Fortunate Son: A Novel (6 page)

“Uh-huh. Me and my mama did.”

“Elton had lunch wit’ Branwyn and you?”

“Uh-huh.”

For a moment Thomas thought that he’d said something wrong, but then May smiled. She had a beautiful smile, and for the first time in many days the boy forgot that he was sad.

“We don’t have a proper bedroom for you yet, Tommy,” May said. “But there’s a cot out on the back porch, and it’s gonna be pretty warm for the next little while. You wanna see it?”

Thomas nodded and put his hand against May’s cheek. When he did this she swelled up, taking in a deep breath. She put him down on the floor and kissed his cheek before she stood up, and then, hand in hand, they walked through the back door and into the screened-in back porch.

The floor was made of unfinished wood planks, a few of which had spaces between them so that Thomas could see down through to the ground underneath. The porch was about twelve feet long and only five feet wide. Three of the walls were made of corroded metal screening, and the roof was layered with white aluminum slats. There was a broken lawn mower in the corner and three decomposing cardboard boxes spilling out rags and papers along the screen walls. The cot supported a bright blue-and-green vinyl-covered mattress that belonged on a chaise longue near a pool.

“I got a sheet that you can have,” May said. “And there’s some pillows and blankets in the cabinet in our room. An’ don’t you worry about Elton. He ain’t mad at you. Him an’ me just fight sometimes.”

After that May showed Thomas her and Elton’s bedroom and then her “sewing room” at the end of another long hall. They got the sheet and a blanket, a pillow and a lamp—which had a ceramic mermaid as a base—for his back-porch room. Thomas had learned to make his own bed from his mother, and so he told May that he could make up the room on his own.

She went to make a phone call, and when she got off she told Thomas that she was going out and to tell Elton, when he got back, that she was going to have dinner with August Murphy.

Thomas wasn’t worried to be alone. All he could see out of his screen walls were the trees of their yard and the yards of their neighbors. Beyond the trees there was a dark area and then the houses of the people behind.

Thomas threaded the cord for his lamp through a small window that led from the kitchen to the porch. He plugged the cord into a socket near the sink. He found a small transistor radio and turned the dial until he came upon a station playing the violin music that Ahn liked to listen to when she was washing clothes.

The back porch was filled with life and death. There were spiderwebs that had dead and dying moths and flies trapped in them. And there were crawling spiders and flying gnats. There was a hornet’s hive on the other side of the screen. Slow-flying yellow-and-black stingers hovered on the breeze humming their low-pitched songs.

In the crook of a tree’s trunk, not five feet away from his transparent wall, Tommy spied a bird’s nest. The chicks chirped and cried until their mother came with food that she forced down their gullets. Then they cried again. On the ground at the foot of the tree lay a dead chick. Three long lines of black ants led to and from the small, gray feathered corpse.

Thomas was happy with his half room at the back of the dark house. He settled down on his knees on the floor and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it would be like to be that open-eyed, open-mouthed chick on the ground below his peeping brothers and sisters, the soft tickle of tiny ants across his body, the spiky grass growing up from underneath.

After a while Thomas forgot the dead chick. He was just there on his knees slowly becoming one with the floor, searching for his mother again among the timbers and nails and then into the ground below.

As he sat there the sun, which filtered onto the porch bringing sweet green light down, began to fade. He even forgot about his mother, being aware of only the cool evening breezes and the sonorous buzzing of hornets.

Just before it was fully night, a banging sound jarred Thomas from his ruminations. Hard footsteps through the floor made him open his eyes. And the loud “May, where are you?” brought him to his feet.

When the back door to the porch opened, he was looking up, ready to face Elton.

“Where’s May?” the man asked his son.

“She’s having dinner with August Murphy,” the boy said.

“What?” Elton cried, the word sounding more like a threat than a question.

Thomas repeated the answer, thinking that his father must have thought that he was saying something else.

“Did she tell you to tell me that or did you hear her on the phone?”

“She was on the phone, and then she said to say it,” Thomas replied.

“What the hell is this lamp doin’ out here?” Elton asked then. And before Thomas could reply, “What the hell you doin’ here with all the lights in the house out? If you leave the lights out then thieves think you ain’t home an’ come an’ rob you. Didn’t they tell you that at those white people’s house?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you mean you don’t know? You stupid?”

Thomas realized that there was no answer he could give that would keep Elton from getting angrier, so he didn’t say anything.

“She said to tell me that she was going out to dinner with August Murphy?”

Thomas nodded.

This seemed to work. Instead of shouting, Elton went back into the house. He banged around and made noises with what sounded to Thomas like bottles and glasses. He made a phone call and did a lot of loud cursing. Then he went two rooms away to the living room, where he turned the TV up loud.

The night came on as all of this was happening. Thousands of insects fluttered up to the screen and thumped up against it in their attempt to get at the lamplight. Beyond the night bugs were a few stars and the quarter moon. Looking up there, Thomas remembered the nights when Dr. Nolan and Eric were gone to some family party. Branwyn and Thomas would go out into the flower garden in their pajamas and bare feet. Big pale-green moths flew overhead, and the boy and his mother made up stories about the stars.

“It’s like a big coat on the man in the moon,” Branwyn would say, “and all the stars are just the dust that fell off the sun.”

“An’ if he brush it off,” Thomas would add, “all the dust would fall down on us, but it would be yellow diamonds and dimes.”

They’d laugh and run through the garden until way after Thomas’s bedtime. And when he’d go to bed finally, he’d get the giggles so bad that he couldn’t go to sleep for laughing.

Lying across that hard and lumpy mattress, on Elton and May’s back porch, Thomas thought about the flower garden and his mother, and he believed that somewhere she was thinking the same things. This made him very happy, and he fell asleep feeling that he wasn’t alone in that screened-in room.

In his dreams he was drowsing in the big chair in the backyard near the pool. As usual he was tired after only a little while, but Eric was still leaping from the diving board and telling everybody to look. Dr. Nolan and Branwyn were lying side by side on two lounge chairs, and Ahn was sitting near to where Eric was, just in case he got into trouble from playing too hard.

Thomas was perfectly happy and dozy in his chair.

Then a woman’s loud scream brought him wide awake.

“What the fuck you mean ‘out’!” Elton yelled.

Then another scream.

“Get your hands off’a me,” May shouted.

“I’ma see if he been up in there,” Elton said. They were in the kitchen, Thomas realized. “An’ if he have been, then I’ma bust yo’ head.”

There was a scuffle and more screams.

Something crashed to the floor, and May let out a yell that picked Thomas up out of the bed and dragged him to the door to the kitchen. He didn’t want to go into the room, but he couldn’t help himself. He was drawn by the sounds of violence.

When he pushed the door open, he saw that Elton had thrown May up on the kitchen table. Her dress was hiked up to her waist, and Elton had his hand up under her red panties.

“If I feel him up there I’ma make it that you ain’t nevah gonna have no babies,” Elton shouted.

“I ain’t done nuthin’, baby,” May moaned. “I just had dinnah.”

“Till two in the mo’nin’?”

Elton moved his hand with a violent twist, and May screamed again.

Without thinking, Thomas rushed at Elton’s leg and wrapped his arms around it.

“Stop, Daddy!” the little boy screamed. “Stop!”

“What?” Elton cried, surprised by the appearance of his son.

He looked down at Thomas as if he had never seen him before. The man’s eyes were very bloodshot, and there was a crazy curl on his lips.

Just then there was a loud sound at the front of the house.

“Help!” May cried. “Help! He’s tryin’ to kill me!”

Four uniformed policemen rushed into the room.

“What the fuck?” Elton shouted.

“Stand down,” a tall black policeman said, and then, before Elton could move, the policeman hit him across the forehead with a short black stick.

Elton fell to the floor. His arms were flailing and his eyes were wild.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Thomas’s father said. “This my house.”

He got halfway up, but another cop hit him with a nightstick and he went down again. But he wasn’t unconscious. He tried once more to get up while May was gibbering and shouting behind an Asian officer near the door.

Thomas had backed up against the wall. He was more frightened of Elton now than he had ever been. He couldn’t understand how someone could be hit so hard, so many times, in the head and not stay down. He now saw his father like a monster on one of those scary shows that Eric liked to watch—a monster that couldn’t be killed and who came back through bombs and gunfire and killed everyone except the women and children he took to his cave, where later he would eat them.

Two of the officers had jumped on top of Elton. They were pulling his hands behind his back. Thomas was expecting to see the policemen thrown off like on TV, but instead they bound Elton’s hands and dragged him to his feet. He struggled but didn’t get away. He yelled, but the threats didn’t hurt anyone.

“You don’t have to hit him like that,” May cried.

Suddenly the big woman jumped at the Asian officer, knocking him into the men trying to subdue Elton.

“Leave him the fuck alone!” May cried. “Leave him!”

“I will kill you when I get outta here,” Elton warned May even though she was trying to help him. “I will kill you when I get out.” And then he turned his head toward Thomas. “An’ you too, you little bastid. You think you cute tellin’ her about that lunch. Lyin’ like I was after her. Lyin’ ’bout what I said. I’ma get you too.”

Then the policemen dragged Elton off. They handcuffed May and took her along too. Finally there was just Thomas and the Asian policeman left in the house.

His name was Robert Leung, and his grandparents had come from China.

“And so Mr. Trueblood is your father?” Officer Leung was asking Thomas. They were sitting on the black couch in the TV room.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied.

“And Miss Fine is your mother?”

“No. May’s Daddy’s girlfriend.”

“Does she live here with you?”

“I think so.”

Officer Leung frowned. “Don’t you know?”

Thomas explained that his mother had died and that he had just come to live with his father.

“Does your father hit you?” the policeman asked.

“No.”

“Are you afraid that he’s going to hit you?”

Thomas didn’t know the answer and so remained silent.

The policeman took him in the squad car down to the precinct police station. There they put him into a cell and locked the door.

“I’m locking the door so nobody else can hurt you,” Officer Leung said. “Child services has to come to get you, but they’re all asleep and so you’ll have to stay here until they get here.”

“Can’t I go with you?” the boy asked the cop.

“I have to go home.”

Thomas couldn’t understand why the policeman didn’t realize that he wanted to go home with him. He thought that if Eric was there he could make the policeman understand.
Eric always makes people understand,
Thomas thought.

“PSSSST,” THOMAS HEARD,
when Officer Leung had left the room full of human cages.

It was a tall, light-colored man across the way, also locked up in a cell.

When Thomas looked the man said, “You ever see a man’s big thing?”

Thomas thought he knew what the man meant, but he wasn’t sure. This uncertainty made him shake his head slightly.

The man, who was clad all in gray, pulled down the zipper of his pants and fished out his penis. It was very long and slender.

The man laughed.

Thomas turned away from him and settled down to the floor on his knees. The man kept talking, but Thomas hummed to himself so that the words the man uttered were unintelligible. After a while the man stopped talking, and all that was left were the sounds of Thomas’s own humming and the hardness of the concrete floor beneath his knees.

5

B
UT WHERE’D
he go?” Eric asked his father when he got home from school and was told that Tommy had moved away for good.

Ahn and Minas were both afraid to have Eric there when Tommy left. They knew that he would react loudly and violently, and it would have been harder on both children.

“Tommy’s father came to take him,” Minas told his son.

“But you’re his father,” Eric argued.

“No.”

“Mama Branwyn was my mother, and she’s his mother too. So you have to be his father.”

“I love Tommy like a son, but Elton Trueblood is his real father. He never married Branwyn, but Tommy is his blood and the law says that he has to go live with him or with his grandmother.”

Eric felt the color red in his head and in his fists and feet. He stormed out of the downstairs den, stomped up to his room, and systematically broke every toy that he owned. He broke the soldier action figures, the rocking horse, the colored lamp that turned slowly, showing horses and circus clowns on his wall at night. He shattered the screen of his television and crushed the clay drum his father had brought back from Algeria. He slung his mattress on the floor and threw his baseball through the closed window. Then he picked up his aluminum baseball bat and beat it against the wall and furniture with the intention of breaking the bat in two. But it wouldn’t break. Instead he dented his maple desk, put holes in the plaster of the wall, and made deep notches in the oak floor.

All the while Eric screamed his brother’s name and shouted obscenities he’d learned from the older kids on the playground.

“Fuck damn!” he shouted.

“Shit!” he cried.

And for every curse or profanity, he broke something or struck the walls or floor with his metal bat.

When the baseball went through the window, Minas headed for the boy’s room. By the time he got there, Eric was wreaking havoc with his bat.

When Minas entered the room, Eric swung at him but missed. The surgeon’s hand darted out and pushed the boy down on the mattress that had been spilled off the bed.

Minas had never struck Eric before. The novelty and shock of that, plus the deep desolation he felt about losing his mother and then his brother, brought Eric to tears. He cried on the mattress and then rolled onto the floor. He caterwauled and howled, whined like a motherless cub, and shouted unintelligible sentences at the Infinite. Minas held his son, and even then, in the boy’s most miserable state, his father marveled at the depth of feeling that Eric was capable of. His sorrow seemed to diminish Minas’s own fears and losses. It was as if Eric was deserving of more care and consideration because he was more, much more, than other humans.

They sat there on the floor of the boy’s destroyed room, Minas thinking of how much they had both lost and Eric howling like some animal faced for the first time with a giant harvest moon.

Late in the afternoon Minas drove Eric down to the beach at Malibu. The boys had always liked it there, and so the father thought it might be good for his son.

“Why did you let them take Tommy?” the child asked his father on the drive.

“I couldn’t stop them, Eric. They had the law on their side.”

“
You
couldn’t stop them, but
I
would have,” the boy said. “And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”

They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.

Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.

“Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.

“Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”

“He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”

“We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.

At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating Pacific.

“Eric,” Minas Nolan said, but before he could go out after his son, the boy was coming back with something wriggling in his hands.

It was a bright-green fish with brownish bumps along its back and big googly eyes that seemed somehow to contain mammalian intelligence. The tail was long and elegant, with a fin at the end shaped like a Japanese fan. The body was thick, and the fins below were so long and powerful they might have been used as legs.

“What is it?” Minas Nolan asked, forgetting his losses for a moment.

“A fish,” Eric said bluntly. “It was stuck in the sand.”

“But what kind?” his father asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. It’s certainly not a California fish. Maybe it’s from the tropics or the deep sea. Maybe this is some fish dredged up by an undersea storm, a fish nobody’s ever seen before.”

With a careless motion, Eric tossed the googly-eyed green fish back into the water, whereupon it darted away.

“I don’t like fish,” the boy said simply. “Let’s go home, Dad.”

THAT NIGHT ERIC
had his father write a letter to his brother, Thomas.

Dear Tommy,

Dad told me that you had to go away with your father. I don’t like it that you had to go, and I know that you want to be back here with us. I’m going to go get you as soon as I can figure out where you are and how I can get there. I will save you and bring you back here so we can play overhand catch and finish the first grade together.

Eric Tanner Nolan

p.s.
I found a green fish today that Dad said was real rare. If you were here I bet that you would have found him first.

Minas wrote the letter in bold characters that Eric could examine when he was done. They put the letter in an envelope, which Minas addressed and Ahn sent off to Madeline Beerman.

Madeline received the letter, but she never gave it to Thomas. She put it, unopened, in the bureau drawer next to her bed.

ERIC RETURNED TO
his life. At school he was the most popular boy in his class. He won every game he played at recess and was always chosen by the teacher to help clean the erasers and pass out papers.

Sometimes at night he would flip a coin with Ahn. It was a simple game. He’d flip an old Indian head nickel his father had once given him, and either he or Ahn would call heads or tails before it settled on the floor.

Eric won almost every time. Ahn was astonished by this. Even though she had little formal education, she knew that he shouldn’t win any more than she did. But there it was—time after time Eric would call heads and heads would turn up; Eric would call tails and tails it would be.

The nanny woke up one night from a deep sleep in which she was having a dream about flipping the coin with Eric. In the dream her faceless father was standing above her and the big blond boy. She and Eric were the same size in the dream. Ahn had lost sixty-three flips in a row when her father said, “One more loss and you will die, my daughter.”

That’s when Ahn awoke with a start.

“Every time he wins someone else loses,” she said to herself.

She gasped and suddenly saw her charge as some kind of monster.

“He killed his mother,” Ahn said to no one. “He killed Miss Branwyn.”

She lay back in her bed thinking of little Thomas.

“Maybe he’s safer away from Eric,” she thought. “Maybe Eric will destroy everyone he touches.”

THE DAYS AND
months and years passed in the Nolan household. Everyone wanted to be Eric’s best friend. Every girl wanted to be his girlfriend. The teachers loved him, and the sun illuminated his path.

He skipped the sixth grade because he knew all the subjects by grade five. It wasn’t hard for him to enter junior high school early because he was much bigger than his classmates anyway. He had natural agility and strength. And he was more mature than many adults at this early age.

And Eric was fearless. Nothing bad ever happened to him. He and another boy, Lester Corning, were once playing with fireworks when Lester’s parents were out. They were both leaning over the same Roman candle when instead of firing a flaming ball into the air, the rocket exploded. Lester took the full blast on the left side of his face, but Eric went unharmed. His hair wasn’t even singed. This was lucky for Lester, who was in so much pain that all he could do was roll on the grass of his backyard and scream.

Eric ran to the house and dialed 911. He explained the problem to the man on the other end of the line, and the ambulance came there in time to save Lester’s eyesight.

Eric was not only unhurt but seen as a hero by everyone. The ambulance attendants praised him for keeping Lester from touching his severely burned face. Lester’s parents thanked Eric for having the presence of mind to call for help. (Lester admitted that playing with the fireworks was his idea and that Eric didn’t even want to.)

That night Dr. Nolan took his son, then ten years old, aside and did the fatherly thing by explaining how risky it was to allow other children to persuade him to do something dangerous.

“You could have been burned just as easily as Lester,” Minas told his son.

“But why wasn’t I burned, Dad?” the boy asked. “We were holding the Roman candle between us. It was just as close to me as it was to him.”

“That’s what you call
serendipity,
” Minas replied. “Sometimes something terrible happens to one man and leaves another alone.

“When I was a boy in Kansas, a tornado hit a neighborhood in my town. The twister set down at the beginning of the two-hundred block of Orchard Street. It knocked down four houses in a row, veered around the fifth, and then came back with a vengeance, destroying every other house on that side of the block. I suppose that there’s some scientific explanation for what happened, but for the people in house number five it was just good fortune.”

Eric went up to his room pondering the word
serendipity.
He often wondered why so many good things happened to him. He never counted on his luck, but things always seemed to go right. He was lying in his bed in the dark, in Thomas’s old room, thinking about Lester and the accident, when there came a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and Ahn shuffled in.

Eric had known Ahn his entire life. She was no longer his nanny. Now she was Dr. Nolan’s housekeeper and the family cook. Eric would have never said that he loved Ahn. He did love his father, but it wasn’t a very strong feeling.

“You have to be careful,” Ahn said to Eric.

“You mean about the fireworks?” the boy asked. “Dad already told me that I could have been burned too.”

“No. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t play with danger because you will hurt others.”

“Not me?”

“You are dangerous,” Ahn said.

Eric tried to decipher what the Vietnamese servant meant. Many times when they talked, she would say things like “you are dangerous,” really meaning that he was in danger.

“You mean I’m in danger?”

“No. You are the reason that boy is burned,” she said. “You are never hurt, but he is not lucky. Be careful with your friends. Do not put them in trouble.”

Ahn’s black eyes stared into Eric’s great blue orbs.

The boy wondered about what she was saying. Sometimes he felt like that, that he was lucky.

The housekeeper turned away.

“Ahn.”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about Tommy?”

“Nobody ever answers your letters, but they don’t come back,” she replied. “I am not finding Mr. Trueblood in the phone book, and his grandmother says that Tommy is with him.”

“But he must be somewhere.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they left Los Angeles.”

“They have to be somewhere.”

“He is safe,” she said, and then turned away again.

Eric was angry at what she said. He knew that she meant Tommy was safe from him. But he would never hurt his brother. He loved Tommy. Always had. Tommy and Branwyn were the only people he’d ever felt passion for.

The door closed behind Ahn, and Eric was once again in darkness. He sat there worrying that maybe Ahn was right. Maybe he drove Tommy away.

That night Eric didn’t go to sleep. Instead he stayed awake thinking about his real mother, dead for so long, and Mama Branwyn, who was the perfect woman in his eyes. He thought about Tommy, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than four years.

After Tommy had left, Eric’s father went back to working long hours. He was quiet at the dinner table, and they hadn’t taken a vacation, or even a weekend holiday, in all that time.

Eric still missed his brother every day. Now and then he made friends at school or summer camp, but he’d never met another soul who saw the world the way Tommy did. Tommy saw faces in rocks, and he laughed at big, broad things like fat trees and passing images in clouds. He knew Branwyn better than anyone and never got mad at Eric for needing her love too.

Eric didn’t feel close to Ahn. When he was smaller she was just always there—to dress him, feed him, make sure that he was in the right place at the right time. He played games with her after Tommy was gone, but he didn’t care about her.

Eric realized that he didn’t care about much. He had fun and was befriended by almost everyone, but he never minded having to go home or when someone he saw every day left for good.

No, he wasn’t close to Ahn, but he remembered one day sitting outside the pool area in a health spa in Palm Springs. He and Tommy were five, and the smaller boy wanted to sit on the brick wall and wait to see if a roadrunner, the fleet-footed bird, might pass by.

Eric got bored and started asking Tommy questions.

He asked how it felt to break a bone. (Tommy had broken his finger, an ankle, his right leg, and his collarbone in falls.) He wanted to know what Branwyn wore when she went to bed. He asked Tommy if he ever wished that he and Branwyn were white like everybody else that they knew.