Futureland - Nine Stories Of An Imminent World by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 0446610739 9780446610735 B002AE7QA6 0299153606 9780299153601
Published: 2015-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

3

Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie's mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.

"Good afternoon, Leon," the short chocolate brown young man said.

"Pell." Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.

And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera's full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager--after Leon had succumbed to the symptoms of Pulse use--and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn't read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the classic novels, and he preferred listening to the East Coast Times to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell's psychological motivation.

"How have you been, Leon?" Pell asked in the small two-man elevator.

"Slow."

"Fera said that you've been taking long walks."

The elevator doors slid open on eight.

Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she'd been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken--Leon was never sure which.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews."

"Mr. Jones," she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. "This your son?"

"No. My daughter's boyfriend."

"You a boxer too, boy?" She spoke with a slight Korean accent.

"No, ma'am. I'm a congressional aide."

Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.

"It's all I got. The gin is good. The tea's good for you."

"No thanks. You been drinkin' a lotta gin?" Pell asked, almost nonchalant.

"Fera's worried, huh?" Leon said. He sat down in the reclining bamboo chair that his first wife had bought when they were just married.

Pell lit on an emerald hassock that came from Amherst with Leon and his second wife, Fera's mother, Nosa.

"Yes she is, sir," Pell admitted. He wore a soft gray andro-suit that was open at the collar, revealing a pendant of twigs bound together in the form of a falling man.

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