All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  There is always something wrong. A bad grade on a report card, or I laugh too loud. The sun could have set wrong. You never know. You never know.

  From time to time, she drops me off at Hillcrest Children’s Home, an Assemblies of God orphanage in Hot Springs. The kids there have no parents, and they resent that I am so bad that my mother doesn’t want me. They bully me, and I am usually there for two days at least, sometimes a week. Longer in summer. Each time she takes me there, I pack my belongings in a little red suitcase, filling it with the toys I have collected for myself—acorns, pine cones, and interesting leaves—because my mother will not let me have Barbies or other dolls. I keep it under my bed at the orphanage. I am constantly scolded for checking to make sure it is there. But I am convinced that my mother will come and take the suitcase when I am not there, proof that I have nothing and that she has left me there forever.

  The people who run the orphanage finally tell her she needs to stop bringing me. “They don’t even want you,” she tells me.

  She beats me constantly, and one day she whips me with the electric cord of a coffee percolator. She breaks the skin on my legs, and I run away, barefoot, through the woods to the house of an old woman. She is sweeping her front porch. I turn and lift my dress just a little so she can see the blood running down my legs.

  The old woman sweeps me away with the broom. “I don’t wanna see it, I don’t wanna get involved,” she says, brushing my feet with the hard bristles of broomcorn. I wash the blood away in the waters of Lake Hamilton.

  In a manic stage, my mother buys me a bicycle. At seven, I get on it in the mornings, and I am not allowed back in the house until dark. I spend entire days exploring. The Oosters have a smokehouse, and I stop and get a sausage end or a baloney end and then go on my way.

  I ride through the woods behind our house, a vast forest of pine by the lake. My sanctuary. Any given day, I find one of those pine beddings where there is no grass, and I make my fort and stay back there. I hide for so long that I forget I’m hiding. I fall in love with Hot Springs, and I want everyone to feel safe in its arms.

  Now, in the living room, I let myself cry. My mother did everything she could to ruin my life. I’d spent my adult life letting her back in and then exiling her again, never asking her why she was so cruel to me. We were on another break. I needed to keep Allison safe from her.

  And now Allison was as lonely as I was.

  I stood up, smoothed my skirt, and went to the kitchen to get the cupcakes. I drove them around to my guys. They all knew Allison, and I told them she wanted them to have them. I never wanted to burden them with our problems.

  Chapter Nine

  The last Friday in June, a jazz orchestra gave a concert in the Arlington’s Crystal Ballroom. This was a little bit of a last hurrah for me. Monday I would be starting a job working at the Weyerhaeuser sawmill, pulling wet grain plywood off the assembly line on the graveyard shift. It was the only job I could get, and it was part-time, just half the week. Allison’s daddy would have to take her for longer, and Bonnie would pick up the slack. I’d applied at so many places, and the ones who brought me in for interviews made it clear sex was a requirement of clerical work. I did two days at a sales office and quit when I realized the boss thought touching my ass was a friendly greeting.

  “Now that you don’t work for me,” he said, “can we go out to the car and you give me a blow job?”

  I got up from the seat in front of his desk. “I’m the one out of a job now,” I said, turning to go out the door. “Don’t you think I should be the one needing something?”

  So, the sawmill job was the best I could do. But I could still dress up for something like this night at the Arlington. A curling iron and a tube of lipstick can hide a million stresses.

  People were dancing, and I wished Sandy had been able to come. I looked at the elderly couples dancing, and I didn’t begrudge them their happiness, but I wanted it for me too. I leaned against the wall as a vocalist took center stage to sing, “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody.” He was in a tuxedo, singing about a woman who haunts him, and I closed my eyes, transported back seventy-five years, with all the ghosts of showgirls and gangsters still in the building coming down to dance.

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  He was on my right, appearing beside me. It was a doctor I barely knew, part of a clinic in town. His specialty and mine did not mix.

  “And what’s that?” I said, staring at the singer.

  “I know you’re testing people.”

  “Testing?” I said, like it was a word I’d never heard.

  “AIDS.”

  Well, that was that. I wanted to ask how he knew, but I didn’t. Maybe he was confirming a rumor. I braced for what was sure to be next, the “I will ruin you” or the “How dare you?”

  Instead, he said, “I don’t mind testing for you.”

  I turned to look up at him. Now it was his turn to look away and focus on the singer. “Really?” I said. The Doctor was tall and had an air of superiority about him. It wasn’t until the early eighties that they let outside doctors come in to Hot Springs. It used to be you couldn’t be a doctor in Hot Springs unless you father or father-in-law was.

  His voice was halting, rehearsed but still unsure. “Bring them to the clinic. At night. The back door. Give me warning, and I’ll leave it open. If it’s locked, leave.”

  “Whatever you want, yes.”

  “Where do you bring the sample?”

  “Health department,” I said. “Little Rock.”

  “Refrigerated?”

  “On ice,” I said. “Minnow box.”

  He suppressed a smug chuckle. “You keep bringing the blood to the lab. Nothing to do with me or the clinic.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t tell anybody.”

  I turned to look him in the eye. “Never. I can’t thank you enou—”

  He moved on. The singer ended with a flourish, holding the last note. I let out a breath as he finally took one. The Doctor was married with a mess of kids, and I knew one of the rules was that I not ask who told him about me.

  The first time I took someone, it was a scared friend of one of my guys. I can’t remember his name, but I was nervous myself. I picked him up, and we drove to the back of the building. It backed up against some woods, so no one would see. We went through a plain white door, and the Doctor was waiting. He did what he would always do when I brought people: he shook hands but did not introduce himself. He’d get right to it, but at the moment of the needle, he was especially gentle. “You can look away if you need to,” he said softly to them. “You’re okay.”

  I took the sample home and put it in the refrigerator to take to Little Rock the next day. Allison never knew what she was going to find in the fridge.

  The first two times with the Doctor, the test was it, and that was plenty. The third time, the Doctor asked if I needed anything. I took that as a signal that I was doing okay by his rules. I told him about a patient who wasn’t responding to antibiotics. “What are they doing for it?” he asked.

  I named a drug, and he suggested a switch to another, writing it down for me. In the hospital I repeated what he said with an air of authority. “What about . . . ?” The doctor at the hospital said it wouldn’t work, but I went back later and saw he had prescribed it. I didn’t point it out, just wrote it down in my little planner.

  I finally had an ally, someone who could help me. And it inspired me to ask someone else for help.

  Right before the night’s finance committee meeting at First United Methodist, I stopped in at the office of Dr. Hays, the lead preacher for the church. He commanded a large room with dark wood and thick rugs. There was a conversation area with leather couches, but he only ever talked to me from his desk, a huge clock behind him to remind me his time was valuable. Crosses here and there to remind everyone who h
ad paid for our sins.

  We said some pleasantries, and he looked at me, expectant. The clock ticked behind him.

  He is a good man, I told myself. He likes you. Just be direct.

  “Dr. Hays, I have been helping some men with AIDS, and I have met a few who have been newly diagnosed.”

  He looked at me. I kept talking.

  “Could I have one of the Sunday-school rooms, just one hour a week, for a group support, uh, support group meeting? In the breezeway?”

  He straightened himself up in his chair. “Surely you’re not talking about bringing those people into this church?”

  That did it for me—the “those.” We had spent every finance committee meeting talking about paying for the new house we had to buy Dr. Hays. We put down new grass for him, and then the sprinklers wouldn’t work to his specifications, and the pattern on the cloth on the chair next to the back door wasn’t the right shade of whatever color. Our answer was always the same: “Well, yes, Dr. Hays. We’ll take it back and pay to have it reupholstered to make you happy, Dr. Hays.”

  “Oh, no, Dr. Hays. I’m talking about bringing them across your new lawn we paid for. And into the house we paid for. And sitting their butts down on the thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture the church bought for you.”

  “You are—”

  “That’s what I’m talking about doing with those people.”

  “Go.”

  “It’s in the breezeway,” I said, walking out as he stood. “Those germs aren’t gonna crawl out and find their next victim.”

  I went outside to cool off before the meeting. I got in my car so nobody would hear me let out a yell. I felt foolish for thinking he would help and that I just needed to summon the courage to ask for it. “Of course, Ruth,” I said aloud. “What do you need? Can we set up a ministry for this? I can’t believe you’ve been doing this on your own. How can we help?”

  That felt better. That’s what he should have said. That’s what Jesus wanted us to do. I got out to go back in. I could smooth this over. He wasn’t going to help. At least I knew where I stood.

  I went in, and the men of the finance committee were at the table. My plan was to just keep my mouth shut.

  Dr. Hays looked up. “Uh, uh. You’re not on the finance committee anymore?” He said it like a question. Like I should know this was the decision or like he was unsure he could actually do it.

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re not.”

  “Why?”

  “Uh, this isn’t the place to talk about it.”

  I looked at the men, these leaders of the community, who had grown to respect me, not simply as my father’s daughter but as someone who had both new ideas about how the church could raise revenue and good ones that widened our scope of pledges. Now they seemed confused.

  “No,” I said, “this is exactly the place to talk about it. Right here, since y’all are gonna talk about it after I leave anyway.”

  “Well, we were going through the records, and we don’t see where you tithe,” he said. “We have to have people that commit to tithing, so we know how much money we have to commit to the church.”

  I didn’t have the kind of money that I could promise ten dollars each week or five. “I give ten percent of what I have,” I said. “And sometimes when I have a five, I want to ask for change out of the offering plate. But you don’t remember the time there was five hundred dollars wrapped with a rubber band?” I asked. “That was me. Jim Edwards won so big at Oaklawn that he gave me that, and I gave it right to the church. I didn’t know I had to sign off with anyone.”

  The men shifted uncomfortably. Some of them had helped me. Picked up a phone and made a problem go away with fifty dollars. They couldn’t know how they extended the lives of my guys, but they did know that I cared.

  “I just asked Dr. Hays for a room, one hour a week, to help some people with AIDS who need supp—”

  Fred Kurtz from the chamber of commerce piped up. “Are you out of your mind? We have to think of the safety of the church and this town. I won’t let you put up a vacancy sign for perverts!”

  “We have church business,” Dr. Hays said firmly, looking away from me.

  “This is church business,” I yelled. Then, catching myself, continued softer: “The business of the church should be helping people. That is exactly what we should be talking about.” Dr. Hays still wouldn’t look at me. “Gentlemen, I thank you for this opportunity to serve the church. I have learned a lot.”

  I walked out and drove home to put on my uniform for the sawmill.

  The next day I checked in on Tim and Jim at home with Tim’s parents. It just seemed like everyone in that house was trying not to be the last one to die. Tim’s dad was just old—though he sure liked to joke by lifting my skirt with his cane—and his mother loved the bottle more than it could ever love her back.

  “Do you ever think about getting a place in Hot Springs?” I asked. “I could get you housing assistance. I know you qualify.” They were living on Tim’s social security check, which was three hundred dollars a month. For some reason, Jim never wanted to apply for it, and I didn’t push it. He didn’t want to be in the system, and I wondered if he’d maybe gotten into some trouble years back.

  “Our own place?” Jim said.

  “Just you two,” I said. I’d never gotten a place for two men together, but why not?

  Well, housing assistance was why not. I was up front with them, saying I had two men with AIDS, and they needed a place and they were together. A studio would be fine. A few weeks went by, and when I called they gave me such a runaround on the phone, saying I had to resubmit forms and prove eligibility. How dare they do this? I knew Tim qualified.

  “We’ll just come down,” I said.

  “Well, that’s not necessary,” the man said, an edge of panic in his voice. “It won’t change the fact that—”

  “Okay, see you soon,” I said.

  The file was in Tim’s name, so I called him and asked if he didn’t mind going down to the housing office with me. He said, “It’s a date.”

  He was waiting at the house and walked to the car. I looked at his outfit: plain black shorts and a tight polyester button-down.

  “Tim,” I said. “You know those Daisy Dukes you love?”

  He nodded.

  “Go put ’em on,” I said.

  The housing building is set low, and to enter it, you have to walk down a really wide, long set of stairs outside. It’s all windows on the side, but the building is set so deep you can’t even see the parking lot. Why they built it that way I don’t know, but I guess the thought never occurred to anybody that disabled people were the ones that need housing assistance.

  But that day it was a stage, and I could see everyone inside staring at us—Tim’s long legs in those short shorts, and me in my highest heels—making our grand entrance down the stairs. If he was with me, they knew he had AIDS. And Tim left no doubt that he was wonderfully, unapologetically gay.

  We were taken care of in five minutes. Approved. Anything we wanted, just get out.

  As we walked back up the stairs, Tim turned to wave at the people behind all that glass, still staring at us. They didn’t wave back.

  “They kind of look like they’re in a zoo, don’t they?” I said.

  “And they think we’re the animals.”

  “Right?” I said, in an earnest, confiding voice, as if the same thought had occurred to me but I was too polite to say it. Tim started to laugh, a big shaking cackle he aimed upward, which made me laugh too. We stood there, laughing until we cried, our arms around each other for fear that if one of us looked back again at those jaw-dropped, wide-eyed faces, it would send us rolling down the stairs. We took another step only when we’d finally wiped our tears, whispering “Okay, okay” to each other.

  Chapter Ten<
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  I stood outside Allison’s school, on top of the hill, and cursed her daddy. “You know what?” I said out loud to myself, “that jerk is not gonna be here. He never shows up for anything.”

  We were high enough that I could see the highway from Little Rock in the distance. He was still working out there but had moved back to Hot Springs, much to my displeasure. As the sun started to set in the September sky, I could see the prettiest little thunderstorm in the distance, like gray and white cotton gathered into a neat pile.

  Allison’s Catholic school was having an evening open house for first grade. They had it on a Monday night in September, so the dads could show up, look at what their kids had done in their first week in school, and not show up again until the father-daughter breakfast in June. I sent a note to him with Allison, and I even had to talk to him to tell him the date. From the door, but still.

  I wasn’t going to put on a show like we weren’t divorced, but I remembered never having my daddy at anything because he was dead. Kids, even six-year-olds like Allison and her classmates, notice everything, even if they don’t get the whole story. I’d invited Imogene, my ex-mother-in-law, to come as a sort of insurance policy. I wanted somebody up there with me to show her teacher and the other parents that Allison had real family. I had to promise to pick Imogene up and drop her off, making the obligation as small as possible. She was already inside, probably saying something about Catholics and idols, so I gave up and went in.

  “Where’s Daddy?” asked Allison. I scanned the room and saw all the dads were here, awkwardly talking to one another. The women used loud voices to praise their kids’ drawings, then looked around to see who was impressed.

  “I think he’s held up,” I said, glancing at Imogene, who sat awkwardly in a little chair sized for a first grader. Her eyebrows were arched, but her eyes were beady, judging everything. Not even for sport or fun, just out of habit.