Virginia Lovers (7 page)

Something was up, but Daniel wasn’t about to ask. He would wait all day for Pete to talk if it came to that, though it had been years—two or three, maybe—since he had spent a whole day with his brother. In fact, barring family-mandatory events like meals or Christmas morning, Daniel had not spent much more than a few hours in his brother’s presence. He believed Pete hated him. He did not hate Pete, though he was ashamed of him.

Not because of how his brother looked—everyone dressed like mill hands that year, a standard uniform of workshirts, jeans, boots. And it was not because of his various habits—half the people in their high school smoked pot and drank. (Daniel liked to get high himself, though only occasionally, and never with anyone who might report back to his brother.) It wasn’t because of the people Pete hung out with, some of whom were scum. What shamed Daniel about his brother was how smart he was and how early and easily he’d surrendered his intelligence to something black and brooding and fiercely coddled inside of him. He had given up already, and he was only seventeen, and even though Daniel felt like giving up himself at times, he kept himself convinced that the things that were making him miserable would not last.

When Pete missed the turn off for school, Daniel said, “Let me guess. Out of rolling papers?”

“We’re taking the day off,” Pete said.

“Who’s
we?”

“Me and you, bro.”

“Thanks for thinking of me, but I’ve got a trig test. And even if I didn’t have a trig test, I would go to school.”

“Why? Don’t you ever feel like taking a day off?”

“Yeah, Pete, I do. Like every other day. But you know what? I figured out that you can’t always get what you want.”

“Like the Stones say,” he said. The Stones were Pete’s favorite band. He had this adolescent boy’s crush on Jagger and Richard going strong. He plastered his walls with Stones posters, all the band members in these tight velvet hiphuggers and Jagger in his white jumpsuit, and of course it never occurred to him or any of his friends that papering your walls with pictures of guys in frilly Elizabethan bell-sleeved shirts and overstuffed crotches was anything but normal. If Daniel had pointed this out, Pete would have called him a fucking square. He would claim he was a fan, that’s all. He
was
pretty fanatical. Daniel preferred the Beatles, always had, but Pete had all the Stones albums and knew all the words to obscure songs like “Sway” on
Sticky Fingers,
and once when he was twelve, he snuck off to a Stones concert in Charlotte when he was supposed to be at a Boy Scout Jamboree. Of course he got caught. He always got caught.

“Okay, right. The Stones said
everything
first. Look, if you don’t turn around, I’m getting out at the next stoplight.”

“Too bad we live in a town where there are only, like, three.”

Daniel looked up at the highway, saw that they were headed west on 24, toward Fayetteville. The last stoplight was at least a quarter mile back in the opposite direction. For the next couple of miles he alternated between anger at being kidnapped by his little brother, disgust for allowing this to go on (for he knew that if he really wanted to, he could be sitting in his desk taking his trig test in a half-hour’s time), and relief for a day off. The last few days of school had been torture. He was glad for a break even though he felt guilty for missing class. Of course, Daniel was used to being torn. “On the one hand/on the other hand” was his favorite phrase. He spent most of his time weighing hands, discarding and taking on ballast to avoid a crash. He had not crashed yet. No one knew how close he’d come. Since his way of dealing with this division was to overachieve, everyone just thought he was driven. They didn’t have a clue. Pete sucked up all the energy. He was self-destructing and Daniel was self-improving and, though both behaviors were desperate and perhaps even pathological, Daniel understood why Pete’s symptoms would draw more spectators.

“Okay, Pete,” Daniel said, “Obviously you’ve got something to talk to me about. You might as well say it so we can get it over with and I can make my trig test.”

Pete looked over at him in that faux-innocent way he had when their parents caught him in the act. He was the worst liar, always had been. He lied a lot, too, big crazy lies. At the ocean he was almost eaten alive by a shark, but he’d befriended this porpoise who chased the shark out to sea. He saw Eric Clapton in line at a Wendy’s in Raleigh.

“Do I look like I’ve got something to talk to you about?”

“It’s not really got much to do with the way you look,” said Daniel. “More the fact that the tardy bell just rang and we’re headed away from town.”

“Fuck the tardy bell,” said Pete.

Daniel faked a big laugh. “Yeah, man, fuck it, fuck that bell.”

Pete laughed then, sincerely, and Daniel felt a little ashamed for mocking him. It didn’t make him feel, well, older, stronger, superior, which was how he almost always felt in his brother’s presence. Daniel thought Pete wanted him to feel that way around him. If he didn’t, why did he keep screwing up and why was he so angry and why didn’t he exercise any of those qualities that, when they were younger, made Daniel a little in awe of him? Daniel used to be jealous of his brother back then, for a lot of reasons. For one, Pete never had to prove himself to the guys in the neighborhood. They accepted him because he was—still was, Daniel had to admit—undeniably cool. Daniel had to work at cool, and he knew that cool was something you couldn’t work at. Put the slightest bit of effort into it and you’re suddenly and forever square

Of course, Daniel reached the point eventually where he saw through cool, though there were still lots of times, like right then, when Daniel felt square and awkward around his brother.

“Turn around, Pete.” Daniel tried to muster anger, but it felt like his anger respository had been depleted over the last week. He’d been angry at himself for days and was desperate enough to try any relief.

“Nope. I’ve decided we need to spend some time together.”

“I don’t have time to waste riding around with you all day.”

“Well, I hear you, but see, to me, wasting time is not like some big sin. I think there’s way too much time, and I don’t really think it’s going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference to treat every moment like you’re going to croak in the next half-hour like preachers and counselors and coaches tell you to do. You know? I mean, there’s a lot of space in a day that you’re just not going to use. I mean you might have a book in your hand or you might be at your job or you might even be screwing some chick on the ground in the graveyard but your mind’s going to be off somewhere else and training your mind like you do a dog, heel, roll over, come back here, hey, that’s the one thing you can’t do to your mind, man, it won’t follow orders, it don’t come when called, so why not go ahead and waste a certain part of the day if you know it’s going to be wasted anyway, why not waste it with some flair, do it up, go for it.”

“Groovy,” Daniel said, though he secretly wanted to laugh.
Don’t laugh, you’ll encourage him,
their dad always said when Pete started up at the dinner table in one of his nothing’s-sacred-every-thing’s-a-target for-my-sarcasm moods, and they all tried to ignore him, but even their mom and dad failed the straight face sometimes.

“Yeah, groovy,” said Pete. He fingered the steering wheel with one hand while his free hand disappeared down his pants.

“What the hell are you doing?” Daniel asked, turning his head away, keeping his eyes on the road. Someone needed to.

Pete pulled out a Sucrets tin from his underwear. Daniel had seen this box enough to know what it held. Often Pete would arrive home reeking, as though he’d been in a phone booth all night long with someone blowing reefer smoke in his hair and on his clothes, and their dad would ask him if he was “messed up,” and Pete would grin his lopsided goofy grin and say, “No, why do you ask?” Other times he would say, calmly, “No, are you?”

Once their dad popped him when he said this. Their dad wasn’t a spare-the-rod type, but he’d succumbed to the corporal with Pete a time or two. Seemed to Daniel that Pete liked it. It allowed him to feel that he had all the more reason to go out and get wasted.
Oh, my dad beat me, I’m abused.
Daniel wished his dad would see how he was just making things worse when he laid his hands on Pete, but Daniel didn’t think it was his place to offer advice on how to be an effective parent.

“You’re not going to smoke that while I’m in the car,” Daniel told him.

“Scared you’ll lose your chance at the scholarship?”

Daniel already knew what Pete felt about his attempt to win the Carmichael—that he was groveling, pathetic, going out for football and running track just to prove himself more well rounded” in the eyes of the panel of snooty lawyers who chose the winners. But it was a lot of money, and Daniel knew his parents were going to be strapped with both boys in college at the same time. He figured it was the least he could do to help out. Nobody was forcing him. His dad had sort of mentioned it once, a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if sort of thing, and Daniel knew that the only way he would even be in the running was if he went out for some sport. He also knew that he’d almost rather skip college than humiliate himself on the football field in front of guys he’d long since learned to ignore. But he wanted out and he was willing to suffer for it.

“Well, I don’t really feel like getting arrested,” Daniel said. “I think sitting around some jail would be a supreme waste of time, your theories of time notwithstanding.”

“Notwithstanding, you say?” Pete lit the joint with a lighter he’d fished off the dashboard, and Daniel reached over to grab the joint and toss it out the window, but Pete dodged his swipe and said, “Hey, don’t fuck with the pilot. You just sit tight and ride shotgun. I ain’t letting you out here.”

They were a couple of miles out of town by then, just past the country club their dad had joined because he thought it would be good for business. The boys always felt uncomfortable there. The other members made them feel like they were crashing their party, as though somehow it was obvious to everyone that their dad joined only because he thought he might bring in more advertising from his Thursday-afternoon eighteen holes or Sunday dinners at the club. It embarrassed Daniel. Privately his dad talked at the supper table about how badly he wanted to write an editorial criticizing the club’s racism—Daniel had heard that Jews were not let in until last year and God forbid you’d see a black man on the golf course who wasn’t behind a mower—but publicly Dad pressed hands in the clubhouse bar. It wasn’t like him, and he knew Daniel knew, and when he used to ask Daniel why he didn’t go to the dances out there or swim at the pool in the summers Daniel would always say, “You know the answer to that question.” Once his father lost it and said, “You know, Danny, you’re going to have a hard time in this world if you stay so self-righteous,” and Daniel said, “That sounds to me like another way of saying something else”—he was on to his father’s pathetic attempt to make Daniel appear uppity when it was his father who was the coward. This was the first, and really the only, time Daniel got a sense of what it must be like to be Pete, because his dad looked at him then the way he looked at Pete all the time, as if he had no idea what to do with him and could not for the life of him figure out what had gone so wrong between them. Somehow this look of hopelessness and confusion was more hurtful than outright anger.

Daniel could not say it brought him any closer to his brother, though hating the country club put them on the same side of things—a rare occurrence. Though Daniel and his brother disagreed about almost everything there was still enough left over from when they were best friends for him to feel as though he shared with Pete something that no one else in his life ever after would be able to understand or approximate. They had in common a sensibility a vision of the world and their place in it, and it depended on a kind of superiority, a belief in their own intelligence and allegiance to things that matter, which verged on snobbishness but wasn’t finally, because they were just as likely to find something to admire in their crazy neighbor who raised chow chows and chinchillas for a living and who had a daughter who came over to their house to sing fundamentalist hymns with a pronounced warble tremoloing each penultimate syllable like a radio preacher than in, say, someone whose sense of the world came close to their own. Not that Daniel knew many people who fit that bill.

This was one of the reasons why it was so frustrating for Daniel to be around his brother. Because Daniel knew that whatever Pete did, however much trouble he got into, he still understood Daniel, and Daniel him, in a way that no one else could. But that didn’t mean he wanted to ride around the back roads all day with him and flunk his trig test.

“Okay,” Daniel said. “What do I have to do to get you to turn around?”

Pete smoked his joint and pretended to think about it. He seemed to fall into one of his infamously dark moods.

“There’s one thing that might make this day a little easier.” They were passing a country store. Pete whipped into the parking lot and pulled up next to a bench of old country loafers in trademark country loafer getup: overalls, feed caps, work boots.

“Forget it,” Daniel said. “I’m not buying you any beer.”

“Wouldn’t be for just me.”

“I try to wait until five o’clock most days.”

Pete looked at his brother with his slitty eyes and smiled. Daniel hated how untrustworthy Pete looked when he was high. He was almost always high.

“Little party action you’re trying to hide from me, huh?”

For some reason this embarrassed Daniel. “I’m not the goody-goody you like to think I am.”

“That’s what I’m hearing.” Pete said this quietly, underbreath, as if it hurt a little to say it. Daniel imagined Pete hearing something about him from one of his buddies, something vicious and all wrong, and it both saddened and annoyed him enough to want to get out of the car.

Then there was the other hand, the hand that was not all about Daniel. Maybe his brother needed him. It hadn’t happened in years, and buying beer for him would not be a big-brotherly move if Pete was in some kind of trouble and needed his help. But helping Pete might allow him to forget his own problems for a while. As would a few beers.