Virginia Lovers (3 page)

“Don’t call him that,” Thomas had said. “And don’t mimic them. You know what you sound like when you mimic the way they talk?”

Pete had shrugged and fallen into sullen silence until his older brother had said, “He’s right, Dad. You don’t want him hanging around with Anthony because he’s black, right?”

Thomas had wrenched the van onto the shoulder of the road, sending shredded circulars and old newsprint flying across the floor. He turned to his sons, who sat together on the plywood toolbox that doubled as a passenger seat, Pete slack and scowling, Daniel fixing him with that imperious and implacably rational look he’d inherited from his mother.

“You boys don’t know the first goddamn thing about what you’re talking about,” he said. “Here I am the only one in this town who half sticks up for black people and let me tell you it would be a lot easier if I didn’t bother. You have no idea how much it costs me, costs you, too. I was under the impression your mother and I had raised you to see the world as it is, to care more about the truth than a new jean jacket. And here you are calling me a racist.”

“A new jean jacket,” Pete mumbled, “I didn’t say anything about a new jean jacket, I don’t see anything wrong with my old jean jacket. I like them old, see, when they’re new—”

“Shut up, Pete,” said Daniel. “Thing is, Dad, Anthony? He’s like no worse than three-quarters of those hippie greasers Pete hangs out with. At least he can read.”

Pete had elbowed his brother in the ribs then, and Daniel had clenched his brother’s neck in a headlock and started to strangle him until Thomas said, “Goddamn it, stop! You two stop it or neither one of you will leave this house for a month.”

“This house?” Pete jerked his head toward the roof of the van, and his brother snickered despite himself, and they seemed once again united against their father until Pete pointed to his brother and, reigniting the tension, said, “What difference would it make to Danny Boy, he don’t ever leave the house anyway, where’s he going to go?” Neither boy could forgo the last word, though often they went weeks without speaking. Thomas had bought the Ford for the two of them to drive to school, but Pete usually caught rides with his friends or on occasion hitchhiked so that he would not have to be seen getting out of the car with his own brother. He never took the car out at night. When Thomas had quizzed Daniel about why Pete never drove, Daniel had said only, “I’d count my blessings if I were you.”

What had bothered Thomas most about this incident was the way Daniel sided with his brother. He knew that Daniel detested Anthony McRae; he’d broken up a fight between them one Wednesday afternoon, which Daniel claimed had started when Anthony made fun of his performance on the football team, saying he was lame and “illiformed,” a term Pete later translated as “spastic.” Now Thomas had wanted to question his son’s defense of a kid whom he knew he despised, but he was fearful of what his response might be: that he hated him because he was a smart-ass, not because he was black.

“Haven’t seen him all day,” Daniel said when Thomas opened his mouth to ask where Pete was. It didn’t surprise him that Daniel predicted his question—they often discussed Pete, his whereabouts, his escapades.
Not even at school?
Thomas wanted to ask, but he checked himself in front of Strickland, who had fielded enough calls about Pete from truant officers and assistant principals.

A half hour later, Pete shuffled in. Thomas heard the inserters calling out to him, heard their trash-talking thicken and accelerate at the sight of new blood. Pete suffered their ribbing, shooting it back rapidfire, exchanging elaborate handshakes with each of the boys, wearing a goofy crooked smile that made Thomas wonder how high he was. Pete thought he had his father fooled, but Thomas had learned to read his son’s eyes—red, shifty, slitted—to tell when and how much dope he’d been smoking. Often he could smell it on him and could detect as well the odors he used as coverup—musk oil, incense, cigarettes. Thomas had tried everything to get the boy to clean up his act, but nothing had worked. Last year when Pete was expelled from school for cutting class, Thomas had enrolled him in a special school in the mountains, where Pete lasted six weeks before he and some other troubled delinquent were caught trying to break in to the school infirmary. Thomas said little these days about the boy’s habits—what was left to say? Every night he hoped his son made it home alive, and every morning that Pete slouched wild-haired from his bedroom, Thomas allowed himself to think that he’d done something right.

“Who killed my boy Pierce?” Anthony McRae asked Pete. Pete shrugged and began to shuffle the stacks of paper together clumsily He was the worst inserter they had, although he’d been at it the longest.

“Beat his ass silly,” one of the boys said.

“How y’all know what they did?” said Pete. “Y’all were there?”

“We read it in the newspaper, chump,” said Anthony. Thomas watched his son pick up the paper, leaf through it.

“You can read it at home,” he called to his son. Exaggerated laughter from the other boys. Pete shot him a sour look. The boys talked among themselves in low whispers, and Thomas, wondering if they were talking about the murder, thought to ask Daniel about it that evening.

But later, after they’d delivered the papers to the post office and dropped Wayman off at this house and were back home, seated with Caroline at the dinner table, neither boy seemed eager to talk about the murder when Thomas brought it up.

“I didn’t know him that well anymore,” said Daniel.

“You knew him better than I did,” said Pete. “Didn’t even know the dude’s name until he got himself killed.”

Thomas found this competition for the role of who-knew-the-dead-boy-less a little strange. Usually it was the other way around when something bad happened to someone around Trent—everyone you ran into had just talked to, had lunch with, played golf with, sold a tank of gas to, the victim. People, in his experience, would go out of their way to claim a connection to a party involved in a tragedy. They enjoyed the celebrity. Especially kids, who were capable of some serious melodrama when death was concerned.

He tried to give Caroline an are-you-hearing-what-I’m-hearing glance, but she was watching her sons. Sometimes it seemed as though he wasn’t even in the room when the four of them were together. Even when they were alone the topic of conversation centered around one or both of the boys—usually, her concern over the way the boys rarely spoke to each other, would not be seen riding in the same car together.

Thomas these days often felt defeated, succumbed to the thinking that he’d given everything he’d had to providing for his family. He’d cross the threshhold and immediately he’s deficient—as a father, as a husband. But being a husband, these days, was solely an extension of fatherhood. It involved discussing his boys with his wife. Endlessly. No romance, no joining forces against the rest of the world, little laughter. Just counseling skills, good listening. Guilty feelings about what they—mostly he—were
not
doing to guide their children through adolescence.

That he’d had no help navigating those years himself—that the very idea of anyone even paying a little attention to his teenage situation, with six siblings and no money, a national depression and the threat of war—was not an argument he could use with Caroline. He knew better than to try. She would say what she always said: “So we’re supposed to make the same mistakes our parents did?”

Heaven knows what would have happened if he’d claimed to have turned out all right himself without coddling and round-the-clock counseling.

His boys were talking to each other, an event worth paying attention to.

“Why are you bragging about not knowing the guy?” said Daniel. “You sound like he’s not anyone you’d care to know, dead or alive.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Pete. “You heard me say that?”

“I heard it in your tone. What’s wrong with him, Pete? Huh?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s dead, I don’t know. All I’m saying, I didn’t know him as well as you did.”

“You’re bragging about not knowing him.”

“I’m not bragging, I’m just stating a fact,” said Pete. His eyes narrowed and his mouth was tight, and Thomas knew from these familiar signs that he was just about to blow.

Daniel opened his mouth to say something, and Thomas said his older son’s name, once, firmly, but Daniel ignored him and said, “What would you know about a fact,” and then Pete was shouting, and Thomas was looking at Caroline, who finally looked over at him as if this whole thing was his fault, since she had done nothing but observe.

The boys traded insults for another minute before Thomas finally told them to shut the hell up, it had been a long day and he didn’t want to hear it. The murder seemed nothing more and nothing less than another source of tension between his sons, which rendered it, to Thomas, just like everything else in the world, good or bad, true or false, right or wrong.

2

THEY WERE MAGICAL
, those woods behind Pete’s house, and had been since he was allowed to explore them on his own. Even before then, the fact that they were off-limits made them desirable, and when he and Danny had played at their edge, the dense wall of longleaf and loblolly pines lay as irresistible as the future. The brothers played there for hours, after school and all day long on weekends and during summer vacation. The woods seemed to belong only to them, created to indulge the elaborate campaigns of their imaginations.

When they were older, nine and ten, Danny was tapped to run with the gang of neighborhood boys who made their headquarters in these woods. Only boys: no girls would be allowed until a few years later, when the Raleigh Road Boys, as they were known to other neighborhood gangs, were old enough to lure girls to their abandoned forts with promises of Boone’s Farm and Miller Lite and hopes of meager sexual triumphs naively measured in lingo leftover from Little League baseball. By that point Danny, never very comfortable with the gang, had found other things to do with his time. Pete took his place, which should have made him grateful, but his brother’s defection bothered him. Not for long, though: the gang warmed to his quiet humor, and girls liked him, too. It came as a shock to find he was successful with the opposite sex despite his inability to remember what erotic prizes the bases corresponded to, save for home, into which he slid, sweaty and grinning, at age fourteen one stifling summer night with a leggy redhead named Shelly Blankenship.

One night Stuart Romine’s older brother Too Tall Paul left a quarter pound of Mexican pot beneath the bunkbed he shared with Stuart, and Stuart discovered it while searching for his brother’s collection of porn mags. He swiped a half ounce and brought it to the woods. It was 1973, late autumn. Pete was fifteen. After a year-long battle he had finally won his war with his father over his obligatory six-week haircut. His hair bushed out to his shoulders in a stiff wedge like a Christmas tree, and he wore the same uniform daily: a pair of shredded jeans poorly patched in the ass and knees, one of a dozen faded pocket T-shirts, scuffed work boots. Pete carried his rebellion proudly, papered his bedroom walls with Stones posters and concert ticket stubs. He looked like a freak, but until that November night in 1973, he was a smart, ironic, curious, and introspective kid who dreamed his life so vibrantly that even his parents thought of him as somewhat ethereal.

But after that night when Too Tall Paul’s swiped stash changed the lives of a half-dozen neighborhood boys, Pete wasn’t around enough for his demeanor to be scrutinized. He and his friends spent as much time in the woods as they could get away with. Pete made it so difficult on his family when he bothered to show up that they came not to mind his absence. In the woods, his once-quiet wit wore off. He became known as someone who would do anything. No dare seemed too risky, no caper pulled on crotchety neighbors too cruel. Of all the boys in the neighborhood, Pete was the one who loved to get high the most.

One night in late October of 1975, Pete entered the woods on his way to meet his best friend, Cozart. He had arrived home later than usual from his after-school job at his father’s newspaper, had left his mom, dad, and brother still lingering over their meal and the national news. Wednesday-night dinners were often tense at his house. His dad was always exhausted from putting the paper out, and the meal was invariably interrupted by some old lady whose paperboy had missed her house. The paper had to be delivered immediately; the task was delegated to whoever was closest when the phone rang, and for that reason Pete ate little and quickly and got out of there fast.

That night he had even more incentive to leave. Brandon Pierce’s murder headlined the front pages of the
Daily Advance,
and he’d watched his mom studying the article as she prepared dinner—Hamburger Helper and frozen brussels sprouts, another reason not to linger. He’d planned to wolf down his supper, pretend great interest in the nightly news, and take off before talk turned to the murder, but his dad segued right onto the subject from the obligatory blessing, as if these things were somehow connected.

“I hardly knew him anymore,” Danny said when his dad asked how well the boys knew the victim. Pete said he didn’t know him at all, which wasn’t exactly true—he knew
of
him would have been a better way to describe it, for in a town as small as theirs you knew
of
everyone who was around your age, and Brandon Pierce was certainly not someone to court anonymity. He stood out in ways he probably did not want to. You couldn’t help but know of him.

“I wouldn’t brag about it,” said Danny. And then he said, right in front of their parents, flat out at the supper table, that Pete sounded like he didn’t care to know Brandon, dead or alive.

Pete stammered out his denials, and they were lame denials, the words too many and not enough at once. He was sure that he’d revealed himself in some unretractable way, and so he did what he usually did in these situations: he started yelling, and then, when everyone was wincing, he pushed his plate away.