Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“Mr. Stark,” Eric said. He held out his hand. “This is my brother, Thomas.”

“Hello,” Stark said to Thomas.

Thomas nodded but did not return the greeting. Silence gripped his throat.

“You’re the reason my daughter took all her money out of the bank.”

“She did it for me, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “And I plan to pay her back within six months.”

“What about my influence?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I put pressure on the governor’s office for this reprieve. What will you give me for that?”

“What do you want?” Eric asked.

Stark looked closely at Eric and then at his brother.

“Why don’t you two boys come and work for me?” he said. “Work off the debt you owe.”

“Sure,” Eric said without hesitation. “But I thought that Mikey said that you didn’t even have an office, that you just sit at a table in the Cape Hotel all day having meetings.”

“Things change,” Kronin said with a shrug. “I’ve recently been made the CEO of an investment organization — the Drumm Investment Group.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “But we have to figure out how much work we need to do to pay you back.”

“What about you, son?” Stark asked Thomas.

“I didn’t ask you to help me,” Thomas said. He found himself squinting at Stark as if the huge billionaire was the sun.

“That’s a bit ungrateful, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that. As a matter of fact I don’t know much at all. I sure couldn’t be a businessman or a doctor or nuthin’, so how could I work for you an’ pay off gettin’ the governor to let me free? You think I could sweep enough floors to do sumpin’ like that?”

“I’ll work for you, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “I’ll do the work for the two of us.”

“I wanted both of you,” Stark said, eyeing the lame Thomas.

“But why?” Thomas asked. “Why’d you do it in the first place?”

“Raela wouldn’t eat until I obtained your clemency.”

“Is she eatin’ now?”

“Yes.”

“Then you been paid,” Thomas stated bluntly.

Eric was perplexed by his brother’s tough attitude.

“Don’t you feel at all indebted to me?” Kronin asked, still addressing Thomas.

“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”

Stark cocked his head like a man who has just heard a threat being issued.

“I was the one who engineered your clemency.”

“I think it was Raela did that,” Thomas said. “You just did what she made you do.”

It was obvious to both young men that Stark expected to get his way easily. The impediment of Thomas’s refusal was beginning to humor Eric.

“Why don’t you let us talk about it?” Eric suggested. “I’ll talk to Tommy alone.”

“Why don’t we discuss it on the ride back?” Stark suggested.

“We didn’t know that you were coming, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “So we called my dad. He’s coming to get us.”

Stark glared at Thomas, who in turn squinted as if the bright light of an inquisitor was shining into his eyes.

“How’d you boys like New York?” Minas Nolan asked on the ride back to Beverly Hills.

“I really liked it, Dad,” Eric said. He felt outgoing and effusive with his father for the first time that he could remember. “Tommy spent every day in the museum, and I was down on Wall Street. We’d get together every night for dinner though.”

“How did you like it, Tommy?” Minas asked, turning momentarily toward the backseat.

“It was pretty good,” the smaller boy said. “The museum was great, and we met some nice people. A lotta people talked about the World Trade Center. I think they’re worried about it happening again.”

“That was a terrible event,” Dr. Nolan agreed.

“Yeah. There’s people live in the subways, you know.”

“Really?” Eric asked. “When were you in the subway?”

“Sometimes I took the Lexington line downtown, but I heard it from this homeless guy I met in the park. I guess he could tell by the way I said hi that I lived on the street before. He said that my face an’ hands didn’t go wit’ the clothes I was wearin’. He told me that if you go down on the subway rails under Grand Central that you’d find a whole village where homeless people lived. They got everything down there, even electricity.”

“That sounds like a tall tale to me,” Minas Nolan said in his certain tone.

“Could be though,” Thomas said. And then he told Minas about his alley valley and the apartment-building clubhouse he shared with Pedro.

“It’s like when you look at someplace and say that there’s not nuthin’ there,” Thomas concluded. “But when you look closer you see animals an’ birds an’ things. I met a woman who told me that there’s all kindsa millions and millions’a animals too small to be seen walkin’ all ovah everywhere all the time. Her daddy was a scientist, but she was crazy an’ had to live in the street.”

“That’s terrible,” Minas said.

“Yeah,” Thomas replied. “But nobody know it.”

Eric and Mona and Thomas and Minas Nolan all sat in the living room drinking a citrus punch that Ahn had made. Eric explained everything he’d learned from Constance Baker without talking about the way things ended with her. Mona sat on Thomas’s lap, rubbing her hands over his fingers.

“Your fingers like sandpaper, Uncle Tommy.”

“I used to spend all my time out in a park that I had.”

“You had your own park?” The girl was astonished.

“Yeah. But it was real dirty because people were always throwin’ trash in it. That’s why I got such rough hands — throwin’ all the trash away all the time.”

“Oh.”

Raela and her brother, Michael, came over in the afternoon. Michael was accompanied by a scarred woman named Doris. Doris wore an orange dress and had one light- and one dark-blue eye. Raela was thinner than before but just as beautiful as Thomas had remembered. After a while Eric and his friends and daughter decided to go down to the beach.

“You wanna come, Tommy?” Eric asked.

“Not today. I just wanna stay around here.”

Thomas was thinking that he could go up to his mother’s old room and sink to his knees. It had been a long time since he’d been home.

But Dr. Nolan wanted to talk awhile longer. Thomas didn’t mind. It had been many years since he was alone with his mother’s lover. When he was traveling the streets of L.A. he often thought of the talks he’d had with the doctor.

“I’m very sorry about the things that have happened,” Minas said when they were alone.

“It’s not your fault,” Thomas replied. “The law took me away. It took me from you, then it took me from my real father, and then it put me in jail. I don’t really like the law all that much. It’s like no matter what I do there’s some law to tell me I’m wrong.”

“When you put it like that,” Minas said, “it doesn’t seem fair. You’d think that the law would protect young people.”

“But it don’t, doesn’t,” Thomas said, correcting his street language with the way he’d learned to speak in Minas’s house years before. “All the kids I knew were in trouble or makin’ trouble. And when I was livin’ on the street, the cops was the last people you wanted to see.”

“How did you manage to survive living like that?” Minas asked.

Thomas could see by the way the doctor winced that he was afraid of the answer.

“It was pretty much always the same,” Thomas said. “You needed food and shelter mostly, and money to buy stuff like toothpaste or Band-Aids. You’d stay in one place as long as you could, but you had other places in mind in case the cops or somebody moved you out. But once you had what you needed, then you could read a book or talk to somebody or think. I liked to think.”