All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  The women would be in the house, but I didn’t have a woman to be in the house with me. My mother was in the TB sanatorium. So I would get to stay out on the porch with my daddy and the men. Daddy was already so weak he couldn’t really walk anymore. Raymond’s nephew Billy would help him in and out of his car and get him to the porch. Billy was Governor Bill Clinton now, but then he was just a high schooler. Even then, we all knew he was going places.

  All the talk was about politics, and Billy would use visiting with me as an excuse to stay out on the porch. Billy would throw me up in the air and catch me as I laughed, eavesdropping on lessons on how to gain and maintain power. When my daddy died when I was five, I sat on Raymond Clinton’s lap at the funeral.

  As long as I didn’t push it, I could go now to these men for donations: Mr. Johnson, a sniper in World War II who came back the quietest man, so meek you’d never know what he’d seen. Mr. Wallace, a Marine in twilight, treating Rotary like his service. Another two men who were presidents of the big banks. These gentlemen still ran the town, but quietly, and I think that they respected that I worked quietly too.

  I had to rely on their discretion and know who I told. But they knew all the secrets in town, so this was only one more. I just had to be careful not to wear them out and not make it their issue. I would make an appointment to meet in their offices and just privately say, “You know, I’ve got these guys, and they don’t have food.” Or they don’t have rent while I’m getting through the paperwork of housing assistance. Or whatever. They would make a phone call. And it would be done. “Put fifty dollars on Ruth Burks’s tab.”

  I had to be up front about this being about AIDS, because I wanted it on their radar. AIDS was something we had to deal with here in Hot Springs. I also knew that if I made up a story then I would have never gotten any more money. I would have been a liar in town, and I didn’t want that reputation. Let people say I’ve got AIDS, but don’t call me a liar.

  I also wanted to make sure Governor Clinton knew what was going on in his hometown. I wrote him these long letters, detailing patterns I saw. Bonnie would proofread them, going over them with me two or three times, suggesting changes to this or that. By the time I was done, they would be fifteen pages long. Stories of the men I’d seen waste away. I knew he knew gay people. Bill was always someone who knew there was a world outside of Arkansas. But I knew he didn’t know the gay men I saw—the poor, the rejected, the ones with nobody to care for them. I always signed it Ruth and Allison Burks because I didn’t want anyone thinking a single woman was writing the governor. He already had a reputation, and all of us in Hot Springs grew up very protective of him. When I went to the health department, I might stop by to take a big, thick envelope to the little state police headquarters just past the front door of the capitol.

  “We’ll get it to his office,” they said. Who knows what they thought of this blond woman all dressed up?

  Sometimes he would call my house and thank me for the information. He asked questions about their lives, how they were getting by.

  “You’re doing good work,” he said. We were both in a bind, each feeling only able to do just so much for fear of being run out of town.

  There were only so many times I could go to the elders of the town for grocery tabs. I knew keeping weight on my guys was helping, but even with Bonnie’s half of the food stamps and all my foraging, I was coming up short.

  And then the answer was right there at the Piggly Wiggly.

  It was early morning, and we needed bread on the way to school, so I swung by the Piggly Wiggly on Park, and we popped in real quick. On my way out, I saw the dumpster was so full they’d left the top open. It wasn’t a huge bin, just about chest-high, and right on top was a clear bag full of plastic-wrapped loaves. The bread I’d just spent money on.

  As Allison got in the car, I walked over to get a better look at the bag. Through the plastic, I could see that all the bread had a sell-by date of just a few days from then. I thought of all the sandwiches I could make my guys and the dressings or the ways I could stretch meatloaf.

  I grabbed it. The whole bag. And once you’re taking food from a dumpster, you’re in. So, what was I going to do but look to see what else they had? Vegetables and fruits with the slightest bruises, some perfectly fine. Dinged cans and the like, probably put out earlier that morning as they went through inventory. It was like the potlucks and galas—all that food gone to waste when it would be gold to the people who weren’t invited to the parties.

  The Piggly Wiggly was right on the corner, so the lot was wide open to traffic. I knew cars were driving by, but I had the focus of someone who’d dropped her keys in there. “I saw that crazy Ruth Coker Burks this morning,” I said aloud to no one. “Dumpster diving. ‘Well, maybe she’s working there?’ Nah, she’s out with the trash at the track.”

  I grabbed as many bags as I could, taking two trips to the trunk of my car.

  “Yuck,” Allison said through the window as I was between trips.

  “It’s not yuck,” I said. “This is perfectly good food. We can help a lot of people with it, and it’s a sin to waste it.”

  I got her to school and worked out a plan. I’d give the fruit and vegetables a bath in hot water from the downtown fountain with a tiny bit of Clorox, make sure I rinsed everything real good, and I’d break off stuff we didn’t want so I could make a big pot of vegetable soup.

  Then it occurred to me that if the Piggly Wiggly had good food, what about the big Kroger out on Airport Road?

  “Well, let’s pay a call,” I said to myself, turning the car around to drive to the lot behind the store, where the trucks came and went for deliveries. At least this one was behind the store, but it was much larger. I really would have to dive in.

  It was worth it though, even in heels, because sure enough, there was a banquet. A lot of it was in date, as if whoever had done the clearing said, “Oh, what the hell, I’ll have to throw it away in a couple of days anyway.”

  It became my secret routine. I would go gathering at the dumpsters in the morning, because it would spoil by afternoon. Usually on the way to school, I’d check the one on Park because it was by the house. Drop off Allison, then hit the Kroger dumpster. I usually didn’t have to be at the racetrack until noon, so I stopped by the hospitals to check on people. “I just stopped by for a bucket of coals,” I’d say. That’s from the old days, when you needed to start your fireplace. Somebody would stop by to get enough coals from your fire to start their own fire. But they had to get home quick so the coals didn’t burn out. It’s a way to say, “I just stopped by for a quick minute.” I’d maybe adjust an IV someone had for antibiotics or just be present so the staff knew someone was checking up on the men.

  The Piggly Wiggly must have seen what I was up to, because they stopped putting the really good stuff in the dumpster. They left it nice, outside the dumpster. Like presents under the garbage tree. No one who worked there ever said a word to me.

  There was a milk truck, a big refrigerated eighteen-wheeler, that was sometimes parked behind Kroger. The driver used to take away all the stuff that was about to expire and deliver the new goods. I think he saw me enough times to know I couldn’t be doing this just for me. One day he was staring at me as I picked up the day’s haul.

  “Hi, there,” I said. He was bald, and it was like he’d smirked as a kid and his face froze that way.

  “You help people, don’t you?” he said. I told him I do my best but moved a little quicker in case this was going to be a thing.

  “I’m gonna leave the door open on my truck by accident, so all that stuff I’m supposed to take away that’s still good is gonna be right there.”

  I nodded.

  “But you don’t know that, do you?” he said.

  “Nope,” I said. “I don’t know a thing.”

  It was such a blessing. Cheese, milk, yogurt, ice cream
. . . The gold-standard butter and Bulgarian buttermilk I put into everything to get my guys more calories so I could keep the weight on them. Whenever I saw that truck, I knew it would be a good week for my guys. I could be like this little grocery-delivery person. Bonnie of course loved all this, because it was like getting something over on the system. As I went around bringing food and meals to people, I especially loved bringing her anything that seemed exotic. The stuff you can’t get with food stamps.

  She brought up food stamps once as an option for me, and I changed the subject, saying I didn’t qualify when we both knew I did. I didn’t go on welfare, not just because of my Southern pride. It didn’t bother me to get everybody else resources they needed. But I was being realistic about my hopes. I knew nobody around Hot Springs wanted to marry someone who’d been on welfare. I’d rather be eating out of a dumpster that nobody knew I was eating out of than ante up food stamps and trade my future in.

  Pride doesn’t pay rent, though, and my daughter couldn’t live in a dumpster. It got to a point that Allison and I needed to move, and I could only budget about two hundred a month in rent. I found a place on Sixth Street, an ugly tan pile of bricks, but it had two bedrooms, so at least Allison could still have her own room. I was relieved there was a phone line in my room.

  Our first night there, I put Allison to bed, for once glad that she still slept with the light on. I knew if I turned it off the roaches would come. I’d probably need to keep the lights on for a month before they got the hint to leave. I stayed up long after she was asleep, maybe from nerves about the new place. Then I heard this low guttural voice, barely intelligible. “Heeeeeey sleeeeeee.”

  It was coming from Allison’s room.

  I panicked, grabbing a broom as I ran to her room. I burst in to find her still asleep.

  The voice again.“Waaaaaaaaa.”

  Whoever it was, he was in her closet. I freaked out, and I remember thinking, This is so weird. I don’t freak out. But I was. I picked her up and backed out of the room to the living room to call the police.

  I took her out on the porch to wait for the police but could still hear him inside, this terrifying voice. I must have sounded scared on the phone, because a cop showed up so fast.

  “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  The cop heard it too, and he drew his gun. “Probably a goddamn junkie,” he said, walking in as scared as I was. As he made his way to Allison’s room, I put her down on the couch, afraid to leave the cop alone with this guy. I stayed at the doorway while the cop twice put his hand to the closet door to open it, each time pulling back in fear. Then he just did it.

  “All right!” he screamed. “Okay!”

  “Uuuuuuppppppppp.”

  He put his head down, and sighed. “Ma’am, you have a Smurf.”

  “What?”

  He reached in and grabbed Allison’s Smurf alarm clock. It was two Smurfs sawing a log, its alarm sound a usually chipper voice saying, “Hey, sleepyhead, it’s time to wake up.” The battery had run down so it just sounded demonic.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s my entrance to the neighborhood. I’m really sorry.”

  “I was scared half to death,” he said.

  “Death by Smurf would be a helluva way to go,” I said. He left, but I noticed he kept popping by for about a month after, just to check in. Usually at night, hoping to get in. “We’re good, Officer.” I’d say. “No Smurfs here.”

  The real problem was the rats. I had to put a board under the washing machine to cover the hole so the rats wouldn’t come in.

  We’ll make do, I told myself.

  My problems were continually put in perspective. My guys kept bringing me people to test. I’d go to an apartment to bring food, and another man would be there. The closeted ones would be in their work gear, nervously rubbing their hands together. There were people I recognized, though I pretended not to know anything about them. And there were some I could just tell had it. They had an old age look at a young age.

  Across the board, everybody would be so nervous. But they trusted that I knew how to do it. Well, I didn’t know how to do it, but I did it somehow. I was afraid to stick people repeatedly, so I would hold my breath as I did it. I thought of Tim—“In like an airplane, not a helicopter”—and in the middle of doing this fluid motion I would realize, I can’t breathe. And then I’d start to breathe.

  Telling people was the worst, but I knew I could deliver the news better than some mean person or someone who would use a needle and dive right in to the vein to hurt them. It was a fact, something to adjust your life to so you could manage it. In the end, though, it was telling somebody they were dying, because that’s what it was. I could offer this bit of hope about AZT and getting into treatment, though I was starting to think that all it did was turn your fingernails black. But it was still hope. My guys would take their AZT until the day they died because they knew tomorrow they would come out with a cure. If they just made it there.

  I fanned the cupcakes with a folded newspaper, trying to get them to cool enough so I could ice them. Allison turned six on May 28, a Saturday. I kept her for the morning, and then her daddy would take her to Little Rock. The temperature was already creeping toward the eighties, and we had no air-conditioning, so I was fighting a losing battle with the fan.

  The plan was for a morning picnic with school friends in the park, nothing at our house. Allison gave out little invites at school, but I hadn’t heard anything back from the other mothers. There were eighteen cupcakes, white cake, and the icing was vanilla. I was anxious about the picnic, so while I waited for the cupcakes to cool, I turned the icing a pale pink with a few drops of blood orange. I just wanted it to be nice for Allison.

  The cupcakes would have to be just cool enough for the icing, because I wanted to have time to do her hair. Her strawberry-blond curls had naturally straightened, falling down to her shoulders. A gorgeous color on my beautiful girl.

  She was watching cartoons, and as I iced the cupcakes I realized how rare it was for her to be here on a weekend. She had a whole routine of favorite TV shows that I’d only heard her mention.

  She wasn’t excited about her birthday, which I just didn’t get. How can you be six and not want a party? I had to snap her out of the trance of cartoons just to get her to look at the cupcakes, and she finally smiled when she saw them.

  I had her sit so I could comb out her hair. “Are kids excited for your party?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I ignored that. We drove over to the picnic spot just before the time I had asked people to come, and I laid out a red gingham cloth in the center, then a few blankets around it. I kept the cupcakes loosely covered with foil to keep away the bugs.

  The stage was set, so we sat. And we waited. I smoothed the red gingham over and over, trying to keep away what I slowly realized was happening.

  “It’s early yet,” I said, fifteen minutes in. Then I stopped saying that.

  No one came.

  She didn’t cry. She knew nobody was going to come long before I understood. Allison had never been invited to a single birthday party. I just assumed the other children didn’t have them. She’d been invited to one, but they’d accidentally put the wrong time on the invitation. We showed up, and it had been over for hours. Allison told me it was on purpose, but I told her it was a mistake.

  Now, I tried to talk to her about it.

  “Mama, stop,” she said. A finality to it. Something pushed away.

  I took her to McDonald’s, and said I wasn’t hungry. “I want you to get whatever you want,” I said. I watched her eat, remembering the kids who taunted me because of my mother. She’d had a horrible reputation in town because she was so mentally ill. The kids who teased me, I realized now, were hearing that from somewhere—that my mother was “crazy.”

  I took Allison home, and her daddy showed up to get her. I hugged h
er so hard. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I felt defeated.

  The cupcakes sat on my counter, still covered in foil, their presence taunting me like those kids in the schoolyard. Those kids were right about my mother, and no matter what they heard, they didn’t know the half of it. And now what had I done to Allison?

  I never let myself go back to that time, my childhood, because I was afraid I would get stuck there. But here it was, unbidden.

  We are living on Lake Hamilton. I am six, Allison’s age, and the house still feels new. Mama burned down our original house when I was five. A white clapboard home that was too regular for her. She had come home from the TB sanatorium broken and wanted a new house before Daddy died. He would get it on credit life. Credit life is when they’ll pay off the balance if you die, which she knew he would.

  She waited until my daddy was out one night to start the fire. I was on the sleeping porch, and I think I was supposed to go up with it. I was asleep when somebody jerked my ankles and pulled me to safety. I don’t know who. Not her.

  The house she built was blood-red brick. A two-bedroom with a beautiful view of the lake. And when Daddy died, it was in this house that she lost her mind.

  It starts like this: she works at Children’s Hospital and comes home late with stories about how the kids climb into her lap while they eat dinner. She loves the kids at Children’s Hospital. She hates me.

  I have a dog. She drives it out to Mount Ida and lets it loose because I don’t deserve it. I come home from school to find she has piled all my clothes into a heap by the water. She throws gasoline on them and tells me I don’t deserve nice clothes. She lights a match and hands it to me to set the pile of my clothes on fire. I do.

  She drags me to Salvation Army and buys me clothes two sizes too big so she doesn’t have to do it again. Before second grade, she takes a scissors to my hair, and I scream as she gives me a short, uneven boy’s cut that will take years to grow out. She tells me how ugly I am.