Eric was once again amazed by his brother. During the years that they were separated, Eric often thought that he’d idealized Thomas, that the boy really wasn’t so brilliant as he remembered. But time after time when they talked, Eric was forced to admit the rightness in Thomas’s keen insights.
“How do you know that, Tommy?” Eric asked a long while later.
“What?” Thomas was looking out of the window, holding tight to the armrests of his seat. He had never been in a jet, or any other aircraft. He was elated and petrified.
“About Connie. I mean, you never even slept with anybody before Clea.”
“You ever been to the carnival that come down on Fifty-fourth Place sometimes?” Thomas asked. “Down toward South Central?”
“No.”
“But you ever been in a hall of mirrors like?”
“No, but I know what you mean.”
“It’s like a door you go in and you try to get out the other side,” Thomas said, remembering when he went into that maze. “It’s all glass walls and mirrors, an’ you can see your reflection all ovah the place an’ you see other people too. But if you go in it an’ there’s only you, then you see yourself a thousand times all ovah. You see the front and back, the sides. It’s just you. Just you whatever way you look.”
“So?” Eric said.
“That’s kinda like you,” Thomas told his brother. “You always been special, an’ so all you see is you. Like when we was in school. It was you all the time. Teacher’s helper, spelling champion, the only little boy in our class that could hit a home run.”
“But that’s just sports or schoolwork.”
“Yeah, but everybody always knows you and is always thinkin’ about you. And so it’s like they’re the mirrors and you look at them and see you. But I don’t do that because you’re my brother, and that means I don’t have to care about you like they do. I know you’re my friend already, and I know you feel bad. But Connie and Christie and Mr. Stroud in the first grade wanted you to see them, but you couldn’t see nuthin’ but what they saw — like a mirror. You see yourself makin’ this one happy an’ breakin’ the other one’s heart. I don’t know exactly what I mean, but it’s somethin’ like that though.”
“So you think that people make up how they feel about me?” Eric asked.
“Sometimes. But even if they don’t, even if it’s like your girlfriend who got killed. She’s the one who made that man mad enough to kill her. It was what she wanted from you. I mean, if you thought about it, you’d think that everyone you meet should fall dead the minute they saw you. But you know some girls think you cute but they don’t leave their boyfriends or nuthin’. You can’t help it if somebody fool enough to get in trouble over you.”
“But, Tommy,” Eric said, “things happen with me that never happen to other people. I win games, girls fall in love; one time the sky parted just in time for me to win a game of tennis.”
“That ain’t nuthin’ but magic tricks,” Thomas said. The jet had just entered a patch of turbulence, so he clasped his hands together and closed his eyes.
“What do you mean by that?” Eric asked, not heeding his brother’s fear.
“Win a game, kiss some girl,” Thomas said, his heart in his throat. “That ain’t nuthin’. I got better luck than that.”
“You?”
“Yeah, me.”
“Tommy, you could fall down just sitting in a chair.”
“Maybe so, but I was born, an’ you know all those days I was walkin’ on the streets, I kept thinkin’ how special you got to be to get born. Nobody knows what kinda baby they gonna have or if they’ll have the baby they want. Even if you’re just a fly alive for a few minutes and then you run into a spider’s web — even that fly is one’a the most luckiest creatures in the world. We all lucky, Eric. And the luckiest ones are the ones happy about bein’ alive.”
The plane dipped in the sky, and Thomas yelped.
Eric laughed and told him that there were always a few bumps in flying.
Kronin Stark met the brothers at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California. Thomas had never seen anybody so large or powerful. He was reminded of an even larger version of Tremont, the muscle-bound drug dealer.
“Mr. Stark,” Eric said. He held out his hand. “This is my brother, Thomas.”
“Hello,” Stark said to Thomas.
Thomas nodded but did not return the greeting. Silence gripped his throat.
“You’re the reason my daughter took all her money out of the bank.”
“She did it for me, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “And I plan to pay her back within six months.”
“What about my influence?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“I put pressure on the governor’s office for this reprieve. What will you give me for that?”
“What do you want?” Eric asked.
Stark looked closely at Eric and then at his brother.
“Why don’t you two boys come and work for me?” he said. “Work off the debt you owe.”
“Sure,” Eric said without hesitation. “But I thought that Mikey said that you didn’t even have an office, that you just sit at a table in the Cape Hotel all day having meetings.”
“Things change,” Kronin said with a shrug. “I’ve recently been made the CEO of an investment organization — the Drumm Investment Group.”
“Okay,” Eric said. “But we have to figure out how much work we need to do to pay you back.”
“What about you, son?” Stark asked Thomas.
“I didn’t ask you to help me,” Thomas said. He found himself squinting at Stark as if the huge billionaire was the sun.
“That’s a bit ungrateful, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know about that. As a matter of fact I don’t know much at all. I sure couldn’t be a businessman or a doctor or nuthin’, so how could I work for you an’ pay off gettin’ the governor to let me free? You think I could sweep enough floors to do sumpin’ like that?”
“I’ll work for you, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “I’ll do the work for the two of us.”
“I wanted both of you,” Stark said, eyeing the lame Thomas.
“But why?” Thomas asked. “Why’d you do it in the first place?”
“Raela wouldn’t eat until I obtained your clemency.”
“Is she eatin’ now?”
“Yes.”
“Then you been paid,” Thomas stated bluntly.
Eric was perplexed by his brother’s tough attitude.
“Don’t you feel at all indebted to me?” Kronin asked, still addressing Thomas.
“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”
Stark cocked his head like a man who has just heard a threat being issued.
“I was the one who engineered your clemency.”
“I think it was Raela did that,” Thomas said. “You just did what she made you do.”
It was obvious to both young men that Stark expected to get his way easily. The impediment of Thomas’s refusal was beginning to humor Eric.
“Why don’t you let us talk about it?” Eric suggested. “I’ll talk to Tommy alone.”
“Why don’t we discuss it on the ride back?” Stark suggested.
“We didn’t know that you were coming, Mr. Stark,” Eric said. “So we called my dad. He’s coming to get us.”
Stark glared at Thomas, who in turn squinted as if the bright light of an inquisitor was shining into his eyes.
“How’d you boys like New York?” Minas Nolan asked on the ride back to Beverly Hills.
“I really liked it, Dad,” Eric said. He felt outgoing and effusive with his father for the first time that he could remember. “Tommy spent every day in the museum, and I was down on Wall Street. We’d get together every night for dinner though.”
“How did you like it, Tommy?” Minas asked, turning momentarily toward the backseat.