Bruno knew everything about them. Johnny Storm, the high-flying Human Torch; bashful Benjamin Grimm; Stretcho; and Suzie, the Invisible Woman. Every day he’d tell Thomas another story about their battles with Doctor Doom or the Mole Man. Bruno couldn’t read all the words, but his sister helped him sometimes. He told Thomas that in the old comics you didn’t need the words because the pictures told the story.
The worst thing about school was the sunlight in the first-grade classroom. He told Mr. Meyers that it hurt his eyes, but the teacher didn’t know what to do.
“We can’t put down the shades, Lucky,” he said. “Children need light.”
“You could get those green shades like the nurse has,”
Thomas suggested.
“I’m lucky if I get a budget for pencils,” Meyers replied.
The sadness he experienced in that bright room became so unbearable that on Thursday Thomas “Lucky” Beerman made a decision.
“I’m not comin’ to school tomorrow,” he told Bruno.
“How come?”
1 1 4
F o r t u n a t e S o n
“I’m not coming back anymore. I don’t like it here.”
“But where you gonna go?”
“Nowhere. Daddy goes to work every morning and doesn’t come back till late. He always goes out, and he doesn’t care ’bout what I’m doing.”
“But what if he stays home sometimes?”
“I’ll just go out in the back alley,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay back there.”
“Okay,” Bruno said as if the final decision was his. “An’ I’ll tell Mr. Meyers that your mother come and took you away.
An’ if they send a letter to your house from the school, we could get Monique t’read it and then th’ow it away.”
Th e ne xt morn i ng Thomas went out the front door and then through the hole in the fence a few houses down. That’s where his journey both ended and began. He climbed around the broken chunks of concrete in the middle of the road directly behind his house, and then he went through the thick bushes that had grown up along the sides. The alley was lower than the yards that abutted it, and so it was always wet from people watering their gardens and lawns.
On the first day Thomas saw lizards and a garden snake, three mice, one rat, and a family of opossums living in the incinerator. He saw crows, redbirds, one soaring hawk, and a bright-green parrot that had escaped from some cage, no doubt. The parrot made his home in an oak tree half in and half out of Thomas’s little valley.
“No man,” the bird would say now and then. “No man.”
Thomas felt that the bird, which he called No Man, was announcing that this was their home and not a place for grown-ups.
1 1 5
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
The alley valley was overgrown with sapling trees and other vegetation. Thomas could stay under a roof of leaves that modulated the light and made him calm.
That first day he explored the length and width of his new home. It was a long block, twenty backyards on either side. At its widest it was twenty-eight boy-sized paces from one fence to the other. There was asphalt and concrete and dirt that made up the various terrains, mostly flowerless trees and bushes. There was a lot of trash too: bits of paper, crumbling cardboard pallets that the occasional homeless person had used to sleep on. There were soda and beer cans, plastics of all kinds, and even old machinery and chunks of metal that people had discarded over the years. But there were few other visitors that Thomas saw in those first few months. That was because it was hard for anyone much larger than Thomas to get back there. The stone wall of the church had a chink big enough for only the little boy to squeeze through, and the rest was fenced off from the private backyards of houses.
Many of these yards had dogs that barked and growled at Thomas, but he stayed out of their way and soon they got used to him.
It was his paradise. The only stable respite his childhood would know. He spent that first Friday laughing and thinking that maybe the name Lucky fit him.
“ What you sm i l i n ’ ’bout, boy?” Elton asked at the dinner table that night.
They were eating meat loaf, mustard greens, and watery mashed potatoes from a take-out restaurant three blocks away.
“Here I am workin’ my butt off to pay the rent and for yo’
breakfast, lunch, an’ dinnah, an’ all you could do is smile. Life 1 1 6
F o r t u n a t e S o n
is serious, Tommy. You cain’t be goin’ through yo’ day grin-nin’ like some fool. You got to get serious an’ work hard like me. You think I keep us in house an’ home walkin’ down the street smilin’?”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, even though he wasn’t.
“Damn right you sorry. Now eat your damn meat.”
“It makes my stomach hurt.”
They ate food from the mom-and-pop takeout at least three nights a week. Thomas had trouble digesting meat
