Skully was gone. Thomas hoped that the puppy had found a home with children that loved him.
No Man was still there. He had taken a mate to live with, another green parrot, and together they built a nest in the top branches of the oak tree.
After two days, Thomas went to the alley where Pedro had sold drugs. The older boy had told him that little kids like Thomas could make good money delivering for the drug dealers there.
“Li’l kids can’t get into trouble if they get busted by the cops,” Pedro had told him. “So they pay you good money just to walk down the street.”
In the alley Thomas met a boy named Chilly. Chilly was even smaller than Thomas, and he had an oval-shaped head and freckles on his nose. He wore a gray hat with a brim and green sunglasses. Chilly told him about the main man — Tremont.
Tremont was a tall man with wide shoulders, big muscles, and a scar that started at the left side of his forehead and went in an arc down the center of his face all the way to the chin.
“You wanna run fo’ me, li’l man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s your mama?”
“Dead.”
“Where’s yo’ daddy?”
“In jail.”
“Where you livin’?”
“With my friend Bruno sometime, an’ with May,” he lied.
Tremont squatted down so that he could look Thomas in the eye.
“How old are you, li’l man?”
“Nine and a half.”
“Who told you about this place?”
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Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“Pedro. He used to work here.”
“If I give you work an’ you tell I will kill you. Do you understand that?”
“I won’t tell. I swear.”
Th e f i r st job Tremont gave Thomas was to carry a small paper bag to an address four blocks away. A lovely brown woman in a violet dressing gown answered the door.
“Are you Lucky?” she asked.
She knelt down and put her hands on his sides. This tickled, and Thomas giggled.
“Aren’t you cute,” the woman said.
She picked him up and hugged him.
“My name is Cilla,” she said. “I’m Tremont’s girl.”
She carried Thomas down a dark and narrow hallway into a small yellow kitchen. There she sat the boy at a table and fed him half a ham sandwich and part of a pomegranate.
While he ate she took the paper bag and opened it. She took out a wad of money and counted it — twice.
“Tremont send you to me to make sure you could do the job,” Cilla told him. “He told you not to look in the bag, and he put a tape on the inside so that I could see that you didn’t.
He wanna know that you can be trusted. How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“You look younger.”
Thomas kicked his feet and ate his sandwich.
“How come you limpin’?”
“I fell off a buildin’ an’ broke my hip.”
Thomas smacked his lips after eating the sandwich. He hadn’t had a meal in a few days.
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F o r t u n a t e S o n
“You’re so cute.” Cilla leaned over and gave Thomas a slow kiss on his mouth.
He closed his eyes and hugged his shoulder with his chin because the kiss both tickled and excited him.
A f te r that h e worked every afternoon for Tremont.
Mostly he took white packages, which he kept in his underpants, to people’s houses and apartments between four and seven, after other little kids were out of school. Once a week Tremont would send Thomas to Cilla’s, where the boy would take a bath and wash his clothes in a small washing machine in the kitchen.
Thomas made twenty dollars a day, and nobody molested him on the streets because people had seen him limping down the sidewalks with Chilly, and everybody knew that Chilly was with Tremont. And nobody messed with
