laughed and laughed, and then he started to cry and he fell asleep on the couch before dinner and had disappeared by morning. Sometimes at the diner one of the old guys would say, “They make it look pretty bad out there, son.” And Tom would say one of two things, either “You have no idea” or “You don’t want to know.” Then someone would say that we had to beat the Communists or they would take over everything, and Tommy would stand up and leave. He always got comped because Mr. Venti had told the waitresses we had to honor his service to our country, even though I wasn’t sure Tom felt that way himself.
Most of the time when he came to visit he would fall asleep in the living room, and my mother would cover him with an old quilt and leave him there. Tommy took a lot of pills, some to help him sleep, some to help him get up in the morning, some to help with the pain in his leg. He took something that was supposed to make him puke if he drank, and he took it and drank anyway and got so sick it seemed he would turn his insides inside out. “I always start the day with good intentions,” he said to me once. Sometimes he even fulfilled them. He would help my father deliver a heavy engine in the truck to someone, or he would pick up groceries for Ruth. He would sit with her and watch television and he would make the two of them baloney sandwiches with mustard and potato chips. And then he would disappear and we wouldn’t see him for days, maybe longer, and Callie would say she hadn’t seen him, either. Usually when he turned up again he looked exhausted, and sometimes he was bruised, or cut up.
You don’t want to know. As far as I was concerned he was right about that part. Sometimes I thought what I imagined was worse than the reality, most of the time not. I would sit in the living room chair and watch him sleep on the couch, not looking at his face but at the rise and fall of his chest under a grimy T-shirt. I wondered what his plan was now. Getting through the day, I figured.
“Daddy!” Clifton would holler when he would finally turn up, and there Tommy would be.
“Daddy,” Clifton hollered, turning away from the cows at the fence, and there he was moving through the smoke, my big brother, swinging his bad leg out the way he did so he wouldn’t have to bend it much. He slung it along with him like a long narrow sack of cement. The funny thing was, a lot of people had come to believe it was a war wound. I guess it was. I guess Tommy’s whole life now was a war wound.
“Who are you?” Tommy said as he bent down slowly, like an old man.
“I’m Clifton.”
“Clifton who?”
“Clifton Miller. Clifton Miller!”
“Clifton Miller? That’s funny—my name’s Tom Miller. Maybe you and me are related.”
“We are related,” Clifton always said, and he always garbled the last word a little bit, like he couldn’t quite get his mouth, with its tiny pearl teeth and pursed pink lips, around all of it. “I’m your boy!”
“You are?” Tom would say. “Hell, yeah, you are! You are my boy!” And then he would pick Clifton up, trying to keep the pain that cost him out of his face, and look him square in the eye, foreheads almost touching. It never got old for Clifton. I wondered when it would. Or if it would. My mother’s lips clenched when Tommy got to the “hell yeah” part. Her crazy love for him was always at war with her disapproval of what he’d become. Whenever anyone would say how hard it was to watch him limp, she would say, “He’s lucky to have that leg at all.”
“Hey,” I said to him.
Tommy put Clifton down slowly, picked up my book and looked at the title. “It’s summer, it’s your day off, what the hell is wrong with you?” he said, rolling his eyes, which were bloodshot, but maybe just from all the smoke. “You want to come up the mountain with us? The fire guys want to cut down a line of brush and shrub to make it harder for the fire to jump any further. I told a couple of them I’d give them a hand with