Fortunate Son

But May had other problems too. Elton was the source of many of them. Mostly it was because he never made enough money, and because of that he was mad all the time. And when he got mad he drank. And when he drank he got mean.

And then he’d go out and get in fights, and when he got home May and Thomas had to hide from him.

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Thomas listened to his father complain about the money he had to spend on the food that Thomas ate, including the dollar for his school lunch.

Thomas would have given up the lunch money except for Skully.

Skully was a mutt puppy that Thomas found on their doorstep one morning on his way to work. (Thomas referred to going to his alley as going to work because he spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned street and fixing up his clubhouse.)

Skully was a whining, licking ball of fur that Thomas immediately fell in love with. He brought the puppy back into the alley and fed him his peanut butter sandwich. That afternoon he went down to the corner store (after three so as not to be caught by the truant officer) and bought cheap dog food for his pet.

He named the dog Skully because of his mispronunciation of the foes of the Fantastic Four, the shape-shifting Skrulls.

Thomas pretended that Skully was a Skrull prince that changed into a puppy and now couldn’t change back, and it was Thomas’s job to feed and protect him until his people came and brought him back home to his castle.

Over the last three years he had made a home for himself among his family and friends. Besides May and Elton, he had his grandmother, Madeline, whom he stayed with one weekend a month. (He persuaded Madeline to let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen, where the hum of the refrigerator’s motor drowned out the all-night TV.) Then there was Bruno, who had been diagnosed with leukemia and juvenile dia-betes. Bruno had managed to go to school through the second grade, but now he was homebound and the school sent a tutor to visit him on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thomas 1 4 7

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dropped by to visit Bruno, and his pixilated Aunt Till, at least one day during the week and also on Saturdays, when May and Elton stayed in bed until noon.

Pedro always talked about going to Seattle to live with his sister, but whenever he got any money, he spent it on pizzas for himself and Thomas — only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.

These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother — and then there was Alicia.

Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys.

Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.

One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.

“Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.

The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.

Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her 1 4 8

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breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name Ralphie written across it.

Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.

When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.

“Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”

“You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.

“Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”

“What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.

“Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”

“But what if we hide her?”

“How?”

“We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top.

Then it would be like a coffin.”

Thomas was thinking about the casket that sat in front of the church, the casket that held his mother. He’d always been ashamed that he hadn’t looked at her to say good-bye even though she’d told him in his dreams that it was okay.