all perked right up when the guide said four workers had died building the dam. Our teacher said she wasn’t sure we needed to know that.
It was probably hard for people to believe, but we didn’t pay that much attention to the river, even though it was so big and so close and had a big strong arm that ran through the center of the valley. They called that Miller’s Creek because years ago it had been just a narrow little run of water, but once the dam went in it turned into something much bigger than that. I’d spent a lot of time around creeks when I was younger, looking for minnows and crayfish, and that was no creek.
It was mainly out-of-town people who went to the river. The current was too strong for swimming, and it was nicer at Pride’s Beach, which was a stretch of trucked-in sand on one side of the lake south of town. The fishing was better in the streams in the valley, although you had to be pretty good at fly casting to get around the overhanging branches.
There was a loud grinding sound through the vent, two wooden chairs pushed against the surface of my mother’s chapped linoleum. “Oh, man,” Tommy whispered. “You got matches?”
“Why would I have matches?”
Tommy sighed. “I had plenty of matches when I was your age.”
“Shut up!” I said, and “shhh,” Tommy said. My parents passed by on the way to their room. “I can’t ever keep track of where he is or what he’s doing,” my mother said, and in the moonlight I saw Tom waggle his eyebrows. Both of us knew our parents were talking about him.
Ever since he’d finished high school my brother had been at a loose end. At least that’s what my aunt Ruth called it, a loose end. It’s not like school had been so great, either: unlike Eddie, who was class valedictorian, Tommy had always been a rotten student. Maybe he had one of those problems they didn’t figure out until later, which I see now all the time, a learning disability or dyslexia or something. He had handwriting so bad that there was no one who could read it. Even he couldn’t make it out sometimes. The only tests in high school where he had a fighting chance were true and false, although even there he occasionally made an F that looked too much like a T. He’d squeaked by, but at the time it didn’t feel like it mattered much; when he strode across the gym and hoisted his diploma, the cheers were louder than they’d been at the end of the class president’s speech.
But then he was out in the world and found it hard to make a living with nothing but his easy ways. He would have been great at politics; instead he’d worked in a car repair place. But he lost his license for six months after he got popped on Main Street late one night speeding, with open beer cans in the car and a girl throwing up out the window; the police officer who stopped him was the father of the girl, and when he looked in the driver’s side window it was easy to see that his daughter wasn’t wearing any pants. Tommy’d met the girl because her uncle owned the car repair place, so he was twice cursed. A lot of what Tommy got into seemed like a story someone was telling, except that it was true.
He worked around the farm, too, but he made my father crazy. “He’s a careless person,” my father would say, not even checking whether Tommy was around to hear him. “I ask him to move some hay and two days later I find a pitchfork rusting by the rain barrel.”
“Tell the old man I went to get gas for the tractors,” Tommy’d say to me, and then he’d disappear for a couple of hours. “You seen your brother?” my father would say, and I’d open my mouth and he’d say, “Don’t tell me he’s out getting gas again because both those tractors are full.” I didn’t have a face for lying. “Just stand behind me,” LaRhonda always said when we had to lie to her mother.
“You got any money?” Tom whispered after he’d heard my mother go from the bathroom back into her bedroom.
“No,” I said, but he kept on staring at me, and finally I said, “Seven bucks.”