“I don’t like him.”
“I know. But I’m not scared. I mean, what could he do to me?”
Thomas gazed at his brother and smiled.
“What are you smilin’ at?” Eric asked.
“For a while there I didn’t think that anything would ever work for me,” Thomas said. “I mean, I couldn’t even get it together to buy a new pair of shoes. I couldn’t even stop my feet from bleedin’ through the holes in my soles.”
“I guess we are lucky like you told me, huh?” Eric said.
“Maybe so.”
One afternoon Thomas put on a pair of black cotton pants and a blue Hawaiian T-shirt that Raela had helped him pick out at a store in West Hollywood. He had on black sandals with no socks and a short-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. Wearing this ensemble, he took four buses down to Compton and knocked on Harold and Monique’s door. Lily answered.
“Uncle Lucky, is that you?”
He picked up the chunky girl and kissed her cheek. Monique came up and kissed her childhood friend on the mouth. Thomas worried that Harold would get mad about that, but he just shook Thomas’s hand and said, “You look good, homeboy. Come on in.”
Thomas started reading books from the shelf at Minas Nolan’s house. It really didn’t matter what he read: science fiction, biography, technical manuals, or general fiction — all of it served the purpose of telling him something, anything. He didn’t retain much of the knowledge he perused; he didn’t expect to collect ideas but merely to be exposed to them.
“What are you reading, son?” Minas would ask when he came upon Thomas in the library hunched over some book.
“Gray’s Anatomy,” he said one day.
“Are you interested in human anatomy?”
“It’s so pretty,” Thomas replied. “I saw this guy cut open once in Tremont’s alley. He stole from Tremont and got his arm cut open. I could see the muscles hangin’ outta his arm. They didn’t look all neat like they do here in this book. In this book it looks nice and, and pretty.”
“Those experiences you had must have been awful,” Minas said.
“It must have been,” Thomas agreed. “But it’s like somebody else’s life when I think about it. I mean, I know that I was there, but it feels like I always been here and those things I did are like a book.”
Thomas held up the anatomy text and shook his head.
Minas wondered if he understood what the boy was saying. Later that night, when he went to bed, he decided that Thomas had become as deep and unfathomable as his mother.
Bishop Ladderman was offered a job as an assistant chef in a fancy Brentwood restaurant, and so he left the Rib Joint. It was quite a surprise. Bishop wasn’t looking for a job, but one day he got a call from Chez Vivienne’s owner, Raoul Mantou. Mr. Mantou said that he’d heard a lot about Bishop and that he wanted him in his kitchen. He offered seventy-five thousand dollars a year, twice what any cook got at Fontanot’s, and so Bishop had to go.
Michael Cotter was hired to take Bishop’s place.
Michael was different from the other smokers. Miranda, Ben, Parker, Penelope, and Thomas Grant were all in their late fifties up to sixty. Bishop was that age too. And even though Thomas was only twenty, he had what Fontanot called an old soul, and because of his scars and limp he seemed more like one of the older workers.
Cotter was young, not quite thirty, and handsome, black as glowing tar and lithe like a panther. He was always laughing and quick to lend a hand. The waitresses from the restaurant would come out to the yard just to look at him when he’d take his shirt off to move the heavy metal smokers or large bundles of meat.
Cotter got along with everybody. He and Thomas became fast friends.
One day, after his first few weeks on the job, Michael offered to drive Thomas home. Thomas took the ride because he liked to hear Michael’s tales about the streets. They were different streets from those Thomas had inhabited. Michael told stories about tough men and fine women that loved and fought in the clubs and bars. Thomas knew what happened outside, and Michael knew what went on indoors.
“So you stayed in that alley and didn’t evah go to school?” Cotter asked on that first day he gave Thomas a ride.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s wild, man. And nobody nevah knew?”
“Not until Pedro killed himself and I tried to stop him and fell off the roof. Then they knew... about me not goin’ to school anyway.”
Michael Cotter loved a good story. He had been in the army for a spell, as a sniper. He told Thomas that they had him “all ovah the niggerlands from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Argentina to North Korea.”
“And you shot people?” Thomas asked.
“Oh, yeah, man. Sometimes, though, they’d put a twist on it.”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes,” Michael said, “when they didn’t wanna kill somebody but just shake him up, they’d have me shoot his wife or young child. Sometimes I’d just wound a dude so he’d miss a meetin’.”
Most of the other smokers liked Cotter, but they didn’t believe his stories.
“He just a blowhard,” Parker had said to the other smokers one day before Cotter had arrived. “I mean, he tell a good story all right. And I believe he had some time in the armed services. But the United States government ain’t nevah gonna have no sniper shoot no child.”
“I’ont know,” Miranda said. “Maybe not a white child, but if it was some little black boy or Arab girl they might not care.”
“What do you think, Lucky?” Ben asked Thomas. “You the one he talk to the most.”
“He prob’ly did all that,” Thomas said.
“Why don’t you think he lyin’?” Penelope asked the youngest smoker.
“People lie to impress people,” Thomas said, paying very little heed to the words as they came out of his mouth. “When they lie they sneak a look to see if you’re impressed. But Cotter don’t care. He just talkin’. I think he did alla what he said. All of it and more.”
Eric was happy to have his brother back in his life. He still lamented Christie’s death, still felt guilty about it. But he didn’t feel alone with Raela as he had with Mona’s mother. If he was sick she nursed him and never got a sniffle. When they went skiing together he broke his leg, and she didn’t even sprain an ankle. And she was forever surprising him with her views of the world and her conviction that they were meant to be together.
“But do you love me?” Eric asked her one day.
“Sure,” she said.
“But I mean really, deeply.”
“That’s not the way you and I think,” she replied. “I’d kill for you if I had to. I’d die for you too. Isn’t that enough?”
“When I was in New York I slept with a woman, a stockbroker named Connie.”
“So?”
“Does that make you jealous?”
Raela gazed up at a spot somewhere above Eric’s head.
“If I smelled her on you I might get violent,” she speculated. “Yeah. If I smelled her on you, you might have to hide for a while.”
“But you didn’t smell her?”
Raela pressed her face against his chest and inhaled deeply.
Then she exhaled and said, “All I smell is me.”
Eric was reminded of Ahn’s story about the tiger. Looking upon this girl and remembering that, the young man felt real fear for the first time that he could remember. It exhilarated him, made him shiver. Raela put her arms around him and pressed his head to her breast. From there he could feel the strong beat of her heart and somewhere, far away, the muted thudding of his own blood.