Virginia Lovers (14 page)

“No you don’t,” said Thomas, but of course he told her anyway.

5

DANIEL SPRAWLED IN THE
shade of an oak behind a gas station. A dirty patch of woods in Somewhere, Virginia. Trucks and buses hummed past on the highway. Between them settled a bleak weekday quiet that reminded Daniel of sickdays. He held his head in his hands and watched ants swarm a hill. The things they carried back to their quarters—bits of corn chips, a crust of bread spread with pimento cheese—were too big for them, yet they shouldered their harvest dutifully He watched with admiration, as if their tireless industry might inspire him to action.

But all he could do was watch until his little brother came splashing through the brush.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. Thought you were in the bathroom.”

“Look at these ants,” said Daniel.

Pete kneeled, his hands plastered across the blown-out knees of his jeans.

“They working their asses off,” he said. Crouching, he watched not the ants but his brother studying the ants. “Anything in particular you want me to take away from this?”

Daniel felt a surge in his belly. It might have been a remnant of big-brotherdom, this rumbling, an instinctual attempt to lead his brother out of harm’s way, teach him a lesson. But it seemed too late for such an impulse, and he decided it could just as easily be thirst.

He said as much. “Take away whatever you want to, I’m thirsty as hell.”

Pete returned to the gas station and bought his brother an orange soda. Daniel turned it up and sucked bubbles from the bottom of the glass. When the soda was empty Pete said, “We best be motivating.”

In the parking lot, Daniel made for the car, but Pete stopped him.

“I sold it,” he said.

“What?”

“The Galaxy. He gave me eight hundred dollars for it. I could have gotten way more but there’s no title. I didn’t even know what a title was. Turns out I know fuck all about selling a car.”

“You sold the car?”

“He asked me if it was hot. I fed him all kinds of bullshit. We need to bolt before he changes his mind.”

Daniel noticed two coveralled men watching them from the mechanic’s bay.

“How are we supposed to get anywhere without a car?”

“I’ll tell you where we’ll get
with
a car. Jail, that’s where. You know they’ve reported us missing by now and you know damn well they’ve got every cop on the East Coast looking for that car.”

“I don’t remember deciding we were going to run from the police,” said Daniel. Actually, he remembered very little of the day before. What he did remember floated back to him fuzzily, out of sequence, which made it all the easier to forget.

“Somebody’s got to decide something. I don’t see you doing anything but studying your ant farm.”

“This isn’t some episode of
Starsky & Hutch,”
said Daniel. But what was it, really? It might as well be some tired cop show, for all the resemblance it had to his life up until a week ago.

“You want to go home?” said Pete. “Fine by me. You tell them what you saw over at Brandon’s and I’ll tell them what I overheard and like you said back in Fayettenam, we’ll be sharing a bunk bed again—in jail.”

“Did I say I wanted to go home? I don’t remember saying anything about what we’re going to do next.”

“You don’t remember much of anything, do you?”

Now he had to think about it. He remembered leaving the bar and he remembered waking in the backseat of the car in the parking lot of this gas station and he remembered listening to his little brother, stretched out in the front seat, sigh in his sleep, and he thought he remembered him talking in his sleep but he wasn’t so sure about that because he had gotten out of the car to be sick again in the woods. He climbed back into the car, smelly and dizzy, then had fallen asleep again and when he next came to his brother was handing him a Goody’s powder, which he swore would fix his stomach right up, and a Coke, and he slipped into the woods just in case the Goody’s did not go down so well, while apparently Pete struck a deal with the men from the gas station who were still watching them now as they stood arguing in the parking lot.

“The longer we stand here the more suspicious we look,” said Pete. He struck off toward the highway. Daniel followed a few feet behind.

They hiked along the shoulder of the road, not talking. At some point during the next half hour both attempted conversation, but nothing surfaced which did not relate to their present predicament.

“Hold up for a moment, I need to take a whiz,” said Pete. He disappeared through a hole in the roadside woods, and when he returned he held an insouciant thumb out to flashing traffic.

“Fuck walking.”

“Yeah man, fuck it,” Daniel said. He was aiming for his trademark sarcasm but Pete did not even acknowledge his remark, which made him think he was suddenly and maybe forever on his little brother’s level, that there was no way he could hold himself above him now even through language.

A van stopped for them. A country hippie carpenter in dusty construction worker clothes who was going to visit his brother in the university hospital up in Charlottesville. After five minutes of silence, Pete said, “What’s wrong with your brother if you don’t mind me asking?”

The driver said his brother fell off a scaffolding while building a movie theater.

Pete said, “Bummer, man, sorry to hear it.”

The driver said, “Yeah, he’s fucked up. Broke both his legs, punctured his lung.”

“Ouch,” said Pete. But he was thinking of his own brother, who appeared pretty fucked up too, though normal to look at him. He was still wearing his favorite—maybe his only—T-shirt. V
IRGINIA
I
S FOR
L
OVERS
, it read in sappy red script, over a blood-red heart.

These shirts were the rage for fifteen minutes a year or so ago but now they were way over, not that Pete paid much attention to the faddish attire of that segment of the teenaged population given to such purchases. Currently it was Adidas shirts, worn by thousands less athletically inclined than he was. Daniel seemed too smart for his T-shirt, especially given their dad’s profession and how often their father lectured them on the power of the media—especially advertising—to distort the truth. The truth was they were in Virginia at that moment. The truth was that Virginia was no more or no less for lovers than the rest of the forty-nine states. The truth was that Daniel looked even more the fool wearing this T-shirt in the very state it made such absurd claims about.

“Y’all going to the concert tonight?”

“What concert?” said Pete.

“James Gang up at the university,” said the driver.

“No shit, James Gang.” Pete pictured the jacket photo of one of their albums, three freaks lounging on chopped Harleys. Outlaws.
James Gang Rides Again.
Jesse James and all that Wild West lore filled his head. He got his stories mixed up, a shootout in an O.K. Corral, Billy the Kid, that movie Dylan was in, Pat Garrett, Bonnie and Clyde even, he was in love with Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, so beautiful in her last bloody moments, her hand limp across the car seat, falling half out of the car, crumpled, the car so shot up, so unfair the way they killed them, the law chasing them everywhere they went in the world.

Daniel, meanwhile, thought of food. He was hungry after saying earlier to his younger brother (who, while Daniel suffered through his Goody’s powder, scarfed down a honey bun, the sticky dough leaving sugary kisses on the plastic as he pulled it out and stuffed it in his mouth, chased it with a Sprite)
I don’t see how you can eat after yesterday, I’ll never eat again,
and now he was hungry enough to go along with anything his little brother said, did. He saw he’d have to sit through a noisy smoky concert in some overheated college gymnasium while Pete whipped his neck back and forth and waved his lighter overhead. He’d do anything if his little brother would just buy him a cheeseburger, for he was broke and his little brother had eight hundred dollars and the way he figured it, the car belonged to him, too. His dad had bought it for the two of them to get around. That money was half his.

They parted ways with the brother of the broken-legged scaffold accident in the parking lot of the huge university hospital, among swarms of people wearing white. Thick white shoes on the feet of nurses, sleek white hose turning their legs into powder. The two brothers worked their way up the street running alongside the campus where Pete cornered the first person he saw with hair past his shoulders and said in his cooler-than-thou rasp, “Where might one buy some smoke?”

“Which one?” said the freak. He studied Daniel, not kindly.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Daniel said. After a stunned second the freak laughed at him, and Pete, amazed, laughed himself.

“Come on,” said the freak, and they followed him down a side-street past a bike shop and a used bookstore and a restaurant with long tables of students spread out beneath thick grape arbors. Daniel studied the tables laden with pitchers of beer and big baskets of fries.

“I’m stopping there, give me some money Pete,” said Daniel. His brother told the freak to wait up just a moment and he led Daniel a few yards away and said, “Hey, we can eat later, I’ll buy you a fucking rib-eye, just hold your horses and don’t talk any more Superfly shit to my man, okay, this won’t take but a few minutes.”

Daniel dropped behind as they took another sidestreet, which led across some railroad tracks. Crossing the ties with careful giant steps, he watched the shards of glass glint in the gravel, raised his head to nod to students passing by on their way to class and imagined he was here, too, in school. He liked it here. The girls were pretty and he tried to want them. But the boys were red-cheeked in the slight chill and he did not have to force himself to feel a thing for them, and he fantasized as he straddled the tracks that he was following a boy back to his apartment. He wished it was raining, and though he said he would never drink again not two hours earlier, he wished in the rain they would stop beneath the bridge up ahead, him and his friend, and trade back and forth a bottle of red wine or even whiskey, which he hated the taste of, didn’t like the smell of it on his father’s breath.

His father was in Pete’s thoughts, too, at that moment. Wondering what his dad was thinking, where he thought they were, if he had connected their disappearance to the stories he had to write to sell papers to damn fools.
Of course he has connected it and of course he knows we didn’t do it but if we didn’t do it (and we didn’t) why are we running what was I thinking this thing just got out of hand like things just do with me, start out simple enough, a trip over to Fayetteville to seedy Hay, next thing I know some freak’s leading me into his basement apartment says take a seat gentlemen puts on Robin Trower,
Bridge of Sighs,
brings out his stash, a half pound looks like in a paper Safeway bag.

Daniel watched his brother weigh the bags of leafy green in his hand as the freak rolled a joint and Pete talked to him about some band called Captain Beyond, which Pete and the freak judged in every way excellent. Pete lit the joint, passed it his way. He knew he could not turn it down, knew it was the last thing he wanted. He didn’t want to think about what he wanted, not then and not in an hour, and he took the joint and smoked, and there were two more guys in the room suddenly, one sweaty and dressed in gym shorts and a raggedy sweatshirt bearing the name of a Virginia prep school, just back from soccer practice he said. Daniel tried to look past him at the poster of Cesar Chavez, which made him smirk. Rich kids boycotting grapes. He toked on the joint and listened to the chatter in the room but not really because he was a student there and he was late for class, and he sat in silence on the edge of a couch imagining that he shared a dorm room with this soccer player and before he knew what he was saying he was on his feet telling his little brother and the rest of the room
It’s been real but I gotta go to class.

“You guys go to school here?” said the freak.

“He does,” says Pete, “I’m just visiting.” He gave his big brother a look of amazed terror, which made Daniel want to laugh. The very idea that Pete would be worried that these boys would find them out when they were hiding so much more from people who mattered so much more.

The soccer player was asking Daniel a question and because Daniel was abruptly and decisively back in the moment, real time, the capital
P
Present, he was able to listen as the soccer player asked him what class he was off to. Daniel did not look at the soccer player’s sweaty brow, the brown hair plastered across his forehead, the down glistening golden on his arms and legs.

“Astronomy.”

The three students talked about how cool a course astronomy is, you just go to class wasted and the lights dim and the planets come up on the screen and you can either go to sleep or just lie back and trip out.

“Motherfucker of a final,” said the soccer player, and he warned Daniel about the math and shit involved.

“Math and shit,” Daniel mumbled, leaking laughter. The pot being stupendous. Bringing all of him fully into the moment so that with one breath Daniel was a student at the University of Virginia getting stoned before astronomy class and with the next he was a fugitive wanted along with his little brother for a crime it would be thereafter hard to convince anyone they did not commit.

“How much?” said Pete to his man, and he forked over the money and Daniel rose too quickly, eager now that he had proclaimed himself a student to get to class, watch the heavens twinkling above him. Outside, stoned and blinking in the autumn light, Pete said, “Watch out for that math and shit,” and giggled as he did when he was four.

They walked along the street riding waves of laughter touched off by some idiotic remark or the other as the students back from class streamed past them.

“You remember how to get back?” Pete asked his brother, then laughing again, quick wheezy breaths, he lowered his voice and said, as if the pot had buoyed him from hilarity to misery, laughter to sniffling tears, “They think we did it. They woke up this morning and when we didn’t come home they probably called the cops and the cops figured it out and now we’re wanted up and down the—”