The Bear in a Muddy Tutu Read online

  “Get my twenty-five dollars,” Betty whispered, low and sexy. Billy Wayne could smell the menthol cigarettes on her breath, and it made him ache, his hardness trapped against his thigh by his Wranglers.

  “It’s all there.” He shoved a wad of ones and fives at Betty, who tucked them into the front of her bra. She slipped past Billy Wayne to sit on the narrow single bed, then crab walked her way up to where his aunt’s pillows waited.

  “Come lay on me,” Betty said, rolling her stretch pants and underwear down to her ankles and giving Billy Wayne his first look ever at a woman’s privates other than his mother’s. The hair was black and full, and there were creases that he didn’t understand at all. He suddenly wasn’t sure where his penis would go, just hoped it would fit into the proper place when he climbed on her.

  “C’mon, big boy,” she cooed, and Billy Wayne unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them one leg at a time. All his underwear had been in the wash, so his penis was now hidden only by his shirttail. This is the first woman to see my penis other than Mother, Billy Wayne thought, looking down over his round belly to where his penis flashed in the space between buttons.

  Billy Wayne climbed onto the bed one knee at a time, lunging up toward Betty. Her legs were now spread wide, inviting, and Billy Wayne caught the scent of her wonderful odor. The fragrance was nothing like when he sponge-bathed his mother. Betty smelled like black licorice, and like something sour, too.

  “Put this on.” Billy Wayne nearly panicked at the little square wrapper. Put it on what? Put it on her? Was it cream? Oh, God.

  “Here, I’ll do it.” He was immediately relieved. She tore open the wrapper with her teeth and pulled out a condom, reaching down to expertly roll it on Billy Wayne’s penis.

  “Oh, Jesus.” She was the first woman, other than his mother, to touch his penis.

  “You like that, don’t you? Isn’t that nice?” Betty stroked his sheathed penis. “Put it inside me, Billy Wayne.”

  As he’d feared, Billy Wayne could not find the mark, prodding too high, and then too low, poking a place that elicited an almost angry response out of Betty.

  “Sorry,” Billy Wayne whimpered, and Betty settled matters with her right hand and a quick shift of the hips.

  “That feels good, doesn’t it?” she asked in his ear, and Billy Wayne nearly swooned again. This is sexual intercourse with a woman, Billy Wayne thought to himself. I’m having sexual intercourse.

  “You have to move,” Betty said after a minute or two had passed. “Like this,” she pulled and pushed on his hips, sending them into the slow rhythm of lovemaking.

  The bed creaked and moaned under their combined weight. Billy Wayne was nearing his first ever orgasm with a woman when his mother’s voice found him.

  “Billy Wayne!” He could still hear her words dripping with revulsion and loathing. “You get right off that dirty tramp!”

  Conditioning told him to obey, to do as he’d been told. He began to turn toward his mother, to tell her he was sorry, but it was too late.

  “Oh, God,” Billy Wayne moaned, ejaculating as Betty tried to pull out from under him, looking for something to cover herself with.

  Four years later, Billy Wayne stood with his face turned up to meet the hot spray of the motel shower, erect penis in his soapy right hand, his mother’s voice echoing in his head.

  Chapter 3

  Clean and refreshed from his long, hot shower, Billy Wayne gripped the wheel of his Dart as it rose up over the sparkling water of Manahawkin Bay. Seagulls lined the safety railing of the bridge, some squawking and preening, but most just watching the cars and trucks speed past on their way to Long Beach Island, a twenty-mile-long strip of land just off the southern New Jersey coast.

  Bill Wayne passed a big surfboard shop with pictures of beautiful women and muscular young men plastered to its gigantic windows, then had to slam the Dart’s brakes to avoid hitting a dozen people in the crosswalk under a red traffic light.

  “Fuckhead,” a teenage girl yelled through the sun glaring windshield, inches from his front bumper. His heart thumped heavily at the sight of her wonderful, bleach-blond hair flowing over her shoulders and her white t-shirt. Over his car hood Billy Wayne could see a lime green bikini bottom peeking at him as she slowly ambled toward the sidewalk and back out of his life.

  He steered the car in the opposite direction of the girl, paying close attention to the busy intersections. The ocean was off to his right, a block away, hidden by tall dunes. Where to find people in need? Bars were an obvious choice, but along this stretch of road there were only a few souvenir stores, seafood restaurants, and increasingly expensive looking homes. A few blocks later, Billy Wayne slowed his car as he approached sets of tennis courts, pulling into a diagonal spot two spaces from where an ice cream truck was parked. A dozen small children had formed an erratic line, some on tiptoes, bouncing as if they had to pee, dollar bills in their hands. Too young, Billy Wayne thought, but maybe they had older brothers and sisters not far away. Tennis courts and a regular ice cream truck stop offered decent potential for recruiting followers. Billy Wayne pushed his hips forward to dig for the pen in his pocket. He wanted to write down the street number for future reference.

  Billy Wayne was fishing deeper in his front pocket for loose change to buy an Eskimo Pie when a tap on his car roof startled him so badly he cried out, banging his knees sharply on the bottom of the steering wheel.

  The police officer had dismounted his bicycle and was scanning the inside of his car through the passenger window. He frowned at Billy Wayne. “Drive away, buddy. Just put it back in your pants and drive away.”

  Billy Wayne’s hands were shaking as he backed up. He cast one last brief, longing glance at the group of children and the colorful menu of ice cream treats on the side of the truck and pulled back into traffic.

  Off to his left he caught peeks at Barnegat Bay, but the ocean remained hidden as the miles slowly passed. At the far end of the island, the traffic thinned. Homes became mansions, and sand started to creep out into the street from tree-filled lots.

  Despite having grown up ten blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, he’d never actually been in it. Not even ankle deep.

  “Where there’s ocean, there’s sand,” Billy Wayne’s mother had complained. “No good ever comes from the sand.”

  Billy Wayne’s father had kicked him and his mother out after she’d come down with an unexplained pregnancy the year he started kindergarten. His mother, it turned out, had been impregnated during a brief fling with the pest control man who had been hired to do something about a nest of termites eating away at their house in Eatontown, New Jersey.

  Billy Wayne had an almost mystical memory of the termite infestation. He’d been standing over a wide crack in the foundation when the termites decided living with the poison wasn’t going to work out. The pudgy five-year-old had been poking a stick and killing a few of the termites that were emerging from the crack one by one, when the flood began. Hundreds, then thousands, then maybe millions of termites poured from the crack and took flight. A swarming, silent brown cloud of insects hung in the air just over his head, expanding like a great balloon, perhaps pausing to decide which way to go. Little Billy Wayne stood there looking up, mouth gaping in amazement as the mass of vibrating wings hovered like a genie just out of the bottle. After the last straggler emerged from the foundation, the cloud slowly elongated, seeming to rev up and drop into gear. With afterburners fired up, they blasted off due south, over the neighbor’s houses, disappearing somewhere among the rooftops and brick chimneys.

  “Holy shit!” he said.

  Billy Wayne’s mother was just stepping out of the kitchen door, the bug-killing impregnator right behind her. “Filthy-mouthed boy.” She slapped the back of his head. But the slap didn’t diminish what he’d just witnessed, and he could tell she wasn’t really mad, anyway. In fact, Mom was acting a little strange and loopy as she walked the bug guy down the sidewalk to a truck with a gigantic gre
en insect bolted to the roof. What kind of bugs had the man been killing in his parent’s bedroom, and why had the door been locked with them both in it? What did Mom know about killing bugs?

  A few months later, Billy Wayne and his pregnant mother would be taking roughly the same path as the expelled termites, due south toward a rental house in Asbury Park, since there was no way his father had been responsible for the fertilization.

  Nobody ever sat down and explained the truth to Billy Wayne about what had happened. What he knew now came from years of eavesdropping, sitting at his mother’s bloated feet under the kitchen table, invisible, a bored little boy listening to her long-distance confessions to relatives scattered in far away states. It was a collection of pieced together snippets of blubbering phone conversations to cousins, aunts, and nieces who seemed to welcome word of other people’s misery.

  His father had been rendered spermless from a motorcycle accident when Billy Wayne was two. He’d lost control of his treasured Harley when its front tires lost grip on a patch of sand deposited at an intersection by recent rains. It was one of those accidents that happened in the blink of an eye. One second he was fine, the next he was being held down by one paramedic, while another tried to free his crotch, which had become impaled on some broad’s Cadillac radio antennae. The prized testicles of Billy Wayne’s dad had been indelicately skewered, rendering him forever infertile.

  After a few beers, James Robert Hooduk would express the opinion, loud and clear, to everyone within earshot that it was no great loss, anyway, since the one kid he knew about was a whiny lump of shit. You had a kid because it was what you did when you got married, like it or not. The Harley was the real loss. By his second six-pack, Jim Bob vowed to cut off the piece of shit insurance agent’s balls if he ever saw him again. He repeated this vow to the mailman, also the paperboy who came to collect once a month.

  It wasn’t yelling and fighting that scared Billy Wayne, but the deafening, angry silence from his father, who loaded the boxes his mother had packed into the back of his pickup without a word. His dad drove back and forth from the rental his mother had found, depositing their lives on an overgrown front lawn. The man who towered over the little boy, spitting out curses at everyone from the mailman to the baseball pitcher on television, had stopped cussing. Billy Wayne saw it all bottled up above that burning red neck, maybe about to explode. Exploding would have been ten thousand times better, Billy Wayne knew. Better than being thrown away along with his mother. Better than being sent off to live alone in some strange house where that bug man might come find them. Billy Wayne had understood bits and pieces, enough to know that the bad man had done something terrible to his mother’s belly.

  Billy Wayne helped his crying mother pack, filling plastic garbage bags with his clothes, rolling up crayon drawings that had hung on his walls. He knew that if he was just a little older, he could have come up with the perfect thing to say to keep his father from sending them away.

  “I don’t wanna move away, Mommy,” Billy Wayne said as he dragged a bag of toys into the kitchen. The ladder from a fire truck had punctured the bag, scratching a wavy line in the linoleum, which got his mother started on a whole new round of sobbing tears.

  “We don’t got a choice.” She eyed the trail of sand that had also escaped from the torn bag. “Go make sure your closet is empty. We ain’t comin’ back for nothin’.”

  Billy Wayne’s mom hated the way sand felt on her skin, would spin a dish towel into a whip to snap every bit off his clothes and bare skin if he’d been playing anywhere near it. She complained how it kept reappearing on your kitchen floor and how it caused your husband to lose his manhood, along with every last bit of kindness.

  Allison Hooduk had confessed her sins to her sister over the phone, and Billy Wayne listened to every word, having stealthily crept around the living room couch to get the best angle for eavesdropping. They were barely settled into their new home, a small Cape Cod that had spent most of its life as a shore house rental. It was located too far from the beach to stay occupied. The distance from the beach suited Allison Hooduk just fine.

  “Jim Bob wouldn’t never have found out about the baby if it weren’t for the sand that caused him to crash and lose his you-know-whats,” his mother confided.

  Billy Wayne was confused, trying to figure out what important things his father had lost, and why no one had gone out and searched for them.

  Quiet again, and Billy Wayne craned his neck toward where Momma sat spread out on a chair at the kitchenette table, the long black phone cord coiled like a skinny snake around her arm.

  “I just don’t wanna go on livin’ most of the time,” she said. His mother’s words scared the little boy. Who would take care of him if she wasn’t livin’? His dad hadn’t even answered the phone when Billy Wayne got the nerve to call him. Even a dad that yells at you was better than one that never wanted to see you.

  After the baby came, and then died right before its first birthday, Billy Wayne watched his mother go from chubby to really fat. She stopped doing things outside and always told him she was too tired to play. She had been making Billy Wayne a grilled cheese when the baby slipped under the soapy water in one plugged-up side of the kitchen’s double sink. The other sink was jammed with greasy pans, dirty dishes, and an old rubber duck that had gotten away from the baby. His mother had been rushing from the kitchen to the living room and back; some real important event had been going on in her soap, enough that she kept shushing Billy Wayne.

  Billy Wayne had been confused by his mother’s screams and crying but did manage to pull a chair over to the stove and twist the knob to “off” before the smoldering sandwich caught fire. He wanted to tell his mom it was okay, that he’d help her make another, but she just kept crying and rocking his wet naked little brother, all squeezed up tight in her arms.

  Late that night, Billy Wayne’s mom dragged him out of his bed, and the site of her wild hair and puffy face scared him badly enough that he didn’t dare ask any questions.

  “Come,” was all she said, and he pulled on his dirty jeans and sweatshirt from the clothes pile as she turned and walked out of his room. He was tugging on one sneaker at a time, hopping on one foot then the other, as he watched her scoop up a wrapped bundle of rags from the kitchen table. She headed out the side door without looking back to see if he was done dressing.

  Billy Wayne followed her down the dark, narrow sidewalk along Second Avenue. As they crossed Emory and Grand, Billy Wayne was glad there were no cars because she didn’t seem to bother looking anywhere but straight down. They crossed Heck and Bergh streets before coming to the light at Kingsley. She never broke stride, stepping in front of a big black sedan that had to swerve to miss them, the driver hammering his horn and swearing something out his open window. His mom just kept going, and Billy Wayne could now hear the waves and see the low clouds that were lit by the reflecting street lights along Ocean Avenue.

  Clutching the bundle of rags to her chest, Allison Hooduk led her son across the last patch of pavement and onto the deep sand. Halfway to the water, she dropped to her knees with a whimper. Billy Wayne sat down next to her, frightened for his mother, still not knowing what she was holding, but knowing it must be mighty important to have made her come down into the sand. Mighty important.

  “Dig a hole, Billy Wayne,” his mom finally said in a voice he didn’t recognize. It was like the croaking of a frog, all thick and wet. But Billy Wayne obeyed. With his small hands, he pulled sand toward him in great scoops between his legs.

  A half-hour later, exhausted, his hands burning and stinging from the coarse sand, Billy Wayne could dig no deeper. He’d reached wet clay about four feet down.

  “I can’t go no more,” he whispered through dry lips, as he stood in a hole up to his shoulders. He was thirstier now than he’d ever been in his life, and his back ached like crazy.

  “Come on out.” His mom reached to pull him up. Allison Hooduk laid the bundle gently in the sand
in front of her and slowly peeled back the layers of baby blankets to expose the impossibly white face of her youngest son.

  “Is he dead, Mom?” Billy Wayne asked in a hushed voice, crowding against her shoulder to look down at his brother. His throat was raspy and dry, and it hurt to swallow. His brother looked like a sleeping doll, except that his eyes were open just a little bit. Billy Wayne had a sudden urge to reach down and push them closed but was afraid to touch him.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she answered. A pair of seagulls circled overhead, probably checking to see if there might be an early breakfast down there.

  “You want me to put him in the hole?”

  “Yes, put him in the hole.” She covered the baby’s face back up. “Put him all the way down, real careful.”

  Billy Wayne did as he was told, laying his baby brother at the bottom of the hole, on top of the wet clay, small avalanches of sand cascading over the sides as he worked. The baby fit perfectly at the bottom, without any cramming, and Billy Wayne was relieved about that. He’d feared having to bend his little brother to make him fit.

  “Go ahead.” His mother indicated she wanted him to push the sand down and fill the hole.

  “What do we do now?” Billy Wayne asked, but she was already turning away, struggling to her feet. “Momma?”

  “You just finish up.”

  Billy Wayne hurriedly pushed the sand into the hole, not wanting to be left alone out there by that dark ocean and all that sand. He was almost in a panic as he swept the last bit flat, jumped to his feet and started running back toward where he thought his mom would be. His feet kicked up sandy rooster tails as he made his legs go as fast as they could. The feeling of sinking started to overwhelm him. The sensation of being pulled down by the sand, or something underneath the sand, drew yelping cries from the little boy, who was terrified of being sucked down and buried like his brother.