Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

Over the last three years he had made a home for himself among his family and friends. Besides May and Elton, he had his grandmother, Madeline, whom he stayed with one weekend a month. (He persuaded Madeline to let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen, where the hum of the refrigerator’s motor drowned out the all-night TV.) Then there was Bruno, who had been diagnosed with leukemia and juvenile diabetes. Bruno had managed to go to school through the second grade, but now he was homebound and the school sent a tutor to visit him on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thomas dropped by to visit Bruno, and his pixilated Aunt Till, at least one day during the week and also on Saturdays, when May and Elton stayed in bed until noon.

Pedro always talked about going to Seattle to live with his sister, but whenever he got any money, he spent it on pizzas for himself and Thomas — only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.

These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother — and then there was Alicia.

Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys. Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.

One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.

“Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.

The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.

Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name Ralphie written across it.

Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.

When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.

“Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”

“You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.

“Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”

“What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.

“Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”

“But what if we hide her?”

“How?”

“We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top. Then it would be like a coffin.”

Thomas was thinking about the casket that sat in front of the church, the casket that held his mother. He’d always been ashamed that he hadn’t looked at her to say good-bye even though she’d told him in his dreams that it was okay.

Pedro spent the next two hours hauling cinder blocks out of the apartment building to the lonely corner where Alicia (Thomas had already named her) lay. Together the boys lined four of the cement bricks down either side of her small and slender body, then placed one at her head and another at her feet. Then they bridged more blocks over her. When they were done, they had constructed a long cement-colored pyramid over the dead girl.

“May you go to heaven and meet your maker,” Thomas said, paraphrasing words he’d heard his grandmother saying about her friends that died.

“Amen,” Pedro chimed. “Man, I’m tired after all that. You think you could get me a peanut butter sandwich?”

Later that day Thomas covered the coffin with leaves and branches so that nobody would see it. He put a small crate near the mound so that he could sit next to Alicia’s makeshift tomb and talk to her. At these times his mother’s voice would come to him, and they would all talk about living and dying.

Thomas doubled his efforts at cleaning up the alley because he didn’t want Alicia’s graveyard to be littered. This was a lot of work because many of the neighbors threw cans and bags of garbage over the fence. For them it was their private junkyard, not a holy place meant to house the dead.

Whenever Thomas filled up a trash bag with garbage, he’d climb up into his “church tree” and drop the bag into their open Dumpster.

Ages six, seven, and eight were good for Thomas, but nine was not so great.

The first thing that happened came out of a conversation he’d had with Pedro. They’d been talking about how Pedro’s family hated him. And he hated them too. Thomas said that he loved his family. He started talking about his mother, and then about Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan. He told Pedro how much he missed them.

“Why don’t you call’em?” the bright-eyed boy suggested. “You know his name is Nolan and that he’s a doctor and he lives in Beverly Hills. All you got to do is call information.”

Thomas tried this when May was out one weekday morning. He got the number and scrawled it on an unopened gas bill.

After many nervous moments, he decided to call.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said cautiously.

“Ahn?” Thomas said, his heart quailing.

“Who this?”

“It’s Tommy.”

Silence.

“It’s Tommy, Ahn. Don’t you remember me?”

“What do you want?” she asked in a slow, metered voice.

Thomas didn’t know what to say. He wanted so much: his mother back alive, his brother living on the floor below, the elementary school where he knew everybody from kindergarten and where the sun wasn’t too bright. He wanted to sit with Dr. Nolan and talk about the heart and blood vessels and muscle and blood. Thomas wanted his room back and the floor where he learned to be quiet and to feel the world become one with him.

“Don’t call here anymore, Tommy,” Ahn said. “It’s not good for you. You stay where you are and things are better.”

Then she hung up.

Thomas cried for the first time since he could remember. He had dreamed for years about being reunited with Eric and Ahn, but now all of that was over. They didn’t want him even to call. He blubbered there on the couch next to the pink phone. He was crying when May came home.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“They don’t love me,” the boy cried. “They told me not to call.”

May thought that he was talking about some friends at school. She took him in her arms and assured him that she and Elton loved him very much. And so did Madeline and lots of other people too.

But Thomas would not be consoled. He had lost something that day that could never be replaced. He was sorry that he’d called. At least if he hadn’t he never would have known the truth.

Ahn was also desolate over Thomas’s call. She sat in her small room, at the back of the big empty house, wringing the blood-spattered T-shirt that she’d kept from childhood. She didn’t want to hurt Thomas — she loved the little boy — but by now she was certain that Eric was cursed. He was a danger to anyone who threatened him or loved him. Thomas was safer where he was.

Three days after the phone call to the Nolan household, Elton came home in the middle of the day. May and Thomas were sitting in the kitchen.

“May!” Elton yelled.

They could tell by the way he slammed the door that he was in a bad mood. His father’s heavy footfalls down the hall brought Thomas to his feet. If he’d had a moment more, the boy would have ducked into the back porch.