All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  Mitch became Mr. Saturday Night, never wanting more. We mostly watched movies, because we were each so exhausted from the work of the week. It was nice to just have a warm, caring body next to me. He called me “Ruthie,” which is how I knew somebody held me in their heart or at least close to it. And maybe I didn’t want someone around twenty-four hours a day. I needed to be mobile for my guys, and I had enough trouble carting Allison around with me, eating her meals in hospital cafeterias. I didn’t need to call some man to explain that dinner wouldn’t be on the table because here’s another patient.

  Mitch wasn’t the most sophisticated guy, but he could work situations and build anything with his hands. He’d designed and welded together the most beautiful docks out on Lake Hamilton and knew exactly how many cubic feet you would need to fill up a certain part of the lake. He was a man who could fix things, and I needed a man who could fix things. He would go to my guys’ houses and could repair anything. And would do it for free.

  I knew he loved that he flew during the week, back and forth to Mexico, getting parts for Jack Butcher and Wal-Mart. Sometimes he went to Asia, and it was in Hong Kong that he had his suits made. I think that’s why he stayed so trim. They had his sizes on file and would send him fabric samples. But God, they were nice suits.

  He was like me, in a way. He understood that the way you dress gets you into places that otherwise wouldn’t even let you in the service entrance. He’d grown up behind the eight ball, living in a chicken shack that had been converted into a place to sleep. His mom was married five or six times, so he had a lot of dads, but he stayed an only child, because she wasn’t making that mistake again. His real dad lived out in Mount Ida and looked just like him but wouldn’t recognize him as his.

  These details fell out as asides. Little things I collected because he was such a mystery to me. I had my mother’s voice in my head still, saying I was only good enough for the tire-retread man. Mitch had a complex too, because he went to Cutter Morning Star High School. It was the rural school, and people still assumed you got there every day by horse or on the back of a wagon. “Cutter” was code for the boonies, and if you went there you were dirt poor and had nothing. He was nice to look at, and he was industrious enough to wrangle a car even in high school, but when the Hot Springs girls asked, “Where do ya go to school?” the second he said, “Cutter,” they’d laugh and head off.

  He never thought he was good enough, and then his wife left him. I heard a lot about her, even though she’d been gone three years. She was still in Hot Springs, and I’d shopped in her store, a little lingerie shop. I liked her a lot. I remembered seeing him in there one time. He was just kind of a blur going by this once. “Oh, that’s my husband,” she’d said, dismissively. I had always noticed her wedding and engagement rings; they would slide down the side of her finger, the diamonds were so big. This was back in the mid-eighties, when women wore leather in different colors. She had these custom-made leather outfits that I now knew he’d had made with those suits in Hong Kong. I pictured her details still on file next to his somewhere.

  He’d dressed her to the nines. Jewelry, diamonds, and furs. He bought her a brand-new Corvette for her birthday. But I wasn’t going to see any of those things—not that I wanted them. I just thought it meant that he had loved her that much and maybe he could again. No one else would date me, because single men were terrified to be seen alone with me.

  Mitch was honest that he’d slept around on his ex, to a point that I had to show him a picture of Sandy to make sure he hadn’t stopped at her bedroom on one of his past side trips. My friendship with Sandy was no longer what it once was. We’d see each other around town, and she’d smile and do a pleasant, “How are you?” but she no longer called me to hang out. It took me a while to realize I had lost my best friend, but I would still stick to her code of girlfriend ethics.

  Or at least consider it. I liked Mitch a lot and would miss him. The way he took me for rides in his sports car, a five-speed, going down dirt roads just to do it. Someone else to drive and pick the route for once. I was just a blond in the passenger seat, the wind in my hair.

  He didn’t want it to get deeper than that, and I was content.

  On Mother’s Day, I made sure to pick up Allison early at her grandparents’. Her grandfather always made a big deal about Mother’s Day. Not about me or even Imogene, really, but the mothers at their church. Her grandfather, who I called the Old Man, had a greenhouse, and he spent months growing the most gorgeous orchids you’ve ever seen, coddled and placed in corsages for the mothers at church on Mother’s Day. As he grew them, he pinched some off, sacrificing some to get the biggest ones to take in and show off. But I never got one. And Allison never got one.

  The Old Man was already loading the orchids into the car when I got there. He was so intent on babying each one, he barely noticed Allison leaving.

  “Wish Imogene a happy Mother’s Day,” I called to him, if only just to be acknowledged. The Old Man looked at me quickly and nodded, then returned to his bounty, stuffing a riot of flowers, white and pink and purple and red, into his car.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I saw you on the television,” the voice on the phone said. He was hoarse and sounded old. Even the words he said out loud sounded misspelled.

  “Right?” I said.

  “I got my son and a cousin,” he said, punctuating it with a cough.

  “Okay,” I said, opening my datebook.

  “They have that thing you talked about.”

  “AIDS.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  He wanted me to come to them in Story, which was even farther out than Mount Ida. I drove up after doing the morning rounds, and as I got closer I started passing the crystal quarries and family-run rock shops along the highways. Something so beautiful making its way out of the ground in such a desolate place. I don’t know what else people would do for work out there. It was different. People had run to the mountains of Arkansas during the Civil War, the ones that didn’t want to talk to anybody or have anybody bother them. I found it was still true of the people there.

  It wasn’t quite a shotgun shack, but it was pretty close. The yard was full of kids and babies, all dirty. Five or six, moving so fast in and out of the house and wearing so little I couldn’t tell them apart to count them. A dozen dogs, all skinny, some lying down, some running with the kids. When I got out, the dogs barked furiously and the kids stopped and stared. None of the dogs charged; they just let out territorial screams. I waved in the kids’ general direction as I walked to the house. None waved back. They stared at me like I was an alien.

  The house was up on stilts, and I climbed the concrete blocks they used to step up into the house. The washing machine was out on the front porch, an electric one with an extension cord connecting it somewhere inside. No dryer, but a clothesline that had lots of clothes. A truck was parked by a tree, the transmission hanging from ropes and chains above it. Some group of guys had all pulled on the ropes to get it out of the way to work on the truck. There were leaves inside, so I wondered how long it had been left just hanging up there. You had to have lunch, and then you had to have dinner. Well, in the country, lunch was dinner, and dinner was supper. Then someone had to do whatever. Might be two or three days before someone could come back and help. Things happen. Jail.

  I knocked on a screen door, metal and mesh. A dark brown hound dog inside seemed to lose its mind, barking, jumping to snap at the screen, and gnashing teeth like all it wanted to do was close its jaws on me.

  I held my date planner like armor. A teenager finally came to the door. No shirt, just ratty blue jeans.

  “Daddy,” he yelled, as he pulled the dog off.

  “She here?” came a voice.

  “She is,” I said.

  “Come in,” said the voice.

  It was dark ins
ide. I wasn’t sure if this was a trap for the lady on TV who loves those gays so much. An older man who may have been in his forties or his sixties—who could tell?—sat at the table, smoking a cigarette, tapping it just above the ashtray. Near him was a picture window with a Confederate flag covering it. And beneath that, on two couches, two very sick men. I was relieved to see them, in a way—they were at least evidence I was invited here for a reason other than murder.

  The older man didn’t get up to greet me; he sat at the table leaning back in the chair with his legs crossed. He cocked his head at the two men.

  I walked up to the couches. “Gentlemen,” I said.

  They said they were cousins, and I accepted that. They each had a rough buzz cut, one a muddy brown, the other jet black against skin so white it almost had the blue of skim milk.

  “We got it from a blood transfusion,” Jet Black said, and the other nodded. It was amazing to hear the quickness of the way he said “transfusion.” Learned, then practiced with repetition. I saw a figure in the back, a woman, poke her head out a doorway to look at me, then retreat.

  “Really,” I said. “You were in the hospital some time?”

  “Yeah,” said Muddy.

  “Where?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Well,” I said. “Do you have a doctor now?”

  More silence. I looked around the room. There was a bumper sticker on the wall, crooked. It read: “If I’d a known all this, I woulda picked my own damn cotton.”

  The dad suddenly piped up. “We aren’t all gonna get the AIDS, are we?”

  “No,” I said. “So, you get AIDS from HIV, which is a virus. It’s spread through sexual contact and sharing needles. Or, uh, blood transfusions, though that doesn’t happen anymore. So, without any of that stuff, you’re good.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette as an answer.

  “It’s those faggots,” said the muddy-haired guy.

  That set off Jet Black, spewing stuff I don’t want to repeat.

  I held up a hand. “Look, this is the way it is. You are not better than they are. You are all in the same boat, and I don’t care how you got it—in my mind you got it the same way everybody else got it, which is that it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  Jet Black only got madder, talking about the Klan cleansing Arkansas. It was ridiculous. Here I was trying to save the lives of two Klansmen who thought they had to talk sense to a blond white woman. These men with their robes and hoods in the closet.

  “I don’t have the same feelings about the KKK that you do,” I said. I left it at that so I didn’t get shot.

  Muddy asked me if I condoned sin, probably showing off for Jet Black. If a question was ever a threat, it was that one. I wanted to call him a liar. Tell him the blood supply had been cleared of HIV since July of ’85.

  “I’m the only person doing this kind of work anywhere,” I said flatly. “If you scare me off—or even just piss me off—I’ll never come back. And then what are you gonna do?”

  That shut them up. I talked to them about AZT and nutrition, opportunistic infections to watch out for. None of it was landing.

  When I left, the dad still didn’t move to get up. “When you need me, call me,” I said. “But I’m not dropping by.”

  I drove past the crystal quarries again, hanging on to something beautiful so I’d stop thinking about the Klan. When I was in high school, there was a white woman over in Glenwood, where there were no black people. She said she’d been raped by a black man, because she didn’t want her parents to know they were dating. They went and got a black man, some person living his life, and snatched him at random. Whichever one, they took him to the river. The story goes they nailed his penis to a stump and set it on fire and gave him a knife.

  What was the answer to depravity? There were patients it was hard to help. I know how that sounds, but it was hard to help those guys. “You know what?” I said aloud. “They’ve been dying up here for hundreds of years and took care of it themselves. Up here you get a snakebite and suck it out and hope you live.”

  But I went back, twice. In August the dad called me and told me they were both dead. “You don’t need to come back.” He hung up before I could ask how or if it was in a hospital. I suspected it wasn’t.

  I didn’t feel relief, but I did feel saved from the obligation of caring for them. And I wondered if this is what people who hated gay men told themselves when they died.

  Louisa Simmons and Margaret Michaels were at an after-church dinner going on about gay people invading the town. They were really going at it.

  “Why do those people need a place?” Louisa said. “I just think it attracts them.”

  “Flies to . . .” prim Margaret’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Shit.”

  “What place are you talking about?” I asked.

  “That disgusting bar,” she said. “They just took over that place on Malvern and Convention.”

  “The gay bar?” I said. “Our House?”

  “What kind of name for a bar is that?” said Margaret.

  “Our House,” spit Louisa. “Can you imagine?”

  “It’s probably code,” I said. “If I invited you to meet at Our House, you would know what I mean but maybe someone else wouldn’t.”

  “They speak in code because they know what they’re doing is wrong,” said Margaret. “I know you know that, Ruth.”

  They eyed me suspiciously, but they always eyed me suspiciously, even before I was the town pariah. I knew these women spread rumors about me, and I knew so many real truths about their lives. When I was walking in town as a child with my mother, she would say hi to some woman, then, as soon as they passed, tell me what that person thought she was hiding, filling me in on three generations’ worth of adultery, murder, and thievery. “Her daddy bulldozed a graveyard to build that house she’s so proud of,” she’d whisper, smiling. Or, “She and her husband have an arrangement. I guess no one’s being cheated on if they’re both doing it.”

  I grew up steeped in these secrets from my mother’s generation and was observant enough to see them repeating in mine. But I kept everything to myself. It just bothered me that people thought they could hide their own sins by inventing ones for others.

  “Seems as though we should bring a gift basket to Our House,” I said. “An apology. Say something like, ‘You were the stranger, and we didn’t welcome you.’”

  Louisa didn’t laugh. I was a tall snake in the short grass. But I was already moving on. Our House, I thought.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I sat in the car and rehearsed what I was going to say. Our House had just moved in to what was likely one of the rattiest buildings in town. It used to be a corner gas station, set catty-corner on the lot on Malvern and Convention, and probably needed to be torn down twenty years before. Even though it was August, all the windows were boarded up, so you couldn’t see who was in there. Still, it hid in plain sight, just two doors down from the police station and next to the library. Right across from a median in the road, a patch of green where the Arkansas and American flags flew high. People just chose not to see Our House.

  I had worn my nicest outfit, an ecru-linen sailor dress with embroidery, and I’d taken to carrying a datebook with me, covered in pink leather. I kept names of doctors and nurses in there. It was a talisman, something I could hold, as if I had some important business.

  I walked in just after the bar opened at five that afternoon, but it could have been midnight inside, what with all the windows covered. I was hit with a wall of stale cigarette smoke and the sounds of Billy Idol singing “Eyes Without a Face.”

  A tall man about my age stood toward the front, wiping the wood of one of the tables to the left. He had his reddish-brown hair pushed back, thin and straight on top but curling down long in the back to his shoulders. He stared at me, then arched a perfect eyebrow
at my datebook.

  “Hello,” I said, putting all the sugar I have in my voice. “I was hoping to talk to the owner.”

  He sat on the corner of the table, crossing his big arms with the rag balled in a fist. He was still eyeing my date planner.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “My name is Ruth Burks.”

  “Paul,” he said, like it was an annoyance to give me even that. “I’m the manager.”

  “Paul . . .” I said. He wasn’t giving me a last name. Okay, that was fine. “Listen, I wonder if you can help me.”

  “Depends.”

  “I guess it does,” I said. “Yes, well . . .” My speech went out the window. “I am trying to help people. A lot of young men. They’re getting AIDS, and they’re dying, and I need to figure this out.”

  He looked confused.

  “Do you know anything about AIDS?” I asked.

  “That’s people in San Francisco.”

  “I’m not saying it’s in your bar,” I said. “But it’s in Arkansas. I’ve been helping a lot of people, so I know it’s here in Hot Springs too.”

  “How many?”

  “I’ve buried about two dozen men, maybe more. Sometimes the ashes came—”

  “Buried.”

  “Yes, they all died.”

  “You buried them yourself?”

  I smoothed my skirt. “Yes.”

  “How old?”

  “Average? Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Young.”

  “Wineland.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t really drink.”

  “Paul Wineland,” he said, uncrossing his arms. “That’s my name.”

  “Oh, I thought you were offering me a drink.”

  “Is that a hint?” he said.

  “Is that an offer?” I said. “I’ll take a club soda and bitters, and maybe we can sit and talk. With lime, please.”