Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.

“I could come home early,” the doctor offered.

“Sure, Dad.”

Ahn came out of the storeroom moments after Minas left. She stood near the door staring at Eric.

“Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.

She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.

Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of. It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.

“The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me. I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.

“He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.

“At night he calls outside my window and asks me to come away with him, the girl said. And when I look out I see him in moonlight. Mother, he is so beautiful and handsome, and his deep voice makes me tremble inside.

“But, my daughter, the mother said. He is a tiger, a man-eater, a monster.

“For you, Mother, I know that he is a beast. But for me he has nothing but love. He takes me riding on his back through the jungle under golden moonlight, and all the creatures there bow down to me as consort to their king.

“It is true, the mother said, that the tiger is a king. He is better than any man you would find in our poor village. But he is still a tiger, something apart. And even if he believes that he loves you, sooner or later you will answer to his claws.

“The girl said nothing more to her mother about her love. That night she disappeared from the house of her parents, taking with her a yellow robe that many generations of her family’s women had worn on their wedding day. Three years passed and nothing was heard about the girl until one morning an infant boy was found in the middle of the village swaddled in a bloody yellow cloth. A beautiful boy with tiger’s eyes and a roar instead of crying. The grandmother took in the child, and he became a great king. But he was always heartbroken and sad because he had no true mother or any father at all.

“And one day, while he was on a crusade to unite all his people, he was beset by a tiger. His retainers mortally wounded the beast, but before the tiger died the young king looked deeply into his eyes. There he saw the truth: that his father, the tiger, had devoured his mother, but she lived on inside of him. The boy had found both his mother and his father, but in finding them they were slain.”

Ahn stood up and walked from the room. Eric felt the warning in her words. He even understood the general meaning of the tale. But he didn’t know what role she saw him in. Was he the tiger or the boy? Was Christie the village girl? Was Ahn the powerless mother? He sat there for over an hour considering the parable. He went over it again and again.

He imagined the stately tiger walking through the jungle with the golden apparition of the village girl astride his back. In his jaws the tiger carried a bloodied yellow cloth in which the royal baby was wrapped. The image made his breath come fast. It was beautiful and very sad.

“The tiger and the village girl had no choice,” Eric declared to an empty kitchen. “They were meant to be. And the boy, the boy can’t help himself either. They’re all just waiting for their parts to play.”

He took the bus down to Santa Monica, seeing himself as a pawn and satisfied to release himself to fate.

For most of those first three years away from the Nolan household, Thomas was more or less happy. He hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since the first week, but he could hear the school bell from the clubhouse / apartment building that he shared with the morose Pedro. Every day at the lunch bell he went to talk to May. She’d make him a hot lunch and talk about her life. May didn’t need any response from the boy, and he loved to hear her talk because she seemed happy to be getting things off her chest. That happiness filled Thomas’s own heart.

Not that May lived a happy life. Elton was very jealous of her. Sometimes at night he would come home and want to know where she’d been and who she’d been with. He’d slapped her on a few occasions; once he’d even blackened her eye.

But May, by her own account, never cheated on Elton. Twice she had to “do things” with Mr. Sanders, the landlord, because they were short on the rent for more than two months. But she did that to help Elton, even though she could never tell him because he would kill both her and Sanders if he knew. But she didn’t like it with Sanders like she did with Thomas’s father.

The only times that she had ever been bad were when she was either drunk or high.

“You should never do any drugs, Lucky,” May had said. “It’s the devil in them.”

That was what had happened one day when Thomas came home to find May and a man called Wolf wrestling in the nude on the living room floor. When Thomas opened the door, Wolf jumped up and stood there with his big erection standing stiff and straight. The man was breathing hard, and his eyes were wild and very white against his black skin.

“That’s just Lucky, Wolf,” May said in a deep voice. “Go wait in the kitchen, Tommy. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”

But she didn’t come in. She and Wolf made noises for a long time, and finally Thomas went out through the back porch to his alley valley.

The next day when Thomas mentioned the man May was with the day before, she said, “How you know about Wolf?”

Somehow she had forgotten even seeing Thomas. He told her about them being naked and wrestling, and asked if his peeny was going to get like Wolf’s.

“You can’t ever tell Elton about Wolf,” she said. And then she told him that he should never do drugs.

“Drugs make you crazy like me an’ Wolf,” she said.

Wolf brought her drugs, and after she took them they took off their clothes and did that. And the drugs also made her forget about Thomas. She promised not to do drugs anymore, and he said okay and they went on for a long time as if that day with Wolf had never happened.

But May had other problems too. Elton was the source of many of them. Mostly it was because he never made enough money, and because of that he was mad all the time. And when he got mad he drank. And when he drank he got mean. And then he’d go out and get in fights, and when he got home May and Thomas had to hide from him.

Thomas listened to his father complain about the money he had to spend on the food that Thomas ate, including the dollar for his school lunch.

Thomas would have given up the lunch money except for Skully.

Skully was a mutt puppy that Thomas found on their doorstep one morning on his way to work. (Thomas referred to going to his alley as going to work because he spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned street and fixing up his clubhouse.)

Skully was a whining, licking ball of fur that Thomas immediately fell in love with. He brought the puppy back into the alley and fed him his peanut butter sandwich. That afternoon he went down to the corner store (after three so as not to be caught by the truant officer) and bought cheap dog food for his pet.

He named the dog Skully because of his mispronunciation of the foes of the Fantastic Four, the shape-shifting Skrulls. Thomas pretended that Skully was a Skrull prince that changed into a puppy and now couldn’t change back, and it was Thomas’s job to feed and protect him until his people came and brought him back home to his castle.