breath come fast. It was beautiful and very sad.
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“The tiger and the village girl had no choice,” Eric declared to an empty kitchen. “They were meant to be. And the boy, the boy can’t help himself either. They’re all just waiting for their parts to play.”
He took the bus down to Santa Monica, seeing himself as a pawn and satisfied to release himself to fate.
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10
For most of those first three years away from the Nolan household, Thomas was more or less happy. He hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since the first week, but he could hear the school bell from the clubhouse /apartment building that he shared with the morose Pedro. Every day at the lunch bell he went to talk to May. She’d make him a hot lunch and talk about her life. May didn’t need any response from the boy, and he loved to hear her talk because she seemed happy to be getting things off her chest. That happiness filled Thomas’s own heart.
Not that May lived a happy life. Elton was very jealous of her. Sometimes at night he would come home and want to know where she’d been and who she’d been with. He’d slapped her on a few occasions; once he’d even blackened her eye.
But May, by her own account, never cheated on Elton.
Twice she had to “do things” with Mr. Sanders, the landlord, because they were short on the rent for more than two months. But she did that to help Elton, even though she could never tell him because he would kill both her and Sanders if he knew. But she didn’t like it with Sanders like she did with Thomas’s father.
The only times that she had ever been bad were when she was either drunk or high.
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Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“You should never do any drugs, Lucky,” May had said.
“It’s the devil in them.”
That was what had happened one day when Thomas came home to find May and a man called Wolf wrestling in the nude on the living room floor. When Thomas opened the door, Wolf jumped up and stood there with his big erection standing stiff and straight. The man was breathing hard, and his eyes were wild and very white against his black skin.
“That’s just Lucky, Wolf,” May said in a deep voice. “Go wait in the kitchen, Tommy. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”
But she didn’t come in. She and Wolf made noises for a long time, and finally Thomas went out through the back porch to his alley valley.
The next day when Thomas mentioned the man May was with the day before, she said, “How you know about Wolf ?”
Somehow she had forgotten even seeing Thomas. He told her about them being naked and wrestling, and asked if his peeny was going to get like Wolf ’s.
“You can’t ever tell Elton about Wolf,” she said. And then she told him that he should never do drugs.
“Drugs make you crazy like me an’ Wolf,” she said.
Wolf brought her drugs, and after she took them they took off their clothes and did that. And the drugs also made her forget about Thomas. She promised not to do drugs anymore, and he said okay and they went on for a long time as if that day with Wolf had never happened.
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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F o r t u n a t e S o n
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
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
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
