Walter Mosley: Fortunate Son

Thomas wondered at the little girl in her bed hovered over by the giant who was trying to woo her with treasures. He thought he understood her steel will then.

“He would have gone on doing that, but you stopped him,” Raela said. “I thought about it for a long time after Eric told me. You grabbed the wheel and ran off the road. You expected to die along with him. He was trying to destroy you like he did everybody else, and you grabbed him so that he’d go with you.”

Raela was gazing directly into Thomas’s eyes. He felt a greater intimacy with her than he’d ever experienced before. It was a terrible intimacy, a frightening knowledge.

“I loved him in a way,” she said. “He made me the most important person in his whole world, and his world was everything. There was nothing I couldn’t have, and no one would hurt me as long as he was alive. He was a monster, but he loved me. But I want you to know that I don’t hold his death against you. It was his own fault, and he’s the only one to blame.”

When Thomas woke up again, Ahn was sitting in a chair where Raela had stood. The Vietnamese nanny was knitting. Thomas gazed at her for a long while before she looked up at him.

“You were asleep,” she said.

Thomas wanted to speak but he didn’t.

“I came to tell you a story,” Ahn said.

Thomas felt his smile rising. Ahn’s stories were the most important tales in his life. He knew that he would get something wonderful from her words.

“Five years after my parents were killed, I lived on a beach in the south. I lived by myself in a refugee camp. American soldiers would come to us to visit the young women and girls there. One night I was hiding in the trees watching a beautiful young woman named Min. She was... was making love with a soldier in the sand. I was watching because many of the young girls did this thing to make money to pay for food and clothes and maybe a way out of Vietnam. I was thinking that maybe I could do like Min and make money to buy my passage.

“I listened to the words she said and I watched the things she did, trying to see if I could do that when a gang of boys ran up to them. The boys were shouting, and the man tried to stand. But before he could get up one boy hit him in the head with a rock. Another boy stabbed him, then another and another.

“Min ran away naked except for the soldier’s pants that she held against her breasts.” Ahn’s breathing was coming fast, and her eyes were looking back more than thirty years. “The boys were from the camp. I knew their names then, but by now I’ve forgotten them. They were all stabbing the soldier, and when they were finished, they ran off in the night screaming like ghosts.

“When they were all gone I came out and looked down on him. He was still alive, but the blood was bubbling out. His eyes were wide open, and he looked at me, begging me. He grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. I just sat there telling him that he would be all right. And then his hand got weaker until it finally fell away.”

Ahn turned her gaze to Thomas then. “He died, and I stayed with him for a long time. I could not save him. The boys that hated him could not stop themselves. The girl who ran away could not save him or stop the boys. Everything that happened was going to happen, and there was no other chance. He had just been making love with a beautiful Vietnamese girl and then he was attacked and then he died holding on to my arm.”

Ahn held up her arm, showing it to Thomas.

“It was our fate.”

Late that night Thomas came awake suddenly. In the corner of his hospital room stood his mother. She was wearing her white slip and the house shoes that Minas Nolan had given her. She was silent, staring at Thomas, and he was just as quiet returning her gaze. As he watched her the color slowly drained away from her image. She turned gray and then slowly became transparent, like glass. When she was almost completely clear, her form began to sparkle from the inside. The cloud of iridescent light then drifted toward the window, out through the glass, and away into the dark sky. The lights kept moving until they covered the nighttime horizon, becoming stars.

When Thomas awoke in the morning, he was exhausted and felt more alone than he’d ever been. It was as if his body had been cut away from his soul and he was floating somewhere above himself on the bed. He knew that he’d been crying, that he’d lost everything that he’d held on to since he was a boy, running like Ahn had taught him to do. He knew that his mother was dead and gone, and that he was a criminal, a murderer.

He looked out the window into the light-filled sky and thought about dying. Then he was filled with wonder at all of the pathways that came together in him on that day in grace.