Tom also runs Ms. Kelley’s art shop when Mom is away on buying trips. In school that year, he’s learning about Islamic terrorists. He’s assigned to read about Islam on the Internet. He stares at photos of thousands of men and women walking around a huge twenty-foot-high black cube in Saudi Arabia, on a pilgrimage, the website says. They look peaceful and happy and seem to have purpose. They don’t look like killers or terrorists. They look like a big family, going to a different kind of church. It looks nice.
Hodge and Tom sleep in a room in single beds, and sometimes Tom looks over at the little lump in the next bed and feels a swelling in his throat. One time in school a bully — an older kid — hits Hodge, and Tom comes flying out of the crowd and knocks the kid down, pummels him until his face is bloody. Tom threatens to kill the kid if he ever touches Hodge.
“You’re the best brother in the world,” Hodge tells Tom. Nothing, no compliment, has ever filled Tom with as much happiness.
His last memories of Hodge begin on the day their next-door neighbor — a Denver real estate lawyer named Richard Gruntz — knocks on the door and announces that he’s got tickets to that night’s Nuggets game in Denver. He can take six boys along with his son Josh. Would Tom like to go?
“Only if Hodge can come.”
“He’s a little young to stay up that late, isn’t he?”
“I won’t go unless Hodge can.”
So Hodge can go. And Tom makes sure that Hodge gets a window seat because Hodge can get queasy on the road. It starts to snow on the way to Denver. There was a storm last night, too, and huge piles of drift lay on both sides of the mountain roads. The radio warns of ice patches. Hodge is staring out the window, excited about the game, when Tom catches sight of Mr. Gruntz pulling out his cell phone. Tom knows that a driver is not supposed to use a cell phone; Tom reaches to pat Mr. Gruntz on the shoulder to ask him to stop, but at that moment — as Gruntz looks down — the van skids, and by the time Mr. Gruntz looks up they’ve slammed into the guardrail, snapped through it. The van is plunging down into a ravine.
Tom screams, “Hodge!”
Hodge is snapped into his seat belt so when the van turns over the boy stays fixed in place. Windows shatter. The roof caves in. The mountain flashes past sideways over upside down, and the boys are screaming and Mr. Gruntz’s phone goes flying and the snowmelt stream at the bottom of the ravine is rushing at them faster, closer, and…
CRASH!!!
Tom hurts all over. He has never hurt this much. It is hard to see because something is wrong with his left eye. Something is in it. It’s hot and sticky. He’s terrified for Hodge. Mr. Gruntz has the front door open. His right arm seems to be hanging, not moving, but he’s getting the boys out of the van, which has started to smoke. Smoke from the vehicle mixes with mist rising from the stream, in which the half-smashed vehicle lies sideways.
Hodge is not bleeding but he’s staring at Tom in terror, gagging and clawing at his face as Tom tries to unbuckle the belt. Hodge’s breathing is crazy fast. Tom’s head hurts badly — myfaultmyfault I made Mr. Gruntz take Hodge. It is hard to breathe or think.
But he gets Hodge out, and sees that other than the terror, Hodge is okay. He’s OKAY! Tom’s relief is so profound that he wants to sit down, but he can’t, because two other boys still need to get out.
The front of the van flickers with fire.
He tells Hodge to wait, sit on a rock, and he runs to the van, reaches in with Mr. Gruntz, pulls out Larry Benton, and half drags out blathering Kendall Black. Both boys are bleeding and crying. Mr. Gruntz is white-faced and says, “I’m sorry.” Tom shouts at him about the cell phone, and Mr. Gruntz puts his face in his hands and cries tears and says, “I was just going to check my messages.” Suddenly the van bursts into flame, fierce and yellow. The blast of heat whips into Tom’s face.
Hodge has fallen asleep.
No, not asleep.
Hodge is lying sideways, toppled off the big snow-covered rock where he was sitting. No breath comes from his mouth. His little hands — gloves off — are twisted near his throat, as if he’d clutched at it. There is hardly any blood. No big injury. Tom sees the smallest, silliest-looking cut on the side of Hodge’s neck. He tells Hodge to wake up, open his eyes. He shouts it. He grips Hodge by the ski jacket and shakes him. He is still screaming as Mr. Gruntz pulls him off, and then police are there and putting out the fire and firemen are helping the boys climb up the ravine, and a stranger, a woman, is dragging Tom up the hill toward an ambulance and all he can do is scream, “Help Hodge!”
Later he will learn that Hodge drowned. The cut in the neck came from glass driving into his trachea, piercing an artery, shooting blood into his lungs. He drowned just as surely as if water had flooded in there. What Tom had taken for panic had been choking. The boy drowned on his own blood while Tom was trying to help the others.
“You could not have saved him, son,” the doctor says. “Do you hear? Say that you heard it. Look at me. Tom!”
Later a police detective comes to the house and tells Tom that Mr. Gruntz says he never used his cell phone in the car, that Tom must be mistaken. The detective explains that the police have a way to check if someone was using a phone at a particular moment. Gruntz never made a call.
“He wasn’t using it! He was starting to! He told me!”
“Maybe you just think that! Everything happened fast.”
“You killed Hodge!” Tom shouts at Mr. Gruntz, in the hospital. And at the funeral. Tom waits outside Mr. Gruntz’s condo and screams, “You murdered Hodge,” whenever Gruntz walks in or out. He tells anyone who will listen what Mr. Gruntz did to his brother. He calls up a reporter at the newspaper and tells her, too. Mr. Gruntz doesn’t look sorry about it anymore. He looks mad. And the detective comes back and tells Mom that if Tom doesn’t stop bothering Mr. Gruntz there will be “consequences,” but Mom is in no shape to do anything but cry and smoke dope and sleep.
Gunther doesn’t know what to do either. He takes Tom to a church to talk to a priest, a compassionate-looking older man with gray hair and a bald dome on top. The priest listens to Tom, and almost seems like he will cry. The priest tells Tom that God does things that look mysterious, but actually have a purpose.
“You mean God killed Hodge?”
“I mean that we can’t understand God because his ways are complicated.”
“It’s not complicated! Hodge died!”
“Let me read you something from the bible.”
“I don’t want to hear the bible! I want you to tell me WHY HODGE GOT KILLED! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”
“Watch your language, son.”
Gunther announces a month later that the house is “no fun” anymore. “You must both get over this. Bad things happen. I will be moving back to Germany next month.”
Mom tells Tom that they’re leaving Breckenridge and moving to Denver, to live with his grandparents and “have a more serious life.”
“I thought you said my grandparents were dead.”
“To me they were. I need to grow up now and they can help. You’ll like them. We both need to change. No more drinking. Or dope. I’ve gotten a job in a gallery in Denver. And, Tom, I promise you, I mean it, no more men.”