Virginia Lovers (2 page)

“You know the boy?” asked Hamp.

“Know
of
him. Know the family, slightly. His dad’s a doctor. Quiet guy. Came here originally to work in the emergency room. The wife teaches piano lessons.”

“Locals?”

“No. He’s from Florida, I think. She’s from out West somewhere.”

Hamp nodded, as if this information was relevant to the murder of their son.

“Your boys about his age?”

“The oldest is,” said Thomas. This was a question he’d asked himself when the police chief called him at the office Sunday night with the news. He remembered Daniel hanging out with the boy—Brandon was his name—back in junior high school, and maybe he’d seen Brandon riding in the front seat of the old Ford he’d bought for his sons. Last Sunday night, when the body was discovered, Thomas had phoned Caroline. He was often one of the first to hear when something happened in Trent, and Caroline, though she wasn’t a gossip, liked to be the second. He’d asked to speak to Daniel, who’d seemed genuinely shocked by the news. Daniel’s quickened breath and muffled words suggested he might even have cried a little.

“He’s never known anyone to die except our parents, and that was back when he was a baby,” Caroline told Thomas late that night over a nightcap.

“Were he and Brandon close? I don’t remember seeing him around; he never called over here much, did he?”

Caroline said, “Daniel mentioned they used to be friends, but that was a long time ago.”

“How long could it have been?” Thomas asked her, pondering the notion of time to an eighteen-year-old.

“You know how those adolescent friendships fall apart,” Caroline said. “One year they have homeroom together and they’re inseparable, the next year they’re split up and they forget they knew each other.”

“I know how quickly everything about a kid can change,” he said.

In the past two years, they’d watched Pete plummet from honor roll student to frequently expelled. Lately it seemed everything reminded Thomas of his younger son’s descent—he could find a way to connect his beloved Tar Heels losing to the Blue Devils to his son’s problems. He was reluctant to talk about it with Caroline, who could easily devote her waking hours to trying to run their sons’ lives. Recently he’d come home to discover her reading
I’m OK-You’re OK
—just the kind of popular psychology he thought a woman of her intelligence would have sneered at—and when he made fun of her, gingerly he thought, she became defensive and all but said that he wasn’t doing enough to save Pete.

She had not replied to his statement about how quickly kids could change, and he realized that he was glad, for he did not want to talk about Pete. Most of their conversations these days were about Pete.

To head her off, he said, “Danny’s an exception to that rule, I guess.”

Caroline said, “What rule?”

“Kids-change-on-a-dime rule.”

She put her drink down, and he noticed it was nearly full.

“You haven’t noticed how moody Danny is lately?”

“He’s eighteen, Caroline. He’s up for the Carmichael. He’s got a lot on his plate.”

To Thomas, there was just cause in all this for the boy’s moodiness. The Carmichael, a lucrative scholarship to Chapel Hill, was a huge deal; it could well determine the course of Danny’s future, as it was the regional equivalent of the Rhodes, and among its recipients were hundreds of success stories. Danny had been approached by the guidance counselor early in his junior year and was told that he was definitely Carmichael material, though deficient in athletics. Thomas had tried hard to be noncommittal about his son’s pursuit of the scholarship—Caroline felt it was best not to put any more pressure on him, as he was, like his father, very good at putting pressure on himself—but once the possibility was introduced, it was hard to remain neutral. For one thing, it would save Thomas thousands of dollars, which he could salt away for their retirement. He hated to think of the money, but on the other hand, his son was gifted, and the Carmichael was designed to recognize such gifts. Why not his son?

“He seems so driven,” Caroline was saying.

Thomas drained his drink and counted to three, then said what he was trying not to say by draining his drink and counting to three.

“I never understand it when people use the word
driven
as a derogatory term.”

Caroline smiled, as if she knew exactly where this sentiment was coming from.

“I just wonder what’s behind it.”

“Behind what? His excellence?”

“His need to win this scholarship, Tom. His need to be the best.”

“Discipline?”

“Sometimes you talk like you’re still in the army.”

“Another thing people love to demonize. The army did me a world of good.”

He’d spent three years in the army—a year stateside, two in Germany and France. Now, thirty years later, it seemed easier to pretend it was all character-building life lessons, but even discipline was only intermittently called for, save the kind required of him to sit around for days waiting on orders to pack up and move somewhere else where they would sit around for days. Many of those days were flat-out wild—not an experience he regretted now that his younger son was embracing his own debauchery. At least he understood the attraction of habitual numbness, unlike Caroline, who rarely had more than two drinks and had never smoked a cigarette and seemed to believe in things—Church, his role as purveyor of truth in the community, their sons—with a faith that made his own seem fledgling. In ways that mattered, she was far more disciplined than he would ever be, though she used the word against him, an epithet of his deep emotional freeze.

“I’ve got to hit the road if I’m going to get that paper out today,” he told Hamp.

“They ought to be finished loading you up by now. You’ll sell a hell of a lot of papers next week, too, you know that.”

“How’s that?”

“Won’t take them more than a few days to solve that murder.”

“I hope so,” said Thomas.

“Of course it would be good business if they drug it out for a month.”

“I imagine I’ll limp by either way,” Thomas said, and as he stood he slid the paper in front of Hamp off the counter. After all, he’d paid for it, and there wasn’t any sense in giving them away.

He took the backroads home, past the flat fallow acreage stubbled with remnant stalks of corn and tobacco, past the empty packing sheds, which weeks before, during the height of produce season, had swarmed with migrants who’d disappeared with the cukes and squash and peppers as if they, too, were cultivated seasonally, their lives subject to the confluence of nature—sun and rain and cancerous blight—that ruled the county. Thomas’s own livelihood depended indirectly on the weather, for when the crops were threatened, the farmers spent no money at local businesses, which, when strapped, cut back on advertising. Even the children had been conditioned to pay attention to the weathermen on the six o’ clock news, aware that a midsummer drought meant hand-me-downs, no late-August week at the beach. Two years ago, Thomas had printed a series of articles investigating the execrable living conditions of the migrant camps. He’d written the articles with a zeal that he only later understood to be driven as much by outrage as a self-destructive impulse that seemed a lot like freedom. The value of the truth appeared proportional to what it might cost him.

Strickland, predictably, had not shared his zeal. Nor, he suspected, had Caroline, though he had to suspect, as she’d read the articles without much comment except to second his scorn for the local farmers who claimed ignorance of injustices taking place on their own lands. She’d never said what he’d wanted her to—that he was right to blow the whistle—and Thomas had interpreted her silence as disapproval. The results were predictable: several dozen canceled subscriptions, a flurry of letters to the editor disputing facts and asserting that photographs had been “manufactured.” A used-car dealership yanked its classifieds, and he lost other larger accounts, with a grocery store on the edge of the town and the local John Deere franchise.

As for the migrants themselves, they’d probably not even noticed—so few spoke English, even fewer could read—and Thomas wondered if his exposé had not cost them work. He wondered where they were now, if they’d finished with apples in New England and had headed home to South Florida, if the crew bosses had, as usual, left them stranded in some frigid hamlet in upstate New York. As the panel van bounced along roads he’d traveled so often that he’d memorized tire swings and yard art, Thomas imagined a migratory life for himself.

He’d grown up only sixty miles from Trent, and he’d never thought much about leaving until the war. What incited him to leave was less the wartime travel, the train trips across the plains to Washington State, his two years in the European theater, than the opportunities afterward—the GI Bill, without which college would have been impossible, as he was only the second in a family of nine to graduate high school. He’d planned on finding a job with a small-town paper and ascending, like so many of his classmates, to papers with larger circulations and grander assignments than covering the chamber of commerce. The day after graduation he’d taken a job with a small paper in the Piedmont, where he’d met Caroline—she was teaching high school history there—and after a year they’d married. A few years later Danny was born, and Pete arrived fourteen months after his brother. Thomas had managed to save enough for a down payment on the
Trent Daily Advance,
which should have satisfied him.

Yet a few years earlier, when Watergate broke, journalism suddenly became a sexy vocation. Thomas had been asked to speak at high schools, civic clubs, the local community college, and even though he delivered the same tired speech—“The Responsibilities of the Press”—and answered the same questions about the identity of Deep Throat until he was sick of the whole subject, the new popularity of his profession revived his aspirations. He’d once dreamed, like every other budding reporter, of writing for the
Washington Post
or the
New York Times.
He’d imagined his own byline on a widely syndicated column. Yet the effects of Watergate had ultimately embarrassed him; the discrepancy between Woodward-Bernstein and Edgecombe-Strickland reminded him that this moment—bumping into town in a gas-fumy van sunken with the week’s thin paper—was what journalism would always be for him.

Often Thomas felt confused about his role in the town. Was he a businessman or a public servant? Deliverer of truth and justice, or purveyor of buy-one-get-one-free turkey breasts? People thought the paper should be free, a civic perk like the library or the Christmas parade. No one really understood his work. Advertisers took issue with the editorial slant, as well as the listing of their names or the names of friends or family members in the district court docket. Some of the few enlightened folks in town seemed to understand the more edifying role of the press but this, too, seemed burdensome, as this camp was rarely satisfied and so small that Thomas could scarcely pay attention to them every week.

As he backed the truck up to the door, his insert crew swarmed the alley behind the office. When Thomas spotted them in the rearview, they appeared loose and wiry and alive—one was dancing atop an air-conditioning unit to a transistor blaring low-wattage soul, several others pitched pennies against a dumpster. The block behind the office was filled with black businesses—Say It Loud Records, Harris’s Pool Room, Modern Barber Shop, a short-order grill called
Lester’s.
The alley was always crowded with black men spilling out of the back doors, and though Thomas knew almost all of them by sight if not by name, and believed he had good standing in the black community, he never felt quite comfortable among them. He used the alley several times a day, and at the sight of him they lowered their voices and their eyes.

Now, as he emerged from the van, a prickly calm appeared on his inserters’ faces. They lined up to unload the papers, snaking a reluctant chain from the van deep inside the office, where the papers were stacked by the glass-topped paste-up tables. Wayman appeared magically from the rear door of the pool room, as if Thomas’s arrival was felt inside the buildings, a palpable tension that summoned Wayman back to work.

Thomas and Strickland traded quibbles about the printing job as they oiled their address-label guns, ancient and inefficient machines that scissored glue-coated labels for out-of-state wraps. There was new technology for everything now—labeling machines, inserters. But like the Linotype and the computer, which replaced it, Thomas could not afford these machines, and he could not imagine putting the paper out without the dozen bodies that filled the office on Wednesday afternoons. He loved the rhythm of Wednesdays, he and Strickland slapping labels, Wayman running the baler, the kids shuffling up to the tables with newly inserted papers. “Need more,” he and Strickland would call out when the boys fell behind, and often the boys would take up his request, passing it along in singsongy insolence.

“He say he need mo, need mo.”

“I need some mo, got to have some mo.”

“I’ mo kick some ass, keep talking about mo…”

Even though Thomas knew he was being made fun of, he enjoyed their riffs.

Thomas noticed Danny only when he brought a stack of papers to his side. Danny never hung out in the alley with the rest of the inserters; he sat up front in the office, doing his homework or talking to Bea, the secretary and paste-up girl. Pete, when he managed to show up on time, always hung out with the black kids. They seemed to like him, and one of them, Anthony McRae, had been a close friend of Pete’s since grade school. Anthony was one of the first black kids to integrate the white schools after the court order came down, and at first Thomas assumed his son was enboldened by having a black boy for a friend. Pete had surprised him by keeping up the friendship for years. The boys spoke to each other in a shorthand that suggested they were still tight.

Thomas didn’t much care for Anthony McRae. He was an intelligent kid, from a good family—his two older brothers had worked for Thomas on Wednesdays, and both had gone on to college on academic scholarships—but he had a mean streak, and a loud foul mouth. He nagged Strickland for more money—the boys were paid four dollars a week for three hours’ work, which was above the minimum wage of $1.25 per hour. Thomas didn’t want his son hanging out with Anthony—the boy was wild enough as it was—but when he mentioned it one Wednesday night on the way home from the post office, Pete surprised him by saying, “Because he a soul brother, right?”