All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  When I walked out, the secretaries made no attempt to hide that they had been listening. One was sitting on a rolling chair by the grate, about a mile from her desk, palms on her knees and mouth still wide open in shock.

  “Ladies,” I said in my sweetest voice.

  I tested a lot of straight people myself, because I was worried that if I brought them to the Doctor, his involvement would get out. In the beginning, I would go to their offices, but when you go into a man’s office, and he closes the door, the secretaries think something’s going on in there. I didn’t want the men coming to my house, because I knew how that would look, so I had to get creative. I tested a lot of people at Hollywood Cemetery, sitting on memorial benches under the oak trees. It was hilly, and there were many places to hide out. Nobody’s going to bother you at a grave, because it was very natural in Hot Springs to stop off after work and visit your relatives. And if someone is crying, you can comfort them. The irony was that Hollywood Cemetery was so well-to-do that they would never have let me bury someone with AIDS there.

  Then, when I saw the men in town, they would nod at me with a guilty look I didn’t return, but the wives would see there was something secret between us. I know a lot of rumors started from those glances. I even had some women ask me point-blank how I knew their husbands, and I would act like I didn’t know anything about it. Nope, I never talked to your husband about AIDS or running off with me, thank you very much.

  The hate calls got more specific. “I can’t believe you brought those faggots here. They’re gonna kill us all.” I had a woman at church get me in the basement and lay me out in lavender about AIDS and how sinful I was to help those people. “Your daughter will never be a debutante,” she said. “It will only happen over my dead body.”

  I wanted to tell her that I knew her son was gay. He was “those people” too, but that was his story to tell, not mine. I looked at her and sighed. “She is seven,” was all I said.

  I set aside time to call Sandy, because I needed a break. I asked if she wanted to go canoeing. She said yes, but there was a catch in her voice. We met and floated out to the Dragover spot on the Ouachita, where the river snakes back on itself and some people get out and take a shortcut. I tried to talk about what I was doing, just state it plainly, because I knew she knew what was going on.

  “Ruthie,” she said quietly, “I told you to quit going around those people.”

  “Sandy, I can’t,” I said. “They really need someone.”

  “So you’ll ruin your life because they ruined theirs? And you’ll ruin Allison’s life?”

  “I’m not trying to ruin her life,” I said quietly.

  “You are,” she said. “You know you are.”

  I wanted to dive into the water. To let it fill my ears so I couldn’t hear her. And at the same time, I wanted my friend.

  “Stop going around those people,” she said. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why you’re being so nice to them.”

  “If you met them—”

  “No. I see enough of them.”

  I felt a door closing. The same feeling I had when I went to someone for help and they refused. I never asked them why or yelled at them or tried to convince them that they should care when they didn’t. I didn’t waste time. I just went to the next person.

  Only I didn’t have another best friend.

  I had to put my car in the shop, so Mitch let me borrow his van while he was out of town. He was doing more of that, because he had sold his share of the restaurant and was focusing on his work. While he was gone, I drove his mother, Donnie, out to Wal-Mart, and she acted like that was the least I could do, considering I was taking advantage of her son’s generosity. I wanted to remind her of all the other times I looked in on her and took her to the store, but I held my tongue.

  I’d been holding my tongue since we met, but Donnie was mostly harmless. She made it known that no one was good enough for her Mitch, and in case she wasn’t clear, that meant me. She settled into her seat on the passenger side and looked at me for a second.

  “You know, Ruthie,” she said in her drawl, “my biggest fear when Mitch got divorced was that he would end up with some old hussy.” She pronounced it “huzzy,” drawing out the z’s long to fill them with disdain.

  I waited for the “but.” No, she let it drop. I chuckled, because it was so mean, which is probably how Donnie went through life. Saying things so cutting you were more surprised than mad that someone could be so mean.

  “Well, thank God that didn’t happen,” I said, making a right turn on to the highway. “I mean, I’m not old.”

  Now she chuckled. I knew deep down Donnie liked me. She’d probably rather deal with me than some shrinking violet. Donnie had had a hard life, and I’d lost track of how many husbands she’d gone through—five or six. I’d had the one, and that almost did me in.

  She shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable, and that reminded me why I always gave her a break. She had lost her right leg because of a blood clot. It made her talk a lot about death, like her ride would be here at any moment. Donnie liked a deal, and she knew that I had all these cemetery plots “up for grabs,” as she said. I said that would be fine.

  “Naw,” she said. “I don’t want to be buried in that cemetery with all that AIDS juice running down over me.”

  “Well, you’ll be dead, so what would it matter?”

  “Still,” she said.

  Donnie talked like that, but she also cooked for my guys from time to time. I sometimes took her around with me to deliver the food, so she could see what it meant to them. She knew what I cooked for them, so she would say, “Now try this.”

  We pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, and she pointed to a handicapped spot right near the front. Like I wouldn’t see it. We had just gotten out when someone walking by stopped to give us a disapproving look.

  “You know that spot is for handicapped people,” he said. He was a little pip-squeak, someone who should have had something better to do than heckle two ladies.

  “Oh, you’re just who I need,” Donnie said in a sweet voice. “Can you come over here and help me with something?” She pointed to the inside of the van.

  He softened, maybe remembering his Southern manners. “Well, sure,” he said. “I can help you.”

  Oh boy, I thought.

  He ambled over as she leaned on the side of the van. When he went to look in the window, she took off her right leg in one fell swoop and started beating him with it.

  “This is why I park in the handicapped,” she said, hopping on her good leg. He ran away, ditching whatever he was going in to Wal-Mart for. I didn’t say a word, and I looked away as she hiked up her dress to reattach her leg. I acted like this happened all day, every day.

  “Give me a hard time,” she muttered to herself.

  “Well, you showed him, Donnie.”

  “Well, sometimes,” she said, straightening her posture to walk in with me, “you have to let people know what’s what.”

  Later that day, after I dropped her off, I was driving through Hot Springs when I saw the house I had been dreaming of. I only found it because I was in Mitch’s van, and the carriage made me sit up higher. I was up on the hill, and I could see over the tree line to this Sears cottage–style house on a pie-shaped lot at the intersection of three streets. You used to be able to order a house from a catalog. The house was worse for wear on the outside, fifty-some years later, but they always had beautiful woodworking in them. It looked exactly like the dream house I had torn out of the magazine and pinned on the pegboard in my kitchen.

  The house was in a part of town that was once the neighborhood you wanted to live in before everything moved out to the lake. From the landscaping, I knew the owner had given up. Some couple had probably built it after the war when they were twenty-three or twenty-four—picked the floor plan from a
catalog and planned on never leaving. I left a note on the door, saying if they ever wanted to sell this beautiful house, let me know.

  The owner called me the next day. Her husband had recently died, and she wanted to move out to Mount Ida. “This house was his dream,” she said.

  “It would be mine too.” I said.

  She said she would let me have it for two thousand dollars up front, then three hundred dollars a month mortgage. It seemed like fate, because social security had just given me a check for two thousand dollars in back payments.

  “I can do that,” I said.

  “It’s a deal, then.”

  Allison loved it too. I felt good providing this for her. The neighborhood we were living in was only getting worse. Someone recently got stabbed on the street, and we came home to find blood all over the sidewalk and the yard. The police had left a note on the door saying there was a stabbing. “No need to worry,” it said. I got out the hose and sprayed the blood away.

  When Mitch came home, I told him I needed him to build a pergola. “Where?” he asked.

  “My new house,” I said. He looked at me like I was crazy. But, as usual, he didn’t ask a single question.

  I wanted to marry Mitch and be a woman who has to check with someone before she buys a house, but I wasn’t. My birthday was in March, and it turned out his ex’s was the day before. I had to hear about all the gifts he’d wasted on her, and all I got was flowers. I finally told him I didn’t want to hear about her anymore. I didn’t think he was going to propose on my birthday, but I realized I would have said yes if he’d asked. So I broached the subject of marriage.

  “Yeah, we’ll get engaged someday,” he said. “But I figure it’s cheaper by the piece.” He’d invested in buying the whole cow before and wasn’t interested. I was hurt, but I didn’t show him. It was enough, I told myself, that he was Mr. Saturday Night. I knew how men were, though.

  “Don’t you go out there and get you any strange,” I warned, “and tell me it didn’t mean anything to you, because it better mean losing me.”

  He chuckled, but he started working on the pergola. I moved my pegboard of dreams into the new kitchen, and I felt like I had checked something off with the house. I had provided that for Allison and me, just not a man who would take up for us. That would still be me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  May 19, 1990, had seemed like a very ordinary Saturday night until we had to pull over on the side of the road because of the downpour. Mitch and I were driving out to dinner at Bohemia, which was our favorite German restaurant downtown. It had rained throughout the day, but now it felt like three thunderstorms had settled right over us, battling for the right to rain on Hot Springs.

  Even Mitch, who generally preferred to ignore the world around him, had conceded defeat and pulled over. We were still high up.

  “The lake is gonna flood,” he said, matter-of-fact. He’d built enough docks out on the lakes to know what they could take and what they couldn’t. I was worried about my house, which I had barely moved into.

  We turned around, and he inched back to my house, then said he needed to leave to be ready. He knew he’d be getting calls about the docks. My house was fine, and I called Bonnie, who was safe and dry, with Allison beside her, watching TV. “ABC’s showing The Ryan White Story again,” she said. “I thought you’d like that.”

  They’d run it last year but were rerunning it because he had died in April. Ryan was a kid with hemophilia in Kokomo, Indiana, who got HIV from a plasma product. He had just turned thirteen when he was diagnosed in 1984, and Kokomo reacted so horribly. They got out a petition instead of pitchforks and banned him from school. He was a great kid, and I admired his family, but the media loved an AIDS “innocent victim.” Where were my guys in that story?

  “Well, tell her I love her and I’m okay too,” I said, drying my hair with a towel. I called around, checking on my guys and the elderly people I kept track of, like Melba and Miss McKissek. Some didn’t answer, so I got in the car.

  There’d been a slight lessening in the downpour after ten, but what I saw was so much worse than I’d anticipated. We’d had a flash flood, and I couldn’t even get to Central Avenue, which was a river. Water rushed by like the Colorado rapids, going up to lick the second floor of buildings I grew up with. Water was rushing by, so loud I couldn’t hear myself say, “Oh my God.” There were mannequins floating by, then cars. Later, Paul told me that the guys in the bar had to do a human chain to get two people who were stuck in a taxi, the water moving so fast it would take them all with one slip.

  I wasn’t able to get to everybody until the next day, after all the downed trees were cleared. People were in shock, and so, later, when I passed a house that had a lot of life about it, it stood out to me. A banner hanging between the two columns of the building read “Psychic Fun Fair.”

  I went in and was relieved to be among people who weren’t shell-shocked. It was sort of like the sales room at the resort, with people giving you free readings to get you to get hooked on them, so you’d keep coming back.

  This one smarmy guy called to me right away, sitting at a table with what looked like a pile of crystals in front of him. He was from out of town, because anyone who’d been in Hot Springs a week could tell that was just a pile of milky quartz. But I sat down, and he made a show of gathering the “crystals,” huffing them like Scarface with a pile of cocaine. I tried not to laugh and did a sympathetic nod when he exhaled.

  “What do you come here to know?”

  “How’s the relationship between my daughter and her father?” I asked. That would be a good test of legitimacy.

  “It will get better,” he said.

  I grabbed my purse. “Thank you for your time,” I said. He didn’t seem surprised, so maybe he saw that coming at least. I walked around and noted a sandy-blond-haired man, a big bear of a guy with a long walrus mustache, doing a reading. His eyes kept drifting past the person he was reading to and falling on me. I could see he started to rush through the reading with this poor guy, turning the cards quicker. I was distracting him so much he finally said to the guy, “Okay, so, like . . . be careful.” He gathered the cards up, the reading abruptly over.

  “Careful of what?” said the guy. It was like getting to the climax of the story and then not hearing the rest of it.

  “Just stuff,” he said, motioning to me. “Thanks.” The guy looked back at me, blinking. I smiled. He didn’t.

  When I sat down, the reader sat back and put down the cards and rested his hands on the crest of his belly. He leaned back like he was trying to get a wide angle on me. “I see a lot of death around you,” he said. “Or something. It’s weird. What do you do?”

  “Well, you tell me,” I said. “You asked me to sit down.”

  He picked up the cards in his hand, then put them down again. “Uh, are you a chaplain? No . . . What are you?”

  I smiled. He put the cards down. “I gotta smoke,” he said. He got up quick and pulled out a pack. I noticed they were Mores. I followed him out to the front porch. He offered me a cigarette, and I took it because it had been that kind of day. He lit us both with a pretty lighter and exhaled with a knowing nod at me.

  “You’re doing something that I gotta know about,” he said. “I think I can help you.”

  It was a game, in a way. I wanted him to guess the unfathomable.

  “You’re not a doctor,” he said.

  “No, not really,” I said.

  He cocked his hip, aiming his cigarette at me. I raised one eyebrow, some unspoken conversation between us telling him he was getting warmer. “I help people with AIDS,” I finally said.

  His whole body melted. “Okay,” he said. Then to himself, in some confirmation of what he’d seen. “Okay.”

  “It’s a lot, I guess,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t eve
n need the cards,” he said. “It makes people think it’s real. I’m Owen.”

  “Ruth.”

  “I’m actually a home health aide,” he said. “I live up in Memphis. My boyfriend, Bill, and I, we had a friend.”

  “Did you help him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “I’m glad he had you.”

  “Who’s got you?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, I was just thinking of this scene in Superman,” he said. “Christopher Reeve catches Margot Kidder when she’s falling off the top of a skyscraper. He says ‘I’ve got you,’ and she looks down and says, ‘You’ve got me? Who’s got you?’”

  I smiled. “You’re a movie buff.”

  “No, I just like people,” he said.

  I stubbed out the cigarette. “So, what do your psychic powers tell you about my future? Are we going to be okay?”

  He didn’t smile. I gave him my number, telling him if he had any more friends in need, they could call me.

  Owen did call me, some months later, but it wasn’t about a friend. He’d taken an elderly patient to dialysis at a hospital, where he saw a flyer about the American Psychological Association hosting a conference about AIDS care and mental health, up there in Memphis, Tennessee.

  “I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or even a counselor,” I said. “How am I going to get there?”

  “Can you get a ride to Memphis?”

  “Well, sure,” I said.

  “You could stay with me and Bill,” he said.

  “I don’t think I can just show up, though.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Owen, I don’t think you’re much of a psychic, because you clearly don’t know what all I’ve got going here. I’m trying to do school with Allison, volunteer for church, and I’ve got like ninety-five thousand AIDS patients across the state, and they’re all dying.”