, but more.”

“Because why?” Thomas asked.

Eric smiled, remembering those words from their childhood,
because why.

“I guess I don’t want anyone to know what I’m like on the inside. I feel ugly, you know? Except when I think about you or Mama Branwyn.”

THEY TALKED WITHOUT
holding anything back. It had been more than a dozen years and the boys hadn’t had one thing in common since the day they were separated, but still it was as if they’d been apart for only a day. They giggled and awed each other; they played and vowed never to be parted again.

“I will never let them take you away, Tommy.”

“And I won’t go nowhere.”

ERIC DIDN’T LEAVE
the hospital until Thomas was asleep, and he was back the next morning with his father, Ahn, and Mona.

“I’m so sorry,” Minas told Branwyn’s son. “I should have done something to keep you. Or at least to find you once we knew that you were lost.”

“That’s okay,” Thomas said. “It’s really not all that bad. I mean, it’s kinda like a dream. I’m not mad at you. And I don’t care about what happened to me. I mean, even when you get shot it only hurts for a while. And if you don’t get all upset about it and nobody shoots at you again, then it’s okay. Or if you’re hungry it’s like that too. Because sooner or later you’re gonna eat, and then you’re not hungry no more. Right?”

Thomas liked being with the whole family, but it wasn’t the same as his time alone with Eric. With Eric he could say anything without thinking, but with the family it was more like he had a part to play. He didn’t mind though. He liked the role.

“You’re the man who saved me,” three-year-old Mona said during a lull in the conversation.

“That’s right,” Eric told her. “This is Uncle Tommy.”

“T’ank you, Uncle Tommy.”

“What would you like to do after you get out of here, Thomas?” Dr. Nolan asked.

“I don’t know. The doctor said that they lost my cart. Everything I had was in there. I had pictures of Monique and my blank book with my writings. I’d like to find that if I could.”

“But what would you like to
do?
”

“What you mean?” Tommy squinted for a moment, remembering the brightness that had driven him away from elementary school.

“Do you want a job? Do you want to go to school? Where would you like to live?”

“Could I stay with you guys for a while?”

“Of course,” Dr. Nolan said. “As long as you want.”

“Yaaaaaa,” Mona sang.

THAT AFTERNOON THE
police were dispatched with a warrant to arrest Thomas Beerman, aka Bruno Forman. They sent Pittman and Rodriguez because the officers could identify the young con-man escapee.

“Thomas Beerman,” Officer Pittman announced. “You are under arrest.”

“No. I didn’t do anything. I, I saved the little girl’s life.”

“You presented yourself to the police with fraudulent identification and you escaped from the juvenile facility where you were being detained.”

For Thomas the facility was a long-ago dream. He couldn’t imagine that they would send him back there now that he was reunited with his family.

“No,” he said.

“No,” Dr. Bettye Freeling repeated. She was standing at the door to Thomas’s room. “This is my patient, and he is far too weak to be moved.”

“We have a warrant for his arrest, ma’am,” Rodriguez said with an apology in his voice.

“I’m a doctor,” she replied. “This is my patient, and you cannot take him without my permission.”

“IT’S PRETTY CLEAR-CUT
,” Nathan Frear, the lawyer, said to Minas Nolan and his son.

They were in Frear’s office at the top floor of a Westwood office high-rise.

“He was convicted of assault on police officers in an attempt to keep them from their duty. It says that he was part of an organized group that opened fire on the officers trying to arrest them.”

“He was twelve,” Eric said. “He didn’t even have a gun.”

“But he was part of the group, and he was convicted under a law devised to dampen gang activity.”

“But he wasn’t part of a gang. He was twelve and nearly homeless. He was just trying to stay alive.”

“All of that evidence was presented in court,” Frear said. “The judge still found him guilty.”

“What will happen if he goes to trial?” Minas asked.

“Either he’ll be returned to the juvenile authority or, more likely, he will be sentenced as an adult and will serve the full term of the original sentence plus whatever else the judge might want to tack on for his further crimes.”

“What crimes?” Eric asked. “All he did was save my daughter from Drew.”

“He lied to the police; he escaped from custody. He committed identity theft by using a Social Security card that belonged to Bruno Forman. The prosecutor might even try to implicate him with the man who killed your girlfriend. After all, Drew Peters used Thomas’s cart to block the door and keep you from saving your wife.”

Frear was tall and extraordinarily thin. His dark-blue suit was made from the finest material, and his aqua tie had a ruby tack that held it perfectly in place.

“That’s crazy,” Minas said. “He’s just a boy.”

“He’s a man,” Frear corrected, “homeless and black. A convicted felon, an admitted drug dealer, an escapee from a state institution, and there’s even some evidence that he was involved in the slaying of a customer of his, a Raymond ‘RayRay’ Smith.

“I can take the case, but it’s going to be very expensive. And without remarkable luck, he’s looking at anywhere from six to ten years in a maximum security prison.”

BETTYE FREELING COULD
keep the police from taking Thomas for three more weeks. Minas decided to retain Frear. The initial fee was fifty thousand dollars. The lawyer visited Thomas twice but received little help from his client.

“I just took a walk,” Thomas said, answering Frear’s question about how his escape occurred. “I just meant to go around the block, but then I kept on walking. It was such a nice day, I remember. The sky had those big white clouds that everybody likes so much.”

When Frear wanted to know about the shooting, all Thomas could recall was Tremont coming out with his Uzi and the police opening fire.

“He went crazy, I think,” Thomas said. “He was mad that the police wanted to be messin’ with him.”

“Did you know about the Uzi?”

“Sure. We all did.”

“Did you know that it was against the law to have that weapon?”

“Tremont was the law in that alley,” Thomas said. “That was the first time I ever saw a cop down there in the three years I worked for him.”

“So you worked for him for three years?” Frear asked.

“Yeah.”

Frear decided not to put Thomas on the stand.

RAELA, IN THE
meanwhile, emptied a special account that Kronin had set up for her. Using her ATM card, she took out five hundred dollars a day for twenty days.

She spent the afternoons helping Eric with Thomas’s physical therapy and the evenings sleeping with Eric in his childhood bed.

Her mother and father threatened to call the police, but she knew they wouldn’t. Eric’s father told his son that Raela was too young, but after a few dinner conversations with the dark-hued girl, he gave up his arguments.

Minas Nolan blamed himself for Christie’s death because he made Eric move out. He wouldn’t kick his son out again.

Raela spent long evenings talking to Ahn and Minas. She had read thousands of books since the age of eight. She was considerate and mature. She helped with the dishes and explained that she and Eric would be married one day soon.

“He needs me,” she said to Minas one evening while everyone else was in bed.

“Eric doesn’t need anyone,” Minas replied. He was embarrassed by the mild note of contempt in his voice.

“No, Dr. Nolan,” Raela said, sounding more like fifty than fifteen. “He’s afraid of people. He thinks everybody is too weak and that if he isn’t careful he’ll hurt them. He blames himself for you losing Mama Branwyn. He even thinks that he caused Tommy to get lost.”

Minas felt the weight of her words in his chest. He realized, maybe for the first time, how closely physical heart disease was connected to the emotional heart. The girl was telling him a truth that he’d always avoided. He knew that Eric had been forced to carry the weight of his broken heart. He knew that his son had lived with Christie because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

“How do you know all this?” he asked the child.

“Because I’m just like him,” she said. “Or almost. My life has been just like his, only I don’t worry about people like he does.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because you can’t save anyone.”

“I save people all the time,” the doctor said, wondering at his need to argue with the child.

“But when people die on your operating table, do you believe that they were going to die with or without you?”

After that evening Minas could not remember if he’d answered her question. He’d lost eight patients under the knife. Eight lives that he could not save. He’d forgotten most of their names and didn’t attend any of their funerals. He’d washed his hands vigorously after every failure, gone home and got into bed. He wondered how a child knew all of that.

AT THE END
of three weeks Raela gave the ten thousand dollars she’d collected to Eric. The next day Ahn and Raela went with Eric to the hospital and helped Thomas down the stairs and then to the station, where the brothers boarded a train bound for Phoenix.

16

O
N THE
trip to Phoenix, Thomas said to his brother, “You didn’t have to come with me, Eric. If you just gave me a ticket and a couple a bucks I coulda gone on my own.”

“But what would you do when you got there?”

“I don’t know. There’s always somethin’ to do. It’s not that hard.”

“I know, Tommy,” Eric said. “But we just found each other. The only reason you would even go to jail is because you were looking for me and because you saved Mona.”

“But what about her?” Thomas asked. “She needs you to be with her.”

“It’s not gonna take long,” Eric explained. “We just need to set you up somewhere where the police won’t find you. Then I’ll go back home. I promise.”

Thomas stopped arguing. He was happy to be able to spend time with Eric. He knew that Eric could use his help, that he was somehow lost and needed Thomas to lead him out of a dark corridor. He could tell by the way Eric looked away so often. There was even sadness in his smile.

So they took a room in a Phoenix residence hotel and began to plan for Thomas’s future.

THE FIRST THING
they did was go shopping for clothes. They cruised through Banana Republic buying sweaters, shirts, pants, jackets, underwear, socks, and even a hat for Thomas. The young man was amazed by the variety and cost of these things. He hadn’t been to a clothes store since his days with Monique and Lily when he’d buy a new pair of pants and a T-shirt at JC Penney once every six months or so.

At the same mall they bought walking shoes and a big suitcase for the trip that Eric had planned.

“I’ve never been to New York,” Eric told Thomas. “That means the police won’t think to look for us there.”

“What about Dad?” Thomas asked.

“I told him we were going and that I’d get in touch with him.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He just looked kinda sad and nodded, and I left.”

“Why’s he so sad?” Thomas asked.

They were sitting across from each other on single beds in the Laramie Extended-Stay Hotel and Residence on the outskirts of the city. Their window looked out onto a vast desert of yellows and oranges.

“He’s been like that ever since Mama Branwyn died and they took you away,” Eric said. “All he does is work and sleep.”

“You can see it in his eyes,” Thomas added. “He’s got old man’s eyes.”

“I think it’s because of me,” Eric added. “When I was a kid I always made him do things for me, and I didn’t even see it. And then when I got older it was already too late.”

Thomas rubbed the palms of his hands over his black-cotton trousers. He thought about not being in jail or on trial.

“Maybe he could come visit after we get to New York,” Thomas suggested.

THE NEXT DAY
they were on an eastbound train. They sat across from each other at the front of the car and talked for eighteen hours a day.

“I took riding lessons . . .”

“I found a glass-cutter and made drinking glasses from beer bottles for a while. After I’d make’em, I sold’em on the boardwalk in Venice until the police chased me away . . .”

“After the SATs I went to UCLA to study economics. I like numbers that do things in people’s pockets. It’s funny . . .”

“I never had sex with a girl yet . . .”

“I’ve never been in love . . .”

“AND ARE YOU
sad like Dad?” Thomas asked after three hundred miles were gone.

“Not like him. I’m not really sad at all. I have everything I want. Especially now.”

“But you look sad,” Thomas said. “You don’t hardly smile, and your eyes are always movin’ around like you’re looking for something all the time.”

“Up until now I guess I’ve always been looking for you. Dad tried to find you after a few years, but nobody even knew where your real father was. Finally they found him down in Texas, but by then he’d lost track of you.”

THAT FIRST NIGHT
on the train from Phoenix, Eric slept while Thomas sat and looked at the moon out of his window. Thomas felt safe sitting next to his brother. He didn’t care about being on the train or going to New York. He wasn’t afraid of the police finding him. The day Eric came to take him away, Thomas was already planning to leave. He thought he might go down to San Diego, where he’d heard a man could sleep under fruit trees and eat off their limbs for breakfast. But Thomas had a feeling of safety with Eric—between them they made something whole.

Thomas exhaled, and for a long moment he just sat there without taking air back in. The train lurched at a turn in the tracks, and he found himself breathing again, feeling deeply satisfied. For the first time that he could remember, he didn’t have to worry about who was coming or when his next meal would be or where he was going to sleep.

But looking out at the lunar-lit plains, Thomas began to think that he might die soon. Death made sense to him. So many people he had known were dead: his mother and Pedro and Alicia and Tremont, Bruno and Chilly and even RayRay. He had been so close to Death for so long that he wasn’t afraid of Him. But he didn’t want to die, because he wanted to be with Eric. Having a brother meant he had something to live for.

“ERIC,” THOMAS WHISPERED
in the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“You know what I worry about all the time?”

“Not having any place to live?”

“Uh-uh. There’s always a place to stay or hide,” Thomas said. “The thing that always scared me was if one day I went crazy and forgot about back home with you and Mama.”

“Which one?” Eric asked.

“Which one what?”

“Are you afraid of going crazy or forgetting?”

“They’re both the same thing.”

THE NEXT MORNING,
in Denver, a young black woman got on the train. The two seats next to Thomas and Eric were free, but she went to a single seat four rows down.

“She’s pretty,” Thomas said to Eric.

“I guess,” Eric said, not really looking.

“Did you ever think that we would be together again on a train going to New York?”

“No,” Eric said. “I thought that I would probably die before seeing you again.”

“You?” Thomas grinned.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think about you dying.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

A young white man moved to the seat next to the young black woman. Thomas felt that maybe he should have done that, but then he thought, no.

“I think about killing myself,” Eric said seriously.

“What for? You got everything. And you said you’re not that sad.”

“Sometimes I think that it’s because of me that other people get hurt.”

“That’s crazy,” Thomas said. “Nobody gets hurt over you.”

“I met Raela, and three days later Drew killed Christie, shot you, and the police killed him.”

“And you think that it’s because you wanted her?”

Sheepishly Eric nodded.

Thomas looked away a moment. He noticed the white man talking to the young woman.

“I was lookin’ at the moon last night,” Thomas said, “while you were asleep.”

“So?”

“I remembered that I met this guy once who used to be a merchant marine, but he got a blood disease and they let him go. He said that he had enough money that he could have had a house and a car, but he found movin’ around a better life. He said that livin’ in a house was like spendin’ your life in a tomb.”

“You think he was lying?” Eric asked.

“I never thought so,” Thomas said. “But I never thought about it. But he said somethin’ else.”

“What’s that?”

Thomas thought that he heard the young black woman say something to the man next to her.

“He said,” Thomas continued, “that the moon has gravity and that the ocean rises up and falls down because of that.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, “the moon governs the tides.”

“So if that’s true,” Thomas said, “and if one day somebody said to you that you couldn’t have what you wanted unless the tide didn’t come in, what do you think would happen?”

“Of course the tide’s gonna come in.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise, people will live an’ die, an’ you can’t do a thing about it.”

“I could kill myself.”

“But it wouldn’t make no difference except to the people who love you.”

“Excuse me,” someone said.

The young men looked up to see the girl who had gotten on earlier.

“Can I sit with you guys? That jerk down there started talkin’ shit.”

“Sure,” Eric said and Thomas wanted to say but didn’t.

“I’m Eric and this is my brother, Tommy, I mean, Thomas.”

“They call me Lucky,” Thomas said.

“They do?” Eric asked.

“I thought you said you were brothers?” the young woman said, settling next to Thomas. She had a wheeled, silvery suitcase that was meant to look like metal but was made from lightweight plastic. Eric got up and put the bag in the rack above their heads.

“We were separated when we were young,” the young white man explained.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “We just found each other again.”

“You don’t look like brothers.”

Thomas and Eric told their story together, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. As they spoke, the young black woman pictured the two men as little boys and found herself smiling at their graceless affection for each other.

Her name was Clea Frank. She was a native of Denver and now was on her way to a scholarship at New York University. She was a language major and wanted to work at the UN.

The young white man had tried to “put the moves on her,” and she wanted to sit with them so that he’d leave her alone. She was happy that Eric and Thomas were going all the way to New York.

“DON’T YOU FEEL
funny calling him brother?” Clea asked Thomas some time after midnight as the train approached Chicago.

“That’s what he is. He’s the only brother I’ve ever had.”

Eric was asleep, and Clea had just come awake after napping through the late afternoon and evening.

“But he’s not your real brother—he’s white,” Clea said. “I mean, I don’t have anything against white people, but I don’t go around calling them my brother either.”

Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.

“But we were raised together and we understand each other. He used to protect me when the big kids would pick on me, and I explain things to him.”

“But he has three years of college and you don’t have hardly any school. What do you explain to him? The street?”

Over the previous day and a half the three had changed trains twice and told their stories. Clea’s father was a baker in Denver, and her mother was a part-time nurse in the pediatric ward of the university’s teaching hospital. Clea was their fourth child. Her two brothers were high school dropouts, and her sister was a schizophrenic who lived on the street half the time and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals. Clea was the hope of her family, and she intended to make something of herself.

Thomas had told her about everything he’d done and about the police being after him. He didn’t think that she would tell anyone, and Eric was asleep by then.

“I can see things in other things,” Thomas said. “Eric’s real smart, but he doesn’t pay attention to everyday things like I do.”

“Like what?”

“Rocks and eyes and making things up.”

He chose that moment to take her hand.

“Your skin is so rough,” she said.

He pulled away, but she reached out and drew the hand back.

“I thought that you were making it up about living in the street,” she said. “But your hands are like a workingman’s hands.”

“I knew a woman that was schizo,” Thomas said. “She saw things too. There was a guy named Benny who would say that she was his ho, an’ he would get money from other homeless guys to have sex with her.”

“And did you have sex with her?”

“No. But I’d go sit with her sometimes, and if I was really quiet she’d get still and tell me about the things she saw.”

“Like what?”

“There was a big man who sometimes chased her and sometimes killed her, but then he could be nice and take her on his shoulders and show her the sea. It was a light-blue-and-pink ocean with fish that swam on top of the water and talked to the men in boats who sailed out there with them. And the moon was very close to the earth, and there wasn’t any cigarettes or alcohol.”

“She was crazy.”

“Maybe. But I can tell you what she said and you don’t call me crazy.”

“What was the woman’s name?” Clea asked.

“Lana.”

“Did you get Lana away from Benny?”

“No. She liked him and called him her husband.”

“But he was pimpin’ her.”

“Yeah, but she said that he never let those men hurt her.”

“That’s crazy. He took those men there in the first place,” Clea said.

“Life’s crazy,” Thomas replied. “When Benny would get money for Lana, he’d go out and buy us all pizza and a quart of root beer.”

“So you lived off her too?”

“I only stayed near them for about a week. And I don’t eat cheese or drink sodas. They make me sick.”

Thomas couldn’t have explained why he kissed Clea then. She didn’t know why she let him.

Clea had her whole life planned out. She would go to college and get her degree and then work at the UN translating French, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages for the sub-Saharan African nations. She would find a young black man who was either a doctor or a lawyer and marry him and move to Montclair, New Jersey, where she would relocate her parents and her sister. Her lazy brothers could fend for themselves.

But there they were kissing passionately in the early hours, in that hurtling train. Eric awoke once and saw them. Clea had her hand on Thomas’s while he kissed her neck again and again.

It was then that Eric thought about what his brother had said about the moon and tides. The Golden Boy, Eric, closed his eyes and muffled a sigh—his brother had somehow delivered him from his fear.