Fortunate Son

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“I wanted both of you,” Stark said, eyeing the lame Thomas.

“But why?” Thomas asked. “Why’d you do it in the first place?”

“Raela wouldn’t eat until I obtained your clemency.”

“Is she eatin’ now?”

“Yes.”

“Then you been paid,” Thomas stated bluntly.

Eric was perplexed by his brother’s tough attitude.

“Don’t you feel at all indebted to me?” Kronin asked, still addressing Thomas.

“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”

Stark cocked his head like a man who has just heard a threat being issued.

“I was the one who engineered your clemency.”

“I think it was Raela did that,” Thomas said. “You just did what she made you do.”

It was obvious to both young men that Stark expected to get his way easily. The impediment of Thomas’s refusal was beginning to humor Eric.

“Why don’t you let us talk about it?” Eric suggested. “I’ll talk to Tommy alone.”

“Why don’t we discuss it on the ride back?” Stark suggested.

“We didn’t know that you were coming, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “So we called my dad. He’s coming to get us.”

Stark glared at Thomas, who in turn squinted as if the bright light of an inquisitor was shining into his eyes.

“ H ow ’d you boys like New York?” Minas Nolan asked on the ride back to Beverly Hills.

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“I really liked it, Dad,” Eric said. He felt outgoing and effu-sive with his father for the first time that he could remember.

“Tommy spent every day in the museum, and I was down on Wall Street. We’d get together every night for dinner though.”

“How did you like it, Tommy?” Minas asked, turning momentarily toward the backseat.

“It was pretty good,” the smaller boy said. “The museum was great, and we met some nice people. A lotta people talked about the World Trade Center. I think they’re worried about it happening again.”

“That was a terrible event,” Dr. Nolan agreed.

“Yeah. There’s people live in the subways, you know.”

“Really?” Eric asked. “When were you in the subway?”

“Sometimes I took the Lexington line downtown, but I heard it from this homeless guy I met in the park. I guess he could tell by the way I said hi that I lived on the street before.

He said that my face an’ hands didn’t go wit’ the clothes I was wearin’. He told me that if you go down on the subway rails under Grand Central that you’d find a whole village where homeless people lived. They got everything down there, even electricity.”

“That sounds like a tall tale to me,” Minas Nolan said in his certain tone.

“Could be though,” Thomas said. And then he told Minas about his alley valley and the apartment-building clubhouse he shared with Pedro.

“It’s like when you look at someplace and say that there’s not nuthin’ there,” Thomas concluded. “But when you look closer you see animals an’ birds an’ things. I met a woman who told me that there’s all kindsa millions and millions’a animals too small to be seen walkin’ all ovah everywhere all 2 8 2

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the time. Her daddy was a scientist, but she was crazy an’ had to live in the street.”

“That’s terrible,” Minas said.

“Yeah,” Thomas replied. “But nobody know it.”

E ri c and M ona and Thomas and Minas Nolan all sat in the living room drinking a citrus punch that Ahn had made.

Eric explained everything he’d learned from Constance Baker without talking about the way things ended with her. Mona sat on Thomas’s lap, rubbing her hands over his fingers.

“Your fingers like sandpaper, Uncle Tommy.”

“I used to spend all my time out in a park that I had.”

“You had your own park?” The girl was astonished.

“Yeah. But it was real dirty because people were always throwin’ trash in it. That’s why I got such rough hands —

throwin’ all the trash away all the time.”

“Oh.”

Raela and her brother, Michael, came over in the afternoon. Michael was accompanied by a scarred woman named Doris. Doris wore an orange dress and had one light- and one dark-blue eye. Raela was thinner than before but just as beautiful as Thomas had remembered. After a while Eric and his friends and daughter decided to go down to the beach.

“You wanna come, Tommy?” Eric asked.

“Not today. I just wanna stay around here.”

Thomas was thinking that he could go up to his mother’s old room and sink to his knees. It had been a long time since he’d been home.

But Dr. Nolan wanted to talk awhile longer. Thomas didn’t mind. It had been many years since he was alone with 2 8 3

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his mother’s lover. When he was traveling the streets of L.A.

he often thought of the talks he’d had with the doctor.

“I’m very sorry about the things that have happened,”

Minas said when they were alone.

“It’s not your fault,” Thomas replied. “The law took me away. It took me from you, then it took me from my real father, and then it put me in jail. I don’t really like the law all that much. It’s like no matter what I do there’s some law to tell me I’m wrong.”