Fortunate Son: A Novel (24 page)

“You think you’ll marry Clea?” Eric asked.

“She’s too young,” Thomas said. “She just wants to go to school and have some fun.”

“Will you live together?”

“Yeah. Maybe we’ll get a place near Fontanot’s or some kinda student housing thing.”

Eric put his arms around Thomas, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “You’re my brother, Tommy.”

Thomas went to bed happy and fell into a dream.

He was in his alley valley again, and all the trash was gone. No Man and his wife were in the oak tree with a dozen parrot chicks crying for food. Skully was there and so was Pedro. Bruno was sitting on the other side of the fence reading a Fantastic Four comic. Thomas was sitting in the shade of the big oak watching the sun creep across the floor of the alley toward his feet. He was feeling completely relaxed when the surface he was sitting on started to shift.

He jumped up and realized that he was sitting on Alicia’s tomb. The head cinder block fell away, and Alicia sat up. At first Thomas was happy to see his old friend come to life, but then he noticed that the tattoo on her left breast no longer read
Ralphie
but now said
Clea.

“Don’t touch me,” Alicia said in a voice much like his mother’s.

He wanted to obey, but his hands moved forward with a will of their own, and even though she screamed, his fingertips grazed her neck. Instantly she fell back dead. An earthquake shook the alley. Tall buildings that had never been there before began to fall. No Man flew away, and the oak toppled upon Bruno—Thomas came awake unable to breathe, unable to yell, but the shout was in his throat.

“HELLO?” ERIC SAID,
answering the call. It was 3:27.

“Eric.”

“What, Tommy?”

“If something bad happens I want you to tell Clea that I really love her.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen, Tommy.”

“And I want you to know how grateful I am for you going back East with me and helping me.”

“What’s wrong?” Eric asked.

“I just had a dream. But it was really real. Everything went wrong all at once. The whole world fell apart in a earthquake.”

“You remember what you told me about the moon, don’t you?”

Thomas took a deep breath, another.

“Yeah, but . . . things have been goin’ so good, Eric. A whole year now and nothin’s wrong.”

“That’s okay, Tommy. You just had it bad, that’s all. Bad things might happen again but not so bad that you won’t be happy.”

“No?”

“It was just a dream. Just a dream.”

“Just a dream,” Thomas echoed. He could feel the sleep returning behind his eyes.

“Go back to bed, man,” Eric said. “It’ll all be fine in the morning.”

BUT THOMAS WAS
upset all day at work. He knocked over a steel smoker filled with chickens. He cut himself in the afternoon, and if it wasn’t for the fast work of Michael Cotter he might have lost a lot of blood.

At the end of the day, when Michael was driving him back, Thomas said, “You should have turned left.”

“Aren’t we gonna have that toast? There’s this great bar I know on Little Santa Monica.”

“I don’t know, Mike,” Thomas said. “I don’t feel much like celebrating.”

“Aw come on, Lucky. It was just a can’a chickens and a slip. You’re gonna be fine.”

Cotter pulled into an almost invisible driveway and up next to a beautiful fountain. A doorman wearing a uniform came out and opened Thomas’s door. Another uniformed man opened Michael’s door and said, “Welcome back, sir.”

“What is this place?” Thomas asked his friend.

In the foyer there were several well-dressed men and women walking, talking, waiting for an elevator.

“It’s a hotel bar,” Cotter was saying. “You know, hotels have the finest bars and restaurants.”

The handsome young smoker led Thomas into a large room filled with small tables. At a table in a far corner sat Kronin Stark.

“What’s goin’ on?” Thomas asked. He stopped walking.

“Mr. Stark has something to tell you . . . about your brother.”

For a moment Thomas was half back in his dream. He felt as if the hotel floor were buckling under his feet. He pitched forward, but Cotter caught him and helped him to a chair in front of the giant.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Stark rumbled. “Clea Frank is coming to California to be with you.”

“What do you want with me?” Thomas said. “And what about my brother?”

“Your brother is about to go to jail for quite some time,” Stark said.

“You’re crazy. Eric hasn’t done anything.”

“As you will,” Kronin replied with a slight bow. “Take a ride with me and I will explain the details.”

“I’m not goin’ anywhere with you.”

“Fine. Leave then.”

Thomas looked at Michael, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“What’s going to happen to Eric?”

“Come with me and you shall be enlightened,” Stark said.

A CAPE HOTEL
doorman opened the back door of the silver Rolls-Royce, and Stark crawled in like a badger waddling into his hole.

“Get in on the other side,” he said to Thomas. “Terry will drive us.”

“I’m not gettin’ in the back with you,” Thomas said.

“Suit yourself. Sit next to Terry then.”

Thomas got in the front seat next to the man he knew as Michael Cotter.

“Your name is Terry?” Thomas asked.

“Sure,” the sudden stranger replied. “Where to, Mr. S?”

“Let’s go up into the canyons. I like it up there.”

The one-time smoker drove off, turning right on Little Santa Monica.

Stark leaned forward and handed Thomas a large red envelope.

“Take it,” Stark said. “Look through the photographs.”

There was a thick sheaf of eight-by-ten glossy photos. They were pictures of Monique and Madeline, Harold and Clea, Minas Nolan, Ahn, and another half dozen people that Thomas did not recognize. He paused at the photograph of a black woman in a straitjacket who was screaming hideously.

“That’s Nelda Frank,” Stark said. “Your girlfriend’s sister. A nice group, isn’t it? Good-looking people. You would never think that that sweet-looking Vietnamese woman is in the country on forged papers or that stolid Harold Portman has been embezzling funds from his boss for years. Your grandmother’s insurance company doesn’t know that she lied about a preexisting condition when she bought her policy. The doctor that kept her records back then has recently agreed to make amends for his wrongdoing.”

They were crossing Sunset, beginning an ascent into the hills.

“What I do to you, man?” Thomas asked, sitting with his back against the door, looking into the backseat.

“Three nights ago I sat with your brother and my little girl. She smiles at me. She kisses me hello, but her joy in me is over. She’s moved out of my house and chosen her man. My life is empty because of Eric Tanner Nolan.”

Stark brought both hands to his face as if he were about to melt into tears, but he did not cry. Instead his fat hands folded into fists.

“She’s gone from me and is never coming back. If your Eric died tomorrow, she wouldn’t even cry on my shoulder. He has taken her heart from me.”

“You crazy,” Thomas said.

“Yes, I am,” Kronin conceded. “That’s an important fact for you to understand. I am crazy, and I will destroy the lives of everyone you know if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do. That’s just how crazy I am. Your former nanny will be thrown out of the country or into a federal penitentiary, and Harold will be in prison too. Your grandmother will die from the cancer in her stomach. Your stepfather will be sued by half a dozen angry patients, and Clea’s sister will fare far worse.”

Silence settled in on Thomas. All the words he knew dried up and flaked off in his throat.

“You yourself will be tried for the murder of a Jane Doe buried under cinder blocks in an alley inhabited only by you. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, is there, Terry?”

“No, sir,” the man once known as Michael Cotter said.

“The district attorney will soon begin to seek charges against your brother for helping a wanted felon escape from the authorities,” Stark said. “He will be sentenced for that felony and spend quite some time behind bars.”

They’d made it up into the hills. The road looked down on the desertlike slope of the mountain.

“And you, Thomas Beerman, will testify at your brother’s trial that it was he who suggested and financed the escape. It was he who masterminded everything.”

“You crazy.” Thomas found the words even in his silence.

“If you don’t do it,” the billionaire warned, “he will still be convicted, and everyone you know will be destroyed along with him.”

“But why? Why would you do this?”

“Because it will break your brother’s heart to see you turn on him. And I want to do to him what he has done to me.”

When Stark leaned forward, and Thomas was nearly blinded by the light off his skin. He averted his eyes—Kronin thought he was crying—and wondered about the moon.

The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise . . .
He remembered the words he’d spoken to his brother. Now he realized that he was wrong. They were entering a sharp curve over a steep incline. Thomas pushed both his normal and shorter leg against the door, propelling himself against the steering wheel. Terry grunted and tried to keep the steering wheel straight, but Thomas’s hands were too strong for the self-proclaimed assassin. There was no way to stop the car from careering off into free flight. Thomas was weightless. He floated into the backseat. Stark was yelling and so was the man he called Terry. When the Rolls hit the first boulder, Thomas slammed into Kronin’s belly and smelled the acrid stench of the fat man’s belching breath. He also felt a severe pain in his good leg. It felt wet and he thought of blood, but then they hit the second hard rock and then the third. No one was crying out now, and darkness was all around them. Then suddenly there was a wrenching sound of metal tearing, and Thomas was dimly aware of flight and then light. There was a flash of heat across his face, and he remembered the fear in Stark’s face when the big man realized that he was about to die.

20

H
E WAS
in a hospital bed once more, looking at the light through the window again. He turned his head to the left and there was someone there. Clea—her hands clasped together and her eyes too sad for tears.

“Hey,” Thomas said.

“Hi. How are you?”

“That depends. Am I gonna die?”

“No. They said that you’re really banged up but that there’s nothing life-threatening.”

“Did I lose my leg?”

“You lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says that the leg’ll be fine,” she told him. “He also said that he might be able to fix the other leg with a hip replacement.”

“And are you still moving out here to live with me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“You will?”

“Of course. Why would this accident make any difference?”

“Does your sister have a gap between her front teeth?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Stark.”

“What about him?”

“He told me. He said . . . he said . . .”

“He said what?”

“He knew about her. He had a picture of her. He knew about everybody I knew, and he was going to hurt all of them unless . . . He wanted me to testify that Eric helped me to escape from the police.”

“Stark’s dead. So’s his driver.”

“They’re dead and I’m not?”

Clea stared at Thomas, not comprehending the meaning of his question.

“You were thrown clear,” she explained.

“But we crashed. The car crushed in around us.”

“You were thrown clear. After that the car fell on its back and then the gas tank blew.”

“So the pictures were burned?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah, I guess. Everything burned.”

“I killed them.”

“Don’t be crazy, Tommy. It was an accident. The police think that it was because of dirt on the road. The driver hit the brakes and slid off the side.”

“I grabbed the steering wheel,” Thomas said.

“I would have too, but you couldn’t stop it. You’re lucky that you weren’t killed with them.”

Clea went over to Thomas and kissed him, but in his mind he was still in that careening car, crashing into boulders, counting out the last beats of his life . . .

“REALLY?” ERIC SAID
that evening when he and Thomas were alone in the hospital room. “He wanted you to testify against me?”

“I think that he planned to marry Raela one day. He said that you stole her from him.”

“And then you grabbed the wheel and ran the car off the mountain?”

“It was the only thing I could think of. I murdered him, Eric. And I didn’t even lose a leg or nuthin’. And everything burned up; even the steering wheel melted. The pictures all burned. What should I do?”

“What do you wanna do, Tommy?”

This set off a series of thoughts that went all the way back to Thomas’s earliest memories: Eric running fast; Eric laughing out loud; Eric falling and rushing into Branwyn’s arms yelling for her to make the pain go away. He remembered a recurring childhood dream about a wasp as big as a horse chasing him, intent upon stinging him in the chest, in his heart. He ran into a cave that was too small for the hornet to get into, but the enraged insect jabbed its stinger in after him again and again. It stung Thomas in the hand and the leg, in his eye and mouth, but it never got him in the chest and finally it died from all that stinging. That was always when Thomas would wake up, after the wasp had defeated itself. In the dream he never left the cave.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not your fault, man. You had to do it.”

In his mind Thomas emerged from the cave. The huge insect lay dying, vibrating its wings in sporadic fits. The stinger had come loose from the abdomen, with the slick entrails following after.

“It’s like nuthin’ makes any sense anymore,” Thomas said to Eric. “Like I fell out of a airplane but then I was okay.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to die if you fall like that.”

For some reason Thomas thought about Alicia then. He remembered struggling with the heavy cinder blocks that he and Pedro used to make her tomb. She was dead. She fell over the fence and never got up again.

THAT AFTERNOON AND
night Thomas had four visitors.

The first was Clea Frank. She came into his room and sat next to his bed.

“I love you,” she said. “I just came by to tell you that I’m going back to New York to pack, but when I come back we’ll get a place together and you’ll go back to school or whatever you want and I’ll finish my degree.”

Clea kissed Thomas and said something, but he’d been on painkillers and fell asleep, missing her words. He remembered her reassuring tones, though, and he felt that maybe things might be okay.

WHEN HE WOKE
up again, Raela was standing there.

She gave him a serious look and then sat down next to him.

“Eric told me what happened with my father,” she said.

Thomas didn’t question why his brother would do such a thing. He didn’t utter a sound. He wondered, dispassionately, if the girl had come to get revenge, not because she was angry but because it was the right thing to do.

“He told me about the pictures and his wanting to send him to jail,” she said. “I believe it because that would have been just another day of business for my father. He destroyed people and businesses all the time. He sent men to jail, and then he’d come to my room and tell me how they’d begged and cried. He said that he was building a great treasure and that it would one day be mine.”

Thomas wondered at the little girl in her bed hovered over by the giant who was trying to woo her with treasures. He thought he understood her steel will then.

“He would have gone on doing that, but you stopped him,” Raela said. “I thought about it for a long time after Eric told me. You grabbed the wheel and ran off the road. You expected to die along with him. He was trying to destroy you like he did everybody else, and you grabbed him so that he’d go with you.”

Raela was gazing directly into Thomas’s eyes. He felt a greater intimacy with her than he’d ever experienced before. It was a terrible intimacy, a frightening knowledge.

“I loved him in a way,” she said. “He made me the most important person in his whole world, and his world was everything. There was nothing I couldn’t have, and no one would hurt me as long as he was alive. He was a monster, but he loved me. But I want you to know that I don’t hold his death against you. It was his own fault, and he’s the only one to blame.”

WHEN THOMAS WOKE
up again, Ahn was sitting in a chair where Raela had stood. The Vietnamese nanny was knitting. Thomas gazed at her for a long while before she looked up at him.

“You were asleep,” she said.

Thomas wanted to speak but he didn’t.

“I came to tell you a story,” Ahn said.

Thomas felt his smile rising. Ahn’s stories were the most important tales in his life. He knew that he would get something wonderful from her words.

“Five years after my parents were killed, I lived on a beach in the south. I lived by myself in a refugee camp. American soldiers would come to us to visit the young women and girls there. One night I was hiding in the trees watching a beautiful young woman named Min. She was . . . was making love with a soldier in the sand. I was watching because many of the young girls did this thing to make money to pay for food and clothes and maybe a way out of Vietnam. I was thinking that maybe I could do like Min and make money to buy my passage.

“I listened to the words she said and I watched the things she did, trying to see if I could do that when a gang of boys ran up to them. The boys were shouting, and the man tried to stand. But before he could get up one boy hit him in the head with a rock. Another boy stabbed him, then another and another.

“Min ran away naked except for the soldier’s pants that she held against her breasts.” Ahn’s breathing was coming fast, and her eyes were looking back more than thirty years. “The boys were from the camp. I knew their names then, but by now I’ve forgotten them. They were all stabbing the soldier, and when they were finished, they ran off in the night screaming like ghosts.

“When they were all gone I came out and looked down on him. He was still alive, but the blood was bubbling out. His eyes were wide open, and he looked at me, begging me. He grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. I just sat there telling him that he would be all right. And then his hand got weaker until it finally fell away.”

Ahn turned her gaze to Thomas then. “He died, and I stayed with him for a long time. I could not save him. The boys that hated him could not stop themselves. The girl who ran away could not save him or stop the boys. Everything that happened was going to happen, and there was no other chance. He had just been making love with a beautiful Vietnamese girl and then he was attacked and then he died holding on to my arm.”

Ahn held up her arm, showing it to Thomas.

“It was our fate.”

LATE THAT NIGHT
Thomas came awake suddenly. In the corner of his hospital room stood his mother. She was wearing her white slip and the house shoes that Minas Nolan had given her. She was silent, staring at Thomas, and he was just as quiet returning her gaze. As he watched her the color slowly drained away from her image. She turned gray and then slowly became transparent, like glass. When she was almost completely clear, her form began to sparkle from the inside. The cloud of iridescent light then drifted toward the window, out through the glass, and away into the dark sky. The lights kept moving until they covered the nighttime horizon, becoming stars.

WHEN THOMAS AWOKE
in the morning, he was exhausted and felt more alone than he’d ever been. It was as if his body had been cut away from his soul and he was floating somewhere above himself on the bed. He knew that he’d been crying, that he’d lost everything that he’d held on to since he was a boy, running like Ahn had taught him to do. He knew that his mother was dead and gone, and that he was a criminal, a murderer.

He looked out the window into the light-filled sky and thought about dying. Then he was filled with wonder at all of the pathways that came together in him on that day in grace.