Pete would not look up at him, which Daniel interpreted as a bad sign.
“Yeah, but I don’t know …,” Pete said in that hesitant lazy way he had of speaking when he was high. “When I first heard about it I thought … well, I kind of admired Brandon for it. I mean, it’s crazy, it’s suicidal, saying something like that to a guy like Tysinger, but, now, it seemed like Brandon was really saying, ‘Hey I’m sick of hiding who I am, I’m going to say the worst thing I can think of because for all these years I’ve put up with all kinds of shit from these people and I’m by God sick of it and if it kills me, well hell, at least I’ll go out having said something to get back at them.’”
“You think that’s admirable?” Daniel peered steadily into his blue bloodshot eyes.
“I mean … well, yeah. In a way. He was being honest. Tysinger is … I mean the guy’s a friend of mine …well, not really a friend, I mean I don’t really …I can’t stand him if you want to know the truth—guy scares me a little too—but I’ve been to his house and …”
“And he is white trash?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you think it.”
“Why are you accusing me all of a sudden?”
Pete’s defensiveness suggested he might be hiding something himself.
“I’m not accusing you of anything. You smoke too much dope. It’s making you paranoid.”
“So how’d you ever get out of the bathroom?” Pete seemed eager to shift the focus back to Daniel.
“I waited until Tysinger left. Brandon was pretty beat up, but nothing was broken. I helped him into the bathroom and he threw up again and I got him into the shower and got him cleaned up and then I helped him back to bed and he passed out. And I left.”
“You didn’t say anything to him about what you’d seen?”
“He wasn’t really in the mood to discuss it. Besides, what was there to say about it? I think he came on to Tysinger because he knew I was watching. I can’t know this for sure, but I imagine if I hadn’t been watching, he might not have said anything about the guy’s mother. I hate to think he said that stuff just for my benefit, because unlike you I don’t see anything admirable about it. You seem to respect him for finally being honest, getting back at these people who’d abused him all his life. There are other ways to be honest than say something mean about someone’s mother. Especially if you know what will happen when you do. I’m not going to let these people get to me. If I have to hide who I am, what I am, fine. I’m not going to let them kill me. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.”
“Nobody wants to kill you,” he said.
Daniel shook his head. “You think you’re so streetwise, sitting here watching that skanky girl take her clothes off, but you don’t know anything. See those jarheads over there?”
Daniel nodded at the table of grunts in the corner.
“Think if I followed one of them into the bathroom and gave him the slightest hint that I was interested in him he wouldn’t go find his buddies and put me in the hospital?”
“First of all, you’re not the type of guy who’s going to go approaching guys in bathrooms.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. We might not have gotten along too well in the past couple years, but you’re still my brother, and I know who you are.”
“I guess now you do,” Daniel said.
There was a long silence during which they both pretended to focus their attention anywhere but on each other: the rows of bottles behind the bar, the Steely Dan song blasting from the tinny sound system, the older redhead with stretch marks and huge breasts whose lethargic dance moves made her seem like she was performing calisthenics underwater.
“Look,” Pete said finally, “I don’t care who you screw.”
“That’s good,” Daniel said, “because so far I haven’t screwed anyone.”
“I thought … what about Brandon?”
“I lied. I wanted you to think I’d at least been to bed with a man if I was going to go to the trouble of declaring myself gay. But I never slept with Brandon. I guess you think because he was the only other gay guy I knew around here, we’d wind up in bed. But we never really talked much about it, the fact that we liked guys, though it was kind of understood. And as soon as I figured out that it wasn’t going to go away, the way I felt, that it wasn’t some kind of phase, which of course is what you tell yourself for as long as you can get away with it, I didn’t want to have anything to do with Brandon. I was scared enough that someone would figure out I was queer. I wasn’t going to flaunt it by hanging around with a guy who couldn’t hide it if he tried.”
Pete looked bewildered.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing. I mean, it’s kind of sad to me, I mean, I feel sorry for the guy and …”
“And you think I ought to feel sorry for him too, since we’ve got the same disease?”
“I wish you’d quit being so defensive. I never said it was a disease.”
“Yeah, but you’re thinking it. And even if you aren’t, everybody else is.”
“I wish you’d fucking listen to me, man. I don’t care if you sleep with parking meters. You’re still my brother. I accept you for who you are, which is more than I can say for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Pete studied his drink, as if trying to decide whether to say what he was thinking.
“All those times I came home all fucked up and in trouble and you looked at me all disgusted, like I was no kin to you.”
Daniel should not have smiled, but he could not help myself. “How was I supposed to look at you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe with some compassion?”
Daniel should not have laughed, either. “You’re kidding. You come home wrecked out of your mind and you want compassion?”
“Man, I got a problem with this stuff,” he said, nodding at his beer. “I start, I can’t stop. It’s not fun anymore. Starts out fine, but I can’t stop myself from taking it way too far.”
“Oh, bullshit. Spare me, right? You don’t want to stop. You and your buddies, all trying to see who can get the most wasted so you can brag about it the next day at the Glam-O-Rama.”
But as he spoke, Daniel suspected Pete really was serious and that he really did have a problem. It made sense, but how to help him? Drinking with him was probably not helpful, but there was the other hand: he’d not felt so close to him in years, and if all of a sudden he cut him off and wrestled the keys away, they’d be back to their usual sniping. He picked up his beer and drank deeply, shamefully.
Pete returned to his beer, too. He seemed to be figuring out how to say whatever he had to say next. It took a while.
“I have a message to give to you from Tysinger.”
“You do, huh? And you’re just now telling me this?”
“I wanted to hear your side of it first.”
“So you could decide whose side to take?”
“Yeah, right. I’m on Tysinger’s side until you prove yourself worthy in my eyes. He fucking killed that kid. You think I’d side with him under any circumstances?”
“How did you know he killed him? I didn’t say he killed him.”
Back to his beer. At the rate Pete was drinking, he wouldn’t be able to drive until the weekend. This was more beer than Daniel had had in one sitting in months, but oddly enough he did not feel drunk at all. Pete, however, looked wasted, but when did he not?
“I was with Tysinger that night.” His words were mumbled, slurry. Daniel deciphered them seconds later, as if Pete was speaking to him long distance.
“What do you mean, with him?”
“I rode over to Brandon’s with him. Not the first time, when you saw him. The second time, when he went back to finish what he started.”
Daniel didn’t think he could feel any worse about things until that moment. If Pete was involved, surely Daniel would get caught. Pete always got caught, and though Daniel didn�
�t think Pete would drag him down with him, he knew that if it came down to it, he’d do anything to protect his little brother.
“You idiot.”
“Me?” Pete said. “I’m the idiot? All I did was ride over there with him, Dan. I stayed out in the garage and got wasted. I didn’t see anything. Why do I get to be the idiot and you, who witnessed the whole thing, get to keep right on being Mr. Honor Student?”
Of course, Daniel didn’t get to be Mr. Honor Student. His GPA was suffering as he sat in that bar, not to mention his chance at the Carmichael. He saw no way out of this now.
“What’s this message from your buddy?”
“Tysinger thinks you’ll talk. He figured out you know something. I don’t know, maybe Brandon told him you were watching from the bathroom when he went back over there.”
“He told you that?”
“No. He would have to admit that he was doing something with Brandon if he told me that. All he said was that he didn’t trust you and for me to tell you that he wouldn’t hesitate to spread the word about you and Brandon if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”
“He doesn’t know a damn thing then, does he?”
Everything seemed out of reach to Daniel then. He felt trapped in a hopeless static. Suddenly he wanted to dig deeper into his hatred, to do something terrible. He wanted to be heard, noticed—not for making good grades or performing well in a school play, but for something else he could not name. He understood things he’d never been able to fathom: why his brother attacked rural mailboxes with M-80s and baseball bats. Why someone broke into the high school and opened the door to the freezer in the cafeteria, ruining hundreds of dollars of frozen hamburger, closing the entire wing down until the odor of spoiled meat drifted away.
There was no way to fix things now. Daniel saw that it was bigger than he had ever imagined, so big it had consumed his whole family, for his father was the one who had to report this to the community, and when it got out that his sons were involved—and surely it would—his parents, too, would be brought down.
He knew he could not outrun it, but he also knew that he could not sit around and wait for it to catch them. Daniel stood up and pushed away his beer.
“I’ve seen enough of human nature. I know why you brought me here, and if you thought I was going to all of a sudden declare myself a healthy hetero after seeing these drugged-out women stumble around the stage, you’re dumber than I thought.”
“I don’t guess I’m ready to go yet. You forget I’ve got the keys.”
Daniel knew one way to get his brother to leave. “You got any more stuff to smoke?”
Pete gave Daniel one of his lopsided stoner grins. “Stuff? You want to smoke more stuff?”
Daniel left him there to pay. As soon as he hit the sunlight he felt the beers. What they did to him was not weaken his knees or make him dizzy, but water down his dignity, his strength: they made him not give a damn. Out on Hay Street it was midmorning, the street was thick with infantrymen in their street clothes, tight jeans and muscle shirts, and Daniel was drunk enough to leer. He wondered, as he often did, how many of them had been with a man, how many of them were just pretending to like women. Ever since that night at Brandon’s, Daniel had hated who he was. He had spent the week wishing to hell he’d been born straight, like his brother, for it seemed he would never be mixed up in something so terrible if he wasn’t queer. But out on the street, checking out the buzzcut GIs, Daniel decided he would never again succumb to that kind of logic, for it wasn’t his queerness that had gotten him in to this.
“What the fuck you looking at?” said a recruit wearing Levi’s and an Adidas shirt. Daniel was about to tell him the truth when Pete yanked him by the arm and towed him down the sidewalk.
“He’s blind without his glasses,” he called out over his shoulder, as if that was going to placate the offended party, and Daniel laughed drunkenly and loudly at his little brother’s excuse for his behavior.
“You lost your mind?” said Pete.
“See any reason to keep yours? We’re screwed,” Daniel said. “I witnessed the first beating and you were around for the second. We’re going to be sharing a bunkbed like the old days, but in jail this time.”
“I told you, I didn’t see anything.”
“You think that’s going to get you off? You were with him, weren’t you? You knew damn well what he was up to when he went back over there.”
“All I knew is what he told me and Cozart. That Brandon said his mother was sorry, and he’d kicked his ass and asked him to apologize, but he wouldn’t say he was sorry for what he said. So Tysinger was going over there to make him say he was sorry.”
“I guess he wasn’t sorry,” Daniel said.
“Are you?”
“Sorry for what?”
“For not stopping him?”
They were strolling down Hay Street, though they’d left the car in front of Rick’s. Daniel realized that he was starving, and he spotted a diner in the next block and suggested lunch.
“How can you think about food?”
“Same way you can think about dope, I guess.”
“Good point. Let’s get high, we’ll get some lunch afterward. It’ll taste better.”
They ducked down an alley and staked out a place behind a Dumpster. Daniel pondered how foreign this day felt, how he would never be caught dead doing something like this normally He wondered if his life would be like this from then on, getting high in alleyways, ogling men on sidewalks, drinking beer for breakfast. He looked at Pete rolling his joint and felt sick when he understood he was as close to him at that moment as he had been in years.
“What are we going to do?” Pete asked when the joint was almost gone.
“Get lunch?”
Pete laughed, a high stoner’s giggle that sounded against his will.
“Okay, eat lunch. I’m talking about after that. Tonight. Tomorrow. What are we going to do?”
Daniel was too high to be planning the future and said so. It didn’t seem to faze Pete, pot on top of all the beer they’d had, but Daniel was well on his way to wasted, and when they walked out of the alley, he bumped up against the Dumpster and nearly ate pavement. His little brother had to help him back to the car.
“I’m starving,” Daniel said.
“We’ll get something to eat,” Pete said as he snapped the seat belt across his brother’s waist.
The cars were swerving toward them and the storefronts were swelling as they passed. A lone hooker stood on the corner down by the bus station where Daniel had heard men looking for sex gathered after dark. One night he had driven over there and circled the block for an hour trying to work up enough nerve to park in the bus station lot and wait for someone to tap on the glass. He thought of that night, of how desperately he wanted to be with a man and of how his whole body burned with nerves and shame, and he tried to roll down the window but he was too late. He vomited all over the floorboard, and Pete pulled over to the curb and leaned over Daniel and cracked open the door and pushed his head out above the pavement, where he emptied his stomach and heaved dryly for a good five minutes in front of a First Presbyterian Church.
Hours later Daniel came to in the backseat. For a long time he lay there staring at the clouds through the back windshield, marveling at the way they were not moving at all, though he could tell from the sound of the Galaxy that they were driving as fast as the old crate would go. The car reeked of cigarette smoke. Daniel was as parched as he’d ever been in his life. It took him ten minutes to work up enough saliva to speak, which he did while lying down still, too queasy to push up from the seat.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“An hour south of Richmond,” said Pete. Daniel started to ask him where the hell they were going, but he knew it didn’t matter. He knew there was nowhere they could go to escape this, and though that thought should have stopped him, it was guilt—over his little brother taking charge, taking care of him—that made him close his eyes
and trust they were headed in the right direction.
4
WHAT A STRANGE THING for Thomas to come home to: an empty house. Caroline worked late on Thursdays—Indigent Clinic night at the Social Services Department, where she was director of Child Services—but they usually saw each other in passing. Tonight the only sign of her was a note: “Ate and ran. Boys not home yet. Take them out for pizza?”
He mixed a drink, carried it out on the patio, leafed through a Newsweek but found he had no interest in news of any kind. The peacefulness of an empty house was news to him. Though it was a weeknight and the boys were due home soon, he mixed another gin and tonic. He loosened his tie, propped his feet up on the chaise lounge, closed his eyes. Last of the sun in quivering shadows struck his cheek and down the street a lawnmower hummed. The night was pleasant, gin-charmed and luxurious; he allowed alcohol to isolate him in this hour that seemed as generous and satisfying a gift as he could have asked for.
Which led Thomas to wonder: Was it wrong of him to covet something so selfish? He chose to marry and have children; he chose a profession where the hours were long and the pay was disproportionately short. He knew what he was getting into, and yet this time alone was so fulfilling that it made him curious about what it might be like to come home to such limitless space each night of his life. Would he be a different person? Would he not have a sharper and more vibrant inner life, a clarity about himself and his place in the world? True, the boys would leave home for good in what seemed like mere minutes—Danny off to college at the end of the school year, Pete at least out of the house a year later if no college would accept him, which looked more and more like the case. But there was Caroline, whom he counted upon in ways that made her resemble, he realized, a domestic version of Strickland. Just as he and Strickland ran the paper, splitting duties and weathering crises, he and Caroline shouldered the business of domesticity. That it had become a business, leached of mystery and much pleasure, he had not quite realized until now.
Virginia Lovers Page 8
