The Bear in a Muddy Tutu (3 page)

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

“Here, I’ll do it
.
”
He was
immediat
ely
relie
ved.
She tore open the wrapper with her teeth and pulled out
a
condom, reaching down to expertly rol
l 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
str
ok
ed
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 t
wo had passed. “Like this,
”
she
pu
lled
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
!
”
H
e 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 tr
ied
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.

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 of
f
the southern New Jersey coast.

Bill Wayne passed a big surfboard shop with pictur
es of beautiful women and muscular young men
plastered to
its
gigantic win
dows
, 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 g
irl
yelled
through the sun
glaring windshield, inches from his front bumper
. H
is heart
thump
ed heavily at the sight of her
wonderful, bleach-
blond hair flow
ing
over he
r
shoulders
and
her white t-shirt.
Over his car hood
Billy Wayne could see
a
lime
green bikini bottom
pe
e
king 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
, B
illy Wayne slowed his car
as he approached
set
s
of tennis courts
,
pull
ing
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
want
ed
to write down the street number
for future reference
.

Billy Wayne
was
fish
ing
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
sh
a
k
ing
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
pee
ks
at
Barnegat B
ay, but the ocean remained
hidden
as the miles slowly passed.
At the far end of the island, t
he traffic thinned
. H
o
mes bec
a
m
e
mansions, and sand started to cre
ep 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
. H
e’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
-
y
ear
-
o
ld 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.
H
undreds, 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
-m
out
hed b
oy.
”
She
s
lapped 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 green 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 whe
n you got married, like it or not
.
The Harley was the real loss
. B
y
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 t
he 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, de
positing
their lives on an overgrown front lawn.
The man who towered over the little boy, spitting out
curse
s at everyone from the mailman to the baseball pitcher o
n
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 t
han being s
ent 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
kn
o
w 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
dr
agg
ed
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
.