Free Fortunate Son: A Novel by Walter Mosley

Tommy left. They knew that he would react loudly and violently, and it would have been harder on both children.
    “Tommy’s father came to take him,” Minas told his son.
    “But you’re his father,” Eric argued.
    “No.”
    “Mama Branwyn was my mother, and she’s his mother too. So you have to be his father.”
    “I love Tommy like a son, but Elton Trueblood is his real father. He never married Branwyn, but Tommy is his blood and the law says that he has to go live with him or with his grandmother.”
    Eric felt the color red in his head and in his fists and feet. He stormed out of the downstairs den, stomped up to his room, and systematically broke every toy that he owned. He broke the soldier action figures, the rocking horse, the colored lamp that turned slowly, showing horses and circus clowns on his wall at night. He shattered the screen of his television and crushed the clay drum his father had brought back from Algeria. He slung his mattress on the floor and threw his baseball through the closed window. Then he picked up his aluminum baseball bat and beat it against the wall and furniture with the intention of breaking the bat in two. But it wouldn’t break. Instead he dented his maple desk, put holes in the plaster of the wall, and made deep notches in the oak floor.
    All the while Eric screamed his brother’s name and shouted obscenities he’d learned from the older kids on the playground.
    “Fuck damn!” he shouted.
    “Shit!” he cried.
    And for every curse or profanity, he broke something or struck the walls or floor with his metal bat.
    When the baseball went through the window, Minas headed for the boy’s room. By the time he got there, Eric was wreaking havoc with his bat.
    When Minas entered the room, Eric swung at him but missed. The surgeon’s hand darted out and pushed the boy down on the mattress that had been spilled off the bed.
    Minas had never struck Eric before. The novelty and shock of that, plus the deep desolation he felt about losing his mother and then his brother, brought Eric to tears. He cried on the mattress and then rolled onto the floor. He caterwauled and howled, whined like a motherless cub, and shouted unintelligible sentences at the Infinite. Minas held his son, and even then, in the boy’s most miserable state, his father marveled at the depth of feeling that Eric was capable of. His sorrow seemed to diminish Minas’s own fears and losses. It was as if Eric was deserving of more care and consideration because he was more, much more, than other humans.
    They sat there on the floor of the boy’s destroyed room, Minas thinking of how much they had both lost and Eric howling like some animal faced for the first time with a giant harvest moon.
    Late in the afternoon Minas drove Eric down to the beach at Malibu. The boys had always liked it there, and so the father thought it might be good for his son.
    “Why did you let them take Tommy?” the child asked his father on the drive.
    “I couldn’t stop them, Eric. They had the law on their side.”
    “
You
couldn’t stop them, but
I
would have,” the boy said. “And you should have too. Tommy is our family. You can’t let family go.”
    They walked down the beach on sand left wet by the receding tide. Minas was wearing a yellow shirt and dark-blue pants. His shoes were made of woven brown leather; a thick golden watch hung from his right wrist.
    Eric had taken off his shoes in the car. His T-shirt was yellow like his father’s pullover, but his pants were tan and rolled up past his ankles.
    “Can I go visit Tommy?” the boy asked his father while scanning the waterline.
    “Maybe after a while. His grandmother wants him to get used to being with them before letting us come see him.”
    “He’s gonna be with them every day,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be used to them anyway.”
    “We’ll see,” Minas Nolan said to his son.
    At that moment Eric gasped and ran out into the shallows of the retreating