All American Boy (36 page)

She's back to standing in the doorway of the living room. The Christmas tree slouches in the corner. It's brown and almost bare, its needles covering the floor. Boxes lie scattered underneath its branches, brightly colored paper crumpled in heaps. The baby screams as he writhes among the needles.

“I'll be home as soon as I can, Regina. Take care of my son. Tell him all about me. Tell him I'm making our country safe for him to grow up in, that I'm off making sure he can grow up proud and free.”

Regina walks over to the baby in the middle of the living room. He screams at her feet. She looks down. For a moment the child opens his tiny blue eyes and stares up at her. She stares back, silent.

“Regina, dear, you cannot allow that child to sit in a soiled diaper. That can cause severe irritation. Imagine what it would be like to sit in your own bowel movement for hours at a time.”

Can you do it? Can you be brave, Regina?

Otherwise the crying will never stop
.

She starts to inhale and exhale very fast, pushing herself over to the window, where she looks out and sees nothing: no day, no night. There is only whiteness, a cold whiteness, like snow gusted up against the window. There is nothing outside. And in here: there is only the crying.

Why won't he stop?

She staggers back to the tree, brushing against a lifeless branch. Dry brown needles scatter to the floor.

“Concentrate on the task at hand,” she tells herself, remembering what they had taught her at the spa. “First thing. Take down the tree …”

The baby cries in uncompleted, tearless gasps. His face is purple.

Regina removes one, then two, ornaments from the tree. She wraps them carefully in newspaper and places them in a box. But then she drops the third ornament, a silver angel, the only one left from the ones Mama used to hang. She'd brought them over from Sweden. It smashes on the floor.

“No,” Regina says.

There's a moment of stillness so deep, so terrible, even the crying cannot penetrate.

And then she turns, swinging her arms, whipping off icicles and stars and hurling them across the room like a firestorm in the night sky. She stomps on top of old red balls, delighting in their fragility, the ease with which they crumble into dust under her bare feet. She ignores the pain, the sharp glass piercing into the soles of her feet. She lunges at the tree, pushing it over. It falls on top of her baby. He screams.

“Let
me
cry, too!” she shouts at him. “
Let me cry, too!
”

She stares down at her baby writhing between the bare brown branches of the tree, his purple face scratched and bleeding.

“Oh, he's so small,” she says softly, almost a whisper.

So small
.

She looks over at the couch.

And the pillows so big …

Her hands are in her hair again. She's screaming. Mother Day is pushing her, shoving her hard, screaming back at her. The church ladies are picking up the baby. Now they're handing him to Mother Day.

Go ahead! Take him! Raise him! Turn him into another Robert!

Mother Day jostles the screaming baby in one arm and dials the phone frantically with the other. Regina flops down onto the couch and puts her hands over her face. She sits that way, not moving, not speaking, not thinking, until the crying has finally stopped.

It's left to Lillian Mayberry to sweep up the broken glass.

21

THE SECRET

“
You
act as if you think she killed him.”

Wally wants to punch the son of a bitch. Has for
years
. Wants to haul off and smack him, right here, right at his desk, right in his big, fat, foul-smelling face.

“What I think doesn't matter,” Sergeant Garafolo tells him, shrugging, and goddamn it if he isn't eating again, this time a jelly donut, with powdered sugar all over his mustache. “The navy thinks he skipped town to beat an assault charge. Can't argue with Uncle Sam.”

“But still you'd like to search my mother's house.” Garafolo stares up at him from his desk. “Yeah. I would.” “Okay.” Wally's seething, and it shows. “Let me get this straight. Despite the fact that my cousin nearly bludgeoned some guy to death, despite the fact that he has a long history of disciplinary problems in the navy, despite the fact that he could be facing a long stretch in jail, you still think his disappearance is totally unconnected to all that. You think, instead, that his senile old aunt who can barely lift a bag of groceries killed him and stuffed his body in a closet.”

A small, tight smile dares to move across Garafolo's face. “All I said,
Walter
, is that I'd like to do a search of her house. That's all.”

“Why haven't you gone after the girlfriend? I tell you, she was—”

“We
did
go after her. And indeed there was a report from her father that she was seen driving off with somebody who fit the description of Kyle. The father couldn't
swear
it was Kyle in the car, but it might have been.” He shrugs. “Probably was.”

“So there. You've got it.”

“But when the girl was questioned in the city, she claimed it was her cousin she was with. Some cousin who's helping her get a job as a model.” Garafolo sighs. A glob of jelly drops from his donut onto whatever official form he'd been reading at his desk. “Fuck,” he says, dabbing at the jelly with a napkin.

“Look,” Wally says, “I've been in my mother's house several times over the last few days. If he was there, dead or alive, I'd have
seen
something.” A terrible memory shoots through his head. “
Smelled
something, if he was dead.”

“I've signed off on the case,” Garafolo tells him irritably, not looking up at him, still wiping jelly off the document on his desk. “I've turned it all over to Uncle Sam. If I had my way, sure, we'd be doing a search of your mother's house. But the navy thinks they know the answer.”

“Well,” Wally says, “in this case, they do.”

There's nothing more to say. He stands there watching Garafolo make the stain on the paper even worse.

Why had he come here? What was the point?

Stalling again, that's why. Stalling, when he had other business to attend to. Much more important business—which he would do,
finally
, and then hightail it out of Brown's Mill. He'd stayed in this goddamn hellhole far too long.

So why had he wasted even more time coming to the police station?

Because of his mother. That's why.

It's always my mother, deep down
.

She was the reason he'd come back to Brown's Mill in the first place. He'd told her she wasn't, but she was. He came back because his mother had called him. She'd been upset. This fucking asshole right here, stinkface Garafolo, was upsetting her.

I think I may be losing my mind
.

Wally heads out of the police station without any further word to the fat smelly cop. He hurries down the hallway toward the front door, his footsteps echoing curiously above him in the high, vaulted ceiling of the station.

Just as they had that day.

“Tell your story, the whole story, you little pervert,” his father had said.

That's why I came here. I'm retracing my steps, only backward. Miss Aletha's house. The police station
.

And now Zandy
.

Wally steps outside into the overcast day. The people of Brown's Mill are milling about, walking up and down the sidewalk, their faces as gray as the sky. They bump into him, brush his shoulders as they pass, but never make contact with his eyes.

Wally stands still, unable to walk any further.

This morning Dee had given him a hearty wave and salute, as if nothing had happened. He was off to school, he announced to Missy, and afterward he'd be at the arcade downtown, hanging with his “peeps.” No sign of conflict, no sign of turmoil in his young, unlined, carefree face. Wally had watched as the boy bounded down the steps and hopped astride his bike, pedaling off into the morning.

“Wally Day?”

He moves his eyes to the man suddenly standing beside him. A bald, paunchy man reeking of bacon grease and burned coffee, a stained, tattered apron beneath his overcoat.

“Freddie?” Wally asks. “Freddie Piatrowski?”

“Yeah,” the man says, and they shake hands.

But what do they say? No words are needed. Wally knows it all without Freddie having to offer a syllable: he's getting off the breakfast shift at the Big Boy, where he's worked as a cook for the past ten, eleven, maybe twelve years. He has a wife—no, he's divorced by now—with several kids, one of whom Wally is certain is retarded, just like Freddie's sister Helen. He knows all this just by looking at Freddie, and he believes every bit of it's true.

“Visiting your mother, Wally?” Freddie asks. ‘That why you're here?”

“Yeah,” Wally says. “That's why I'm here.”

Freddie nods. “You still an actor, Wally? I've seen you on TV, you know. That movie with the gal from the soap operas. What's her name? You know who I mean.”

“Yeah,” Wally tells him. “I know who you mean.”

“So you still doing that? Acting?”

“Yeah,” Wally says. “I'm still acting.”

Freddie smiles awkwardly. That's all. That's all they'll say.

I wanted to marry him. Told everyone in my kindergarten class that he was the person I would marry someday
.

“Well, good to see ya, Wally,” Freddie says.

“Yeah,” Wally tells him. “Good to see you, too.”

Freddie hurries on past him, glancing up at the sky to see if it's going to rain.

Wally stands riveted to the spot. He turns toward the corner of Main and Washington, where poor Dicky Trout staggers down the street, drunk as a skunk at ten in the morning. A few yards past him cadaverous old Mr. Smoke leans against a parking meter, a cigarette dangling from his thin blue lips, still not dead from lung cancer after all these years. A bit of commotion in the crosswalk makes Wally look: a woman is scolding an overweight teenage boy. Could it really be Ann Marie Adorno, she of the big pimply tits and tight sweaters in high school, now devolved into a shrill, pop-eyed mother of a fat, belligerent son?

Wally stands there, caught by the scenes around him. The people of Brown's Mill go about their day, glancing up at the sky now and then to check for rain. But they never look at each other, and the lost, bewildered man who lingers on the sidewalk never even gets a glance.

Had there ever been anything good about this place?

The Palace Theater. It had been good, Wally thinks. So much more majestic than that little Cine 1 and 2. The Palace had closed when Wally was nine, but he remembers sitting in the cobwebby old balcony eating popcorn and watching
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
. That was good. That was a good memory.

And the factories. They were the ruins of Mordor for him, and Wally was Aragorn, or sometimes the elf princess Arwen. Or else they were an abandoned abbey and Wally was the vampire Barnabas Collins, with his coffin hidden in the basement …

And South End News, that was a
very
good memory. Every Thursday afternoon after school, Wally would head there to buy his comic books. There was a smell to the place: newsprint, bubble gum, tobacco, all mixed together into a wondrous fragrance that would hit him as soon as he pushed open the door. He feels an ache in his chest to be able to inhale that aroma once again, but South End News is gone. Long, long gone.

And, finally, the orchards. Here is the best memory of all. Wally stops his car in the same place he had on his first day back in Brown's Mill, hoping once again to spy some lovers among the trees. But the orchards are still today, quiet. The leaves are mostly gone now, bare branches scratching against the gray, overcast sky.

Here is the place I first knew love
.

But what about Mother?

Again his thoughts turn to her, even here.

What love has she ever known?

He's surprised by the question. It gnaws at him.

What love has his mother ever known?

Did she ever love Wally's father? It seems unlikely. Who, then? Wally knows so little. Who were his mother's friends? There was a man named Sully … but who was he? Had he mattered? Or had he been just a name his father liked to throw at her—his father, who probably knew as little about her as Wally did?

Who else? Who else was there in his mother's life? Her sister … Wally certainly knows his mother had loved her sister. She always talked about Aunt Rochelle.
Rocky
, she called her. Oh, yes, it was clear she had loved Rocky. But who had loved
Mother
? Who had loved Regina Gunderson?

He's suddenly terrified by the answer, by the realization that it's possible
no one
has ever loved his mother. Oh, maybe Rocky had, but Wally sensed that the aunt he'd never known had always been so busy leading her own life that she'd had little time left over for her sister. Of his grandparents, he knew next to nothing. His grandmother had died when Wally's mother was just a little girl. His grandfather had been a drunk, and certainly there had been no love coming from the sadistic Uncle Axel or the coiled, repressed Aunt Selma.

No one's loved her
.

“No one,” Wally repeats to himself, as the first scattering of raindrops dances upon the windshield.

And who had loved Zandy?

“Who's he?” Wally had asked, all those years ago, holding up a photograph of a red-haired man in a sleeveless sweater, oxford shirt, and checkered bow tie.

“That's Lance,” Zandy told him, sitting in his beanbag, smoking a joint. “My first love.”

Wally felt a momentary stab of jealousy. “Where is he now?” he asked.

“San Francisco, last I heard.”

Wally beamed. “You're going to take me there someday, right?”