Virginia Lovers (20 page)

Normally he would tweak the situation a little. Provide just enough salacious detail to sell the next week’s paper. It occurred to him, now that he was unwilling to provide such detail and the paper was selling better than ever, to wonder if he had not compromised himself unnecessarily, underestimated his readers. They weren’t damn fools after all, at least no more foolish than the rest of the world. He was the one who felt foolish for making money off this mess.

In the alley his hired boys loitered, just like on any other Wednesday afternoon. At the sight of the van backing down the alley they quit pitching pennies against the air-conditioning unit, tossed their cigarettes, and made their slow and sullen way back inside. He was glad when Wayman emerged to supervise the unloading, for he felt even more self-conscious than usual around these boys who knew both of his sons, had worked alongside them for years, and now were probably saying things about them that he did not care to know, much less hear. Not that there was any escape from this feeling: he felt it when alone, he felt it in the shower and late at night when he sat in the den watching the late news and whatever happened to flash on the screen then. He felt the stares of even the weathermen, the sports anchors; the late-night comedians seemed to be telling jokes about his family.

He threw himself into stamping address labels, sweating next to Strickland without words, and for a half hour or so he managed to distract himself from the stares, real or imagined. But after a while he looked up instinctively toward the front of the room where Pete usually performed his sloppy inserting alongside his buddy Anthony McRae, and he realized two things that made him flush and falter. His rhythms were still tied to Pete’s comings and goings (for Pete was at least a half-hour late to work every week, this was around the time when he would slouch in sneaky and high, munching popcorn from Eagle’s Five and Dime, trying to hide his slitty eyes and his guilty grin from his father while flaunting it to the rest of the boys). This thought was hard enough until he let himself focus on the place where Pete ought to have been and saw Anthony McCrae leaning across the mock-up table, his elbows on the glass, idly reading the front page of the paper.

He did not wonder what article the boy was reading. He put down his address gun, ignored Strickland’s stare, walked up behind McRae, grabbed the paper away from him, made a flagrant and awkward show of merging it with the grocery circulars, and told Anthony he did not pay him to read the Goddamn thing.

Strickland had followed him. “Tom,” he was saying, but Thomas ignored him and did not bother to look at the McRae boy, went back to work.

Busy again, Thomas felt ashamed. Of course the boy would be curious about what had been written: The whole town would be reading it in minutes, and that was the point, wasn’t it? And Anthony McRae had been Pete’s friend; didn’t this give him even more reason to follow the story?

Suddenly the sight of the newsprint, the smell of its ink, sickened Thomas. He nearly ran to the bathroom, bolted himself inside, and stood retching and sweating until his stomach was clenched and empty.

He felt the change in the room once past the partition that separated the front office from the back. No one looked up at him, for one thing; the boys had their eyes on something else, McRae he figured at first, until he saw his older son standing in the place where Pete would be right now, shuffling papers into papers, doing so with a dexterity that infuriated him. What was he doing here? His mother had taken him to get a haircut after school. He’d assumed they would be home now.

Thomas walked to the front of the room, stood beside Danny until he looked up, motioned for him to follow him to the front office.

“What are you doing here?” he asked his son as soon as they were out of earshot.

“Working. I thought you’d need some help.”

“Danny,” Thomas started, but Danny cut him off.

“Mom and I were downtown for my haircut and I saw you pass by in the van and I told her I’d rather come to work than go home. You need me, anyway. I noticed you haven’t found anyone to replace either one of us.”

Thomas studied his son: the fair skin he’d inherited from his mother, his frame bulked up from the weight training he’d endured for the chance at a scholarship, his thin brown hair, which Thomas had requested he get trimmed before the next day’s meeting with the police. The one thing different about him was his clothes. Usually he dressed as though he was about to pledge a fraternity—Lacoste shirts, khakis, Topsiders. Today he wore a t-shirt with the name of a band that Thomas didn’t recognize, jeans, and tennis shoes.

But at least he wasn’t wearing the T-shirt that claimed Virginia Is For Lovers, which he’d worn on his trip to Washington. There was something pathetic about this shirt to Thomas, for it was, so far as he knew, the only sloppy T-shirt the boy owned, and the sentiment it expressed seemed somehow beneath Daniel.

“You don’t have to pay me,” said Danny.

“Danny, look,” said Thomas. “Of course I’ll pay you, don’t be ridiculous.”

He stopped, ran out of words. These weren’t the right ones. What right had he to accuse the boy of ridiculousness? But how to tell him that his presence here just made everything worse? How to let him know that the other boys would ignore their work to stare at him all afternoon, that even Wayman and Strickland would sneak glances at the boy they had not seen since he’d returned home.

Since the funeral, he’d been out of the house only to go to school and to his lawyer’s office. Croom wanted to talk to him but agreed to put it off until after the funeral. Against his father’s wishes, Danny had quit the football team and, it seemed, given up all his other extracurricular activities as well. By the time Thomas arrived home at night, Danny was out of sight, down the hallway he shared with his brother, on the other side of the house, hiding out in Pete’s room, doing God knows whatever it was he did in there. The room was a disaster, as it had always been when Pete was alive; no one had made any move to clean it, to go through Pete’s things, start the process of getting rid of some of it, though Thomas had mentioned the need one night at dinner, to Caroline’s apathy and Danny’s silent but palpable protest. Danny obviously did not want them to know he was spending time in Pete’s room, but Thomas had spied him, from the kitchen, slipping in and out. He’d heard the music too, and though he knew next to nothing about rock music—could not have told the difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—he knew from the way the heavy bass vibrated the air-conditioning shaft in Pete’s room that Danny was listening to his little brother’s records.

“I’ll drive you home,” Thomas said.

“I don’t want to go home, Dad. I’m sick of staying at home, I’d rather help out. Plus, I’m sure Mom could use some time alone.”

“Wait here while I tell Strickland.”

They drove the company car, a Vega they’d picked up for covering runs when the bike route boys called in sick. Strickland drove it home nights, but he offered it eagerly, said he’d drop the papers off at the post office and drive the van home. Neither Thomas nor Danny spoke on the ride through town. Though he had planned on dropping Danny off and returning to work, Thomas found himself driving straight out of town, into the country.

“Where we going?” asked Danny.

“If you’re sick of staying at home, we’ll go for a ride.”

“Don’t you need to go back to work?” said Danny, but Thomas, preoccupied, did not answer. There were no words between them for a few miles, and Thomas studied the fields and the farmhouses and returned rotely the waves of the porchsitting retirees and tried to figure out how to say the things he wanted.

“If you had just told us,” he said finally.

“Told you what?”

“You know how you felt about. I mean, that you liked … boys. Your mother and I …”

“Would have been mostly fine about it, I’m sure. But think about it, Dad. Put yourself in my place. I wanted that scholarship, and to get it, I knew I had to keep that part of me secret from everybody, because you know as well as I do that they wouldn’t give it to a queer.”

“Don’t use that word,” said Thomas. “I’m sick of that word, I never want to hear it again as long as I live.”

“Kind of doubt you’ll get your wish.” Danny shrugged. He said, “So I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you any more than Pete could come to you and say he smoked pot before breakfast every day and got drunk three times a week minimum and hung out with guys who blew up black people’s mailboxes and hated himself for it. I couldn’t tell you any more than he could.”

“Well, there’s a difference,” said Thomas, even though he was pretty sure there was not. But he had to say something, and he did not want to turn around yet. He had to keep driving, he had to have this conversation if he was going to retrieve his boy from the front pages of his newspaper.

“What?”

“I knew about Pete’s problems.”

“Then why didn’t you do something?”

“You think I didn’t try?”

Thomas felt his face grow hot. Ashamed of the anger in his voice, he glanced sidelong at Danny, who said nothing. This wasn’t working. This was a mistake. He should have let the boy help out at the office, should have stayed there himself. After delivering the papers to the post office, he could have dropped him by the house and gone out to eat, then back to the office to kill time until he knew everyone at home was asleep.

“Pete did something right that night,” said Thomas. “Going to look for you, I mean. Something considerate. But listen: we both know he could just have easily done something, well, characteristic.”

“Dad, don’t.”

“I say just as easily, as if there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would do something good. It’s more like eighty-twenty.”

“Dad, stop. He wasn’t that bad.”

“He could be. Very bad. He could easily have gotten caught breaking into a drugstore.”

“Why are you saying these things?” Danny’s voice cracked, and Thomas looked out the window at the passing pine forest rather than at his son.

“Because he’s gone and we’re turning him into a saint and that’s not fair to him and it’s certainly not fair to you.”

Thomas understood that his emotional survival depended upon a confluence of memory, myth, and wish. He would not ever be able to get over his son’s death if he held himself to the truth. He was trying to be honest about this. But from the look on Danny’s face, it seemed he had defamed his dead son.

“If he was so bad, why didn’t you do anything to help him?”

“I tried, Danny. Your mother and I tried. We didn’t know how to help him. I guess we thought he’d grow out of it. He was so damn smart.”

“Smarter than I am,” said Danny.

“Hey now. I didn’t say that. You’re both smart boys. I’ve tried never to compare you.” “Then, maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might have tried not to compare us when he was alive. But now I can’t blame you for thinking you’d rather have him around than your homo son.”

Thomas braked as safely as he could. He waited until he found a place on the shoulder that seemed solid enough, and this caution felt like a triumph, given the rage he felt inside. He put the car in park and turned to his son.

“I don’t ever want to hear you say a thing like that again. I don’t care what happens, I don’t want to hear things like that come out of your mouth. Your mother and I …”

“
Your mother and I, your mother and I.”
Danny was crying now, sputtering as he repeated Thomas’s words. “Don’t keep saying that, she can speak for herself, don’t always pretend you two think the same things or feel them because you don’t, it’s a lie. You might be married but you aren’t the same person and besides I know what she thinks, she has the guts to tell me every once in a while. But you? You don’t say shit, Dad. You just say things like ‘Your mother and I love you’ and then you rush back to work.”

“Okay,” said Thomas. “All right. Not your mother and I, then. You’re right, she’s better at this than I am. She’s a better parent than I am.”

Danny sniffled, cleared his throat. “Great. Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Exactly what you tell me not to do.”

“Danny, look. I know you feel horrible for what happened in Washington. I know you feel horrible for not going to the police about Brandon. I understand why you kept quiet, I really do, but you have to know that your … you have to know that I love you like you are, I don’t care who you’re attracted to and I don’t give a good Goddamn if you don’t get a scholarship. I don’t care about any of that, Danny. I don’t know how things got to this point, but look, I want you to know that you’re going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”

A crowded carload of teenagers on an afternoon hellride flashed past the Vega, their horn blaring, their slurs lingering. Thomas realized he was blocking half the lane.

“You really believe that?”

“Believe that we’re going to be fine?” he said as he started the car and eased off the shoulder. What he believed—what he
had
to believe in order to survive—was that it would not be possible for them to live this way, feel this way, forever. Or even much longer.

“I do.”

“What about you and mom?”

“You needn’t worry about us.”

“I do, though. Worry. If you two ended up splitting up now, over—”

“That’s not going to happen. I don’t want to hear you talk about such a ridiculous thing.”

“You ought to talk to her, Dad. I mean, talk more. Let her talk to you.”

Thomas swallowed, breathed big to calm himself.

“I will,” he said. “When I’m ready.”

“She needs you now.”

“Goddamit, Danny, don’t you think I’m trying? Don’t you think I’ve got enough to worry about?”

“Think about how I feel,” said Danny after a long pause. “It gets worse every day. I try not to worry about the trial, but I do. I see the jury looking at Tysinger and then at me, and I see them thinking about the star linebacker who a lame benchwarmer like me is accusing of some sick things, and I imagine them looking at me like there is no doubt in their minds that I was born to do the sick things that I’m going to get up there and claim Tysinger did with Brandon before he beat him to death, and how do you think that makes me feel? You think that makes me feel good?”