Sam Wilson, the hero

toli-a:

(see end for notes)

Sam never saw himself as a hero – not even when his father
spat the word at him, the night Sam’s family took him out for dinner to
celebrate his summa cum laude and
discovered he’d applied for the USAF instead of the MA/PhD.

“Just an act of rebellion,” his mother said, because Sam’s
mother had fifteen books on the ‘feminine in the masculine’ and ‘understanding
Oedipal mirroring in a post-structural world’ and she’d written the last three.
“Be glad he didn’t join a gang, Gerald.”

Sam was handpicked by the government halfway through Basic Training,
plucked from ranks of exhausted young men and one woman – the creation of masculinity through the oppression of the feminine,
his mother would have said – and his new CO clapped him on the shoulder. “Your
parents must be proud,” he said, and Wilson didn’t bother to inform the man
that his parents expected him to come home with tattoos and bricks of cocaine.

He went home with a tattoo, the Falcon unit crest over his
bicep, virtute alisque above it, No One Comes Close in the scroll below.
His father sniffed and went back to his medical journals, and his mother asked
if there had been a ceremony, perhaps some ritual consumption of alcohol in
this process of manhood.

Sam’s mother had sat them all down with articles on womanhood
when Sam’s older sister got her first period. They had celebrated the new stage
in her life and each handed her something useful to help her on her path –
Celeste had muttered to Sam that new
parents would be useful, but no one else heard – and Sam had never been so
glad to be a boy, until his mother had suggested they hold a similar ceremony
for everyone’s sexual awakening.

Reilly, though. Reilly was always meant to be a hero.
Michael O’Reilly was built like Captain America, over six feet tall with dark
hair and a broad grin, bright eyes that crinkled at the corners even when he
wasn’t smiling, dimples in his cheeks and a booming voice. There was something
about Reilly’s face that made people take a second look, that kept the whole
base staring for a little too long.

Reilly had designed the tattoos; he’d enlisted fresh out of
high school, five years in to Sam’s one, planning to fly until his wings or his
heart gave way. His older brother had joined the Marines, like their Dad, and
Reilly had gone for the Air Force to honor the grandfather who’d died over Nazi
Germany. (At least, that’s what he told everyone who asked. After meeting
Reilly’s older brother, Sam’s degree in psychology and Dr. Annette Cole Wilson’s
books suggested that Reilly had joined the Air Force to harass his water-bound
brother from the sky.)

Sam went home with Reilly for Thanksgiving the second year,
because the first year Reilly had talked nonstop through long days in theater
about his mother’s pie, and the Wilson family didn’t celebrate holidays that
reified the genocide of minorities. (In fourth grade, Sam’s teacher had asked
them to write an essay on Valentine’s Day, and Sam Wilson had argued that it
glorified violence done to corporate Italian bodies. Ms. Kupperman had not been
impressed.) Mrs. O’Reilly had met them at door, completely dwarfed by her
husband’s bulk and her American sons.

Embarrassingly, Sam had stood there with his mouth open for
longer than the son of Drs. Cole Wilson should have, shocked to see Reilly
sweep the tiny, smiling Asian woman into his arms and shout, “May!” (It was
another year and several more dinners before Sam learned that Mrs. O’Reilly’s
name wasn’t ‘May,’ and that he’d been calling Reilly’s mother ‘mẹ’
since they’d first met.)

“I told you my parents met in ‘Nam,
birdbrain,” Reilly laughed, taking Sam’s speechlessness with his usual grin. “What
did you think I meant?”

“I thought she was a nurse!” Sam
defended himself, and felt his cheeks heat up when Mr. O’Reilly winked and
said, “Oh, son, she was.”

It turned out that Mrs. O’Reilly made a mean Thanksgiving
dinner and seemed unconcerned with the commemoration of cultural extermination.
“It’s a good dinner,” she told him, when Sam asked, patting his cheek and
spooning more gravy onto his plate. “All my kids home. I show you pictures
later, my boys in school play. Mike was big turkey.”

Michael O’Reilly had indeed been a large turkey in his first
grade play. Michael O’Reilly had been a hero, from the insults he had fought as
a child – Reilly and his brother on the playground, slant-eyed kids with the mother
who couldn’t talk right, just like Sam had been the black kid in his private
school, the kid that didn’t know how to be black when their mother made them
volunteer at the youth center when he was a teen – to the wars he had tried to
end at just eighteen.

The thing about heroes, though? They never stick around long
enough to collect the medals they earn. Sam had stood on the stage next to
Reilly’s brother, both of them buttoned into their military best and choking
for air, the wrong Reilly accepting the cold, metallic honors his little
brother had earned while their mother sobbed against Mr. O’Reilly’s shirt.

Sam meets Steve Rogers in July, goes on the run a week
later, phones home from a burn phone to let his parents know he’s all right.
Annette Cole Wilson wants to know if this rebellion is to reinforce the
boundaries of masculinity in a militaristic setting, and Gerald Wilson tells
them to stop by and stock the first aid kit before they go.

In November, he puts down his gun and shakes off his wings
and brings the team to mẹ’s. “Where
are we going?” Steve asks, broad shoulders and a hero’s bright eyes.

“To look at some pictures of a big
turkey,” Sam tells him, rubbing at the wings of his tattoo. “And eat some pie.”

Mrs. O’Reilly meets them at the door,
light as a feather when Sam scoops her into his arms, a soft smile for the pack
of fugitives behind him, vivid aubergine lipstick and her son’s twinkling eyes.
“You stay for dinner,” she commands, beckoning them in, reaching up to pat Sam
on the cheek, rubbing her thumb at the damp spot under his eye. “All my kids
come home.”

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