Virginia Lovers Page 6

  “Groovy,” Daniel said, though he secretly wanted to laugh. Don’t laugh, you’ll encourage him, their dad always said when Pete started up at the dinner table in one of his nothing’s-sacred-every-thing’s-a-target for-my-sarcasm moods, and they all tried to ignore him, but even their mom and dad failed the straight face sometimes.

  “Yeah, groovy,” said Pete. He fingered the steering wheel with one hand while his free hand disappeared down his pants.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Daniel asked, turning his head away, keeping his eyes on the road. Someone needed to.

  Pete pulled out a Sucrets tin from his underwear. Daniel had seen this box enough to know what it held. Often Pete would arrive home reeking, as though he’d been in a phone booth all night long with someone blowing reefer smoke in his hair and on his clothes, and their dad would ask him if he was “messed up,” and Pete would grin his lopsided goofy grin and say, “No, why do you ask?” Other times he would say, calmly, “No, are you?”

  Once their dad popped him when he said this. Their dad wasn’t a spare-the-rod type, but he’d succumbed to the corporal with Pete a time or two. Seemed to Daniel that Pete liked it. It allowed him to feel that he had all the more reason to go out and get wasted. Oh, my dad beat me, I’m abused. Daniel wished his dad would see how he was just making things worse when he laid his hands on Pete, but Daniel didn’t think it was his place to offer advice on how to be an effective parent.

  “You’re not going to smoke that while I’m in the car,” Daniel told him.

  “Scared you’ll lose your chance at the scholarship?”

  Daniel already knew what Pete felt about his attempt to win the Carmichael—that he was groveling, pathetic, going out for football and running track just to prove himself more well rounded” in the eyes of the panel of snooty lawyers who chose the winners. But it was a lot of money, and Daniel knew his parents were going to be strapped with both boys in college at the same time. He figured it was the least he could do to help out. Nobody was forcing him. His dad had sort of mentioned it once, a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if sort of thing, and Daniel knew that the only way he would even be in the running was if he went out for some sport. He also knew that he’d almost rather skip college than humiliate himself on the football field in front of guys he’d long since learned to ignore. But he wanted out and he was willing to suffer for it.

  “Well, I don’t really feel like getting arrested,” Daniel said. “I think sitting around some jail would be a supreme waste of time, your theories of time notwithstanding.”

  “Notwithstanding, you say?” Pete lit the joint with a lighter he’d fished off the dashboard, and Daniel reached over to grab the joint and toss it out the window, but Pete dodged his swipe and said, “Hey, don’t fuck with the pilot. You just sit tight and ride shotgun. I ain’t letting you out here.”

  They were a couple of miles out of town by then, just past the country club their dad had joined because he thought it would be good for business. The boys always felt uncomfortable there. The other members made them feel like they were crashing their party, as though somehow it was obvious to everyone that their dad joined only because he thought he might bring in more advertising from his Thursday-afternoon eighteen holes or Sunday dinners at the club. It embarrassed Daniel. Privately his dad talked at the supper table about how badly he wanted to write an editorial criticizing the club’s racism—Daniel had heard that Jews were not let in until last year and God forbid you’d see a black man on the golf course who wasn’t behind a mower—but publicly Dad pressed hands in the clubhouse bar. It wasn’t like him, and he knew Daniel knew, and when he used to ask Daniel why he didn’t go to the dances out there or swim at the pool in the summers Daniel would always say, “You know the answer to that question.” Once his father lost it and said, “You know, Danny, you’re going to have a hard time in this world if you stay so self-righteous,” and Daniel said, “That sounds to me like another way of saying something else”—he was on to his father’s pathetic attempt to make Daniel appear uppity when it was his father who was the coward. This was the first, and really the only, time Daniel got a sense of what it must be like to be Pete, because his dad looked at him then the way he looked at Pete all the time, as if he had no idea what to do with him and could not for the life of him figure out what had gone so wrong between them. Somehow this look of hopelessness and confusion was more hurtful than outright anger.

  Daniel could not say it brought him any closer to his brother, though hating the country club put them on the same side of things—a rare occurrence. Though Daniel and his brother disagreed about almost everything there was still enough left over from when they were best friends for him to feel as though he shared with Pete something that no one else in his life ever after would be able to understand or approximate. They had in common a sensibility a vision of the world and their place in it, and it depended on a kind of superiority, a belief in their own intelligence and allegiance to things that matter, which verged on snobbishness but wasn’t finally, because they were just as likely to find something to admire in their crazy neighbor who raised chow chows and chinchillas for a living and who had a daughter who came over to their house to sing fundamentalist hymns with a pronounced warble tremoloing each penultimate syllable like a radio preacher than in, say, someone whose sense of the world came close to their own. Not that Daniel knew many people who fit that bill.

  This was one of the reasons why it was so frustrating for Daniel to be around his brother. Because Daniel knew that whatever Pete did, however much trouble he got into, he still understood Daniel, and Daniel him, in a way that no one else could. But that didn’t mean he wanted to ride around the back roads all day with him and flunk his trig test.

  “Okay,” Daniel said. “What do I have to do to get you to turn around?”

  Pete smoked his joint and pretended to think about it. He seemed to fall into one of his infamously dark moods.

  “There’s one thing that might make this day a little easier.” They were passing a country store. Pete whipped into the parking lot and pulled up next to a bench of old country loafers in trademark country loafer getup: overalls, feed caps, work boots.

  “Forget it,” Daniel said. “I’m not buying you any beer.”

  “Wouldn’t be for just me.”

  “I try to wait until five o’clock most days.”

  Pete looked at his brother with his slitty eyes and smiled. Daniel hated how untrustworthy Pete looked when he was high. He was almost always high.

  “Little party action you’re trying to hide from me, huh?”

  For some reason this embarrassed Daniel. “I’m not the goody-goody you like to think I am.”

  “That’s what I’m hearing.” Pete said this quietly, underbreath, as if it hurt a little to say it. Daniel imagined Pete hearing something about him from one of his buddies, something vicious and all wrong, and it both saddened and annoyed him enough to want to get out of the car.

  Then there was the other hand, the hand that was not all about Daniel. Maybe his brother needed him. It hadn’t happened in years, and buying beer for him would not be a big-brotherly move if Pete was in some kind of trouble and needed his help. But helping Pete might allow him to forget his own problems for a while. As would a few beers.

  “What kind?”

  “Six of Bud should do us for now. Until we hit Hay Street.”

  “I’m not going with you to Hay Street.” Hay Street was a sleazy carnival of strip bars, massage parlors, and adult bookstores in downtown Fayetteville. “FayetteNam” they called it, filled with grunts who’d come back from the war with Vietnamese women they’d married and then abandoned once they got back home and realized that their families and ex-girlfriends and the buddies who had pulled deferments hated them for marrying outside their race. Hay Street was a rite of passage for boys in Trent. Daniel would never let Pete know it, but he’d been there himself, though not for the same things Pete and his buddies went there to find.


  “Suit yourself,” Pete said. He reached in his wallet and handed Daniel some bills. “Just get the six, we’ll ride around in the country, take in some nature.”

  “Okay, nature boy,” Daniel said. Inside he suffered the unnerving scrutiny he always drew inside some shabby country store. For some reason Pete could go in a place like that and they didn’t even notice him, but when Daniel walked in it was like a stranger beeper went off and they watched his every move. The girl behind the counter didn’t card Daniel, though— she looked to be about Pete’s age, and Daniel guessed they were far enough out in the country that the liquor laws didn’t really apply. He hated growing up in Trent. He’d always felt that he should be living in a city. Everything in his life would be fine, he thought, if his father had taken a job in Raleigh or Charlotte or better yet someplace out of state, for Daniel was not real crazy about the South, either. He despised that abysmal southern rock that Pete was into—Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band.

  Once Daniel, who admittedly knew very little about the subject, argued with Pete about rock ‘n’ roll, but Daniel was in one of those moods when he’d argue with Pete just for the sake of it. Pete claimed that all rock ‘n’ roll was Southern, really, that all important American music was Southern by birth—jazz and blues and country and soul—and their dad, who was listening in on this argument, said, “Pete’s got a point: roots of it all are right down here in the cotton patch.” Daniel started whistling “Dixie” and told them both that they ought to get out more, like he was some kind of regular visitor to Manhattan. Pete had an amazing head for irrelevant trivia; he could tell you who the session players were for some Velvet Underground album as if that meant anything in the scheme of things. Once, he constructed this chart for their mom, who was trying to draw him out and asked him some naive and not terribly sincere question about some rocker—wasn’t he in some other band? Pete created a timeline on a sheet of newsprint he brought home from his dad’s office that he rolled out in the living room, tracing the interconnected and nepotistic careers of all these rock stars Daniel had never even heard of, not that he gave a damn.

  Back in the car, Daniel stowed the beer in the backseat, ignoring Pete’s outstretched hand. He let it hang there, empty, until Pete started the car. When they were back on the road, Daniel broke open the six, handed one to his brother; he took one for himself, but held it unopened. He knew he couldn’t go to school, not with beer on his breath. If he missed that test he could not expect more than an A- for the term, and he was after a 4.0 to cushion his deficiency on the football field.

  “Go ahead,” Pete said, “You know you’re going to drink it eventually.”

  Holding the sweaty beer in his hand, Daniel felt as if he’d been released from the slow but steady creep of time itself, as if the clock had stopped, giving him a day off to waste with his little brother. It was his father’s failing, time—before Daniel even understood time he understood his father’s relationship to it, how it hobbled him, grayed his hair. Assiduously performing the tasks that would impress the committee, Daniel saw how he had inherited this enslavement to the hours of the day. It seemed a terrible trait to share, since it wasn’t something that could be discussed or even acknowledged. He had enough problems he could not talk about.

  Daniel popped the ring of his beer, reached over to turn on the radio, knowing what was coming. Pete listened exclusively to WQDR, stale headbanger rock, and Daniel liked WKIX, which played top 40 and classic soul and wasn’t nearly as self-consciously cool as Pete’s station. As soon as his hand left the dial, Pete twisted it, cranking up Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up.”

  “Lead singer of this band used to be in the Zombies,” he said.

  “I guess this was on your chart,” Daniel said. He made relentless fun of his little brother’s rock lineage chart, of the way Pete treated it as if it explained civilization or culture.

  “You’re just jealous because you didn’t know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.”

  “You know, the ancient Greeks believed there was a slot in the back of your head, and when your brain was filled with useless information, that slot opened automatically and discarded the fluff so you could have more room for stuff that counted.”

  “Like trigonometry, you mean? Or the names of the judges for the Carmichael scholarship?”

  Pete knew how to get to him, always. But already the beer, settling on nothing but a half-bowl of cereal and a banana, was allowing Daniel to afford Pete his insults. Daniel needed a day when he just did not care, needed it so badly he was willing to put up with Pete’s slights.

  “I’m just saying maybe you need to get your slot checked. See if it needs oil or something. Maybe it’s rusted shut. Maybe your hair’s so thick back there nothing can get past it.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe yours is working so well you can pretty much push out anything that comes between you and that scholarship.”

  Daniel wasn’t strong enough or high enough to let this go.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m just curious, bro, how far you’d be willing to go just to get the hell out of Trent.”

  Pete, suddenly, was intimidating him.

  “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want,” Pete said. “We’ll save it for later. How about another round?”

  Daniel drained his beer and popped another, ensuring that there would be no return to school, priming himself for this later Pete kept threatening. He slouched into a sullen silence, drank his beer and watched the stubbly fields flash past as he pondered Pete’s question: What would he be willing to do to escape?

  But he could not answer Pete’s question now and he saw no reason to confess to his brother until confronted with whatever it was Pete knew. Daniel drank his beer, and watched the outskirts of Fayetteville lay claim on the pine forests and tobacco fields. They crossed the muddy Cape Fear at its widest, and immediately the sleaze began: pawnshops and topless bars, tattoo parlors and “adult emporiums,” dozens of windowless cinderblock bars. For years, thousands of boys from every state in the Union had arrived there weekly to do their duty, either by government decree or a desperation so great that they would run off to war to avoid another moment in their hometowns. Daniel spotted them everywhere, the parking lots of convenience stores, in souped-up cars flashing past in other lanes, their scalps pink beneath crewcut stubble, their camouflage uniforms a joke against the grayness of paved-over forest.

  “Not a tree in sight,” Daniel said.

  “Our excursion has opened your eyes to nature after all.”

  “It’s human nature that wrecked this place.”

  “As a student of human nature, you’ll love our next stop.”

  Daniel didn’t like the sound of this but thought he might as well really go along for the ride, let his brother show him whatever it was he had to show him. Even Hay Street, or Pete’s version of Hay Street.

  “I need a pit stop,” Daniel said.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “We better be.” They cruised downtown, past the old slave market that had been reclaimed by the arts council. Now its walls held bland pastel still lifes by artsy ladies whose ancestors had once gone there to bid on black people. Daniel got lost for a few blocks thinking about how some places in this world seemed reserved for those who would never change. When he came to they were in the darkest heart of Hay Street and his brother was nosing the Galaxy into a metered space in front of Rick’s Lounge, the most notorious strip joint in eastern North Carolina.

  “What?”

  “Human Nature, Exhibit A.” Pete pointed to a corner where two Vietnamese girls in vinyl miniskirts and jean jackets smiled listlessly at cars backed up at the light. Daniel looked across the street to the Fine Arts Theatre, now showing a masterpiece of cinema called Thar She Blows, its poster featuring a huge-breasted mermaid wrapping her scaly tail around a phallic harpoon.

  “Oh, brother,” Daniel said.

  “At
your service.”

  “Start the car, then.”

  “Tour begins in two seconds. We need a place where we can talk. You said you needed a bathroom, right?”

  “McDonald’s will do fine.”

  “Too bad,” Pete said, and he pocketed the keys and was inside Rick’s before Daniel could pull himself out of the car.

  Inside was eye-blinking black. Neon beer signs diced shadows from the darkness, and clouds of smoke laced those shadows. Daniel smelled beer and sweat and some industrial-strength disinfectant meant to cover the aroma but only made it more prominent. He had never been in a strip joint before and he was afraid it showed somehow, though those present would hardly witness his self-consciousness: a bored greaser behind the bar who did not seem to notice nor care that the boys were underage, and a half-dozen early-morning drinkers, mostly enlisted men, seated at tables that came into focus only gradually, and down at the end of the bar a group of girls, obviously dancers, sipping Cokes and talking in a huddle. On the curved stage that ran behind the bar a lone girl dressed like a nurse danced to the O’Jays’ “Love Train.”

  Pete sat right in front of her, of course. Daniel didn’t feel he could argue with him anymore. He was sure he knew what this was about and wanted only to get it over with so that they could leave this place, which did not offend him because he was above it, but rather because it seemed so desperate a place to spend your morning. He couldn’t look at the girl, who was inching her nurse’s uniform up to show the straps linking her white hose to her tiny panties.