All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  Wally can’t even frame his words. He strides away from his mother and over to Dee. “Just dump the dirt,” he says. “Spread it out and then let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t know what she’s going to start asking me next.”

  He hadn’t come home to see his mother.

  She’s irrelevant to his life now. Completely irrelevant. There’s nothing left to work out with her. He rarely even thought of her anymore. She had forfeited any place in his life a long time ago—that day when he was eleven years old, in fact, when he’d asked her for help and she had refused him—and Wally was long past grieving over the fact.

  Like you wanted to be a singer. Please help me, Mom! Please!

  No, he hadn’t returned to Brown’s Mill because of his mother. Why would he do that?

  He’d come back to see Zandy, to make it right.

  “So were you in love with him?” Dee asks him, when they’re done with the dirt. “Alexander Reefy?”

  They’re eating cheeseburgers and french fries at the Big Boy restaurant on Main Street. The fries are piping hot, straight from the fryer, and Dee burns the roof of his mouth eating too fast.

  “In love?” Wally considers the idea. “I don’t know. But I loved him. I know that much. In fact, that’s the only thing that’s entirely clear to me.” He looks over at the boy wolfing down the fries. “You eat as if you haven’t had a meal in a week.”

  “I’ve seen that girl before,” Dee tells him. Wally has to shake his head at the way the kid’s mind jumps around …

  “What girl?” Wally asks.

  “That Puerto Rican girl at your mother’s. Luz something.”

  “Yeah?”

  Dee nods, biting into his burger. A big drop of grease seeps out onto his plate. “Yeah, she was a senior when I was a freshman. She got expelled for selling crack.”

  “Well, now I understand what she and Kyle had in common.”

  “She was one of those bad girls. You know, tough. Hard.”

  Wally shrugs. “She looked sweet to me. But you never know.”

  “I saw her yesterday at the drugstore having this huge fight with some guy. She was swearing and spitting and everything.”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Like how old?”

  “I don’t know. Old.” Dee looks up at Wally and grins. “Maybe your age.”

  “Brat,” Wally says. “Was he white? Puerto Rican?”

  “White.”

  “Did it seem like he was her boyfriend?”

  “I dunno. She was just mad. Really mad.” He looks over at Wally. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Actually, I don’t,” Wally says.

  Dee finishes his burger. “When I was a kid,” he says, taking a sip of Coke through his straw, “my mom used to bring me here to the Big Boy every Thursday.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Dee nods. “It would be after the prayer meetings at the church. We’d get the hot fudge brownie sundae. It was the fucking best sundae you’d ever want to get, man. Really moist cake with like scalding hot fudge and truly excellent mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. Fuckin’ orgasmic.” He sneers. “But then my stepfather found out and put an end to our little Thursday night visits.”

  “Why was that?”

  “It wasn’t Christian. It was indulgent.”

  “So the fundies don’t like hot fudge sundaes either? What do they like?”

  “Jesus. They like Jesus.”

  Wally laughs. He watches the boy as he pours ketchup on the last of the fries. Dee’s spiked up his orange hair, exposing his brown roots in little clusters. At least he washed off the mascara, for which Wally is grateful. The hair, the three pendants around the neck, and the six chains hooked to his belt loop are already drawing enough attention.

  “Do you miss them at all?” Wally asks. “Your family?”

  Dee shrugs. “My mom sometimes. But she’s too weird now. Has been ever since she married Leo. I miss my brother Jed. He’s only nine. No, wait, he’s ten now.” He bites into his cheeseburger. “Poor kid. I can only imagine what they’re doing to him.”

  “When did you tell them you were gay?”

  Dee makes a face. “I don’t use terms like gay. Gay is so your generation. I’m queer. Or, actually, nonheterosexual.”

  Wally smiles, restraining himself from sarcasm. “Okay, then when did you tell them you were nonheterosexual?”

  “Like I had to tell them? Just look at me.”

  “Point taken,” Wally says.

  “When I bleached my hair the first time, my stepfather just knew. It was like, okay, so the kid’s a faggot. Next stop: Faith Healers Inc.”

  “So who was this guy you had sex with at eleven?”

  “Some teenager in my neighborhood. A basketball player at school. He was very hot. I know you think I had no idea what I was doing, but I wanted him. You can believe it or not, but it’s true. I went after him. I got him to wrestle me in his backyard and then we started fooling around.”

  Wally doesn’t like the fact that story turns him on. The kid was eleven, for God’s sake, he thinks. At least I’d hit puberty when I started with Zandy.

  But it was the same, wasn’t it? Wally had gone after Zandy, like Dee had gone after the basketball player. It wasn’t the other way around. Wally had rung Zandy’s doorbell and—

  “It was no big deal,” Dee’s saying.

  Wally looks at him. “Of course it was a big deal. Whether you initiated it or not, the kid should’ve—”

  Dee’s grinning. “Should’ve what? Said no?”

  “How old was he?”

  “I think seventeen.”

  “Yeah, he should’ve said no. He should’ve known better.”

  Wally hates that he wants to ask what the basketball player looked like, hates that he wants to know what they did. Sucking? Fucking? What did Dee mean by “fooling around”?

  “I figured everything out early,” Dee says. He’s got ketchup on his chin but doesn’t seem aware of it.

  “Everything?” Wally asks.

  “Well, nearly everything. I watched The Real World. I knew I was the queer kid. So what?”

  “Wipe your chin,” Wally says finally.

  The boy obeys. They sit there quietly for a while, Wally trying to erase the image of Dee and the basketball player wrestling around in the grass from his mind.

  “So what’s your favorite movie?” Dee asks.

  “The Wizard of Oz.”

  The boy smirks. “Like I said. You’re casebook gay.”

  “Well, then, I’ll go you one even further. Saturday Night Fever.”

  Dee laughs. “I never even saw that. Seems so lame.”

  “Lots of gay code. It sent me over the edge when I was your age.”

  “I guess that’s how I felt about Beautiful Thing. You seen that?”

  Wally nods. “Two boys in love.”

  “It changed my life.”

  “And nothing coded about it. All right there, out in the open.”

  Dee takes the last fry, then pauses with it halfway to his mouth. “You want it?”

  “You take it,” Wally says. “You can handle the carbs better than I can.”

  The boy happily chomps away. “So is your mother a total freak show?”

  Wally shrugs. “Yeah. I guess she is.”

  “What was up with that dirt?”

  “Who knows?” Wally doesn’t want to talk about his mother. He changes the subject. “But what about your parents? Don’t you have any contact with them?”

  Dee shakes his head. “Nope. Not since Leo hit me. All communication goes through my state caseworker.”

  “Who placed you with Miss Aletha.”

  “Yeah, she’s a certified foster parent.”

  Wally smiles. Missy had found her calling. Roses and runaways.

  “So fuck my family,” Dee is saying. “Just because we share some chromosomes doesn’t mean I have any obligation to them.” He paus
es. “Except maybe Jed. Someday, when I’m old enough, I’m going back to rescue him.”

  “And you have gay friends?” Wally asks. “Peers?”

  “Well, some. Nobody here in Brown’s Mill, but there’s a Gay-Straight Alliance over in Mayville, and Missy takes me.”

  Wally rests his chin on his hand and leans in to look at the boy. “Is that where you met your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” Dee says, almost defensively.

  “Then who’s the guy you took to your junior prom?”

  “Oh, him. Well, that’s over now. He graduated.”

  “How long did you date?”

  “I dunno.” Dee seems uncomfortable with the topic. “Not long.”

  “How long is not long?”

  “About nine days.” He rolls his eyes. “I think we just wanted to say we went to the prom together. Kind of, to make a statement.”

  Wally laughs.

  “So what do you say?” Dee asks, after sucking down the last of his Coke and making that sound with his straw against the bottom of the glass. “You want to go back to Missy’s and fool around?”

  Wally pulls back in his seat but keeps his eyes on the kid. “What makes you think I’d do that?”

  “You find me attractive, don’t you?”

  The power thing again. The kid assumes that just because he’s sixteen and lean and nubile he’s irresistible. Well, Wally won’t give him the satisfaction. “I suppose so,” he says, half-shrugging. “Not really my type though.”

  “Oh, come on. Like it’s every day you get a sixteen-year-old propositioning you. And not only that, you’ve got permission from his guardian. You know Missy wants it to happen. So why not? Won’t it be a great story for your big-city gym-boy friends?”

  Wally narrows his eyes at him. “So is this cocky wiseass persona just a way of occupying the time until you grow up?”

  Dee’s right back at him, not losing a beat. “Possibly. And maybe your obvious fascination with me is simply your own regret for not being more like me when you were my age.”

  They sit staring at each other, neither blinking, until the waitress comes by and clears off their plates.

  I watched The Real World. I knew I was the queer kid.

  How had Wally known?

  It had been from the boys in his class at St. John the Baptist that Wally first heard about Alexander Reefy, the strange, bearded man who lived in a little red brick house behind the boarded-up factories in Dogtown. He was a homo. That meant he liked men. Alexander Reefy liked men the way most guys liked girls. He did sexual stuff with other men, like touching their dicks and kissing them right on the lips. And everybody knew it, because he always kept his front porch light glowing, which was a sign that he was free and available. Wally’s classmates had all the facts. The story had been passed down from the older kids: Alexander Reefy left his front porch light on so that men would know to come by. Just watch, Wally’s friends insisted: men went in and out of that house all the time. The light would go off for the duration, then flick back on after the guy had left.

  That front porch light became an obsession for Wally. A light on a house he had never seen, owned by a man whose face he had never glimpsed, but whose name conjured up images that consumed his thoughts and his dreams.

  Alexander Reefy.

  It was a cold November morning, and Wally and Freddie Piatrowski and Michael Marino had decided to skip class. Eighth grade was a waste of time, merely treading water before high school. Freddie had cigarettes and a stash of his father’s porno magazines in his backpack. Sitting behind one of the abandoned factories, Wally smoked a Camel, though he hated the taste. But as he looked through the magazines Freddie passed to him, he realized he hated the big fleshy knockers of the women even more.

  “Hey,” Wally suggested all at once. “Let’s go find Alexander Reefy.”

  “You mean the homo?” Michael Marino asked.

  “Yeah. You know, the one with the front porch light you told me about.”

  Freddie made a face. “What’re we going to do when we find him?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s just see if we can get him to come outside.”

  The boys shrugged, putting away the cigarettes and magazines and creeping through the marsh, stinking of bad water and rusting iron. Michael knew exactly which house was Alexander Reefy’s. “Look,” he said. “His light’s on.”

  And that it was: a soft, golden light, burning through the morning fog. Wally couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  “Well, are you coming?” Michael insisted. “It was your idea, Wally.”

  “Yeah,” Wally breathed. “I’m coming.”

  They approached like warriors, but there was no plan beyond getting there. No words were spoken. Freddie picked up a stone and threw it at the window. The other two followed suit. The tiny pings of the stones against the glass were the only sounds along the street.

  He emerged finally, awakened by the stones: sleepy-eyed and disheveled, not shouting as the boys had expected. From his lair he crept dizzily, not stealthily or threateningly. “Hey, what the—?” he asked, rubbing his eyes, and Wally tried desperately to get a glimpse.

  But Freddie barked: “Run!” So they ran, turning on their heels and plunging back through the swampy field, foul-smelling mud soaking into their shoes as they tripped over rusting casements of the old factory and dove into the darkness within.

  But this Wally saw: Alexander Reefy, shirtless, a mat of mysterious black fur on his chest, in checkered pajama bottoms, standing on the steps of his house under the dull golden glow of his front porch light, and he was smiling.

  “Hey, peace and love, you little hooligans,” he said, and then he went back to bed.

  They drive down Main Street. It’s become a shadow of what Wally remembers from his childhood, its life sapped by the Wal-Mart out on Washington Avenue that sprung up about six years ago. Once dozens of shops lined Main Street, from South End News at one terminus, where Wally had bought every issue of Action Comics for nine straight years, to Schafer’s Shoes at the other, where Wally’s father had worked after whatever had happened to end his navy career. Now South End News is a parking lot, Schafer’s Shoes a Spanish grocery, and Big Boy squats in place of what used to be Henry’s Diner. NO LOITERING signs are posted everywhere, a futile attempt to ward off the homeless and mentally ill.

  Wally turns into the cemetery near Devil’s Hopyard and shuts off the ignition.

  “What are we gonna do here?” Dee asks. “Make out?”

  Wally ignores him and gets out of the car. He starts trudging through the tall, yellow grass that reaches up past his ankles. He hears Dee follow him. The sun has come out and the gravestones cast long, late-day shadows. It’s been a long time since Wally has been here. He’s never even seen what he paid for, years ago, when he learned from Miss Aletha that no stone had ever been erected.

  “So who are you coming to see?” Dee asks, catching up with him.

  “My teacher,” Wally says.

  “From Brown’s Mill High?”

  “No.” He spots the stone. Pink marble. Wally smiles. She would have liked that.

  They stand over it, looking down.

  JOSEPHINE LEOPOLD

  1889–1976

  A BRIGHT STAR FROM THE HEAVENS

  “Who was she?” Dee asks.

  “My first acting teacher. And a great star. You ought to know about her if you want to be an actor. She trod the boards with Minnie Maddern Fiske and Eva Le Gallienne.”

  “She did what with who?”

  Wally just stares down at the stone.

  It had been the least he could do. It hadn’t come cheap, and Ned had grumbled a bit at the expense, but he understood. Wally couldn’t live with the fact that she lay here without any stone, without any marker. Without any proof that she had been here, that she had lived, that she had mattered to a frightened, confused boy.

  Wally looks up. Dee has wandered off through the grass, scanning t
he stones, mumbling to himself. He’s an odd one, Wally thinks. One moment so brash and arrogant, the next naïve and ingenuous. I wasn’t so different from you, he thinks, watching him move through the cemetery. Okay, so he didn’t have Gay-Straight Alliances and a boyfriend to take to his prom. But not so different. Not really.

  Dee has stopped walking and stands several yards away, looking down into the grass.

  Wally walks up behind him. “See somebody you know?”

  “Yeah,” Dee says.

  Wally glances down at the flat stone at the boy’s feet. Nearly obscured with grass, it reads:

  DONALD KYRWINSKI, SENIOR

  1960–1991

  “It’s my father.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was only like eight or something when he died. But he was cool. At least I think he was.”

  “Well, if you remember him as cool, then he probably was.”

  Dee grunts. “Who knows if he’d have turned into a prick when I got older? But sometimes I think what it might have been like if he hadn’t died and my mom had never married Leo and never turned into a religious nutcase.”

  Wally places his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What did he die from?”

  “A heart attack.”

  “He was only thirty-one,” Wally says, realizing that’s younger than he is now.

  “Yeah, it was like this big tragedy, everybody crying, nobody believing it.” Dee shrugs. “My mom didn’t let me go to the funeral. So it’s all kind of a vague blur to me.”

  The boy starts to trudge off through the grass back toward the car. Wally looks once more back down at the stone, then turns to follow him.

  “Hey,” Dee says, slowing down as his eyes spot something.

  “Don’t stop,” Wally says. He knows what the boy sees.

  “But isn’t that your mother’s name?”

  Wally sighs. He had no intention of paying any respects. He had come here for Josephine. No one else.

  But he looks down anyway.

  And there’s his father’s name, etched starkly into the blue granite, just his name and his dates beside it. ROBERT DAY. 1934–1987. That’s all. Elsewhere in the cemetery, Wally knows, stands the great black marble stone of his grandparents, with his grandfather’s naval rank boldly, proudly inscribed. But nothing for Wally’s father. Just his name and his dates. As if he’d been nothing more than a common laborer. Or a shoe store salesman, which he was, at the end.