Fortunate Son

“My name is Mary,” the woman said. “You’re Tommy, right?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get hurt, Tommy?”

“Fell.”

“Did anybody push you?”

“No.”

“Did anybody hit you?”

“No.”

“Were you alone when you fell down?”

“No.”

“Was your father there?”

“No.”

“Was your mother there?”

“My mother’s dead.”

“Oh,” the woman said. Thomas could see the sad kindness in her face even though she wore lots of makeup. “I mean your father’s friend, Miss Fine. Was she there?”

“May wasn’t there either. It was just me an’ Pedro. He was sad about his father, and he had a gun that he was gonna use to shoot the boys that killed his father, but then he was on the roof and he shot the gun and I jumped out to save him but we fell.”

“Where is Pedro now?” The woman was frowning.

“Dead, I think.”

A f te r that th i ng s were not the same. Thomas told the woman about the clubhouse but not the alley. She left and he went to sleep. Neither his father nor May ever came back to 1 5 6

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visit him, and every time he woke up he was in a different room with different nurses talking to him and smiling. One day he woke up feeling lots of pain in his hip. He reached down, finding something hard there instead of flesh.

“It’s in a cast,” a smiling black nurse said. “They operated on your broken bone and now it has to heal.”

“Can I walk?”

“Not now, but later on you’ll be able to.”

Thomas lived in the hospital for six months after his opera-tion. He had to use crutches at first, and later he walked with difficulty. He was told by the doctor that he might have a slight limp afterward but, if he did the right exercises and went to rehabilitation, that it would go away.

May and Elton had been put in jail and held over for trial.

That’s what the social worker, Mr. Hardy, said.

“Why didn’t you go to school, Lucky?” he asked.

“Because the light hurt my eyes.”

“Did your parents know that you weren’t there?”

“No.”

“Didn’t they ask for your report cards?”

“I just told them that they didn’t have report cards no more.”

“Did they believe that?”

“No. Daddy said that he was gonna go talk to’em about it, but he was always workin’, and then after they fired him he was asleep all day. How long is he gonna be in jail?”

“Soon you’ll be leaving the hospital,” Mr. Hardy said.

“There’s a family that wants you to come stay with them.”

“But what about my dad and May?”

“The Rickerts will make a very nice home for you, Thomas,” Hardy said. He had pink skin, short gray and black hairs on his head and chin, and glistening droplets of sweat across his forehead like a netting of glass beads.

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“Do I have to?” Thomas asked.

“It’s what’s best,” the social worker told him. “They’ll send you to school and be home every night. And they have three other boys in their care, so you’ll have brothers to play with.”

Th re e days late r, Thomas was driven to the Rickerts’

house by the social worker. Thomas’s limp had become per-manent by then, but he didn’t mind. He was much more worried about the family he had come to live with.

Robert Rickert was thin as a rail and the color of a green olive that’s turning brown. Melba, his wife, was deep brown and as broad as the doorway. The husband was silent and sour, but his wife was mean.

Thomas’s foster brothers had names, but he never learned them. They were all about the same age, and the first night they told him about the gang they were in at school.

“Nobody messes with us,” the biggest boy with the silver tooth said. “ ’Cause they know that it’s all’a us then.”

“You wit’ us?” the smaller, darker boy asked. “ ’Cause if you ain’t, we gonna mess you up bad.”

The first night at the Rickert house, Thomas was sent to bed without dessert because he didn’t answer half of the questions Melba asked. He didn’t want the sherbet anyway, but he knew that she wanted to hurt his feelings by depriving him.

The George Washington Carver School classroom for slow third-graders was loud, and the teacher (whose name Thomas also forgot) didn’t teach very much. Thomas got into two fights the first day. Instead of going home he wandered away; then, after asking directions, he headed toward Central.

When he got to his old block, he climbed under the fence and into his blessed valley.

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Skully was gone. Thomas hoped that the puppy had found a home with children that loved him.

No Man was still there. He had taken a mate to live with, another green parrot, and together they built a nest in the top branches of the oak tree.

After two days, Thomas went to the alley where Pedro had sold drugs. The older boy had told him that little kids like Thomas could make good money delivering for the drug dealers there.

“Li’l kids can’t get into trouble if they get busted by the cops,” Pedro had told him. “So they pay you good money just to walk down the street.”