“Where is Pedro now?” The woman was frowning.
“Dead, I think.”
After that things were not the same. Thomas told the woman about the clubhouse but not the alley. She left and he went to sleep. Neither his father nor May ever came back to visit him, and every time he woke up he was in a different room with different nurses talking to him and smiling. One day he woke up feeling lots of pain in his hip. He reached down, finding something hard there instead of flesh.
“It’s in a cast,” a smiling black nurse said. “They operated on your broken bone and now it has to heal.”
“Can I walk?”
“Not now, but later on you’ll be able to.”
Thomas lived in the hospital for six months after his operation. He had to use crutches at first, and later he walked with difficulty. He was told by the doctor that he might have a slight limp afterward but, if he did the right exercises and went to rehabilitation, that it would go away.
May and Elton had been put in jail and held over for trial. That’s what the social worker, Mr. Hardy, said.
“Why didn’t you go to school, Lucky?” he asked.
“Because the light hurt my eyes.”
“Did your parents know that you weren’t there?”
“No.”
“Didn’t they ask for your report cards?”
“I just told them that they didn’t have report cards no more.”
“Did they believe that?”
“No. Daddy said that he was gonna go talk to’em about it, but he was always workin’, and then after they fired him he was asleep all day. How long is he gonna be in jail?”
“Soon you’ll be leaving the hospital,” Mr. Hardy said. “There’s a family that wants you to come stay with them.”
“But what about my dad and May?”
“The Rickerts will make a very nice home for you, Thomas,” Hardy said. He had pink skin, short gray and black hairs on his head and chin, and glistening droplets of sweat across his forehead like a netting of glass beads.
“Do I have to?” Thomas asked.
“It’s what’s best,” the social worker told him. “They’ll send you to school and be home every night. And they have three other boys in their care, so you’ll have brothers to play with.”
Three days later, Thomas was driven to the Rickerts’ house by the social worker. Thomas’s limp had become permanent by then, but he didn’t mind. He was much more worried about the family he had come to live with.
Robert Rickert was thin as a rail and the color of a green olive that’s turning brown. Melba, his wife, was deep brown and as broad as the doorway. The husband was silent and sour, but his wife was mean.
Thomas’s foster brothers had names, but he never learned them. They were all about the same age, and the first night they told him about the gang they were in at school.
“Nobody messes with us,” the biggest boy with the silver tooth said. “’Cause they know that it’s all’a us then.”
“You wit’ us?” the smaller, darker boy asked. “’Cause if you ain’t, we gonna mess you up bad.”
The first night at the Rickert house, Thomas was sent to bed without dessert because he didn’t answer half of the questions Melba asked. He didn’t want the sherbet anyway, but he knew that she wanted to hurt his feelings by depriving him.
The George Washington Carver School classroom for slow third-graders was loud, and the teacher (whose name Thomas also forgot) didn’t teach very much. Thomas got into two fights the first day. Instead of going home he wandered away; then, after asking directions, he headed toward Central. When he got to his old block, he climbed under the fence and into his blessed valley.
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?”
“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.”
The first 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.
“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.
After that he 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 Tremont’s peeps.
After four weeks Thomas went to Bruno’s house. His friend’s elderly aunt Till answered the door.
“Hello, young man,” she said, with eyes that held no memory of him.
“Is Bruno home, Aunt Till?”
“No,” she said, looking as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. “Bruno died.”