Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“What you smilin’ ’bout, boy?” Elton asked at the dinner table that night.

They were eating meat loaf, mustard greens, and watery mashed potatoes from a take-out restaurant three blocks away.

“Here I am workin’ my butt off to pay the rent and for yo’ breakfast, lunch, an’ dinnah, an’ all you could do is smile. Life is serious, Tommy. You cain’t be goin’ through yo’ day grinnin’ like some fool. You got to get serious an’ work hard like me. You think I keep us in house an’ home walkin’ down the street smilin’?”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said, even though he wasn’t.

“Damn right you sorry. Now eat your damn meat.”

“It makes my stomach hurt.”

They ate food from the mom-and-pop takeout at least three nights a week. Thomas had trouble digesting meat with a lot of fat in it. Ahn used to trim all the fat from his portions.

“Hurt your stomach. You should try not eatin’. That’s what hurts.”

Thomas took a bite of meat loaf to placate Elton. Then he worked on the mashed potatoes and greens.

The boy didn’t want his piece of lemon meringue pie, and so Elton gobbled it down to teach his spoiled son a lesson, he said.

That weekend Bruno came over. Thomas didn’t invite his jolly friend into his valley. He wanted to keep that paradise for himself. Instead he and Bruno walked the four blocks to Bruno’s house, where together they read a very old, very beat-up comic book about the Fantastic Four and their journey to the planet of the Skrulls.

The Skrulls were born shape-shifters who could become any creature or thing they could imagine. They could be birds or monkeys or even giant bugs. They had the ability to make themselves look human and pass among men with no one knowing the difference.

“If you could turn into anything you wanted, what would it be?” Bruno asked his new and best friend.

Thomas had never thought about being different before that day. It was a novel idea, and he found no words to answer.

“I’d turn into a white man,” Bruno said, impatient with his friend’s deliberation. “No, no, no. First I’d turn into Lana McKinney and look up under my shirt at them fine titties. Then I’d turn into a white man. You know why?”

Thomas shook his head, still trying to find an answer to the first question.

“’Cause if I was a white dude I could be all up there in Beverly Hills and Hollywood and on the cowboy ranches an’ shit like that. An’ they wouldn’t even know that some niggah be all up in they business, so they’d all act natural and then I’d get’em.”

Thomas was lost in Bruno’s sea of words. What would he be? And titties and white men and Hollywood and cowboys.

“I think I’d be a snake,” Thomas said haltingly. “Yeah. A snake.”

“A rattlesnake? Then you could bite Alvin Johnson and kill him, but nobody’d ever know it was you.”

“I don’t care what kind of snake,” Thomas said. “I just wanna be a snake ’cause then I could go all the places I want.”

“Like what?” Bruno asked.

“A snake can climb trees and go real high, and he could go in a hole down in the ground. And he could get through any fence or thornbush and see everything.”

“But a snake don’t have no hands. How would you eat?”

“Like snakes do.”

“Not me. If I was a animal it’a be a tiger or a eagle.”

That afternoon Bruno got tired and had to go to bed. Monique walked Thomas back home so that Alvin Johnson and his gang didn’t beat him up.

“How come you’re wearin’ them tore-up pants?” Monique asked as they walked.

“’Cause my daddy says that I have to wear’em because I let those boys beat me up.”

“You didn’t let’em. They bigger than you. Don’t he know that?”

“He doesn’t care about that,” little Lucky replied.

“Why you so different from other little boys?” Monique asked.

“I didn’t know that I was different.”

“Yeah you is,” Monique assured him. They were walking down Central Avenue under a too-bright sun. “You talk half like a niggah an’ half like somebody white. An’ you don’t know nuthin’ on TV, an’ you always lookin’ at stuff real close like you crazy or sumpin’. An’ if somebody tell you what to do, you just do it like you they slave, but if you don’t wanna talk you mouth be shet like a clam.”

“I like you, Monique,” Thomas said.

“There you go again bein’ different. I’m tellin’ you how weird you is an’ then you tell me how much you like me.”

“But I do,” the boy said. “You’re nice to me, an’ Bruno too.”

Elton met Thomas and Monique at the front door.

“Where’s the fat boy?” Thomas’s blood-father asked.

“Bruno’s sleep,” Thomas said.

“And who are you?” Elton asked Monique.

“Bruno’s sistah. I walked Lucky heah ’cause I’m going t’see my auntie ovah on Fi’ty-second Street.”

Thomas pulled on Monique’s arm until she bent over enough for him to kiss her cheek.

She grinned at him and said, “Stupid,” in not an angry way at all.

In the house Elton asked him, “Why you kiss that girl?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause she walked me home.”

“I don’t want her doin’ that no mo’,” Elton said. “No son’a mine’s gonna be protected by a girl.”

On sunday Thomas left the house because Elton was sleeping and left strict orders that he was not to be awakened for anything or anyone.

So Thomas went into his valley and studied the landscape. There were a few breaks in the fence. One was the oak tree where the green parrot No Man lived. Another was an old, old brick apartment building that had all of its windows and doors barricaded by cinder blocks. There was a metal cellar door, however, that could be bent up enough for a small boy to squeeze through. Thomas stuck his head inside, but it was too dark in there, even for his eyes, and so he decided to come back during the week with candles and a flashlight.

At the stone fence behind the church, Thomas was looking for snakes when he heard the organ sound.

A choir began to sing.

Pressing through the chink in the wall, Thomas cut his cheek. He knew from many, many cuts and scrapes that he had to put pressure on the gash. And so he entered the double door of Holy Baptist Congregational pressing his fingers against the bloody cut, with a crooked nose and pants torn at both knees revealing the scabs from his recent falls.

He sat at the back of what seemed to him a huge room. There he looked up at the black men and women dressed in off-white satin gowns singing about Jesus and his Word. The stained glass and dark woods reminded him of the church where they’d had his mother’s funeral. He felt that the singers both in the choir and among the parishioners were offering hymns for his mother, and so he hummed along with them. He didn’t notice that the well-dressed church members were looking at him sitting there, with his broken nose and bloody face, his sockless feet in muddy shoes, and his torn pants.

A tall, white-gloved deacon came up to him and asked, “Where are your parents, boy?”

“My dad’s asleep and my mother’s dead,” he said.

“They have to be members of the congregation for you to be here,” the man told him.

It took Thomas a few moments to realize that he was being asked to leave. He went out the front door and sat on the concrete stairs listening to the chants and sermons under the shadow of the eaves.

That was Thomas’s life for the next few years. He spent his weekdays in the alley valley and Saturdays at Bruno’s house. On Sundays while Elton slept he perched in a tree behind the church where he could listen to the beautiful songs, which were, in his opinion, about his mother.