All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

Melba put the playing cards down on the tiny yellow checks of her plastic tablecloth. “You asked about Mitch,” she said tentative.

  “Yes,” I said. I could tell something was up. Bonnie was with me; she’d come along with me when I brought Melba a casserole to last her through the week. When Bonnie heard the tone in Melba’s voice, she shot me a look that said, “Careful what you wish for.”

  Melba didn’t like to give bad news when she read people’s cards. I’d brought some of the guys down to her place, and all she saw was death. She would talk about anything but, then mention they were going to go on a journey. Now, I could see she was choosing her words carefully.

  “Uh, I see him with lots of wine and laughing.”

  “Wine?” Mitch only drank beer. “He barely drinks, period.”

  “Well, I see all this life,” said Melba. “He is having a grand old time.”

  Bonnie laughed, her guttural chuckle. “Well, how do we get in on all this fun?” I gave her a look. “What?” she said. “I like a good time.”

  “Just ask him where he’s been having this fun,” Melba said.

  I didn’t. I kept telling myself that she had her psychic wires crossed, because Mitch wasn’t a drinker. And he wasn’t that jolly of a person. That was the dead giveaway.

  A woman from town called me a few weeks later. She was one of the most beautiful women in Hot Springs, but she’d been dumped by a guy who turned out to be gay, so she turned on me because I was sort of the ambassador for the gay community. She was breathless, so excited to tell me what she’d heard. She prefaced it by saying, “I hate to tell you this,” which always means the person has been waiting for just this very moment.

  “I heard that Mitch has a girlfriend,” she said. “A doctor in Texas.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Well, we had a neighborhood meeting last night,” she said.

  “And I was on the agenda?”

  “No, well, it came up.”

  “At the meeting?”

  “After.”

  “Oh, did someone bring this up under New Business? Where did everybody land on it?”

  She started to talk, but I stopped her. “Thank you,” I said. “I know it gave you no pleasure to tell me about this gossip. I have to be going, though.”

  I wasn’t going kill the messenger, because I didn’t want to waste the ammo. I needed it for Mitch. I drove over to his house, and I let him have it right at the door.

  “I hear that you’ve been on a mission to sow enough oats to qualify for a farm loan.”

  “Well, hello to you too,” he said.

  I pushed past him to let myself in. Four years, and I had only ever been here a few times. Our dates always ended at my house. “Some lady in Texas? Did you tell her you’d get engaged someday too?”

  He didn’t deny it, didn’t say anything. I saw his eyes dart to something on a shelf behind me, so I looked. It was a picture of the two of them. They looked so happy. I had never seen him look happy like that, the whole time I knew him.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “That’s her?” She wasn’t even pretty. Looked as old as his mother. It all spilled out of him. He’d been driving five and half hours to see her when he told me he was going to Texas for work.

  “I hear she’s a doctor,” I said.

  “A chiropractor.”

  “So not even a doctor doctor?” I yelled. “And on top of that she looks like your mother. I can’t believe you left me for that.”

  “Well, can’t I keep you both?”

  That did it. “Screw you,” I said.

  I got so mad he ended up picking me up and carrying me out the front door. He slammed it, and I drove right over to Bonnie’s.

  “Well, Melba was right,” I said when she opened the door.

  “She usually is,” she said. “Come on in.”

  I was already moving on. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a betrayal. I tried to change the subject, just like always. “I was wondering if you could help me with some letters,” I said. “I have an idea to get the Downtown Merchants Association to do some stuff for World AIDS Day on December 1. It’ll be Billy’s birthday, so I want it to—”

  “Ruth, I’m sorry about Mitch.”

  “Who?”

  She laughed. I took her hand. “You know, that person, that man I used to date . . . He thinks I am going to come to my senses.” She nodded.

  “Well, I have,” I said. “I would rather be alone than treated that way.”

  “And you’re not alone.”

  “That’s right. I have you. And I have my guys. And I have Allison. But I spent all this time believing everything I heard in church—that I need a husband to be whole, to have a family for Allison. And the whole time I’ve been creating one.”

  We were still for about ten seconds, and I sat up. “Now, these letters I want to write. I have to get the tone just right, so I need your brain . . .”

  Epilogue

  It’s a few weeks shy of Thanksgiving 2019, and I am going through a box of old photos and newspaper clippings before I drive down to Hot Springs. Those letters I started writing with Bonnie that day got the Downtown Merchants Association to hold a World AIDS Day event on December 1, 1993. Billy’s birthday. I find the full-page ad I tore from the paper, the one I got all three banks in town to pay for and sign their name to. “TIME TO ACT” it reads, with a giant red ribbon.

  It was past time, but I was grateful. I also saved the letter to the editor that was sent to the paper after. Under the headline, “AIDS Awareness Overdone,” George W. Wilkerson, owner of Paw Paw’s Vintage Photos in Hot Springs, wrote that he had just withdrawn his membership in the Downtown Merchants Association, “because of their endorsement of AIDS Awareness Day.” George, who I knew, wrote: “AIDS is a behaviorally-transmitted disease and does not need awareness or anything other than saying ‘no’ to homosexuality or drug use. How much does it cost to teach that?”

  It’s been nearly thirty years, and so much has changed and yet so little. After we lost Billy, there were many more deaths in the Our House family. I watched survivors become numb as funerals became commonplace. People asked if they could scatter the ashes of lovers at Files, and I said yes, feeling so guilty that I was running from hospital to hospital that I couldn’t even be there. I was never able to get a job with an AIDS service organization and continued to do my work alone.

  When researchers developed a new class of drugs in late 1995 called protease inhibitors, people started living with AIDS. It took some time for us to get the new medicines, but they came to Arkansas and with them the “Lazarus effect” I’d read about. People who were at death’s door were suddenly going to live. This was the day my guys and I had dreamed of. But now people with letters behind their names, some who got into the “AIDS business” for the money, didn’t need me to care for the dying anymore. I became functionally obsolete. “Thanks for your service. We’ll take it from here.” The experts knew best because they were paid to know best.

  I made my own job, as a fishing guide, taking tourists out on the water for two to three hours. The flyers I put in the hotels read, “You ask, ‘Can she fish?’ You bet your bass she can.” I did all right, but the tourists stopped coming to Hot Springs. I finally decided to move in 2000, loading everything into a gold Ford Explorer I packed to the gills. I felt bad leaving Files, but Hot Springs wasn’t sad to see me go. A lot of the people either still hated me for helping the gay community, or they wished they didn’t have a constant reminder of what they’d done to me—or hadn’t done for others.

  Before I left, Dr. Hays, our old preacher at First United, came up to me at a church dinner. “I want to apologize. I was wrong.” He had reconciled with the lesbian and gay community in his head and decided they were true human beings worthy of God’s love.

  He was an old man t
rying to get into heaven. “No, Dr. Hays,” I said, as kind as I could be. “I cannot accept your apology.”

  His face fell, and I continued: “It doesn’t seem like my forgiveness to give. Every Sunday you were spot-on for whatever I needed to hear that week. My marching orders. And I thank you for that. But that forgiveness? That would be up to the men I cared for, and they’re gone.”

  It wasn’t just the people who died of AIDS. Even many who did not have the virus ended up committing suicide. They lived through the depths of the epidemic only to take their own lives. But I knew the memories they were living with, and why it might be too much to bear.

  When I left Hot Springs, I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I would know it when I saw it. I thought I would probably end up in South Florida—probably Key Largo but maybe as far as Key West. That was where my Daddy’s people came from, and I loved fishing, so I figured I could get a job working on a boat cleaning fish. And maybe I was re-creating the journey I’d taken so many of my guys on, reading them my guidebook of the Florida Keys. Key West was always the last stop—the place where nobody could judge or hurt you anymore. I was tired of hurting.

  I didn’t make it that far. I stopped in Orlando and noticed there was old moss on the big, big trees. And old roofs. I took those as clues that they didn’t have hurricanes coming through there. I needed to go be someplace where something wouldn’t just happen to take everything from me. They say, do what you know, so I got into the funeral business to make a living. It made sense to sell burial plots in God’s waiting room. It was like time-shares, where you get to meet new people but never see them again.

  Then, in 2004, Orlando got hit by hurricanes after all, so back-to-back that people didn’t even bother to take the boards down from their windows between the storms. I took the hint and moved to where I live now, Northwest Arkansas—the land of Sam Walton—to be closer to Allison when she had her first child, a boy. Her three children, Jack, Ike, and Ella, call me Coco, because “Grandma” never really seemed to suit me.

  In 2012, I had a stroke the very day my health insurance ran out. I had to learn to walk and talk again, and then I couldn’t get insurance because I had a preexisting condition. As I recovered, I thought a lot about Bonnie having to cope after her surgeries. She was gone by then, her cancer finally getting her twenty-five years after she’d been given a three percent chance of living. I told her I could bury her in Files, but she wanted teaspoons of her ashes sprinkled in cemeteries around the world. I said that was a tall order, so she decided to donate her body to science. Leave it to Bonnie to have the answers even in death.

  Mitch came back, though not in the way I thought he would. I’d erased him from my life and never even drove past his house again when I was in Hot Springs. He tracked me down through Allison, and I learned he’d had a stroke and was living with his mother, Donnie.

  I agreed to have dinner with him and Donnie, if they were going to fry chicken and make biscuits for me. Mitch was in the kitchen when I got there, and I remember he was bent down to get the biscuits out of the oven. He looked up at me, and he was an old man, his beauty lost. He had this big tumor in his neck that was pushing into his carotid artery, and he couldn’t take care of himself. He was dependent on Donnie.

  I was going the next day to look at condos, and I asked if he wanted to ride with me. I had just signed the offer on one when he got the call that Donnie had fallen out of a chair and broken her hip. She died three days later, and we buried her at Files. Mitch couldn’t take care of himself and didn’t have an income, so I told him that he could stay at my house until he found a place to live. I didn’t realize he’d already found it. I’ve kept him alive for years. He was diagnosed with calcium buildup in his basal ganglia, the part of the brain that controls movement. His symptoms are like Parkinson’s disease and include dementia. So he became another patient for me. When I put him in the nursing facility, they assumed I was his wife, and I didn’t say otherwise. We ended up sort of married after all.

  AIDS followed me, of course. A year after my own stroke, I was minding my own business in my new home when a school district ten minutes north from where I lived told three foster siblings that they could not come back to school until they provided documentation that they were not HIV positive. An administrator had reportedly found out their birth mother was positive. These were disabled, elementary-school-age children—kids in foster care. I went on TV to go to bat for them, and soon word got out that I was not hirable. Nobody wanted to give a job to a troublemaker. I made do, focusing on my grandkids.

  Recently, on a particularly warm day in October, Allison and I went tubing together. Out on the water, I asked if she ever wanted me to stop what I was doing when she was little. Someone had asked me, and I realized I didn’t know the answer. She was insulted by the question.

  “But why did you hide that you were so lonely at school?” I asked.

  “I had nothing in common with those kids,” she said. “My friends were the guys. That’s who I played with after school.”

  I was quiet for a minute, the cool of the water contrasting with the heat of the air.

  She continued, softer: “I didn’t know a different life, and I was happy with it. And if sometimes it was hard, I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was afraid you would stop what you were doing,” she said. “And then what would happen to all these people?”

  Neither of us was able to answer that question or even approach it. There was no one behind me. I had no choice but to help them. But I didn’t say that aloud. Instead, we floated in the water, a mother and child after a war.

  Now it’s November, and I’m driving alone to Hot Springs. It’s nearly a four-hour drive from where I live now in Northwest Arkansas. I still drive fast, so I can do it in three without really trying.

  I pass Glenwood on my way to Hot Springs, so I stop in to see Chip’s grave. My guy who made it all the way to DC, only to end up in the place he’d escaped from. I haven’t been back to his grave since his burial in 1991, and for a moment I worry I won’t easily find him. It’s been twenty-eight years.

  “Chip,” I say to the air, “I need you to lead me to you.”

  I walk carefully around the graves where the ground has sunk. I trust him to bring me to him, calling his name from time to time. And there he is. I see the dip in his grave, the depression where the ground is sinking. His stone is leaning forward, toward the east, and the top is covered in lichen. But someone has left white flowers.

  “I knew I would find you,” I say.

  I talk to Chip like I used to, and I want to ask him about the Doctor. Tell him that whatever their relationship was, I was glad he had it. Across the way, I can hear the thunder of an old-fashioned revival. A preacher is raving into a microphone, the sound so loud it carries all the way to here. It may as well be 1991.

  When I get to Hot Springs, my first stop is at the house of Luke’s family. I arrive unannounced, but his mother is gracious. Her husband has died, and I thank her again for being one of the only families to take in their child. She asks if I ever hear from Todd. I have tracked him down, still in Fort Worth, after years of never making more than a five-year plan. When I speak with him on the phone, he is sitting in the same house he and Luke were going to share.

  When I leave Luke’s mother, I notice they have laid down cement to dam up the creek in the spot where Luke was baptized.

  On the way to town, I pass a strip club where Dolly worked, now called the Boogie Bar and Grill. On Central Avenue I can see the statue of Mary across from the Arlington Hotel, and I take a small detour to pass the place where Our House stood. I smile as I pass.

  I make my way, finally, to Files Cemetery.

  The carpet of pine needles crunches under my feet as I make the rounds. The mockingbirds still caw above me. I clear brush here and there on the graves, sayi
ng hi to Misty before walking over to see Angel, Carlos, and Antonio.

  It’s by Tim and Jim’s grave that I see the little glints of rock shining in the sun. I kneel and move dirt to uncover them: quartz crystals pushed up from the earth. Perfectly clear, with tiny points. I gather some in my hand to take back to my grandchildren. Gifts from Tim and Jim.

  I go to the grave shared by my father and Jimmy. The question I get most, the one I hate, is why I went into his room. And why I helped people. Again and again, “Why did you do it? How?” The answer is, How could I not? The real question is, How could you not?

  “You started it all,” I tell Jimmy. “Thank you.”

  I drive to the place I’ve rented on Lake Hamilton for the night. I can breathe better here, at the lake and woods that were my refuge as a little girl. The condo is on the water, with big bay windows facing west, so I can watch the sun set over the mountain and the bridge.

  I am standing at those windows, admiring the expanse of blue, when the front doorbell rings.

  “You’re here,” I say, almost dancing to the door.

  I open the door to see him and can’t raise my arms fast enough to take him into a hug.

  “Hi, Ruthie.”

  “Paul, I am so glad to see you.”

  I usher him in, as if from a rainstorm, though it’s a clear day. We talk over each other, saying how happy we are to see each other. He has brought two tote bags full of photo albums, and he lays them on the table by the bay windows.

  For hours we sit, looking at each photo and letting the memories come. For years we suppressed them. I remark that it’s nice to be with someone who understands how hard it is to think about those times, about these memories we don’t want to have.

  “They’re too painful,” he said. “It started back then. You had to put it all aside. I couldn’t go to a job, and if they were like ‘Well, why are you upset?’ say, ‘Well, I went to another friend’s funeral who died of AIDS.’ You could not do that. If you were in public, you just didn’t do that. Now it’s a little different, but people still don’t want to hear it.”