Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

They heard the front door slam, and Thomas breathed a sigh of relief that his father had gone.

The woman carried Thomas to a wooden chair at a table in the center of the big room. She sat with him nestled in her lap.

Thomas liked her soft warmth and sweet odor. When she put her hand to the side of his cheek, he pressed his head against her palm.

“You a sweet boy, huh?” she said, hugging him closer. “My name is May. I used to know your mother a long time ago, before you were born.”

“I thought Daddy said that you moved away?” Thomas said then, remembering the conversation at the hotel restaurant.

“He did? When did he say that?”

“When we had lunch.”

“You had lunch with him before today?”

“Uh-huh. Me and my mama did.”

“Elton had lunch wit’ Branwyn and you?”

“Uh-huh.”

For a moment Thomas thought that he’d said something wrong, but then May smiled. She had a beautiful smile, and for the first time in many days the boy forgot that he was sad.

“We don’t have a proper bedroom for you yet, Tommy,” May said. “But there’s a cot out on the back porch, and it’s gonna be pretty warm for the next little while. You wanna see it?”

Thomas nodded and put his hand against May’s cheek. When he did this she swelled up, taking in a deep breath. She put him down on the floor and kissed his cheek before she stood up, and then, hand in hand, they walked through the back door and into the screened-in back porch.

The floor was made of unfinished wood planks, a few of which had spaces between them so that Thomas could see down through to the ground underneath. The porch was about twelve feet long and only five feet wide. Three of the walls were made of corroded metal screening, and the roof was layered with white aluminum slats. There was a broken lawn mower in the corner and three decomposing cardboard boxes spilling out rags and papers along the screen walls. The cot supported a bright blue-and-green vinyl-covered mattress that belonged on a chaise longue near a pool.

“I got a sheet that you can have,” May said. “And there’s some pillows and blankets in the cabinet in our room. An’ don’t you worry about Elton. He ain’t mad at you. Him an’ me just fight sometimes.”

After that May showed Thomas her and Elton’s bedroom and then her “sewing room” at the end of another long hall. They got the sheet and a blanket, a pillow and a lamp — which had a ceramic mermaid as a base — for his back-porch room. Thomas had learned to make his own bed from his mother, and so he told May that he could make up the room on his own.

She went to make a phone call, and when she got off she told Thomas that she was going out and to tell Elton, when he got back, that she was going to have dinner with August Murphy.

Thomas wasn’t worried to be alone. All he could see out of his screen walls were the trees of their yard and the yards of their neighbors. Beyond the trees there was a dark area and then the houses of the people behind.

Thomas threaded the cord for his lamp through a small window that led from the kitchen to the porch. He plugged the cord into a socket near the sink. He found a small transistor radio and turned the dial until he came upon a station playing the violin music that Ahn liked to listen to when she was washing clothes.

The back porch was filled with life and death. There were spiderwebs that had dead and dying moths and flies trapped in them. And there were crawling spiders and flying gnats. There was a hornet’s hive on the other side of the screen. Slow-flying yellow-and-black stingers hovered on the breeze humming their low-pitched songs.

In the crook of a tree’s trunk, not five feet away from his transparent wall, Tommy spied a bird’s nest. The chicks chirped and cried until their mother came with food that she forced down their gullets. Then they cried again. On the ground at the foot of the tree lay a dead chick. Three long lines of black ants led to and from the small, gray feathered corpse.

Thomas was happy with his half room at the back of the dark house. He settled down on his knees on the floor and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it would be like to be that open-eyed, open-mouthed chick on the ground below his peeping brothers and sisters, the soft tickle of tiny ants across his body, the spiky grass growing up from underneath.

After a while Thomas forgot the dead chick. He was just there on his knees slowly becoming one with the floor, searching for his mother again among the timbers and nails and then into the ground below.

As he sat there the sun, which filtered onto the porch bringing sweet green light down, began to fade. He even forgot about his mother, being aware of only the cool evening breezes and the sonorous buzzing of hornets.

Just before it was fully night, a banging sound jarred Thomas from his ruminations. Hard footsteps through the floor made him open his eyes. And the loud “May, where are you?” brought him to his feet.

When the back door to the porch opened, he was looking up, ready to face Elton.

“Where’s May?” the man asked his son.

“She’s having dinner with August Murphy,” the boy said.

“What?” Elton cried, the word sounding more like a threat than a question.

Thomas repeated the answer, thinking that his father must have thought that he was saying something else.

“Did she tell you to tell me that or did you hear her on the phone?”

“She was on the phone, and then she said to say it,” Thomas replied.

“What the hell is this lamp doin’ out here?” Elton asked then. And before Thomas could reply, “What the hell you doin’ here with all the lights in the house out? If you leave the lights out then thieves think you ain’t home an’ come an’ rob you. Didn’t they tell you that at those white people’s house?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you mean you don’t know? You stupid?”

Thomas realized that there was no answer he could give that would keep Elton from getting angrier, so he didn’t say anything.

“She said to tell me that she was going out to dinner with August Murphy?”

Thomas nodded.

This seemed to work. Instead of shouting, Elton went back into the house. He banged around and made noises with what sounded to Thomas like bottles and glasses. He made a phone call and did a lot of loud cursing. Then he went two rooms away to the living room, where he turned the TV up loud.

The night came on as all of this was happening. Thousands of insects fluttered up to the screen and thumped up against it in their attempt to get at the lamplight. Beyond the night bugs were a few stars and the quarter moon. Looking up there, Thomas remembered the nights when Dr. Nolan and Eric were gone to some family party. Branwyn and Thomas would go out into the flower garden in their pajamas and bare feet. Big pale-green moths flew overhead, and the boy and his mother made up stories about the stars.

“It’s like a big coat on the man in the moon,” Branwyn would say, “and all the stars are just the dust that fell off the sun.”

“An’ if he brush it off,” Thomas would add, “all the dust would fall down on us, but it would be yellow diamonds and dimes.”

They’d laugh and run through the garden until way after Thomas’s bedtime. And when he’d go to bed finally, he’d get the giggles so bad that he couldn’t go to sleep for laughing.

Lying across that hard and lumpy mattress, on Elton and May’s back porch, Thomas thought about the flower garden and his mother, and he believed that somewhere she was thinking the same things. This made him very happy, and he fell asleep feeling that he wasn’t alone in that screened-in room.

In his dreams he was drowsing in the big chair in the backyard near the pool. As usual he was tired after only a little while, but Eric was still leaping from the diving board and telling everybody to look. Dr. Nolan and Branwyn were lying side by side on two lounge chairs, and Ahn was sitting near to where Eric was, just in case he got into trouble from playing too hard.