Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  “I’ll be back,” Daniel said, and he lingered in the bathroom as long as he could stand.

  Back at the bar, Daniel felt uncomfortable, but at least he was dressed casually. Instead of his typical uniform of Lacoste or button-down Oxford shirt and khakis, he wore jeans and a VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS T-shirt he’d bought at the Methodist Women’s Thrift Shop down on Sycamore Street. Pete and his friends scoured the musty aisles of the thrift shop weekly—Pete’s entire wardrobe, their father once joked, was likely valued at seventeen dollars and some change—but Daniel had set foot in the shop only once, and only this T-shirt, black and a little too big for him, misshapen by someone’s wide shoulders and a larger gut, paint-stained and a little frayed at the collar, appealed to him. He liked the red lettering, the large red heart beneath the word Lovers. He liked the absurdity of the slogan; he liked to wear the shirt ironically, as opposed to others he spotted wearing them (for these shirts were popular a year or so earlier among teenagers, quickly replaced by BERT’S SURF SHOP or the official tour Tee of some flavor-of-the-month band) whom, he liked to believe, took literally the notion that there existed a place—a commonwealth!—wherein people might locate that most elusive of emotions. That the shirt could be mistaken for earnestness, for gullibility, made the joke all the more delicious.

  Pete had ordered beers with no trouble from the bartender. Daniel thought of remarking on this phenomenon but that might imply that he was interested in his surroundings.

  “So what do you think of her?” Pete said when he sat.

  “What are we doing here, Pete?”

  Pete shrugged. “Mind if I watch?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think she’s pathetic.”

  She was pathetic. She was so high on something her eyes were just liquid slants, and her movements were so fluid it was doubtful she was even boned. She had the skin of a forty-year-old; her breasts, once she exposed them, were sadly deflated. She kept her G-string on, so technically she was not naked, but aside from magazines passed among the Raleigh Road boys back when he used to hang around the black pipe, she was as nude a woman as Daniel had ever seen. He could not help but look, even if he was unaroused by what he saw.

  “Pathetic how?”

  “Actually, we’re the pathetic ones for watching her.” Daniel swung around to face his brother. “Whatever it is you brought me here to say you better say it now, or I’m leaving.”

  “Long walk,” Pete said, patting the keys in his jeans.

  “I’ll call Mom to come pick me up.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “I would. I will.”

  “Hell you will. Because if you do I’ll tell her what I know about you and Brandon Pierce.”

  Pete’s face flushed then, and he turned away and pretended to check out the dancer, but Daniel could tell he was upset, that he’d been saving this and had spilled it too early and in a way he had not planned on. Still it hung there, his threat, and though Daniel was shocked that Pete would stoop to this, a part of him was glad to finally have it out.

  “And what would you tell her?”

  “You tell me, Dan. I’d hate to get the facts wrong.”

  “Well, you’ve always been one to take extra care with the facts. What is it about me and Brandon Pierce you want to know, Pete?”

  “Come on, man. Don’t make this harder.”

  “You think I had something to do with Brandon’s death? Is that it? You think I’m a murderer now?”

  Pete fished a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it with a shaky hand. He looked exhausted suddenly, as if he wished he’d never brought any of this up.

  “No, I don’t think you’re a murderer.”

  “Then what?”

  “Here’s what: I know you can’t stand me. I know I embarrass the hell out of you. But still, man… I just wish you had the guts to tell me yourself. You ever stop to think how it felt to hear it from somebody else?”

  “Hear what, Pete. Tell you what?”

  “Jesus Christ. That you liked guys.”

  The dancer had worked her way over to them again and was performing her lackluster gyrations not three feet away. Dan was worried that she’d heard Pete, but the music was too loud.

  “Who told you that?”

  “What does it matter who? It wasn’t you.”

  “But whoever it was, you believed it?”

  “I’m not supposed to?”

  “You’re asking me what you’re supposed to believe?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “I don’t know why you’re asking me. Obviously you already found someone you trust.”

  “You haven’t denied it,” said Pete. He sounded almost shocked by this, as if he’d just realized it.

  “I have better things to do with my time than deny or confirm gossip.”

  “You mean you’d let people believe you were gay if you weren’t?”

  “You think denying it would make them stop saying it?”

  “I don’t give a damn about them.” Pete looked anxious then, as if the conversation had gotten away from him, which is exactly what Daniel wanted: to circle him with sentences until he surrendered.

  But he wasn’t ready to give up yet. “I’m the one asking. And I’m your brother.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” said Daniel. “Sometimes I forget.”

  “Yeah? Well, I never forget.”

  “I’d like to believe that, Pete. But it’s kind of hard for me to, see, because this is the first time in a year or two, maybe longer, that we’ve had a conversation longer than two or three minutes, and it’s all because you heard something about me that might do some damage to your reputation as Mr. Super Cool.”

  “I don’t give a damn about my reputation. We’re not talking about my reputation.”

  “No, we’re talking about how you all of a sudden feel brotherly toward me, isn’t that right? After you hear something that makes you ashamed to be seen with me, you feel real close. Skip school, spend some quality time with your brother, right? In this place?”

  Daniel nodded down the bar at the sad dancer, who had revealed all she was legally allowed to and was playing to a room obviously tired of her. Men talked, laughed, drank, but no one paid her any attention, and yet she danced as if she could care less. Daniel had to admire her imperviousness.

  “What’s wrong with this place? You don’t like it here?”

  “Let’s say I don’t. Does that mean what you heard about me is true?”

  Daniel watched the dancer. Her imperviousness, on the other hand, imprisoned her here, as if she was a little less detached she might care a little more about herself. The one hand, the other hand. He realized how tired he was of both hands, how he wished things were simpler, not so double-sided always.

  The music stopped and the nurse gathered her clothes from the dance floor and scowled at them before she disappeared behind a curtain.

  After a few seconds of intolerably loud silence, Pete said, “You ever think how it might feel, me finding this out from some asshole at school, when I grew up sharing a bunk bed with you? You ought to have told me.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re all upset about this because you used to share a bunk bed with me. It’s not like I was lusting after you. You’re not really my type.”

  “Man, shut the hell up, will you? Don’t ever say stuff like that to me. I’m your brother.”

  Daniel started to apologize—he saw how uncomfortable he’d made Pete—but he stopped when he remembered he was pretty uncomfortable sitting in this strip joint.

  “So Brandon Pierce, what, was he your type?”

  “Whatever you heard about us is wrong.”

  “You mean you never …”

  “I did, once, a long time ago. But not in a long time.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “And who’d you hear this from? Who is this reliable source of yours?”

  Pete slugged his beer, wiped the foam from his lip, slouched t
here looking mock-pensive.

  “Lee Tysinger,” Pete said.

  “He ought to know.”

  “Ought to know what?”

  “You wouldn’t think Brandon was Lee Tysinger’s type either, but it just goes to show, little brother, how you can’t just tell by looking at a guy what it is he really likes.”

  “Brandon told you that?”

  “Yeah, he did. I knew about the two of them long before I saw them together.”

  “You saw them? When?”

  “Surprised?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “You think guys like him act so tough because they are that tough? They’re trying to hide who they really are, that’s all.”

  “Oh, okay. Right, I got you. Just because you turn out to be gay, all of a sudden everybody’s gay.”

  “Nope. I didn’t say that. I only know about Tysinger. Brandon claimed there were others—he liked football players, and claimed they liked him back—but I don’t know about anyone else. Just Tysinger. At first Tysinger made a big deal out of saying that he could just close his eyes and pretend Brandon was a girl. A blow job’s a blow job, he said. That’s how it starts with all of them. But then, after they’d been together a few times, Tysinger decided it was time to give and receive.”

  “I’m not believing this.”

  “Fine. Don’t believe it. I’m just a fag, right? Why should you trust me?”

  “Don’t call yourself that.”

  “Why not, Pete? That’s what your friends call me, right?”

  “Some of them,” he said. He slugged his beer hard and said, “Some of them do.”

  “And do you bother to correct them?”

  “Depends on whether or not you and I are getting along.”

  “I guess that means you don’t bother to correct them.”

  “Maybe we’ll get along better now, since you’re finally being honest with me.”

  What control Daniel had gained slipped away then as he hid his face, hot-flushed with shame, behind his beer mug. Pete appeared hurt; Daniel could have predicted anger or even embarrassment, but never resentment. Pete acted as if he’d been betrayed, as if they really were the kind of brothers who confided in each other.

  “You said you saw Tysinger with Brandon. When?”

  Daniel hesitated, so unnerved that he paid attention to the new dancer, an energetic Asian woman clad in red leather hot pants and a rawhide halter. Daniel saw how this woman would appear sexy to the men in the room. She was lithe and curvy, her breasts full, her legs long and muscular. He willed himself to feel sorry for her, to feel superior.

  “The night Brandon died,” Daniel said.

  “You were there?”

  “I didn’t want to be. I went over there with Caroline and Marsha, who were good friends with Brandon still. As soon as I saw what was going on, I wanted to leave, but I stayed because I felt sorry for him, I guess. All those people over there drinking his booze and trashing his house and making fun of him behind his back. It made me mad, though I could see why they were treating him like that. I mean, he kind of asked for it, throwing that party, as if that was suddenly going to make him popular.”

  “What did you see?”

  Daniel hadn’t told anyone what he’d seen that night because he’d seen too much. But he’d already gotten over the hardest part, which seemed huge compared to what he was doing in Brandon’s parents’ bedroom with Brandon, who was drunk-sick, sprawled across his parents’ king-size bed in only his underwear. He’d thrown up all over his pants, and because no one else would, Daniel had helped him out of his clothes and thrown them in the washer and cleaned him up and was sitting there listening to him whine about how unhappy he was. Brandon was the kind of maudlin drunk that made Daniel hate drinking. He was going on and on about how unfair it was to have been born in a place where no one understood him, how much he’d suffered at the hands of those assholes out there who were drinking his booze and wouldn’t even say hi to him, how some of them even came to him for sex and the moment it was over went back to treating him like the town freak. He was in as bitter a mood as Daniel had ever seen anyone, and Daniel hated him then, for it seemed to him that Brandon had allowed himself to be used by the people gathered in his parents’ living room, that even anyone of the group of girls he called his best friends would desert him in a minute if one of those boys out there who took such delight in calling him names was to pay attention to her. Brandon was weak, and just because he and Daniel shared this secret did not mean that Daniel had to like him, or try to save him. Daniel did what he could for him that night for all the wrong reasons. He helped him out of his nasty clothes and listened to him whine because it made Daniel feel better than him, stronger, better able to keep his own secret.

  Daniel ordered another beer.

  “Me too,” Pete told the bartender, and Daniel said, “Who’s going to drive?” and Pete said, “We’ll walk around some, sober up, no problem.” Daniel didn’t believe him, but he wasn’t about to start acting like an older brother at that point. Instead, he told Pete what happened that night.

  “Brandon got really, really, drunk, really, really fast. He was drinking screwdrivers and chasing them with beer from the keg, and he was dancing in the kitchen, making a fool of himself. I guess he thought throwing this party when his parents were out of town would make him popular with all the kids who’d given him such grief since he was in the third grade. Of course they ignored him, made fun of his dancing, complained about the music. They trashed his house. The meaner they were to him, the more he drank. He started shooting his mouth off to everyone, and if he hadn’t have gotten sick, he would have gotten his ass kicked eventually.

  “After he got sick, I took him back in his parents’ bedroom and cleaned him up and sat there with him while he whined about his life. I stayed with him for way too long. It was making me sick listening to him bitch about how much he hated his life, and I would have gotten out of there had I not gone to the bathroom to get him a wet washcloth and heard someone come in the room.”

  “Tysinger?” said Pete.

  “Your buddy. I heard them talking, and for some reason, which I will regret as long as I live, I decided to hang out in the bathroom and spy. Brandon had bragged before about what he called his ‘affair’ with Tysinger. I didn’t believe him. It seemed sad to me, him choosing the most unlikely guy in school to claim to be sleeping with. So I guess I stayed to see if it was true.”

  “And was it?”

  “Yeah. I mean, something was going on between them, I don’t know and won’t ever know if all of what Brandon told me was true, but when I looked through the bathroom door, which was cracked enough so that I could get a view of the bed, Tysinger was sitting on the bed talking to Brandon, and Brandon was rubbing Tysinger’s crotch. If Tysinger was offended, he didn’t show it. After a while he started running his fingers through Brandon’s hair and Brandon unzipped Tysinger’s pants and I guess even a healthy heterosexual like yourself, patron of fine establishments like this one, can figure out the rest of it.”

  What Daniel did not describe to his brother was the way Tysinger spoke to Brandon—with an ease and familiarity that suggested he needed something only Brandon could give him. Nor did he tell Pete about the conversation he overheard. “Anyone see you come in?” Brandon asked Tysinger and Tysinger, framed by the sliver of cracked bathroom door, appeared for a second unconcerned with what the rest of the world thought. “Fuck ’em,” he told Brandon, shrugging. “Came in here to go through your parents’ medicine cabinet if anybody asks.” Brandon laughed—a high drunken giggle—and Tysinger said, again, “Fuck ’em,” and for a second Daniel felt close to Tysinger, the very asshole who had humiliated him on the football field.

  “Jesus,” said Pete finally. He would not look at Daniel and seemed to be having a hard time with this information.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Pete still would not look at him. The Vietnamese woman had stripped to her G-st
ring and was lap-dancing for a group of men dressed identically in the blue work clothes of a maintenance crew. Pete seemed entranced by her. Daniel could not tell if he was entranced or just too freaked out by what he’d heard to look his brother in the eye.

  “I believe you,” he said. “It’s just … I mean, weren’t you scared you’d get caught?”

  “Why should I have been scared? What was Tysinger going to do to me? I had the power, I mean, I still do in a way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Pete lit another cigarette and gave Daniel a look over the blown-out match that suggested he thought otherwise.

  “What happened next?”

  “After it was over, you mean? Brandon asked Tysinger to come back later on and stay the night with him. He said they’d have their own private party when everyone else was gone. He was drunk enough still to get all sappy about it, talking about how romantic it would be for them to wake up in each other’s arms and take a shower together and have breakfast in bed and on and on.”

  “What’d Lee say to that?”

  “He said, ‘You think I’m going to play fucking house with you? I wouldn’t spend the night in this bed with you even if I were gay.’ Then Brandon got all uppity and said things he shouldn’t have.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stuff about how Tysinger thought he was too good for him when all he was was white trash.”

  “Did he say anything about Tysinger’s mom?”

  “Yes. He called her sorry.”

  “So Tysinger was telling the truth,” said Pete.

  “His version of it. With significant information omitted, for obvious reasons.”

  “No one would have believed Brandon if he’d told them what really happened.”

  “No, you’re right. But that didn’t stop Brandon from threatening to tell, and he threatened this after Tysinger had already backhanded him for calling his mother sorry.”

  “You saw Tysinger hit him?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I do anything to stop it? Because I didn’t think it was going to go as far as it did, obviously, and because I thought Brandon deserved at least some of what he got. I mean, it wasn’t like Tysinger was going to say, ‘Oh, no thanks, I really can’t spend the night, I’ve got to get home, got to get up early for church tomorrow.’ Brandon knew what Tysinger was doing and he knew exactly what the limits were and I don’t care how drunk he was, he shouldn’t have said those things.”