Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

Thomas talked about it all the way down in the Art Deco elevator.

“We were actually in a cloud, Eric. I never did anything like that before.”

“You never flew?” Eric asked.

“Where I’ma fly to? The soup kitchen?”

Then one morning Eric got a call on a bright-red cell phone that Raela had given him.

“Hi, Eric,” the raven-haired girl said into the line. Her voice was exultant.

“Hi, honey,” he said.

Connie, who was lying next to him in the bed, sat straight up.

“The governor of California has commuted Thomas’s sentence, and he’s persuaded the district attorney to drop all the other charges,” Raela said. “You can come home. Daddy’s sending a plane tomorrow to pick you up at Stewart Airport.”

“What time?”

“Three in the afternoon.”

“We’ll be there.”

When he disconnected the call, Connie said, “You’re leaving?”

“Uh... yeah.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow... at three.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I told you we were going back.”

“But just one day’s notice?”

“We’ve got to go. That’s where we live. I have a daughter there.”

“You’re married?”

“No. But I told you about my girlfriend.”

“So you take advantage of me and then walk out with hardly a good-bye?”

“Connie.”

“Get out of my house.”

Telling Clea was somewhat easier. She cried a little.

“Will we ever see each other again?” she asked Thomas.

“I’d come back if you want me to,” he said. “I could maybe get my GED and a job at the museum. I could stay at the Y.”

“Maybe I could come out to California in the summer,” she said. “Then you’d have time to see your family awhile. I mean, it sounds like you haven’t had a break in years.”

“I love you.” Thomas hadn’t remembered using those words since he was a boy with Branwyn.

“Go back home, Thomas, and call me. If it’s right I’ll come out this summer and we’ll see.”

“I don’t want to leave you, but I want to go home too.”

“Go.”

Kronin Stark sent a private jet — his own personal 767, in which he had never flown — for the boys the next afternoon. Connie didn’t even say good-bye to Eric. She just slammed the door after telling him that he had destroyed her life.

“I don’t see how you did that, Eric,” Thomas said as the jet gained altitude. “I mean, you told her that you were going back to California and that you had a girl. She’s twice your age. I mean, damn — what more did she need?”

“I shouldn’t have led her on.”

“You didn’t.”

“What do you know about it, Tommy? Nobody ever threw herself at you and then fell out of a window instead.”

“Maybe not. But so what? You think that means I’m too stupid to know?”

“No. Not that. But I have problems that you wouldn’t understand. I have to be careful how I treat people. You have to be careful how people treat you. She said that I ruined her life.”

“You didn’t do nuthin’ to her, man. All you did was go along for the ride. You don’t know what you did to her. She don’t know either.”

“She knows how she feels.”

“Maybe. But she broke up with that boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She probably needed to do that. She needed to leave him, and she told herself that she was in love with you to do it. Of course she’s gonna be mad. But she’s mad at her boyfriend, mad at herself for bein’ with him. It don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ you.”

Eric was once again amazed by his brother. During the years that they were separated, Eric often thought that he’d idealized Thomas, that the boy really wasn’t so brilliant as he remembered. But time after time when they talked, Eric was forced to admit the rightness in Thomas’s keen insights.

“How do you know that, Tommy?” Eric asked a long while later.

“What?” Thomas was looking out of the window, holding tight to the armrests of his seat. He had never been in a jet, or any other aircraft. He was elated and petrified.

“About Connie. I mean, you never even slept with anybody before Clea.”

“You ever been to the carnival that come down on Fifty-fourth Place sometimes?” Thomas asked. “Down toward South Central?”

“No.”

“But you ever been in a hall of mirrors like?”

“No, but I know what you mean.”

“It’s like a door you go in and you try to get out the other side,” Thomas said, remembering when he went into that maze. “It’s all glass walls and mirrors, an’ you can see your reflection all ovah the place an’ you see other people too. But if you go in it an’ there’s only you, then you see yourself a thousand times all ovah. You see the front and back, the sides. It’s just you. Just you whatever way you look.”

“So?” Eric said.

“That’s kinda like you,” Thomas told his brother. “You always been special, an’ so all you see is you. Like when we was in school. It was you all the time. Teacher’s helper, spelling champion, the only little boy in our class that could hit a home run.”

“But that’s just sports or schoolwork.”

“Yeah, but everybody always knows you and is always thinkin’ about you. And so it’s like they’re the mirrors and you look at them and see you. But I don’t do that because you’re my brother, and that means I don’t have to care about you like they do. I know you’re my friend already, and I know you feel bad. But Connie and Christie and Mr. Stroud in the first grade wanted you to see them, but you couldn’t see nuthin’ but what they saw — like a mirror. You see yourself makin’ this one happy an’ breakin’ the other one’s heart. I don’t know exactly what I mean, but it’s somethin’ like that though.”

“So you think that people make up how they feel about me?” Eric asked.

“Sometimes. But even if they don’t, even if it’s like your girlfriend who got killed. She’s the one who made that man mad enough to kill her. It was what she wanted from you. I mean, if you thought about it, you’d think that everyone you meet should fall dead the minute they saw you. But you know some girls think you cute but they don’t leave their boyfriends or nuthin’. You can’t help it if somebody fool enough to get in trouble over you.”

“But, Tommy,” Eric said, “things happen with me that never happen to other people. I win games, girls fall in love; one time the sky parted just in time for me to win a game of tennis.”

“That ain’t nuthin’ but magic tricks,” Thomas said. The jet had just entered a patch of turbulence, so he clasped his hands together and closed his eyes.

“What do you mean by that?” Eric asked, not heeding his brother’s fear.

“Win a game, kiss some girl,” Thomas said, his heart in his throat. “That ain’t nuthin’. I got better luck than that.”

“You?”

“Yeah, me.”

“Tommy, you could fall down just sitting in a chair.”

“Maybe so, but I was born, an’ you know all those days I was walkin’ on the streets, I kept thinkin’ how special you got to be to get born. Nobody knows what kinda baby they gonna have or if they’ll have the baby they want. Even if you’re just a fly alive for a few minutes and then you run into a spider’s web — even that fly is one’a the most luckiest creatures in the world. We all lucky, Eric. And the luckiest ones are the ones happy about bein’ alive.”

The plane dipped in the sky, and Thomas yelped.

Eric laughed and told him that there were always a few bumps in flying.

Kronin Stark met the brothers at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California. Thomas had never seen anybody so large or powerful. He was reminded of an even larger version of Tremont, the muscle-bound drug dealer.