Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  6

  DANIEL WOKE EARLY, past nine, to the maid knocking at the door and then opening it when he did not respond. At the sight of him, she mumbled Spanish and backed out of the room. Daniel pulled a pillow over his head and said to his little brother, who at that moment, second period on a Friday morning, was missing his stoner Spanish class, “Translate, amigo, no comprende.” When Pete did not answer Daniel heaved a pillow at the bed.

  Daniel drifted into thin sleep. Minutes later, when he discovered the bed was empty, he suspected Pete went out for breakfast or cigarettes. He’d been so nice to Daniel the night before, so supportive in his tentative way. Maybe he wanted to let his big brother sleep later.

  An hour later, when Pete had not returned, Daniel began to worry. He thought Pete got scared and rose early when Daniel was still asleep and, rather than wake him, sneaked out. He decided Pete left without saying good-bye because he did not want to be talked out of leaving, and because he knew Daniel was not about to go back now that he had blown his chance at the Carmichael.

  For surely everyone knew. Especially the committee of straight lawyers in their three-piece suits who looked at him funny, even before he slept with a boy.

  When the knock came again Daniel was sure it was the maid. He did not have time to get dressed before she swung open the door and the two detectives thanked her in Spanish, pushed into the room. Daniel snatched at the bedspread, stood draped stupidly in flowered polyester.

  “What we got here?” said one of the detectives.

  Goddamn Pete, Daniel thought, he turned me in. For it was immediately obvious that these sideburned, slick-suited men were policemen. Was Pete trying to save Daniel from himself? My job to take care of him, Daniel reminded himself, searching the corridor for the maid who had left without making eye contact. The surly detectives sized him up in his floral bedspread.

  “What the fuck we got here?” One of them pulled the room key from his pocket, flashed it like a badge. “You know who belongs to this?”

  “My brother,” Daniel said.

  “Your brother, huh?”

  “My brother. Pete Edgecombe. Where is he? What did he do?”

  Daniel felt foolish for believing Pete had gone home. He must have broken into something. A drugstore again? Or had he tried to score more pot and gotten busted?

  The detectives exchanged detective glances.

  “Let’s see some identification,” one of the detectives said. Daniel shuffled over to the desk where his pants lay tossed across the back of a chair. The bedspread minced his steps. He handed over his driver’s license. This time the detective glances were even more stereotypically unreadable.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just get dressed now. You have to come with us.”

  “Am I coming back here?” he asked. He wanted badly to act as if he did not care what had happened to his little brother, wanted to affect a weariness with the whole situation.

  “Get what you can now. If you leave anything, don’t worry we’ll send someone back over here for it.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel said, grateful for the detective’s gentler tone. They left him alone while he struggled into the only clothes he had. As if he had anything to leave in the room. There was the thrift shop suit coat, the fedora; he thought of grabbing them but was embarrassed now to be carrying such clothes. He couldn’t remember what possessed him to buy them. He couldn’t really remember what had possessed him since he’d skipped school.

  The detectives were waiting in the hallway. One said to Daniel, his tone kindly, solicitous, “You got everything, son?” Despite his kindness Daniel wanted to say, I am not your son, but didn’t for he might as well have been the detective’s son. Surely the man who had raised him to tell the truth would not from that point on want to claim Daniel as his own.

  In the car ride to the station the detectives talked to themselves of unrelated matters, some guy they worked with, a putz named Rodriquez. Daniel grew more worried the longer they kept quiet, and finally it dawned on him the reason behind the sudden softening. Something must have happened. Something bad.

  “I need to know what’s going on now,” he said.

  “Very soon,” said the driver.

  Daniel settled back into the seat, letting the noises of the noontime city wash over the silence until they arrived at the station.

  “Your little brother is dead,” they told Daniel when he was seated in some overly lit room. “Stabbed to death in an alley behind a bar called La Cage Aux Folles.”

  He thought they were lying. That they had Pete in another room and were saying such a thing to coerce Daniel to confess to his part in Brandon’s murder. Pete had been busted and he told them everything and now they were trying to trick Daniel. He almost smiled. But then he remembered the name of the place Pete followed him into the afternoon before. He saw his little brother waiting there for him, stoned and shuffling to some imagined guitar riff, huddled in the doorway, naively smiling at passersby in the predawn streets.

  One of the detectives said, “We need to ask you some questions, okay?”

  So long as only facts are required, thought Daniel. No more than yes or no.

  He nodded at the wall behind them.

  “Was your brother a homosexual?”

  “No sir,” he said. It was the sir that made him feel pitiful, errant, truant. It made him cry.

  “I need to call my parents,” Daniel said when he could stop crying enough to speak.

  “Before you do, son, we need you to come with us, identify the body.”

  Daniel did not listen to the detectives talk on the ride to the morgue. They were mostly quiet, talking softly now and again about things they needed to do to finish up their shift. Paperwork, phone calls. Two cars floated through the cab-thick streets: in one Daniel was being delivered to jail for his part in a boy’s brutal beating and in another he was on his way to identify his brother’s body.

  They only showed his head, his eyes blue-blackened, a thick cut on his cheekbone.

  “Lee Tysinger,” Daniel rasped when he saw his brother’s face.

  The detective said, “I thought his name was Pete.”

  “Lee Tysinger,” Daniel said, louder this time.

  “You know who did this?” said the detective.

  “Lee Tysinger.” He turned to go. The detectives shrugged and followed a few respectful feet behind. On the car ride to the station he told everything, beginning with the keg party Daniel could not believe he went to and then the morning (three days ago? … three years, it seemed) when Pete wanted to drive. He tried to explain things: the Carmichael, even his father’s fanatical pursuit of the truth.

  “But why did you run, Daniel?”

  As if it was not obvious. How much more obvious could he make it? To him it seemed clear, and surely Pete understood. But no one else would. No one else would see his lapse of reason as he did: proof, first of all, that he had abundant reason to let lapse, and not so secondly, reaction to his father’s unyielding faith in his older son’s ability to reason.

  Back at the station, the voices of the detectives came to him like a bleating alarm in the midst of a bottomless sleep.

  “I ran because I was scared.”

  And because he knew he would not get the Carmichael and because he guessed he wanted to leave that badly, wanted so desperately away from Trent and his few friends and even his family.

  “But your little brother, he—”

  “Wanted to leave that bad too, only see, things we were running away from had nothing to do with home.”

  We carried those things with us he wanted to say, but those detectives were after the kind of facts his father printed in the paper and called the truth. What Daniel wanted to tell them about the reasons why he ran were not factual though they were truthful, yes. Honest to so help me God nothing but.

  Daniel’s parents called from the Raleigh-Durham airport, let the detectives know they would arrive by late afternoon. He had never known
them to fly. He sat in the lobby of the station. A sweet precinct secretary checked on him from time to time. Above her desk a window streaked with city grime looked hopelessly out onto a pigeon-infested alleyway. Chipped brick and steel bars. But in one corner, high and so slender Daniel had to crane his head to see, floated pure sky. Blue and sparkling occasionally with the cursive trails of jets.

  He watched the sky for his parents. Sat straight up in his chair as if waiting to be interviewed by the Carmichael committee, while around him all day long cops brought in criminals, some handcuffed, some crazy, agitated, spitting Fuck you motherfuckers around the office. Daniel sat up straight because he was not one of them, not guilty. “You okay, honey?” the sweet secretary said. “You want a sandwich or something? I can run down to the deli get you something.” Daniel smiled and watched the sky for the glint of silver. “No thanks,” he told her, “I’m good.” It was doubtful that he would ever crave food again. I’m not that good.

  His mother was first into the small office where the secretary had moved him, he supposed so he would not have to witness the spitting criminals. Daniel saw her through the skinny pane of glass, crosshatched with wire; for a second she stood outside in the hallway nodding, listening to the detective, and Daniel wondered if maybe she was alone, if his father had stayed behind to get the paper out, if even this would not prevent him from his daily advance of the truth. He sat straight, not looking at her until she pulled him up and to her, hot tears on his shoulder, heaving sobs for which he was ridiculously grateful.

  “Where’s Dad?” he said when they had both recovered enough to speak again. Hoarse, wet-eyed.

  “Where’s my dad?”

  Paying the taxi driver? Talking to the detective? Daniel could not remember where his mother said his father was for those first five tearful minutes after his parents spiraled down from the blue city sky. Later he imagined his father was interviewing the detectives, notebook in hand, gathering facts. By the time his father entered the room, Daniel had recovered to stand and reach to embrace his father. His father’s distance was obvious in his light and tentative grasp, his pulling away too quickly as if scared such bodily contact even in this context might rouse wrong, sick parts of Daniel.

  No, that was not it at all: he could not touch Daniel because of what Daniel had done to his little brother. Later Daniel learned that then his father believed—or was trying not to believe—that his own son, his oldest, had killed Brandon Pierce. No wonder he recoiled.

  Daniel’s mother saw it. She stiffened and sobbed.

  They left Daniel alone in the room for a while with his parents. The talk assumed an uneven, awkward rhythm: trickle, sudden tearful torrents. Daniel did not need to be questioned, for he wanted to talk, to tell them everything. He owed them that. Sometime in the middle of that tense time, Daniel realized how many stories there were to tell. Separate but related ones: what happened the night of the party, what happened that morning Pete announced he wanted to drive, why Daniel let him drive and why he let Pete keep on driving. North to Richmond and beyond. Why they sold the Galaxy. How they ended up in Washington. What he was doing while Pete was kicked and knifed to death.

  Here he sped up. No details, just a smooth glossing-over: “I went to a guy I met’s apartment.”

  His father looked away, out the high window at the chipped brick and trapped sky. His mother fixed her eyes on his and said,

  “Who?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  Daniel swallowed. “At this bar.”

  “Oh Danny, baby, that’s so dangerous,” said his mother. But his father looked with a mix of pity and irritation, the way Daniel had seen him glare at city council members who possessed in their filibustering and self-absorbed monologues a startling flair for the obvious.

  The detective returned to talk about what he referred to as “the case,” saving Daniel from his father’s shifty and unfocused gaze. As soon as the detective entered the room the mood changed because Daniel’s father, trained reporter, could ask the detective questions he could not bring himself to ask his son.

  Later, on the plane, Daniel’s dad offered to take the seat across the aisle and let his son sit with his mom but Daniel stood up to him. “No way, sit with mom, I’ll sit over here.” People on the plane were returning to their homes after touring the capital. A troop of Girl Scouts in their uniforms reading fashion magazines for teenaged girls. Families with boisterous toddlers who, as soon as the seat belt signs switched off, were allowed to run up and down the aisle.

  In the belly of the plane rested his little brother. Caged vacationing dogs barked and frozen organs, freshly plucked from car crash victims now on their way to save lives, slashed about next to Pete in inconspicuous Igloo coolers. Daniel imagined stowing away down under, keeping his little brother company and finding in a beat cooler a heart to replace his brother’s lifeless one. Every spot of turbulence caused Daniel to wince as the stewardess instructed him rotely how to fly the friendly skies.

  “After the funeral we need to get with the lawyer,” Daniel’s dad said on the ride home from the Raleigh-Durham airport. “The police want to talk to you and—”

  “Can this wait, Thomas?” said Daniel’s mom, and his dad said, “That’s what I’m saying, Caroline, it’s going to have to wait until after the funeral, anyway, Danny”—Daniel had asked him not to call him “Danny”, but what did it matter now ?—we’ve got plenty to talk about before we talk to the police.”

  “What do we have to talk about?” Daniel said, and his father cut his eyes at Daniel in the rearview mirror and breathed big, a patient attempt not to lose it.

  “Thomas,” Daniel’s mother said, and finally his father said, “We have to talk about a lot of things.”

  At home Daniel told his parents he was going to bed. It was late enough so that they disappeared into the den and Daniel realized he had the whole wing to himself, including Pete’s room. He never went in there. Warily he pushed open the door and tiptoed in, as if on some highly dangerous night mission. Pete’s stuff was splayed all over the floor: underwear, album covers, paperbacks, back issues of Rolling Stone, a six-inch drift covering everything. Daniel sat on the bed and flipped through Pete’s copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which along with On the Road and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Trout Fishing in America and Naked Lunch and Catch-22 were his favorite books. Daniel realized he’d never read any of them. If he had time left over from his studies to read for leisure he borrowed a John Le Carre novel from his father, or read nonfiction—biographies, political analysis. Daniel stood and rummaged through his brother’s albums looking for something to listen to and settled finally on Sticky Fingers, trying not to look at the cover with its Warhol photo of a pair of tight jeans strained by an obvious hard-on, the zipper partially open, pubic hair visible beneath. Daniel dropped the album sleeve on the floor and glanced up at the posters of Jagger and Richards, the giant scarlet tongue in a horrific lick his little brother got in trouble for painting on the sheet-metal air-conditioning duct that rose in a corner of his room. “Honky Tonky Woman” was the only song Daniel really knew and he sang along weakly, turned the music down lest his dad return to the kitchen for more Scotch and hear the familiar guitar chords spilling from underneath the door and think his youngest son had sneaked in past curfew late and messed up like every other night of his life.

  Daniel woke the next morning with his clothes on, in his brother’s bed, to the click of a needle bumping over a skip at the bitter end of “Sister Morphine.”

  Two days later they buried his brother. The house filled with cousins and casseroles. For as long as he could Daniel hid out in his room. The suit he wore was the one he would have worn to his Carmichael interview and as he stood in front of the mirror tying his tie it occurred to him to blame the Carmichael for everything: Brandon’s death, and Pete’s. For if Daniel had not been so ambitious, so eager for a stupid scholarship, he would have stopped L
ee Tysinger, Pete would have had no message to deliver, there would have been no Washington, D.C.

  But he could just as easily blame it on the fact that he liked boys.

  Or where he happened to have been born. His father’s job, his father’s ignoble pursuit of Truth. The uncovered truths of a small, sorry town were to blame. It was Daniel’s father’s fault.

  Or maybe it was time, the dilatory tick of it, its imposing and omnipotent order. Daniel knew what time could do. He had seen how it had ruined his father’s life, how everyone his father came into contact with was bound by his allegiance to the clock.

  He knew he could go on and on, blaming. Instead, he tied his tie and joined the cousins and casseroles in the kitchen. The oxygen in the room rose to a thin, collective cartoon bubble hovering just below the ceiling. Everyone in the room stopped talking, breathed conservatively as if now that Daniel was among them such a simple, guaranteed given as breathing was affected by his presence. Or so it seemed to Daniel as he made his way slowly, nodding grimly, over to the sink where his mother stood with one of her sisters, who hugged Daniel hard to her, flattened her breasts against him. Daniel managed a smile. Reminded himself to stand up straight. It was not him riding in the lead limo between his mom and dad, was not him trudging up the aisle of the church past half of Trent High School, Pete’s friends’ cocked heads turning to sight him, following him as if he was a bride.