All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  “You were at school,” Wally tells him.

  “I’d have skipped out if you asked me.”

  Wally holds up his hands. “Far from me to contribute to juvenile delinquency.”

  Dee raises his eyebrows as he turns for the first time to look at Wally directly. “A little late for that, don’t you think?”

  Wally narrows his eyes at him. “You’re no delinquent, Dee.”

  “So you gonna take me with you? To the city?”

  Wally hadn’t planned on engaging with the kid. He hadn’t even wanted to see him again. He’d just wanted to go to bed, avoid him, then blow out of town in the morning without saying goodbye. Would teach the little prick right for being so aloof.

  But he sits down in the chair opposite Dee and looks over into his eyes.

  “I can skip school tomorrow,” the boy is saying. “Then it’s the weekend.” His eyes are big and pleading. “I can take the train back Sunday night. So can I go with you? Please?”

  “Dee—”

  “Oh, come on, you know what it’s like. How horrible this place is.”

  “It’s not horrible,” Wally tells him. “You can make it horrible. Just like there are many people for whom the city becomes a horrible place to live.”

  Dee just makes a face and turns back to the television. He’s disgusted, apparently giving up on Wally once again.

  “Come on,” Wally challenges him. “Tell me something good about Brown’s Mill.”

  “There is nothing good.”

  “Hot fudge brownie sundaes at the Big Boy.”

  Dee snorts. “You can get ’em anywhere.”

  “There’s got to be one thing, Dee.” Wally’s not sure why he’s being so insistent, why it matters so much, why the boy intrigues him the way he does, why ever since they’d had sex he hasn’t been able to get Dee off his mind. “Tell me one good memory of being a kid in Brown’s Mill and then I’ll consider taking you with me to the city.”

  Dee looks at him as if he’s insane.

  “I’m serious,” Wally says.

  “Since when did you sign onto the Brown’s Mill Chamber of Commerce?”

  “Come on, one thing.”

  Dee scrunches up his face, shaking his head. But he’s thinking. Wally can tell he’s thinking.

  “Okay,” the boy finally says. “Being in Peter Pan in grade school. I loved that play. It was awesome. They rigged it up so we could fly on wires and everything.”

  Wally smiles. “Were you Peter?”

  Dee laughs. “I wish. I was just one of the Lost Boys. Mr. All-American-Boy Dean Dalrymple got to play Peter.”

  Wally pauses a moment. “All American Boy?”

  “Yeah.” Dee rolls his eyes. “Some freak who got all the teachers gushing over him because the American Legion named him their All American Boy. I mean, who gives a fuck? How geeky is that?”

  Wally laughs. “Yeah,” he admits. “It’s pretty geeky.”

  “So I can go with you? To the city?”

  “I said I’d consider it.”

  “I’ll start packing.” Dee leaps up out of the chair. “You going to say good-bye to your mother? Any more jobs for you to do?”

  “I have to carry some wood down into her basement,” Wally says.

  “I’ll help you,” the boy says, bounding up the stairs to pack.

  “I said I’d consider taking you!” Wally shouts after him. “Not that I definitely would.” But Dee is already upstairs.

  Wally stands and walks over to the window. The stench from the swamps is heavy tonight. He looks out onto the way the moonlight reflects on the rusted roofs of the old factories next door. It makes them look like medieval castles. Or a vampire’s lair.

  You going to say good-bye to your mother? Any more jobs for you to do?

  Wally lets out a long sigh. “What else, Mother? What else is there for me to do?”

  Once, twenty years ago, he’d gone to her house to say goodbye, and he’d ended up staying a week. It was right before he left for college, right before he left Brown’s Mill for good. His father had been dead for a few months by then, and Miss Aletha had encouraged Wally to go over to his mother’s house, to make some kind of overture to her. And Wally had gone, he’d actually gone—because somewhere, deep down, something was still twisting, still living, still feeling for his mother. What it was, he wasn’t sure. Love? Probably not. Obligation? He owed her nothing. But something. There was something.

  “Maybe you’ll find out by going there,” Missy said. “Maybe she’ll surprise you.”

  “Oh, she surprises me all right,” Wally whispers, looking out into the dark. “She never ceases to surprise me.”

  He closes his eyes and leans his head against the glass.

  She doesn’t have any eyebrows. When she was young it hadn’t mattered. She was blond and blue-eyed, with eyebrows so fair they practically disappeared against her soft pale skin. She had the face of an angel then, and Wally knows that face. As a boy, he would turn the pages of her yearbook, Brown’s Mill High School, Class of 1944, and gaze down at his mother, so young and pretty, with her blond hair and dark red lipstick, smiling demurely into the photographer’s lens. Wally remembers the inscriptions of the fellas who’d soon be marching off to war. “Dear Sweetie.” “Dear Angel.” When he was a boy, Wally had concurred with the sentiments: his mother was an angel, a vision of light and loveliness. But as he got older, the face in the yearbook and the inscriptions of the fellas could only be appreciated as expressions of camp.

  She’d started penciling her eyebrows after she got married, when her hair had gotten darker and her face began to get old. She was older than most of the other mothers; kids would always ask Wally if she was his grandmother. But when she did her face she made herself look as beautiful as a movie star. Wally remembers sitting entranced, watching his mother at her vanity table. She’d open her eyes wide and arch her eyebrows high, carefully tracing them with her pencil. She’d follow that with applications of rouge, powder, and lipstick. Wally would watch her face come to life, come into its true beauty. He’d watch her transform from a tired old mother into the angel of Brown’s Mill High.

  Once, when he was six, Wally had snatched his mother’s eyebrow pencil and drew an entire carnival of black, smudgy creatures. His mother had laughed and taped the picture up on the refrigerator. When he was sixteen, Wally had taken her pencil again—to darken his first moustache, the hairs of which, like her eyebrows, were too blond to see.

  Wally’s looking at his mother now as she stands in the hallway of their house, and he feels endlessly sad that she has no eyebrows. He’d come to say good-bye, one last attempt at some kind of relationship. He was on his way to the city, to college, to a new life far away from all the horrors of the past few years. But he had found her ill. She’s been in bed for days, she said, coughing and wheezing. She stands in the doorway of her room, Kleenex tucked up inside her sleeve. Her robe is held together at her throat by a giant safety pin.

  How can he leave? How can he leave her now?

  “I’m going to make you some soup for lunch,” he says.

  “No, Walter, that’s not necess—” And she begins to cough—hard, wracking, dog-like sounds.

  He ignores her and lights the old burner with a match, lowering the burst of blue flame to a simmer. “Please, Mother. Just go back to bed.”

  He had come to say good-bye, to just spend a half an hour—but he wouldn’t leave for a week. He’d call Miss Aletha later and tell her he was staying the night. And the next, and the one after that.

  “I’m going to call Dr. Fitzgerald,” Wally calls down to his mother.

  “Oh, no, there’s no need—”

  “I’m calling the doctor, Mother.”

  He gets his secretary on the phone. The doctor doesn’t make house calls anymore, she says, but when she hears it’s Regina Day she says she’s certain he’ll make an exception—given how much the poor lady’s been through. Wally thanks her and hangs up the pho
ne.

  “The doctor is coming tomorrow at four,” he tells her.

  “Oh, thank you, Walter.”

  He looks back at her. How drawn she looks. How old.

  “You might want to do your face,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “I’ll do my face.”

  How many years had it been since it was just the two of them in the house? When Wally was a boy, his father had simply been an unwelcome visitor, an intruder who needed to be tolerated for the duration of his stays but who never, thank God, was a permanent fixture. It wasn’t until Wally was thirteen that his father had come home for good, never returning to his ship. It was only then that Dad started drinking his days into oblivion, becoming increasingly nasty and sullen and bitter, only then that hell had burst up through their floorboards, destroying their home and their way of life as completely as if their furnace had exploded and the place had burned to cinders.

  It was quiet now. Wally walks through the house marveling at the stillness. But echoes of the past can still surprise him around any corner.

  You little pervert! Do you have any idea how you have shamed the name of Day?

  She found him in the basement. His father.

  Hanging by his own belt, Wally knows. She found him hanging from a rafter. He was probably all blue or black or green—whatever color hanging corpses turn.

  Have you any idea how you have shamed the name of Day?

  He hears his mother hacking in her room.

  Why did I come back here? Wally feels trapped, tricked, bewildered. What was I hoping to find?

  “I’m going out for a bit,” he tells his mother, standing in the doorway to her room.

  “All right, Walter.”

  “You’ll be okay there for now?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.” She looks over at him. “Walter?”

  “Yes?”

  She fumbles for words. “I want—I want to be able to tell you to have a good time, wherever you’re going. I want to say it, but I can’t. Because ever since you left, Walter, I don’t know what it is that you do.”

  He laughs, a little bitterly. “You never have.”

  “No. I suppose I never have.” She looks at him, as if looking at him for the first time. “And I never asked.”

  The Nyquil she’s taking must be making her loopy. She’s never been this inquisitive before.

  “Mother,” he tells her, “you can rest assured I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  “It doesn’t have to be wrong,” she says weakly, looking up at him with her sunken blue eyes. “I just don’t understand. It’s something I just don’t understand, Walter.”

  She covers her face with her shriveled old hands, the veins on the back making a network of blue.

  “Your life outside this house has always been mysterious,” she says from behind her hands. “I’ve never understood what it is that you do.”

  In that moment, in that moment when she sat there so weak, so frail, so desperate, covering her old face with her old hands in her bed, he wanted to stay with her forever. He wanted to call Missy and tell her he was never coming back, that he wasn’t going away to school, that he was going to forget all about the city and acting and being gay and just stay home with his mother. Stay home with her and watch game shows and eat goulash and plant marigolds in the rock garden, forever and ever. We could be happy again, Mother. Just you and I. The way it was, a long time ago.

  He walks over to her, putting his arm around her shoulders and kissing her cheek. When was the last time he had kissed her? Years ago. An eighth grade play, perhaps? The day Sister Angela presented him with his certificate for perfect attendance?

  He feels her hand press his, slipping something inside his fist. Wally looks down. A five-dollar bill rolled up tightly, still moist from her palm.

  “Mom, I don’t need—”

  “Take it. It’s not much. It’ll make me feel better if I know you have it.”

  He stuffs it down into the front pocket of his jeans. He imagines her lying there, nervously rolling it tighter and tighter, as she waited for him.

  He had no place to go. He just needed to get out of the house. So he walks down Washington Avenue to Josephine’s old house. No one’s bought the place since she died. People think it’s haunted. Wally imagines it might be. He looks through the window into the empty rooms inside. Then he sits on the steps with his face in his hands.

  It doesn’t have to be wrong. I just don’t understand.

  And it wasn’t all her fault for not understanding, for not wanting to know. It was his fault, too, for not wanting to tell her. “And why don’t you want to tell her about your life?” his therapist had asked, before Wally decided that therapy wasn’t working, that he was just wasting Miss Aletha’s money. “After all, your father’s gone now. Why not try telling your mother a little about who you are?”

  “I don’t know,” Wally replied, defensive, on edge, coy. “What is it that you want me to say? That maybe some place deep down I still want her to love me, and I think that if I tell her about who I really am, she won’t?”

  “Maybe that’s some of it.”

  “Some of it? Isn’t that enough?”

  But more. The goddamn therapist had wanted more.

  When he gets home, he finds her vomiting, deep wracking spasms that threaten to split her frail little body in two, just the way it had happened when Wally was born.

  “I wish you’d consider coming back for Zandy’s memorial.”

  Miss Aletha stands in the doorway watching as Wally tosses his few belongings into his backpack. His razor, his toothbrush, the sweatshirts and underwear he’d bought over in Mayville when this little trip home turned out to last longer than he expected.

  Funny how that has a way of happening.

  Wally looks over at her. “Is that really a good idea?”

  “Why not? He’d want you to be there.”

  “Do you think?”

  She nods.

  Wally zips up his backpack and sets it against the wall. There. He’s all set to get on the road first thing in the morning. All set to blow out of here.

  “And him?” Missy nods toward the other room. “Are you taking Dee with you?”

  “Yeah,” Wally says. “I’m taking him with me.”

  He likes how that sounds. As silly as it might be to feel that way, he likes how that sounds. He’s taking Dee with him.

  Missy sits down on the bed and arches an eyebrow up at Wally. “But I thought he was just using you. Just trying to get a job. Concerned only about getting his rocks off.”

  “Yeah,” he says, smiling, sitting down next to her. “At this point, I take what I can get.” He rubs noses with her. “I’ll make sure he’s back for school on Monday.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Don’t want the state calling me an unfit guardian.”

  Wally kisses her cheek. “You’re the best, Missy. You know that?”

  She grins. “So I’ve been told. A few times in this long, long life.” She looks over at him. “So any news about finding the boy?”

  “What boy?”

  “Your cousin. The one who’s gone missing.”

  Wally smirks. “He’s not a boy, Missy. Kyle is my age.”

  “You’re all boys to me. Well, I hope he’s okay, wherever he is.”

  Wally stands up. “Kyle was a monster.”

  “He was a boy, just like you.”

  “No. He was born wrong. The wiring in his head wasn’t right.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The things he did, Missy. I had fucked-up parents, too, but I didn’t beat people up. I didn’t steal and do drugs and piss all over the school.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you were a good boy.”

  Wally just laughs.

  “Who’s to explain why we do the things we do?” Missy asks. “Why one of us chooses one form of rebellion and another does something else? Who’s to say why and how we settle on our own particular method of survival?�
��

  “But Kyle was cruel,” Wally says.

  He’d come here to make peace, Wally supposes, but he can never make peace with Kyle. Kyle was bad. Kyle was cruel. He can’t make peace with that.

  “He was my evil twin, my doppelganger, my foil, my Bizarro double,” Wally had once described Kyle for Ned. He remembers a time when both were eight, when they got into a knockdown, rolling-on-the-grass kind of fight. Kyle had whupped Wally’s butt, leaving him with a shiny black eye.

  His mother held an ice pack to his face.

  “What did you fight about, Walter?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Kyle said you were crazy.”

  He remembers his mother’s face when he said that. He saw the little lines indent across her brow, the sudden whiteness that came to her lips.

  “And why did he say that?” she asked.

  Wally was so angry, so filled with outrage. “He said that Aunt Bernadette told him you were sent to live in a funny farm.”

  His mother said nothing, just removed the ice pack to inspect his eye.

  “What’s a funny farm?” Wally asked her.

  She replaced the ice pack. “Just a place where people go.”

  “And the people there are funny?”

  She smiled, even laughed a little. “Yes. I suppose they are.” She paused. “Not always, though. Sometimes they’re very sad.”

  Later, when Wally would go to the institute after Ned’s death, they asked him if depression ran in his family. “I think my mother was institutionalized once,” he told them, “but I don’t know any of the details.”

  Not a one. As a boy with a shiny black eye, he had looked up at her and asked, “How come you never told me about it? The funny farm?”

  His mother looked as if she might cry. “I suppose there are many things I’ve never told you, Walter.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like … oh, I don’t know.” Her eyes moved past him to look out the window. “Like how when I was a little girl I used to love to dress in pretty clothes and tie ribbons in my hair. Like how I used to pick the crab apples from the tree because I thought they were cherries.” She looked down into Wally’s face. “Like how, when you were born, I didn’t know if I could do it right, be a mother to a little boy. How could I understand what boys go through?”