Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

With the money he made from drug dealing, he paid the rent and bought the groceries. During most days he’d leave Monique to stay in his alley and on the roof of his apartment building. There he’d visit with Alicia and commemorate his friend Pedro. In the afternoon he went to work for Tremont delivering ecstasy, cocaine, crack, and sometimes heroin.

Two months after he and Monique had moved in together, Thomas came home to find that Monique’s mother had come over and helped deliver Monique’s daughter — Lily. Thomas loved the little baby girl and thought of her as his baby sister. Now he had two sisters.

One night, toward the end of his first year working for Tremont, Thomas went to a house where a big, fat black man, wearing only a ratty bathrobe, answered the door.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I brought you sumpin’ from Tremont,” the boy said.

The man looked around and then grabbed the boy, pulling him into the darkened apartment. He shoved Thomas into a big room where the only light came from a giant television set. The scene on the screen was like when Thomas had come in on Wolf and May. There was a laughing black man with a large erection that he was pressing into a white woman who cried out in pain.

“I’ma do you like that man doin’ that woman,” the large man said.

The big man opened up his bathrobe, and Thomas could see the erection rising up toward his captor’s belly.

“Gimme that rock,” the man said.

Thomas reached down into his underpants and handed over the package.

The man on the screen said, “Take all of it, bitch.”

The woman screamed.

“Take off your pants,” the man told Thomas.

The boy fumbled with the snap while the man tore open the paper.

“I gotta go bafroom,” Thomas said.

“You bettah not have nuthin’ on when you come out.” The man already had the first rock in his glass pipe. He was lighting the match as Thomas closed the bathroom door. The boy turned the lock and jumped up on the toilet. There was a little window over the commode.

Thomas tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Hurry up in there!” the man yelled.

Thomas could see the doorknob jiggle.

“Unlock this goddamned do’!”

There was a loud thump, and the door shuddered.

“Open up!”

Thomas wondered if he should unlock the door.

The loud thump came again, and the doorjamb buckled and cracked.

Thomas found a thick green bottle of aftershave and threw it into the glass. The window shattered, and the door caved in. Thomas jumped through the window, cutting his left thigh and right forearm as he did. He could hear the man’s heavy footsteps across the floor behind him. He stuck his arm out after Thomas, grabbing the boy by his shoulder.

“Let me go!” he cried.

Thomas moved from side to side, scraping the fat man’s arm on the jagged glass that lined the window frame. Suddenly he was free and running down the street in his underwear and T-shirt.

When he got to the secret door in Tremont’s alley, Chilly let him in.

“What the fuck you mean you ain’t got my money, niggah?” Tremont bellowed. He surged up out of his chair and lifted Thomas by one arm.

“He made me take off my pants and showed me what he was gonna do to me in a movie,” Thomas whined. “I had to jump out the windah.”

“Where the money, li’l man?”

“He didn’t pay me. He was just naked, an’ his thing was big.”

“I’ont care about that. I want my money.”

“You know Lucky ain’t stealin’, Tree,” Chilly said in a calm, slow voice. “All he do is what you say, man.”

Thomas’s right arm was bleeding, and his left was in pain from the way the powerful drug dealer held him.

“Look at him,” Chilly continued. “He bleedin’. He ain’t got no pants.”

“RayRay cut you like that?” Tremont asked.

Thomas nodded and sniffed. The drug dealer’s biceps was bigger than his head.

Tremont put Thomas down and then said, “Com’on wit’ me.”

They got to the door, and Tremont turned to Chilly. “Give the li’l man yo’ pants,” he said.

On the way Tremont promised Thomas that he’d kill him if he was lying.

“If you stealin’ from me I’ll kill you,” he said.

Thomas knew the threat was real. Tremont had killed man and boy before.

Tremont banged on RayRay’s door with the butt of his pistol. When nobody answered, he knocked the door in with his shoulder.

In the dark room the DVD was still playing. Now it was a scene of two men having sex with each other. A woman was kissing one and then the other while they groaned. When the screen got very bright, it shone on RayRay, who was sitting in a big chair, the glass pipe still in his hand. His other arm hung down at his side. Below it there was a great deal of gelatinous blood.

“Mothahfuckah daid,” Tremont said, amazed. “Got so high he bleed to death an’ didn’t even know it.”

When Tremont turned on the light, Thomas could see that the fat man’s eyes were half open and sightless, as Alicia’s had been.

“Mothahfuckah cut himself tryin’ to grab you, but he was so fucked up that he just did more rock. Damn. I guess you ain’t lyin’, li’l man.”

Monique cleaned and dressed Thomas’s wounds, but the next day he had a fever. By evening he was talking out of his head.

She brought him to the emergency room with a story about them being brother and sister. He had forgotten his key and locked himself out of the apartment so he broke the window but cut himself climbing in.

“I tried to clean it up, but then he come down with fever,” she said.

The nurse saw her with the infant Lily in her arms and admitted Thomas without alerting social services.

The next day Thomas was weak, but Monique couldn’t keep him from going off to work.

“You gotta quit,” she told him.

“But who gonna pay for you an’ Lily?” the ten-year-old replied. “I’m the only one.”

In the next two years Thomas got stabbed twice and badly beaten once. He’d lost the use of the baby finger of his left hand after being knifed in the arm, but that didn’t bother him much. “Baby finger don’t do much anyway,” he reasoned. He grew, but something about the damage to his hip made his limp worse. Lily was walking and talking and calling him Lucky. Monique had a job at Ralph’s Market as a checkout clerk, but she could only work part-time while Thomas stayed home in the mornings and some evenings with Lily.

They all slept in the same bed, snuggled up and warm, every night. Sometimes in the day, when Monique was working, Thomas would take Lily to the alley valley he loved so much. He told her about Pedro and introduced her to Alicia’s tomb.

On the morning of Thomas’s twelfth birthday, he got up early to go to the toilet. When he came out, Lily giggled and said, “Look at Lucky’s peepee, Mama. It stickin’ out.”

Thomas was embarrassed. He went back into the toilet and came out wearing a towel around his slender hips.

“You want Frosted Flakes?” Monique asked Lily to stop her from laughing.

Thomas was grateful to his friend.

That evening when he got home from drug dealing, he found Monique there alone.

“Lily spendin’ the night wit’ her grandmother,” Monique told him.

The apartment felt funny without Lily there to greet him. But Monique said that the girl needed her grandmother and that they needed time alone sometimes.

“Come here an’ I’ma show you sumpin’,” Monique, now eighteen, said to her partner.

She made him take off his clothes and lie down on the bed. She took off her top. When he saw her large breasts, he became excited and turned over onto his stomach to hide his stiff thing. But Monique said, “Turn back around.”