Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  What bothered Daniel most about the funeral was the fact that his brother was eulogized by their preacher whom Daniel could not stand. Pete could not stand him either. Their dad could not stand him. He had never said so outright, but Daniel knew from the way he sneered when, after lunch, sitting down to Sunday pot roast with a glass of wine in his hand, his father listened to his mother compliment the service then, as if he was outlining an editorial, took the sermon quietly and skillfully apart.

  One night Daniel had locked his keys in the Galaxy after youth group and knocked on the pastor’s backdoor for twenty minutes in want of a coat hanger; the pastor was home alone, and Daniel could see him moving stealthily around the kitchen, his napkin tucked into his collar like a Victorian dandy. He never came to the door. Daniel had called his father from a friend’s house and had told his father this story while they fidgeted with the lock through the slivered window. His father, recounting to Daniel the preacher’s countless sermons championing the social responsibility of the flock, had grown so annoyed that it had taken him a half hour to unlock the door. Thereafter, on Sunday mornings while the pastor preached with the grandiloquent air of the televised, both father and son entertained the image of him sneaking about his kitchen, bibbed with a sirloin-greasy square of linen, praying that the knock at his backdoor would go the hell away.

  The preacher was prissy and his teeth were green and his robe pooched out around his waist as his body went the middle-aged way of a pear. Daniel hated him. He sermonized on the innocence and folly of youth. Folly? Was it folly that attacked Daniel’s little brother in an alley because he was thought to be different? Or was it an innocence still vibrant after all Pete had done to feel guilty about?

  Always in the days following his brother’s death, Daniel was aware of everything he did in a foggy remove. He felt as if he was not walking around in his own story but someone—not a stranger, but someone very close to Daniel—was telling him later what happened. During those days his thoughts lacked much logic and all organization. Even when he was back home, in his room, wearing the clothes he’d worn to school—even when he was back in school, sitting in the same carved-up, graffitied desks surrounded by classmates he’d known since grade school—few thoughts followed any sort of order. His consciousness seemed to have been permanently damaged by their decision to keep going once they left Rick’s Lounge. The fabric of his days felt more like he imagined his little brother’s life was like: no connective tissue, a fragmented and fairly careless concept of time. Clock warped like the Salvador Dali print Pete had hung in his bedroom.

  Daniel did not leave the house between the funeral and the trial except for once, when his mother drove him into town to get a haircut. As per his father’s instructions: got to look good for the trial. Daniel did not want a haircut. Now that the Carmichael was out of reach he did not care what he looked like and would have gladly grown his hair to his ass or at least to his shoulders as his little brother had, but he did what was expected of him.

  Daniel’s mother took a leave of absence from Social Services. She drove him to school and she picked him up and it wasn’t Daniel who went to class but someone in his clothes and the only people he talked to and who talked to him were teachers, which was just fine with Daniel because he did not seem to recognize any of his old friends. Sometimes he would see Pete’s friends in the hallway and they would look at him with practiced and sullen hatred. Once a friend of Lee Tysinger’s sidled up to Daniel in the cafeteria and told him he was fucking dead meat. Daniel wanted to laugh at Tysinger’s tough-guy’s talk, which he was certain he’d passed on verbatim to his minion but he ignored him and walked away. What did he care that Lee Tysinger wanted him dead? There were times, though he tried hard not to admit it and harder not to give into it, when he wanted the same for himself.

  It was not your fault, Daniel’s mother told him over and over. I love you, Dan, I love you today just as much as I did a month ago, before all this started. It wasn’t your fault. Sometimes Daniel was almost convinced that it was not his fault—that it was just a matter of wrong timing, wrong place. He’d never allowed himself to believe in such a thing as luck before—for some reason he was born scornful of luck, serendipity, fortuitous timing. Or maybe his father taught him not to put stock in such things. Daniel could not remember his dad ever lecturing him on the subject, but perhaps he picked it up from his father’s example, his life story. For his father believed in hard work netting desired results. He believed that there was a truth to be uncovered and luck seemed incompatible with his relentless search for same.

  Pete believed in luck. His was mostly bad. Often he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—parties raided by cops, the parking lots of clubs where men were shot over drug deals gone wrong—but Pete truly believed it was an accident each time. Probably because of all the drugs and booze, which made everything seem fragmented. “Surreal,” as Pete called it. “Surreal” was one of his favorite words, and Daniel always used to challenge him on it, Daniel always used to tell Pete that surreal didn’t mean what he thought it meant, not that Daniel really knew what it meant. Once, during one of those rare windows when they were actually talking to each other, Pete told Daniel on the ride home from school how he and Cozart had smoked some awesome dope over the weekend and on their way from the black pipe to the Glam they’d passed three houses in one block where men were mowing their lawns with manual pushmowers. “I had some tune playing in my head and the mowers were all quiet and it was like the whole world was inside my head, man.” Daniel said something smart-assed like, Far out, man, to let Pete know how ridiculous he found this, but now he was thinking that, awesome dope notwithstanding, Pete was maybe right, the whole world was inside his head and even if his luck was bad, still he could see things Daniel never could. Lively and spontaneous corner-of-the-eye things that Daniel had been too tight-assed to pay attention to. Maybe Pete had seen his life the way it was supposed to be seen: unedited, uncontrolled. He did not lie about who he was. Everyone knew he was a fuckup; if there was any doubt, he’d tell you himself.

  The day before he was to be interviewed by the police, Daniel rode with his mom downtown for a haircut. Afterward, when Daniel got in the car he spotted his father’s van backing into the alley. He thought his father might really need his help down at the office, as he was short two inserters now, and so Daniel asked his mom if he could help out at the paper. Her face clouded but she said, finally, “I don’t see why not.” Daniel told his mom he’d see her at home. He did not go directly to the office—first he walked around awhile trying to summon his nerve, for he was not sure his dad wanted him there, even though he could surely use his help. Daniel thought it might be the break he needed with his father, showing up unsummoned to lend him a hand, since he respected hard work above all and his life was timed to the Daily Advance. Daniel entered the office hopeful that this small offering might be just the thing to make his father want to claim him as his son again.

  7

  HERE IS WHAT FELT the hardest to Thomas: shaving, pulling his pants on, reaching across Caroline’s sleeping body to switch off the alarm clock, rattling around the office first thing in the morning while Strickland and Wayman and Bea tiptoed around him, trying to gauge his mood. DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL THINGS. Caroline’s secretary had cross-stitched this phrase badly in yellow thread and presented it to Caroline for Christmas one year. Because she was a good soul, Caroline had hung the eyesore in the master bath, where Thomas had to see it every morning of his life. When he complained, she had said, “Mary Louise spent hours on it, the least I can do is honor her work by displaying it.” Carrying politeness to the extreme; a pathological, if not destructive, politeness. Is this what it took to be a good soul? Given his circumstances, wasn’t Thomas hereafter excused from such indulgent behavior in the name of bereavement?

  This morning when he stepped from the shower he had given in to the urge he felt every morning, lifted the cliché off the nail, and placed it facedown on t
he back of the toilet.

  He was tying his tie when Caroline emerged from the bathroom and he knew from the way she would not look at him that she had found it, and found his annoyance with it petty and misdirected. He could tell, she didn’t need to say anything, he knew. Other things to condemn besides some sweet, well-meaning secretary’s tacky Christmas present.

  But during those first days and nights it was the smallest stuff that had proved the most impossible. The tension settled in the most mundane details. Lifting a fork to his mouth proved strenuous; television, especially the nightly news, repulsed him. He could not smoke his cigars, which had always relaxed him, and the sound of Bea’s voice on the phone to one of her friends had so grated him that he had tried to fire her.

  The smallest stuff once again antagonized Thomas as he sat at the counter of the hot dog joint where he waited each Wednesday for Rick Hampton to print the week’s paper. The simple act of waiting, of killing time with his unlit Tiparillo, a half-eaten chili dog, was intolerable to him. He ordered a beer, something he would never have allowed himself before, since he had hours to go still before his day was over. The paper had to be folded and wrapped and loaded into bags and delivered to the post office, he still had to stamp the mixed-states singles with address labels and listen to the hired boys talk their trash as if nothing had happened.

  Sipping his beer, Thomas thought of the large stuff he’d encountered over the years. He had spent a full year out of three in the army engaged in combat. His battalion had been pinned down in a valley near Nothberg, Germany, for almost forty-eight hours under heavy artillery and antitank gun fire from the enemy. More than half of his battalion had lost their lives in that rainy, smoky valley, and he’d endured the second of those nights lying beneath a dead friend, clinging to the heat departing from his friend’s body, soaked in sweat and blood, playing dead himself, lest the Germans emerge from the hills above.

  Thirty years later, he had buried his younger son. Yet this—killing time waiting for the paper to be printed, idling at the counter of a grill in Mt. Sinah, North Carolina—seemed the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

  Rick Hampton’s voice beside him, telling him the paper was ready, You good to go now, Tom, did not make it any better. He nodded and cupped his beer mug tightly but did not have the energy to lift it to his mouth. Still he ordered another, and when he did he heard Hamp sigh from somewhere behind him. He had not yet looked up, could not force himself to look at anything but the mirror behind the counter that showed how haggard and sallow his face had become in the last few weeks. He’d lost weight, which he’d needed to lose, but he wished it back now, wished he’d never found a way to shed it. He felt Hamp scoot a stool up and sit beside him, heard him order a beer himself.

  “Why don’t I drive you back, Tom?” said Hamp. “I can get one of my boys to follow me, hell, they don’t need me this afternoon anyway, I was fixing to get out of here, play some golf. I don’t mind.”

  “No,” said Thomas. “Thanks.”

  Hamp paid for both beers and Thomas let him even though he did not want charity or pity or even heartfelt sympathy, for it was too much his fault, what had happened with both boys. He had not allowed himself to see. Had not paid enough attention.

  “I’m sorry as I can be,” said Hamp. And maybe he meant it. Maybe they all did. But what were they sorry about was not the truth: that one of his sons had been killed in an alley behind a gay bar, murdered by thugs the cops called “gay-bashers.” “Happens a lot,” the detective had told him and Caroline when they arrived in Washington to claim the body and pick up Danny. “Been a wave of these for the past few years, men from out in the surrounding counties we think coming into town to assault homosexuals.” The detective did not look at either of them when he said the word and it sounded funny in his mouth, unnatural, as if he was used to some other far less palatable synonym.

  “You handling this thing better than I ever could have,” said Hamp.

  Thomas felt briefly like agreeing. Of course he was handling it better, he was a journalist, not a businessman, he cared about the truth, he sought it out and wrote it up even when no one who read it even recognized it. Of course in this case the truth was slippery, less recognizable to him than to his readers. He had no perspective. His son was dead; both his sons were involved in a murder. He’d had to write a short piece about Pete’s death, as it was news, but it was as vague as it could be and still be considered journalism. LOCAL YOUTH DEAD IN APPARENT HOMICIDE was the headline. He thought about pitching it as a robbery—no money was found in Pete’s pockets, but who would know the difference? The D.C. detectives did not read papers from Trent, N.C.

  He did not need to report everything, did not need to mention the bar or what type of clientele it drew. “Apparent homicide” was enough. He knew that the details of Pete’s death were of heightened interest to his readers mostly because of the obvious connection to the Pierce boy. He knew that people in town were talking even before he received that call from the D.C. police, knew that the rumor mill had connected his sons’ disappearance to the Pierce murder within hours.

  Whatever mistakes he had made so far, or would make yet, he was dealing with it better than Hamp ever could. This wasn’t much consolation. He sipped his beer and thanked Hamp for it and said he had to get on the road if he was going to get the paper out today.

  “You sure you don’t want me to drive you back? I ain’t got a thing going on.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. See you next week.”

  Within seconds he was lurching along the empty streets of Mt. Sinah to the back roads where there were no cars, no traffic save the occasional crawling pickup and a couple of tractors bucking along slowly with raised discs muddy from the fields.

  On the drive home he thought about how he’d not been able to talk to Danny about what had happened. Surely Danny wanted to talk; he might well be praying for his father to come into the room he had once shared with Pete, all those years ago when they were inseparable. Thomas remembered nights when the two of them stayed up late playing cowboy games in the Conestoga bunk bed Thomas had bought them for Christmas one year, tucking their bedclothes beneath the top mattress and hiding out in the cave of the bottom bunk, surrounded by plastic cowboys and Indians, G.I. Joes and anachronistic Hot Wheels, keeping themselves busy hours past their bedtime with a concentration he admired so much he found it hard to interrupt them.

  Now he found it difficult to interrupt the impenetrable self-absorption of his grief. Thomas knew that he had been avoiding Danny. It wasn’t just that he was mad, though he was, furious at the boy for things he did or did not do to his younger brother. How could he ever know what had happened? He would never understand, though he had heard the story so many times it seemed to be approaching the truth. He knew this from his work: tell a story enough times and it begins to sound irrefutable.

  All his emphasis, by example at home and at the office, on telling the truth, and look where it had led him. This seemed his largest failure, greater even than the way he’d ignored his sons and his wife, not bothering to take note of the ways in which everyone hurt. But weren’t they related? Wasn’t his dogged devotion to getting it all down, setting straight the truths of his adopted town, the very reason why his sons had turned out to be so troubled? It was common knowledge that the children of ministers and missionaries were spiritually deficient; no surprise that a newspaperman’s child would have trouble with facts.

  It was easy to blame his work now, this afternoon, ferrying the truth across the forlorn countryside to sell to damn fools. But they weren’t so damn foolish, and they bought this truth in unprecedented numbers. Hamp was right. In twenty years in the business, he’d never sold so many papers, yet the fact that he might end up profiting from the situation made him all the more miserable.

  For the first time in his career he was having a hard time deciding how much truth to print. So far he had erred on the side of restraint. He told himself this to patch his anxiet
y, reminded himself , at his most anxious moments how the situation was delicate and called for delicate reportage. He’d written a much-shorter-than-usual piece about the Tysinger boy’s arrest and had run the short article about Pete’s death a day before he wrote the obit.

  Normally he would tweak the situation a little. Provide just enough salacious detail to sell the next week’s paper. It occurred to him, now that he was unwilling to provide such detail and the paper was selling better than ever, to wonder if he had not compromised himself unnecessarily, underestimated his readers. They weren’t damn fools after all, at least no more foolish than the rest of the world. He was the one who felt foolish for making money off this mess.

  In the alley his hired boys loitered, just like on any other Wednesday afternoon. At the sight of the van backing down the alley they quit pitching pennies against the air-conditioning unit, tossed their cigarettes, and made their slow and sullen way back inside. He was glad when Wayman emerged to supervise the unloading, for he felt even more self-conscious than usual around these boys who knew both of his sons, had worked alongside them for years, and now were probably saying things about them that he did not care to know, much less hear. Not that there was any escape from this feeling: he felt it when alone, he felt it in the shower and late at night when he sat in the den watching the late news and whatever happened to flash on the screen then. He felt the stares of even the weathermen, the sports anchors; the late-night comedians seemed to be telling jokes about his family.

  He threw himself into stamping address labels, sweating next to Strickland without words, and for a half hour or so he managed to distract himself from the stares, real or imagined. But after a while he looked up instinctively toward the front of the room where Pete usually performed his sloppy inserting alongside his buddy Anthony McRae, and he realized two things that made him flush and falter. His rhythms were still tied to Pete’s comings and goings (for Pete was at least a half-hour late to work every week, this was around the time when he would slouch in sneaky and high, munching popcorn from Eagle’s Five and Dime, trying to hide his slitty eyes and his guilty grin from his father while flaunting it to the rest of the boys). This thought was hard enough until he let himself focus on the place where Pete ought to have been and saw Anthony McCrae leaning across the mock-up table, his elbows on the glass, idly reading the front page of the paper.