All American Boy (37 page)

“Sure, kid. I'll show it all to you.”

“And can I meet Lance?”

Zandy laughed. “Oh, I don't know. I broke his heart.”

“You did?”

“Afraid so. I wasn't much older than you at the time, and he was a college man.” Zandy folded his hands over his chest and smiled. “You can tell he's a college man, can't you? From the way he looks? You can always tell college men from their pictures.”

Wally settled down beside him in the beanbag, his chin resting on Zandy's chest as he looked up into his eyes. “So how did you break Lance's heart?”

The older man let out a slow ring of smoke over his head. He seemed to be considering his answer. “I grew up, I suppose. I had other things to do, other places to see. I just stopped returning his calls. Oh, I'm sure he got over it.” He took another drag off the pipe. “He probably doesn't even remember me anymore. But I remember him. I may have broken his heart but still, I've carried him around in mine all these years.”

That's the image Wally will keep of Alexander Reefy: sitting in his beanbag chair, his face ringed with smoke, his gnarled, beautiful hands folded over his chest.

And this is where Alexander Reefy ends up: a squat, gray, two-floor apartment building, the old Hebrew Home converted into public housing. Here there is no front porch light to flick on and off as his libido wills. Only a stoop covered with hardened mounds of chewing gum, littered with cigarette butts, graffiti spray-painted on the concrete.

Wally gets out of the car.

He hadn't brought an umbrella. He hurries across the sidewalk as the rain pounds the pavement, stepping up quickly to the buzzer. He sees the name. A.
REEFY.

He doesn't hesitate. He presses the button beside the name. He hears the shrill electronic sound it makes somewhere inside the building.

And then he waits.

And waits.

There's no answer, no crackling voice coming over the intercom to ask, “Who is it?” Wally wonders for a moment if he's gone out, but Zandy's too sick to go out, Miss Aletha had told him. Maybe he's too sick to even open the door.

A young woman is suddenly behind him. She smiles shyly as Wally steps aside, allowing her to slip her key into the lock. In her arms she juggles a bag of groceries, so Wally gallantly holds open the door for her. “Thank you,” she says, stepping inside.

Wally nods, following her. She doesn't appear to be uncomfortable with him doing so, nor with his presence behind her up a flight of stairs. At the landing, however, she turns quickly and unlocks the door to the first apartment on the right. Once she is inside, Wally hears a chain lock slide into place.

He looks down the hallway. Zandy's apartment is 211.

Taking a deep breath, he begins to walk. The building smells of mold and mildew. The gray carpeting is marred by large brown stains. At the far end of the corridor, a window is imprinted with grimy fingerprints, letting in shards of dull gray light.

On his left, he finds 211.

If it were me, I sure as hell wouldn't want to go all by myself to face somebody who's life I ruined
.

He gathers his thoughts and knocks. Raps once, then twice. Not too loudly but not just a tap either.

He listens. He hears nothing. He decides Zandy's gone, perhaps in the hospital. His whole trip here has been in vain.

But then he senses something from inside: a shudder, an animal stirring back to life after a long hibernation. There's a sound, a noiseless kind of sound, as if from under something: a pile of blankets, maybe, or a mound of pine needles and soil.

“Zandy?” Wally whispers through the door.

There's the sound of air, a strange quiver, like the flurry of wind in the eaves. Then it's quiet again.

“Zandy? It's Wally Day.”

He swallows hard. Why should Zandy want to see him? Who's to say he doesn't hate him? And who would blame him? Miss Aletha was right: this has been all about Wally, all about
his
needs—his need to see Zandy, his need to make peace. He'd given no thought to whether Zandy would want to see him. He should go—get out of here—turn and run back down this filthy hallway—

Then he hears the scuffing. Footsteps approaching the door. And finally a voice, softly entreating:

“Go ahead,” it says. “You're welcome to come in.”

“It's the one myth about homos that I hate the most,” Ned had said. “I can take the nelly jokes and the opera queen stories but when they start in on saying we're out to recruit little kids, that's when I get mad.”

He had been clipping his toenails as they sat watching TV. One of the Pats—Robertson or Buchanan—was on the news going on about how America needed to protect its kids from predatory homos. Ned was getting angrier with each toenail clipped. One flew up from his foot and actually pinged against the glass of the television set.

“Will you be careful with those?” Wally grumbled. “I'm going to have to get out the vacuum if you don't clean up.”

“Like the perv you sent to jail,” Ned said, not listening.

“Oh, come on, Ned. Not the same thing at all.”

“How was it different?”

“I was fifteen. I
wanted
it.”

“He started you at
thirteen
.”

“I rode my bike over there. I rang his doorbell. I grabbed his crotch.”

“It's gross. What was he? Forty?”

“No.” Wally stood from his spot beside Ned on the couch and walked over to the closet to retrieve the handheld vac. He switched it on and began sucking up the little crusts of toenails scattered across the carpet. “Besides,” he said, shouting over the noise, “he was good to me. He taught me a lot.”

“So is he still in jail?”

Wally switched off the vacuum and sat cross-legged on the floor. “I don't know,” he said, staring.

“Missy not tell you?”

“We never talk about Zandy.”

“What could he have possibly taught you, Wally? He was a zoned-out hippie. What did he even do for a living? Collected welfare, right?” Ned looked down at his hands, his nails and fingerprints permanently outlined in black from all the pipes he had cleaned. “I can't stand freeloaders.”

“He was a handyman,” Wally said, his voice distracted and far away. “A jack of all trades …”

“So what did he teach you? How to fix a leaky faucet? How to spackle walls? How to put a hinge on a door?”

“No,” Wally told his lover. “He never taught me any of that.”

“Wally Day,” comes the voice from the darkness of the shuttered room behind the door.

Wally can't see him clearly. The figure behind the door is vague and imprecise. It steps aside to let Wally in.

The apartment is dark, cast with a strange blue glow. Venetian blinds are pulled tightly against the windows. The smell is foul: cigarettes, urine, bad milk. And something else, too …

Wally turns to look at the man standing beside him, his eyes struggling to adjust to the dimness. He can discern that Zandy is wearing a long untucked flannel shirt, way too big for him, though it probably fit him when he was healthy. On his legs are gray sweat pants, stained and torn. He's barefoot.

“Wally Day,” he says again.

He stands there in the dark, grinning. It's difficult to recognize him. Zandy's face has the skeletal look Wally has come to recognize as a last sign of the plague: deep hollow cheeks, wide eyes, protruding teeth. His breath is rancid, as if all his organs were decaying inside of him, the stench making its way up through his mouth. He's unshaven. Poking out of the flannel shirt Wally can see his chest hair. What he'd once so eroticized is now a straggly tuft of gray.

“Zandy …” he says, and his voice breaks.

“Wally.”

“I … I wanted to come and see you.”

“Well,” he says, “here I am.”

Wally reaches over to touch him, to shake his hand, something. But Zandy just folds his arms over his chest. His hands—those wonderful, magnificent hands—brush against Wally's as he does so, and the sensation causes Wally to pull back. At the moment of contact he felt nothing. It's as if his hand swept through smoke, not flesh.

“Zandy,” he tries again, “I want you to know—”

The other man laughs. “How sorry you are? Is that it, babe? Is that why you've come?”

Wally feels as if he'll start crying. “Yes. I suppose that's part of it.”

For a flash he sees the old Zandy: the face hidden behind the death mask. He's transported nearly two decades back into time, and feels a strange stirring in his loins.

“And what should I tell you now?” Zandy asks. “What is it that you've come back to hear me say?”

“I don't know.”

“How about ‘I exonerate you?'” Zandy asks suddenly, his eyes lighting up, filled with a strange light incongruous to the dark. “Isn't that why you came back? To receive absolution from a dying man?”

“Zandy—”

“Well, you're too late. I'm already dead.”

He moves away from Wally abruptly, heading over to his ratty couch, where he sits—where he's probably been sitting for days at a time.

“Look, Zandy,” Wally says, following him. “I can understand your anger. And I don't need you to forgive me. I've had to do that for myself.”

He stops. Looking down at the frail, tiny man on the couch, it's as if he can see right through him: lungs and heart and ribcage, and then the fabric of the upholstery beyond.

Wally goes on, desperate to find the right words. “I just wanted to say that I was a fucked-up kid who nonetheless loved you very much.” His voice cracks again. “And still does. And always will.”

Zandy gives him a small smile. “You little ballbuster, you.”

“There was so much, so very much you taught me. I am who I am because of you. Everything I know about being gay, about our history, our traditions—you taught me. You taught me not to be ashamed. You taught me that what I felt wasn't wrong. That I could love and be loved. I owe you enough to at least come back here and tell you that—”

“You don't owe me anything.” Zandy puts his hands over his face. They're as knotty as Wally remembers, but thinner, so much thinner. “Nothing. Not a thing.”

“But I do.”

He removes his hands to look back at Wally. “All you owe me is a good life. Have you had one, Wally? Has your life been good?”

Wally's not sure how to answer.

“Have you had love, Wally? Did you find love out there in the world?”

“Yes,” he tells him. “I found love.”

“Then that's all you owe me. To tell me that.”

Wally moves in closer to him. “What about you, Zandy? Have you had love?”

The frail little man on the couch grins. “Finally he asks.” His eyes sparkle again with that strange glow. “Tell me, Wally. What do you know about me?”

Wally's not sure what he should say.

“How old am I, Wally? What did I want to be when I was a kid? Were my hopes realized, my dreams accomplished? Is that what I wanted to be, a Brown's Mill handyman?”

Wally tries to say something, but can't.

“Was it all worth it to me? You? Going to prison? My whole life?”

“I don't know,” Wally admits, and he starts to cry.

Zandy shrugs. “And now it's too late to find out. Because I'm gone.”

Wally crouches down in front of him. He touches Zandy's knees. Once again he's struck by their incredible lightness, their lack of solidity. It's as if he's touching air.

“Zandy, I'm sorry—”

“Sorry doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what you do now.”

“I don't understand,” Wally says.

“You think your time here is finished? You think you can just go back to the city now and forget all about Brown's Mill, when there's so much you still don't know, so much you've never bothered to find out?”

He looks at Wally with those wide, distended eyes.

“It's
still
going to be grand, Wally. It's still going to be oh-so-fucking grand.”

Wally just kneels there, saying nothing, staring into Zandy's eyes.

The older man smiles. “Do you remember, Wally, the secret Miss Aletha taught me?”

Wally hesitates for just a second. “You mean … about the apples?”

“Yes,” Zandy says. “How sweet are the twisted apples that they leave behind.”

They hold each other's gaze, and Wally can see through his eyes.

He knows what he means.

“Don't worry,” Zandy says. “You can't get infected by a dead man.”

Wally nods. He's not frightened, being here with the ghost of a man who loved him, who he loved in return, the ghost of a man he could have been, and still might be. They hold each other's gaze for several seconds. Then Wally runs his hands up the length of Zandy's bony thighs, gently pulling down his sweat pants. His fingers caress cold, cold flesh. He finds Zandy's dick, shriveled and blue, and for the first time takes the icy shaft into his mouth. Zandy moans, and for a second Wally remembers that voice: the soft cooing in his ear, the gentle assurances of self, the promises of a world yet to be explored. And when his lover shoots, Wally takes his semen down his throat, drinking every last drop of that sweet freezing liquid. It burns all the way down, purifying him.

“He's dead,” he tells Miss Aletha when he returns to her house.

She's outside, clipping the purple roses from their vine. “Some warm water,” she says. ‘That'll keep these for a few more days.”

The sun is setting in a watery mix of reds and purples.

Wally just stands there, looking at her. “You're not surprised.”

“No,” she says, putting aside the roses and peeling off her gloves. “I knew it was a matter of days. But I also knew you'd get there in time.”

“But I didn't,” he tells her.