All American Boy Read Online Free PDF

remembering his Matchbox cars. He scoops them up and darts off toward his house, just as a thunderclap reverberates on the soundtrack. The wind shrieks, the rain begins to pound.
    Cut to: a gleaming kitchen with orange wallpaper and avocado green appliances. “Take your shoes off if they’re wet, Walter,” a voice says. Close-up of Wally’s mother, a tired, attractive blond woman in her forties, standing at an ironing board. She has large turquoise curlers in her hair.
    â€œAre we having a cyclone?” Wally asks.
    â€œNo, I think just a thunderstorm,” his mother replies, as if she’s disappointed.
    â€œMommy,” Wally suddenly announces. “I want to be a witch for Halloween.”
    â€œA witch?”
    â€œYes. And not a witch with a mask. I want to be a witch with a pointed hat and a long clay nose that you make for me.”
    â€œI don’t know, Walter.”
    â€œPlease?”
    The thunder gets louder.
    â€œPlease, Mommy?”
    â€œWe’ll see, Walter. Go to your room now and get ready for supper.”
    Fade to: a boy’s room. There’s a desk, a globe, and a poster of the Partridge Family on the wall. The door opens. Wally enters.
    He jumps up onto his bed. He’s listening to the roars of the thunder and feeling just a little bit afraid. What if a cyclone did pick up his house—tearing it from its cellar, ripping it out of the ground as if it were a weed, exposing a gaping, obscene hole in their half-acre lot in their quiet little cul-de-sac? What then? Mommy’s gone outside; Wally can hear the regular squeaks of the clothesline as she pulls his shirts and underpants in from the rain. What if the cyclone picks up the house while he’s in here alone? The thought terrifies. Suddenly Wally doesn’t want to go to Oz. (On the soundtrack, the loudest boom yet.) He thinks of Dorothy in the Witch’s Castle, and puts his pillow over his head.
    Judy Garland’s face suddenly fills the screen. “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again,” she says, “I won’t look any farther than my own backyard.”
    Wally had lifted his face to his mother as he lay on the floor watching the final credits roll. His mother sat across the room, at a little table, putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the Last Supper .
    â€œWhat does ‘heart’s desire’ mean?” the boy asked.
    His mother hadn’t answered him for several seconds. “I don’t know, Walter,” she finally said. “I suppose it means something you want but you can’t have.”
    Now Wally sits here on his bed listening to the thunder and thinking about Dorothy and her heart’s desire. Whatever it is—and he isn’t quite sure—Dorothy learned that it had been in her own backyard all along. He thinks of the stretch of lawn out behind his house. There wasn’t much to his backyard, just his mother’s rock garden and the three-foot-tall poplar trees his father had planted the last time he was home. Is that where it is, his heart’s desire?
    Last night, he’d slept over Freddie Piatrowski’s house, developing a terrible case of homesickness. He had really been convinced that he wanted to stay the night, lugging over his sleeping bag and sixteen issues of Action Comics , but when it got dark and Freddie’s sister Helen kept screaming upstairs, Wally started having second thoughts. Looking out the window, he saw his reflection in the dark glass, but he imagined instead he was seeing his mother’s face, the way Dorothy had seen Auntie Em in the crystal ball. “I’m here in Oz, Mommy! I’m locked up in Mrs. Piatrowski’s castle, and I’m trying to get home to you! Oh, Mommy, the hourglass is getting low!”
    Close-up of a crystal ball: inside, Wally’s mother is standing in the rain, hair pasted down around her face. A few clothespins are clasped between her teeth as