Fortunate Son

“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.”

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“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.

“ P s s s st,” Th omas h eard, 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.

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5

But 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 Alge-ria. He slung his mattress on the floor and threw his baseball 6 9

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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.

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F o r t u n a t e S o n

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.