Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

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.