All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  “Yeah.” Wally imagines those deep eyes and those tight black pants. He imagines the priest’s hands bearing down on his shoulders, snapping his bones, tearing his cartilege.

  “I see.”

  He needs to climax. He pumps his cock so hard it actually hurts a little.

  “Why don’t you tell me who this is?”

  Why can’t I come? I want to shoot so I can fucking hang up.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you want me to fuck you?”

  Jesus fuck he said it he said fuck and I’m coming I’m fucking coming! Fucking priest, he said fuck!

  The cum shoots hard and splatters against the mirror. Wally falls back on to the bed and groans into the phone, the cord stretched taut across his chest.

  He hears the priest say, “I told you that you were welcome to call me if you needed to talk.”

  He jumps up and crashes down the receiver.

  It’s suddenly very quiet in his room. Silent except for the yelps of the boys throwing the football in the street.

  “Are you finished with that goddamn phone?” comes the voice of his father again. “I need to call the radio station. I know the answer to the prize question.”

  Wally just lies there. His cock curls up like a raw shrimp nesting in his wet kinky pubic hair.

  “It was Edie Adams!” his father is shouting. “She was Our Miss Brooks. Did you hear me? Bring me the goddamn phone! We could win a hundred bucks here!”

  Wally doesn’t move, waiting for the phone to ring.

  “Open this door! What are you doing in there? Jesus Christ, we could win a goddamn hundred—”

  Wally just stares at the phone.

  “Oh, forget it now,” his father growls through the door. “Somebody just called in with the answer. Forget it now. Just forget it now.”

  At last Wally stands and cleans his mess off the mirror with Kleenex. He peels off his tight polyester pants and slips back into his jeans. He carries the phone out to his father.

  “It was Eve Arden,” he tells him.

  His father glares at him. “Don’t you think I know that? They just said it. Get outside and finish mowing the grass. Don’t you think I know it was Eve Arden?”

  Wally doesn’t go outside. He just sits and waits for the phone to ring all day. But it never does.

  12

  WAITING FOR THE VAMPIRE

  “There is a very good reason I have not allowed myself to die, not for more than a hundred years,” says old Mr. Samuel Horowitz, the oldest man at the Hebrew Home.

  “And what’s that, Mr. Horowitz?”

  “When I was a young boy in Russia, back in the days of the tsars, I was bitten by a vampire, and now I am afraid to die.” He opens his eyes wide. “I am afraid that when I die, I will rise from my grave as one of the undead.”

  Regina Gunderson, new to her job as an aide at the Hebrew Home, wasn’t expecting this. Nobody warned her about vampires.

  “You don’t believe me.” The old man shifts in his chair and looks out the window. It’s a bright January day. Samuel Horowitz’s old black eyes blink against the day.

  “The light hurts my eyes, you know,” he tells Regina. “Has, ever since.”

  Regina offers a small laugh. “There aren’t such things as vampires.”

  “You think not? You are wrong. In Russia, there were vampires. And one of them came to my home. Invited by my father, in fact. They must be invited, you know. They cannot enter a place unbidden.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “His name was Count Alexei Petrovich Guchkov. He was a most charming man. Tall and handsome and dark. I was just sixteen. My father had money. They all hated my father because he was a Jew, but he had money, so they tolerated him. At least for a little while. Count Guchkov would come to our house and my mother would offer him wine, but he would always refuse. I found him mesmerizing. I could not take my eyes off him.”

  “Mr. Horowitz, here, have some tea—”

  “You think it was merely a schoolboy fancy? You are wrong. One night, a cold black winter night, with the moon in the sky and the snow anxious to fall, he put his warm lips on mine and kissed me, with my parents just a few feet away …”

  “Oh, please, Mr. Horowitz …”

  “He kissed me, Miss Gunderson, and I liked it. He awoke in me passions I had forgotten from another life, passions that I have never felt since. His lips were warm but his hands were cold, but that was all right by me, especially when he moved his hands down my neck and over my shoulders, down between my legs …”

  “Oh …”

  “And then he pulled me into him, his strong arms wrapped around me, and I surrendered, willingly, eagerly, as he sunk his teeth into my throat and drank my young virgin blood.”

  Mr. Horowitz is quiet. He lets out a deep, long, labored breath and resumes looking out the window. Regina says nothing. She just sits there, breathing. Finally, with trembling fingers, she lifts Mr. Horowitz’s cup of tea to her own lips, and drinks.

  “I want to have my hair cut short and dyed black, like Elizabeth Taylor’s,” Rocky says, admiring herself in the mirror. She’s blond, with tiny, delicate features. “Chase just adores Elizabeth Taylor. More than Sophia Loren now. Remember, Gina, how all he could talk about was Sophia Loren?”

  “Yes,” Regina says, sitting behind her on the bed.

  “We’re going away.” Rocky looks at her sister through the mirror. “Chase is taking me on a little getaway trip.”

  “Oh, no, Rocky, please. I hate it when you go away.”

  “Now don’t start with me, Regina. You’d think you were a child. Now relax. We’ll only be gone for three days.”

  “Three days? Oh, Rocky, you shouldn’t—”

  She turns around to glare at Regina. “Now don’t start. I’m twenty-one years old, Gina. I’ve wasted enough time.”

  Regina knows better than to debate her sister. She tries to quiet the terror that’s surging even now up into her throat, that’s constricting her arms from moving, that’s popping out as sweat on her palms and cheeks. She watches her sister move over to the window and pull on her hose, not caring if the neighbors can see.

  “So where are you going?” Regina asks finally.

  “We’re going on an airplane!” Rocky tells her, wide-eyed and big-mouthed, and for a moment Regina wants to slap her—slap her right across the face—but then pushes the thought away.

  “We’re going to St. Croix! It’s in the Virgin Islands. We own it. The United States, I mean.”

  Regina says nothing.

  “Can you imagine, Gina? White sandy beaches and a big sun overhead. And the water’s so crystal blue and clear you can see the brightly colored tropical fish.” She pauses, as if expecting her sister to voice disbelief. “It says so, in the brochure.”

  Regina gives her a small smile.

  “Isn’t it just too divine? It was Chase’s idea. He’s paying for the whole thing! His father’s given him some time off from the bank. Of course he doesn’t know Chase is taking a girl, but Chase has got him fooled good.” Rocky flops down on the bed next to her sister, clutching the pillow to her chest and squeezing it. “Wasn’t I lucky to find him?”

  Regina stands and walks over to the mirror. She discovers her eyes. They stare back at her, big blue orbs, like the balls on the pool table Papa used to shoot.

  “Rocky,” she asks, not turning around. “Do you believe in vampires?”

  But her sister has left the room.

  “It was the year 1868,” Mr. Horowitz tells her the next day. “I was a boy of eleven. Ever since then, I have been determined to stay alive. But it has been a life of fear. It has gripped me every night, the fear that I will not wake, that instead one cold night I will open my eyes to find myself in a coffin, the lust for blood overpowering me!”

  “Please, Mr. Horowitz, please don’t start talking that way again.”

  He eyes her. “Are you Christian, Miss Gunderson?”

  “Yes.”

  “An
d you work here, as an aide in the Hebrew Home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, that is why I noticed the difference, why I thought you might believe. The Jews have stopped believing in such things. We have seen too much horror at the hands of men to believe in such things as vampires anymore. But we believed once. Have you ever heard the story of the Golem, Miss Gunderson?”

  “No, Mr. Horowitz, and please, don’t tell me. You’ll frighten me more.”

  The old man moves his head against his pillow. His hair is still thick and white, loose around his face, a face of old bark, of a thousand crevices, of years of pain and anguish and scattered moments of joy, but mostly of fear.

  “What kind of Christian are you?”

  “What kind?”

  “Yes. Are you Anglican? Catholic?”

  “Lutheran.”

  “Ah. The German Protestant.” Mr. Horowitz closes his eyes. “They hunted us down, but that was many years later. I was living with my sister and her husband then. I had never married, of course. Who would want me? I had been defiled. We had been driven from Russia by the Communists, but Germany wasn’t far enough away to save me from a vampire. He still haunted my dreams. He could have found me, come to me, drank my blood again, if he had so chosen.”

  “Mr. Horowitz …”

  “So leave if you don’t want to hear! Why do you stand there, if what I tell you so disturbs you?”

  “I’m concerned that you may be upsetting yourself.”

  “Upsetting myself!” The old man turns his head away from Regina. “I have felt this way for ninety years, as I hid not only from the Russians and the Germans but also from a creature of the night who was even more loathsome. I have feared death because of what it could mean to me. When the Germans forced us out, when in the black of night my brother-in-law huddled us under blankets and drove us to a waiting train so we could escape to America, I rejoiced. For so long I had wanted to come here, for only here, across the ocean, across the moving waters, would I be safe.” He pauses. “You see, a vampire cannot cross moving water.”

  Regina has taken a seat beside the old man’s bed. “Yet you are still afraid,” she says, caught now by his tale.

  The old man closes his eyes. “Yes. There is no escape. He could not get to me here, but in my blood his taint remains. I can’t go on living forever! It has been an act of sheer will to live this long. I have kept death at arm’s length for nearly a century. I have refused to open the door when he came courting, and he has come many times, Miss Gunderson. But I grow tired. I cannot hold out much longer. And when I die …”

  “Yes?” Regina can stand it no longer. “What will happen when you die?”

  “On the night of the third day, I will arise, out of my grave, a vampire myself, returned to feast on the blood of the living.”

  Regina Gunderson has placed her hands over her mouth. She cannot speak.

  “Hey, stop that!”

  Rocky is standing in front of the mirror again, wearing nothing but her black bra and red panties. Chase, her boyfriend, is on his hands and knees on the bed behind her. He’s snapped the back of her bra strap so that it makes a sharp sound slapping against her flesh.

  Regina pauses in the doorway. “Are you all right, Rocky?” she asks.

  “I will be, if this lecherous monster leaves me alone.”

  Chase growls, making bear claws with his hands.

  Rocky giggles. Regina turns to walk away.

  “Hey, Gina,” her sister calls after her. “Maybe you ought to go stay with Aunt Selma and Uncle Axel while we’re away.”

  Regina pauses. Perhaps. Perhaps that might be best.

  Chase laughs. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Rocky. You act like Gina’s the baby sister, instead of the other way around. She’ll be fine. Won’t ya now, Gina?”

  Regina looks at him. A broad, dimpled grin stretches across Chase’s face. All at once he pounces off the bed and lands in front of Regina. She makes a little yelp in surprise. Chase places his hands on her hips, drawing her in to give her a quick kiss on the nose.

  Regina hates it when Chase does things like this. But she doesn’t pull away from his grip. She just stands in front of him, not an inch separating their lips. She can smell his breath. Sweet, like candy.

  “You just need to remember a few things,” Rocky is saying, pulling on her lacy white blouse and buttoning it down the front, her black bra showing through. “Dicky, the paper boy, needs to be paid on Thursday. I’ve left the money in an envelope. And Mr. Otfinowski, the milkman, gets paid on Friday morning. Make sure you leave his money in the crate on Thursday night, because otherwise he comes so early you’ll never catch him. We’ll be coming back Friday afternoon, but by the time we get a cab from the airport and get dinner, it’ll be late, so don’t wait up.”

  “Okay,” Regina says softly, nose-to-nose with Chase.

  “Gosh,” he says, studying her, “you’ve got pretty eyes.”

  She yanks away all at once and hurries down the hall to her room. She can hear her sister shushing Chase, saying he shouldn’t have said that, that he knows Gina is shy around men.

  “But I never noticed how blue her eyes were before,” Chase is saying. That’s when Regina turns on her radio very loud, singing along in her head to Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame.”

  The Gunderson sisters live in a four-room flat in an old building on Pleasant Street, just off Main. It’s one of the grand old buildings of Brown’s Mill, with the elegant moldings and filigrees of the nineteenth century. From her window Regina can see the top of the next building, and just beyond that the steeple of St. John the Baptist. Up the hill toward the orchards, she can just make out the corner of the cemetery, where Mama and Mormor and Rocky’s baby are buried.

  She gets into bed but can’t fall asleep. She tosses and turns, thinking about Mr. Horowitz’s stories. She tries to think of something else, but she can’t.

  “Oh, Rocky, Rocky, Rocky …”

  Chase’s voice seeps through the darkness from the other room.

  Regina doesn’t want to hear it. Even thinking about vampires is preferable to listening to that.

  “Oh, yesss.”

  Now her sister’s low, hushed voice comes through the wall.

  Regina pulls her blankets up to her chin as she lies there in the dark.

  I can still feel the warmth of his mouth and the coldness of his hands, here.

  Tomorrow her sister will be gone. Three days and even worse: three nights. And Chase with her.

  “Oh, God!” Rocky’s voice suddenly calls out, and Regina gasps.

  “Yeah, that’s it, baby,” Chase says, and Regina isn’t sure if she really hears him or if his words are inside her head, a memory still burning from other times like this.

  She flings back the covers and places her bare feet against the cold hardwood floor. The flat is dark as she stands and pulls on her robe. In the winter, with the windows closed, their building is utterly quiet. From two floors above, one might hear the soft chime of Mr. Goldstein’s pendulum clock striking the hour. Or maybe the tinkling of Miss Wright’s piano, or the radiators clattering with heat, or the buzz of electricity that one only notices when it’s dark and still.

  Regina scuffs her way down the hallway through the darkness. Flickering candlelight shines from the crack of her sister’s door. It’s enough to let Regina see the heaving of Chase’s strong muscular back, Rocky’s red-tipped hands laced around his neck. For several moments she watches soundlessly as Chase’s back rises and falls, the bedsprings squeaking. Then she turns away.

  In the dark bathroom, the tiles of the floor are even colder than the wood. Regina’s feet react, wanting to run. But she stands beside the toilet, effortlessly finding the handle in the dark. She flushes.

  The sound of the water rushing through the pipes in the great old building echoes among the rooms, as surely as they must have in each of the flats in the building. Somewhere above them perhaps Mr. Goldstein sits up in his bed and w
onders who is awake at this hour. Below them maybe old Miss Wright opens her eyes and shakes her head in dismay.

  When Regina leaves the bathroom, she knows the sliver of light from her sister’s room will be gone, and the sounds will have stopped.

  But still she cannot fall asleep.

  Mr. Horowitz dies the morning Rocky and Chase get on their airplane and fly to St. Croix.

  “Oh, no,” Regina says, arriving at the Hebrew Home.

  Mrs. Newberg nods. “Poor old warhorse. He didn’t want to go. He fought like a tiger right to the end. It was before the sun was up. That was why he was fighting so, trying to hold back.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He said he wanted to see the sun, one last time,” Mrs. Newberg tells her.

  “Oh.”

  “Very sad, really. But he’d lived a long time. A very long time. You were close to him, weren’t you, Regina?”

  But Regina isn’t listening. Somewhere overhead, an airplane passes, and it seems as if the building shakes.

  The movie is Son of Dracula, and it is paired with Son of Frankenstein. Regina stares at the poster beneath the Palace marquee: a top-hatted vampire raising his cape and baring his fangs. As a child, Regina had loved coming to the Palace to see the latest Deanna Durbin picture, or Andy Hardy, or anything with Alice Faye. She and Rocky would walk to the theater together, two little blond girls with bright blue eyes, skipping and holding hands. Sometimes they’d stay at the theater all day, through newsreels, cartoons, trailers, and double features, waiting until they were sure Papa had passed out on the couch.

  “Do you like vampire movies?”

  Regina is startled by the voice. She looks up from the poster and sees a man standing next to her, an older, distinguished man with gray hair and mustache.

  “Oh, I was simply—”

  She feels her voice catch in her throat. The sun is setting. Rocky should have arrived in St. Croix by now.

  “It’s quite good,” the man is saying. “But of course, no one can top Lugosi in the original. Have you seen that version?”

  He has a slight British accent, or at least Regina thinks he does. “No,” she says. “Well, I don’t remember. It’s possible.”