Virginia Lovers (15 page)

“I’m hungry,” said Daniel. “I’m goddamn famished.”

His little brother looked sadly his way as if Daniel’s hunger at a time like this was a sign of some grave unalterable flaw.

They arrived at the street running alongside campus where they found a sub shop and had a fight about whether it was to go, their foot-long subs, or eat in so Pete could drink a beer. Daniel ignored his little brother and carried his sub outside and crossed the street to the grounds of the university and planted himself upside a huge oak in front of a building bearing in a marbled cornice the engraved names of philosophers.

Hours to kill. They slayed them with more pot and a pitcher of beer at a pizza parlor and a walk through the chilly streets of Charlottesville, which was ringed with squat mountains, blue misty hills corralling them there and blocking out all they had left behind. Hours disposed of casually, weaving in and out of storefronts that looked the slightest bit interesting: a head shop, a thrift shop where they each bought suit coats and flannel shirts and hats in case of rain, Pete’s a John Deere tractor cap from which his frizzy hair spilled defiantly, Daniel an old man’s beat black fedora chosen because of the embarrassment which shaded his little brother’s face when he tried it on.

Daniel sought some part of the city not overrun by students. Everywhere more students, carrying backpacks, couples curling their arms around each other, students on bicycles and motorcycles, more of them running along the sidewalk in sweats proclaiming the name of their school. It depressed him for this was what he could have had and what he’d lost. What bothered him the most was the sexy ease with which they walked through their day, how obviously entitled they were to their leisure—gangs of them sipping beers on the balcony of a second-story bar, young lovers lying entwined on the grassy grounds. As if they had not worked at all to get there, as if it was given, understood, their place. Daniel knew that not one of them had to pass himself off as a jock or a heterosexual to get here.

When they arrived at a train station he stopped dead center of the sidewalk.

“We’re getting on a train,” he said.

“No way, bro. Sober up now. We’re going to see the James Gang.”

“I’m not going to see the James Gang.” He felt himself heating up, as if he was back in Trent, picking a thousandth futile fight with his little brother. “I’m not going to see Captain Beyond or Robin Trower either.”

“Well, that’s cool because they ain’t playing, it’s only the James Gang,” Pete said, and he launched into one of their songs, strumming air guitar chords so wildly students had to veer into the gutter to avoid getting clobbered.

“I’m not going. But don’t let me stop you. Give me half the dough and we’ll split up.”

Pete looked crushed. He had been this way since he was a baby, so easy to read, every emotion registering in neon the moment it hit, impossible for him to hide anything. Daniel remembered when they were younger and he would tell Pete that he was adopted, how quickly and drastically the horror crumpled his brother’s face and then his entire body.

“It’s half mine,” said Daniel.

“I’m the one who sold the goddamn thing while you were laid out under a tree studying ants. Plus I never drove it, you drove it all the time. You wore it out, put all those miles on it, I never got to use my half, I deserve more.”

“You should really be in school, Pete. Debate team is meeting as we speak. They need you desperately.”

“Which train is it you’re so hot to take?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“What do you want with Washington, D.C?”

“I’ve never been there. I’d like to see the Washington Monument.”

“This ain’t a fucking field trip, brotherman.”

“What is it, soul brother?”

Pete lit a cigarette, blew smoke down the street, and said, “We got to go back. If we don’t go back we’ll be in a whole lot more trouble than we already are.”

“You started this excursion. It was your idea. What happened?”

“What happened to
you!
You aren’t acting right.”

“No?”

Pete smoked, but the smoke could not shroud his agitation.

“Man, come on, Dan, we’re in a whole shitload of trouble. We sold the car.”

“You’re the one who sold it, remember? But I still get half and I want it now.”

“So you can see the Washington Monument?”

“This place depresses me. If I’m not going to spend the next four years in some college town, I don’t want to spend any more time around these assholes than I have to.”

“You’re going to spend the next twenty years in jail if we don’t turn around and go home.”

“I’m not going home.”

Pete put his cigarette out on the heel of his boot. He tottered, lost his balance almost, trying to act as if he did not give a damn what his brother said. He spat on the sidewalk but could not hide his fear, and Daniel could see it creeping through his body, tightening his stance and turning his slack, stoned grin into a wince. It was so obvious, this shift, that Daniel felt something through all the leftover booze and the pot and the indifference that came from giving up everything he had worked for, settling for so much less. What something was this he felt? Maybe sympathy, pity maybe. He was on the verge of identifying it when the numbness returned and he said to his brother, “Okay, you can go with me. Come on.”

Pete shook his head. “Man, you’re crazy.”
I
created a monster,
Pete thought as his brother walked toward the dingy train station. But when his brother disappeared inside, Pete, terrified of being left behind, followed.

He stood in line behind his brother who sensed his presence and did him the favor of not acknowledging, not prodding, as he usually would have. Daniel extended the favor of not talking until they were seated an hour later on the train, which jerked to a start and crawled first through the poor black eastside tumbling bungalows then into hillbilly neighborhoods of flapping backyard sheets and weedwild vegetable gardens and finally into farmland so pristine and crisply whitefenced it seemed to both brothers, who knew only the landscape they’d fled, like something out of
National Geographic
or some movie about rich horsey girls who fall in love with stable boys.

Pete thought of how he really wanted not the easy, slutty, halter-topped types he had such luck with down by the black pipe, but just once a real date. One of those severely smooth-skinned country club girls who would not speak to him even after he joined the country club. He thought of what they’d do: drive up to Raleigh or down to Wilmington, see a movie, visit a jazz club you had to go down steps to enter, brick walls and dim little lamps on each table, and the rich girl would prove not at all what he predicted by turning out sweet and smart and interested in his dissection of the contrasting tonal sax styles of Cannonball and ‘Trane on
Kind of Blue.

Outside the pastures gave way to forest and occasionally the great estate and then into the small proud redbrick towns of the upper Virginia Piedmont, Orange, Culpeper, Warrenton. Pete drifted off to sleep with his mouth open and descended so deeply into some gone zone that the gum in his mouth fell into his lap and he did not even notice. Daniel reached over to pick the gum from his brother’s crotch carefully only to turn as he deposited it on the underside of the seat to find the man and woman across the aisle watching.

He found he did not care at all what they thought, for who knew him and why hide this part of him now that there was so much more to hide?

He relaxed into his seat, determined to keep going, vigilantly prolonging his escape. His blood thumped to a chant:
I
will not go back, I will not go back.
There was money enough to send his little brother back on a bus and let him explain to their parents and the police that he went along only to try and talk Daniel out of running, that Daniel asked him to drop him off that morning at the bus station and Pete refused and went with him as far as Richmond thinking he’d change his mind, and when they stopped for a bathroom break Daniel sold the car and with the money kept on going north, and Pete tried and tried to talk him out of it, he hung in there as far north as Washington where his brother when last seen was sitting atop a double-decker tour bus.

Which took them down to the Mall, past the Capitol and the Washington Monument standing watch at the far end and let them out by the Smithsonian, which Pete insisted on visiting as he’d heard much about it from the
National Geographics
his parents had given him for years to try and get him interested in reading. Of course they needed to refresh their buzz first.

“Very cool,” Pete said after an hour wandering among the exhibits. “Now where?”

“My turn,” said Daniel.

Pete followed him down the Mall, past the bland beige government buildings, then away from the Mall, uphill into the city proper. Pete watched until he was nearly out of sight, then took off running, every smoke he’d had in his life coming back to him as he trudged up the hill in his work boots. He followed his brother a few feet behind, past corner delis, drugstores, banks, office buildings.

After a half hour of walking they arrived at a string of bars not, judging from the outside, host to upscale Washingtonians or even thirsty commuters. Daniel passed one that tripped some vague switch within him and he backed up, stared into the cool darkness and breathed big and quick when he saw only men. There was the question of what to do with his little brother, who asked him, “You’re not going in there, are you?”

Daniel didn’t answer. He stood still outside the propped-open doors, as if waiting to be ushered inside on account of his innocence and his good virginal looks.

Pete said, “I ain’t about to go in there.”

“Nobody’s asking you to,” said Daniel. He stripped off his ridiculous headgear and handed it and his used suit coat to his brother as if his brother was some butler standing aside to take his castoffs. He put one foot tentatively in front of another and understood that the stupendous pot would float him inside where it was warm and loud with Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on the jukebox, and then just as quickly the pot took away what guts he had and sent him down the street in an almost-trot, his little brother so close behind him he felt his breath on his neck.

“You don’t want to go in there,” said Pete. Daniel stopped. People streamed around them in the middle of the sidewalk. A black man pushed into Pete and told him to get the fuck out the way. Instead of talking trash, Pete said meekly, “Hey, sorry.”

“Yes, I do want to go in there,” Daniel said, “that’s exactly what I want to do, what I came here to do.”

“You mean you didn’t really want to see the Washington Monument? ‘Cause I don’t know, I kind of did want to see it. I mean …”

Pete fell silent. They stood there, sidewalk traffic diverted around them like river water around debris, until Daniel told Pete to go back down to the Mall and smoke another joint and see some more of the Smithsonian, he’d meet him later outside the museum.

“Okay, see you later, fine,” Pete said, but did not move.

“So go,” said Daniel, then watched him away and up the sidewalk, and in one moment he chased after his brother and led him to a pay phone and they called their parents and asked them to come get them, and in the same moment he walked back to the bar where once again he felt drawn in by waves of desire though in fact it was far from a moment as it took three passes and close to fifteen minutes before he actually stepped inside the dark space. While working up his nerve he thought of Brandon. He wondered if Brandon had ever been to a bar like this. Daniel thought of how much he was throwing away—college, family, his upstanding young reputation—just to take this one step.

Brandon was dead. Daniel liked Brandon only slightly less in death than he did when he had to hear him bitch about his life, but he knew what happened to Brandon could just as well have happened to him. Therefore he could not hesitate, could not make another sweep past this bar.

Inside, he jerked stiff-boned up to the bar. A bartender with a wide black bushy mustache and short military hair leaned way across to his stool, smiled at him as if he knew exactly how nervous he was, whispered, “Okay, you’re legal, right?”

“Of course,” said Daniel, hoarsely, his words rusting in his throat. “I’ll have a Heineken.”

The bartender smiled and shrugged and bent down to fish the bottle of beer from a cooler and when he straightened up said, “What about your friend? He doesn’t look legal to me.”

Daniel turned to see his little brother in the corner by the jukebox, studying the selections, still wearing his suitcoat and his John Deere cap, the clothes Daniel handed to him to keep crumpled in a pile on a nearby table.

Daniel noticed the whole room staring at either or both of them as he crossed the room to the jukebox, avoiding gazes.

“Man, ain’t no Stones on here, not a damn thing worth listening to on this box, what kind of place is this?” Pete said.

“You know good and well what kind of place it is.”

Pete ducked his head to inspect the jukebox selections. “Isn’t it creeping you out, the way they’re all staring at us?”

“On the contrary I kind of like it.”

“Well I don’t. I think it’s fucking creepy.”

So much for Brandon, Daniel decided. Brandon is dead. Daniel was sorry he was dead, he was sorry he did not save him, but he suddenly felt sick at the thought of how he had, seconds ago, used Brandon’s death to justify his visit to this bar. Seemed he could rationalize any sort of behavior now. He looked at Pete, realized he had obligations still: to his little brother, to his parents. He could not stay here with Pete.

“All right, let’s go then.”

“No, hey, it’s cool, man, I guess you’ve been waiting for a long time to come to a place like this. I can just go hang out down the street somewhere while you …”

“We need to find a place to stay anyway,” said Daniel, and he pushed past Pete toward the door, a voice calling out as he crossed the threshold, “Come back, come back, come back.”

A half block away Pete caught up with him and said, “No offense, man, but there were some creepy old dudes in that place.”