Virginia Lovers Read online

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  THEY WERE MAGICAL, those woods behind Pete’s house, and had been since he was allowed to explore them on his own. Even before then, the fact that they were off-limits made them desirable, and when he and Danny had played at their edge, the dense wall of longleaf and loblolly pines lay as irresistible as the future. The brothers played there for hours, after school and all day long on weekends and during summer vacation. The woods seemed to belong only to them, created to indulge the elaborate campaigns of their imaginations.

  When they were older, nine and ten, Danny was tapped to run with the gang of neighborhood boys who made their headquarters in these woods. Only boys: no girls would be allowed until a few years later, when the Raleigh Road Boys, as they were known to other neighborhood gangs, were old enough to lure girls to their abandoned forts with promises of Boone’s Farm and Miller Lite and hopes of meager sexual triumphs naively measured in lingo leftover from Little League baseball. By that point Danny, never very comfortable with the gang, had found other things to do with his time. Pete took his place, which should have made him grateful, but his brother’s defection bothered him. Not for long, though: the gang warmed to his quiet humor, and girls liked him, too. It came as a shock to find he was successful with the opposite sex despite his inability to remember what erotic prizes the bases corresponded to, save for home, into which he slid, sweaty and grinning, at age fourteen one stifling summer night with a leggy redhead named Shelly Blankenship.

  One night Stuart Romine’s older brother Too Tall Paul left a quarter pound of Mexican pot beneath the bunkbed he shared with Stuart, and Stuart discovered it while searching for his brother’s collection of porn mags. He swiped a half ounce and brought it to the woods. It was 1973, late autumn. Pete was fifteen. After a year-long battle he had finally won his war with his father over his obligatory six-week haircut. His hair bushed out to his shoulders in a stiff wedge like a Christmas tree, and he wore the same uniform daily: a pair of shredded jeans poorly patched in the ass and knees, one of a dozen faded pocket T-shirts, scuffed work boots. Pete carried his rebellion proudly, papered his bedroom walls with Stones posters and concert ticket stubs. He looked like a freak, but until that November night in 1973, he was a smart, ironic, curious, and introspective kid who dreamed his life so vibrantly that even his parents thought of him as somewhat ethereal.

  But after that night when Too Tall Paul’s swiped stash changed the lives of a half-dozen neighborhood boys, Pete wasn’t around enough for his demeanor to be scrutinized. He and his friends spent as much time in the woods as they could get away with. Pete made it so difficult on his family when he bothered to show up that they came not to mind his absence. In the woods, his once-quiet wit wore off. He became known as someone who would do anything. No dare seemed too risky, no caper pulled on crotchety neighbors too cruel. Of all the boys in the neighborhood, Pete was the one who loved to get high the most.

  One night in late October of 1975, Pete entered the woods on his way to meet his best friend, Cozart. He had arrived home later than usual from his after-school job at his father’s newspaper, had left his mom, dad, and brother still lingering over their meal and the national news. Wednesday-night dinners were often tense at his house. His dad was always exhausted from putting the paper out, and the meal was invariably interrupted by some old lady whose paperboy had missed her house. The paper had to be delivered immediately; the task was delegated to whoever was closest when the phone rang, and for that reason Pete ate little and quickly and got out of there fast.

  That night he had even more incentive to leave. Brandon Pierce’s murder headlined the front pages of the Daily Advance, and he’d watched his mom studying the article as she prepared dinner—Hamburger Helper and frozen brussels sprouts, another reason not to linger. He’d planned to wolf down his supper, pretend great interest in the nightly news, and take off before talk turned to the murder, but his dad segued right onto the subject from the obligatory blessing, as if these things were somehow connected.

  “I hardly knew him anymore,” Danny said when his dad asked how well the boys knew the victim. Pete said he didn’t know him at all, which wasn’t exactly true—he knew of him would have been a better way to describe it, for in a town as small as theirs you knew of everyone who was around your age, and Brandon Pierce was certainly not someone to court anonymity. He stood out in ways he probably did not want to. You couldn’t help but know of him.

  “I wouldn’t brag about it,” said Danny. And then he said, right in front of their parents, flat out at the supper table, that Pete sounded like he didn’t care to know Brandon, dead or alive.

  Pete stammered out his denials, and they were lame denials, the words too many and not enough at once. He was sure that he’d revealed himself in some unretractable way, and so he did what he usually did in these situations: he started yelling, and then, when everyone was wincing, he pushed his plate away.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” his dad asked as he rose from the table.

  “Where does he ever go?” said Danny.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete said, but his brother only rolled his eyes and speared a buttery brussels sprout and returned to Walter Cronkite, who was narrating footage of the fall of Saigon. The fall had taken place months ago but apparently it was still newsworthy, which depressed Pete a little. Life moved slowly enough without having its sluggishness confirmed on the nightly news. Pete decided to stay put and feign interest, since bolting would have made his tantrum more suspicious. A helicopter hovered above the roof of a shabby hotel; dozens of foreign correspondents and low-level diplomats angled for a place in the chopper, and dozens more Vietnamese were being held back by a line of American servicemen. Pete watched the chopper lift; a lone Vietnamese broke through the line and lunged for the runner, clinging as the chopper rose for a few seconds before dropping ten feet onto the helipad. The image touched that part of Pete that had been restless and unsettled since Saturday night, when he’d left a party at Brandon Pierce’s house with his friend Cozart and a boy named Lee Tysinger.

  “It’s a weeknight, Pete,” said his mom.

  “Yep. Wednesday. Hump day.”

  “No telling what you’re going to hump,” Danny said under his breath, but everyone heard, and it shocked Pete. Danny was too disgustingly polite to talk such trash in front of their mother. Something was seriously wrong with his brother, and Pete wasn’t the only one to notice it.

  “Jesus, you too now?” his dad said. “Watch your mouth, Daniel, and apologize to your mother.”

  Pete was tempted to stick around long enough to hear his apology but now seemed a good enough time as any to bolt, before the smoke cleared and his dad remembered to call out a curfew both of them knew he would never make.

  Briefly Pete ducked into his bedroom, rummaging through the pockets of his father’s old Ike jacket where he kept his stash and then fled, through the backdoor, across the yard, into the woods. In the after-supper dusk the woods quivered with soft shadows. Once again Pete was overcome with a sudden and intolerable anxiety. Normally he felt better as soon as he entered the shadowed secrecy of the woods, but tonight the pines crouched overhead as if bent by an insidious wind, and the needles whispered in this breeze, and Pete thought he heard the blades of that helicopter whipping the air. He looked to the sky to see the lone Vietnamese, desperate to flee his country’s doomed future, and even though he saw nothing but leaves and a thin smear of white sky, he felt he was that escapee, clinging with his fingernails to an airlifted safety. He closed his eyes and felt his grip loosening, felt himself falling, plummeting, about to hit ground.

  In the middle of the trail, Pete stopped and opened his Sucrets tin, lit the single joint inside. Fuck Cozart. Pete had promised to share it but he needed it now.

  A few hundred yards into the woods, a black pipe carrying sewage to the city treatment plant emerged from a sloping bank to run trestled above a dip of marshy land to higher, drier ground. Raleigh Roa
d Boys congregated at the black pipe nightly, converging on the pipe from the grids of split-levels and ranch houses that had eaten away at the once-vast woods. Long-haired, loose-limbed boys slashing air guitars and flinging their bangs to memorized Clapton solos stumbled from the brush to dance recklessly across the pipe to its greatest height, equidistant from either shore, where they plopped down and dangled their feet and spit into the cattails and rolled and passed joints, this being the safest place to toke up should a parent or cop turn up on either end.

  It happened once. Old sour-mugged Mr. Turrentine was out walking his beagle and came upon Pete and Cozart and a few others and hobbled back to his house to call the cops. A half hour later two Trent cops and the canine unit burst fat-assed and sweaty through the bushes. Pete was holding that night, and he discreetly dumped the evidence into the swampy pit below. Lined up on the bank, patted down and threatened with all grades of disproportional punishment, Pete and Cozart snickered as the dope dog splashed about in the stagnant water, turning up nothing more than a muddy Mountain Dew bottle.

  Cozart was already out on the pipe, waiting. When he smelled the pot he made it clear he was not waiting for Pete’s conversation.

  “Hey, no way, you said you’d wait.”

  “Woods be messing with my head,” said Pete. “Couldn’t wait.”

  “You been hanging around that nigger McRae, I can always tell. You come away talking like one of them.”

  Though Cozart was Pete’s best friend in the neighborhood, he was unapologetically racist. Pete hated that part of him, but not enough to give up on him. Pete had been raised never to use the word nigger nor associate with those who did. He knew his dad disliked his black friend, Anthony McRae for other reasons than the color of his skin, but sometimes he pretended his dad was a racist to justify hanging out with one so blatant as Cozart.

  “I’ll tell McRae you said that. He’ll kick your off-white ass.”

  Cozart snorted and snatched the joint from between Pete’s fingers.

  “So what was on the menu over at the Cozart castle?” Pete asked.

  “Boxed pizza. Tasted like box. You?”

  “Hamburger Helper. Needed some serious help, too, man. I should have gotten high before I ate.”

  “You probably did.” Cozart leaned over to examine Pete’s slitted eyes. “Didn’t you?”

  “Hours ago. At work. Me and McRae stepped out into the alley for what he referred to as some ‘herbal renewal.’”

  “Picked that term up from his neighborhood no doubt,” said Cozart. “Ain’t nothing over there worth renewing if you ask me. Fucking government throwing money at the spooks. Bunch of Caddies and Lincolns pulled up in front of shacks is all it is over there.”

  “I’ve heard this editorial before,” said Pete.

  Cozart sucked smoke and held it, gagging a little before he exhaled. “Your old man’s the one who writes editorials.”

  “Speaking of which, you see the paper tonight?”

  “You know my dad don’t take that commie fishwrap. He claims it will kill the grass, not that the little pissant y’all got delivering can manage to hit the lawn from his banana bike.”

  “Tell him we’ll be happy to mail it to him,” said Pete. “I take it you didn’t see the paper tonight?”

  “Hell no. Why?”

  “My dad wrote the article about Brandon.”

  “No way.”

  “Front page, lead headline, everything.”

  “And?”

  “They don’t know jack.”

  “They know his faggot ass is dead,” said Cozart.

  Cozart liked to rag on faggots, too. Niggers and queers. And the Mexican migrants, though he tended to forget about them when they weren’t in season, the way people forget about oranges and Christmas.

  “All they know is somebody beat him to death,” Pete said.

  “It said that in the paper?”

  “Coroner’s report.”

  Cozart shook his bangs out of his eyes. His hair was thin and parted easily in the middle, and it fell straight as a waterfall to his shoulders. Pete, with his dark kinky waves, envied Cozart’s hair, though he would never admit to something so vain.

  “What else?” said Cozart.

  Pete pinched the joint between his thumb and the calloused tip of his index finger, so singed that he doubted he even had a fingerprint left.

  “Want any more of this?”

  “Yeah I do. Since you bogarted the thing after promising to share it with your best bud.”

  “I paid for it, I guess I got the right to roll it up and suck on it.”

  “Yeah, well, suck on this,” said Cozart, grabbing his crotch.

  There were times when Pete recognized that his brother’s opinion of his friends was dead-on. He knew sides of them Danny didn’t, but those sides showed themselves so seldomly that he often forgot them himself. Still, he and Cozart had had some good times together.

  “What else did the paper say?” asked Cozart.

  “Nothing.”

  “So they don’t know anything yet. But you know some wussy’s going to start naming names.”

  Pete didn’t say anything. He’d caught a buzz but he knew it would not last. Soon he would lose this numbness, soon he would feel again; this realization made him more anxious than any news about the murder.

  “Why did we get in that car with him?” Pete said finally. He knew he wasn’t talking to Cozart, but Cozart shook his bangs and answered.

  “Seriously dumb move, man.”

  “We must of been way fucked up.”

  “Not as fucked up as we’re going to be if they find out we were with him.”

  Pete tossed the roach into the water below, watched it twist away downstream.

  “Let’s motivate,” he said.

  Cozart shrugged and they rose in springy limber looseness from the pipe. Cozart hummed loudly and dipped his arms like a thermal-riding hawk, which he always did at this point in the evening and which Pete wished he would not do tonight, since it reminded him of that chopper, brought back the unsettled fear and the image of unsuccessful escape and a dozen other things he could not name. He’d had trouble sleeping since Saturday night, which seemed like a month gone now. Every minute was tensely lived; even when high (and he’d spent the whole week wasted) Pete felt the seconds ticking away. He was used to feeling a similar if slightly lesser anxiety—he almost always had something to hide those days—but this was different. His life could go either way now, which is why he longed to be rescued, airlifted to safety, why the sleepy strip mall that awaited him on the other side of the woods seemed every bit as chaotic and dangerous as those six-month-old images of falling Saigon.

  “Where we headed?” said Cozart.

  “Where else?” said Pete. Nightly they made this trek, out of the woods and along Raleigh Road past porch-sitters they did not acknowledge who eyed them as if they were proof of the end of civilization, two shaggy-haired, insolent boys stumbling crooked and giggly from the woods, creatures from some primitive past or lawless future, either way, bad news. Once, high on angel dust sprinkled atop hash oil, Pete stopped in front of a porch filled with disapproving spectators, yelled out, “We’ll be back for your daughters when they come of age,” and yanked his pants down to punctuate his threat. Cozart and friends wrestled him into the backyard of an empty ranch house, where they hid from the cops all night under a sprawling magnolia.

  Remembering this, Pete flushed with shame. He kept his eyes on the pavement as they crossed South Boulevard to the thronged parking lot of the Glam-O-Rama.

  The Glam, it was called. Or GlamRock-A-Rama. Pete and Cozart hung there during hours not spent at the black pipe. The Glam was the southern point of a paved triangle that drew half the county’s teenagers into a tedious but perpetual orbit. Kids from the neighborhoods north of town,—known to be redder of neck, more given to fistfights and drag races—hung out in the parking lot of the Little Pep. The West Siders lined the sidewalks in fron
t of a coffeehouse run by the Episcopal Church, which was in a cool storefront though strictly chaperoned by the minister’s stringy wife, who did not wear a bra and played Jim Croce songs on the guitar and sometimes asked to smell the boys’ breath. East Trent was 95 percent black; by choice, historical precedent, or both, the blacks kept to themselves.

  The Glam was nothing special, a Laundromat frequented by washed-out young mothers with too many kids and a wretched enough trailer life not to mind doing clothes among a crowd of stoned and surly kids. There were two pinball machines and a Foosball table in the back, which the owner put in after he realized the kids were not going to leave him alone. He’d even added a jukebox, which Pete immediately commandeered, loading quarters into the slot and punching up the same two Allman Brothers songs—“Melissa” and “Blue Sky”—every night for months.

  And then there was nothing to do but waste quarters on pinball and more Allman Brothers, say the same things to largely the same people as every other night of his life. Saturday night was godawful, he wished it had never happened, but at least it upset the rhythm. There was a time, early on, when pot made things magical, transformed the woods behind his house into a fairytaleish domain, made his every nerve and capillary tingle, as if he’d been brought into the world in every moment he experienced while high, and that very moment was always and easily a lungful away. He remembered the moments he’d spent, freshly stoned with his friends, traipsing through the too-familiar landscape of his hometown recast as a place laden with possibility and wonder. A trip to the drugstore for fresh-squeezed lemonade made him feel like a conquistador, laying claim to a new land. The sidewalks of the Raleigh Road strip mall might have belonged to New York or London, crowded with citizens whose own stories, ones Pete sometimes narrated aloud for his friends, were suddenly colorful and significant, ever worthy of his curiosity. Music, back in those days, had always sounded glorious. Always an anthemic aria played loudly in Pete’s head; he timed his feet to it, it spilled from trees and power lines, from clouds and the heavens above, as if the world itself hummed these tunes to accompany its perpetual turning.