Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  And now the music was as stale as Casey Kasem’s Sunday-afternoon Top 40 countdown. A night like the last, preview of the next. Pete tilted the pinball machine, drawing Underwood, the proprietor of the Glam, out from behind his counter to deliver his standard spiel on respect of property. A girl named Sheila Fay Mock who had renamed herself only “Chloe,” an over-eyeshadowed, lost, pouting thing who slept with boys for shared joints, tried to entice Pete out back with her usual sad barters. Sorry, Chloe, wish I had something to share. He’d give it to her if he was holding. Accepting her payback would only make him feel more desperate, as her self-disgust was contagious, Pete knew from experience.

  Cozart bummed Pete’s cigarettes and with each Marlboro promised to pay him back triple when his ship came in. Outside the lights of cruising cars swept the parking lot, a continuous parade of his peers trapped in their meaningless orbit. Throughout it all, haggard mothers arrived, their low, muddy American sedans sunken with laundry and dirty-faced kids dressed in T-shirts and diapers, who crawled about the floor of the Glam putting things in their mouths that their mothers slapped them for touching—that thang’s filthy; you come here and mind!

  Punching up his two tunes for the fourth time, Pete thought of home, of what he’d be doing if he were there. Hiding out in his room, listening to Exile on Main Street, most likely. He tried to think of other things he could do. He could read a book. He used to read a book a night almost, but in the past two years he’d read only biographies of rock stars and backpacking magazines and old issues of Rolling Stone. His parents had given him a subscription to National Geographic each year since he was eight, when he’d developed a fierce passion for the names of places, maps, accounts of foreign travel, of Life Elsewhere. But the yellow magazines stacked up on the living room coffee table and only occasionally did he take one into the bathroom.

  Pete was thinking of leaving, walking home to read some article about the Panama Canal zone, when Cozart slid up to the pinball machine, reeking of pot, and told him Tysinger was outside asking for them.

  “He saw us already,” said Cozart when Pete shrugged.

  “He saw you, you mean. What does he want?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  After his last ball, Pete moved to the plate-glass window. Tysinger’s TransAm idled out front, a couple of boys gathered around the driver’s side window. Tysinger came from the side of the neighborhood that Pete’s father, liberal voice of the coastal plain, had told him in so many words to stay away from. Danny, of course, had a built-in radar for what he called “the raffish element,” a prissy term he’d read in some book, British probably, and the people who lived on Tysinger’s street, Wilmington Avenue, and the sad blocks behind the National Guard Armory, were definitely of this element. Among those few streets you could find every cliché of white-trashdom: Cars on blocks in muddy front yards, their engine blocks wrenched in the air with rusty chains, swinging from the limbs of oaks. Grocery carts wheeled home from the Piggly Wiggly and abandoned to rust in the ditches. Yard art of the store-bought and homemade variety, ceramic deer and plastic trellises, tires spray-painted white and half-buried in the sand to frame an unkempt circle of ragweed and dying daylily

  Tysinger lived down there with his mother and father and grandmother, and even though Raleigh Road was in another income bracket from Wilmington Avenue, it was close enough for outsiders to consider it the same neighborhood. Only Tysinger and a few other boys from those blocks occasionally hung out at the black pipe—the rest were either in reform school or were motorheads who spent all their time at some uncle’s garage, waxing and buffing their machines.

  Tysinger was Cozart’s friend, mostly. Pete was intimidated by him, not only because of his size—six-two, 240 pounds, a star linebacker for the Trent High Stallions, so powerful and dependable that the coach, a notorious hater of longhairs and fuckups, kept him on the team despite his shoulder-length curls and his blatant disregard of the training regimen—but because he rarely spoke. To Pete, Tysinger seemed so unaware of and uninterested in the possibilities of words and their music that he might as well cut his tongue out. Pete found his silence sinister. Yet he hung around with him because Tysinger was Danny’s age and at eighteen could always be counted upon to buy beer.

  Often Pete and Cozart ended up with Tysinger toward the end of the night. He always had pot and he didn’t mind sharing his stash.

  Tonight was the first time Pete had seen Tysinger since Saturday night when Tysinger had picked up Pete and Cozart at the Glam around eleven and drove them to a party at Brandon Pierce’s house.

  That Brandon Pierce was the most effeminate boy at Trent High had not stopped them from crashing his party. In Trent you did not have to like or even be acquainted with a kid throwing an unchaperoned party to show up.

  Brandon was slight and limber and had a gossipy alto, often featured in the musical productions of the Trent High Drama Club. His friends were girls, except for a few of these girls’ boyfriends who tolerated him because they had to, and Pete’s brother, Danny, who used to hang around with him some in tenth grade when they were both officers in the French Club. That friendship was brief and carried on mostly in private—Pete remembered Brandon showing up at the house a few times with the group of girls Danny knew, the smartest and straightest girls at school—but when, last year, Danny decided to go out for football in order to improve his chances for the Carmichael, Danny dropped Brandon Pierce.

  Pete was relieved, for his friends used to say, when they saw Danny with Brandon at school, “How come your brother hangs out with that fag?” Pete admired his brother for befriending Brandon, for he knew that Danny did so more because he knew Brandon needed a male friend than because he enjoyed his company—once Pete had overheard Danny say to some girl on the phone that Brandon was such a whiny snob it was no wonder he had no friends. But it also embarrassed Pete to have to endure his friends’ comments. With the exception of Cozart, who he had known long enough to ignore all but his most benign qualities, Pete had to be stoned to stand their company, and he did not welcome any other reasons to feel uneasy.

  That night of Brandon’s party had started out like any of a hundred nights in his life. He and Cozart had been hanging around the Glam when Tysinger had shown up in the parking lot. A crowd of kids gathered around his car, and it was clear to Pete even from inside the Glam that something was up. Cozart went to find out and came back breathless and giddy.

  “Man, Tysinger kicked Brandon Pierce’s ass,” he said.

  “What a match,” Pete said. “Let me guess: he crashes his party, drinks his daddy’s liquor, and then kicks his ass to thank him?”

  “Pierce said something about his mother, man.”

  Pete looked up from his pinball game.

  “What?”

  “Called her sorry,” said Cozart. “Come on, you got to hear this shit.”

  Pete lingered over his last ball, tried to act as if this shit didn’t interest him, but he was fascinated. What had possessed Brandon Pierce to say something about Tysinger’s mother? Suicide, clearly. Like walking down Sampson Street, calling out Hey nigger to the knots of black men in front of Say It Loud or Harris’s Pool Room.

  The crowd around the TransAm had grown by the time Pete ambled over. Tysinger was preaching to a steady chorus of incredulous responses—No way, man; Get the hell out; He really said that?—and he was clearly enjoying the attention. At the height of his performance he motioned Pete and Cozart over to the car, told them to get in, they were going for a ride. Pete climbed in without thinking, as if he were merely headed out into the country to get stoned. Which is exactly what they did, though this night was not like any other, for Tysinger was as worked up as he’d ever been on the football field, and despite Pete’s suspicion that this could easily turn treacherous, he wanted to hear what had happened.

  Perhaps it was the canned way Tysinger carried on about his mother that intrigued Pete for so long. Or the fact that he found it necessary to defend, to
Pete and Cozart, two scrawny stoners who would not dare doubt him, his mother’s honor. He told them how she’d grown up hard, in the country, never said a word against nodamnbody. As they cruised the backroads, Tysinger’s mother—he called her only “Ma”—took shape as a long-suffering line worker out at Hamilton Beach, where she screwed blades onto the bottom of blenders for little more than minimum wage. A simple, pure woman who never did anyone any harm. Describing her life, Tysinger teared up, his thin voice cracking.

  It occurred to Pete that this might have been the first time Tysinger had seriously considered what his mother’s life was like. The deeper into his mother’s character he dug, the wilder he drove. His recklessness suggested the apathy common to boys from back of the armory, yet his plaintive defense of his mother made Pete feel that he cared very much for things Pete had thought him oblivious to: honor and dignity and integrity. Pete was impressed by this show even as he distrusted it.

  Fifteen more minutes passed before Tysinger got around to telling them what happened. Apparently he headed out to the garage for another draft, where he found Brandon, standing drunk and alone by the keg. Tysinger claimed Brandon just up and started talking about Tysinger’s mother, calling her “trailer trash” and “sorry.”

  Initially, Pete was fascinated more by the language Brandon chose than the meaning behind his words. Sorry, in Trent, was rarely used to connote apology. Sorry, sorryassed, one sorry sumbitch: The adjective was trotted out for the lazy the besotted, the chronically unemployed, the simpleminded, the felonious, the deceitful, and the unfaithful. Sorry was a ubiquitous term, applied indiscriminately to those whose automobiles were jacked up too high or too low or who hung fuzzy dice or graduation tassels from their rearview mirrors, or who sanded the paint on their Camaros down to primer. An eighteen-year-old in ninth grade study hall was one sorry specimen; all dropouts, however cool, were sorry. Trent itself was unanimously acknowledged as one sorry excuse for a place to grow up.

  But it didn’t sound to Pete like a word Brandon Pierce might use. Brandon, like Danny, was affected; like Danny, he’d taught himself to speak in a way that made it clear that he was leaving Trent as soon as he graduated high school. Maybe Brandon Pierce had said something else derogatory about Tysinger’s mother, and sorry was the word Tysinger found to translate the slur into his own language. Or perhaps Brandon Pierce had said nothing at all.

  There wasn’t time to puzzle over the news, for they had arrived at the party. Tysinger passed by the house and parked around the corner, on another street.

  “What, we’re going to call a cab from here?” said Cozart. Tysinger didn’t answer. He got out and they followed. Though there were only a half dozen cars parked along the shoulder in front of Pierce’s house, there was plenty evidence of a crowd in the six-pack rings and empties littering the grass. When they reached the edge of the yard, Tysinger told them to stay in the garage, near the keg, to make sure no one came in the house, then disappeared around the side of the building.

  “What’s up with him?” Cozart said.

  “Guess he doesn’t want anyone to see him,” said Pete. “Maybe we should bolt.”

  “Let’s get a beer first.”

  There were still a few kids around the keg. Those who remained were practicing the accounts they would spread through the smoking lounge at school Monday, for as with all teenage psychodramas, there was a sense of privilege among those lucky enough to have witnessed the events. The next day they would be celebrities, would have people who would not normally acknowledge them hanging on their every word. One of the witnesses announced he was off to the Glam, and suddenly the garage cleared out, everyone racing to be the first to spread the news. Pete and Cozart were alone except for two of Brandon’s girlfriends, quiet, proper girls whom Cozart started to chat up in the driveway.

  “Fucking queer never did tell Tysinger he was sorry,” Pete heard Cozart say to one of them, and for some reason he said the word aloud—“sorry”—as if it was some sort of secret code for what was happening. Pete stood around in the driveway for a while with Cozart and the girls, listening to Cozart’s pathetic small talk, and not listening, too; he faded in and out and kept his cup filled with foamy draft.

  Around this time his memory of that night dimmed and shrouded. One of the girls said she had to go. Cozart tried to talk her out of it, and when she and her friend started to walk to their cars, Cozart told them to wait up a minute, and he came over to Pete and dragged him around the side of the garage and said, “Man, what’s wrong with you, those girls are drunk as shit, get your act together and stop spacing out, we’re fixing to get lucky.”

  “You’re not going to get anywhere with those girls,” said Pete. “Those girls are friends of my brother’s,” Pete told him, “they’re straight as they come.” And Cozart said, “They ain’t so straight tonight,” and dribbled on about how straight girls need it, too. Pete told him to knock himself out, and Cozart shrugged and spit into the shubbery and said that sometimes he wondered about Pete, and Pete asked him what the fuck was that supposed to mean and Cozart made a rake out of his hand and combed it through his lank hair a couple times and wiped his mouth off with his sleeve and left Pete standing there while he chased after his straight girls, who were lingering in the dark by their cars.

  Pete headed back to the garage for another draft and spent forever running foam out of his cup until it was brimming with cold golden beer. He dragged a lawn chair out into the driveway and sat beneath a basketball board. He thought about Brandon’s father, buying him the hoop for a Christmas present and spending all day putting it up, and coming home early from the hospital for a few weeks afterward to shoot baskets with his son, who had to be forced to go outside and talked into a game of Horse, which dragged on for hours, slowest spelling game ever, as Brandon sissy-dribbled the ball around and took limp-wristed shots. The father lost his patience somewhere between an easy layup O and a bankshot R and accused his son of not even trying, and Pete imagined Brandon crumpling into tears, running inside to hide in his room. It made Pete sad to see it. He teared up a little himself and pulled the lawn chair back into the garage where he could be alone by the keg.

  When he heard a car start and pull off he walked over to the driveway and saw Cozart lying on the hood of a yellow Pinto with a girl named Marsha Maybanks, a homely girl with huge breasts and acne, who was friends with Danny. Once Pete came home on a Saturday night stoned and irritable, having argued with Cozart about the fact that Cozart always had to drive, which was true because Pete was scared to drive, scared he would get busted or wreck the car and so he always claimed to Cozart and the rest of his friends that his parents would not let him have the car, though this was a lie, they were always asking if he needed it. Marsha Maybanks and some of her friends were sitting in the den watching James Taylor on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and Pete pretended they weren’t there as he raided the fridge and made himself a huge, disgusting sandwich out of ketchup, mayonnaise, pickles, and some leftover meatloaf, and when he passed by them on his way to his room this Marsha Maybanks gave him this toothy smile she probably thought was sexy, and Daniel asked if he wanted to watch Sweet Baby James with them, and even though he hated himself for it, he let out a surly snort and said he’d rather listen to the furnace than James Fucking Taylor.

  For a while he stood at the edge of the garage watching Cozart and Marsha Maybanks wrestle on the hood of the Pinto. Cozart had his hand on her breasts and his mouth mashed against hers, and they were dry-humping like they’d been struck by some kind of badly synchronized seizure. After a few minutes of this they climbed into the backseat of the car, and Pete retreated to his lawn chair and drank another couple beers and smoked a joint he’d been hoarding from Cozart. When he’d finished the joint he headed inside the house to scare up something to munch on and it was only when he entered the kitchen that he wondered what the hell Tysinger was doing in there with Brandon Pierce. It seemed strange to Pete that Tysinger would not want an aud
ience. He found a package of individually wrapped Cheetos in a cabinet, obviously meant for Brandon Pierce’s lunch, and was on his way back out to the garage when he heard a scream from the back of the house.

  Pete didn’t want to know and he understood he couldn’t not know. He was way too fucked up to do anything about it, whatever it was, and a part of him knew he wouldn’t do anything if he was stone sober. This was the worst part of it, knowing he’d rather live with the guilt of having done nothing than piss off Tysinger and lose what little cool he’d established with what Daniel called the “demimonde of Trent”—one of his lacy-ass French terms. Pete assumed it meant “riffraff,” the word his parents used for the crowd he ran with.

  He could not not know even if he did nothing about it and so he stashed the Cheetos and tiptoed down the hallway to a door with a light beneath it. Even though it was shut tight and he was not about to open it, Pete stood there breathing huge and ragged, his fingers curled into red fists. So much of his life took place outside the body he dragged through the hallways of school and in and out of the cars of people he had nothing at all to say to and thought way beneath him—riffraff demimonde—so much of his day spent floating, far above the parking lots of laundromats and suburban woods. In thought he lived valiantly and loved and was loved back with simple honesty. He said wildly funny, smart things. People wrote them down. The space between him and earth was as high as the drop from black pipe to sodden, bottle-strewn marsh. So much time spent hovering above in some precisely imagined space where the things he did were not always right, but never once did he feel, after having done them, that he’d sullied not only his own life but the lives of everyone he knew. He meant well.