Page 32 of The Drifter

"Housekeeping. You want me fluff peellow?"

The hand stopped.

There is exactly one human being on this earth who does that voice. It belonged to a much-viewed DVD of Tommy Boy and a bunk bed in Valentine, Texas, and to a boy who used it on every brother he ever ambushed. It had not improved with age.

I got up and padded across the room and opened the door.

Tommy Dane stood in the hallway grinning like sunrise.

He looked good. He always looked good—Tommy came out of the womb looking like a recruiting poster and never lost it. Jeans and a plain T-shirt, and somehow, on him, it read like a man who owned the block.

"There he is," Tommy said. "Ugliest man in six states."

"Seven, now. I've been traveling."

He laughed and came in and got his arms around me, and I got mine around him. We stood there in the doorway hammering each other on the back the way men do when the words aren't going to come out right. He smelled like coffee and cedar. He felt solid. My little brother, thick through the shoulders now, with sun lines at his eyes.

I let him go and checked the clock. A couple hours of sleep. I've run wars on less.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Errand boy." He dropped into the armchair by the window like he'd paid for it. "That's me this morning. Chief courier of the family, on account of my oldest brother lives like it's 1875."

"It was a good year."

"You'd know." He dug in his pocket and came out with a phone, black, new, still with the little plastic film on the screen, and held it out to me. "Here."

I looked at it. I didn't take it.

"I don't need one."

"See, that's where you're wrong. This is how the human race communicates now. They send each other little messages. Sometimes, a picture of their lunch. It's a whole thing, you'd hate it."

"I would."

"There's also a backup plan," Tommy said, and pointed past me at the nightstand. "Called the hotel phone. Which works great, generally. Except somebody unplugged it."

I glanced back. The cord lay coiled on the carpet where I'd left it.

Right. Habit. First five minutes in any room—windows, exits, and the phone comes out of the wall. A phone that can ring is a phone somebody else decides when to use. I sleep better when the only thing in the room that can go off is me.

"What if I plug it back in?"

Tommy gave me a look. The look said, you're being difficult on purpose.

I gave him one back. Mine said, and?

The years fell off the room. For a second, we were two boys across a kitchen table with our mother telling us to quit it without looking up from the stove.

Then, Tommy quit smiling, and that got my attention, because Tommy not smiling is a rarer event than rain out home.

"Take the phone, Clint. It's important."

"I know it's important. Cash doesn't fly to Texas unless it’s important." I set the phone on the dresser, which was as far as I was willing to commit. "But I'm not planning on getting into any trouble."

Tommy laughed. It came out short, and there wasn't much floor under it.

"Man," he said. "You have no idea."