Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“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.

“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.