All American Boy (7 page)

She stands up. Rocky resumes her humming. Regina slips softly upstairs.

From a bedroom window she watches the black cars drive slowly down the street. There are three of them, and she knows Mama must be in one. They come up from Main Street and turn onto Oak Avenue. They pass in front of the house and wind back the way they came. She thinks she sees Mormor sitting in one of the cars. She doesn't know for sure. She doesn't know where they're taking Mama. She doesn't know why the black cars came by the house. She doesn't know where she and Rocky are going to sleep tonight.

All she knows is: you touch one, you kill them all.

5

GHOST MANAGEMENT

Wally drives along the river into Dogtown, where the stench of sewage and swamp water hangs so heavy in the air he can taste it on his tongue, like soot after a fire.

“Don't go down there,” his mother used to warn him, wringing her hands. “It's bad down there.
Bad
.”

And bad it was. Behind the crumbling factories the old tenant housing remained, rowhouses built by factory owners for their immigrant workers at the turn of the last century. Irish, then Swedes, then Poles and Jews, finally Italians and Puerto Ricans. The houses of Dogtown were built over swamps, where skunk cabbage grew plentiful and tall, where velvety cat-o'-nine-tails enticed children to wade across the muddy, stinking water that licked the edges of the tenements. “Don't go down there,” Wally's mother had pleaded, but although he continued to listen intently to every conversation dropped in line at Grant's department store, he had long since stopped listening to her.

“It's got to be Alzheimer's,” he tells Cheri on his cell phone. “That's the only way to explain her behavior. It's bizarre, even for her.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“She has no one else.” Wally sighs. “I've got to get her in to see a doctor.”

“You okay managing all these ghosts?”

“I don't believe in ghosts.” He makes a left turn. “I've got to go, babe. I'm almost there.”

“Okay, Wally. Good luck.”

He hits
END.
Ahead of him is the house he seeks: the place where he once sought refuge, a place without which he believes he wouldn't be here today. He'd be over in Eagle Hill Cemetery, in the plot next to his father, “pushing up daisies,” as Miss Aletha liked to say.

He parks the car on the street and heads up the walk. Her rosebushes still show some buds, even this late in the season. The leaves are a deep purple.

“Can I help you?”

Wally looks up. A boy is sitting on the front steps, his short hair dyed bright orange and his eyes thick with mascara.

“I'm looking for Missy.”

“And you are …?”

Wally stands over him. The boy can't be more than fifteen, sixteen. Acne reddens his chin, but he's cute. Large brown eyes, seriously pouty lips, surprisingly broad and powerful shoulders for so slight a frame.

“The name's Wally Day.”

The boy's lips twist into a grin. “Oh, yeah, the actor. Missy said you were coming.”

“Do you live here?”

“Yeah. Missy's been feeding me like a stray cat and I won't go away.” He stands. “I'm Dee.”

They shake.

“I'm going to be an actor, too.”

Wally smirks. “It's my duty to advise you to consider a career that doesn't require as much effort or discipline. Like maybe rocket science or brain surgery.”

The boy ignores him. “Can you help me get me a part in something? I don't care what it is. TV show. Play. Even a commercial.”

Wally looks past him toward Missy's front door. “Sure, kid. I'll give Geffen a call for you.”

“Don't think I don't know sarcasm.”

“Is Missy here?”

Dee nods over his shoulder. “She's never anywhere else.”

Wally raps on the door.

“Just go on in,” Dee says. “She's too deaf to hear you knock.”

Miss Aletha saved Wally's life. She gave him refuge, shelter, a way out. She got a dentist to cap his tooth after his father had broken it. She found a shrink for him to spill his guts out to in twice-weekly sessions. She even paid for a tutor to help with his studies after school became unbearable and Wally started skipping classes.

He's going to go far, that Wally Day
, his teachers had once said.

But at the time it didn't seem he'd get much farther than Dogtown.

“Wally,” Miss Aletha says, her arms outstretched, welcoming him home.

How old she's gotten. How unlike his memories. But it's her, just the same: Miss Aletha, who saved his life, who set him right, whose roses every year still win first place in the Brown's Mill Flower Show, despite the clucking of the biddies in the big white houses on Eagle Hill. Every year on her birthday, Wally sends a card and she always remembers him with a Christmas gift—but they haven't seen each other now in many, many years. After Wally first moved to the city, Miss Aletha would come and visit. Once she came to one of his parties and gotten high with his friends. Wally has an image of her: holding a banana as a microphone and lipsynching Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Everyone had loved Miss Aletha.

“Missy.” Wally pulls her close and looks down into her soft blue eyes. How strange it feels to be so much taller than she is. Miss Aletha had always seemed so big. She's shrunk, withered down into a little old lady.

A teakettle whistles. “Join me?” she asks.

Wally nods. Her kitchen, unlike herself, is exactly as he remembers: cluttered and odoriferous, with a tanginess underneath, as if something in the refrigerator has gone bad. But it's not an unpleasant smell: rather, it's the candied scent of overripe fruit or the tempting promise of old wine.

She pours some tea. Wally sits at the table overlooking the swampy backyard. Along the trellis outside shiver a few roses, a deep red-purple.

“You always did manage to keep them blooming all year,” he says.

“Eh?”

“Your roses,” he says, louder. “Still in bloom.”

“Yes,” she says, settling the teacup in front of him. “But tonight there will be a frost.”

“Will you bring them inside?”

“I can't save them all,” she says, taking the seat opposite him.

Wally smirks. “Oh, I don't know about that. Who's the monkey on your front porch?”

“His name is Donald. He's sixteen. You can fill in the rest, I'm sure.”

“Kicked out of his house when his parents found out he was gay.”

She nods. “Fundamentalists. They took him to a faith healer.”

“I see it did the trick.”

“The world has changed, I hear,” Missy says. “But not Brown's Mill.”

One of her cats rubs against Wally's ankles. He reaches down to stroke it.

“Your call came as quite a surprise,” she says softly, finding his eyes.

“I'm sure it did.”

“You've seen your mother?”

Wally sighs. “Yeah. She's not right. Not that she ever was, but—”

“There's been a lot of talk, Wally, ever since that boy disappeared.”

Wally shakes his head. “Kyle isn't a boy, Missy. He's my age, a navy SEAL or whatever he is. And he hasn't disappeared. He's hightailed it out of town. Maybe he didn't want to be shipped off to Kosovo or wherever. I don't know why the police are making such a mystery out of it.”

“Well, I guess Uncle Sam doesn't like it when one of his boys takes off without letting him know where he's going.”

“Kyle's always been a fuck-up. But I don't want to talk about him.”

Miss Aletha smiles. “I know who you
do
want to talk about.”

How long has this been going on?

Since I was thirteen
.

“I'm going to see him,” Wally tells her. “If he's still alive.”

“He's alive.” Her old eyes hold his. “But you don't know if he wants to see you.”

“No. I don't.”

She reaches across the table to take his hand. “Have you been seeing anyone? Anyone special?”

Wally looks back out the window, at the purple rose on the vine.

“Still no one,” Miss Aletha says, reading his mind. “No one since Ned.”

“Who would want me?” Wally asks. “I'm an
old man
in gay years, Missy. Long gone is the boy you knew. Once you pass thirty, you're old meat. Who adopts the old hound at the pound? Everybody wants a puppy.”

Miss Aletha gives him a stern look. Even with her thousands of wrinkles, it is still the same look she used to give him all those years ago, a look that said: “You are being foolish but I love you anyway.” Wally receives that look for what it is, and he smiles.

Once she had been a drag queen on the stages of the city, feted and celebrated and revered. But she had come back here, to Brown's Mill, where she had been born a boy, with the name of Howard Greer. “We're not so different,” she once told Wally. “We were both born here in this place. We both did things people said were bad. You're no different from me, Wally Day. I know who you are. I may be thirty years older, but there's no difference between you and me.”

Ah, but there was. Maybe they had both been boys who did bad things, but Missy had never really been a boy. At twelve, she took a pair of garden shears and snipped off the head of her penis. After spending three weeks in a hospital, her parents committed her to Windcliff Sanitarium over in Mayville, a place where doctors did horrible things to her—like strapping her to a table and sending electric shocks through her frail little mutilated body. She lived in constant terror of more of those shocks until one night she ran away and hitchhiked a ride to the city. Within a few weeks she was performing on stage at a backalley dive that was forever being raided by the police.
Come see Miss Aletha
—
the amazing, the amusing, the astounding
—
you'll swear she's Eartha Kitt! Marilyn Monroe! Ethel Merman! Sophie Tucker!

But Miss Aletha didn't care about all that. “What's so great about being astounding?” she'd laugh, years later. All she'd ever wanted was to be a lady who grew roses and entered them in contests. And so that's what she became. She returned to Brown's Mill and bought a house in Dogtown. The job she'd started with those garden shears was finally completed some twenty years later, with more professional tools, and with much more satisfactory results.

“Missy,” Wally says, taking her hand and pressing it to his lips, “it feels good to be here.”

She smiles. “I'm glad.”

“I didn't know how I'd feel.”

She nods. “It's been a long time, Wally.”

“Too long.”

“So what will you do? Put your mother in a home?”

“I don't know. Maybe. What other options do I have?”

“You could get to know her.”

“Oh, please. You know the whole story, Missy. Tell me honestly that you think there's anything more that can be done.”

She shrugs.

“You see? You can't. The only thing left to do now in our long, sorry saga will be to bury her out beside my father when she dies. Then it'll all be over. I'll sell the house, pocket the cash—”

“Is he the one who sent Zandy to jail?”

They look up, startled. Dee has come inside. He stands in front of them with his arms crossed against his chest. He wears enormous baggy jeans that threaten to slide right off his narrow hips.

“What did he say?” Miss Aletha asks, adjusting the hearing aid hidden under her wig. “I just know it was something fresh.”

“It's all right, Missy,” Wally tells her. “He didn't say anything that wasn't true.”

He levels his eyes at the boy. “Do you know Zandy, Dee?”

“Yeah.” The kid's studying him with his mascara eyes. “I've met him.”

“How is he?”

“Old. And sick. And his breath reeks.”

Wally looks across the table at Miss Aletha. “His health …”

She lets out a long sigh. “He's gotten to be very reclusive. When he realized the drugs weren't working, he just kind of closed himself off from most people.”

“Are you going to go see him?” Dee asks.

“Yeah.” Wally looks out the window again. The wind is kicking up and the sun is starting to set. He hates these short autumn days.

“You want me to take you there?” the boy asks.

Miss Aletha tries to wave him away. “Donald, go watch television or play your ridiculous rap music.”

Wally smiles. “Actually, I might like the company.”

“Yeah,” Dee agrees. “If it were me, I sure as hell wouldn't want to go all by myself to face somebody whose life I ruined.”

“Now, scat, you!” Miss Aletha shouts.

“He's only stating the obvious, Missy.”

She frowns. “You've got to stop blaming yourself, Wally. Zandy knew what he was doing. You were too young. I told him that.”

“But I sent him to prison.”

She stands and walks back over to the stove for the tea kettle. She refills Wally's cup as Dee sits on the linoleum floor, staring up at them with his knees pulled up to his chest.

“He survived prison,” Missy says. “Prison wasn't what was so bad. It was afterward. Things started happening here in Brown's Mill after you left, Wally. Some of us tried to put together a community center. Zandy was part of that. And we got a political group going. Do you know we got a civil rights bill passed in this state?”

Wally nods.

“We did some good things. But then ten, twelve years ago somebody came along, some do-gooder from the gay rights alliance or whatever they call it up in the state capital, and he says that it's not such a good idea to have a convicted child molester playing such a public role in such a small town. Bad for the image, you know. What would the media do if they got ahold of it? The
community
, he said. Think of the
community
. So Zandy dropped out.”