Fortunate Son

now I’m fired wit’ no references. Three years an’ now it’s like I never even had a job. Get me some gotdamn beer.”

Elton was drunk for the next three weeks. Thomas couldn’t come back home at noon anymore, and there were fights every night. Some nights he would sneak out of the house and go to stay with Pedro so he didn’t have to hear the yelling and crying.

One moonlit evening, while Elton broke furniture and called May a whore, Thomas went out to sit by Alicia’s tomb.

There were crickets and frogs singing all around him. He delighted in the moon shining on his hands and feet, and spoke softly to the girl.

“Are you lonely, Alicia?” he asked. “I know you must be, and I’m sorry if I don’t come talk to you enough. But I been real busy tryin’ to keep it cleaned up around here. An’ sometimes it’s better to be alone. Sometimes people jus’ scream an’

watch TV an’ tell you they don’t like you.”

Thomas climbed up on the makeshift tomb and lay down.

He slept for a while, and when he awoke the moon filled not only his eyes but all of his senses. He tasted it and heard its rich music. He felt the light on his skin like golden oil sooth-ing him. In his mind the moon was speaking to him, telling him that everything was all right. He fell back to sleep on the rock-rough crypt smiling at his good fortune.

The next day Pedro’s father was killed in a shoot-out on Slauson.

Alfonso Middleman was shot dead on the street. People told Pedro that it was kids trying to take his drug money. No one knew where Pedro’s mother’s family lived, and the father’s family wouldn’t even let him in the door.

“I went to his mother’s house,” the gray-eyed teenager said. “But they said that my mother lied and they were no 1 5 3

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blood to me. I don’t even know where they’re burying him. I can’t even go to his funeral.”

Pedro got a job selling crack out of an alley six blocks east of Thomas’s Eden. He made enough money and then bought a pistol from the people he dealt for.

“I’m gonna kill them suckahs murdered my dad,” he told Thomas one night. “Kill’em all. And then they can put me in jail. I don’t even care. But I’m not gonna let’em get away with that shit.”

Thomas spent seven nights with Pedro in the clubhouse.

The bigger boy was despondent over the death of a father he hadn’t talked to in eight years. He hungered for revenge.

Thomas didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble at home. Elton had a night job at an assembly plant by then, and May was seeing Wolf again. Many nights she wasn’t home, and even when she was there, she was too high to miss Thomas.

It wasn’t until about a month later that everything went completely wrong.

Thomas was asleep in his back-porch bedroom. In his dream his mother was showing him how to fly. Wolf had been arrested the week before for drug dealing and implica-tion in the murder of a man in Compton. That night May had promised Thomas that she wouldn’t see Wolf again and that she’d stop getting high. The boy had not asked her to stop, but he was happy that she wanted to.

He came awake suddenly with fear clutching his heart. He didn’t know why.

He hurried out of the house and across his valley into the clubhouse and up to the roof. There he found Pedro sitting on the rusted-out fire escape with the muzzle of his pistol shoved in his mouth. Pedro was crying. Thomas screamed and ran at his friend.

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“Stop!” Thomas shouted as he leaped onto the metal basket.

The gun fired before Thomas could grab his friend. But he couldn’t stop, and when he fell upon Pedro, the metal wrenched away from the wall and crashed the four floors to the ground.

For long moments all Thomas knew was pain.

When he could finally think a bit, he crawled over his wide-eyed dead friend to the hole in the fence and back home. He made it to the street and up to the front door.

There he collapsed.

Elton found him in the morning when he was coming home from work.

“Lucky.”

“I fell,” the boy said.

“Don’t worry, boy,” Elton said in an unusually kind voice.

Thomas was happy to hear his father’s gentle tone.

He woke up in the hospital with May and Elton standing over him. There was a white woman wearing a brown dress suit standing there too, and a doctor and a nurse and a policeman in uniform.

“I want to speak to him alone,” the white woman in the suit said.

“Why?” Elton complained. “You think we did somethin’

to him? I’m not leavin’. I’m not.”

“I can have you arrested right now, Mr. Trueblood. Right now.”

Thomas didn’t understand what the woman wanted. He was feeling kindly toward Elton because he obviously cared about what happened to him. After all, he had brought him to the hospital even though it was bound to cost a lot of money.

Thomas felt dizzy, and somewhere beyond that his hip hurt. But he wasn’t worried about the pain.

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The room cleared out except for the nurse in white and the white woman in the brown suit.