“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.
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 diabetes. 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 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 on pizzas for himself and Thomas — only Thomas couldn’t eat pizza because of the grease. But he was happy that Pedro stayed in the clubhouse. The black Chicano didn’t spend much time in the alley. He was sensitive to mosquito bites, and he didn’t like all the plants.
These were some of the happiest days of Thomas’s young life. He had parents and friends, a pet, and even a grandmother — and then there was Alicia.
Now and then people other than Pedro or Thomas climbed the fence to get into the alley. But they never stayed around too long. The fence was high and crowned with dense razor wire; there were few places to sit, and the alley was damp and full of bugs. Pedro had put a lock on the cellar door to their clubhouse, and only he and Thomas had keys. Thomas hid from any strangers in the dense foliage on the north side of the alley. He’d move through the leaves and watch junkies smoke or shoot up and young lovers kissing and sucking on each other.
One Thursday morning, when he’d just arrived, he saw a young black woman sleeping. Skully yapped at the girl and butted her cheek with his nose.
“Come here, Skully,” Thomas said.
The young dog ran to his master, always expecting food when he heard his voice. No Man landed on a tree above the young woman and squawked.
Thomas thought the noise would cause the girl to get up, but it didn’t. She had on an orange skirt but no top. Her breasts were small, not like May’s or Madeline’s, and she had a tattoo of a heart on the left one. The heart had the name Ralphie written across it.
Her eyes were open, and there was blood on her lips.
When Thomas saw an ant walk across her eye, he knew the girl was dead. He ran and got Pedro.
“Shit, man. This some trouble here. Cops gonna take away all our toys.”
“You mean the clubhouse?” Thomas asked.
“Clubhouse, alley. They send me back to juvy and, and maybe you too.”
“What if we don’t tell nobody?” Thomas asked.
“Somebody bound to find a dead body. You know, they stink after a while.”
“But what if we hide her?”
“How?”
“We could take those extra cinder blocks from the basement and stack’em around her and then put’em over the top. Then it would be like a coffin.”
Thomas was thinking about the casket that sat in front of the church, the casket that held his mother. He’d always been ashamed that he hadn’t looked at her to say good-bye even though she’d told him in his dreams that it was okay.
Pedro spent the next two hours hauling cinder blocks out of the apartment building to the lonely corner where Alicia (Thomas had already named her) lay. Together the boys lined four of the cement bricks down either side of her small and slender body, then placed one at her head and another at her feet. Then they bridged more blocks over her. When they were done, they had constructed a long cement-colored pyramid over the dead girl.
“May you go to heaven and meet your maker,” Thomas said, paraphrasing words he’d heard his grandmother saying about her friends that died.
“Amen,” Pedro chimed. “Man, I’m tired after all that. You think you could get me a peanut butter sandwich?”
Later that day Thomas covered the coffin with leaves and branches so that nobody would see it. He put a small crate near the mound so that he could sit next to Alicia’s makeshift tomb and talk to her. At these times his mother’s voice would come to him, and they would all talk about living and dying.
Thomas doubled his efforts at cleaning up the alley because he didn’t want Alicia’s graveyard to be littered. This was a lot of work because many of the neighbors threw cans and bags of garbage over the fence. For them it was their private junkyard, not a holy place meant to house the dead.
Whenever Thomas filled up a trash bag with garbage, he’d climb up into his “church tree” and drop the bag into their open Dumpster.
Ages six, seven, and eight were good for Thomas, but nine was not so great.
The first thing that happened came out of a conversation he’d had with Pedro. They’d been talking about how Pedro’s family hated him. And he hated them too. Thomas said that he loved his family. He started talking about his mother, and then about Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan. He told Pedro how much he missed them.
“Why don’t you call’em?” the bright-eyed boy suggested. “You know his name is Nolan and that he’s a doctor and he lives in Beverly Hills. All you got to do is call information.”
Thomas tried this when May was out one weekday morning. He got the number and scrawled it on an unopened gas bill.
After many nervous moments, he decided to call.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said cautiously.
“Ahn?” Thomas said, his heart quailing.
“Who this?”
“It’s Tommy.”
Silence.
“It’s Tommy, Ahn. Don’t you remember me?”
“What do you want?” she asked in a slow, metered voice.
Thomas didn’t know what to say. He wanted so much: his mother back alive, his brother living on the floor below, the elementary school where he knew everybody from kindergarten and where the sun wasn’t too bright. He wanted to sit with Dr. Nolan and talk about the heart and blood vessels and muscle and blood. Thomas wanted his room back and the floor where he learned to be quiet and to feel the world become one with him.