Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  He did not wonder what article the boy was reading. He put down his address gun, ignored Strickland’s stare, walked up behind McRae, grabbed the paper away from him, made a flagrant and awkward show of merging it with the grocery circulars, and told Anthony he did not pay him to read the Goddamn thing.

  Strickland had followed him. “Tom,” he was saying, but Thomas ignored him and did not bother to look at the McRae boy, went back to work.

  Busy again, Thomas felt ashamed. Of course the boy would be curious about what had been written: The whole town would be reading it in minutes, and that was the point, wasn’t it? And Anthony McRae had been Pete’s friend; didn’t this give him even more reason to follow the story?

  Suddenly the sight of the newsprint, the smell of its ink, sickened Thomas. He nearly ran to the bathroom, bolted himself inside, and stood retching and sweating until his stomach was clenched and empty.

  He felt the change in the room once past the partition that separated the front office from the back. No one looked up at him, for one thing; the boys had their eyes on something else, McRae he figured at first, until he saw his older son standing in the place where Pete would be right now, shuffling papers into papers, doing so with a dexterity that infuriated him. What was he doing here? His mother had taken him to get a haircut after school. He’d assumed they would be home now.

  Thomas walked to the front of the room, stood beside Danny until he looked up, motioned for him to follow him to the front office.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked his son as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “Working. I thought you’d need some help.”

  “Danny,” Thomas started, but Danny cut him off.

  “Mom and I were downtown for my haircut and I saw you pass by in the van and I told her I’d rather come to work than go home. You need me, anyway. I noticed you haven’t found anyone to replace either one of us.”

  Thomas studied his son: the fair skin he’d inherited from his mother, his frame bulked up from the weight training he’d endured for the chance at a scholarship, his thin brown hair, which Thomas had requested he get trimmed before the next day’s meeting with the police. The one thing different about him was his clothes. Usually he dressed as though he was about to pledge a fraternity—Lacoste shirts, khakis, Topsiders. Today he wore a t-shirt with the name of a band that Thomas didn’t recognize, jeans, and tennis shoes.

  But at least he wasn’t wearing the T-shirt that claimed Virginia Is For Lovers, which he’d worn on his trip to Washington. There was something pathetic about this shirt to Thomas, for it was, so far as he knew, the only sloppy T-shirt the boy owned, and the sentiment it expressed seemed somehow beneath Daniel.

  “You don’t have to pay me,” said Danny.

  “Danny, look,” said Thomas. “Of course I’ll pay you, don’t be ridiculous.”

  He stopped, ran out of words. These weren’t the right ones. What right had he to accuse the boy of ridiculousness? But how to tell him that his presence here just made everything worse? How to let him know that the other boys would ignore their work to stare at him all afternoon, that even Wayman and Strickland would sneak glances at the boy they had not seen since he’d returned home.

  Since the funeral, he’d been out of the house only to go to school and to his lawyer’s office. Croom wanted to talk to him but agreed to put it off until after the funeral. Against his father’s wishes, Danny had quit the football team and, it seemed, given up all his other extracurricular activities as well. By the time Thomas arrived home at night, Danny was out of sight, down the hallway he shared with his brother, on the other side of the house, hiding out in Pete’s room, doing God knows whatever it was he did in there. The room was a disaster, as it had always been when Pete was alive; no one had made any move to clean it, to go through Pete’s things, start the process of getting rid of some of it, though Thomas had mentioned the need one night at dinner, to Caroline’s apathy and Danny’s silent but palpable protest. Danny obviously did not want them to know he was spending time in Pete’s room, but Thomas had spied him, from the kitchen, slipping in and out. He’d heard the music too, and though he knew next to nothing about rock music—could not have told the difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—he knew from the way the heavy bass vibrated the air-conditioning shaft in Pete’s room that Danny was listening to his little brother’s records.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Thomas said.

  “I don’t want to go home, Dad. I’m sick of staying at home, I’d rather help out. Plus, I’m sure Mom could use some time alone.”

  “Wait here while I tell Strickland.”

  They drove the company car, a Vega they’d picked up for covering runs when the bike route boys called in sick. Strickland drove it home nights, but he offered it eagerly, said he’d drop the papers off at the post office and drive the van home. Neither Thomas nor Danny spoke on the ride through town. Though he had planned on dropping Danny off and returning to work, Thomas found himself driving straight out of town, into the country.

  “Where we going?” asked Danny.

  “If you’re sick of staying at home, we’ll go for a ride.”

  “Don’t you need to go back to work?” said Danny, but Thomas, preoccupied, did not answer. There were no words between them for a few miles, and Thomas studied the fields and the farmhouses and returned rotely the waves of the porchsitting retirees and tried to figure out how to say the things he wanted.

  “If you had just told us,” he said finally.

  “Told you what?”

  “You know how you felt about. I mean, that you liked … boys. Your mother and I …”

  “Would have been mostly fine about it, I’m sure. But think about it, Dad. Put yourself in my place. I wanted that scholarship, and to get it, I knew I had to keep that part of me secret from everybody, because you know as well as I do that they wouldn’t give it to a queer.”

  “Don’t use that word,” said Thomas. “I’m sick of that word, I never want to hear it again as long as I live.”

  “Kind of doubt you’ll get your wish.” Danny shrugged. He said, “So I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you any more than Pete could come to you and say he smoked pot before breakfast every day and got drunk three times a week minimum and hung out with guys who blew up black people’s mailboxes and hated himself for it. I couldn’t tell you any more than he could.”

  “Well, there’s a difference,” said Thomas, even though he was pretty sure there was not. But he had to say something, and he did not want to turn around yet. He had to keep driving, he had to have this conversation if he was going to retrieve his boy from the front pages of his newspaper.

  “What?”

  “I knew about Pete’s problems.”

  “Then why didn’t you do something?”

  “You think I didn’t try?”

  Thomas felt his face grow hot. Ashamed of the anger in his voice, he glanced sidelong at Danny, who said nothing. This wasn’t working. This was a mistake. He should have let the boy help out at the office, should have stayed there himself. After delivering the papers to the post office, he could have dropped him by the house and gone out to eat, then back to the office to kill time until he knew everyone at home was asleep.

  “Pete did something right that night,” said Thomas. “Going to look for you, I mean. Something considerate. But listen: we both know he could just have easily done something, well, characteristic.”

  “Dad, don’t.”

  “I say just as easily, as if there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would do something good. It’s more like eighty-twenty.”

  “Dad, stop. He wasn’t that bad.”

  “He could be. Very bad. He could easily have gotten caught breaking into a drugstore.”

  “Why are you saying these things?” Danny’s voice cracked, and Thomas looked out the window at the passing pine forest rather than at his son.

  “Because he’s gone and we’re turning him into
a saint and that’s not fair to him and it’s certainly not fair to you.”

  Thomas understood that his emotional survival depended upon a confluence of memory, myth, and wish. He would not ever be able to get over his son’s death if he held himself to the truth. He was trying to be honest about this. But from the look on Danny’s face, it seemed he had defamed his dead son.

  “If he was so bad, why didn’t you do anything to help him?”

  “I tried, Danny. Your mother and I tried. We didn’t know how to help him. I guess we thought he’d grow out of it. He was so damn smart.”

  “Smarter than I am,” said Danny.

  “Hey now. I didn’t say that. You’re both smart boys. I’ve tried never to compare you.” “Then, maybe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might have tried not to compare us when he was alive. But now I can’t blame you for thinking you’d rather have him around than your homo son.”

  Thomas braked as safely as he could. He waited until he found a place on the shoulder that seemed solid enough, and this caution felt like a triumph, given the rage he felt inside. He put the car in park and turned to his son.

  “I don’t ever want to hear you say a thing like that again. I don’t care what happens, I don’t want to hear things like that come out of your mouth. Your mother and I …”

  “Your mother and I, your mother and I.” Danny was crying now, sputtering as he repeated Thomas’s words. “Don’t keep saying that, she can speak for herself, don’t always pretend you two think the same things or feel them because you don’t, it’s a lie. You might be married but you aren’t the same person and besides I know what she thinks, she has the guts to tell me every once in a while. But you? You don’t say shit, Dad. You just say things like ‘Your mother and I love you’ and then you rush back to work.”

  “Okay,” said Thomas. “All right. Not your mother and I, then. You’re right, she’s better at this than I am. She’s a better parent than I am.”

  Danny sniffled, cleared his throat. “Great. Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Exactly what you tell me not to do.”

  “Danny, look. I know you feel horrible for what happened in Washington. I know you feel horrible for not going to the police about Brandon. I understand why you kept quiet, I really do, but you have to know that your … you have to know that I love you like you are, I don’t care who you’re attracted to and I don’t give a good Goddamn if you don’t get a scholarship. I don’t care about any of that, Danny. I don’t know how things got to this point, but look, I want you to know that you’re going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”

  A crowded carload of teenagers on an afternoon hellride flashed past the Vega, their horn blaring, their slurs lingering. Thomas realized he was blocking half the lane.

  “You really believe that?”

  “Believe that we’re going to be fine?” he said as he started the car and eased off the shoulder. What he believed—what he had to believe in order to survive—was that it would not be possible for them to live this way, feel this way, forever. Or even much longer.

  “I do.”

  “What about you and mom?”

  “You needn’t worry about us.”

  “I do, though. Worry. If you two ended up splitting up now, over—”

  “That’s not going to happen. I don’t want to hear you talk about such a ridiculous thing.”

  “You ought to talk to her, Dad. I mean, talk more. Let her talk to you.”

  Thomas swallowed, breathed big to calm himself.

  “I will,” he said. “When I’m ready.”

  “She needs you now.”

  “Goddamit, Danny, don’t you think I’m trying? Don’t you think I’ve got enough to worry about?”

  “Think about how I feel,” said Danny after a long pause. “It gets worse every day. I try not to worry about the trial, but I do. I see the jury looking at Tysinger and then at me, and I see them thinking about the star linebacker who a lame benchwarmer like me is accusing of some sick things, and I imagine them looking at me like there is no doubt in their minds that I was born to do the sick things that I’m going to get up there and claim Tysinger did with Brandon before he beat him to death, and how do you think that makes me feel? You think that makes me feel good?”

  “They’re not sick.”

  “What?”

  “You said you did sick things. They’re not sick. If you feel them, and you find someone to do them with who feels the same way, well, that’s not sickness. I have not raised you to think that, so don’t say it. And look, Danny, you don’t know what that jury is going to think. You saw that boy beat Brandon Pierce. Yes, you should have come forward and so should have Pete. But just because you’re …”

  “Gay?”

  “I know the word for it. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean that you’re a liar.”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Yes I am, Danny.”

  “No, you’re not, Dad. You know how people think. I hear you complain about the letters they write to you about your editorials, I hear you tell Mom how they cancel their subscription if you say anything that goes against the preachers they listen to on the radio, I know how depressed you get when some idiot on the city council makes some racist remark around you, as if you’re one of them. You know what I’m talking about, Dad. You know how they think.”

  Thomas wanted to say, Okay, you’re right, I do know, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t hope that they might do the right thing this time. But how could he say that and not insult his son? He’d rather have his respect than give him false hope about human nature. Still, he had to say something.

  “Let’s go home.” This is what he said, and it felt like a failure. Like everything else he did these days, it felt as though he’d given up.

  At home, Caroline, standing at the stove browning chicken, said, “You’re early, what happened? Why aren’t you two still at work?”

  Thomas looked at Danny, who looked back at him as if he wasn’t about to explain, then slipped down the dark hallway to his room. Come back, Thomas wanted to call to him, Don’t leave me alone with her, help me out here.

  He knew Caroline would think he should have allowed Danny to stay no matter what. He knew that she would think that Thomas brought him home because he was ashamed.

  “I just didn’t think it was a good idea, him starting back to work right yet,” he said. “It’s hard enough on him already, he doesn’t need those other boys staring at him.”

  “He can’t just stay in his room until all this is over.”

  “It will be over soon enough,” said Thomas.

  Caroline laid her spatula on the counter with such measured calm that Thomas grew fretful.

  “It will never be over,” she said. “You know that. The only thing we can hope for now is that Danny will come out of this without hating himself for the rest of his life.”

  “I don’t know how to fix that,” said Thomas. It was true, he didn’t. He had no idea how to make himself feel human again, how to quell that niggling feeling that Pete was just away on one of his AWOL trips, that any minute he would come slinking in the front door, stoned out of his mind, in some kind of trouble, maybe even escorted by the police, but at least alive. It stayed with him always, despite his attempt to reconcile himself to time, the intolerable crawl of it. He’d thought, earlier that day, hauling the news back to town, of how time was so absurdly important to his existence. His life was calibrated to a tight production schedule, and to the meetings he had to cover, and to accommodate the occasional tragedies that struck in the middle of the night that he was required to document. These were the only surprises, and he’d grown so accustomed over the years to the notion that his sleep might be interrupted to snap a picture of some triple-fatality car crash that he could scarcely think of them as surprises anymore.

  It seemed crippling now, this schedule. His hours were not his at all. The rising sun that demarcated one d
ay from the next for the rest of humanity was arbitrary to him. What separated his days was his need to escape the things he might have to confront should he find some other way to live.

  “Well, I don’t know how to fix it either,” Caroline was saying as she bullied the chicken around the smoky skillet, “but I’m going to try to find a way. I’m not about to lose the only son I have.”

  “You think I want him to hate himself? You think I want him to be miserable?”

  “I don’t know what you think. Sometimes I’m convinced you think he’ll sort it out on his own, and so you stand out of his light. Other times I think you—”

  She stopped talking, stopped stirring the chicken, and her silence, her stillness, made his breath come quick and shallow.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but sometimes I think you blame him for what happened to Pete. As if he had anything to do with Pete’s death. I know Pete wouldn’t have been there if Danny hadn’t decided to go to Washington, and he wouldn’t have been hanging around that bar at four in the morning if Danny would not have left him alone, in that hotel room. Danny made some terrible decisions. He let his brother down. But that does not mean it’s his fault that Pete’s dead.”

  “Did I say it was his fault?”

  “No. You didn’t say it.”

  Thomas crossed the kitchen to the cabinet above the oven where he kept the liquor. He mixed his drink without looking at her.

  He drained half his glass on the first pull, then set it down and placed his hands on the counter as if he was being searched by a policeman and said, “Do I think it’s his fault?”