All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  She implores him now with those hands. “One favor, Wally.”

  He looks at her. “What’s going on, Mother?”

  “I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I need you to get rid of a crate for me.”

  He blinks. “A crate?”

  “Yes. Take it down to the swamp in Dogtown. It’s too heavy for me to move. But I need to get rid of it as soon as possible.”

  Wally leans in close, studying her eyes.

  “Will you do it for me, Walter? Please?”

  “Why should I do anything for you, Mother?” he whispers, only inches now from her face. “What did you ever do for me?”

  “Please, Walter. Please.”

  He backs off. “Where is it? This crate?”

  “In the basement, Walter. Behind the furnace.”

  In Wally’s last show, some moth-eaten musical touring upstate New York, he met an old woman. She was about his mother’s age, fair and pretty like her too. Her name was Cora, and she’d been in show business since the days of vaudeville, tap-dancing behind Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor at the age of eight. Now the poor old thing was always forgetting her lines, and the director, fed up, was going to drop her. All she had were three simple sentences in a scene where she played a bag lady, but they always came out wrong, and in reverse order. So Wally cooked up a plan: he wrote her lines down on his shirt with a black permanent marker so she could read them. It meant he had to keep his back to the audience and never got to show his face, but Cora got to keep the job, and she was tremendously grateful.

  One night, after the show, they sat in a coffee shop, still in their makeup and costumes. “Do you have someone special in your life?” Cora asked him.

  Wally considered the question. “I have some good friends.”

  “But no special one among them?”

  He hesitated. “I did. But he died.”

  Cora smiled. “What was his name?”

  “Ned. His name was Ned.”

  “And was he your first love?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But close to it.”

  “And there’s been no one since?”

  Wally thought of the boys who’d paraded through his bedroom in the years since Ned had died. Boys only a few years older than he had been when he’d sent Alexander Reefy to jail.

  “No,” he told Cora. “No one since.”

  “But the world is a large place, Wally. There are others out there.”

  “Yes. But none like him.”

  “Of course not like him,” Cora said. “Never like him.”

  In that short conversation, Cora had learned more about him than his mother had in his whole lifetime.

  Heading down the staircase into the basement, Wally realizes that while Brown’s Mill may not have changed, while his mother might not have changed, one important thing had. Once Wally had known all of Brown’s Mill’s secrets. He knew what was hidden where, which bodies might be found in whatever closet.

  But no more.

  Wally lifts the lid of his mother’s crate and looks inside.

  2

  THE BASEMENT

  Until she killed him, he’d been a moody sort with yellow hair buzzed close to his head and a wicked little smile that dared her to do it. And so, one day, she did. It was a bright, sunny autumn day, with orange maple leaves twirling through the air, and he was asleep on the couch. She had just finished working in the garden, turning the mulch for the winter, and she carried the iron rake in with her, raising it up and smashing it down into his face, aiming for his temple, while he slept.

  Regina Day is a good woman. Everyone in Brown’s Mill would agree to that. So much tragedy in her life: her mother, her sister, her husband, her son. Yet every Sunday, there she is, attending services at St. Peter’s Lutheran church at the south end of Main Street. She’s always giving generously whenever those adorable little Puerto Rican children come around from Dogtown, ringing her bell, collecting for the heart fund or the leukemia drives. And everybody in town gets a Christmas card from Regina, even that scandalous Gladys Carroll and the disgraced former Mayor Winslow.

  Yes, Regina Day is a good woman. It’s just that one day she’d had enough, and so she killed the boy. She was surprised by how easy it was to decide to do it. Never in her life had she made a decision so easily. She usually fretted and worried and hemmed and hawed. But this time it was a snap.

  Even the killing was easy. The only difficult part was the cleaning up afterward. He’d gushed a great deal of blood, and an Oriental vase that had been her grandmother’s had shattered when his arms flailed out and over the sides of the couch. Mopping and sweeping was what took a long time, and dragging the boy’s body downstairs into the basement and stuffing it into the crate was especially arduous. Regina was an old woman, after all, seventy-three this year, with arthritis in her legs, and the boy had weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds.

  But once it was done, she sat down at her kitchen table and had a cup of orange tea and some graham crackers. Once her breath returned, she dialed the number for the police.

  “Hello? Is this the Brown’s Mill police department? Yes, this is Regina Day. May I speak with Officer Garafolo? Oh, yes, hello, how are you? I’m fine. No, no, it’s not anything like that. I just—well, I want to report a missing person.” Pause. “My nephew. Kyle Francis Day. He was in the navy. I think he’s gone AWOL.”

  “Mother!” Walter calls up the stairs. “There’s nothing in this crate but a bunch of old linens!”

  Regina stands at the top of the basement stairs looking down.

  “No, no, Walter, don’t look inside—”

  Her son has appeared at the bottom of the stairs glaring up at her. “Why in God’s name would you want to sink a crateful of linens into the swamp?”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Regina says, gripping hold of the banister and starting down the stairs. Her arthritis twinges but she keeps going. She brushes past her son to hurry round the furnace and peer down into the opened crate.

  Linens.

  She begins moving them aside, digging underneath. The crate is filled with musty old linens. And has been for fifteen years.

  Regina closes the lid and sits down on top of the crate.

  “Mom,” Walter says, and dare she think it? Is there a small hint of compassion in his voice? “What did you think was in that crate?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Are you on any medications that might be—?”

  “No. Well, for my arthritis. But I’ve taken those for years.”

  She lifts her eyes up at him. Yes, he does look like Robert. Exactly like Robert, so tall and handsome when she met him, resplendent in his uniform.

  Would you come back to my room with me? Robert had breathed in her ear. Before I head off to face certain death in the jungles of the Mekong?

  Oh, how Robert had dazzled her. He was younger than she was, and far more handsome than she deserved. In that moment, Regina had felt not like herself, but like her sister Rocky, who all the boys had fancied. Rocky—who was never afraid, who was always taking risks—

  “Mom.”

  She looks up at her son.

  “Does this have anything to do with Kyle?”

  Kyle.

  Dear God, I’m afraid I’m losing my mind …

  “Mom,” Walter says again

  It happened before. Why not again?

  “Mother! Do you have any idea where Kyle went?”

  Not in the crate. Why had she thought he was in the crate?

  I buried him. I remember now. In the back yard. The shovel … Yes, I took the shovel and I dug. Beside the poplar trees …

  “He was a bad boy, Walter,” she says finally. “Such a bad one. He got into so much trouble as a boy. You remember, don’t you? You were a good boy, Walter, but he was bad.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Oh, but you were good, Walter. You—”

  “You know what I did, M
other!” Her son is raising his voice now. “Stop saying I was a good boy!”

  I dug a grave in the backyard. That’s where he is. I’m sure that’s where he is.

  “You all wanted to make me out to be a good boy, but I wasn’t.” Walter is looking at her with hard, glassy eyes. “You know what I did, even if you won’t talk about it.”

  “It was Kyle who was bad, Walter. Don’t you remember when he stole that money from Father Carson? Oh, how ashamed poor Bernadette was. And then he got into that fistfight with his teacher. Remember, Walter? How embarrassing it was for the family?”

  Walter laughs. “That’s what embarrassed the family, Mother? Nothing else?”

  Beside the poplar trees.

  “A bad boy, Walter. That’s what Kyle was. A very bad boy.”

  Already at ten Kyle was bad. Sitting beside his parents as Walter received his certificate from Sister Angela, Kyle had squirmed and made noises with his hands. “Farting noises,” he’d called them, and though Bernadette had shushed him, it was to no avail. Sister went on singing Walter’s praises, commending his perfect attendance and straight As, but Kyle would not be silenced. Regina felt a spitball land in her hair. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bernadette take the boy by the arm out of the room to spank him, but Kyle managed to wriggle out of her grip and run away, disrupting the whole ceremony.

  Such a bad boy.

  If only he had never come back.

  “I’m sure your father will be very proud,” Regina told Walter that day, shutting out Kyle’s cries from her ears. She told her son to hold up his certificate so that she could take a photograph and send it to Robert on the aircraft carrier. Somewhere down here in the basement she still has the photos from that day, probably in one of those moldy boxes stacked against the far wall. But it doesn’t matter where they are: she can see them clearly in her mind. Walter was wearing his Boy Scout uniform that day, and he was beaming, a big ear-to-ear grin, holding up the school certificate that proclaimed him a straight-A student. Regina had snapped a dozen photographs, sending them all to Robert. And when he got them, she was certain, her husband had passed them around to all of his men, boasting, “This is my son. My son Walter, the future admiral.”

  “Walter’s a faggot! Walter’s a faggot!”

  Kyle was shouting from the back of the hall. His mother had finally caught him and was spanking him, but it made no difference. Still he shouted, still he tried to ruin Walter’s moment.

  “Mom,” Walter is saying. “Come upstairs.”

  She stands but doesn’t follow. The basement smells damp and musty. It’s been years since she’s been through all these boxes. So many of them are Robert’s things. She has no idea what he might have been holding onto. After he left the service there were things he told her never to look at, never to open or ask questions about. So she never did. Boxes stamped USN have mildewed down here ever since he died.

  “You ought to have your father’s things,” she tells her son.

  “I don’t want his things.”

  “Then your things, Walter. I still have all your things here. All your toys, your comic books, your school papers—”

  “I have everything I need, Mom.”

  “But look, Walter. Do you remember?”

  She bends down and retrieves from the cobwebs a plastic model of Frankenstein’s monster. She holds it out to Walter, who takes it from her and looks down at it in his hands.

  “I had them all,” he says. “Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera.” He lifts his eyes to look over at Regina. “I glued them all together and then painted them.”

  “Oh, yes, Walter. How you loved your models.”

  “Dad said it was like playing with dolls.”

  Regina just makes a little sound in her throat.

  “Don’t you remember, Mom? How he said it was a sissy hobby? If I wanted to build models, why not of ships? Or airplanes?”

  “You had a Dracula model, too. It must be here somewhere—”

  “He brought me home a kit for an aircraft carrier. Do you remember that, Mom? When I never built it, he got so pissed he went into my room and broke my Wolfman model into bits, right in front of my eyes.”

  She finds the Dracula model and hands it over to Walter. He doesn’t take it. He just stands there looking at her.

  “You never said anything,” her son tells her. “He did what he wanted. You never said a word.”

  “You were a good boy, Walter,” she says. “You were a very good boy.”

  And he was. Straight As from first grade until ninth. Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Eagle Scout. Everyone said Walter Day would go far in life. That he’d make his parents proud.

  Not like Kyle Day. Oh, no, not like him at all. Kyle Day shamed his parents. That’s what sent poor Albert, Robert’s brother, to an early grave, and why poor Bernadette, Albert’s wife, took to drink. It was all Kyle’s fault. He was a bad, bad boy.

  That’s why I did what I did, Regina tells herself. He was bad. To the core.

  I buried him in the backyard. That’s where he is. Out by the poplar trees.

  “His car is still in the garage,” Walter says, after they’ve gone upstairs.

  “Yes,” Regina agrees. “It’s still there.”

  Her son sighs. “Wherever he went, somebody else was apparently driving.” Walter gazes out at the car through the door between the kitchen and the garage. “Looks like the car meant a lot to him, the way it’s been rebuilt and all.”

  “Oh, yes, it did,” Regina says, looking at the car darkly. “He was always out there, working on it, polishing it.”

  It’s a shined-up, repainted 1979 red and gold Trans Am. The interior is all-new black leather. Regina remembers when he had it installed, how he was out there all day, cursing, spitting, drinking beer.

  “Odd that he’d leave it behind,” Walter says.

  “Yes. I suppose it is.”

  He’s looking at her. “Why was he living here?”

  “He had no where else after your Aunt Bernadette died.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “This last time, maybe three weeks. But he’d been using this as his base for the past few years.”

  Walter sighs, walking into the living room. He passes by her jigsaw puzzle, moves a few pieces around with his fingers, then gives up. He sits down on the couch. Regina is watching him carefully. There had been blood on the couch. Can he smell it? Does he notice anything? Regina had washed the cushions as best as she could, then turned them over to hide any lingering stains.

  She sits in a chair opposite her son. “How long can you stay, Walter?”

  “Just a day or so.”

  “Are you sure you won’t stay here?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’ll stay with—her?”

  He nods. “Yes. I’ll stay with Miss Aletha. I called her this morning.”

  She isn’t really a her, Regina thinks. She used to be called Howard Greer and the men always used to pick on him.

  “Before you go, Walter,” Regina asks, sitting forward in her chair, “maybe I could ask you to do another favor for me.”

  He narrows his eyes at her. Once again he reminds her of Robert. “What’s that?” he asks, not quite generously.

  “I want to get some soil. I want to build a rock garden.”

  “Mom, it’s October.”

  “Yes, well, I want the soil ready for the spring. I want you to just make a little mound of earth, out in back by the poplar trees.”

  The grave is shallow. Anyone can find it. Dogs will dig him up …

  “Mom, these favors—”

  “Please, Walter.”

  He leans back into the cushions on the couch. “Have you been getting confused like this a lot? Have you seen your doctor?”

  “I told you. Doctor Fitzgerald died—”

  “Then you need to see another doctor.”

  “All that’s wrong with me is a little arthritis.”

  �
��You told me you thought you were losing your mind.”

  “I said that?”

  He stands, seeming angry with her. She follows him with her eyes. Oh, but he is the exact likeness of Robert. He even walks the same way.

  “Will you get the soil for me, Walter? Please?”

  Did she ever love him? Of course she did. What a silly question. He was her son. A bright-eyed boy with so much imagination. He was like Rocky in that way. Oh, Walter would have loved his aunt, and Rocky would have loved him. Before Mama died, Rocky would put on little shows in the parlor, giving Regina songs to sing and parts to play. It’s clear where Walter got his imagination. When he was a boy, he would make up stories and act them out in the backyard. He’d watch that vampire soap opera on television when he’d get home from school and then afterward run around the yard with a blanket, using it as a cape, biting imaginary girls on the neck. Sometimes Grace Daley would call from next door and say she’d been watching him talk to himself, suggesting that maybe he ought to see a psychiatrist. “Oh, he just has an active imagination,” Regina would tell her. “He’s just like my sister.”

  In fact, Bernadette had often wished Kyle was as creative as Walter. “All Kyle’s interested in is fighting and soldiers,” Bernadette had confided to her. “He scares me, Regina. He really does.”

  Give me the money, you crazy old cunt.

  “He was a bad boy,” Regina murmurs. “A very bad boy.”

  Kyle had had a girlfriend. Her name was Luz. Just a girl of eighteen, far too young for Kyle. After all, Kyle was Walter’s age; they would have been in the same class at school if Kyle hadn’t been held back in third grade, to Bernadette’s undying shame. Kyle was more than thirty when he started seeing Luz, and Regina was simply horrified. He would bring the girl to Regina’s house and he’d kiss her right here on this couch. Oh, but it was horrible to watch. From the hallway Regina would spy on them kissing and she’d cry. She’d just cry and cry and cry. Luz was a good girl. Regina knew that from the start—and it was because of Luz that Regina did what she did.