Sintown Chronicles I: Behind Closed Doors (35 page)

Mack came to the final sentence of the ceremony, but suddenly paused and looked up at the starless sky. Sandra began to cry. She was not alone. Mack's voice broke as he said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” The couple embraced, both crying unashamedly as the tiny white flakes accumulated briefly before melting on their hair and shoulders.

The first carol sung was not a carol at all. It was “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."

Bo shook his head sharply, trying to dislodge the echoing chant from his brain as the chartered bus pulled away from the Reynolds High School parking lot.

“Something wrong, Bo?"

He glanced at his seatmate. “No—felt like a gnat in my ear."

Betty Elizabeth Hensley, he thought. My only companion since grade school. Why? Because she is as ugly as I am and nobody will have anything to do with her either.

He thought about his only friend. He visualized her long, poorly groomed, very thin brown hair. He glanced out of the side of his eyes to see if she managed to comb it better today. It does look better pulled straight back and fastened with a braid, he thought, but her hair is so thin I can still see her scalp. That hairdo also makes her angular face and crooked nose more prominent, poor thing. Who the hell am I to talk? He chuckled out loud.

“What's funny?” she asked.

“Damn gnat is tickling my ear,” he lied. Her brown eyes, spaced a little too closely together, and her front teeth that protruded, often resting on her lower lip, were not a pretty sight. He turned to stare out the bus window.

He breathed deeply, enjoying the smell of the bus exhaust fumes that seeped inside the slowly lumbering vehicle. Thank God I'm no longer fat, he thought, but I'm still short and my head is too small for my body. Talk about
her
nose. Think of your own huge nostrils inside that flat thing on
your
face, and those big ol’ floppy elephant ears and hair all over your body like a damn monkey. He shook his head in dismay.

“The weatherman was good to us today,” Betty said, ignoring his obvious desire to avoid conversation. “Do you remember last year's band picnic?"

She does have a pretty voice, though, and talented as hell, he thought as he turned to face her. I wouldn't mind having one of her big boobs in my mouth either, Bo grinned.

“Yeah,” he replied without enthusiasm to her question. “It rained all day."

“Bo, are you okay?"

“Sure. I just wonder why we keep going to these damn things."

More taunts from his childhood invaded his mind. He pictured his friends in years past dancing around him when his Dad called him to come in from playing to eat supper. “Bastard. Bastard. Bastard,” they would chant in unison. “Go on home Bastard. Your daddy's calling you.” Even his preacher slipped one Sunday in church while introducing him to a visiting teenager. “Let me introduce you to Bastard, uh, Bascomb Nading,” the preacher said.

Why in the world did Dad name me Bascomb? he asked himself, as he had done so many times before. Couldn't he see where that would lead? It was Betty who started calling me ‘Bo', short for Bascomb Oliver. Thank goodness it caught on.

“Bo?"

“I'm sorry, Betty. My mind is somewhere else this morning. Must be the gas fumes. Why
do
we keep coming to these things?"

“I don't know about you, but I have fun."

“You have fun? How can you possibly have fun? When we get to Reynolds Park some of the kids will head to the swimming pool. Do you think they want you to go with them? Some will choose up and play softball. Do you think they will ask you to play? When we eat, will anyone besides me sit with you?"

Her eyes watered briefly. “It's a pretty park. You and I can follow a nature trail, look at the birds and wild flowers, and talk."

“Yeah, like we always do. For my part, I'm glad we will be graduating in a few days and won't have to do this anymore."

“Well, if it makes you so miserable, why didn't you stay at home, Bascomb Oliver Nading?” she pouted.

“Because I knew you were hell bent to come to this thing and I didn't want you to be alone,” he replied.

“Bo, that's sweet,” she cooed. She reached for his hand but he pulled it away.

Not so sweet, you ugly thing, he thought. I don't love you. I feel sorry for you.

There were many groups visiting the city park that Saturday morning. As the chartered bus unloaded in the parking lot, a crowd of cigarette puffing youths, all clad in denim jackets, sat or propped on car hoods and trunks watching the bus. They saw the adults and a few students unload boxes and head for a picnic pavilion. They watched as another group headed towards the swimming pool and a larger group move in the direction of the softball field. And they watched a tall ugly girl and a short ugly boy slowly shuffle towards the nature trail.

“That's two ugly ducklings,” one of the onlookers observed as he expertly flicked his filter tipped cigarette towards a passing dog.

“Yeah, but did you see the size of her tits?” a companion replied, grasping his crotch in an obscene gesture.

“Bo, cheer up,” Betty urged when they had followed the trail a hundred yards. “Granted, we're not popular. Who can blame them? I scare the hell out of myself every time I look in a mirror."

She laughed, but he didn't find her observation humorous.

“Looks are not everything,” she continued. “We're both bright, talented and young. We have long lives ahead of us. It's up to us to minimize our weaknesses and maximize our strengths."

There goes old Sweaty Betty again, spouting her philosophy memorized straight out of some textbook, he thought.

“You're talented all right,” he responded. “Nobody can draw cartoons and caricatures any better than you. I really wish you could have taken that mail-order cartooning course."

“I couldn't afford it."

“Maybe you can after you get a job."

“Yeah, maybe."

They walked on, deeper and deeper into the heavy foliage.

“At least you got a taste of being popular,” he mumbled.

“Say what?"

“Come on, Betty. Back in the seventh grade. You sprouted boobs long before the other girls—big ones at that."

Betty blushed.

“Hell, you suddenly didn't have time for me anymore until the other girls caught up a year or so later. Boys were around you all the time and oh, how you loved to wrestle with them on the playground. You would take on five or six at a time, let them get you down and feel you up. Shit, I remember watching you from our secret place in the bushes. One day you let them take your shirt off and just sat there while everybody looked and pawed and squeezed."

“Bo,” she responded coldly. “I'm trying to forget that. I didn't know much about sex then. All I knew was that I suddenly possessed something the other girls didn't have and the boys liked it."

“Yeah, sure,” he teased.

“I remember that secret place in the bushes,” she said, smiling. “We could slip inside the bushes and sit in a leafy cave. We could see the playground, but nobody could see us."

“Yeah,” he grinned. “We used to hide in there to avoid being chosen last in whatever game was being played during recess."

“I may have let the other guys play with my boobs when they became noticeable, but you were the first to ever see them."

“I remember,” Bo laughed. “But that doesn't count. They were just little knobs then."

Betty looked at him, her eyes dancing. “I wanted you to kiss them, but as soon as your lips touched one you peed in your pants."

“Hell, Betty,” Bo chuckled, his humor changing abruptly. “I didn't pee in my pants. I ejaculated.” He felt his face coloring. “I didn't know what it was. It scared the shit out of me."

Betty looked in all directions with a gleam in her eye and stepped off the trail behind a large tree trunk. Bo followed curiously. Quickly she unbuttoned her blouse and pushed the bra up over her breasts. “Does this make up for me slighting you in the seventh grade?” she asked in the most sensuous voice she could muster while pulling her blouse open even wider.

He could not speak. His eyes locked onto the milky white softball sized mammary glands tipped with ripe strawberries. Slowly he leaned forward. She did not retreat. He kissed her left nipple, then her right nipple and gently drew it into his mouth. He moaned. “Shit!” he exclaimed.

“Don't tell me you did it again,” she laughed.

He wheeled around and rushed back to the trail. She quickly reassembled her clothing and joined him.

They paused and pretended interest in a yellow and white flower, which neither could identify.

“You had your day in the sun, too,” she said.

“Me? When?"

“Don't pretend you've forgotten the credenza."

“Yeah,” he smiled. “I'll never forget that."

Again they fell silent as each recalled the story. On another Saturday, just over a year ago, the concert band gathered on a charter bus on the way to Greensboro and the district band contest. All band members were present except the first chair clarinetist, Ned Griffith. Ned was a good musician and was scheduled to play a forty-two bar credenza in one of the pieces they were to perform. The director told the band that Ned woke up that morning with an abscessed tooth and could not play. They would have to drop the piece from their repertoire. Betty let the band director know that Bo could play the difficult passage. The director was skeptical, but as soon as the band reached the Greensboro practice room he gave Bo a chance and Bo played it with just a few mistakes. When the band performed the piece on stage, only Bo knew that he missed one note. When the curtain closed, his fellow musicians gave him a standing ovation.

“Let's go that way,” Betty said pointing to the left.

“That's not a part of the trail."

“Oh, where's your spirit of adventure?” she laughed as she pushed into the bushes.

Bo followed.

Soon she located a dry, leaf carpeted drainage culvert and they followed it down the long hill.

“How's your dad and his new bride?” she asked.

“He's the happiest I've ever seen him,” Bo replied with no enthusiasm. “He's not a garbage collector anymore you know."

“No, I didn't know."

“Yeah, they finally made him a supervisor a couple of weeks ago. He calls himself a sanitation engineer now."

“And his wife?"

“She hates my guts. The feeling is mutual. God I wish my mom hadn't died when I was born.” Immediately he regretted the comment.

They came to a grassy clearing and Betty sat down, her back to a tree, softly crying. Not knowing how to comfort her, he squatted at the opposite end of the clearing. He remembered the day Betty's mom died as if it were yesterday.

Her father disappeared shortly after the last of his four children was born. He was never heard from again. There was no choice for Betty's mom. She accepted welfare in order to survive, which to her was a humiliating disgrace. One morning towards the end of the seventh grade, Betty's year of popularity with her male schoolmates, the loud speaker in the classroom crackled and the principle's voice boomed into the room. “Betty Elizabeth Hensley, come to the office please.” Betty gathered up her books and left the room. Bo did not see her again until the start of the new school year, but he learned what happened when he picked up the afternoon newspapers for delivery on his route. After Betty left for school that morning, her mom took the other three children, including the baby, to rain-swollen Salem Creek and somehow drug them into the raging water. They all drowned. Betty wound up in a foster home.

“Betty, I'm sorry,” he finally said.

“Me too,” she replied. She hugged her knees and rested her chin on them. Several minutes passed before she looked up and asked, “What are you going to do after graduation?” She was still hugging her knees. Her short skirt had ridden backwards, revealing most of her shapely legs and dingy white panties.

“Get a job and a place of my own,” he replied instantly, sneaking a peek at her crotch while trying to go unobserved. “I can't wait to get away from that witch Dad married."

“I wouldn't mind staying with the Williams. As foster parents go, they're okay. However, the county won't give them any more money for my support after I graduate, so they say I have to move out. I've interviewed for several jobs, but the only offer I've gotten so far is from Reynolds Tobacco Company as a maid in one of the making rooms, whatever that is."

“I've asked around too. Dad says I can get on as a garbage collector, so that's probably what I'll do."

Betty nodded, looked to her left and froze, her face contorted in terror.

“Don't make a fuckin’ sound,” a sinister sounding voice commanded.

Herks, the denim clad gang who watched the band get off the bus, surrounded them. The voice came from a blond with a crew cut who was holding a pistol pointed directly at Bo. One other Herk was waving a pistol and the rest threatened the frightened couple with two-foot lengths of iron pipe.

Betty watched in horror as they gagged and mercilessly beat Bo. When he was half conscious they stripped him down to his jockey shorts and one of the Herks stomped his groin. He lurched forward and lapsed into oblivion.

They forced Betty to the middle of the clearing.

“Get your damned clothes off,” the blond demanded.

“Please don't do this,” she begged. She felt the iron bar slam into her back. She stumbled forward and someone kicked her feet. She fell to her hands and knees and the toe of a shoe sank into her stomach. She rolled on the ground clutching her belly. They dragged her to her unconscious companion. She watched in disbelief as a switchblade was popped open and Bo's underwear was cut away. She felt a hand under her skirt, probing her buttocks. When the sharp blade touched the bottom of Bo's scrotum, she blurted, “Okay! Okay! I'll do it."