Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

The room was very quiet and white. Painfully, he pulled himself to a seated position at the head of the bed. This made him a little dizzy, but it was manageable. He realized, a little sadly, that his travels in the valley were a dream.

“Maybe this is a dream too,” he whispered. “Maybe everything is. Maybe it’s not even me dreaming.”

With these thoughts he fell into a light doze.

As he slept he tumbled down mountainsides, was attacked by feral dogs, and was raped unmercifully by boys from the desert facility whose names he had forgotten. But none of this pained him. His mother died, but she came back to console him. His brother got lost in a wilderness but still made it home in time for dinner. He found himself adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, floating in circles and being laughed at by cruel dolphins. In this last ordeal Thomas thought that it might be time to fall over the side, allowing himself to sink under the waves. He wanted to die and be with his mother and Alicia, Chilly, Bruno, and Pedro. He could look for Eric’s wife.

Eric.

When he opened his eyes again he was still sitting upright. The sun through the window had moved a good six feet across the wall. The door was open, and a moment later Eric was standing there.

“Are you a dream, Eric?” he asked.

The blue-eyed Titan came up to the bed and cupped his brother’s face with both hands.

“I’m sorry I let them take you, Tommy. And for making Mama Branwyn sick.”

“Ahn said that she thought you would hurt me,” Thomas replied. “But I told her that you always saved me.”

Eric pulled up the visitor’s chair, and the brothers talked for hours. In a haphazard, rambling manner, Thomas told his story. He started out with drug dealing and Monique and Lily. Then he talked about his alley and his father’s arrests.

“He isn’t really a bad guy,” Thomas said. “But he was just mad all the time because people were always trying to take things from him.”

When Eric told his story, it started with the beached green fish that he caught with his hands and unfolded event by event until Raela came to his house and said that they were meant to be.

In the middle of his story, a nurse popped her head in to tell Eric that visiting hours were over.

“This is my brother,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other since we were six. I can’t leave him.”

The nurse, a middle-aged Chicano woman, smiled and nodded, then quietly closed the door.

Eric confessed his crimes against the people he should have loved. He killed his mother and Branwyn and Drew and Christie. He won every game he ever played that was important. He failed to bring happiness into his father’s life.

“But Dad doesn’t think that,” Thomas stated with certainty. “All that stuff is just in your head.”

Eric thought about his self-portrait and the worried look on his art teacher’s face. Something fell together for him. He wasn’t complaining or distraught — just feeling empty.

Thomas took Eric’s hand and asked, “What about that girl? Do you love her?”

“No. I mean, she’s the only one other than you or Mama Branwyn that ever made me feel something. But it’s a little like I’m afraid of her, the way I used to feel about Ahn, but more.”

“Because why?” Thomas asked.

Eric smiled, remembering those words from their childhood, because why.

“I guess I don’t want anyone to know what I’m like on the inside. I feel ugly, you know? Except when I think about you or Mama Branwyn.”

They talked without holding anything back. It had been more than a dozen years and the boys hadn’t had one thing in common since the day they were separated, but still it was as if they’d been apart for only a day. They giggled and awed each other; they played and vowed never to be parted again.

“I will never let them take you away, Tommy.”

“And I won’t go nowhere.”

Eric didn’t leave the hospital until Thomas was asleep, and he was back the next morning with his father, Ahn, and Mona.

“I’m so sorry,” Minas told Branwyn’s son. “I should have done something to keep you. Or at least to find you once we knew that you were lost.”

“That’s okay,” Thomas said. “It’s really not all that bad. I mean, it’s kinda like a dream. I’m not mad at you. And I don’t care about what happened to me. I mean, even when you get shot it only hurts for a while. And if you don’t get all upset about it and nobody shoots at you again, then it’s okay. Or if you’re hungry it’s like that too. Because sooner or later you’re gonna eat, and then you’re not hungry no more. Right?”

Thomas liked being with the whole family, but it wasn’t the same as his time alone with Eric. With Eric he could say anything without thinking, but with the family it was more like he had a part to play. He didn’t mind though. He liked the role.

“You’re the man who saved me,” three-year-old Mona said during a lull in the conversation.

“That’s right,” Eric told her. “This is Uncle Tommy.”

“T’ank you, Uncle Tommy.”

“What would you like to do after you get out of here, Thomas?” Dr. Nolan asked.

“I don’t know. The doctor said that they lost my cart. Everything I had was in there. I had pictures of Monique and my blank book with my writings. I’d like to find that if I could.”

“But what would you like to do? ”

“What you mean?” Tommy squinted for a moment, remembering the brightness that had driven him away from elementary school.

“Do you want a job? Do you want to go to school? Where would you like to live?”

“Could I stay with you guys for a while?”

“Of course,” Dr. Nolan said. “As long as you want.”

“Yaaaaaa,” Mona sang.

That afternoon the police were dispatched with a warrant to arrest Thomas Beerman, aka Bruno Forman. They sent Pittman and Rodriguez because the officers could identify the young con-man escapee.

“Thomas Beerman,” Officer Pittman announced. “You are under arrest.”

“No. I didn’t do anything. I, I saved the little girl’s life.”

“You presented yourself to the police with fraudulent identification and you escaped from the juvenile facility where you were being detained.”

For Thomas the facility was a long-ago dream. He couldn’t imagine that they would send him back there now that he was reunited with his family.

“No,” he said.

“No,” Dr. Bettye Freeling repeated. She was standing at the door to Thomas’s room. “This is my patient, and he is far too weak to be moved.”

“We have a warrant for his arrest, ma’am,” Rodriguez said with an apology in his voice.

“I’m a doctor,” she replied. “This is my patient, and you cannot take him without my permission.”

“It’s pretty clear-cut,” Nathan Frear, the lawyer, said to Minas Nolan and his son.

They were in Frear’s office at the top floor of a Westwood office high-rise.

“He was convicted of assault on police officers in an attempt to keep them from their duty. It says that he was part of an organized group that opened fire on the officers trying to arrest them.”

“He was twelve,” Eric said. “He didn’t even have a gun.”

“But he was part of the group, and he was convicted under a law devised to dampen gang activity.”

“But he wasn’t part of a gang. He was twelve and nearly homeless. He was just trying to stay alive.”

“All of that evidence was presented in court,” Frear said. “The judge still found him guilty.”

“What will happen if he goes to trial?” Minas asked.

“Either he’ll be returned to the juvenile authority or, more likely, he will be sentenced as an adult and will serve the full term of the original sentence plus whatever else the judge might want to tack on for his further crimes.”