Fortunate Son: A Novel (7 page)

Tommy answered every question in his soft and slow voice.

“When my ankle broke it hurt so bad that I had to think that I was in another room from my foot,” Tommy said.

His mother wore a white cotton slip to bed, and he didn’t care what color they were.

Finally Eric asked Tommy, “Why do you think Ahn’s crazy?”

For a long time Tommy stared out into the desert between the cholla cacti and Joshua trees. After a while Eric thought that his brother had forgotten the question.

Then Tommy started talking in a voice so soft that he was in the middle of his answer before Eric realized that he was being addressed.

“An’ she’s been in the places where everybody’s sad all the time,” Tommy was saying.

“Who?” Eric asked.

“Ahn. She comes from far away in a war, my mom says. She’s always lookin’ to see bad things comin’, and that’s why Dr. Nolan hired her, so she could see trouble before it gets here.”

Remembering these words in the bed, Eric sat up and turned the lamp on.
She sees bad things coming,
he thought.

Eric believed that Tommy understood things. Even now, after years, he listened to his brother’s words. Ahn knew what she was talking about. It was her job to see trouble coming.

With the sun rising over his dead mother’s garden, Eric decided that he would stay out of trouble as much as he could and that he would never put anybody in danger again.

6

T
HE MORNING AFTER
Elton and May were arrested, and Thomas was put in the holding cell, Madeline Beerman came to retrieve her grandson. She brought him home to her fourth-floor apartment on Denker and served him cornflakes for lunch. Thomas didn’t mind the breakfast food. He hadn’t eaten since the afternoon before because May and Elton were away at dinnertime and there was nothing he could eat in the refrigerator or the cupboards.

“I don’t want you thinking bad about your father because of what happened last night,” Madeline told him at the pine dining table that was crowded into her tiny studio apartment.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied, gulping down cereal.

“It’s really that May that’s the problem,” Madeline continued. “She’s been a bad seed ever since a long time ago when she was friends with Branwyn. She wants every man she sees.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to visit Elton in jail. He’ll be out in a few days. He says he wants you to come back and live with him and that he’s showing May the door.”

Thomas stopped eating and turned his eyes to Madeline. He wondered what violent act occurred when you were shown the door, and he knew that he didn’t want to go back to live with his brutal father. But he understood that he couldn’t say what he wanted. Whatever he said would cause trouble, and so he kept his mouth shut.

It was just as well that he did so. After three days in Madeline’s house, Thomas would have gone to live anywhere else. There was only that one room besides the kitchen and toilet. Madeline slept on the sofa, and Thomas was given a mat on the floor. Madeline watched television day and night, and the boy couldn’t get to sleep or look for his mother with his eyes closed because there was always somebody talking on the tinny TV speaker.

Madeline even kept the TV on when she was asleep.

“I use it for my sleeping pill,” she told Thomas on the first night. “I leave it on and it drowses me.”

When Elton came on the fourth morning, Thomas was actually happy to see him.

Elton wore his mechanic’s overalls. There was a bump on his right temple, and two fingers on his left hand were bandaged together.

“You ret to go, boy?” Elton asked.

Thomas stood up from his chair and nodded. He’d hardly slept in the past three days, and he hadn’t left the apartment at all because Madeline said the streets were full of hoodlums. So he was ready to go anywhere.

In the car Thomas sat in the passenger’s seat and was barely tall enough to peek out of the window.

“I’m sorry about what happened with that bitch,” Elton said.

Thomas giggled to hear a man say a curse word that the bad kids used on the playground.

“I didn’t mean to get so upset on your first night there. But you know she made me mad goin’ out with her old boyfriend an’ tellin’ me through you. But I got my head together ovah that shit. I was gonna leave May for your mother anyway. I sure was.”

Thomas got up on his knees and looked out at Central Avenue. He liked this street more than Wilshire or Sunset, near to where Dr. Nolan’s house was. The stores looked more inviting, with bright colors and chairs outside. There were children playing on the street too. And almost all of the people were brown or black like him and his mother.

“Watch it!” Elton cried.

A boy on a skateboard had veered out in front of the car. Elton hit the brakes, and Thomas’s face slammed into the dashboard. He felt the pain mainly in his nose. It was like a bright red flame in the center of his face.

His eyes were closed, but he heard Elton open his door and then scream, “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? You almost got killed!”

He yelled for a while, and Thomas held his nose trying to keep the blood from spilling out onto Elton’s car seats. He knew that his father would not want blood in his car.

“What happened to you?” Elton cried when he tired of screaming at the skateboarder and came back to the car. “You bleedin’?”

AT THE EMERGENCY
room the nurse asked Thomas if somebody had hit him.

“No, ma’am,” the boy answered. “I wanted to look out the window, so I sat up on my knees instead of putting on my seat belt.”

The nurse’s name was Stella. She was sand-colored and had straight black hair. She had big breasts, and Thomas wished that she would let him sit on her lap so that he could lie back against her and close his eyes.

ON THE RIDE
home Elton complained about the two hundred thirty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents that the emergency room visit cost.

“Why you got to go an’ break your nose, boy?” he asked. “That was our spendin’ money for the next three weeks.”

By now Thomas knew that Elton didn’t expect an answer. He only wanted to complain about whatever there was in front of him. So the boy simply held the ice pack to his nose and closed his eyes, thinking himself around the pain.

This was another trick Thomas had learned—to concentrate on some part of his body that wasn’t hurting when he was in pain. If his head hurt he thought about his hands and how they worked. He looked at his hands, grabbed things with them, anything to keep his mind off the place that hurt.

At home Elton gave Thomas a pill that made him dizzy. So he went out into the back porch and lay down with the ice pack on his face. He couldn’t sit on his knees, but he could lie on his back and listen to the baby chicks and the murmuring drone of hornets. Every now and then a bird would cry or a dog would bark. Cats in heat battled in the yards, and people talked and laughed, called out to one another and played music.

Thomas felt good about his new home. He wasn’t afraid of Elton anymore. The big car mechanic just needed to be left alone to complain and shout.

That was on a Wednesday.

On Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Thomas stayed in the house mainly and ate peanut butter and tuna fish. He went through the porch screen door into the backyard and found out that there was an abandoned road, an alley really, on the other side of the chain-link fence at the back of the property. Across the alley there were the backyards of other houses and buildings, some of them abandoned.

Thomas didn’t try to go into the alley because there was enough to see in the yard. There were weeds and proper plants, a wild rosebush that had small golden flowers. A gopher had pushed up half a dozen mounds of earth here and there, and a striped red cat passed through now and then, alternately crying and hissing at Thomas.

The boy didn’t try to climb the tree because he often fell. But he did sit underneath it listening to the crying chicks. Hornets hovered above him, but he wasn’t afraid of their stings. He’d been stung many times and had no fear of the pain.

From under the tree he scanned the skies and listened for traces of his mother in the world. He missed Eric, his brother, but he knew that Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan would all be fine. And he was about to go to school.

Elton had enrolled Thomas in Carson Elementary, only a block and a half away from the house. On Monday morning he would walk there with Elton, and then he’d finish the first grade.

Thomas liked school. There were so many people with so many different kinds of voices. And there were books and sometimes pictures of animals, and teachers who wore nice clothes and smelled good.

Thomas wasn’t afraid of the new place. He had not often felt fear. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t run very well, but he’d learned to skirt around pain and bullies and anger.

So he looked forward to the new school.

IT WAS A
big salmon-pink building with red and dirty green unglazed tiles for a roof. When he was led into Mr. Meyers’s first-grade class, the children were all laughing at something, and the bald-headed teacher was trying to make them quiet down.

“Everyone be quiet. Back to your seat, Maryanne,” the teacher was saying when Miss Andrews from the Registrar’s Office brought Thomas through the back door of the classroom.

The children got louder.

Miss Andrews waved at Meyers. He pointed at an empty chair, and she said, “Sit here, Tommy. Mr. Meyers will introduce you later.”

And so he entered the first-grade class with no one noticing, no one but the boy who sat in the other chair at the two-student table.

“I’m Bruno,” the husky boy said. He stuck out a chubby hand, and Thomas shook it.

“I’m Tommy. I just moved here last week. Why’s everybody laughing?”

“You talk funny,” Bruno said.

At first Tommy thought Bruno was saying that the class was laughing at him, but, he thought, they couldn’t be because they were laughing before he got there.

“Mr. Meyers farted,” Bruno said then.

He giggled.

Thomas giggled.

Then they were friends.

Thomas gazed around the room filled with laughing black children. One girl jumped up out of her chair and ran from one desk to another while waving her arms in the air, all the time laughing. A boy made a farting sound with his mouth, and the whole class broke down. Several kids rolled out of their chairs and laughed on the floor.

There was a chalkboard with the letters
A, B, C,
and
D
written upon it. There was a carpeted corner filled with toys and books.

The children were laughing and the sun was shining in, and for some reason Thomas began to weep. He put his head down into his arms, and the tears flowed onto his hands and then the desk.

If someone had asked him at that moment why he was crying, Thomas wouldn’t have known, not exactly. It had something to do with one new room too many and the sun shining in and all the children laughing at a joke he hadn’t heard.

“Shut up!” Mr. Meyers shouted in a deep, masculine voice.

The children all stopped in an instant. Now that the rest of the class was silent, Thomas’s soft weeping was the only sound.

“Yo, man,” Bruno whispered. “They could hear you.”

“Who’s that?” a girl asked.

“Why he cryin’?” another girl added.

Thomas wanted to stop but he couldn’t.

A shadow fell over Thomas, and the deep voice said, “Stop that.”

Didn’t he know that you can stop laughing but not crying?

“You, boy,” the voice said.

A hand pulled his shoulder, and the sun lanced Thomas’s eyes. The tears ran down, and he cried out from the attempt to stop crying.

“Who are you?” short, pudgy Mr. Meyers asked.

“Thomas Beerman,” the boy said, but nobody understood him because of his sobbing.

“Do you know this boy?” Meyers asked Bruno.

“That’s Tommy, Mr. Meyers,” Bruno said proudly.

“Take him down to the nurse’s office, Mr. Forman.”

Thomas felt Bruno’s hands on his shoulders. He got to his feet and, blinded by tears, allowed his new friend to guide him into the darker hallway.

Thomas breathed in the darkness, and the sadness in his chest subsided.

“I’m okay now,” he told his burly friend.

“Yeh,” Bruno said, “but now we got the hall pass.”

He held up a wooden board that was about a foot long and half that in width. It was painted bright orange, with the number
12
written on it in iridescent blue.

“That means we don’t have to go back to class,” Bruno said. “We could go to the nurse’s office an’ hang out.”

Thomas didn’t want to go back to the room of sunlight and laughter.

“Do we have to go outside?” he asked.

“Naw,” Bruno replied, and then he ran up the hall.

Thomas ran after him. Even though Bruno was big and slow, he got to the end of the hall before Thomas.

“Why you breathin’ so hard?” Bruno asked his new friend.

“I was in a glass bubble when I was a baby. ’Cause of a hole in my chest. Ever since then I get tired easy.”

“AND WHAT’S WRONG
with you?” Mrs. Turner, the school nurse, asked Thomas.

The boy just looked up at her thinking that she had the same skin color as his mother but her voice and face were different.

“Well?” the nurse asked.

“He was cryin’,” Bruno, who stood beside the seated Thomas, said.

“Crying about what?” Mrs. Turner asked Bruno.

“How should I know?” the fat boy replied, folding his arms over his chest.

The nurse smiled instead of getting angry at Bruno’s impudence.

“Why were you crying, Tommy?” she asked.

“They were laughin’ and the sun was too bright—it, it pained me.”

Bruno giggled, and Mrs. Turner cocked her head to the side.

“It hurt?” she asked.

“In my heart,” the boy said, “where I had to heed.”

Thomas touched the center of his chest.

The nurse gasped and touched herself in the same place.

Bruno had stopped his laughing. Now he was staring goggle-eyed and astonished at his new friend.

“Would you like to take a nap, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked in a most gentle voice.

Thomas nodded.

“Can Bruno take one too?”

“No. He has to go back to class.”

“Dog,” Forman complained.

After Bruno left, the nurse led Thomas to a small room that smelled slightly of disinfectant. There were built-in glass-doored cabinets on the right side and there was a small cot against the opposite wall. When she pulled the shade down, Thomas realized that it was made from clear green plastic so the sun still shone in but not so brightly like in Mr. Meyers’s classroom.

Thomas took off his shoes and put them under the cot. Then he got into the bed, and Mrs. Turner pulled the thin blanket over him.

“What happened to your nose?” the school nurse asked.

“My dad put on the brakes so he didn’t hit this kid on a skateboard.” Tommy liked it when she put the flat of her hand on his chest.

“Is this your first day at school, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked the boy.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where is your family from?”

“My dad lives down the street.”

“But then why is this your first day?”

Thomas told the nurse the story about his mother dying and his father coming to take him. He told her about the police and his grandmother’s TV and Eric, his white brother who lived in Beverly Hills.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Mrs. Turner said.