Free We Were Brothers by Barry Moser

he asked,
    “Well, he did, didn’t he?”
    “No,” I said, and immediately felt like a shithead. Why couldn’t I just have kept my big mouth shut?
    But instead of being angry, Todd chuckled.
    “You know,” he said, “that’s just like Daddy. He’d tell a story and it’d be about this big” (his hands gesturing a smallish size), “and then he’d tell the same story again, and it would be this big” (his hands gesturing yet a larger size), “and then it’d be this big, and before long he’d get to believing it himself.”
    THE INTIMIDATION AND humiliation that Tommy endured for those four years at Baylor, whether real or imagined, or a combination of both, eventually drove him to quit. He had no desire to continue down that road, so he dropped out and went to work. He worked at menial jobs—washing cars, pumping gas, sweeping floors, stacking shelves—until he landed a well-paying job in Combustion Engineering’s Chattanooga foundry. He made, and saved, good money. He bought a sporty little MG convertible. A red one.
    A few years later, our cousin Wayland helped Tommy find a job at American National Bank, where Wayland was, or had been, a teller. Tommy started as a runner, the lowest spot on the banking totem pole back then. But without the benefit of a college education—or even a completed high-school education—he worked his way up that totem pole. He became a teller, then a head teller, and eventually a branch manager. No one ever faulted my brother for lack of ambition, or determination, or for being stupid about money.
    When Tommy died on July 19, 2005, he probably had twenty-five cents of the first dollar he ever earned stashed in a bank somewhere, or a coffee can. Our uncle Bob always said that Tommy pinched a quarter so hard that the eagle squawked.
    The younger brother has never been frugal. Bob always said that money always burned a hole in my pocket.

THE BUS
    THOSE OF US WHO LIVED far away from the campus spent a lot of time on the bus. An hour each way for Tommy and me and the other boys who lived near us. Longer than that for the boys who lived up on Lookout Mountain. Unlike the public buses, the more senior boys—officers, noncommissioned officers, juniors and seniors—reserved the back of the Baylor bus for themselves. When the bus entered Stringer’s Ridge tunnel everybody ducked. It was a short tunnel, and the darkness, which came on suddenly, lasted only a few seconds. But the very brevity caused all hell to break loose—and furiously so. Only the boys in the back remained sitting up. Books and all manner of things not stowed or battened down flew through the air, hitting anybody who dared stay sitting up. Seniors turned the hefty part of their class rings to the inside of the palms of their hands and popped the younger kids on the backs of their heads. Hard. Cadet officers, under the pretense of maintaining or restoring order, meted out punishment by whacking kids upside their heads with their folded overseas caps. The caps themselves were limp, soft wool, and were harmless, but the officers’ metal pips that were pinned to the front of the cap could, and did, inflict pain.
    There were other, more sadistic, torments on the ride home that made the mayhem of Stringer’s Ridge tunnel seem tame by comparison.
    Sometimes a boy was forcibly stripped to the waist and held down while two or three other boys—all at the same time and in unison—slapped his naked stomach hard and fast until the boy’s belly was red and raw. Other times a boy was stripped and pinned down while other boys rubbed the hair on his belly enthusiastically until it was all twisted up in small, tight pills of hair that had to be shaved off. Sometimes a boy was stripped of his trousers and forced off the bus in his skivvies to stand helplessly on the curb watching his trousers dangle out the bus window until they were dropped off a block or two from the unfortunate cadet’s point of disembarkation.
    Neither