Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“Maybe he could come visit after we get to New York,” Thomas suggested.

The next day they were on an eastbound train. They sat across from each other at the front of the car and talked for eighteen hours a day.

“I took riding lessons...”

“I found a glass-cutter and made drinking glasses from beer bottles for a while. After I’d make’em, I sold’em on the boardwalk in Venice until the police chased me away...”

“After the SATs I went to UCLA to study economics. I like numbers that do things in people’s pockets. It’s funny...”

“I never had sex with a girl yet...”

“I’ve never been in love...”

“And are you sad like Dad?” Thomas asked after three hundred miles were gone.

“Not like him. I’m not really sad at all. I have everything I want. Especially now.”

“But you look sad,” Thomas said. “You don’t hardly smile, and your eyes are always movin’ around like you’re looking for something all the time.”

“Up until now I guess I’ve always been looking for you. Dad tried to find you after a few years, but nobody even knew where your real father was. Finally they found him down in Texas, but by then he’d lost track of you.”

That first night on the train from Phoenix, Eric slept while Thomas sat and looked at the moon out of his window. Thomas felt safe sitting next to his brother. He didn’t care about being on the train or going to New York. He wasn’t afraid of the police finding him. The day Eric came to take him away, Thomas was already planning to leave. He thought he might go down to San Diego, where he’d heard a man could sleep under fruit trees and eat off their limbs for breakfast. But Thomas had a feeling of safety with Eric — between them they made something whole.

Thomas exhaled, and for a long moment he just sat there without taking air back in. The train lurched at a turn in the tracks, and he found himself breathing again, feeling deeply satisfied. For the first time that he could remember, he didn’t have to worry about who was coming or when his next meal would be or where he was going to sleep.

But looking out at the lunar-lit plains, Thomas began to think that he might die soon. Death made sense to him. So many people he had known were dead: his mother and Pedro and Alicia and Tremont, Bruno and Chilly and even RayRay. He had been so close to Death for so long that he wasn’t afraid of Him. But he didn’t want to die, because he wanted to be with Eric. Having a brother meant he had something to live for.

“Eric,” Thomas whispered in the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“You know what I worry about all the time?”

“Not having any place to live?”

“Uh-uh. There’s always a place to stay or hide,” Thomas said. “The thing that always scared me was if one day I went crazy and forgot about back home with you and Mama.”

“Which one?” Eric asked.

“Which one what?”

“Are you afraid of going crazy or forgetting?”

“They’re both the same thing.”

The next morning, in Denver, a young black woman got on the train. The two seats next to Thomas and Eric were free, but she went to a single seat four rows down.

“She’s pretty,” Thomas said to Eric.

“I guess,” Eric said, not really looking.

“Did you ever think that we would be together again on a train going to New York?”

“No,” Eric said. “I thought that I would probably die before seeing you again.”

“You?” Thomas grinned.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think about you dying.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

A young white man moved to the seat next to the young black woman. Thomas felt that maybe he should have done that, but then he thought, no.

“I think about killing myself,” Eric said seriously.

“What for? You got everything. And you said you’re not that sad.”

“Sometimes I think that it’s because of me that other people get hurt.”

“That’s crazy,” Thomas said. “Nobody gets hurt over you.”

“I met Raela, and three days later Drew killed Christie, shot you, and the police killed him.”

“And you think that it’s because you wanted her?”

Sheepishly Eric nodded.

Thomas looked away a moment. He noticed the white man talking to the young woman.

“I was lookin’ at the moon last night,” Thomas said, “while you were asleep.”

“So?”

“I remembered that I met this guy once who used to be a merchant marine, but he got a blood disease and they let him go. He said that he had enough money that he could have had a house and a car, but he found movin’ around a better life. He said that livin’ in a house was like spendin’ your life in a tomb.”

“You think he was lying?” Eric asked.

“I never thought so,” Thomas said. “But I never thought about it. But he said somethin’ else.”

“What’s that?”

Thomas thought that he heard the young black woman say something to the man next to her.

“He said,” Thomas continued, “that the moon has gravity and that the ocean rises up and falls down because of that.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, “the moon governs the tides.”

“So if that’s true,” Thomas said, “and if one day somebody said to you that you couldn’t have what you wanted unless the tide didn’t come in, what do you think would happen?”

“Of course the tide’s gonna come in.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise, people will live an’ die, an’ you can’t do a thing about it.”

“I could kill myself.”

“But it wouldn’t make no difference except to the people who love you.”

“Excuse me,” someone said.

The young men looked up to see the girl who had gotten on earlier.

“Can I sit with you guys? That jerk down there started talkin’ shit.”

“Sure,” Eric said and Thomas wanted to say but didn’t.

“I’m Eric and this is my brother, Tommy, I mean, Thomas.”

“They call me Lucky,” Thomas said.

“They do?” Eric asked.

“I thought you said you were brothers?” the young woman said, settling next to Thomas. She had a wheeled, silvery suitcase that was meant to look like metal but was made from lightweight plastic. Eric got up and put the bag in the rack above their heads.

“We were separated when we were young,” the young white man explained.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “We just found each other again.”

“You don’t look like brothers.”

Thomas and Eric told their story together, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. As they spoke, the young black woman pictured the two men as little boys and found herself smiling at their graceless affection for each other.

Her name was Clea Frank. She was a native of Denver and now was on her way to a scholarship at New York University. She was a language major and wanted to work at the UN.

The young white man had tried to “put the moves on her,” and she wanted to sit with them so that he’d leave her alone. She was happy that Eric and Thomas were going all the way to New York.

“Don’t you feel funny calling him brother?” Clea asked Thomas some time after midnight as the train approached Chicago.

“That’s what he is. He’s the only brother I’ve ever had.”

Eric was asleep, and Clea had just come awake after napping through the late afternoon and evening.

“But he’s not your real brother — he’s white,” Clea said. “I mean, I don’t have anything against white people, but I don’t go around calling them my brother either.”

Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.