All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  “I lived in the city for a while,” Regina tells her.

  “Oh, really? When was this?”

  “During the war.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I was a singer. I—well, my sister and I—we sang at a nightclub.”

  “That’s swell,” the woman says, exhaling smoke. “But you came back to Brown’s Mill?”

  Regina looks up at the sky. “It does look as if it’s going to rain.”

  “I’m Theresa Santacroce,” her companion says, green eyes looking over at Regina from under long lashes. “Call me Terry.”

  “I’m Regina Gunderson. My sister used to call me Gina, but nobody ever does anymore.”

  “Well, I’ll call you Gina. How about that?”

  Regina laughs as she shakes the other woman’s hand. Terry’s face is tanned, an Indian summer tan, and Regina pictures her walking through the city, taxicabs honking, people scurrying by, her eyes closed and her face lifted to the sun.

  “I like your shoes,” Regina ventures.

  “Do you? Oh, thanks. I was in the city last week and got them. Do you ever go into the city anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, we must go sometime. My friend doesn’t like to go shopping, and she never leaves Brown’s Mill. Can you imagine?”

  “Oh, no!” Regina laughs. She hardly notices the light tickle of raindrops all at once on her face.

  “Ooops, here comes the rain,” Terry says, and pops open her umbrella. It makes a little poosh. Regina shrugs helplessly.

  “Here, share mine,” Terry offers, patting the spot next to her. Regina slides over on the bench, finding dry protection under Terry’s umbrella.

  “It was sunny this morning,” Regina says, smiling so hard her face feels funny.

  “Such strange weather we’ve been having,” Terry says, and they both giggle.

  “I think the heavens are going to open up,” Regina says. “What do you think?”

  “I think they just might,” Terry agrees. There’s a moment of silence between them, the warmth of their thighs pressing against each other. “So what do you do?”

  “I work for the mayor.”

  “Oh, that must be exciting.”

  “Not really.” Regina shrugs. “I’m just a typist.”

  Terry throws down her cigarette butt and stubs it out on the sidewalk with the toe of her high-heeled shoe. Still holding the umbrella with one hand, she shakes another cigarette from the package. “Smoke?” she asks Regina.

  “Oh, no, thanks.”

  Terry lights up, inhaling deeply and closing her eyes, then letting out her smoke slow and deliberately, savoring it.

  “So,” she says.

  “So!” Regina laughs ridiculously.

  Terry smiles. “Do you like being a typist?”

  “Well, it’s all I know how to do.”

  “Oh, come on. I don’t believe that.”

  “No, really. I didn’t go to college or anything.” She can feel her outside leg getting wet, so she pulls in farther, closer to Terry.

  “But you’re a singer. You know how to sing.”

  “Oh, yes, but—well—”

  “You must have been good if you sang at a nightclub.”

  Regina just looks at her. “Oh, well, I guess I …” Her words trail off. “What do you do for work?”

  Terry takes another drag on her cigarette. “I knock on doors, honey.”

  “You’re a traveling saleswoman?”

  Terry laughs. “I’m a searcher. That’s what I am. I knock on doors and see what’s behind them.”

  “That’s an unusual job,” Regina says.

  “You think? It’s all about believing in yourself, Regina. I knock and knock and knock. My philosophy is sooner or later someone’s got to answer.”

  Regina laughs. “I guess I’m just not that good at knocking on doors.”

  “Give it a try sometime, Regina.”

  A gust of wind sweeps rain under their umbrella and wets their legs. They both yelp, pulling even closer together.

  “Well,” Terry exclaims, raising her voice, “I think you’re right. The heavens have officially opened!”

  Laughter again. Regina can feel the warmth of Terry’s leg pressing against hers.

  The rain pounds hard against the pavement now, splashing onto their feet, making a steady beat on top of their umbrella.

  “Tell you what, sister,” Terry says, “if we make it through this alive, what say we stop off for a corned beef on rye at the Dogtown Deli?”

  “That’d be swell,” Regina says. She’s missed Mrs. Unwin’s hot meal by now anyway. Going to the deli would be fun. She would tell Betty and Ruth all about it on Monday morning, just as they’d tell her stories about their weekends. She would tell them how she and Terry ate corned beef sandwiches and maybe a caramel sundae and how they talked all night, laughing and joking—

  She feels Terry’s hand softly on her knee. She looks down. Neon pink nails on Regina’s white knee.

  “Real nylons,” Terry’s saying softly. “Remember how hard these were to get during the war?”

  Regina feels her heart quicken. Terry’s hand slides down, around to the top of Regina’s calf.

  “These feel like silk,” Terry says, and she turns her face toward Regina. “Are they?”

  “No,” Regina answers quietly.

  She hears the scream of the bus as it approaches, its brakes shrieking in the rain.

  Terry’s still looking at Regina, smiling. “Ahh,” she purrs. “Salvation has arrived.”

  Regina stands up abruptly, knocking the umbrella. Terry’s hand falls from her leg, thrown to the bench. The rain dances on Regina’s head.

  “I just remembered,” Regina blurts. “I’ve got to go back to Town Hall. I’ve got to wait for that bus instead.”

  “Back? But why?”

  “Because I forgot something. The mayor—I was supposed to—”

  “Supposed to what?”

  Regina can’t speak.

  Terry starts to smile, her lips curling to say something, but then she stops, as if she’d changed her mind.

  Regina stares down at her wet shoes. The rain pounds at her. The bus splatters through the puddles, coming to a stop in front of them. Its doors are flung open with a squeal of metal, inviting them into the dry comfort within.

  Terry looks at her with silent eyes. “Are you coming, Gina?”

  “No,” Regina says, her lacquered hair slowly beginning to melt around her face. “I told you. I have to go back.”

  Terry nods slowly. Then she turns, almost as if in slow motion, like they do in the movies sometimes, and she leaps like a ballet dancer across the deep dark puddle that separates the bench from the bus.

  And yet it’s the strangest thing: Regina doesn’t see her go inside. It’s as if Terry just leapt over the puddle and disappeared. No coins rattle in the money collector. The driver never looks up to see anyone go by. He just stares at Regina as if she’s crazy.

  “Whatsa matter?” he grunts. “Aren’t ya gettin’ in?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m—I’m waiting for another bus.”

  The door retreats as it had opened. There’s a hiss of black smoke, and the bus screeches off again through the puddles. Regina watches it splash down the watery canal that once was a street. It turns at a far block, heading for Dogtown. She sits back down on the bench, no umbrella this time, and the rain drenches her.

  She wipes her watchface on her sleeve. It’s 5:45. She sits in the rain and watches without moving when the bus to Main Street comes by, and finally, closer to six, she boards the last bus to Dogtown.

  The bus driver, a different one this time, arches a furry eyebrow at her. “Sure is raining cats and dogs, ain’t it?”

  The bus is almost empty. An old black woman way in back, a teenaged white boy with freckles up near the front. Regina stumbles to a seat in the middle, the wetness of her clothes squishing against her skin, the backs of her legs s
ticking to the fake leather seats. She puts her head against the window and stares out into the dark. She watches as the rain hits the glass, exploding into thousands of crystal drops, much as it must have against the car windows the night Rocky died. The wipers would have struggled across the windshield in a vain attempt to keep the torrential rain from blocking her sister’s vision. And then her wheels had slipped on a curve, and she plummeted into the gorge—or else Rocky had turned to Chase and said, white teeth in the dark, “Here is the place we die.”

  Regina watches the streetlights bob through the watery, distorted glass. She’ll go to her room and put on a dry robe and eat a cold dinner in the kitchen, and then she’ll go to bed. There’s nothing else. It’s much too miserable a night for the old man to play his flute.

  17

  MAKING LOVE

  “What if Zandy dies before you get to see him?”

  “What if I threw you out into traffic before anyone could stop me?”

  Dee smirks, sitting beside him in the front seat of the car. “You do brittle real good, man, but I know you like me.”

  Wally sighs. “I’m just not ready to go over to see Zandy yet. I’ve been too caught up with my mother’s bullshit. But that’s ending today.” He pulls into the parking lot beside the CVS drugstore. “You want anything?”

  “What I want they don’t sell at CVS.” He grins. “But I’ll take an Almond Joy.”

  Wally smiles. He’s going in for a newspaper. A real newspaper, not the Brown’s Mill Reminder. He needs to read something real. Something about what’s going on outside this little river valley town, how real people are living their lives. He’s tried calling Cheri three times this morning but got her voice mail. He’s craving some connection to the city.

  “Hey,” Dee says as Wally slides out from behind the wheel. “Look who’s over there. Talk about your mother’s bullshit.”

  Wally’s eyes follow the direction in which Dee’s pointing. Idling in a No Parking zone in front of the drugstore is Kyle’s Trans Am, and leaning against the passenger side door is Luz, smoking a cigarette.

  Dee hurries out of the car himself, following Wally as he walks up to the girl.

  “Hey,” Wally calls.

  Luz turns to look at him. She immediately becomes agitated, throwing down her cigarette and stubbing it out with her toe.

  “What’s up?” Wally asks.

  “Nothing,” the girl replies.

  “Looks like you’re waiting for somebody.”

  “No,” she says, but Wally doesn’t believe her. “I’m not waiting for anybody.”

  “So how come you’re standing there?” Dee interjects aggressively.

  She looks at him with utter disdain. “Like I don’t have a right to stand where I want?”

  “You’re in a No Parking zone with the car running,” Wally observes.

  Luz gives him a face. “Who are you, the cops?”

  “Well, it just looks like you’re waiting for someone,” Wally offers. “And I was just wondering if it might just so happen to be my cousin Kyle.”

  She glares at him. “I told you. I don’t know where Kyle is.”

  “So,” Wally says, getting in close, “if I go into that store right now, I won’t see him? I won’t find him in there?”

  Luz pulls away from him and walks around to the driver’s side of the car. “I don’t know who the fuck you’ll find in there. I don’t know where Kyle is. How many times do I have to tell people that?”

  Wally peers into the car. On the back seat there are three suitcases.

  “Going somewhere?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” she says, looking off toward the drugstore, then back at Wally. “I’m going out of town. Got a problem with that?”

  “You and Kyle?”

  “Fuck off,” she says. She’s trembling; Wally can see that quite clearly. “Why do you have to harass me?” she’s asking. “I’ve never done anything to you.”

  “I’m just making sure you’re being straight with my mother,” Wally says.

  Luz laughs. “Me being straight with your mother? Why don’t you try it, Walter Day? Why don’t you try being straight with her?”

  “Hey,” Dee pipes in, “is that a slur against being gay?”

  Luz looks over at him as if he were some annoying insect, then returns her ire to Wally. “Why don’t you just try being a good son to her for a change? Maybe actually talk with her, listen to her. Maybe stop judging her, yelling at her. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen how you talk to her.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Wally says.

  “I know your mother one whole hell of a lot better than you do. She’s a good woman, a good person. If you’re worried about how somebody’s treating her, you oughta take a good long look in the mirror first before you start giving shit to others.”

  She looks up at the drugstore once more, then makes a sound in frustration. She whips open the car door, slides in, gunning the motor and screeching off. Smoke and skid marks are left behind.

  “What a cunt,” Dee says.

  But Wally’s already hurrying into the drugstore. He’s got to be in here, he’s thinking. She was waiting for him, and now she’s taken off. Up one aisle he runs, then down the next. Kyle’s got to be in here. He’s got to be!

  “Did you see a man in here?” he asks the woman at the counter, out of breath. “A man about my age, short-cropped hair, blond, kind of looks like me, my height?” The woman just looks at him strangely, shudders, then turns her attention without answering him to the customers waiting in line.

  Dee’s been up and down the aisles too. “There’s nobody like that in here,” he tells Wally. “He probably snuck out while we were talking to Luz and she sped off to pick him up around the corner.”

  “Fuck,” Wally says.

  “That’s probably what happened,” Dee says, “don’t you think?”

  Wally forgets about his newspaper. He just pushes back out through the door into the morning, heading down Main Street. Dee follows.

  Why don’t you try it, Walter Day? Why don’t you try to be a good son to her for a change?

  Across the street stands St. John the Baptist Church, its brownstone steeple slicing into the blue sky. It’s one of the few things that haven’t changed about downtown. Wally crosses the street without thinking, heading down the alley between the church and its adjacent school, a squat brownstone structure that also hasn’t changed very much.

  “Where are you going?” Dee asks, jogging up behind him.

  “It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Wally says, suddenly consumed.

  “What is?”

  “It’s here,” Wally says. “It’s got to be here.”

  “Man, are you losing it?” Dee complains. “You’re acting very weird. Let’s just go see Zandy and get it over with.”

  Wally doesn’t reply. He starts running his hands along the side of the school building, examining the exterior, stone by stone. “This was my eighth grade classroom,” he says. “Right here through this window.”

  “Dude, you are freaking me out,” Dee says.

  “Eighth grade,” Wally murmurs. “Before my whole fucking world crumbled in on itself.”

  “What are you looking for?” Dee demands.

  “I know it’s here,” Wally says. “Right under the window. I know it’s here.”

  In eighth grade, he still had friends. Things weren’t as bad then. His father hadn’t yet come home for good, and Saturday Night Fever was still a year in the future. His life hadn’t yet changed, taken that fork in the road that led him to Zandy and all the shit that came afterward. But even in eighth grade Wally had a sense of what was to come. He was a smart boy, after all. The smartest in his class. He knew what lie ahead.

  “Jewboy,” Freddie Piatrowski spit.

  David Schnur stood his ground.

  “What are you doing in a Catholic school anyway? Why are you here?”

  David said nothing.

  “I’
ll tell you why you’re here,” Freddie said, grinning, “Because you kept getting the shit kicked outta you in public school.”

  The other boys hoot.

  “Well, I can only promise you one thing, Jewboy.” Freddie slammed his fist in his palm. “More of the same.”

  Freddie Piatrowski was the boy Wally had wanted to marry. He’d announced it to his kindergarten class, said right out loud that he loved Freddie and wanted to marry him when he grew up. And in some ways that had never really changed, not even after Wally came to understand that boys could only marry girls. Freddie had been his best friend all these years. They had slept at each other’s houses, sometimes in the same bed, and they’d done all sorts of boy stuff together, like telling scary stories and playing with trucks and catching frogs. I still want to marry you, Wally would think, looking straight into Freddie’s green eyes, though he knew he could never again say the words out loud.

  Freddie was very handsome. Not handsome like Wally, who was girly handsome, handsome in the perfect, symmetrical way that made mothers gush when they looked at their child’s class photo. “Oh, there’s a good-looking boy,” they’d say. “Is that Wally Day? He sure is a handsome one, don’t you think?”

  No, Freddie’s kind of handsome was nothing like that. Freddie was handsome in a boy way. His face was tilted, not perfect, no symmetry at all. His mouth was wide and crooked in a manner that the girls seemed to love: big smile, big lips, big teeth. By eighth grade, the girls weren’t paying attention to Wally’s kind of handsome anymore. Freddie had replaced him as the most desirable boy in the class. Freddie—with the thin white scar between his upper lip and nose, the result of an accident with a jackknife, the very same he’d brought to school once and received a detention for. Freddie—with his crooked face and big mouth and wiry arms that could shoot a basketball straight into its net from across the playground. That was the kind of handsome that mattered by eighth grade.

  Freddie Piatrowski is why I fell in love with Ned, Wally would come to realize, years later. The two had a lot in common. Scars. Jackknives. A lack of symmetry to their faces, their bodies, their lives. So much in common. Except—

  “Kick his ass!” Freddie had ordered his troops. “Kick that Jewboy ass!”

  Except Ned would never have done what Freddie did.