The Bear in a Muddy Tutu (18 page)

The sun was an orange disc sliced in two by leftover jet engine contrails
that
were slowly breaking apart in the westerly breeze. The low sun always turned the sand a deeper shade of pink. Morgan had learned in science class
that the pink color
was
due to
the red skeletons of single-cell animals called Red Forams, tiny critters living beneath the coral reef. One of the boys from her class who boogie boarded on this beach had claimed it was whale blood from the great whale graveyards. Just like elephants, he had sworn, whales
came
to Bermuda to die.

“Look around
.
”
T
he boy
grabbed
up his board after they
shared the same small wave and
were
swept onto the beach. “Everything comes here to die. Dead crabs, dead jelly fish.
”

“Even the seaweed comes here to die
.
”
H
e
scooped
a big handful of dripping seaweed, whipping it ahead of them into the surf.

When the other kids saw
that
the boy was talking to the creepy little girl who talked to birds
,
he raised his voice
.
“And stay off my waves, Cuckoo Bird.
”

Morgan hoisted her board by the coiled rubber leash and flopped down the beach in her swim fins. Most kids hated walking in flippers, but Morgan didn’t mind at all. She felt very bird-like and figured it was good practice for when she died, especially if she became a pelican. There were about twenty kids on boogie boards, and Morgan made her way to the far end of the lineup before turning and stepping back into the surf. She lunged forward, splashing down like a Red-breasted Merganser, which was a silly looking duck whose head reminded her of the Roadrunner cartoon. She’d seen two Merganser drakes on this beach, neither of which were her father.

Morgan and her mom were living in the same rental as wh
en they arrived five
years earlier on Somerset Island. The island accounted for
a
large portion of Sandys Parish, which was the westernmost of nine Bermuda parishes. She was just finishing up the fourth grade at Sandys Primary School, where she was one lone student among two hundred kids
,
age
s
four to eleven.

The only good thing about school was art class, which was the on
e
place
where
she wasn’t given a hard time for drawing pictures of birds. Any hint of paint on her
narrow
bedroom walls was hidden by a gallery of her bird drawings, from the graceful Mute Swans
—
which really did talk
—
to a variety of black and white images of diving and darting Shearwaters.

Morgan’s collection also included a Brown Boobie, which she sometimes imagined she’d become when she died. The boobies she watched on the rocks at the south end of her regular beach were amazing fliers, but lousy at taking off. They would stumble forward, almost falling over their big webbed feet
,
trying to get themselves airborn
e
. Morgan
could definitely sympathize. A b
oobie needed a good strong wind and a high perch for an easy takeoff. The coolest thing about these birds with small wings and long tails was how they
fished f
rom the air. They
spotted
a flash of silver below and
went
into dive bomb mode, plunging into the ocean at incredible speeds. It took her breath away each time. She sometimes thought she’d like to do that to the kids who were mean to her, just dive bomb them from above.

The little blue house she shared with her mom was on
No Name Lane. It was just a few
blocks
from the west
—
facing
windward
beach
,
where Morgan
went
after school every day until the sun dropped into the ocean. Her school was a ten minute walk in the opposite direction, away from the beach and most of the interesting birds. The whitewashed stone school was home to dozens of Laughing Gulls, obviously named for their high-pitched call that sounded like a person laughing. But it didn’t sound like a good kind of laugh to Morgan. It sounded more like the mocking laughter of the kids who picked on her.

Morgan paddled her boogie board out through the small swells, aiming directly at the big orange sun. It was getting late, but she didn’t want to go home yet. Here, far enough away from the other kids, she felt a little closer to her dad. Maybe he could find her better out here, away from the buildings and clutter. Morgan
kick
ed in a slow circle with her swim fins
,
as she and her board lifted up and over the undulating sea. She was well beyond the place where you could catch even the outside breakers, but this was her favorite spot. And this was feeding time for the fish, so the littlest ones were jumping up out of the water to escape the bigger ones. Her mom didn’t like her in the water this time of day, but one of Morgan’s teachers had told them the only shark attacks
happened
on the eastern beaches, and those were very rare.

Morgan had seen a Galapagos shark once, but her teacher had already explained they were just bottom feeders
that
ate small fish and octopus.
T
he shark’s big dorsal fin had broken the surface ten feet away and scared the
bejeebers
out of her at first. It had circled her boogie
board
twice,
probably
just to check out the bobbing girl, finally sweeping under the water like a diving submarine.

Even though Morgan didn’t want to be eaten by a shark, she wasn’t afraid to die. She’d decided it wasn’t going to be much different than her long afternoons and evenings out here beyond the breakers. Instead of wings, she had her swim fins. Instead of the breeze, she had the ocean to ride.

And anyway, she’d be able to find her dad much easier once she became a bird.

Billy Wayne was on a mission
as he
sped up Great Bay Boulevard with Bill Cosby
Jell-O
Pudding commercials dancing in his head. He’d loved the television program about Cosby’s family, the smart and funny mother and father. Mr. Cosby could tease and tease, but it was never hurtful. And all those children, with big white smiles and bright clean clothes, running around that expensive house. It hurt Billy Wayne when his mother called the family the nastiest word possible.

Billy Wayne
didn’t know what made
the Haitian women outside the
Laundromat
so
evil and
menacing, even
though he tried his best to ignore them,
while the same color family on television were people he admired.

“Komon ou ye?
”
the women taunted, deep and guttural, each time he’d walk past on his way to the dollar store. They all spoke the words, one by one, some evil voodoo chant.
E
ven if he’d known they were politely asking how he was,
he
wouldn’t have
felt
any less intimidated. The tone of their v
o
ices was what scared him the most. And those glowering white eyes.

Maybe if you sold pudding in commercials you weren’t capable of hurting people? Billy Wayne sensed
that as a cult leader
he should know these things, but his mother’s hatefulness confirmed how he felt when the women spoke their evil language as he walked p
ast. Billy Wayne had been warned
about
their
voodoo
and knew to keep moving
.

Bill Cosby wouldn’t
believe in
voodoo. No
,
sir,
Bill understood
what made the world a better place,
so
it was no surprise at all
when Billy Wayne’s book mentioned
vanilla pudding.

Step number forty-one
from
How
t
o Become
a
Cult Leader
i
n 50 Easy Steps
:
“Keep plenty of vanilla pudding in the cupboards. Comfort foods are called just that for a very good reason. Vanilla pudding is easy to whip up and a delight for all ages. Just a small cup of vanilla pudding for
each
to share after a difficult and trying day will
create
a sense of fellowship among even your most skeptical
followers
.
”

Billy Wayne drove his Dart back to West Tuckerton, pulling right up to the same group of teenage boys who had previously sent him on the wild goose chase in search of the defunct sporting goods store. He hurried past them into the convenience store and scooped up every box of vanilla pudding
they had
. He dropped the armful on the counter and went back for a few boxes of chocolate. Billy Wayne decided chocolate was a clever touch and was proud of himself for going above and beyond what the good book said. He also just happened to prefer chocolate.

On
Billy Wayne
’s
return
trip
, he marveled at how fast the island had been transformed. From the top of
the rickety bridge, he
looked out over the two large main tents and the collection of smaller
ones
being staked down. Away from the shadow
s
of the casino
s
, the tents seemed huge
,
and Billy Wayne’s mind wandered to the wonderful and fiery speeches he’d give under the spotlights usually reserved for the ringmaster and performers. A nervous thrill ran through his body as he drove slowly down the gravel lane, careful not to spook the zonkey being pulled along behind the pretty young contortionist at the end of a thin nylon rope. The zonkey, as Billy Wayne had understood it, was the result of cross-breeding a zebra and a donkey. The
resulting
configuration was somehow easier to ride.

The contortionist
,
Amira
Anne
,
stirred something deep inside Billy Wayne. He’d witnessed her act under the big tent back in the casino parking lot and found himself shamefully aroused.
She was one of the performers who entertained the early ticket buyers.
Billy Wayne
had been
perched in the second row of one of the three sets of bleachers when
Amira
had entered under a single spotlight to slow, sexy Middle Eastern music. She
peeled
off a full-length feather coat to reveal a glossy,
skin
-
tight blue one-piece. Under the glaring light, Billy Wayne
was
able to
see every curve and every niche of her wonderful body as she easily hoisted herself onto a platform in the middle of the ring.

Amira
fac
ed
Billy Wayne as she lowered her chin to the wood base and stepped
backwards
over her own body, giving
him
and the
small
crowd a full
-
on view of her blue crotch. He adjusted his trousers to hide what his mother had called Satan’s Little Pink Snout as the contortionist
got
to her feet and brought one leg all the way behind her head. Oh, God, Billy Wayne sighed
as she leaned forward to grab the handle on top of the
metal bar. The girl lifted herself by one hand and
d
id
a split over her head, rotating slowly.

Billy Wayne nearly exploded, tiny lines of sweat running from below each
uneven
sideburn, hands shaking. He
wasn’t
able to
look away from the girl
and
tried
not
to
think about all the miserable chores and humiliation Momma had inflicted upon him after she’d caught him playing with Satan’s Little Pink Snout
as he
s
at
on the toilet when he was twelve.

Billy Wayne smiled out the car window at the pretty blond girl leading the
zonkey
down the road and was startled when she smiled and waved back.

“We got a tent all set up for ya,
boss
,
”
one of the ride mechanics told Billy Wayne, as he climbed out of his Dart with his two plastic bags full of pudding. “There’s a pretty nice cot
that
used to belong to Enzo. It kinda smells like piss, but it’s real comfy.
”

“Thank you,
”
Billy Wayne said to the man whose hands and arms looked to have been stained black from years of grease and a lack of soap. “Oh, and would you please pass the word around that I’d like everyone to gather in the
first
main tent in an hour? I have a few things I’d like to say.
”

“Yeah, sure
’
nuff,
boss
.
”

“Wait,
”
he called to the mechanic who’d already turned to work on this new duty. “Please let everyone know there will be vanilla pudding.
”

Billy Wayn
e
had now relegated a task and
announced
a magnanimous offering
—
the vanilla pudding
—
so
he was feeling on top of the world as he went in search of the cook tent. There, he relegated another task, then went back to his new home
,
set up by the mechanic.

The round tent was red and yellow canvas, with twenty stakes around the perimeter, and a center pole that gave him a ceiling more than twice his height. At least four hay bales had been cut loose and spread around the mucky floor. The deep hay made it necessary to high step across to the cot, but he figured it would get trampled soon enough.
With just the bed and one low wooden stool, t
he space seemed huge.

Billy Wayne hadn’t been to church in more than a dozen years,
ever
since his mother had gotten too fat to leave the house. And even then, keeping her company was the only reason he had gone. To Billy Wayne, it all sounded like guilt and anger. It was fire and brimstone speeches from an old man in a white collar and a pressed black shirt. But his opinion was only based on little snippets from the Methodist minister. Billy Wayne had perfected the art of falling asleep with his eyes half open, and the dimwitted look it projected wasn’t particularly unflattering to him; as a teenager and young adult, Billy Wayne spent most of his time appearing to be the imbecile son of the really fat woman. People tended to steer clear of the pair, and that was fine. Church went faster when you didn’t stand around talking afterward.

But behind those half-closed, imbecile eyes, Billy Wayne was laying out a plot. Years before stumbling across his
How
t
o
Become
a Cult Leader
book, he’d watched a dark documentary about a cult living somewhere off in a jungle. The followers of this man were recruited through their faith in God but were then shown the real deal. That’s just how the narrator put it: “The Reverend hooked them with scripture and then they were shown the real deal.
”

It gave Billy Wayne goose pimples.

The leader and his followers had committed mass suicide, so some of the details were sketchy and blanks had to
be
filled in. But the documentary producers had interviewed several people who had defected before things got out of hand. Suicide having been the ultimate fate of the cult leader distressed Billy Wayne when he first watched the show, but he knew in his heart of hearts it would never come to that with him.
N
o matter how terrible and desperate things got, he was far and away too cowardly to kill himself. No way
that was ever
gonna happen.

The former members did their best to describe the cult leader’s motivations, as they saw them. Billy Wayne struggled to understand what m
ust be the important parts, where
cults were being compared to communism. The members talked about how there were no social classes, with no repression and common ownership of all property and possessions. Decisions on governing policies
were
made democratically and everyone
had
an equal vote, including the cult leader.

And there was the tricky part, Billy Wayne thought then and struggled with now. It was a conundrum even his How To book didn’t really have an easy answer for, and Billy W
ayne craved easy answers. How
could
you
be acknowledged as th
e leader in a society of equals?
He suspected they must have covered it somewhere in the documentary, maybe
during his trip to
the
toilet
. He regretted
not
record
ing
the show. He might have found the answer.

Billy Wayne had never led anything, not even the Pledge of Allegiance in homeroom, even though the teacher had all the kids take turns. Little Billy Wayne froze up each time he tried. Most of the class mocked him with giggling and cruel words, and the teacher finally let him off the hook and
quietly
skipped over his turns. The humiliation became one more reason Billy Wayne was more than happy to stop going to school and take care of his mother’s needs full-time.

Billy Wayne also felt a connection to the cult leader profiled in the show. He
,
too
,
had been r
idiculed as a boy. Neighbors of
the leader’s childhood home claimed he’d been caught starting fires and cut
ting
the heads off cats. He then
supposedly
held elaborate backyard funerals, burying the little bodies in shallow graves. They’d called him a “weird little boy, bound for no good
.
”
Billy Wayne figured the neighbors could have made it all up for
the television cameras. Billy Wayne had
also been accused by his own neighbors of starting fires
, as well as
trying to kill their dog. And while he did go through a stage of lighting small fires
—
didn’t every kid?
—
it was Billy Wayne’s mother who had wanted the yapping neighbor’s dog shut up once and for all. Billy Wayne truly believed he was just doing what his mom wanted when he fed the dog balled up pieces of hamburger with a bunch of fishhooks inside. The dog, though, just shit them out, which is how he ended up being accused. What kind of person pays that close attention to his dog’s turds, anyway?