“Lawrence owes me, Mick. That’s the difference between me and those other cops. And a long prison term isn’t in Lawrence’s future—no matter what happens.”
I don’t get the insinuation, and I tell Tommy so.
“Lawrence has liver cancer. It’s metastasized to his lungs and his brain. He wants to enjoy his freedom while he still can. I told him he can stay at the trailer as long as he wants. I’ll keep going up whenever I’m able. Bring supplies, help him. Keep him company. Until . . .”
“You really want to go through this again?”
“Hey. I’m the rock. The Slab. Remember?” Tommy tries to sound lighthearted, but his voice is tinged with bitterness.
I can’t recall exactly when I first became cognizant of my father’s coughing. I want to say it was in tenth or eleventh grade. At first, Tommy and I made jokes about the old man’s smoking. But as time went on and the hacking worsened, we got more serious with him, pressuring him to quit. He did, finally, when I was a senior in high school and Tommy a sophomore. By then it was too late, though none of us knew it. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if our father had quit cigarettes years earlier—or never even started smoking. It wasn’t the smokes that killed him but his job at Manheim Newbestos, the asbestos plant where he had worked for twenty years as a machinist.
When I left home after graduation, Dad was coughing as bad as ever, but he was still working and looked healthy enough to wrestle a bear. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years in college, Dad still looked pretty strong, though he often seemed to have a hard time catching his breath. I remember being home during the summer and tossing a football around with Tommy and our father in the field behind our house, and Dad going out for a long pass and then being bent over at the knees, sucking air after he’d caught the ball. Tommy and I exchanged concerned glances, but Dad shrugged it off and told us it was no big deal. When summer was over, I went back to college for my junior year. Whenever I called home, Tommy would tell me Dad seemed to be getting worse, but when I returned for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, he appeared energetic enough and had a positive attitude. I’d asked him more than once when Tommy wasn’t around how he was doing, and he said that, apart from the cough and the wheezing, he felt fine.
Still, I wasn’t all that surprised when, after my brother graduated from high school, he told me he was putting off enlisting in the military for a while to stay home with the old man.
The summer between my junior and senior years, I stayed on campus because I had a chance to work in a local law office. Before the summer started, though, I did get a chance to go home once. It was then that I began to see a marked change in Dad’s appearance. He’d lost weight and his skin didn’t look right. I made a point of getting home every other weekend, and it seemed that Dad had plateaued. He didn’t look great, but he didn’t seem to be getting worse. I remember saying so to Tommy one night late in August after the three of us had gone out for some beers at a bar near our house. Tommy and I were sitting together on the picnic table in our small backyard. It was after midnight, and the sky was brilliant with stars.
Tommy raised his head for a long moment and looked back at me, hard. “But he is worse, Mick.”
January of my senior year, Tommy called to tell me our father had retired and hired a lawyer. When I asked why, Tommy answered with a single word: “Asbestos.” It was only then that I put two and two together and realized that our father wasn’t suffering emphysema from smoking. I called one of the lawyers I had worked for in State College that summer, and he told me all about the massive asbestos litigation that had been going on around the country for years. I drove home that night and, after our father had gone to bed, pressured Tommy to tell me how bad he really was.
“Come on, Mick. Open your eyes! Or your ears. He coughs nonstop. He’s lost thirty pounds. He’s bad. You already know that. Stop bullshitting me—and yourself.”
“I’ll withdraw from school. Help you take care of him.”
Tommy snorted, an angry sound. “You have one more semester. Go back to school. Finish up. Graduate. Then you can help me with Dad.”
Tommy and I spoke to our father, who said he agreed with Tommy. “After you graduate, the three of us will take a road trip together,” he said. “I always wanted to rent one of those big Winnebagos, go to the Grand Canyon.”
So I went back to State College for my last semester. The second week of April, my phone rang at two in the morning. I leaned over in bed and picked up the receiver. The air at the other end of the line was dead for a full five seconds. “Hello? Who’s there?” I asked impatiently, my eyes still closed.
“Dad’s gone.”
I bolted up in bed. “What happened?”
But Tommy had already hung up.
The next few weeks were a blur. The long drive home. My father’s lifeless body in his bed. The funeral. The wake. The meetings with the lawyers. I floated through it all in zombielike numbness. The only thing I can remember with any clarity is my brother. As distant from the ordeal as I felt, Tommy seemed to me to be wholly present, wholly in control—of himself, our relatives, the attorneys, funeral directors, caterers. Me. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen my little brother as a grown-up, as a man. It startled me. I was twenty-two years old, a senior in college with three years of law school ahead of me. I was a student, and I saw myself that way. Not a child but not fully an adult yet, either. I had the body of a man, the face of a man, but hadn’t even begun making my way in the world. My twenty-year-old kid brother, on the other hand, had been working for two years at the local ball-bearing plant. He’d become the caretaker of our ailing father. He paid the bills. Painted and rewired the house. Took our father to his doctor’s appointments, nursed and entertained him at home. And when Dad passed, Tommy took control of the situation like an old-time party boss.
But then, a few weeks after I’d graduated and come home for the summer, Tommy fell apart. I turned in early one night. Tommy was sitting on the couch, watching TV with a beer in his hand when I went up to bed. The next morning when I came downstairs, Tommy was still sitting there. The TV was still on. Tommy wasn’t holding the beer anymore, though, but an empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Half a dozen empty beer bottles littered the coffee table. I asked Tommy if he was all right. He ignored me, kept staring at the television. I cleared the coffee table, removed the whiskey bottle from Tommy’s hand, and turned off the TV. Tommy closed his eyes but otherwise didn’t move a muscle.
Tommy didn’t leave the house for three days. He didn’t bathe or shave, either. Or change clothes. His eyes grew hollow. Because he wasn’t eating, Tommy began to lose weight. His chiseled face grew gaunt, his skin turned sallow. The thing that frightened me most, though, was what I saw in his eyes. Tommy was afraid. More than afraid. And I thought I’d figured out why. After our mother died, Tommy had latched on to our father like a barnacle on a keel. Wherever Dad went, Tommy went. Whatever Dad did, Tommy was there helping him. When Dad worked on the car, Tommy handed him his tools. Tommy accompanied our father to Home Depot and Lowe’s, the grocery store, beer distributors—everywhere. And it dawned on me, finally, that Tommy was hanging around our father for protection. Whatever had seized our mother and killed her before our very eyes had left our father standing. As strong as death was, Tommy had believed, our dad was stronger.
Dad’s invincibility, I decided, had become a core tenet of young Tommy’s belief system. But that a priori principle had just been shattered. Death had come for our father, just as it had hunted down our mother. The only thing Dad’s gargantuan strength had bought him was a long, slow demise. Death couldn’t knock the old man down with a single blow as it had his wife, so it picked him apart, piece by piece, pound by pound, and ate him alive. Tommy had witnessed it happen, and he was terrified. And there was something more. Tommy had stood shoulder to shoulder with my father through the whole thing, tried to fight off the old man’s death himself. But he’d failed. And Tommy’s failure to save our father,
I decided, filled him with guilt. I could see that, too, in Tommy’s eyes. Bottomless guilt.
I congratulated myself for figuring it all out, and I fed Tommy every timeworn bromide I could think of. There was nothing Tommy could have done. It was just Dad’s time. Tommy had his whole life ahead of him. Dad was now with Mom, and they both wanted Tommy to be happy.
Tommy sat in perfect stillness while I counseled him. Sometimes he’d just grit his teeth and stare at the wall, the television, some spot on the ceiling. Sometimes he’d close his eyes and shake his head. And sometimes he’d glare at me, every muscle in his granite body tensed up like he was ready to spring, tear me apart. And when he got that way, I became afraid. Tommy was a physical force, like our father had been. God help any man Tommy turned against.
The summer months wore on. I spent my nights tending bar at a local pub owned by a high school classmate. When I came home from work at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, Tommy would still be awake. We’d exchange some small talk, then I’d go to bed while Tommy stayed downstairs, pacing the floor, drinking, watching television, occasionally crying. In early August, Tommy went back to work at the ball-bearing plant. He lasted two days before getting into a fight with his foreman and storming out of the building. Tommy told me what had happened when I got home from work, and I blew my top at him. I told him he had to pull himself together. I urged him to go down to the local recruitment office and resume his long-held plan to make it to the Special Forces.
“You’re falling apart at the seams,” I told him. “You need structure. And with Dad gone, there’s no reason to put off your own dreams any longer. Just take the first step. Stop being self-destructive. You’re beating yourself up for no reason. There’s nothing you could have done.”
Tommy, sitting on the couch, his head in his hands, looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
“You’ve always been smart, Mick. Real smart. But you don’t know anything.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I was shouting. I couldn’t bear to see my brother like this. “What’s with all the self-pity? I look at you the past couple months, and I ask myself who is living in my house. I don’t know this guy. He looks like my brother, but he sure as hell doesn’t act like him. Come on. Clean yourself up. Stand up and move forward. Man up, Tommy. Man the fuck up!”
I stormed up the stairs and slammed shut the door to my bedroom. After a few minutes, full of remorse, I walked back down to apologize to Tommy. But he was gone. The front door was wide open, and our dad’s pickup had disappeared from the driveway. Tommy was back on the couch the next night when I came home from work. I tried to apologize, but Tommy brushed me off.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Leave it alone.”
The following week, the money came in. By the time my father died, huge funds of money had been set aside by the courts to pay out asbestos claims. Some cases went to trial, but most were settled out of court, according to criteria that had been agreed to by the plaintiffs’ attorneys and corporate defense counsel. My father’s case was one that settled. A big factor, I learned, was the “dying deposition” he had given a month before he passed. Dad was videotaped lying in his bed, on oxygen, as he was questioned by his own counsel and then by three lawyers representing the asbestos companies. The ordeal went on for almost two hours, during which our dad, with Tommy sitting next to him and holding his hand, talked about his life, his marriage, his sons, and his illness—coughing, hacking, and choking all the while. I had no idea this ever took place until my father’s lawyer mentioned it to me when he called to say the case had settled. After the call, I asked Tommy about it.
“It was pathetic,” he answered. “Fucking pathetic. I think that was the whole point,” he added bitterly. “But I guess it got the job done.”
I was stunned by the amount of money the case settled for. Even after the 40 percent siphoned off by the lawyers and with the case expenses and medical liens, Tommy and I each ended up with more than $200,000. Enough to pay for law school for me. Enough, it turned out, to fuel Tommy’s sudden flight from whatever demons were tormenting him.
Two weeks after I left for law school, I received a postcard from South Beach. I turned the card over and read Tommy’s scribble: “Sun, sand, and blondes. It doesn’t get any better.” No phone number or address. Six weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, I received another postcard, from Cancún, Mexico. On the back of the card, Tommy had again scratched some vacuous contrivance intended to convince me of what a great time he was having, ending with “Happy Turkey Day, bro.” I figured that was Tommy’s way of saying we weren’t going to get together for the holidays. It was six months before I received the next postcard. This one was from San Francisco, and it featured the zigzagging Lombard Street, billed as the crookedest street in the world. More postcards dribbled in over the next three years, from the redwood parklands in Northern California; the Grand Canyon; ski resorts in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming; and the beaches of Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas.
It wasn’t until the summer after I’d graduated from law school that I laid eyes again on my brother. I was at our father’s house, meeting with the owner of a small cleaning service I was interviewing. The housekeeper who’d kept the place up was moving, and I had to hire a replacement. The phone rang, and it was Tommy on the other end. He was at the Greyhound bus station downtown and asked if I’d pick him up.
Tommy was waiting on the curb when I pulled up, a small knapsack sitting on the pavement beside him. He was sunburned and bloated, carrying a lot of extra weight. His eyes were bloodshot. He had a week’s worth of whiskers and unkempt hair. When he climbed into the passenger seat, he grinned broadly and shook my hand.
“So, how was law school?” he blurted, his words carrying a not-so-faint aroma of stale beer.
“Interesting,” I replied, trying to hide the coolness I was feeling toward him. “How was . . . the Western hemisphere?”
“Fanfuckintastic.”
“I guess so. Sounds like you jet-setted to the four corners.”
I wanted to add something sharp about coming home on a bus. Tommy’s share of the money from the lawsuit was, obviously, gone.
My plan had been to drive back to my apartment in Philly once I’d shored things up with the new house cleaners. With Tommy home, though, I decided to stick around for a few weeks. I lasted three days. Living with Tommy was like sharing a house with a pack of nocturnal rodents. He was up all night and was loud about it. The television and stereo blaring, shouting matches over the phone with some woman he’d left in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And in the morning, bottles and pizza boxes strewn across the coffee table and floor. Socks and sneakers and T-shirts, even his boxers, left on the furniture.
I suppressed my anger, my disgust. Half a dozen times I sat down with Tommy, described the last three years of my life—the rigors of law school, the imperious professors, my initial concerns that I wasn’t smart enough for an Ivy League law school, being intimidated by the wealth and worldliness of some of my classmates, my hopes and fears about starting to work in the fall at the district attorney’s office. Then I’d pause and wait for Tommy to open up to me. Nothing came out. Unless you counted some sordid story of how he’d nailed two NFL cheerleaders in Dallas. Or how he and his buddy had kicked three other guys’ asses outside a bar in Detroit and spent the weekend in the pokey. Tommy shared nothing about what was going on inside him. The only nanosecond of honest emotion he betrayed was in response to my mention of our father, when a dozen dark colors flashed across his eyes.
In the early afternoon of my fourth day with Tommy, I woke him up on the couch and told him I had to get back to Philadelphia. “But you should stay here as long as you want. I’m going to call the lawyers and tell them to draft something up, to transfer my share of the house to you. I want you to own it by yourself. I have a little money left, and I’ll make enough at the DA’s office to pay my rent.” Tommy thanked me and said he was planning to go down to the lumberyard he�
�d worked at when he was in high school. He said they’d given him a standing offer to come back anytime he wanted. I told him that was a great idea; then I walked out and drove away.
A month later, with the title to our dad’s house now exclusively in his name, Tommy hired a real estate agent. He had her price the house for a fast sale. As had happened the year our father died, Tommy was on the road before Thanksgiving. This time, though, the first contact I had from—actually, about—Tommy didn’t come in the form of a postcard, but a phone call. Early in February, I received a call at my office from Spencer Watley, a classmate of mine at Penn Law. Like me, Spencer had just begun his career as a prosecutor. Not in Philadelphia, though; he had returned to his home in Pensacola, Florida. Spencer called me to let me know he’d just been assigned a case in which the defendant had badly beaten up another man who, it turned out, was an off-duty police officer. The defendant was Tommy.
“The background check showed he was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and you’d talked to me about a brother named Tommy. I thought I’d call and give you a heads-up in case your brother couldn’t get through to you.”
I exhaled and asked where Tommy was in the process.
“Still in lockup, waiting for his arraignment. I don’t think he has a public defender yet.”
“What’s the charge going to be?”
Spencer paused before answering. “Aggravated battery.”
I froze. Aggravated battery is a felony that can carry serious jail time.
“It was a cop, Mick. And your brother beat the hell out of him.”
I said nothing.
“Plus, there are all the priors.”
“Priors?”
Spencer read through a long list of messes and altercations Tommy had gotten himself into during the previous three years. Most involved fistfights that were pled out on public nuisance and intoxication charges. Tommy had copped to two assault charges, however, and spent several months in jail. His carefree tour of the Americas and Mexico hadn’t been so carefree, after all.
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