Virginia Lovers (8 page)

“What kind?”

“Six of Bud should do us for now. Until we hit Hay Street.”

“I’m not going with you to Hay Street.” Hay Street was a sleazy carnival of strip bars, massage parlors, and adult bookstores in downtown Fayetteville. “FayetteNam” they called it, filled with grunts who’d come back from the war with Vietnamese women they’d married and then abandoned once they got back home and realized that their families and ex-girlfriends and the buddies who had pulled deferments hated them for marrying outside their race. Hay Street was a rite of passage for boys in Trent. Daniel would never let Pete know it, but he’d been there himself, though not for the same things Pete and his buddies went there to find.

“Suit yourself,” Pete said. He reached in his wallet and handed Daniel some bills. “Just get the six, we’ll ride around in the country, take in some nature.”

“Okay, nature boy,” Daniel said. Inside he suffered the unnerving scrutiny he always drew inside some shabby country store. For some reason Pete could go in a place like that and they didn’t even notice him, but when Daniel walked in it was like a stranger beeper went off and they watched his every move. The girl behind the counter didn’t card Daniel, though— she looked to be about Pete’s age, and Daniel guessed they were far enough out in the country that the liquor laws didn’t really apply. He hated growing up in Trent. He’d always felt that he should be living in a city. Everything in his life would be fine, he thought, if his father had taken a job in Raleigh or Charlotte or better yet someplace out of state, for Daniel was not real crazy about the South, either. He despised that abysmal southern rock that Pete was into—Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band.

Once Daniel, who admittedly knew very little about the subject, argued with Pete about rock ‘n’ roll, but Daniel was in one of those moods when he’d argue with Pete just for the sake of it. Pete claimed that all rock ‘n’ roll was Southern, really, that all important American music was Southern by birth—jazz and blues and country and soul—and their dad, who was listening in on this argument, said, “Pete’s got a point: roots of it all are right down here in the cotton patch.” Daniel started whistling “Dixie” and told them both that they ought to get out more, like he was some kind of regular visitor to Manhattan. Pete had an amazing head for irrelevant trivia; he could tell you who the session players were for some Velvet Underground album as if that meant anything in the scheme of things. Once, he constructed this chart for their mom, who was trying to draw him out and asked him some naive and not terribly sincere question about some rocker—wasn’t he in some other band? Pete created a timeline on a sheet of newsprint he brought home from his dad’s office that he rolled out in the living room, tracing the interconnected and nepotistic careers of all these rock stars Daniel had never even heard of, not that he gave a damn.

Back in the car, Daniel stowed the beer in the backseat, ignoring Pete’s outstretched hand. He let it hang there, empty, until Pete started the car. When they were back on the road, Daniel broke open the six, handed one to his brother; he took one for himself, but held it unopened. He knew he couldn’t go to school, not with beer on his breath. If he missed that test he could not expect more than an A- for the term, and he was after a 4.0 to cushion his deficiency on the football field.

“Go ahead,” Pete said, “You know you’re going to drink it eventually.”

Holding the sweaty beer in his hand, Daniel felt as if he’d been released from the slow but steady creep of time itself, as if the clock had stopped, giving him a day off to waste with his little brother. It was his father’s failing, time—before Daniel even understood time he understood his father’s relationship to it, how it hobbled him, grayed his hair. Assiduously performing the tasks that would impress the committee, Daniel saw how he had inherited this enslavement to the hours of the day. It seemed a terrible trait to share, since it wasn’t something that could be discussed or even acknowledged. He had enough problems he could not talk about.

Daniel popped the ring of his beer, reached over to turn on the radio, knowing what was coming. Pete listened exclusively to WQDR, stale headbanger rock, and Daniel liked WKIX, which played top 40 and classic soul and wasn’t nearly as self-consciously cool as Pete’s station. As soon as his hand left the dial, Pete twisted it, cranking up Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up.”

“Lead singer of this band used to be in the Zombies,” he said.

“I guess this was on your chart,” Daniel said. He made relentless fun of his little brother’s rock lineage chart, of the way Pete treated it as if it explained civilization or culture.

“You’re just jealous because you didn’t know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.”

“You know, the ancient Greeks believed there was a slot in the back of your head, and when your brain was filled with useless information, that slot opened automatically and discarded the fluff so you could have more room for stuff that counted.”

“Like trigonometry, you mean? Or the names of the judges for the Carmichael scholarship?”

Pete knew how to get to him, always. But already the beer, settling on nothing but a half-bowl of cereal and a banana, was allowing Daniel to afford Pete his insults. Daniel needed a day when he just did not care, needed it so badly he was willing to put up with Pete’s slights.

“I’m just saying maybe you need to get your slot checked. See if it needs oil or something. Maybe it’s rusted shut. Maybe your hair’s so thick back there nothing can get past it.”

“Maybe so. Maybe yours is working so well you can pretty much push out anything that comes between you and that scholarship.”

Daniel wasn’t strong enough or high enough to let this go.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m just curious, bro, how far you’d be willing to go just to get the hell out of Trent.”

Pete, suddenly, was intimidating him.

“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want,” Pete said. “We’ll save it for later. How about another round?”

Daniel drained his beer and popped another, ensuring that there would be no return to school, priming himself for this
later
Pete kept threatening. He slouched into a sullen silence, drank his beer and watched the stubbly fields flash past as he pondered Pete’s question: What would he be willing to do to escape?

But he could not answer Pete’s question now and he saw no reason to confess to his brother until confronted with whatever it was Pete knew. Daniel drank his beer, and watched the outskirts of Fayetteville lay claim on the pine forests and tobacco fields. They crossed the muddy Cape Fear at its widest, and immediately the sleaze began: pawnshops and topless bars, tattoo parlors and “adult emporiums,” dozens of windowless cinderblock bars. For years, thousands of boys from every state in the Union had arrived there weekly to do their duty, either by government decree or a desperation so great that they would run off to war to avoid another moment in their hometowns. Daniel spotted them everywhere, the parking lots of convenience stores, in souped-up cars flashing past in other lanes, their scalps pink beneath crewcut stubble, their camouflage uniforms a joke against the grayness of paved-over forest.

“Not a tree in sight,” Daniel said.

“Our excursion has opened your eyes to nature after all.”

“It’s human nature that wrecked this place.”

“As a student of human nature, you’ll love our next stop.”

Daniel didn’t like the sound of this but thought he might as well really go along for the ride, let his brother show him whatever it was he had to show him. Even Hay Street, or Pete’s version of Hay Street.

“I need a pit stop,” Daniel said.

“We’re almost there.”

“We better be.” They cruised downtown, past the old slave market that had been reclaimed by the arts council. Now its walls held bland pastel still lifes by artsy ladies whose ancestors had once gone there to bid on black people. Daniel got lost for a few blocks thinking about how some places in this world seemed reserved for those who would never change. When he came to they were in the darkest heart of Hay Street and his brother was nosing the Galaxy into a metered space in front of Rick’s Lounge, the most notorious strip joint in eastern North Carolina.

“What?”

“Human Nature, Exhibit A.” Pete pointed to a corner where two Vietnamese girls in vinyl miniskirts and jean jackets smiled listlessly at cars backed up at the light. Daniel looked across the street to the Fine Arts Theatre, now showing a masterpiece of cinema called
Thar She Blows,
its poster featuring a huge-breasted mermaid wrapping her scaly tail around a phallic harpoon.

“Oh, brother,” Daniel said.

“At your service.”

“Start the car, then.”

“Tour begins in two seconds. We need a place where we can talk. You said you needed a bathroom, right?”

“McDonald’s will do fine.”

“Too bad,” Pete said, and he pocketed the keys and was inside Rick’s before Daniel could pull himself out of the car.

Inside was eye-blinking black. Neon beer signs diced shadows from the darkness, and clouds of smoke laced those shadows. Daniel smelled beer and sweat and some industrial-strength disinfectant meant to cover the aroma but only made it more prominent. He had never been in a strip joint before and he was afraid it showed somehow, though those present would hardly witness his self-consciousness: a bored greaser behind the bar who did not seem to notice nor care that the boys were underage, and a half-dozen early-morning drinkers, mostly enlisted men, seated at tables that came into focus only gradually, and down at the end of the bar a group of girls, obviously dancers, sipping Cokes and talking in a huddle. On the curved stage that ran behind the bar a lone girl dressed like a nurse danced to the O’Jays’ “Love Train.”

Pete sat right in front of her, of course. Daniel didn’t feel he could argue with him anymore. He was sure he knew what this was about and wanted only to get it over with so that they could leave this place, which did not offend him because he was above it, but rather because it seemed so desperate a place to spend your morning. He couldn’t look at the girl, who was inching her nurse’s uniform up to show the straps linking her white hose to her tiny panties.

“I’ll be back,” Daniel said, and he lingered in the bathroom as long as he could stand.

Back at the bar, Daniel felt uncomfortable, but at least he was dressed casually. Instead of his typical uniform of Lacoste or button-down Oxford shirt and khakis, he wore jeans and a VI
RGINIA
I
S FOR
L
OVERS
T-shirt he’d bought at the Methodist Women’s Thrift Shop down on Sycamore Street. Pete and his friends scoured the musty aisles of the thrift shop weekly—Pete’s entire wardrobe, their father once joked, was likely valued at seventeen dollars and some change—but Daniel had set foot in the shop only once, and only this T-shirt, black and a little too big for him, misshapen by someone’s wide shoulders and a larger gut, paint-stained and a little frayed at the collar, appealed to him. He liked the red lettering, the large red heart beneath the word
Lovers.
He liked the absurdity of the slogan; he liked to wear the shirt ironically, as opposed to others he spotted wearing them (for these shirts were popular a year or so earlier among teenagers, quickly replaced by B
ERT’S
S
URF
S
HOP
or the official tour Tee of some flavor-of-the-month band) whom, he liked to believe, took literally the notion that there existed a place—a commonwealth!—wherein people might locate that most elusive of emotions. That the shirt could be mistaken for earnestness, for gullibility, made the joke all the more delicious.

Pete had ordered beers with no trouble from the bartender. Daniel thought of remarking on this phenomenon but that might imply that he was interested in his surroundings.

“So what do you think of her?” Pete said when he sat.

“What are we doing here, Pete?”

Pete shrugged. “Mind if I watch?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think she’s pathetic.”

She
was
pathetic. She was so high on something her eyes were just liquid slants, and her movements were so fluid it was doubtful she was even boned. She had the skin of a forty-year-old; her breasts, once she exposed them, were sadly deflated. She kept her G-string on, so technically she was not naked, but aside from magazines passed among the Raleigh Road boys back when he used to hang around the black pipe, she was as nude a woman as Daniel had ever seen. He could not help but look, even if he was unaroused by what he saw.

“Pathetic how?”

“Actually, we’re the pathetic ones for watching her.” Daniel swung around to face his brother. “Whatever it is you brought me here to say you better say it now, or I’m leaving.”

“Long walk,” Pete said, patting the keys in his jeans.

“I’ll call Mom to come pick me up.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“I would. I will.”

“Hell you will. Because if you do I’ll tell her what I know about you and Brandon Pierce.”

Pete’s face flushed then, and he turned away and pretended to check out the dancer, but Daniel could tell he was upset, that he’d been saving this and had spilled it too early and in a way he had not planned on. Still it hung there, his threat, and though Daniel was shocked that Pete would stoop to this, a part of him was glad to finally have it out.

“And what would you tell her?”

“You tell me, Dan. I’d hate to get the facts wrong.”

“Well, you’ve always been one to take extra care with the facts. What is it about me and Brandon Pierce you want to know, Pete?”

“Come on, man. Don’t make this harder.”

“You think I had something to do with Brandon’s death? Is that it? You think I’m a murderer now?”

Pete fished a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it with a shaky hand. He looked exhausted suddenly, as if he wished he’d never brought any of this up.

“No, I don’t think you’re a murderer.”

“Then what?”

“Here’s what: I know you can’t stand me. I know I embarrass the hell out of you. But still, man… I just wish you had the guts to tell me yourself. You ever stop to think how it felt to hear it from somebody else?”