Fortunate Son: A Novel by Walter Mosley Page A

thinking that the dog would get away somehow and chase him down. But the restraint held.
    Thomas sighed. He took three steps toward school.
    “Hey you, mothahfuckah,” a familiar voice called from behind.
    They surrounded him quickly. Three of them were dressed in signature white T-shirt and jeans. One boy wore a jean jacket and black pants. All of their tennis shoes were white.
    Thomas noticed these things, categorizing, listing, and hoping somehow the knowledge would save him from another beating, still knowing that nothing would save him. Nothing ever would.
    “You got money in yo’ pocket, suckah?” the tall eight-year-old leader asked.
    Thomas breathed in through his mouth and shook his head—no.
    The backhand stung his left cheek. He felt a trickle of blood come out of his left nostril.
    “Empty yo’ pockets, man,” another boy said.
    Thomas looked at all eight eyes staring angrily at him. Years later he would wake up from a nightmare about those eyes, not in fear of violence but from the sad memory of their hatred.
    Fight ’em back,
he heard his father say. And then he turned to run. But his feet got tangled up, and he fell right there in front of his enemies.
    “Kick his ass!” a boy shouted.
    Thomas rolled up like the gray-shelled pill bugs he would watch in the garden. He closed his eyes and made ready to count the blows, but instead he heard a girl shouting. He wondered if the boys had attacked somebody else, somebody behind him.
    He opened his eyes and raised his head.
    A very large black girl (who looked somehow familiar) was punching the ringleader of the gang in the face. The other boys rushed at her, but she slapped one, punched another, and kicked the third, one, two, three times. The first boy she hit was crying. Thomas hadn’t believed that those mean boys
could
cry. The other three were running.
    “Git!” the big girl yelled, and stamped her foot on the concrete.
    The crying boy let out howling.
    “You show’em, girl,” the old woman from across the street called. “Show them li’l niggahs a thing or two.”
    The girl turned her head toward Thomas, and the boy quailed. He thought that she would destroy him now with her fists and feet and loud shouts. But instead Bruno ran up from nowhere and held out his hand.
    “Come on, Lucky,” the jolly first-grader said. “Git up.”
    The girl reached down too. For a moment Thomas felt weightless, and then he was standing on his feet.
    “This Monique,” Bruno said in the way of an introduction. “My sister. She’s twelve, in junior high.”
    “Hi,” the big girl said. She smiled. “That li’l Alvin Johnson need somebody to kick his butt ev’ry mornin’. That’s the on’y way he evah gonna do right.”
    “I told Monique about you, Lucky. I told her you talked funny but you might get lost on the way to school. So she walked me ovah here.”
    Thomas was very happy. He laughed, and big Monique smiled down on him.
    “Don’t you know the secret way to school?” she asked him.
    He shook his head.
    “Com’on,” Monique said, and with a wave of her hand she led them down the driveway of the house with the leashed dog.
    When it barked at her, she got down on her knees and held out her hand. The dog growled, then sniffed, then licked her fingers.
    Thomas knew that if he tried that the dog would bite his whole hand off.
    Behind the house was a fence with a hole in it that led to the blocked-off alley behind Elton’s house. Back there sapling trees grew in profusion and birds sang and small creatures scuttled. There were pools of water with bright-green algae growing over them and an old redbrick incinerator that housed a large rodentlike creature.
    “This alley was blocked off a long time ago,” Monique was explaining. “An’ it go all the way to the end of the block. All you got to do is climb through the fence next to the church and cut through the back’a there an’ you across the street from the school. Not so many other kids do