Fortunate Son: A Novel (23 page)

Fontanot knew Thomas at first sight. He folded the young man in his arms and kissed his cheek.

“Boy, you are a sight for sore eyes,” he bellowed. “Look just like your mother. You sure do.”

They crowded into the kitchen and ate catfish and sausages. Thomas couldn’t eat too much, but he was happy at the loud entrepreneur’s special table.

Ira had married a big Texan girl named Coretta.

“Got some meat on her bones,” he told the doctor and his son. “But she ain’t fat. No, no—just bullheaded. When she told me she wanted to live together, I said that I wasn’t ready for that, so the next night when I got home she had all her stuff already moved in. I tried to th’ow her out an’ she rassled me to the floor. I couldn’t break her grip ’cause I was laughin’ so hard. Now, you know if a girl gonna make you laugh like that then it’s all ovah. We got married in Vegas the next weekend.”

Thomas didn’t remember ever feeling so happy or so safe as he did in Fontanot’s kitchen.

“Mr. Fontanot?” Thomas said after many stories.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think you might have a job here that I could do? I have washed dishes for men’s shelters before, and I know how to clean up.”

“I could use a good man on my smokers,” the big man said. “You know, I only put men I could trust out in the backyard.”

“You can trust me.”

“Then you can start tomorrow.”

THAT NIGHT THOMAS
was sitting on his old bed (Eric had moved back to his original bedroom) thinking about working for Fontanot. At the Rib Joint he felt that he could make a new life and maybe things would be all right. He’d have a job, and no one was looking to put him back in jail; he could get a license to drive and maybe even get a used car. That way he’d have an ID with a picture and an address. And then he could take a train back East and visit Clea at NYU when Fontanot gave him vacation. Maybe even Monique’s husband would shake his hand and smile.

The knocking at his door was very soft.

“Come in,” he said, knowing that it was Ahn.

The nanny-turned-housekeeper had on a boy’s blue jeans and T-shirt. She also wore round wire-rimmed spectacles.

Thomas glanced at the hem of the T-shirt to see if there were old bloodstains there, but all he saw was bright white cotton.

“Hello, Tommy,” she said, leaning forward slightly with just a hint of a bow.

Tommy moved toward the end of the bed, and she sat next to him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m going to work for Mr. Fontanot. I’m gonna be a rib smoker.”

“Dr. Nolan and Eric tell me that you were shot one time before,” she said, frowning.

“A long time ago. I don’t hardly ever even think about that.”

“Was that before you called me?”

“No. I got shot later.”

“I could have saved you, maybe?”

“Prob’ly not, Ahn. I was in trouble, and nobody could have got me out. You know, it’s tough in the streets of L.A. I knew this guy once from down in Mexico, illegal, you know. And he told me that if he was sick he’d be better off at home because down there there was always somebody to give you some beans an’a tortilla, someplace to sleep at least.”

“But I could have fed you then. But I told you not to call.”

“It’s okay, Ahn. Really. I always remembered what you told me about running. No matter what happens you got to keep on movin’. You can’t stop to cry or wonder why or nuthin’. I got that from you, Ahn, and that’s why I stayed alive.”

The small woman and Thomas hugged there on his childhood bed. She was crying. Thomas remembered all the times that he and Eric had run to Ahn with cuts and scrapes and bruises. She would always be there, ready to take care of them.

“It’s okay, Ahn,” Thomas whispered. “We don’t have to run anymore.”

WHEN AHN LEFT
for her room, Thomas went down into the garden. He was barefoot and wore only his black jeans. In that way he remembered his mother and their nocturnal sojourns in the garden when Eric and Dr. Nolan were away. He expected to be alone, but he found Raela there, sitting on the stone bench.

“Hello,” the teenager said.

Thomas liked this girl. She seemed to him to hold herself like ballet dancers that performed in the park in the summer. It was the way she held her head high and how her eyes took a moment to settle on you. He grinned and sat down next to her.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked.

“When Eric falls to sleep sometimes I come down to sit with the flowers,” she said.

Thomas nodded.

“Eric told me that my stepfather wanted you to work for him but you said no.”

He nodded again, breathing in the strong scent of far-off night-blooming jasmine.

“Why did you say no?”

“Because . . .”

“What?”

“Because he made my eyes hurt when I looked at him.”

It was Raela’s turn to nod.

For long minutes they sat not talking. Now and then the flutter of a nightbird or some large moth broke the silence.

“He loves me too much,” the girl said after a while. “When I was a kid he’d come and watch me play. He would talk to me for hours but never even pay any attention to my brother at all.”

“I knew a woman once who told me that her father made her have sex with him,” Thomas said. “That’s why she ran away and lived in the street. He said he’d kill her if she even went out with a boy. He had killed another daughter and put her in the basement, but she never told no one except us in the street.”

“He never touched me,” Raela said. “And he never made threats. But I think he hates Eric—he hates him because we’re together.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said, nodding again. “Maybe that’s why he hurts my eyes.”

“I told Eric not to work for him. I told him that my stepfather is like a big old stone. He just falls on top of you and stays there until you’re crushed. When I was younger he would tell me about how he would sometimes just sit with a man at lunch, and by teatime the man would have lost everything it took him his whole life to make. I’d ask him why the man didn’t shoot him.”

“What did he say?” Thomas asked, scared as if he were being told a ghost story.

“That the way he got inside the man’s soul made the man happy to be losing just his business.”

Thomas thought about his lost cart then. He wondered if Kronin Stark had ever pushed anybody out of that fancy hotel and into the street.

“Do you love Eric?” Thomas asked, still thinking about pushing that cart.

Raela turned to Thomas, taking a moment for her eyes to settle. Then her brow furrowed.

Thomas liked the way she took her time. It was as if she knew there was no hurry. Sometimes it took a while to say something.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I mean, when I see him I think, ‘There’s Eric. I know him from inside his core to his skin.’ I think, ‘I need his warmth in my bed.’ Is that love?”

“Does he make you want to giggle and laugh out loud?”

“When I see him with you he does,” she said with no hesitation. “Seeing you and him together makes me happy.”

19

W
ORKING AT
the Rib Joint was a joy for Thomas Beerman. Minas gave him a ride to the restaurant every morning, and Thomas took the Wilshire bus back home at night.

Smoking the ribs, sausages, slabs of beef, and other exotic meats was a seven-man job (even though three of those men were women). They had to prepare the meat by cutting it into the proper portions, marinate it for twenty-four hours, and then smoke it in the twelve big metal cans out in the yard. They smoked beef, pork, and chicken, and wild game like venison and boar. They smoked homemade, hand-stuffed sausages. Miranda Braithwaite made the sauce and marinated the meats the way Ira had taught her. Ben Tallman and Parker Todd used brushes to baste the meat and turn it from time to time. Thomas Grant and Penelope Sargent prepared the orders and prepped for the others when they weren’t busy. There was a sixth man, Bishop Ladderman, who carved the meat and carried the orders into the kitchen for Ira to finish off and for the waitresses to deliver.

THREE TIMES A
week Thomas talked on the phone to Clea in New York. He half expected her to start dating the law student Brad again. She did see him from time to time, she said, but only as a friend.

“He’s got another girlfriend now,” she said. “She’s preparing to study law like him, and they’re very happy.”

Love flourished in the long talks they had via cell phone.

“I never knew anybody who thinks as deeply as you,” she would say. “It’s like you were a thousand years old and had the time to wonder about everything in the world.”

Thomas liked having her to talk to. He even planned to take a flight to New York on his first three-day weekend, which would come in three months. By then he would have saved the money.

Clea had said that she loved him over the phone.

ON HIS DAYS
off Thomas visited Raela and Eric at the Tennyson. They had moved in together, and he was back in school. Thomas babysat for Mona when Raela and his brother went out, and he talked late into the night with Eric when the two came home from their date.

“So you’re not gonna work for Stark?” Thomas asked Eric one such late evening.

Raela was asleep with Mona in her bed because the child still had bad dreams about her mother’s murder. That’s why Mona liked to have Thomas babysit for her—the child was convinced that he could always save her if something bad happened.

“No,” Eric said. “Raela doesn’t want me to. She doesn’t trust him, but I think he’s just trying to keep his family together. We go over there at least once a week for dinner.”

“I don’t like him.”

“I know. But I’m not scared. I mean, what could he do to me?”

Thomas gazed at his brother and smiled.

“What are you smilin’ at?” Eric asked.

“For a while there I didn’t think that anything would ever work for me,” Thomas said. “I mean, I couldn’t even get it together to buy a new pair of shoes. I couldn’t even stop my feet from bleedin’ through the holes in my soles.”

“I guess we are lucky like you told me, huh?” Eric said.

“Maybe so.”

ONE AFTERNOON THOMAS
put on a pair of black cotton pants and a blue Hawaiian T-shirt that Raela had helped him pick out at a store in West Hollywood. He had on black sandals with no socks and a short-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. Wearing this ensemble, he took four buses down to Compton and knocked on Harold and Monique’s door. Lily answered.

“Uncle Lucky, is that you?”

He picked up the chunky girl and kissed her cheek. Monique came up and kissed her childhood friend on the mouth. Thomas worried that Harold would get mad about that, but he just shook Thomas’s hand and said, “You look good, homeboy. Come on in.”

THOMAS STARTED READING
books from the shelf at Minas Nolan’s house. It really didn’t matter what he read: science fiction, biography, technical manuals, or general fiction—all of it served the purpose of telling him something, anything. He didn’t retain much of the knowledge he perused; he didn’t expect to collect ideas but merely to be exposed to them.

“What are you reading, son?” Minas would ask when he came upon Thomas in the library hunched over some book.

“Gray’s Anatomy,”
he said one day.

“Are you interested in human anatomy?”

“It’s so pretty,” Thomas replied. “I saw this guy cut open once in Tremont’s alley. He stole from Tremont and got his arm cut open. I could see the muscles hangin’ outta his arm. They didn’t look all neat like they do here in this book. In this book it looks nice and, and pretty.”

“Those experiences you had must have been awful,” Minas said.

“It must have been,” Thomas agreed. “But it’s like somebody else’s life when I think about it. I mean, I know that I was there, but it feels like I always been here and those things I did are like a book.”

Thomas held up the anatomy text and shook his head.

Minas wondered if he understood what the boy was saying. Later that night, when he went to bed, he decided that Thomas had become as deep and unfathomable as his mother.

BISHOP LADDERMAN WAS
offered a job as an assistant chef in a fancy Brentwood restaurant, and so he left the Rib Joint. It was quite a surprise. Bishop wasn’t looking for a job, but one day he got a call from Chez Vivienne’s owner, Raoul Mantou. Mr. Mantou said that he’d heard a lot about Bishop and that he wanted him in his kitchen. He offered seventy-five thousand dollars a year, twice what any cook got at Fontanot’s, and so Bishop had to go.

Michael Cotter was hired to take Bishop’s place.

Michael was different from the other smokers. Miranda, Ben, Parker, Penelope, and Thomas Grant were all in their late fifties up to sixty. Bishop was that age too. And even though Thomas was only twenty, he had what Fontanot called an old soul, and because of his scars and limp he seemed more like one of the older workers.

Cotter was young, not quite thirty, and handsome, black as glowing tar and lithe like a panther. He was always laughing and quick to lend a hand. The waitresses from the restaurant would come out to the yard just to look at him when he’d take his shirt off to move the heavy metal smokers or large bundles of meat.

Cotter got along with everybody. He and Thomas became fast friends.

One day, after his first few weeks on the job, Michael offered to drive Thomas home. Thomas took the ride because he liked to hear Michael’s tales about the streets. They were different streets from those Thomas had inhabited. Michael told stories about tough men and fine women that loved and fought in the clubs and bars. Thomas knew what happened outside, and Michael knew what went on indoors.

“So you stayed in that alley and didn’t evah go to school?” Cotter asked on that first day he gave Thomas a ride.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s wild, man. And nobody nevah knew?”

“Not until Pedro killed himself and I tried to stop him and fell off the roof. Then they knew . . . about me not goin’ to school anyway.”

MICHAEL COTTER LOVED
a good story. He had been in the army for a spell, as a sniper. He told Thomas that they had him “all ovah the niggerlands from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Argentina to North Korea.”

“And you shot people?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, yeah, man. Sometimes, though, they’d put a twist on it.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes,” Michael said, “when they didn’t wanna kill somebody but just shake him up, they’d have me shoot his wife or young child. Sometimes I’d just wound a dude so he’d miss a meetin’.”

Most of the other smokers liked Cotter, but they didn’t believe his stories.

“He just a blowhard,” Parker had said to the other smokers one day before Cotter had arrived. “I mean, he tell a good story all right. And I believe he had some time in the armed services. But the United States government ain’t nevah gonna have no sniper shoot no child.”

“I’ont know,” Miranda said. “Maybe not a white child, but if it was some little black boy or Arab girl they might not care.”

“What do you think, Lucky?” Ben asked Thomas. “You the one he talk to the most.”

“He prob’ly did all that,” Thomas said.

“Why don’t you think he lyin’?” Penelope asked the youngest smoker.

“People lie to impress people,” Thomas said, paying very little heed to the words as they came out of his mouth. “When they lie they sneak a look to see if you’re impressed. But Cotter don’t care. He just talkin’. I think he did alla what he said. All of it and more.”

ERIC WAS HAPPY
to have his brother back in his life. He still lamented Christie’s death, still felt guilty about it. But he didn’t feel alone with Raela as he had with Mona’s mother. If he was sick she nursed him and never got a sniffle. When they went skiing together he broke his leg, and she didn’t even sprain an ankle. And she was forever surprising him with her views of the world and her conviction that they were meant to be together.

“But do you love me?” Eric asked her one day.

“Sure,” she said.

“But I mean really, deeply.”

“That’s not the way you and I think,” she replied. “I’d kill for you if I had to. I’d die for you too. Isn’t that enough?”

“When I was in New York I slept with a woman, a stockbroker named Connie.”

“So?”

“Does that make you jealous?”

Raela gazed up at a spot somewhere above Eric’s head.

“If I smelled her on you I might get violent,” she speculated. “Yeah. If I smelled her on you, you might have to hide for a while.”

“But you didn’t smell her?”

Raela pressed her face against his chest and inhaled deeply.

Then she exhaled and said, “All I smell is me.”

Eric was reminded of Ahn’s story about the tiger. Looking upon this girl and remembering that, the young man felt real fear for the first time that he could remember. It exhilarated him, made him shiver. Raela put her arms around him and pressed his head to her breast. From there he could feel the strong beat of her heart and somewhere, far away, the muted thudding of his own blood.

“What we have is what we need,” she said with conviction.

Eric thought that he was directionless in this jungle of a girl, directionless but not lost.

A YEAR PASSED
for the brothers. Thomas went twice to New York and found Clea there waiting for him. In that year he had not cut himself or fallen down, nor was he stopped by the police even once. Every day he woke up early and sat with his stepfather. They read the newspaper and talked about the events in the world. Minas seemed infinitely interested in Thomas’s ideas and point of view.

“You’re so much like your mother that it’s uncanny,” Minas said to Thomas.

“She was the kindest person in the world,” Thomas would say.

“Yes, she was,” Minas agreed, “and as long as you are here she will never be gone.”

Eric relaxed. He experienced a profound love for his daughter now that he wasn’t afraid he’d do her harm. They’d spend hours playing games and going to amusement parks and the zoo.

His feelings for Raela never changed, but this didn’t bother him. She was his sail, he thought, and he was her ship. They were ancient archetypes instead of real people.

Sometimes when thinking this, Eric became terribly sad. He’d see himself like a reflection in a mirror, unable to reach out into the world of flesh and bone. But at those times Raela would come to him, and he realized that even in isolation he wasn’t completely alone.

And he also had Thomas. The brothers saw each other at least three times a week.

“You know, the more I think about what you said,” Eric was telling Thomas at the stone animal park, “the more I think that it’s true.”

“What?”

“That you’re the one who’s lucky. You loving life makes you like that. There’s nowhere you can go where you don’t feel at home.”

“Like a snake,” Thomas said, happy to continue the conversation he’d had so many years ago with Bruno. “A snake can go anywhere he wants to.”

“See that? If somebody called you a snake, even that would make you happy. You can’t get much luckier than that.”

MICHAEL COTTER WAS
driving Thomas every day by the end of the year. Thomas had talked to Michael almost as much as to his brother or Clea. He’d told him about the alley parrot chanting “no man” and Alicia in her cinder-block tomb. He talked about his years as a drug dealer and in the youth facility and as the child husband of Monique and de facto father of Lily.

“I called Clea at lunch, and she told me that she applied to UCLA and that they accepted her,” Thomas said to Michael on their ride home after work one day. “She asked me if I wanted her to come out here and live with me.”

“And what did you say?” Michael asked.

“I said absolutely.”

“Congratulations, my man.”

“Thanks. You know, she says that after she graduates, we’ll figure out whether or not to go back to New York.”

“Hey, man, that’s great. We should celebrate that. I got to see somebody today, but why don’t we have a drink tomorrow to toast you and your girlfriend.”

“Okay. Great.”

THAT NIGHT THE
whole family got together to celebrate. Eric, Mona, Raela, Ahn, and Minas were all there. Michael came with Doris. Michael had gone to live on a date farm in the desert. He’d grown a beard and dropped out of college. He no longer communicated with Raela’s parents (that’s how he began to think of Kronin and Maya). Doris drank too much sometimes, and when she did she got rowdy. But Michael said that he loved her, and Raela spent weekends with them once a month.

“It’s been a long journey, Tommy,” Minas said, holding up a glass of cognac. “But I think you’ve made it through.”

They all drank and cheered.

Raela played the piano for them, and Ahn sang a Vietnamese song that she remembered from her youth before coming to America.

Sometime late in the evening, Eric took his brother into the garden.

Eric seemed older. There could often be seen a slight smile on his lips. His shoulders sagged slightly, and he paid a lot of attention to people around him.