Free I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Page B

were there, I guess I overlooked them. Let down my guard. Big mistake.
    Nobody except Thomas and Nadine knew he’d stopped taking his Haldol. Or that he’d begun to wear a ring of aluminum foil around his head every night when he went to bed because it somehow let God’s voice through but scrambled the messages of his enemies. My brother: the human radio receiver pulling in the Jesus frequency. Mr. Tinfoil Head. I mean, it’s not funny, but it is. If I didn’t laugh about it sometimes, I’d be down in the bughouse in the bed next to his.
    The new drive-thru window at McDonald’s had been installed only about a week or two before Thomas cracked. Later on, he blamed his assistant manager, who had balked that morning when Thomas showed up for work wearing his aluminum foil hat.
    Thomas had tried to explain to the guy that Communist agents were ridiculing him through the outside speaker—calling to him as he emptied the garbage or swept the parking lot, encouraging him to go inside and eat the rat poison in the utility closet. By the time the police got there, Thomas, wielding his floor polisher, had already knocked off Ronald McDonald’s life-sized fiberglass head and wasted the restaurant’s brand-new drive-thru speaker. The cops found him sobbing away behind the Dumpster, bees hovering all around him. Thomas had to check out of the group home, of I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 52
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    course—check back into the hospital. About a month after that, he got a postcard of the Grand Ole Opry from Nadine and Chuckie, this other high-on-Jesus buddy of theirs. Chuckie and Nadine had eloped, were honeymooning in Tennessee. I was worried the news from Nadine was going to set Thomas back further, but he took it like a stoic and held no grudges.
    “Read me something from my Bible, Dominick,” Thomas ordered me now in the cruiser, midway between Shanley Memorial and the hospital. He’d been making demands for four days: get him this, check on that. Ordering instead of asking, the way he always did when he was in bad shape. I turned around and looked back at him.
    The lights from a passing car illuminated his face. Despite the Valium, his eyes looked clear, hungry for something. “Read to me from the Book of Psalms,” he said.
    The binding on Thomas’s Bible is broken, its loose pages nearly translucent from finger oil. The whole thing’s held together with rubber bands. “The Book of Psalms?” I said. I pulled off the elastics, flipped through the tissuey pages. “Where are they at?”
    “In the middle. Between the Book of Job and the Book of Proverbs.
    Read me the Twenty-sixth Psalm.”
    In the confusion at the library five days earlier, my brother’s Bible had been left behind, then scooped up by the police detectives assigned to the case. Later, in the recovery room, Thomas had bubbled up from the anesthetic calling for it. He called for it all the next day, too. Clamored for it. A substitute wouldn’t do—it had to be his Bible—the one Ma had given him for his confirmation back when we were in sixth grade. (She’d given us each one, but mine was long gone. Gone where is anyone’s guess.) After several hours of listening to his bellyaching, I’d finally gone down to police headquarters and told the guy behind the glass that we needed that Bible over at the hospital a lot more than they needed it at the station. I’d repeated my request to his supervisor, then to that guy’s supervisor. It was Jerry Martineau, the deputy chief, who finally cut through all the I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 53
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    “official police investigation” bullshit and ended the impasse.
    Martineau and I had played hoops together in high school. Well, to be accurate, we’d mostly kept each other company on the bench while the hotshots played. Jerry was the comedian type—the kind of kid that could get you laughing so hard, you couldn’t breathe. He did this imitation of Jerry