All American Boy (15 page)

“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 the 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.

And beside him, even more chillingly, is Wally's mother's name, her death date just waiting to be carved.

They head back to Miss Aletha's. The swamps of Dogtown are particularly rank this evening, foul and tart. But Miss Aletha is cooking something good in the kitchen, some kind of gingerbread cake, and that takes care of that. Wally sinks down deep in an overstuffed armchair, transfixed by the flames in Missy's fireplace.

“So when are we gonna do it?” Dee asks, coming around at his side.

“Do what?”

“Get naked. Your body parts and mine.”

Wally laughs. “Isn't it past your bedtime?”

“Fuck off. You think treating me like a kid is funny. But you're just making yourself look like an idiot.”

The boy flops down onto the couch, flicking the TV on with the remote control, settling on some stupid reality thing. Wally hates those shows. Dumb-ass twentysomethings doing whatever it takes for their fifteen minutes and a fistful of spending money. Not to mention using up all the airtime and taking jobs away from real actors.

He sneaks a peek at Dee on the couch. He's stretching, showing off his torso again, all those sinewy young muscles, no body fat. Wally looks away. Had it been this way for Zandy too? Had he looked at Wally with the same mix of repulsion and attraction that Wally feels for Dee?

“I'm going up to my room,” he announces. Dee just grunts in reply.

Wally heads upstairs. He undresses, lies down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The first time Zandy fucked him, he remembers, he cried. There was so much pain—pain as he had never known, before or since. Not even his father's blows had hurt so bad. Zandy encircled him around the waist and lifted Wally up off his feet, holding him in front of him, pushing his dick deep up inside him, causing the boy to squirm, to writhe, to cry like a little baby.

He was fourteen.

And then afterward, they built a fire, in an open section of the old factory, where the roof had caved in. There was a pool of oily black water beside them, where Zandy rinsed off the Vaseline from his hands. Wally sat in front of the fire, feeling his sphincter still contracting, feeling as if he needed to shit, to piss, to pass out. And Zandy came up behind him, wrapped his big arms around the frail, shaking boy, holding him tight, kissing his neck.

In that moment, Wally loved him more than anyone else in the whole world.

Alexander Reefy was not a handsome man. His nose was too long and his eyes too small. And his hands, of course, were rough and gnarled, hit too many times with a hammer, scarred from too many cuts with a saw. But they were a man's hands, nothing so pristine as Wally's father's hands, hands of a naval officer, soft and manicured. Zandy was a bear, a big old lumberjack, whose scent was strong, whose embrace was solid. Wally can still smell him, taste him sometimes, when he closes his eyes, imagining his face pressed against Zandy's chest, falling asleep on his furry, silken pectorals, listening to his heart. Zandy would caress his hair, whispering in his ear: “It's gonna be okay, babe. Trust me. It's gonna be okay.”

Wally never knew exactly how old Zandy was. Not quite thirty when they started, Wally thinks. Younger than he is now. The thought staggers. To Wally, Zandy had seemed much, much older than he was, but he also seemed ageless, like a genie or an elf out of Tolkien. And what did Wally care how old Zandy was anyway? Or even what he looked like? Zandy was a
man
—a man with a penis and a chest like a bear, a man who recognized the urgency within him, and affirmed it.

Zandy taught Wally the things his father should have: why he had to shower more frequently now that he was sprouting hair, how to wash his dick to keep it clean, how to lather up and shave the pesky little whiskers that showed up on his chin. He taught Wally that the feelings he'd been having were no cause for concern. “It's a natural thing,” he said, “and don't you ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”

It was twenty years ago. No, even more than that. Twenty-one, twenty-two … a time before
The Real World
, before Gay-Straight Alliances, before Ellen on
Newsweek
, before there were any Wills or Graces. What Zandy was suggesting to Wally was a radical thing, a subversive act. “It's perfectly natural, your gayness,” he told Wally. “
It's the way God made you
.”

Of course, there was more that Zandy taught: how to give pleasure and how to receive it, the best way to handle a man's dick, the best way to show your partner what turned you on.

But Wally never sucked Zandy's dick. He offered his own, and gave him his ass, but never could he bring himself to place his lips around the older man's penis. Wally was fascinated by it, and often couldn't take his eyes from it: but to put it in his mouth seemed vile somehow—
dirty
—and Wally just could never do it. Zandy didn't insist. He never pressured Wally to do anything that he didn't want to do.

Except, of course, he had.

“You had no consent to give,” the judge said to Wally. “You didn't know what consent even meant.”

He had said nothing then. The time for spilling out the truth had ended the moment he signed his name to the complaint and handed it back to Sergeant Garafolo.

“Hey.”

Wally jumps. A voice in his ear.

He sits up in bed. Had he fallen asleep? Was he dreaming?

“Hey,” the voice in the dark whispers again. “It's just me.”

A shiver of moonlight reveals Dee in bed beside him.

“What the fuck?”

“Make love to me,” the boy says, his voice urgent. “Make love to me, Wally.”

The kid's naked. Wally can see that now, as the sheet falls away, the moonlight exposing Dee's arms, his smooth, hollow chest.

“What, are you
crazy
? Get out of here.”

A fragrance of soap reaches Wally's nostrils. The boy leans forward, tries to kiss Wally on the lips. Wally pushes him back.

Dee grimaces. “Am I that bad looking?”

“You're sixteen.”

“Yeah. Age of consent in this state.”

“I don't care. Get out of here. Find a boy your own age to get your rocks off with.”

“Why? Are you suddenly against older guys and younger guys doing it?”

Wally is getting furious. “Yes! Yes, I am!”

The boy sneers. “So you are saying what you and Zandy did was wrong.”

Wally doesn't reply.

Dee pounces, gathering force. “You
don't
think it was wrong. If you did, you wouldn't be going back to apologize to him. It was
you
who did the wrong thing by sending him to jail!”

Wally feels as if he might explode. “Get out of my bed.”

Dee slides out, his long boydick swinging between his legs. Wally notices a tattoo of a rose on his abdomen.

“Well, at least I've learned one thing,” the boy says.

Wally sighs. “What's that?”

“You
do
find me attractive.”

Wally's suddenly aware that his cock is spearheading his white briefs. He whips the sheet back up to cover himself.

Dee grins. “'Night, Wally,” he says, and shuts the door behind him.

But he can't sleep. Wally throws the sheet aside, gets up, pulls on a pair of sweats. He heads downstairs to find Miss Aletha sitting at the kitchen table.