Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.
“But we were raised together and we understand each other. He used to protect me when the big kids would pick on me, and I explain things to him.”
“But he has three years of college and you don’t have hardly any school. What do you explain to him? The street?”
Over the previous day and a half the three had changed trains twice and told their stories. Clea’s father was a baker in Denver, and her mother was a part-time nurse in the pediatric ward of the university’s teaching hospital. Clea was their fourth child. Her two brothers were high school dropouts, and her sister was a schizophrenic who lived on the street half the time and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals. Clea was the hope of her family, and she intended to make something of herself.
Thomas had told her about everything he’d done and about the police being after him. He didn’t think that she would tell anyone, and Eric was asleep by then.
“I can see things in other things,” Thomas said. “Eric’s real smart, but he doesn’t pay attention to everyday things like I do.”
“Like what?”
“Rocks and eyes and making things up.”
He chose that moment to take her hand.
“Your skin is so rough,” she said.
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He pulled away, but she reached out and drew the hand back.
“I thought that you were making it up about living in the street,” she said. “But your hands are like a workingman’s hands.”
“I knew a woman that was schizo,” Thomas said. “She saw things too. There was a guy named Benny who would say that she was his ho, an’ he would get money from other homeless guys to have sex with her.”
“And did you have sex with her?”
“No. But I’d go sit with her sometimes, and if I was really quiet she’d get still and tell me about the things she saw.”
“Like what?”
“There was a big man who sometimes chased her and sometimes killed her, but then he could be nice and take her on his shoulders and show her the sea. It was a light-blue-and-pink ocean with fish that swam on top of the water and talked to the men in boats who sailed out there with them.
And the moon was very close to the earth, and there wasn’t any cigarettes or alcohol.”
“She was crazy.”
“Maybe. But I can tell you what she said and you don’t call me crazy.”
“What was the woman’s name?” Clea asked.
“Lana.”
“Did you get Lana away from Benny?”
“No. She liked him and called him her husband.”
“But he was pimpin’ her.”
“Yeah, but she said that he never let those men hurt her.”
“That’s crazy. He took those men there in the first place,”
Clea said.
“Life’s crazy,” Thomas replied. “When Benny would get 2 4 8
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money for Lana, he’d go out and buy us all pizza and a quart of root beer.”
“So you lived off her too?”
“I only stayed near them for about a week. And I don’t eat cheese or drink sodas. They make me sick.”
Thomas couldn’t have explained why he kissed Clea then.
She didn’t know why she let him.
Clea had her whole life planned out. She would go to college and get her degree and then work at the UN translating French, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages for the sub-Saharan African nations. She would find a young black man who was either a doctor or a lawyer and marry him and move to Montclair, New Jersey, where she would relocate her parents and her sister. Her lazy brothers could fend for themselves.
But there they were kissing passionately in the early hours, in that hurtling train. Eric awoke once and saw them. Clea had her hand on Thomas’s while he kissed her neck again and again.
It was then that Eric thought about what his brother had said about the moon and tides. The Golden Boy, Eric, closed his eyes and muffled a sigh — his brother had somehow delivered him from his fear.
E i g h te e n h our s later the train pulled into Penn Station.
The boys put Clea into a yellow taxi, and she gave them her cell number.
