Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

The TV tinkled, and Monique’s and Harold’s voices boomed from somewhere in the house.

“Do I know you?” Lily asked. She was standing at a sliding-glass door that led out into the backyard.

“Do you remember me?” Thomas asked.

“How come you don’t sit on the couch?” she asked then. “It’s more comfortable.”

“I’ve been walkin’ so far and sleepin’ outside,” Thomas said. “I wouldn’t want to get your fancy couch all dirty.”

Lily was staring hard at Thomas.

“Did we go to a secret green park once?” she asked.

“You remember that?”

“Was there a big pile of rocks?”

“Cinder blocks,” he said.

“And a secret clubhouse?” Lily’s eyes were open wide at the memory.

“We would go there when your mother was at the supermarket working.”

“I remember,” she said. “I used to think about it, but then I would think that it was a dream.”

“No,” Thomas assured her. “We went there all the time when I took care of you while your mother was gone.”

“An’ we used to all sleep in a big bed, and there was a bathtub in the kitchen.”

“You have a good memory for a little girl,” Thomas said.

“I know.”

Just then there was a loud yell from somewhere in the house.

“Your parents can really fight,” Thomas said.

“Harold’s not my dad,” Lily told him. “Only my mama is my parent.”

“Oh.”

“Go to your room, Lily,” Harold said.

The child and Thomas turned to see Harold standing in the doorway. His voice was now definitely angry.

“But Lucky used to take me to the secret green park.”

“I said, go to your room.”

The big man came in looking around, as if searching the golden floor around Thomas for crumbs or dirt he might have dropped.

While Harold stared, Monique came in wearing a long maroon dress. She was still big-boned and thick, but Thomas thought that she was good-looking. She stared at Harold.

“Well?” she said.

Harold turned his hateful gaze to her, but he soon looked down.

“Monique tells me,” Harold said to the floor, “that you, that you put yo’ life on the line feedin’ her an’ Lily when you was just a boy. She says that you was on the street buyin’ her food an’ payin’ her rent.”

He looked up at the skinny boy. Thomas had seen that hateful stare every day through the bars of the cells at the desert youth facility.

“An’ because you did that you are welcome in this home. You can, you can... You are welcome to stay as long as you need to.”

Lily hadn’t gone to her room. She was staring with amazement at the man who was not her father. Monique had her eyes on him too.

“I’ma go out,” Harold said, no longer able to bear the scrutiny.

And soon it was only Monique, Thomas, and Lily in the house.

They talked about the old days for a long time. Lily had lots of questions about half-remembered adventures she’d had all those long child-years ago.

Monique told Thomas that she met Harold when she was a checkout girl at Ralph’s.

“He’s a plumber an’ he liked it how I worked so hard. An’ I liked him because life was so normal in his world. No shootin’s or drugs or tiny li’l ’partments.”

“No bathtubs in’a kitchen,” Lily said a little wistfully.

Monique served baked beans and white bread in their large eat-in kitchen. She poured lemonade squeezed out of fruit from their own tree.

After a while Monique said, “Do you wanna see your room, Lucky?”

They went out the back door to a pine hut that had a tar-paper roof. Inside there was a very comfortable, if small, room that had a single bed, a maple bureau, and a window that looked out on the green yard. The floor was covered by an eggshell shag carpet, and there was a radio and a door that led to a bathroom with a real bathtub.

“Harold built this for his mother whenever she wanna stay. But she’s in Houston now with her new husband.”

“She lived with us for six months,” Lily said in an exasperated tone that Thomas recognized from his years living with Monique.

“You can stay here as long as you want, Lucky,” Monique said.

She moved near to him and kissed his forehead. She moved back a bit and crinkled up her nose.

“If you put your clothes outside the door I’ll wash ’em,” she added. “Come on, turnip. Let’s leave Lucky to wash up an’ rest.”

He hadn’t taken a bath since the days he lived with Monique and Lily in that one-room apartment on Hooper. Thomas turned on the water and took off his clothes. He was about to step into the tub when he remembered Monique’s offer to clean his soiled pants and shirt. So he went to the front door of his hut and placed the clothes outside in a neat pile. On his way back to the bath, he saw someone moving in the room and he jumped — a natural reflex for a small boy among so many predators in the juvenile criminal system.

But there was no one there. What he had seen was his own reflection in the full-length mirror that hung from the bathroom door.

Thomas couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his naked image in a mirror. He knew that it had been years before, when he lived with Eric and Ahn and his mother.

Thomas was still short among boys his age. At his last visit to the infirmary he’d been told he was five foot five. He was slender and lopsided because of his shorter left leg. His face too had its abnormalities — a twice-broken nose, three scars, and a network of lines around his eyes from wincing at the light. There was the crater of flesh in the center of his chest from being shot in the drug bust, and then the various wounds he’d received in the street and at the facility. Thomas saw that his arms were long and that his hands were strong like Harold’s. His ribs were visible, and his skin was near-black, with ashen patches here and there.

Thomas moved close to the silvered glass and stared deeply into his own eyes. Something about what he saw made him think that those eyes had something to teach him. He touched the mirror, outlined the contours of the face with his fingers. He kissed the cold image of his own lips and placed his hands on top of his head in surrender to a fate not of his own design.

Thomas came to stay at Monique’s house at the beginning of summer. In the morning Thomas would walk Lily to the day-care center where she spent from nine to noon playing with other children and getting exercise.

It was a seven-block walk to the day-care center at Compton Elementary School. On the way, Lily was full of questions and declarations.

“I wanna be a bird when I grow up,” she said to Thomas one morning.

“What kinda bird?”

“A hummingbird or a dragonfly.”

“And where would you go, little bird?” he asked.

“I’d fly to the North Pole to see Santa Claus, and I’d fly to Disneyland right over the fence so I wouldn’t have to pay all that money that Harold don’t wanna throw away.”

“That’a be fun,” Thomas said.

He loved those walks with Lily. When he was in the facility he used to think about her and wonder if they’d ever see each other again.

“Why they call you Lucky, Lucky?” Lily asked. “Is that your real name?”

“No.”

“What is your real name?”

“Thomas, Tommy.”

“Which one is it?”

“Both, really,” Thomas said. “My mother named me Thomas Beerman.”

“Oh. Where would you go if you were a bird, Lucky?”

“I’d fly deep in the woods,” he said without hesitation, “to the tallest tree I could find, and then I’d sit on the very highest branch and look out over the forest until it became the sea.”

“And what would you look for?” the girl asked.