Fortunate Son

Doris liked the sentence. It was the way her first boyfriend’s father used to say things. The boy was a dog, but his father always made promises that he kept.

“Even after Manly dropped me, his father made him give me the car he promised,” Doris was saying many hours and many beers later.

“Manly was the son?” Michael asked, a little unsteady on his bar stool.

It was three in the morning, and Doris had closed at one.

She opened the tap then and refused to take any more of Michael’s money.

“Yeah,” she said. “Manly was the son, and Big Boy was his old man. Only Big Boy was the man, and Manly was the boy.

You want another beer?”

“I don’t think I could even walk across the road if I did,”

he said.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m gonna help you to your bed.”

“You are?”

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

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I knew that from the minute you said that you had the money for one beer and another.”

They’d both been drinking.

“So your sister’s just fifteen and she’s with a senior in college?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna go kick his ass for robbing the cradle?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you hate him for doin’ that?”

When Michael turned his head, his eyes and brain seemed to wait a second before following. He turned to look at Doris’s eyes, felt a moment of fuzzy light-headedness, and then she materialized out of his confusion. This momentary hallucination seemed to have deep meaning for the young man. He touched her lip-scar with his finger.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said you must wanna kick his ass for molesting your sister. That’s a crime, you know.”

“Yeah, but I don’t, I don’t hate him. My sister is like, I don’t know . . . she’s like a woman. I mean, Eric is the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He can do like . . . anything.

And my sister’s like that too, only there’s nothing holding her back. She has eyes like a snake, but I love her.”

“Kiss me,” Doris said.

In his desert motel bed he saw how skinny and scarred Doris was. She admitted to him that she was twenty-eight and that she drank too much. She’d slept with “more than a few men,” she said.

“I’ve used this motel a whole lotta nights,” she admitted after their first time making love. “I’ve fucked at least three guys in this bed.”

Michael realized that this was a test of some sort. He knew 2 6 7

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

that he couldn’t say that that was all right. If he said that, she’d think that he thought she was a whore but he didn’t care because that’s why he was with her. And he knew that he couldn’t say that what she had done was wrong but that he still wanted to be with her because then he’d be looking down on her and she’d get mad.

He knew these things, but they didn’t matter. They didn’t matter to him because of how he felt.

“I’m twenty-one,” he said, fingering a crescent-shaped scar on her rib cage, just below the tattoo of the red rose on her left breast. “And this is the first time that I’ve ever felt like anybody has ever seen me. You know what I mean?”

Doris stared into his face with her mismatched blue eyes.

She wanted to speak but didn’t or couldn’t.

“I’ve never had such a long talk with anybody,” he said.

“Man or woman. Not a real talk where I said things about myself and they wanted to know what I was saying.”

“I want to stop drinking,” she said.

“Will you still talk to me if you do?”

“ What do you want from me?” Kronin Stark asked Raela five days later.

She was too weak now to get up from her bed. The giant loomed above her. Because of the weakness of her vision, he seemed to be shimmering.

“You know,” she said. “And I want my brother back in the house and for you to apologize to him.”

“You think you can order me?”

“Leave me alone.”

She closed her eyes until the shadow that covered her was gone.

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

The next morning in the lounge area of the Cape Hotel in Beverly Hills, a slight man in a rumpled light-gray suit approached Kronin Stark’s table. The man’s name was Silas Renfield, but everyone called him Renny. Renny worked for the governor, though he had no particular job title — no official position at all. He showed up at odd hours and traveled extensively around the state and the nation. Whenever he appeared at the governor’s door he was always admitted whether or not he had an appointment.

“Hello, Mr. Stark,” Renny said, remaining on his feet.

“Sit,” Kronin replied.

“How are you, sir?”

“I don’t have time for pleasantries, Mr. Renfield. You know what I want. Are you ready to give it to me?”

“The boy was convicted of a violent crime under a state law that the governor himself pushed through the legislature. It would be . . . unseemly for him to rescind his own legislation.”

“I’m not asking for him to overturn the law. All I need is for him to allow clemency for one boy, a hero.”

“This boy was convicted of gang activity.”