Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  “I’ve got to hit the road if I’m going to get that paper out today,” he told Hamp.

  “They ought to be finished loading you up by now. You’ll sell a hell of a lot of papers next week, too, you know that.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Won’t take them more than a few days to solve that murder.”

  “I hope so,” said Thomas.

  “Of course it would be good business if they drug it out for a month.”

  “I imagine I’ll limp by either way,” Thomas said, and as he stood he slid the paper in front of Hamp off the counter. After all, he’d paid for it, and there wasn’t any sense in giving them away.

  He took the backroads home, past the flat fallow acreage stubbled with remnant stalks of corn and tobacco, past the empty packing sheds, which weeks before, during the height of produce season, had swarmed with migrants who’d disappeared with the cukes and squash and peppers as if they, too, were cultivated seasonally, their lives subject to the confluence of nature—sun and rain and cancerous blight—that ruled the county. Thomas’s own livelihood depended indirectly on the weather, for when the crops were threatened, the farmers spent no money at local businesses, which, when strapped, cut back on advertising. Even the children had been conditioned to pay attention to the weathermen on the six o’ clock news, aware that a midsummer drought meant hand-me-downs, no late-August week at the beach. Two years ago, Thomas had printed a series of articles investigating the execrable living conditions of the migrant camps. He’d written the articles with a zeal that he only later understood to be driven as much by outrage as a self-destructive impulse that seemed a lot like freedom. The value of the truth appeared proportional to what it might cost him.

  Strickland, predictably, had not shared his zeal. Nor, he suspected, had Caroline, though he had to suspect, as she’d read the articles without much comment except to second his scorn for the local farmers who claimed ignorance of injustices taking place on their own lands. She’d never said what he’d wanted her to—that he was right to blow the whistle—and Thomas had interpreted her silence as disapproval. The results were predictable: several dozen canceled subscriptions, a flurry of letters to the editor disputing facts and asserting that photographs had been “manufactured.” A used-car dealership yanked its classifieds, and he lost other larger accounts, with a grocery store on the edge of the town and the local John Deere franchise.

  As for the migrants themselves, they’d probably not even noticed—so few spoke English, even fewer could read—and Thomas wondered if his exposé had not cost them work. He wondered where they were now, if they’d finished with apples in New England and had headed home to South Florida, if the crew bosses had, as usual, left them stranded in some frigid hamlet in upstate New York. As the panel van bounced along roads he’d traveled so often that he’d memorized tire swings and yard art, Thomas imagined a migratory life for himself.

  He’d grown up only sixty miles from Trent, and he’d never thought much about leaving until the war. What incited him to leave was less the wartime travel, the train trips across the plains to Washington State, his two years in the European theater, than the opportunities afterward—the GI Bill, without which college would have been impossible, as he was only the second in a family of nine to graduate high school. He’d planned on finding a job with a small-town paper and ascending, like so many of his classmates, to papers with larger circulations and grander assignments than covering the chamber of commerce. The day after graduation he’d taken a job with a small paper in the Piedmont, where he’d met Caroline—she was teaching high school history there—and after a year they’d married. A few years later Danny was born, and Pete arrived fourteen months after his brother. Thomas had managed to save enough for a down payment on the Trent Daily Advance, which should have satisfied him.

  Yet a few years earlier, when Watergate broke, journalism suddenly became a sexy vocation. Thomas had been asked to speak at high schools, civic clubs, the local community college, and even though he delivered the same tired speech—“The Responsibilities of the Press”—and answered the same questions about the identity of Deep Throat until he was sick of the whole subject, the new popularity of his profession revived his aspirations. He’d once dreamed, like every other budding reporter, of writing for the Washington Post or the New York Times. He’d imagined his own byline on a widely syndicated column. Yet the effects of Watergate had ultimately embarrassed him; the discrepancy between Woodward-Bernstein and Edgecombe-Strickland reminded him that this moment—bumping into town in a gas-fumy van sunken with the week’s thin paper—was what journalism would always be for him.

  Often Thomas felt confused about his role in the town. Was he a businessman or a public servant? Deliverer of truth and justice, or purveyor of buy-one-get-one-free turkey breasts? People thought the paper should be free, a civic perk like the library or the Christmas parade. No one really understood his work. Advertisers took issue with the editorial slant, as well as the listing of their names or the names of friends or family members in the district court docket. Some of the few enlightened folks in town seemed to understand the more edifying role of the press but this, too, seemed burdensome, as this camp was rarely satisfied and so small that Thomas could scarcely pay attention to them every week.

  As he backed the truck up to the door, his insert crew swarmed the alley behind the office. When Thomas spotted them in the rearview, they appeared loose and wiry and alive—one was dancing atop an air-conditioning unit to a transistor blaring low-wattage soul, several others pitched pennies against a dumpster. The block behind the office was filled with black businesses—Say It Loud Records, Harris’s Pool Room, Modern Barber Shop, a short-order grill called Lester’s. The alley was always crowded with black men spilling out of the back doors, and though Thomas knew almost all of them by sight if not by name, and believed he had good standing in the black community, he never felt quite comfortable among them. He used the alley several times a day, and at the sight of him they lowered their voices and their eyes.

  Now, as he emerged from the van, a prickly calm appeared on his inserters’ faces. They lined up to unload the papers, snaking a reluctant chain from the van deep inside the office, where the papers were stacked by the glass-topped paste-up tables. Wayman appeared magically from the rear door of the pool room, as if Thomas’s arrival was felt inside the buildings, a palpable tension that summoned Wayman back to work.

  Thomas and Strickland traded quibbles about the printing job as they oiled their address-label guns, ancient and inefficient machines that scissored glue-coated labels for out-of-state wraps. There was new technology for everything now—labeling machines, inserters. But like the Linotype and the computer, which replaced it, Thomas could not afford these machines, and he could not imagine putting the paper out without the dozen bodies that filled the office on Wednesday afternoons. He loved the rhythm of Wednesdays, he and Strickland slapping labels, Wayman running the baler, the kids shuffling up to the tables with newly inserted papers. “Need more,” he and Strickland would call out when the boys fell behind, and often the boys would take up his request, passing it along in singsongy insolence.

  “He say he need mo, need mo.”

  “I need some mo, got to have some mo.”

  “I’ mo kick some ass, keep talking about mo…”

  Even though Thomas knew he was being made fun of, he enjoyed their riffs.

  Thomas noticed Danny only when he brought a stack of papers to his side. Danny never hung out in the alley with the rest of the inserters; he sat up front in the office, doing his homework or talking to Bea, the secretary and paste-up girl. Pete, when he managed to show up on time, always hung out with the black kids. They seemed to like him, and one of them, Anthony McRae, had been a close friend of Pete’s since grade school. Anthony was one of the first black kids to integrate the white schools after the court order came down, and at first Thomas assumed his son was enboldened by having a black boy for a fri
end. Pete had surprised him by keeping up the friendship for years. The boys spoke to each other in a shorthand that suggested they were still tight.

  Thomas didn’t much care for Anthony McRae. He was an intelligent kid, from a good family—his two older brothers had worked for Thomas on Wednesdays, and both had gone on to college on academic scholarships—but he had a mean streak, and a loud foul mouth. He nagged Strickland for more money—the boys were paid four dollars a week for three hours’ work, which was above the minimum wage of $1.25 per hour. Thomas didn’t want his son hanging out with Anthony—the boy was wild enough as it was—but when he mentioned it one Wednesday night on the way home from the post office, Pete surprised him by saying, “Because he a soul brother, right?”

  “Don’t call him that,” Thomas had said. “And don’t mimic them. You know what you sound like when you mimic the way they talk?”

  Pete had shrugged and fallen into sullen silence until his older brother had said, “He’s right, Dad. You don’t want him hanging around with Anthony because he’s black, right?”

  Thomas had wrenched the van onto the shoulder of the road, sending shredded circulars and old newsprint flying across the floor. He turned to his sons, who sat together on the plywood toolbox that doubled as a passenger seat, Pete slack and scowling, Daniel fixing him with that imperious and implacably rational look he’d inherited from his mother.

  “You boys don’t know the first goddamn thing about what you’re talking about,” he said. “Here I am the only one in this town who half sticks up for black people and let me tell you it would be a lot easier if I didn’t bother. You have no idea how much it costs me, costs you, too. I was under the impression your mother and I had raised you to see the world as it is, to care more about the truth than a new jean jacket. And here you are calling me a racist.”

  “A new jean jacket,” Pete mumbled, “I didn’t say anything about a new jean jacket, I don’t see anything wrong with my old jean jacket. I like them old, see, when they’re new—”

  “Shut up, Pete,” said Daniel. “Thing is, Dad, Anthony? He’s like no worse than three-quarters of those hippie greasers Pete hangs out with. At least he can read.”

  Pete had elbowed his brother in the ribs then, and Daniel had clenched his brother’s neck in a headlock and started to strangle him until Thomas said, “Goddamn it, stop! You two stop it or neither one of you will leave this house for a month.”

  “This house?” Pete jerked his head toward the roof of the van, and his brother snickered despite himself, and they seemed once again united against their father until Pete pointed to his brother and, reigniting the tension, said, “What difference would it make to Danny Boy, he don’t ever leave the house anyway, where’s he going to go?” Neither boy could forgo the last word, though often they went weeks without speaking. Thomas had bought the Ford for the two of them to drive to school, but Pete usually caught rides with his friends or on occasion hitchhiked so that he would not have to be seen getting out of the car with his own brother. He never took the car out at night. When Thomas had quizzed Daniel about why Pete never drove, Daniel had said only, “I’d count my blessings if I were you.”

  What had bothered Thomas most about this incident was the way Daniel sided with his brother. He knew that Daniel detested Anthony McRae; he’d broken up a fight between them one Wednesday afternoon, which Daniel claimed had started when Anthony made fun of his performance on the football team, saying he was lame and “illiformed,” a term Pete later translated as “spastic.” Now Thomas had wanted to question his son’s defense of a kid whom he knew he despised, but he was fearful of what his response might be: that he hated him because he was a smart-ass, not because he was black.

  “Haven’t seen him all day,” Daniel said when Thomas opened his mouth to ask where Pete was. It didn’t surprise him that Daniel predicted his question—they often discussed Pete, his whereabouts, his escapades. Not even at school? Thomas wanted to ask, but he checked himself in front of Strickland, who had fielded enough calls about Pete from truant officers and assistant principals.

  A half hour later, Pete shuffled in. Thomas heard the inserters calling out to him, heard their trash-talking thicken and accelerate at the sight of new blood. Pete suffered their ribbing, shooting it back rapidfire, exchanging elaborate handshakes with each of the boys, wearing a goofy crooked smile that made Thomas wonder how high he was. Pete thought he had his father fooled, but Thomas had learned to read his son’s eyes—red, shifty, slitted—to tell when and how much dope he’d been smoking. Often he could smell it on him and could detect as well the odors he used as coverup—musk oil, incense, cigarettes. Thomas had tried everything to get the boy to clean up his act, but nothing had worked. Last year when Pete was expelled from school for cutting class, Thomas had enrolled him in a special school in the mountains, where Pete lasted six weeks before he and some other troubled delinquent were caught trying to break in to the school infirmary. Thomas said little these days about the boy’s habits—what was left to say? Every night he hoped his son made it home alive, and every morning that Pete slouched wild-haired from his bedroom, Thomas allowed himself to think that he’d done something right.

  “Who killed my boy Pierce?” Anthony McRae asked Pete. Pete shrugged and began to shuffle the stacks of paper together clumsily He was the worst inserter they had, although he’d been at it the longest.

  “Beat his ass silly,” one of the boys said.

  “How y’all know what they did?” said Pete. “Y’all were there?”

  “We read it in the newspaper, chump,” said Anthony. Thomas watched his son pick up the paper, leaf through it.

  “You can read it at home,” he called to his son. Exaggerated laughter from the other boys. Pete shot him a sour look. The boys talked among themselves in low whispers, and Thomas, wondering if they were talking about the murder, thought to ask Daniel about it that evening.

  But later, after they’d delivered the papers to the post office and dropped Wayman off at this house and were back home, seated with Caroline at the dinner table, neither boy seemed eager to talk about the murder when Thomas brought it up.

  “I didn’t know him that well anymore,” said Daniel.

  “You knew him better than I did,” said Pete. “Didn’t even know the dude’s name until he got himself killed.”

  Thomas found this competition for the role of who-knew-the-dead-boy-less a little strange. Usually it was the other way around when something bad happened to someone around Trent—everyone you ran into had just talked to, had lunch with, played golf with, sold a tank of gas to, the victim. People, in his experience, would go out of their way to claim a connection to a party involved in a tragedy. They enjoyed the celebrity. Especially kids, who were capable of some serious melodrama when death was concerned.

  He tried to give Caroline an are-you-hearing-what-I’m-hearing glance, but she was watching her sons. Sometimes it seemed as though he wasn’t even in the room when the four of them were together. Even when they were alone the topic of conversation centered around one or both of the boys—usually, her concern over the way the boys rarely spoke to each other, would not be seen riding in the same car together.

  Thomas these days often felt defeated, succumbed to the thinking that he’d given everything he’d had to providing for his family. He’d cross the threshhold and immediately he’s deficient—as a father, as a husband. But being a husband, these days, was solely an extension of fatherhood. It involved discussing his boys with his wife. Endlessly. No romance, no joining forces against the rest of the world, little laughter. Just counseling skills, good listening. Guilty feelings about what they—mostly he—were not doing to guide their children through adolescence.

  That he’d had no help navigating those years himself—that the very idea of anyone even paying a little attention to his teenage situation, with six siblings and no money, a national depression and the threat of war—was not an argument he could use with Caroline. He knew
better than to try. She would say what she always said: “So we’re supposed to make the same mistakes our parents did?”

  Heaven knows what would have happened if he’d claimed to have turned out all right himself without coddling and round-the-clock counseling.

  His boys were talking to each other, an event worth paying attention to.

  “Why are you bragging about not knowing the guy?” said Daniel. “You sound like he’s not anyone you’d care to know, dead or alive.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Pete. “You heard me say that?”

  “I heard it in your tone. What’s wrong with him, Pete? Huh?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s dead, I don’t know. All I’m saying, I didn’t know him as well as you did.”

  “You’re bragging about not knowing him.”

  “I’m not bragging, I’m just stating a fact,” said Pete. His eyes narrowed and his mouth was tight, and Thomas knew from these familiar signs that he was just about to blow.

  Daniel opened his mouth to say something, and Thomas said his older son’s name, once, firmly, but Daniel ignored him and said, “What would you know about a fact,” and then Pete was shouting, and Thomas was looking at Caroline, who finally looked over at him as if this whole thing was his fault, since she had done nothing but observe.

  The boys traded insults for another minute before Thomas finally told them to shut the hell up, it had been a long day and he didn’t want to hear it. The murder seemed nothing more and nothing less than another source of tension between his sons, which rendered it, to Thomas, just like everything else in the world, good or bad, true or false, right or wrong.