Fortunate Son

People appeared to him. His father wouldn’t know what to say, he knew. Ahn would agree with his assessment of the problem and shake her head fatalistically. Michael and Christie and Mona were useless. He had no other friends that could help.

All he could think of was Tommy and Mama Branwyn.

But she was dead, and no matter how quickly he opened his eyes he never caught a glimpse of her as Tommy had done.

And his brother was lost to him. He believed that if he found Thomas he might be saved from his own cursed luck. But 1 9 5

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

there was no sign of Thomas anywhere in L.A. Even his grandmother had lost track of him.

Having lost his brother again in his mind, Eric realized and accepted that he was alone in the world. He decided that he’d never talk to Raela again. He could control his destiny. He didn’t have to give in to the gravity he felt in her presence.

After all it still wasn’t love that he felt. There was a rightness in the combination of him and Michael’s sister. She was his other half in some way, his equal. She’d be immune to his providence.

But he would never see her again and his family would be safe. Mona would grow up and move away, and he and Christie would live into old age, her resenting his distance and him guarding her life.

The sweat broke and Eric laughed to himself. He felt as if he had jousted with a tiger. He’d battled an inner demon and won, with no one but himself to mark the victory.

E ri c cam e h om e to find Drew Peters sitting on the sofa, casually talking to Christie.

She seemed a little nervous, but Eric felt that that was only natural. Drew and Christie had been together, off and on, since they were twelve. There was a deep bond between them, and it must have been difficult for them to sit together when she was now with Eric.

“Hey, Drew,” Eric said.

“I won that last point” were the first words out of his mouth.

“You would have,” Eric agreed for the hundredth time, “if the sun hadn’t come out right then.”

“You better believe it,” Drew added. “I had your ass.”

1 9 6

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

Eric sat with them and talked about Drew’s work at Yale.

He went in wanting to become a physicist, but now he was interested in painting. His father was angry about the change of major, but he didn’t care.

“I’m going to do what’s right for me,” Drew said with deep conviction and maybe even a little anger. “And I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

Eric had little to say about his own work. It wasn’t much different than the studies he did at Hensley. Mona toddled in while they talked. She crawled up onto her father’s knee and went instantly to sleep there.

Christie watched them with a frown on her face.

Drew soon excused himself, and Christie went to bed with a headache.

Eric sat on the little patio twenty-five stories above L.A.

The building was also on a hill and so looked far out on the horizon. Mona woke up and said, “Daddy?”

“Yes, baby?”

“Do you love me?”

“Very much,” he said.

He kissed her to cover up the lie.

1 9 7

13

During the first few years that Eric attended UCLA, life got very hard for his brother Thomas. The lean escapee found a shopping cart and traveled the streets of Los Angeles gathering things that he found beautiful and useful.

He loved blue glass and chrome, red cloth and books. He collected all kinds of books. Some he could read and others not.

He ranged all over L.A., sometimes sleeping in Griffith Park, sometimes in the cavelike feeders to the concrete L.A. River.

He was robbed every other month or so but only raped once, by a wild man who came upon him sleeping in an alley off Florence, when he was thinking of going back to his alley valley.

Once Thomas went down to Malibu and walked the beaches where he’d gone with his brother and Dr. Nolan. He didn’t stay long because the sun on the sand was too bright.

The police stopped him all the time, but he used Bruno’s social security card as identification and claimed that he was twenty-three. The police believed him because after all that time living outside, Thomas’s voice had become rough and his face was quite weathered and beat-up.

He had no friends. The only people he knew were other street people who traveled the avenues and alleys looking for refuse that was either edible or of some value to someone 1 9 8

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

somewhere. He gathered bottles to return for the deposits and copper piping from discarded air conditioners, stoves, and refrigerators. These valuable metals he brought to recycling centers for a couple of dollars every now and then. In an old mayonnaise jar he kept the carcasses of interesting bugs that he’d find. In the day sometimes he’d dump out the bugs and investigate God’s divine will manifest in their intricate designs.

While Thomas walked, he’d usually have a running dialogue with his mother, Branwyn.