All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  Regina reaches across the table and takes the girl’s hands. What can she do? What can she say to console her, to stop her tears—awful, terrible tears that are breaking Regina’s heart?

  “Hush little baby,” Regina sings, “don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby …”

  Luz looks up at her. A small smile tricks across her lips.

  “Oh, good,” Regina says. “I’ve made you smile.”

  The girl wipes her eyes. “I knew you still had a beautiful voice.”

  “Oh,” Regina says, blushing.

  Luz sniffles. “Sing some more for me, Mrs. Day. Please?”

  Regina laughs. “Oh, dear. What would I sing?”

  “What did you sing on the stage?”

  “Old songs. Songs you wouldn’t know …”

  “Sing one of them. Please?”

  “Oh, I don’t know …”

  “Please! It would make me happy.”

  There’s nothing Regina wants more, so, sitting there in her kitchen, with the light fading into dusk, Regina sings.

  “Don’t sit under the apple tree,” she begins, unused to the sound of her voice. She pauses and starts again. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me …”

  Luz chimes in.

  “With anyone else but me …”

  Regina sings the whole song, with Luz joining in on the refrain. When she’s done, Luz claps, and Regina laughs, covering her face with her hands.

  “So long,” she says. “So long since I’ve sung.”

  “Thank you for singing to me, Mrs. Day.” Luz stands, gives Regina a kiss on the cheek, then heads to her room to pack. By the time the sun has set, she has driven off in Kyle’s car.

  The wood furnace needs to be fired up. That would take away some of the cold. It always did. There weren’t many things Regina loved about this house, but the wood furnace was one of them. It was the only thing that could take the chill off cold winter nights, especially when Robert was home, lying beside her, snoring, a stranger in her bed. Regina never slept well when Robert was home. He was always pulling the blankets to his side. Sometimes, in the night, when she’d awaken, her teeth chattering, she’d be angry, angry enough to scream, to pound her fists against her husband’s back, to shriek at him for doing this to her, all of this, all of this horrible life—

  But she never did. She just tiptoed out of bed, snuck downstairs into the basement, and added some wood to the furnace. Then she slipped back into bed, gingerly prying part of the blanket from Robert’s hands, always careful not to wake him.

  “I don’t know how you manage,” Bernadette had said. “Why not divorce him, Regina? It was only after I kicked Albert out that my life truly became my own again.”

  Robert had forbidden her from seeing Bernadette after the divorce. But Robert was away on the ship; he’d never know if Regina disobeyed him. She’d consented to the visit so that the boys, Walter and Kyle, would have a chance to play together. It was good for cousins to stay close. The boys were in the living room, eating popcorn and watching that vampire soap opera on television. Regina stood at her ironing board in the kitchen. She had offered Bernadette a cup of tea and her ex-sister-in-law had accepted, taking out a flask from her denim jacket and pouring a shot of whatever it was into the cup. Bernie had turned into quite the hippie, Regina thought: she was always off protesting the war and the military. Her hair was tied up in a bandana, and on the back of her jacket she had sewn a peace sign with red, white, and blue thread.

  “Do you think they should be watching such things?” Bernadette asked her.

  “You mean that television show?” Regina asked.

  “There’s a severed head in there,” Bernadette said. “I just walked through and saw it. It’s been chopped off and put in a box. And that man with the fangs is always running around biting girls on the neck.” She shivered.

  “Well, Walter loves it,” Regina told her.

  “But is it good for him? I mean, I worry about our children, Regina. Their fathers are war nuts. Whenever Albert is with Kyle, all he talks about is guns and killing. That’s why I’ve set some limits on how often they can see each other. I don’t want Kyle growing up warped.” She made a face as if she thought Regina didn’t understand. “Come on, you know what it’s like, Regina. Robert is the same way.”

  Regina just sighed, ironing a sleeve of Walter’s school shirt.

  “I worry about our children, and so should you, Regina. Every night on the news they see all those dead Vietnamese people.”

  Regina looked up at her, disturbed. “Please, Bernie—”

  “All of this has an impact. I heard Dr. Spock talking about it on the Mike Douglas Show yesterday. I’m really worried, Regina. How will our children grow up?”

  Regina had never really thought about all this before. “Wally has a very vivid imagination,” she told Bernadette. “He’s like my sister. He just likes to … imagine things.”

  “Well, when that imagination starts leading him to chop off girls’ heads and put them in boxes, then you’ll say I was right.” Bernadette opens up her purse and withdraws the silver flask again, pouring another shot into her tea. “We’re responsible for them. We brought these boys into the world. We have to take care of them.”

  No, that’s wrong, Regina thinks.

  I didn’t bring Walter into the world.

  His father did. It wasn’t me.

  Oh, but it had been her. The pain—the terrible agony of his birth. Walter had torn her apart, ripped right through her—

  “Missa Day.”

  She looks up. Jorge stands in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. He wears Batman Underoos that are too tight on him. A round little belly protrudes over the waistband.

  “Where Luz?”

  “You know she went away for a little while, Jorge.”

  “Luz wants to go.”

  “Oh,” Regina says. “Come here to me, Jorge.”

  He climbs up onto her lap. She feels his little hands encircle her neck.

  “She’ll be back in a couple of days. And then we’ll make it real nice for her, won’t we? She’ll never want to leave again.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything. He just rests his head on Regina’s shoulder.

  “Have you been looking for the treasure, Jorge?”

  She feels him nod.

  “Did you look where I told you?’

  He nods again.

  “In the basement? In the crate?”

  He nods.

  “Out in the yard? Under the trees?”

  He keeps on nodding. Regina sets him down on his feet and stares directly into his eyes.

  “Well, we’ve got to keep looking, Jorge. Will you help me?”

  “I hep you,” he tells her.

  Regina holds the little boy’s gaze. Once there was another little boy in this house. Strange how she can’t remember him very well. If not for the photograph on the wall, she might not be able to picture little Walter at all. He slept in the same room where Jorge now sleeps, sat in the same chair, ate his Lucky Charms out of the same bowl.

  “I want to be an actor,” Jorge tells her, looking up at her with his big brown eyes.

  “An actor?” Regina responds. “What a lovely idea. What a good actor you’d be.”

  The boy stares up at her with uncomprehending eyes.

  “You could become famous, like Rocky and I were in the city. Oh, yes, you will be such a wonderful actor. What can I do to help?”

  We’re responsible for them. We brought these boys into the world. We have to take care of them.

  How long has it been? Just a day since Luz left? Or weeks? Months? Regina can only remember one night in between the time Luz drove off in Kyle’s car and now—one long, horrible, terrible night, when she’d sat up and wailed in bed like a child, cried like she hadn’t in years, howled so loudly that she was sure Grace Daley next door must have heard her. But there may have been many other nights since Luz left than just that one. She forgets
so much these days.

  So awful much.

  But not so much that she doesn’t know it’s nearing lunch time. Jorge will need to eat. She had to make sure he had lunch. I’m responsible for him now.

  She scuffs across the floor in her slippers to peer inside the cupboard. Suddenly she has a splendid idea: she’ll make Jorge her goulash! She used to make it for Walter, and oh, how he had loved it! It was his favorite meal. She’d fry up some hamburger in a skillet and then mix it in with Franco-American spaghetti. Swedish goulash, she called it. Walter would cover it all with a thick frosting of ketchup. “Make it again tonight,” he’d badger her, and so she would. It was so easy. Hardly any clean up at all.

  The doorbell rings just as she begins to open the can.

  “Luz!” Regina shouts, rushing, despite her arthritis, to the door.

  But it’s a man.

  It’s—

  Robert.

  In his navy uniform, all pressed and shiny.

  “Mrs. Day?”

  “Who—?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Bryce Bennett,” the man tells her. “I’ve come to ask you a few questions about your nephew, Kyle.”

  “Oh.” Regina’s heart is thudding in her chest. It’s not Robert. How silly of her. It’s a young man. A nice-looking young man with a kind, friendly face.

  “May I come in?” he asks her.

  A few maple leaves blow through the open door.

  “Yes,” Regina says, “of course.”

  She steps aside to let the man in.

  “Is Kyle here?” he asks, walking into the living room without waiting for her.

  “No,” she tells him. “He’s not here.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  Regina begins to twirl the top button on her sweater. “No. I haven’t.”

  Lieutenant Bryce Bennett is looking around the room. “His car’s not in the garage. I checked on my way in. I thought you told the Brown’s Mill police that he’d left his car behind when he left.”

  “Yes, yes, he did, but Luz took—”

  “Luz Vargas?”

  “Yes, she took—”

  “His girlfriend. Have they gone off together?”

  “Oh, no! Luz wouldn’t—”

  “Mrs. Day, the navy doesn’t believe your story.”

  Regina makes a little startled sound. She stares at the man. No, he’s not nice. Not nice at all. He’s mean. Cruel. She begins to tremble.

  The man comes close to her. She can smell his breath. Listerine. “What are you keeping from us, Mrs. Day?”

  “Oh, nothing—I—”

  “Mind if I look around?”

  She doesn’t reply, just stands there trembling. She watches as Lieutenant Bryce Bennett turns away from her and begins walking around the living room. He looks at her end tables. He looks at the bookcase, running his finger across the spines of her Reader’s Digest condensed books. He looks down at her puzzle of the Taj Mahal. He looks at the couch where she smashed Kyle’s head in with the shovel.

  Or the hoe.

  One of them.

  “May I see his room?”

  “Luz and Jorge are using it now,” she says, but the lieutenant is already down the hall. She follows.

  “Jorge is the girlfriend’s brother,” the man is saying, lifting Jorge’s teddy bear and turning it upside down, looking between its furry little legs. “Retarded, yes?”

  “He’s outside playing—”

  He drops the teddy bear on the bed and moves across the room to slide open the closet. He runs his hand across Luz’s blouses that are hanging there. Several empty wire hangers clang together.

  “Are all her things here?” he asks. “See anything that’s missing?”

  Regina looks. “Her blue blouse is gone. And her striped top. And—and I think her sweatshirt …”

  “So she’s gone, too? Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She’s looking for a job. She wants to be a model. She’s so pretty I’m sure that—”

  “She just left the kid with you? No way to get in touch with her?”

  “It’s just for a couple days …”

  The lieutenant has moved over to the bureau where he pulls open the top drawer. What does he hope to find? All of Kyle’s things are gone. Regina had thrown them all out when Luz moved in. All of his ratty, holey underwear and soiled socks—and his uniform. His spiteful blue uniform with its gold buttons. She got rid of it all. She wanted Luz to have plenty of room. Now Luz’s lacy, pretty panties and bras take the place of Kyle’s dirty, ugly things.

  Except—

  “Seems she took quite a bit, wherever she went,” the lieutenant says, his hand rummaging through the drawers. “Not much here.”

  “She doesn’t have a lot.”

  He pulls out a black bra, studying it, letting it dangle from his fingers. Then he drops it back into the drawer.

  “And Kyle’s clothes? Where are they?”

  “I threw them out.”

  He lifts an eyebrow at her. “That certain he wasn’t coming back, huh?”

  Regina says nothing.

  The lieutenant continues looking around, lifting the bedspread to peer under the bed. Then he heads back into the hallway, opening the door to the linen closet and looking inside. He ducks into the bathroom to check behind the shower curtain. Regina keeps following him, twirling the top button on her sweater.

  “I’m not sure what you’re looking for—”

  “May I see the basement?” he asks abruptly.

  Regina begins to shake all over.

  Where is he? Where did I put him?

  The crate in the basement?

  The shed?

  Did I bury him in the yard?

  Regina says nothing as Lieutenant Bryce Bennett pushes past her down the hallway and into the kitchen. He yanks open the cellar door and clomps down the wooden steps. Regina follows only as far as the top of the stairs, where she stands listening to him moving things around in the basement. She hears a stack of cardboard boxes topple over.

  “He lookin’ for tresha?”

  She turns. Jorge has come inside and stands behind her.

  “Shh, Jorge,” Regina says, her finger to her lips.

  The lieutenant is heading back up the wooden stairs. “Mrs. Day,” he asks, shutting the door behind him, “did Kyle ever mention the name William Penny to you?”

  She thinks. “No. No, he didn’t.”

  “Never? Not once?”

  “No, I don’t believe he—”

  “Think, Mrs. Day! William Penny!”

  “No,” she says in a tiny voice.

  “Kyle never told you how he bludgeoned Ensign Penny with a baseball bat and left him for dead, his brains oozing out onto the pier?”

  “Oh, dear. Oh, no, never.”

  He’s close up in her face again. “Because that’s what he did, Mrs. Day. Right before his last leave, he beat an ensign to nearly an inch of his life. His name was William Penny, Mrs. Day, an African-American kid, a new recruit, age just nineteen.” His eyes burn holes into her face. “You sure Kyle never mentioned him to you?”

  “No,” Regina says. “He never mentioned him to me.”

  Why now does she hear the applause? The hoots and whistles of the soldiers, cheering her on, begging for another song?

  What if she had become famous? What if she’d never come back, stayed in the city, become even more famous than Dinah Shore?

  They’d be alive, she thinks. Kyle. And Robert. And Rocky.

  And William Penny, too.

  And me, Regina thinks. There would be no Walter, but I’d be alive. I’d be so alive.

  Lieutenant Bryce Bennett is sneering. “He thought no one would ever know. He thought he’d messed the kid’s brains up so bad he’d never be able to tell who did it. But he was wrong.”

  “Oh,” Regina says, her hands over her mouth. Jorge grips her around the waist, holding her tightly.

  “Is okay, Missa Day,” the boy tells her
.

  The lieutenant leans in even closer. He lowers his voice. “If you’re covering for him, you and this girlfriend of his, you would be interfering with a criminal investigation. You realize that, Mrs. Day, don’t you?”

  She nods.

  “So you want to tell me where he is?”

  “I—I don’t know—”

  The yard? The crate in the basement? The shed? The attic?

  “I don’t know where he is!” she sobs.

  “We’re going to find him,” the lieutenant says. “And his girlfriend, too.”

  “Yes,” Regina says, desperate suddenly. She grabs the lieutenant’s hands. “Yes, you must! Find Luz. Please find Luz!”

  15

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ZANDY

  “Someday,” Zandy promises, “we won’t have to hide. We won’t have to pretend.”

  Every Sunday afternoon Wally hops on his bike and pedals all the way down Washington Avenue to Main Street, then hangs a left and crisscrosses through traffic to head out along River Road to Dogtown. There he spends the day with Zandy and his friends, who have their one day off from fixing cars and painting fences. Miss Aletha sings show tunes at the piano and Bertrand practices his magic act, trying (mostly without success) to pull parakeets out of a hat. They listen to records—mostly Bob Dylan, the Stones, Mama Cass—and watch old movies on television. They smoke a considerable amount of grass.

  “Someday,” Zandy tells him, leaning back in his beanbag chair and inhaling a long drag on his pipe, “I’ll take you to a gay pride parade in the city.”

  Wally beams. “I’ve seen the pictures of them in the newspaper.”

  “Babe, it’s fabulous.” He lets the smoke out in rings above his head. “Lots of balloons and banners and great music to dance to. We’ll go and we’ll watch all the hundreds and hundreds of homosexuals walking right through the heart of the city. You’d never believe there were so many.”

  “I used to think I was the only one.”

  “Babe, that’s one line that gets repeated every generation. But hopefully for not much longer. Things are changing, babe. You’ll see.”

  Wally’s practically jumping out of his seat. “What will we do in the city?”

  Zandy laughs. “Oh, we’ll stay out all night. We’ll party until the sun comes up.”