Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

Thomas brought Pedro down into the building and gave him candles that he’d taken from his father’s house.

“There rats in here?” Pedro asked, looking around suspiciously at the shadowy corners.

“Naw,” said Thomas. “There’s nuthin’ for rats to eat in here. As long as you don’t have any food there’s no rats or roaches. Just some spiders and moths and stuff.”

They settled in, and Pedro told Thomas about his sad life. His mother’s family, who didn’t like his father, and his father, who was a good guy when he wasn’t high. And all the people who hated Pedro because he was a half-breed.

Thomas felt akin to the boy. He gave him a peanut butter sandwich that he’d made in his house. They talked for hours, until the school bell rang and Thomas had to go.

“When you coming back, Lucky?” Pedro asked his host.

“Not till tomorrow morning.” And he was off.

When thomas got home, his house smelled of cooking.

“I’m makin’ chicken an’ dumplin’s,” May told him. “That’s your father’s favorite.”

The kitchen was spotless, and so were the living room and the hallway, Elton’s bedroom and May’s room too. She had picked up, swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed the whole house in the time Thomas was gone.

The cleanliness somehow elated the boy. He laughed and capered.

Later on May gave him string cheese and black cherry jam on dense pumpernickel bread. Then she made some not-too-sweet hot chocolate, and they sat at the table in the kitchen with her apologizing to him for the night she and Elton fought.

“You should never blame your father for that,” she said. “It was all my fault. A man can’t bear to hear about his woman bein’ off with another man. He got to do somethin’. He got to get mad.”

Thomas was sitting on May’s lap when she told him this.

Then the front door could be heard banging open, followed by a man’s voice saying, “What the hell?”

Thomas leaped from May’s lap and ran to the back porch. He jumped in the bed and hid his head under the pillow so as not to hear the yelling and crashing. He counted up to fifteen, and then he counted again. When he reached thirty and hadn’t heard a thing, he became even more anxious. He remembered his mother dying there next to him without even a sound to warn him. Maybe May was dying somehow, he thought. And so he climbed out of the bed and crawled to the door.

He pushed the door open and saw that Elton had May on the kitchen table again. But this time they were kissing. Elton had his hand up under May’s dress again. But she was holding his head and smiling when he wasn’t kissing her.

“The boy,” May said wistfully.

“What about him?” Elton said in a husky voice.

“He’s right back there, Elton.”

“He got to learn sometime. Anyway, he probably just a little faggot.”

“No, baby. Let’s go to our room.”

Elton picked May up off the table and stumbled out of the room, straining under the weight.

Later on Thomas heard her hollering from their bedroom. He worried that maybe they were fighting again and that the police would come and that he’d be put in a cell with some man taking out his thing.

But the screaming stopped and the police never came.

Later still May came and got him, and they all ate a late-night dinner of chicken and dumplings in the clean-smelling house.

Years after Thomas was gone from May and Elton’s home, Eric skipped the eleventh grade. He had done the core course work over the summer, spending the evenings with Christie. She got an apartment near the beach in Santa Monica, where he spent most afternoons doing his homework, surfing, and making love to her.

At first Drew called every day. He’d leave long, tearful messages asking Christie to come back East. She told him again and again that she couldn’t, that she needed time to think about things.

One day, while Eric waxed his surfboard on the couch across from her, Christie answered the phone, frowned, and said, “Oh, hi, Drew.”

He had called to tell her that he’d made the decision to come home midyear and go to UCLA.

“But you wanted to graduate from Yale,” she said.

“I want you.”

“I’ve met another man,” she said in a clear, emotionless voice. “And I love him.”

Eric could hear Drew crying.

“You can come back, but I’m with him now.”

She listened to him cry and tried to make him feel better. But there was no caring in her voice, no love left over for him.

When she hung up the phone, she said to Eric, “Come fuck me.”

Eric’s embarrassment for Drew, combined with his admiration for Christie’s brazen request, caused him to become very excited. They went at it so powerfully that Eric broke the condom when he came.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I just finished my period yesterday.”

And so they made love again, and again, without protection.

Eric called Ahn and told her that he was spending the night in Santa Monica.

“Be careful,” Ahn told him.

Christie cried and then they made love. She laughed and they made love.

“I dropped him,” she said, surprised at her own resolve.

“You didn’t love him,” Eric explained.

“I do love him. I want to marry him. I want to go to school in the East and be with him every weekend.”

“Then why don’t you?” Eric asked.

“I tried, but I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

They were sitting side by side in Christie’s single bed. She’d been fired from her father’s company when he found out that she was spending all her time with a fifteen-year-old boy. Now she worked for a design agency that had offices in the Third Street Mall. Her father took back the company car and disowned her.

The rent was due, and she was a hundred dollars short. Eric could help her this month, but he wondered how long she could live like that.

“I can’t even be away from you for more than two days, Eric,” she said. “When you stay home on the weekends, sometimes I cry until you’re back again.”

“Because you miss me?” he asked.

“Because it hurts,” she said. “It hurts inside me. Sometimes I don’t even like you. I look at you and think how great my life was before we met. I even hate you for not caring about anything. And then you get up just to go to the toilet and I get scared that I might not ever see you again.”

Eric remembered the times when she came into the bathroom while he was taking a piss. She’d come up behind him, shivering against him, and hold his penis while he urinated.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“Do you love me? Is that it?”

“It’s not that at all. I love Drew. Sometimes I think about him, how sweet he was trying to be tough, trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes when we’d get together, he’d tell me about how scared he was that he wouldn’t get into Yale or that he wouldn’t be able to make it from nothing like his father did. That’s when I loved him the most. I protected him.”

Eric realized that Christie was telling him something that he’d always suspected but never really knew because he found it so hard to understand. He still didn’t completely grasp what it was that people felt about him. But at least Christie opened the door.

“So you don’t love me?” he asked.

“It’s not about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time I saw you I wanted to get down on my knees,” the young woman said with anger and some fear in her voice. “It scared me, and I went home and took a bath. But that didn’t help. I went to my room and closed the door, and then I started thinking about dying.”

“Dying? Why?”

“That’s how you made me feel.” She was weeping now. “I knew that either I was going to call you or that I’d die.”