“No, ma’am,” the boy answered. “I wanted to look out the window, so I sat up on my knees instead of putting on my seat belt.”
The nurse’s name was Stella. She was sand-colored and had 8 1
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straight black hair. She had big breasts, and Thomas wished that she would let him sit on her lap so that he could lie back against her and close his eyes.
O n th e ri de home Elton complained about the two hundred thirty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents that the emergency room visit cost.
“Why you got to go an’ break your nose, boy?” he asked.
“That was our spendin’ money for the next three weeks.”
By now Thomas knew that Elton didn’t expect an answer.
He only wanted to complain about whatever there was in front of him. So the boy simply held the ice pack to his nose and closed his eyes, thinking himself around the pain.
This was another trick Thomas had learned — to concentrate on some part of his body that wasn’t hurting when he was in pain. If his head hurt he thought about his hands and how they worked. He looked at his hands, grabbed things with them, anything to keep his mind off the place that hurt.
At home Elton gave Thomas a pill that made him dizzy. So he went out into the back porch and lay down with the ice pack on his face. He couldn’t sit on his knees, but he could lie on his back and listen to the baby chicks and the mur-muring drone of hornets. Every now and then a bird would cry or a dog would bark. Cats in heat battled in the yards, and people talked and laughed, called out to one another and played music.
Thomas felt good about his new home. He wasn’t afraid of Elton anymore. The big car mechanic just needed to be left alone to complain and shout.
That was on a Wednesday.
On Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Thomas 8 2
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stayed in the house mainly and ate peanut butter and tuna fish. He went through the porch screen door into the backyard and found out that there was an abandoned road, an alley really, on the other side of the chain-link fence at the back of the property. Across the alley there were the backyards of other houses and buildings, some of them abandoned.
Thomas didn’t try to go into the alley because there was enough to see in the yard. There were weeds and proper plants, a wild rosebush that had small golden flowers. A gopher had pushed up half a dozen mounds of earth here and there, and a striped red cat passed through now and then, alternately crying and hissing at Thomas.
The boy didn’t try to climb the tree because he often fell.
But he did sit underneath it listening to the crying chicks. Hornets hovered above him, but he wasn’t afraid of their stings.
He’d been stung many times and had no fear of the pain.
From under the tree he scanned the skies and listened for traces of his mother in the world. He missed Eric, his brother, but he knew that Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan would all be fine. And he was about to go to school.
Elton had enrolled Thomas in Carson Elementary, only a block and a half away from the house. On Monday morning he would walk there with Elton, and then he’d finish the first grade.
Thomas liked school. There were so many people with so many different kinds of voices. And there were books and sometimes pictures of animals, and teachers who wore nice clothes and smelled good.
Thomas wasn’t afraid of the new place. He had not often felt fear. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t run very well, but he’d learned to skirt around pain and bullies and anger.
So he looked forward to the new school.
8 3
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*
*
*
I t was a big salmon-pink building with red and dirty green unglazed tiles for a roof. When he was led into Mr. Meyers’s first-grade class, the children were all laughing at something, and the bald-headed teacher was trying to make them quiet down.
“Everyone be quiet. Back to your seat, Maryanne,” the teacher was saying when Miss Andrews from the Registrar’s Office brought Thomas through the back door of the classroom.
The children got louder.
Miss Andrews waved at Meyers. He pointed at an empty chair, and she said, “Sit here, Tommy. Mr. Meyers will introduce you later.”
And so he entered the first-grade class with no one noticing, no one but the boy who sat in the other chair at the two-student table.
“I’m Bruno,” the husky boy said. He stuck out a chubby hand, and Thomas shook it.
“I’m Tommy. I just moved here last week. Why’s everybody laughing?”
“You talk funny,” Bruno said.
