by Meany, John
On this occasion, she gazed at her reflection in a small handheld mirror, which had a silver handle.
“What about prison?” my mother asks.
The bad lady scowled, arched her eyebrows wickedly. “Bridgette, don’t concern yourself with prison,” she advised. “Worry about God. In the end he is the final judgment.”
Bridgette was my mom’s name. With her long brown hair spilled in tatters over her face, she sat in candle light, at her wooden desk, penning her greeting cards. Or at least my mother had been writing her greeting cards before she had picked up the mirror; the notepad that she jotted her poetic verses down on lay spread out in front of her.
A stick of mango incense burned, the sweet aroma floated idly in the air. Protruding from a ceramic Smiley face mug, which was next to the notebook, were several sharpened black pencils. From the nearby stereo music played softly, a unique style of composition that you would never hear on mainstream radio. No, this music had a creepy-sounding organ, a guitar, and a spellbinding drumbeat, with mysterious people chanting unknown words in the background, which reminded me of a weird religious ceremony.
“Is what you’re telling me his will?”
“Yes,” the bad lady concurred. “The order I just gave you comes directly from the highest angel. Sin brings sorrow. Nancy Sutcliffe is an evildoer; you must do what is right in the eyes of the father.”
Suddenly, I accidentally bumped my elbow against the bedroom door, causing the hinges to creak somewhat. I got lucky though. My mom, who, at the moment, wore a black satin robe, and the bad lady were too busy with their conversation to notice. Also, I think the strange music camouflaged my noisy blunder.
The way the candlelight radiated on my mother’s face made her resemble a ghost. Her eyes looked incredibly spooky. The dim, orange candlelight also put eerie shadows on the wall and ceiling.
“I should have paid closer attention to Billy,” my mom says, shaking head her. “Maybe it’s my fault.”
“How can it be you fault?” the bad lady inquires. “Or your son’s fault?”
My mother sparked a cigarette, which she had gotten from the desk drawer. Then with quivering hands, she nervously inhaled the smoke. “I’ve been trying to raise him the best I can.”
“This has nothing to do with how you raised him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Even though the world is full of sinners,” the bad lady continued to lecture, “you can’t keep the boy locked up at home twenty-four hours a day.”
“I know. That would be impossible.”
“And when a sinner like that pedophile Nancy Sutcliffe does what she did, there is no excuse. That woman needs to pay. Now, because of her sick, twisted fetish, Billy might be scarred forever . . . So tomorrow, you take care of it.”
“I will.”
“You’d better Bridgette. Remember, it‘s the way it has to be. And if you don‘t take care of it, I will.”
I never knew what to make of it when my mom spoke to the bad lady. However, this particular conversation frightened me, I mean really frightened me. Gave me the chills deep down inside and caused goose flesh to break out all over my skin. That was one thing about the bad lady that I never understood, she always focused on punishment.
I think many of my mother’s problems stemmed from my father walking out on us. I wish I could remember him so that I had more to go on. My mom always made my Long Lost Daddy out to be a villain. I did not want to think of him that way. It seemed unfair. Yet the more time went by without him trying to reconnect, the harder it became for me not to think he must have been a jerk.
Someone once told me that if a man falls out of love with his wife, and decides that he no longer wants to live with her that man should at least remain a part of his child’s life.
That made sense to me because I did not get why my daddy would never come to visit me, or call on the phone; write me a letter, send me birthday or Christmas cards or presents, nothing. The sad thing was if I walked past him on the street, or saw him at McDonalds or somewhere, I would not even know who he was. Nope. My biological father would not know who I was either. Although I presume in his case, it would not matter. Since he did not like my mother, that most likely meant that he did not like me much either. I don’t know why. Other than being born, I never did anything to him.
Now, as I tiptoed back down the murky hallway, returning to my room, I heard my mom still talking. You might be wondering how long these discussions between her and the bad lady normally lasted. Well frankly, it was always different. Sometimes their conversations would be pretty short, only a couple of minutes, whereas other discussions might drag on for ten or fifteen minutes. It would depend on what they were talking about. If the topic was, say serious, like this one about Nancy, that’s when the chats would be longer. With the bad lady usually getting pissed off and spouting her rules.
Anyway, after carefully closing my door and turning off the light, I climbed back into bed, threw my blanket and cool white sheets over my face, yet found that I could not sleep. There were too many thoughts galloping through my brain.
As expected, I began to think about Nancy again. I did not want to be angry with her. Even though I now knew that what we had done had not only been clearly inappropriate, it had also been a serious sin against God.
Since I could not sleep, I sat up, found my tiny flashlight, and then commenced to leaf through the pages of one of my Spiderman comic books, hoping to distract myself.
Outside the window, I heard cars occasionally pass by. As well, as kids on bicycles. That happened a lot during the warm months.
There was a Seven Eleven up the road. Many teenagers that lived in town, high school kids, hung out at there at night drinking Slurpees and eating nachos with cheese, while shooting the crap, making up ridiculous stories about how many hot chicks they had supposedly been with. There wasn’t much else to do in Hampton, other than maybe go to the mall or take in a movie.
CHAPTER 10
All of a sudden, the phone rang.
“I have to get it,” I heard my mom tell the bad lady, as she quickly exited her room and headed to the kitchen. The kitchen was the only room in the house equipped with a telephone. It hung on the wall next to the refrigerator.
Curious, I again jumped up out of the bed, crept over to my door, and opened it a slight crack, to find out if I could hear who had dialed our number. For some reason I thought it might be Nancy. And the idea that it might be her triggered, within, a great deal of discomfort.
“Hello?” False alarm. What a relief. It was my mom’s boyfriend Rudy. “Yeah babe, what’s up?” My mother turned the intercom on, a habit she had gotten into a while ago so that she could mosey around the kitchen and do other things. I heard the refrigerator open and then the clatter of a plate being removed from the cupboard. I wondered if my mom planned to eat the yummy slice of Boston Crème pie that Mrs. Keller had given her.
“Sorry I had to leave tonight in such a hurry,” Rudy‘s voice came over the intercom. “I had no choice, Bridgette. Timmy is on his way to Nashville first thing in the morning.”
“What, to pick up that acoustic guitar for his weekend country band?”
“So he says.”
“Well, I hope it turns out to be the instrument he wanted. Did you get the air conditioners?”
“Yes. Just now.”
“Thank goodness,” my mother replied. “I don’t know if me and Billy could have survived another night without them. This heat is unbearable. I can’t believe, at this time of night, it‘s still in the upper eighties.”
“I know. Tell me about it. I‘m drinking another orange Gatorade as we speak.”
Timmy was Rudy’s brother. A few days before the central air in our cottage had unfortunately stopped working. It started to make a funny noise and then just conked out. My mom had tried like hell to get a repairperson over. But had been told that a technician would not be able to get to the
house for at least a week. Perhaps even longer than that. Rudy‘s brother, who owned a company that sold used appliances, said, for the time being, he would let us borrow a couple of portable air conditioners that we could stick in the windows.
“Do you want me to bring them over now?” Rudy asked. “The air conditioners are in the back of my pickup truck.”
“Yeah . . . That is, if you’re not doing anything else.”
“Bridgette?”
There was long gap of unspoken words. “I‘m still here.”
“What’s the matter, you don‘t sound right?”
Based on that statement, I knew that the bad lady must have still been haunting my mom. “Sorry. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
“It’s Billy.”
“Your son?”
“Uh huh.”
“What about Billy?”
“There’s been a situation,” my mother explained.
“Situation?”
“Look Rudy, I really can’t talk about it on the phone.”
“Wait a minute. What is it, did something happen to him?”
“You could say that.”
“Is he okay?”
She sighed. “I just told you Rudy, I really don’t feel like talking about it on the phone. I’ll tell you what’s going on when you get here.”
“All right. I’m on my way.”
They hung up, forcing me to hurriedly shut my door and leap back into bed. The floorboards creaked, cracked, and groaned.
“Billy,” I heard my mother call my name. Darn! I knew she had heard those loose floorboards. Her authoritative voice sent my skittish body into near convulsions. “Is that you?”
I did not respond. No way did I plan to do that.
I lay on my side, clutching my covers tightly. As she approached to check on me, my mom’s thumping footsteps gathered strength. When she entered the room, she switched the ceiling light on. I pretended to be asleep. I felt her standing there staring at me. I struggled not to cough, sneeze, or scratch an anxious itch.
“Billy, are you awake?” my mother whispered. Now her feet made the floor whimper.
I remained as still as a sculpture, crossed my fingers, and hoped the bad lady would go away.
“I thought I heard you creeping around, Billy, that wasn’t you?”
Sure, it sounded like my mom, calm, cool, and friendly, but that did not mean that the bad lady had definitely went back to wherever the heck it was that she went when she wasn’t around.
“I guess I must have heard the footsteps of a spirit wandering around,” my mother joked, while leaning over my bed and then kissing me pleasantly on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, my little one.” She tucked me in and then clicked the light off. When she walked out of the room, she left the door partly open.
I lay there and waited for Rudy Knorr’s pickup truck to arrive. I did not need to be Einstein to know that my mom was planning to tell her boyfriend how Nancy had taken advantage of me. If you want to know the truth, that did not sit right with me.
Not at all.
The way I saw it, Rudy Knorr did not need to hear everything that went on with me. I understood my mother always needed a man’s opinion about certain things, as well as a man’s approval, or seemed to anyway. However, it definitely soured my feelings when she couldn’t keep some things to herself.
I kept thinking, Rudy isn‘t even my father, he doesn’t need to be involved in this.
PART FIVE
RUDY
CHAPTER 11
No longer content to lie under my blankets and pretend to be asleep, I waited until my mom went outside to have a cigarette on the front porch, before, for the third consecutive time; I snuck out of my bed.
After parting the curtain, I peeked out the living room window.
Aside from smoking, my mother sat on the porch sipping a small glass of Tennessee whiskey on the rocks. That’s when I realized she must have been even more upset than I already assumed, because usually the only time she drank hard liquor was when something was bothering her. For the most part the Jack Daniel’s rarely left the liquor cabinet. The same could be said about the bottles of Southern Comfort, Grey Goose vodka, and the Johnnie Walker scotch.
I watched my mom use a magazine to fan her face. The clammy heat must have been getting to her. The same with the mosquitoes. I saw her swat one on her ankle. We needed a replacement bulb for our bug zapper. I did not know how she could possibly tolerate sitting out there, while constantly being bit.
My mother’s boyfriend Rudy must have been close by when he had phoned, because it did not take long for him to get to the house. His pick-up truck had a distinct-sounding engine, like the buzz of a lawn mower. I heard him coming down the street, from probably a quarter of a mile away. He parked his maroon Ford truck in the driveway, behind my mother’s car.
You might be surprised, considering how physically attractive my mom was, by how ordinary her boyfriend looked. Some people, like me, and I guess Mrs. Keller, might even say Rudy was dang garn ugly. He had a dirty blonde mullet, a face full of scraggly beard stubble, and his crooked teeth were the furthest thing from pearly white. In fact, they were as brown as dirt, wrecked by years of heavy smoking. Usually, when Rudy got off from work he did not smell too good either. He stunk of sweaty armpits, a moldy blue cheese odor, and the automotive grease that he got all over his hands and clothing from the garage he worked at.
When he approached the cement porch and tried to give my mother, a loving kiss on the lips as he normally did when he first came over, she shied away.
“Hey, what gives?” Rudy asked, disappointed.
Thrusting a hand through her tousled mocha hair, my mom dragged long and hard on her cigarette. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says, picking up her alcoholic drink and then jiggling the ice.
“What’s going on?” Rudy sat down. He put his arm around her. “You said it has something to do with Billy?”
She nodded, stared straight ahead at the residential street. A car traveled past.
“Bridgette, what happened?”
“Billy said she-”
“What, what is it?”
“He said she touched him, encouraged him to touch her.”
Through the living room window, I could tell that Rudy had no idea what she was getting at.
“Who?” he said. “Bridgette, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“The lady who drives the Good Humor truck, Nancy Sutcliffe.”
“What about her?”
“Billy said she molested him.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly how I had put it. My mother made the situation sound a hundred times worse.
For a few seconds, Rudy looked down, and drifted into a silent coma. Much the same as when my mom had first heard about this, he too seemed to be in complete shock. “Let me see if I‘m understanding this correctly, your son told you that?”
“Yes.” My mom began to weep.
“And you believe him?”
“Of course I believe him. Why would Billy make this up?”
“Bridgette, I’m just saying sometimes kids can misinterpret things.”
“My boy wouldn’t make something like this up. He doesn’t even know what sex is. That woman is a sinner. The lowest form of scum on earth.”
As my mom sipped more bourbon, Rudy leaned over and wrapped his arms around her. He might not have been handsome or smelled good, even so I’ll admit he sure seemed to care about her an awful lot. That gave Rudy a few points in my book.
“This is unbelievable. Where did Billy say this happened, and when?”
“Today. He said it happened this afternoon, in the ice cream truck. He said the woman had him take off his shirt, to supposedly cool it off in the freezer. Then evidently things escalated from there.” My mother stood up, began to pace in front of the porch. For an instant, when she gl
anced toward the living room window, I had to duck to make sure she wouldn’t spot me behind the curtain spying. “Billy said that it all basically started when Nancy Sutcliffe encouraged him to fondle her breasts. Can you imagine that? A grown woman asking a child to feel her fucking tits? How fucking desperate can you possibly be?”
“Whoa!” said Rudy, cringing. “What are you going to do? Did you call the police?”
“What good would that do? It’s his word against hers.”
“Bridgette, you have to do something.”
“I will.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Well, for one thing, before I decide whether or not I’m going to contact child services, the child abuse hotline, or whoever you‘re supposed to call to report something like this, me and this pedophile Nancy Sutcliffe are going to have a long, long chat. Actually, after Billy told me she molested him, I called her.”
“You did? What did she say?”
“Naturally she denied that anything sexual took place. I kept pressing the issue. She didn’t want to hear it. Got pissed off and hung up on me. Cursed me out pretty bad.”
The more I heard my mom gripe about this, the more I wished that I had kept what had happened a secret, as Nancy had strongly recommended. The weird thing is, I kind of liked what Nancy and me had done. I enjoyed touching her, how it had made me all tingly inside, and I liked it when she had touched me. The way she had tried to teach me about my body. That’s why I was so confused. Yet I knew what we had engaged in must have been thoroughly disgraceful, otherwise, my mom would not have been so livid, and the bad lady would not have been on her case so harshly.