Fortunate Son: A Novel (8 page)

“She looks over me,” Thomas replied, and the nurse gasped again.

Nurse Turner shared her lunch with Thomas. After that he returned to Mr. Meyers’s class. The sun still bothered him, but he kept from crying by looking at the floor.

Toward the end of the day, Mr. Meyers called on a tall black girl named Shauna Jones. He pointed to the letter
R,
written in dusty yellow on the dark-green chalkboard.

“Are,” Mr. Meyers said clearly.

“Ara,” Shauna repeated.

“Are.”

“Ara.”

“Are.”

“Arar.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones,” Meyers said. “New boy. Your turn.”

Shauna sat down, showing no sign that she had failed the white teacher’s test.

Thomas tried to stand up, but somehow his feet got tangled and he tripped and fell.

The children all laughed, except for Bruno, who helped his new friend to his feet.

“Shut up!”

Thomas turned to face the angry teacher.

“Are,” Meyers said.

“Are,” Thomas repeated, raising his voice and using the same angry tone.

“Are.”

“Are.”

Meyers stared at the boy suspiciously. It was almost as if he thought that this slender black child was pulling a joke on him.

“Constantinople,” the first-grade teacher said, suddenly jutting his head forward like a striking snake.

“Wha’?” Shauna said.

“Constantinople,” Thomas said easily.

“Sit down,” Meyers said.

As Thomas did so he noticed that many of the children were staring at him with the same concentrated frown that the teacher had on his face.

“You talk funny,” Bruno whispered.

AFTER THE FINAL
bell Bruno showed Thomas where the big front door was. But when the new boy got out in front of the school, he found himself in the midst of a thousand running and shouting children. In all that confusion he didn’t know which way to go.

“Where you live at?” Bruno asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ont know where you live at?”

“My dad walked me here today,” Thomas said. “He was tellin’ me how I shouldn’t be in trouble and I didn’t look.”

“Where you near?” Bruno asked.

Bigger children were pushing by them. They were laughing and yelling, and the sun shone down from the western sky. Thomas felt his heart beating, and he clenched his jaw to stem the onset of tears.

“There’s a gas station that’s closed,” he said. “It’s got a horse with wings in front of a big
A.
”

“I know where that’s at,” Bruno said with a reassuring smile. “You go on down that street there.”

Thomas looked in the direction that Bruno was pointing. There were dozens of children that they had to get through to get to the crosswalk. There stood an old black man with a red handheld stop sign.

“You sure is lucky,” Bruno was saying.

“What?”

“The nurse let you stay an’ you wasn’t even sick.”

Thomas giggled.

“See ya, Bruno,” he said.

“See ya, Lucky.”

HALFWAY DOWN THE
block to Elton’s house, Thomas ran into a knot of four boys. They were all dark-skinned like him but a year or two older. None of them smiled, and they all walked with exaggerated limps.

“Who you, mothahfuckah?” one of the boys asked.

He was moving his head from side to side and wore black jeans and a white T-shirt that was at least three sizes too big.

Hearing the anger in the boy’s tone, Thomas didn’t answer, only stared.

“Don’t you heah me talkin’ to you, mothahfuckah?” the boy said, and then he slapped Thomas—hard.

Thomas tried to run, but after only three steps, he felt a fist in his back. One more step and something hit him in the right calf. Thomas fell and the boys set on him. He put his hands up around his ears, and with nothing else he could do, he counted the blows.

One, two in the back. Three on the ear. Four, five, six on his shoulder. Seven was his head bumping the concrete.

And then it was over. No more hitting or cursing. Thomas looked up and saw the four boys limping away from the battle scene. The smallest one (who was still much larger than Thomas) looked back. Thomas ducked his head, not wanting to make eye contact.

When he got home he had a bloody scrape on the side of his head and pains in his back and leg. His pants were torn at the knees, and his injured nose throbbed.

Elton got home at seven.

“What you mean them boys beat up on you?” he asked his son. “Did you hit’em back? Did you?”

“No.”

“Well then how you evah expect them to respect you if you don’t fight back? An’ look at yo’ pants. I cain’t go out an’ buy you new clothes every time you a coward.”

The whine in Elton’s voice made it seem as if he was pleading with Thomas, begging him not to make him treat him like a coward.

Thomas didn’t want to talk about his day at school or the bullies that beat him. He didn’t want new pants or respect.

Elton brought home pizza, but Thomas had already eaten tuna on slightly moldy whole-wheat bread with Miracle Whip and a glass of Tang.

He got away from his angry father as soon as he could, going out to his bedroom porch. He moved around on the mattress until none of his bruises or scrapes hurt. He had to breathe through his mouth because his nose was stuffy from the swelling, but he didn’t mind. In a short while he was asleep.

And in that rest he finally found what he’d been looking for all the days since his mother had died next to him in the bed.

He was hunkered down in a room that he’d never been in before. There was no furniture at all, no paintings on the white walls or carpeting on the dusty, dark wood floor. There was a doorway with no door in it that revealed nothing but an outer hallway and a real door that Thomas knew somehow opened onto a closet. He was squatting in the middle of the room, but he didn’t know how he got there.

“I’m just sittin’ here,” he said aloud to himself.

Very slowly, the closet door opened. And then Branwyn stuck her head out, smiling at her son. He stayed perfectly still and silent so as not to scare her away. She moved her head around, looking to see if there was anyone else there.

“You alone?” she asked.

She came out of the closet wearing her white slip and the cream-colored satin slippers that Dr. Nolan had bought her in Chinatown.

Smiling broadly, she knelt down in front of her son and ran her fingertips along his brow.

“What have they done to you, baby?” she asked.

Thomas began crying again, as he had in Mr. Meyers’s room. Branwyn sat in the dust and took him on her lap. They rocked there in the middle of the floor, both crying in separate sadness and combined joy. After a long time the mother lifted her boy’s chin and looked deeply into his eyes.

“The birds and crickets and hornets and spiders have all been telling me that they see you looking for me.”

Thomas nodded and kissed her hand.

“You don’t have to look so far, honey,” she said. “I’m right here in your heart whenever you want me. Just whisper my name and then listen and I will be there.”

Thomas raised his head to kiss his mother’s lips and came awake in the bed kissing the air.

Ribbet,
came the call of a frog.

Ribbet.

It was late in the night. The house was dark. The neighborhood was dark. And two sociable frogs were talking about their day.

Thomas took their calls for proof that his mother had been there and that she would always be there with him—inside, where no one could ever take her away again.

“NO I WILL
not walk you to school,” Elton told him the next morning.

They were sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast. Thomas was eating Frosted Flakes and toasted English muffins with strawberry jam. Elton had instant coffee while he smoked a menthol cigarette.

“It’s not that I don’t have the time neither,” Thomas’s father continued. “I could walk ya if I wanted to, but you got to learn to stand up for yo’self.”

Slowly, Thomas made his way toward the front of the house.

“Tommy,” his father said before he entered the long hallway that led from the kitchen to the front room.

“Yes, Dad?”

“Come here.”

Thomas obeyed. He walked up to his father’s chair and stood before him, looking down at the floor.

“Look at me.”

Thomas raised his head, afraid for a moment that his father was going to hit him.

Elton did reach out, but it was only to put a hand on his boy’s shoulder.

“You don’t have to flinch from me, boy,” he said. “I love you. Do you know that?”

Thomas stared at his father, trying to understand.

“I know you mad that I took you outta that white family’s house. I know you want me to walk you to school. But you have to understand that everything I’m doin,’ I’m doin’ for you. You need to be with your own blood. You got to learn to stand up for yo’self. Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too,” Elton replied.

“You?”

“Scared to death every day I climb out the bed,” he said. “You know, a black man out here in these streets got a thousand enemies. Men want his money, his woman, his life, and he don’t even know who they are. That’s why I took you, Tommy. I want you to learn what I know. Do you understand what I’m sayin’ to you?”

“If a rabbit sees a lion he gets scared and runs,” Thomas said, remembering a story that Ahn had told him.

“What’s that?”

“If a rabbit sees a lion he gets scared and runs,” the boy said again. “But then if a lion sees a elephant he runs ’cause the elephant could step on him an’ break his back.”

“The lion is the king of the jungle,” Elton said, his tone angry and not angry at the same time.

“I know. But he’s still afraid of the elephant.”

Father and son stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. Elton had the feeling that he’d missed something, but he had no idea what that something was.

“Go on to school now, boy,” he said at last.

ON THE FRONT
step of the shabby box-shaped house, Thomas looked both ways, watching for the big boys that he’d run into the day before. He didn’t see anyone except an old woman across the street sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house. Thomas hurried down the pavement, almost running on his way to school.

Three houses down a hidden dog jumped out, lunging at him. The dog growled and snapped, but the chain around its neck stopped him from getting at the boy.

Thomas froze, thinking that the dog would get away somehow and chase him down. But the restraint held.

Thomas sighed. He took three steps toward school.

“Hey you, mothahfuckah,” a familiar voice called from behind.

They surrounded him quickly. Three of them were dressed in signature white T-shirt and jeans. One boy wore a jean jacket and black pants. All of their tennis shoes were white.

Thomas noticed these things, categorizing, listing, and hoping somehow the knowledge would save him from another beating, still knowing that nothing would save him. Nothing ever would.

“You got money in yo’ pocket, suckah?” the tall eight-year-old leader asked.

Thomas breathed in through his mouth and shook his head—no.

The backhand stung his left cheek. He felt a trickle of blood come out of his left nostril.

“Empty yo’ pockets, man,” another boy said.

Thomas looked at all eight eyes staring angrily at him. Years later he would wake up from a nightmare about those eyes, not in fear of violence but from the sad memory of their hatred.

Fight ’em back,
he heard his father say. And then he turned to run. But his feet got tangled up, and he fell right there in front of his enemies.

“Kick his ass!” a boy shouted.

Thomas rolled up like the gray-shelled pill bugs he would watch in the garden. He closed his eyes and made ready to count the blows, but instead he heard a girl shouting. He wondered if the boys had attacked somebody else, somebody behind him.

He opened his eyes and raised his head.

A very large black girl (who looked somehow familiar) was punching the ringleader of the gang in the face. The other boys rushed at her, but she slapped one, punched another, and kicked the third, one, two, three times. The first boy she hit was crying. Thomas hadn’t believed that those mean boys
could
cry. The other three were running.

“Git!” the big girl yelled, and stamped her foot on the concrete.

The crying boy let out howling.

“You show’em, girl,” the old woman from across the street called. “Show them li’l niggahs a thing or two.”

The girl turned her head toward Thomas, and the boy quailed. He thought that she would destroy him now with her fists and feet and loud shouts. But instead Bruno ran up from nowhere and held out his hand.

“Come on, Lucky,” the jolly first-grader said. “Git up.”

The girl reached down too. For a moment Thomas felt weightless, and then he was standing on his feet.

“This Monique,” Bruno said in the way of an introduction. “My sister. She’s twelve, in junior high.”

“Hi,” the big girl said. She smiled. “That li’l Alvin Johnson need somebody to kick his butt ev’ry mornin’. That’s the on’y way he evah gonna do right.”

“I told Monique about you, Lucky. I told her you talked funny but you might get lost on the way to school. So she walked me ovah here.”

Thomas was very happy. He laughed, and big Monique smiled down on him.

“Don’t you know the secret way to school?” she asked him.

He shook his head.

“Com’on,” Monique said, and with a wave of her hand she led them down the driveway of the house with the leashed dog.

When it barked at her, she got down on her knees and held out her hand. The dog growled, then sniffed, then licked her fingers.

Thomas knew that if he tried that the dog would bite his whole hand off.

Behind the house was a fence with a hole in it that led to the blocked-off alley behind Elton’s house. Back there sapling trees grew in profusion and birds sang and small creatures scuttled. There were pools of water with bright-green algae growing over them and an old redbrick incinerator that housed a large rodentlike creature.