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Fortunate Son

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“Can I sit with you guys? That jerk down there started talkin’ shit.”

“Sure,” Eric said and Thomas wanted to say but didn’t.

“I’m Eric and this is my brother, Tommy, I mean, Thomas.”

“They call me Lucky,” Thomas said.

“They do?” Eric asked.

“I thought you said you were brothers?” the young woman said, settling next to Thomas. She had a wheeled, silvery suitcase that was meant to look like metal but was made from lightweight plastic. Eric got up and put the bag in the rack above their heads.

“We were separated when we were young,” the young white man explained.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “We just found each other again.”

“You don’t look like brothers.”

Thomas and Eric told their story together, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. As they spoke, the young black woman pictured the two men as little boys and found herself smiling at their graceless affection for each other.

Her name was Clea Frank. She was a native of Denver and now was on her way to a scholarship at New York University.

She was a language major and wanted to work at the UN.

The young white man had tried to “put the moves on her,”

and she wanted to sit with them so that he’d leave her alone.

She was happy that Eric and Thomas were going all the way to New York.

“ D on ’t you f e e l funny calling him brother?” Clea asked Thomas some time after midnight as the train approached Chicago.

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

“That’s what he is. He’s the only brother I’ve ever had.”

Eric was asleep, and Clea had just come awake after napping through the late afternoon and evening.

“But he’s not your real brother — he’s white,” Clea said. “I mean, I don’t have anything against white people, but I don’t go around calling them my brother either.”

Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.

“But we were raised together and we understand each other. He used to protect me when the big kids would pick on me, and I explain things to him.”

“But he has three years of college and you don’t have hardly any school. What do you explain to him? The street?”

Over the previous day and a half the three had changed trains twice and told their stories. Clea’s father was a baker in Denver, and her mother was a part-time nurse in the pediatric ward of the university’s teaching hospital. Clea was their fourth child. Her two brothers were high school dropouts, and her sister was a schizophrenic who lived on the street half the time and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals. Clea was the hope of her family, and she intended to make something of herself.

Thomas had told her about everything he’d done and about the police being after him. He didn’t think that she would tell anyone, and Eric was asleep by then.

“I can see things in other things,” Thomas said. “Eric’s real smart, but he doesn’t pay attention to everyday things like I do.”

“Like what?”

“Rocks and eyes and making things up.”

He chose that moment to take her hand.

“Your skin is so rough,” she said.

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Wa l t e r M o s l e y

He pulled away, but she reached out and drew the hand back.

“I thought that you were making it up about living in the street,” she said. “But your hands are like a workingman’s hands.”

“I knew a woman that was schizo,” Thomas said. “She saw things too. There was a guy named Benny who would say that she was his ho, an’ he would get money from other homeless guys to have sex with her.”

“And did you have sex with her?”

“No. But I’d go sit with her sometimes, and if I was really quiet she’d get still and tell me about the things she saw.”

“Like what?”

“There was a big man who sometimes chased her and sometimes killed her, but then he could be nice and take her on his shoulders and show her the sea. It was a light-blue-and-pink ocean with fish that swam on top of the water and talked to the men in boats who sailed out there with them.

And the moon was very close to the earth, and there wasn’t any cigarettes or alcohol.”

“She was crazy.”

“Maybe. But I can tell you what she said and you don’t call me crazy.”

“What was the woman’s name?” Clea asked.

“Lana.”

“Did you get Lana away from Benny?”

“No. She liked him and called him her husband.”

“But he was pimpin’ her.”

“Yeah, but she said that he never let those men hurt her.”

“That’s crazy. He took those men there in the first place,”

Clea said.

“Life’s crazy,” Thomas replied. “When Benny would get 2 4 8