All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  Regina had awakened to the sound of her mother calling her name in the dark, the way Regina used to call to her, when she was very little and woke up from a bad dream. She had the feeling her mother had been calling for a long time.

  “Just pick up the phone and tell the operator to send an ambulance,” Mama told her. “Can you do that? Just give her our address.”

  “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “I’ve hurt myself. Please do it now, Regina. Go quickly.”

  Mama made a little gesture with her head, a little toss of her chin in the direction of the stairs. The sweat on her face and the blood on her hands glistened in the moonlight. Regina turned and ran.

  She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. She tripped at the bottom of the stairs. She picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

  “Is this the operator?”

  She spoke directly over the mouthpiece, trying to be clear.

  “Can you help my mother?”

  Regina gave the address, and the operator made her repeat it. Then she replaced the phone on its hook and sat down on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. She pulled her knees up to her chest and held them, just as she knew Mama was doing upstairs. She thought about waking Rocky, but she didn’t want to go back upstairs. She would sit on the cold wood floor and wait.

  The house was very quiet. The buzz of the electricity filled Regina’s ears, and she wondered why it made that noise even when everything was turned off. And she thought she heard a bird, trapped in the kitchen, but then the sound was gone.

  She heard the sirens a long way off, and suddenly they were at the door, bright lights shining through the windows, illuminating the dark house. Men in white were banging against the glass. She opened the door and said calmly, “My mother’s upstairs. She’s hurt herself.”

  The men in white ran up the stairs, and Regina followed, a small, slow figure trailing behind them.

  “Get a stretcher,” one man called, and Regina looked past him, into Mama’s room. Mama had fallen over on to her side, and Regina could see more blood under her now. Rocky had walked out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. A man led her downstairs. Regina walked over and sat by her mother.

  “Mama?”

  Her mother’s face was against the floor. Her eyes were closed.

  “Mama, I did like you said.”

  They came in with the stretcher.

  “Where’s your father, little girl?” one of the men asked her.

  “We don’t have one.”

  “How about grandparents?”

  “A grandmother.”

  “Why don’t you go down and call her?”

  “Will my mother be all right?”

  They lifted her up on to the stretcher. Blood dripped to the floor. “Don’t look, honey,” the man said. “Go downstairs and call your grandma.”

  It was only after they left, when Regina started to clean the room, that she found the wire and the bloody bundle. That’s when Mormor got there with Aunt Selma and ordered her to her room.

  “I’ll take them for a few days,” Aunt Selma is saying, “but Axel isn’t good with children, you know that, Mother. Especially not girls.”

  Mormor sits at the head of the table, with the radio on a stand next to her. She raises her hand to silence Aunt Selma as she listens to the end of Stella Dallas’s travails this week.

  “Mother, please, Axel is very upset. We can’t afford—”

  Regina and Rocky stare at their plates. They are pretending not to hear. Regina cannot eat the roast beef on her plate. It is too runny, too red.

  “Eat your meat, Regina,” Mormor says in her heavy accent.

  “Mother—”

  “Selma, you’ll do what is required,” Mormor says, cutting her off. “Your sister is dead. And I’m an old woman with arthritis in my legs.”

  Aunt Selma makes a face. “I just want to know where he is. He does have some responsibilities in this. Two of them, to be exact.”

  Mormor holds up her hand again, listening to the opening theme of the next serial.

  “I’m not hungry,” Regina whispers.

  “Eat your meat, Regina,” Mormor says, turning to her, “or else you’ll end up with arthritis, too.”

  Last spring a robin had built a nest in the wisteria that grew along their house just outside the back door. Every morning Regina, Rocky, and their mother would watch the robin bringing straw and twigs, fashioning together a safe little bed, hidden among the ivy. One day they stood on a stool and peeked into the leaves to see two tiny blue eggs in the nest.

  “The baby robins are inside those eggs,” their mother told them. “But we mustn’t touch them or else the mother will fly away and leave them all alone.”

  Regina was very disturbed by this. “But then they’d die, Mama. Who would bring them worms?”

  “No one, Regina. So we must never touch them.”

  One day the baby birds hatched and Regina could hear their constant chirping all day long. The mother flew in and out of the leaves.

  Regina and Rocky stood on the stool looking in at the babies, their beaks open, tiny heads turned up. Somewhere in the bushes the mother bird screeched.

  “Come on, Gina,” Rocky said, “we’re making the mother afraid.”

  But Regina wasn’t listening. She reached in and cupped one of the babies in her hand.

  Rocky screamed and pushed her sister from the stool. “You can’t touch them!” The baby bird fell, fluttered for a moment on the ground, and then was still. Regina began to cry.

  “Gina touched them!” Rocky screamed to her mother. “She touched the baby birds!” Their mother stood in the doorway and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Come into the house, girls. There’s nothing we can do now.”

  The mother bird flew in once and then she was gone. She didn’t come back to the nest. The remaining baby cried all through the day. Finally Mama went out and brought the nest inside. They fed the baby apple juice with an eyedropper. They put it in a warm spot in the kitchen. During the night Regina could hear it chirping, sometimes frantic, sometimes irregular. In the morning the bird was dead in its nest.

  “But I only touched one,” Regina said between sobs. “Why did the mother leave this one?”

  Mama didn’t know what to say. Rocky looked at her sister, choking with hatred, and explained what seemed to her to be absolutely common sense:

  “You touch one, you kill them all.”

  Mama bundled the baby bird in a cloth and took it outside. She was crying, too.

  Now they are back at Mormor’s house by the roses. The roses smell beautiful, and the bees are dancing around the vines, humming a more varied tune today, up and down and swirling through the air. Regina and Rocky are looking into the roses, not speakinging.

  Regina is thinking about the weak little gesture Mama had made with her head, when she told her to run for help. She’s thought about that a lot. It bothers her more than the blood. It was the last thing Mama ever did.

  A long time passes.

  Regina says, “I want to kill these roses.”

  “Yes,” says Rocky, “I do, too.”

  They grab the flowers in their fists, squashing them and pulling their heads from the vine. Petals flutter to the ground like snowflakes. Rocky grinds them into the dirt with her heel. Regina continues to pull at the vine, ripping the roses and their leaves, mindless of the thorns and her bloody hands. The bees dive angrily at them. The girls simply swat them away, intent on their work. They keep pulling and ripping at the flowers until every last one of them is gone. A blanket of crushed petals lies at their feet.

  They see Mormor leaning on her cane in the doorway, looking at what they’ve done. They see her mouth open into a large, angry O. Regina doesn’t care. She hears her grandmother shouting at them, ordering them inside to account for their behavior, telling them what bad girls they are. Regina runs. She doesn’t think. She just keeps running. She runs out of the yard and down the street. She runs
past St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, where Mama used to take them. She runs onto Main Street and then right through the busy intersection of Washington Avenue, a bus driver leaning on his horn at her. Right past Henry’s Diner she runs, right past the town hall, past the Palace movie theater and St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, which has always scared her with its black-robed priests and heavy smells of incense. Into the tall grass of Devil’s Hopyard she runs, where she finally collapses, her legs feeling as if they’ll snap right off.

  Only then does she turn to see that Rocky was behind her the whole way. They roll into each other’s arms and cry for a long, long time.

  Aunt Selma doesn’t go to the funeral. She stays home to watch her sister’s girls.

  “Sit here and eat your oatmeal,” she tells them. She is dressed all in black. “I don’t want you to move from those chairs. I want to say good-bye to your Mama. They’re going to drive her by here after the church. I’m going to watch from the front door.”

  “Can we watch, too, Aunt Selma?” Rocky asks.

  “No. I don’t want you to remember your Mama in a hearse.”

  They don’t know what a hearse is. Aunt Selma goes to the front door. They sit and drink their milk. It is a quiet morning, except for the birds chirping outside. The girls do not talk. Rochelle starts to hum. Regina fidgets.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Regina says softly.

  “Aunt Selma said we can’t move from these chairs.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Regina says again.

  She stands up. Rocky resumes her humming. Regina slips softly upstairs.

  From a bedroom window she watches the black cars drive slowly down the street. There are three of them, and she knows Mama must be in one. They come up from Main Street and turn onto Oak Avenue. They pass in front of the house and wind back the way they came. She thinks she sees Mormor sitting in one of the cars. She doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t know where they’re taking Mama. She doesn’t know why the black cars came by the house. She doesn’t know where she and Rocky are going to sleep tonight.

  All she knows is: you touch one, you kill them all.

  5

  GHOST MANAGEMENT

  Wally drives along the river into Dogtown, where the stench of sewage and swamp water hangs so heavy in the air he can taste it on his tongue, like soot after a fire.

  “Don’t go down there,” his mother used to warn him, wringing her hands. “It’s bad down there. Bad.”

  And bad it was. Behind the crumbling factories the old tenant housing remained, rowhouses built by factory owners for their immigrant workers at the turn of the last century. Irish, then Swedes, then Poles and Jews, finally Italians and Puerto Ricans. The houses of Dogtown were built over swamps, where skunk cabbage grew plentiful and tall, where velvety cat-o’-nine-tails enticed children to wade across the muddy, stinking water that licked the edges of the tenements. “Don’t go down there,” Wally’s mother had pleaded, but although he continued to listen intently to every conversation dropped in line at Grant’s department store, he had long since stopped listening to her.

  “It’s got to be Alzheimer’s,” he tells Cheri on his cell phone. “That’s the only way to explain her behavior. It’s bizarre, even for her.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “She has no one else.” Wally sighs. “I’ve got to get her in to see a doctor.”

  “You okay managing all these ghosts?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts.” He makes a left turn. “I’ve got to go, babe. I’m almost there.”

  “Okay, Wally. Good luck.”

  He hits END. Ahead of him is the house he seeks: the place where he once sought refuge, a place without which he believes he wouldn’t be here today. He’d be over in Eagle Hill Cemetery, in the plot next to his father, “pushing up daisies,” as Miss Aletha liked to say.

  He parks the car on the street and heads up the walk. Her rosebushes still show some buds, even this late in the season. The leaves are a deep purple.

  “Can I help you?”

  Wally looks up. A boy is sitting on the front steps, his short hair dyed bright orange and his eyes thick with mascara.

  “I’m looking for Missy.”

  “And you are …?”

  Wally stands over him. The boy can’t be more than fifteen, sixteen. Acne reddens his chin, but he’s cute. Large brown eyes, seriously pouty lips, surprisingly broad and powerful shoulders for so slight a frame.

  “The name’s Wally Day.”

  The boy’s lips twist into a grin. “Oh, yeah, the actor. Missy said you were coming.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “Yeah. Missy’s been feeding me like a stray cat and I won’t go away.” He stands. “I’m Dee.”

  They shake.

  “I’m going to be an actor, too.”

  Wally smirks. “It’s my duty to advise you to consider a career that doesn’t require as much effort or discipline. Like maybe rocket science or brain surgery.”

  The boy ignores him. “Can you help me get me a part in something? I don’t care what it is. TV show. Play. Even a commercial.”

  Wally looks past him toward Missy’s front door. “Sure, kid. I’ll give Geffen a call for you.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know sarcasm.”

  “Is Missy here?”

  Dee nods over his shoulder. “She’s never anywhere else.”

  Wally raps on the door.

  “Just go on in,” Dee says. “She’s too deaf to hear you knock.”

  Miss Aletha saved Wally’s life. She gave him refuge, shelter, a way out. She got a dentist to cap his tooth after his father had broken it. She found a shrink for him to spill his guts out to in twice-weekly sessions. She even paid for a tutor to help with his studies after school became unbearable and Wally started skipping classes.

  He’s going to go far, that Wally Day, his teachers had once said.

  But at the time it didn’t seem he’d get much farther than Dogtown.

  “Wally,” Miss Aletha says, her arms outstretched, welcoming him home.

  How old she’s gotten. How unlike his memories. But it’s her, just the same: Miss Aletha, who saved his life, who set him right, whose roses every year still win first place in the Brown’s Mill Flower Show, despite the clucking of the biddies in the big white houses on Eagle Hill. Every year on her birthday, Wally sends a card and she always remembers him with a Christmas gift—but they haven’t seen each other now in many, many years. After Wally first moved to the city, Miss Aletha would come and visit. Once she came to one of his parties and gotten high with his friends. Wally has an image of her: holding a banana as a microphone and lipsynching Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Everyone had loved Miss Aletha.

  “Missy.” Wally pulls her close and looks down into her soft blue eyes. How strange it feels to be so much taller than she is. Miss Aletha had always seemed so big. She’s shrunk, withered down into a little old lady.

  A teakettle whistles. “Join me?” she asks.

  Wally nods. Her kitchen, unlike herself, is exactly as he remembers: cluttered and odoriferous, with a tanginess underneath, as if something in the refrigerator has gone bad. But it’s not an unpleasant smell: rather, it’s the candied scent of overripe fruit or the tempting promise of old wine.

  She pours some tea. Wally sits at the table overlooking the swampy backyard. Along the trellis outside shiver a few roses, a deep red-purple.

  “You always did manage to keep them blooming all year,” he says.

  “Eh?”

  “Your roses,” he says, louder. “Still in bloom.”

  “Yes,” she says, settling the teacup in front of him. “But tonight there will be a frost.”

  “Will you bring them inside?”

  “I can’t save them all,” she says, taking the seat opposite him.

  Wally smirks. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Who’s the monkey on your front porch?”


  “His name is Donald. He’s sixteen. You can fill in the rest, I’m sure.”

  “Kicked out of his house when his parents found out he was gay.”

  She nods. “Fundamentalists. They took him to a faith healer.”

  “I see it did the trick.”

  “The world has changed, I hear,” Missy says. “But not Brown’s Mill.”

  One of her cats rubs against Wally’s ankles. He reaches down to stroke it.

  “Your call came as quite a surprise,” she says softly, finding his eyes.

  “I’m sure it did.”

  “You’ve seen your mother?”

  Wally sighs. “Yeah. She’s not right. Not that she ever was, but—”

  “There’s been a lot of talk, Wally, ever since that boy disappeared.”

  Wally shakes his head. “Kyle isn’t a boy, Missy. He’s my age, a navy SEAL or whatever he is. And he hasn’t disappeared. He’s hightailed it out of town. Maybe he didn’t want to be shipped off to Kosovo or wherever. I don’t know why the police are making such a mystery out of it.”

  “Well, I guess Uncle Sam doesn’t like it when one of his boys takes off without letting him know where he’s going.”

  “Kyle’s always been a fuck-up. But I don’t want to talk about him.”

  Miss Aletha smiles. “I know who you do want to talk about.”

  How long has this been going on?

  Since I was thirteen.

  “I’m going to see him,” Wally tells her. “If he’s still alive.”

  “He’s alive.” Her old eyes hold his. “But you don’t know if he wants to see you.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  She reaches across the table to take his hand. “Have you been seeing anyone? Anyone special?”

  Wally looks back out the window, at the purple rose on the vine.

  “Still no one,” Miss Aletha says, reading his mind. “No one since Ned.”

  “Who would want me?” Wally asks. “I’m an old man in gay years, Missy. Long gone is the boy you knew. Once you pass thirty, you’re old meat. Who adopts the old hound at the pound? Everybody wants a puppy.”

  Miss Aletha gives him a stern look. Even with her thousands of wrinkles, it is still the same look she used to give him all those years ago, a look that said: “You are being foolish but I love you anyway.” Wally receives that look for what it is, and he smiles.