All American Boy (40 page)

The girl looks into her eyes. “I had to come back and ask your forgiveness. I carried such guilt here, in my heart, for the last few days. I went to the priest, Mrs. Day, and told him of the horrible thing I had done to you. He said I must return the money, but I told him that I couldn't, that I'd spent it. So he said that I had to tell you, and I had to pay you back.” Luz shudders with leftover tears. “And then I said the Act of Contrition with him.”

Regina is still stroking the girl's hair. “I remember the Act of Contrition from when I was a Catholic.” She smiles, a little wryly. “They would make you say it to show you were truly sorry for something.”

The girl nods.

“Then let's say it together, Luz.”

Luz looks at her. “Say it …?”

“Yes,” Regina says. “Together. How does it begin again?”

Luz hesitates a moment, then says, “
My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee
…”

Regina joins in. “
And I detest of all my sins
—”

Luz follows along.

“—
because of thine just punishments
,” they both intone, “
but most of all because I have offended thee, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love
.”

Again Luz falls silent.

“
I firmly resolve
…,” Regina prompts.

“…
with the help of thy grace
,” Luz says.

“—
to sin no more
—”

“—
and to avoid the near occasion of sin
.”

“Amen,” Regina says.

“Amen,” Luz echoes.

“Now go, Luz.”

The girl looks up at her. “But I've come for Jorge …”

“No. Not Jorge. Not yet. It would be too much for the boy. He's happy here. When you're settled, then you can come for him.”

“Oh, but Mrs. Day, I couldn't possibly impose on you—”

“He's a good boy, Luz,” Regina says. “And you will be doing all sorts of new things now. Like all those beautiful girls I see on TV and the covers of magazines. You can do it, Luz. I know you can.”

“I'll send you money,” Luz promises.

“No,” Regina says. “I don't want it.”

“But I must—”

“All you must do is
go
.”

Luz starts to cry again. “Oh, Mrs. Day, you are a
saint
. A saint on earth.”

Regina just touches the girl's face. How beautiful she is. How lovely.

“As soon as I can I'll come for Jorge,” Luz says, between tears. “I'm going back to the city, and I'm going to make everything right! Maybe I really
will
be a model!”

They clasp hands in the moonlight.

“Thank you, Mrs. Day,” Luz exclaims, turning to hurry back to Kyle's car. “You won't be disappointed in me! I promise!”

Regina just beams.

“I owe it all to you, Mrs. Day,” Luz calls, sliding in behind the wheel and starting the engine. “All to you!”

The Trans Am roars into life. Its headlights momentarily blind Regina, who turns her face and squints her eyes as she watches Luz back out of the driveway then turn the car's wheels to screech off down the street.

“Go, Luz, go,” Regina says softly.

The wind seems to have died down. She no longer feels so cold.

The wood can wait until tomorrow.

23

A GOOD BOY

“Will you give this to Donald Kyrwinski, please?”

The woman standing in front of him is holding a blue parka with synthetic fur around the edge of the hood.

“It's getting colder now,” she says. “He's going to need it.”

“He's inside,” Wally says, accepting the coat. “Do you want me to get him?”

“No,” the woman says, hurrying back down the steps into the night. She's thin, blond, very fair and very frightened. “Just give him the coat, please. Thank you.”

Closing the front door, Wally turns to see Dee standing behind him.

“Yours, I take it.”

The boy looks at the coat in Wally's hands. “Like I'd wear such an ugly thing.”

“Why didn't you come out and see her?”

“She didn't want to see me.” Dee shrugs. “Just throw the coat on the rack.”

Wally does, then follows Dee into the living room.

“It says something that she came over with it,” he suggests.

“Oh, yeah? What does it say?” Dee flops down into a chair and hits the remote, turning on the TV. It's the Shopping Channel. Suzanne Somers, or somebody who looks likes her, is selling jewelry.

Wally decides not to pursue the subject of the boy's mother. What indeed
did
it say that she had brought over a winter coat for her son to wear, but chose not to see him?

“I hear you're heading back to the city in the morning,” Dee says.

“You hear right.”

“So you finally got over there to see Zandy and he was dead, huh?” Dee starts flicking through the channels with the remote control, a kaleidoscope of images, a cacophony of sound. “Talk about ironic.”

Wally says nothing.

“I thought you wanted me to go with you,” Dee says, settling on the Game Show Network. A rerun of an old
Match Game
episode. Brett Somers is hitting Charles Nelson Reilly over the head with her card.

“You were at school,” Wally tells him.

“I'd have skipped out if you asked me.”

Wally holds up his hands. “Far from me to contribute to juvenile delinquency.”

Dee raises his eyebrows as he turns for the first time to look at Wally directly. “A little late for that, don't you think?”

Wally narrows his eyes at him. “You're no delinquent, Dee.”

“So you gonna take me with you? To the city?”

Wally hadn't planned on engaging with the kid. He hadn't even wanted to
see
him again. He'd just wanted to go to bed, avoid him, then blow out of town in the morning without saying goodbye. Would teach the little prick right for being so aloof.

But he sits down in the chair opposite Dee and looks over into his eyes.

“I can skip school tomorrow,” the boy is saying. “Then it's the weekend.” His eyes are big and pleading. “I can take the train back Sunday night. So can I go with you?
Please
?”

“Dee—”

“Oh, come
on
, you know what it's like. How
horrible
this place is.”

“It's not horrible,” Wally tells him. “You can
make
it horrible. Just like there are many people for whom the city becomes a horrible place to live.”

Dee just makes a face and turns back to the television. He's disgusted, apparently giving up on Wally once again.

“Come on,” Wally challenges him. “Tell me something good about Brown's Mill.”

“There
is
nothing good.”

“Hot fudge brownie sundaes at the Big Boy.”

Dee snorts. “You can get 'em anywhere.”

“There's got to be one thing, Dee.” Wally's not sure why he's being so insistent, why it matters so much, why the boy intrigues him the way he does, why ever since they'd had sex he hasn't been able to get Dee off his mind. “Tell me one good memory of being a kid in Brown's Mill and then I'll consider taking you with me to the city.”

Dee looks at him as if he's insane.

“I'm serious,” Wally says.

“Since when did you sign onto the Brown's Mill Chamber of Commerce?”

“Come on, one thing.”

Dee scrunches up his face, shaking his head. But he's thinking. Wally can tell he's thinking.

“Okay,” the boy finally says. “Being in
Peter Pan
in grade school. I loved that play. It was awesome. They rigged it up so we could fly on wires and everything.”

Wally smiles. “Were you Peter?”

Dee laughs. “I
wish
. I was just one of the Lost Boys. Mr. All-American-Boy Dean Dalrymple got to play Peter.”

Wally pauses a moment. “All American Boy?”

“Yeah.” Dee rolls his eyes. “Some freak who got all the teachers gushing over him because the American Legion named him their All American Boy. I mean, who gives a fuck? How geeky is that?”

Wally laughs. “Yeah,” he admits. “It's pretty geeky.”

“So I can go with you? To the city?”

“I said I'd
consider
it.”

“I'll start packing.” Dee leaps up out of the chair. “You going to say good-bye to your mother? Any more jobs for you to do?”

“I have to carry some wood down into her basement,” Wally says.

“I'll help you,” the boy says, bounding up the stairs to pack.

“I said I'd
consider
taking you!” Wally shouts after him. “Not that I definitely
would
.” But Dee is already upstairs.

Wally stands and walks over to the window. The stench from the swamps is heavy tonight. He looks out onto the way the moonlight reflects on the rusted roofs of the old factories next door. It makes them look like medieval castles. Or a vampire's lair.

You going to say good-bye to your mother? Any more jobs for you to do?

Wally lets out a long sigh. “What else, Mother? What else is there for me to do?”

Once, twenty years ago, he'd gone to her house to say goodbye, and he'd ended up staying a week. It was right before he left for college, right before he left Brown's Mill for good. His father had been dead for a few months by then, and Miss Aletha had encouraged Wally to go over to his mother's house, to make some kind of overture to her. And Wally had gone, he'd actually
gone
—because somewhere, deep down, something was still twisting, still living, still
feeling
for his mother. What it was, he wasn't sure. Love? Probably not. Obligation? He owed her nothing. But something. There was something.

“Maybe you'll find out by going there,” Missy said. “Maybe she'll surprise you.”

“Oh, she surprises me all right,” Wally whispers, looking out into the dark. “She never ceases to surprise me.”

He closes his eyes and leans his head against the glass.

She doesn't have any eyebrows. When she was young it hadn't mattered. She was blond and blue-eyed, with eyebrows so fair they practically disappeared against her soft pale skin. She had the face of an angel then, and Wally knows that face. As a boy, he would turn the pages of her yearbook, Brown's Mill High School, Class of 1944, and gaze down at his mother, so young and pretty, with her blond hair and dark red lipstick, smiling demurely into the photographer's lens. Wally remembers the inscriptions of the fellas who'd soon be marching off to war. “Dear Sweetie.” “Dear Angel.” When he was a boy, Wally had concurred with the sentiments: his mother
was
an angel, a vision of light and loveliness. But as he got older, the face in the yearbook and the inscriptions of the fellas could only be appreciated as expressions of camp.

She'd started penciling her eyebrows after she got married, when her hair had gotten darker and her face began to get old. She was older than most of the other mothers; kids would always ask Wally if she was his grandmother. But when she did her face she made herself look as beautiful as a movie star. Wally remembers sitting entranced, watching his mother at her vanity table. She'd open her eyes wide and arch her eyebrows high, carefully tracing them with her pencil. She'd follow that with applications of rouge, powder, and lipstick. Wally would watch her face come to life, come into its true beauty. He'd watch her transform from a tired old mother into the angel of Brown's Mill High.

Once, when he was six, Wally had snatched his mother's eyebrow pencil and drew an entire carnival of black, smudgy creatures. His mother had laughed and taped the picture up on the refrigerator. When he was sixteen, Wally had taken her pencil again—to darken his first moustache, the hairs of which, like her eyebrows, were too blond to see.

Wally's looking at his mother now as she stands in the hallway of their house, and he feels endlessly sad that she has no eyebrows. He'd come to say good-bye, one last attempt at some kind of relationship. He was on his way to the city, to college, to a new life far away from all the horrors of the past few years. But he had found her ill. She's been in bed for days, she said, coughing and wheezing. She stands in the doorway of her room, Kleenex tucked up inside her sleeve. Her robe is held together at her throat by a giant safety pin.

How can he leave? How can he leave her now?

“I'm going to make you some soup for lunch,” he says.

“No, Walter, that's not necess—” And she begins to cough—hard, wracking, dog-like sounds.

He ignores her and lights the old burner with a match, lowering the burst of blue flame to a simmer. “Please, Mother. Just go back to bed.”

He had come to say good-bye, to just spend a half an hour—but he wouldn't leave for a week. He'd call Miss Aletha later and tell her he was staying the night. And the next, and the one after that.

“I'm going to call Dr. Fitzgerald,” Wally calls down to his mother.

“Oh, no, there's no need—”

“I'm calling the doctor, Mother.”

He gets his secretary on the phone. The doctor doesn't make house calls anymore, she says, but when she hears it's Regina Day she says she's certain he'll make an exception—given how much the poor lady's been through. Wally thanks her and hangs up the phone.

“The doctor is coming tomorrow at four,” he tells her.

“Oh, thank you, Walter.”

He looks back at her. How drawn she looks. How old.

“You might want to do your face,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “I'll do my face.”

How many years had it been since it was just the two of them in the house? When Wally was a boy, his father had simply been an unwelcome visitor, an intruder who needed to be tolerated for the duration of his stays but who never, thank God, was a permanent fixture. It wasn't until Wally was thirteen that his father had come home for good, never returning to his ship. It was only then that Dad started drinking his days into oblivion, becoming increasingly nasty and sullen and bitter, only then that hell had burst up through their floorboards, destroying their home and their way of life as completely as if their furnace had exploded and the place had burned to cinders.