Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“I will not be bullied by you,” Kronin said to the queen of his heart.

“I’m not the bully.”

“What did you do with that money?”

“It’s my money, and I can do with it what I please.”

“Not ten thousand dollars.”

“Why not? Didn’t you put it into my account? Didn’t you tell me that you trusted me to make sensible decisions?”

“I don’t know if I trust you anymore.”

“I’m tired,” Raela said then. “I’m going to bed.”

“Eat something,” Kronin said, no longer loud or a bully.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll die.”

“Everything dies.”

Michael was beyond understanding this confrontation. He was unaware of Eric’s relationship with his sister. He hadn’t heard much from his friend since the funeral. Michael had called Eric, but that phone number was disconnected and he’d taken a leave from UCLA.

Raela walked out, leaving the older man seething and the younger one perplexed.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Kronin asked Michael.

“No, sir.”

“Why not? You brought him into this house.”

“Who?”

“That Eric Nolan. He’s bewitched her. She’s taken all the money I gave her and given it to him.”

“To Eric? Why?”

“Talk to your sister. And if you want to keep coming here you’d better make her listen to reason. The only reason you are suffered in this house is because of her.”

Michael had always known that he was not a true member of the family. Maya never wanted him, and Kronin hadn’t adopted him. Everyone loved his sister, not him. But no one had ever spoken these words. No one had ever told him that he was worthless. And so, even though he revered Stark and loved his life among the rich in Bel-Air, Michael went to his room and packed up his few things. He drove away from the Stark residence with no intention of returning.

Six blocks away his cell phone sounded.

“Hello?”

“Come back home, Michael,” Maya said into the receiver.

It was the first time she’d called him in well over a year. He disconnected the call.

A few minutes later the phone sounded again. Michael wouldn’t have answered except that it might have been his sister.

“Yes?”

Kronin Stark’s voice boomed into the young man’s ear. “Michael.”

Again he disconnected the call.

Michael drove for many miles that night, taking the same path that Christie had when she’d made her fateful decision. He couldn’t have known where Christie had gone, but there he was. He stopped at a motel outside of Twentynine Palms and gave them his credit card.

“Do you have another one, son?” the silver-haired proprietor asked. “This one’s being declined.”

The room was only twenty-nine dollars a night, a promotional offer for the off-season. Michael had enough money to last him a week.

He went to his room, which opened onto the parking lot, and sat on the lumpy mattress, amazed that Kronin had canceled his credit card so quickly. This made Michael feel insubstantial. It was as if his whole life had been jotted down in light pencil and at any moment it could be completely erased. He had no mother or father, no one who loved him.

“Do you love me?” he had asked his sister when he was seventeen and she was eleven. He asked because he needed someone to care, and he believed that he saw his love reflected in Raela’s eyes.

“I would die for you,” she replied.

That night he went across the highway to the Monster Bar and ordered a beer. It was a small bungalow under the huge, looming shadow of a billboard in the shape of a Gila monster. The reptile’s fat red tongue lolled lasciviously.

The woman behind the bar was named Doris Tina Warren. Her lower lip had been deeply cut from side to side, and the scar was like another, fatter lip bulging out from the first one.

“You stayin’ at the hotel across the street?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Vacation?”

“I just got kicked out of my sister’s father’s house.”

“You have different fathers?”

“No. We have the same father, but he died. This guy adopted her but not me.”

“That’s fucked up,” the fake platinum blonde said. “What is he, some kind of a pervert?”

“I don’t know. He gave me a credit card a long time ago, but as soon as I was gone he canceled it.”

“But you have cash?”

Michael looked into the thin woman’s eyes, which were two different shades of blue, and realized that she was worried that he couldn’t pay.

“I got enough for this beer and the next one,” he said.

Doris liked the sentence. It was the way her first boyfriend’s father used to say things. The boy was a dog, but his father always made promises that he kept.

“Even after Manly dropped me, his father made him give me the car he promised,” Doris was saying many hours and many beers later.

“Manly was the son?” Michael asked, a little unsteady on his bar stool.

It was three in the morning, and Doris had closed at one. She opened the tap then and refused to take any more of Michael’s money.

“Yeah,” she said. “Manly was the son, and Big Boy was his old man. Only Big Boy was the man, and Manly was the boy. You want another beer?”

“I don’t think I could even walk across the road if I did,” he said.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m gonna help you to your bed.”

“You are?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I knew that from the minute you said that you had the money for one beer and another.”

They’d both been drinking.

“So your sister’s just fifteen and she’s with a senior in college?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna go kick his ass for robbing the cradle?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you hate him for doin’ that?”

When Michael turned his head, his eyes and brain seemed to wait a second before following. He turned to look at Doris’s eyes, felt a moment of fuzzy light-headedness, and then she materialized out of his confusion. This momentary hallucination seemed to have deep meaning for the young man. He touched her lip-scar with his finger.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said you must wanna kick his ass for molesting your sister. That’s a crime, you know.”

“Yeah, but I don’t, I don’t hate him. My sister is like, I don’t know... she’s like a woman. I mean, Eric is the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He can do like... anything. And my sister’s like that too, only there’s nothing holding her back. She has eyes like a snake, but I love her.”

“Kiss me,” Doris said.

In his desert motel bed he saw how skinny and scarred Doris was. She admitted to him that she was twenty-eight and that she drank too much. She’d slept with “more than a few men,” she said.

“I’ve used this motel a whole lotta nights,” she admitted after their first time making love. “I’ve fucked at least three guys in this bed.”

Michael realized that this was a test of some sort. He knew that he couldn’t say that that was all right. If he said that, she’d think that he thought she was a whore but he didn’t care because that’s why he was with her. And he knew that he couldn’t say that what she had done was wrong but that he still wanted to be with her because then he’d be looking down on her and she’d get mad.

He knew these things, but they didn’t matter. They didn’t matter to him because of how he felt.

“I’m twenty-one,” he said, fingering a crescent-shaped scar on her rib cage, just below the tattoo of the red rose on her left breast. “And this is the first time that I’ve ever felt like anybody has ever seen me. You know what I mean?”

Doris stared into his face with her mismatched blue eyes. She wanted to speak but didn’t or couldn’t.