Virginia Lovers (17 page)

A half-second later his family’s faith seemed to him indifference. They were so self-involved that they did not even notice his obvious pain. When high, he felt so acutely everything and its opposite. The one hand, the other hand: pendulum seesawing heavily from light to dark. The darker truth always stuck. Pete wondered for the hundredth time if this was not just his general disposition, if getting high was not the problem at all but merely an attempt to escape the often intolerable pain of seeing clearly the far bleaker flip side. He convinced himself that life would be intolerable sober. Seconds later and he was wishing Stuart Romine had never gone searching for his brother’s porn mags, that Too Tall Paul had chosen to hide his stash in a less obvious place. It was easy enough now, standing lonely and terrified in front of a shut-tight gay bar, to think his life would be perfect if he’d played it straighter. But then he thought of his brother, who seemed now to blame all his problems on the fact that he was gay. Pete wondered if both of them weren’t oversimplifying things, searching out a lone scapegoat reason for their unhappiness.

A light rain began falling on the pavement, and he was intensely aware of its smell, this city rain, pavement rain—metallic rather than dusty, acrid compared to rain back home, which sometimes, winging in across the miles of open fields surrounding town, smelled nourishing, as if you could survive, grow healthy even, simply by allowing in lungfuls.

He and Daniel had it pretty good, really. Parents who loved them and tried as hard as they could to pay attention. What problems they had seemed as light and ephemeral as this rain, not substantial enough to require wipers on the slow prowling cars that, three or four times since he’d taken up his vigilant post by the bar, had pulled over to the curb very near where he stood, idled there for a few moments before pulling away.

Pete had ignored them, lost as he was in his appraisal of this life. It did not occur to him that the cars were pulling over for him until the jacked-up Dodge Charger, silver and dented as if wrapped in aluminum foil, whipped into the parking space in front of him.

Out of it spilled three guys, clutching tallboys. The largest hung back and smiled as the two smaller ones flanked Pete, too close, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and booze.

“Hey, stud,” said the big one, whose left eye even in the dim streetlight was unfocused, filmy permanently half-closed.

Pete focused straight ahead, at a cab singing along wet pavement. He tried to tame his terror into something that looked like boredom.

“How much to blow all three of us, chicken hawk?”

No, you got it all wrong,
Pete started to say,
See, I’m just waiting here for someone, I’m not…
But he did not speak, for the truth felt a betrayal of his big brother.

He understood, then, the prowling cars, why their drivers had idled there in front of the bar, casting glances his way. Waiting for his approach, a negotiation. It had never occurred to him as he’d never been anywhere near a bar like this, had never seen a prostitute in the flesh except those working Hay Street who were more objects of derision and amusement for he and his friends. He’d barely been to a city, only once to New York for the ‘64 World’s Fair, when he was six, and the faintly remembered tour did not include the seamier side of human behavior.

“Spit or swallow, stud?” the leader was saying. He was slightly smaller than Tysinger—his hair was cropped, as if he’d just gotten out of the military, and he was not in shape like Tysinger, his belly rolling beneath a too tight Foghat T-shirt. But Pete looked at him and saw Tysinger. He remembered Tysinger’s defense of his maligned mama that night, remembered the unsettling sympathy he felt for someone he’d always hated. Obviously Tysinger had his own hardships to deal with and, like Pete, like the rest of the world, he dealt badly much of the time, but there was beneath the hatred and violence an essential goodness. Surely even this drunk—these three drunks—hid a similar light beneath their redneck insolence.

Pete realized he was smiling. The leader noticed, too, and smirked.

“Say something, faggot,” said the boy on his right. Maybe it was the word, and his realization that, buried goodness notwithstanding, these were the types his brother had complained about for the past two days, the ones who would not let him be who he was. Perhaps it was recognizing himself in those three—bored, drunk, out late trying to prolong an empty and diminishing high, willing to do anything to keep the excitement going.

“Fuck you, losers.”

The boys pushed in closer and their leader said, “No, sweetheart, fuck you,” and then they were half-carrying, half-dragging Pete down the alleyway where earlier he’d nodded into a mellow trance over a street sweeper.

Once he tried and failed to scream. As he was being dragged farther into the shadows, Pete realized he should have stayed in the hotel room, that his brother was probably there now, waiting, worried about him.

“Get him down on his knees,” said the leader, sliding his wide black leather belt from the loops of his filthy jeans. Pete’s knees grazed the pavement once before he surged up kicking, freeing his arms and managing to knee the leader in the crotch, and this is when the others attacked, pummeling arms and swift kicks from work boots.

When he was stretched, retching, on the pavement they let up. He lay there thinking of something he sometimes chanted, silently, at night to help him sleep:
I am a good person. Basically I am a good person.

The leader bent before him, wheezing still from his groin kick. He started to talk but Pete, anticipating his words, told him again to go fuck himself. The leader spit words Pete’s way but Pete was watching his hand as he reached into his pocket. Pete saw the black curved knife handle and remembered that summer-lush Saturday afternoon when he and Cozart were sitting on the black pipe talking their idle trash and passing a joint and scheming about what they would do when they finally got out of Trent, where they would go. They decided to meet in San Francisco, because there the mountains meet the sea and even though Pete knew this would never happen, understood that he and Cozart would grow apart after high school and in ten years he would have straightened his life out and gone to college and become more like his brother, Danny, whom his parents idolized and whom Pete secretly had always wanted to be more like, he allowed himself to participate in this fantasy and even agreed to slice his finger with a pen knife and mix his blood with Cozart’s blood.

But there was way too much blood for a simple slice of a finger and it was pouring from his stomach and another place on his thigh and he saw that the knife was not a penknife at all but a longer blade, its handle black and curved and stained with more of his blood. He watched it as it disappeared dripping up the alley.

When he was alone he called out weakly for Daniel.

Who an hour later entered the hotel room on tiptoes so as not to wake his sleeping brother. He felt bad for leaving him there, even though he got it done, what he left to do, and it was neither fulfilling nor unsatisfying, it merely was. Now it was over and he could rest because he knew at least that this was who he was. Riding back to the hotel in the preppy guy’s car he decided what he and Pete would do in the morning: call home first thing and tell their father everything and wait for the police, and even though there would be hell to pay for both of them, and Daniel felt guilty for not setting a better example for Pete, who was troubled enough without any encouragement from him, Daniel felt that some things were accomplished on this excursion. He was closer to his brother now than ever before, for one thing, and that closeness, despite what had brought them together and what would happen to them when they returned to Trent, would never leave. No one could take it away from them. He felt like waking Pete to tell him so but decided not to, for in the dark room in the sleeping city his little brother was so soundly asleep he did not even seem to breathe.

6

DANIEL WOKE EARLY
, past nine, to the maid knocking at the door and then opening it when he did not respond. At the sight of him, she mumbled Spanish and backed out of the room. Daniel pulled a pillow over his head and said to his little brother, who at that moment, second period on a Friday morning, was missing his stoner Spanish class, “Translate, amigo, no comprende.” When Pete did not answer Daniel heaved a pillow at the bed.

Daniel drifted into thin sleep. Minutes later, when he discovered the bed was empty, he suspected Pete went out for breakfast or cigarettes. He’d been so nice to Daniel the night before, so supportive in his tentative way. Maybe he wanted to let his big brother sleep later.

An hour later, when Pete had not returned, Daniel began to worry. He thought Pete got scared and rose early when Daniel was still asleep and, rather than wake him, sneaked out. He decided Pete left without saying good-bye because he did not want to be talked out of leaving, and because he knew Daniel was not about to go back now that he had blown his chance at the Carmichael.

For surely everyone knew. Especially the committee of straight lawyers in their three-piece suits who looked at him funny, even
before
he slept with a boy.

When the knock came again Daniel was sure it was the maid. He did not have time to get dressed before she swung open the door and the two detectives thanked her in Spanish, pushed into the room. Daniel snatched at the bedspread, stood draped stupidly in flowered polyester.

“What we got here?” said one of the detectives.

Goddamn Pete, Daniel thought, he turned me in. For it was immediately obvious that these sideburned, slick-suited men were policemen. Was Pete trying to save Daniel from himself? My job to take care of him, Daniel reminded himself, searching the corridor for the maid who had left without making eye contact. The surly detectives sized him up in his floral bedspread.

“What the fuck we got here?” One of them pulled the room key from his pocket, flashed it like a badge. “You know who belongs to this?”

“My brother,” Daniel said.

“Your brother, huh?”

“My brother. Pete Edgecombe. Where is he? What did he do?”

Daniel felt foolish for believing Pete had gone home. He must have broken into something. A drugstore again? Or had he tried to score more pot and gotten busted?

The detectives exchanged detective glances.

“Let’s see some identification,” one of the detectives said. Daniel shuffled over to the desk where his pants lay tossed across the back of a chair. The bedspread minced his steps. He handed over his driver’s license. This time the detective glances were even more stereotypically unreadable.

“What?” he asked.

“Just get dressed now. You have to come with us.”

“Am I coming back here?” he asked. He wanted badly to act as if he did not care what had happened to his little brother, wanted to affect a weariness with the whole situation.

“Get what you can now. If you leave anything, don’t worry we’ll send someone back over here for it.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, grateful for the detective’s gentler tone. They left him alone while he struggled into the only clothes he had. As if he had anything to leave in the room. There was the thrift shop suit coat, the fedora; he thought of grabbing them but was embarrassed now to be carrying such clothes. He couldn’t remember what possessed him to buy them. He couldn’t really remember what had possessed him since he’d skipped school.

The detectives were waiting in the hallway. One said to Daniel, his tone kindly, solicitous, “You got everything, son?” Despite his kindness Daniel wanted to say, I am not your son, but didn’t for he might as well have been the detective’s son. Surely the man who had raised him to tell the truth would not from that point on want to claim Daniel as his own.

In the car ride to the station the detectives talked to themselves of unrelated matters, some guy they worked with, a putz named Rodriquez. Daniel grew more worried the longer they kept quiet, and finally it dawned on him the reason behind the sudden softening. Something must have happened. Something bad.

“I need to know what’s going on now,” he said.

“Very soon,” said the driver.

Daniel settled back into the seat, letting the noises of the noontime city wash over the silence until they arrived at the station.

“Your little brother is dead,” they told Daniel when he was seated in some overly lit room. “Stabbed to death in an alley behind a bar called La Cage Aux Folles.”

He thought they were lying. That they had Pete in another room and were saying such a thing to coerce Daniel to confess to his part in Brandon’s murder. Pete had been busted and he told them everything and now they were trying to trick Daniel. He almost smiled. But then he remembered the name of the place Pete followed him into the afternoon before. He saw his little brother waiting there for him, stoned and shuffling to some imagined guitar riff, huddled in the doorway, naively smiling at passersby in the predawn streets.

One of the detectives said, “We need to ask you some questions, okay?”

So long as only facts are required, thought Daniel. No more than yes or no.

He nodded at the wall behind them.

“Was your brother a homosexual?”

“No sir,” he said. It was the
sir
that made him feel pitiful, errant, truant. It made him cry.

“I need to call my parents,” Daniel said when he could stop crying enough to speak.

“Before you do, son, we need you to come with us, identify the body.”

Daniel did not listen to the detectives talk on the ride to the morgue. They were mostly quiet, talking softly now and again about things they needed to do to finish up their shift. Paperwork, phone calls. Two cars floated through the cab-thick streets: in one Daniel was being delivered to jail for his part in a boy’s brutal beating and in another he was on his way to identify his brother’s body.

They only showed his head, his eyes blue-blackened, a thick cut on his cheekbone.

“Lee Tysinger,” Daniel rasped when he saw his brother’s face.