Billy (2 page)

     
The vulnerability of children could be extraordinarily intimidating. Barton wasn't a predator, he was a romantic and did not like to see himself as an exploiter. Getting close to kids also meant seeing their imperfections, which could ruin everything ... or it could be delicious.

     
On the side of this boy's perfectly white left hand there was a small brown mole. Farther up his arm there was another. These were not fatal imperfections, like Jack's relentlessly foul mouth or the black birthmark on Timmy's thigh. Rather, they enhanced the child's beauty in an almost poignant manner.

     
Watching this sensitive child play Space Harrier was like watching an angel hitting on a bottle of booze.

     
Barton moved closer. The boy's skin shone in the arcade's lurid fluorescence. It was all Barton could do not to touch the warm smoothness of his hand, to let his finger brush across the mole.

     
As the boy's Space Harrier game ended Barton put a quarter into the RPM machine beside it. This was a two-person game. In a quavering tone, he asked, "Want to race?"

     
"Sure."

     
Wonderful voice! Soft, yet richly melodious. And a real surprise: this voice was kind!

     
The boy came over and dropped a quarter into his side of the machine. He barely reached Barton's shoulder.

     
Even though Barton tried his hardest, he was bested three times in a row, which he found lovely. Nothing was said until the end, when the boy looked up at him and with a sparkle in his eye said, "Want to play for money?"

     
Barton smiled. "This is already costing me."

     
The boy laughed and went over to his dark-headed friend. A moment later the friend's brittle, sneering voice drifted back: "Just some queer."

     
The boy glanced quickly at Barton. There was apology in his soft eyes.

     
The boy's friend had, in addition to his pimples and his coal-black hair, the extended face of a horse.

     
Suddenly it hit Barton:
I'm being seen by a potential witness!
He had to get out of here, even if it meant losing the boy.

     
That was a monstrous thought! In his few minutes on RPM he'd fallen far: he could hardly bear the thought of letting the child out of his sight. But prudence demanded that he leave at once.

     
The van was stifling. He started the engine and turned the air conditioning on high.

     
The locals were all talking about how hot and dry a summer it had been. The corn was stunted, and the farmers wanted rain. Barton had learned to talk about it, too. Every morning he read the Stevensville Iowan, and when the waitress served his breakfast he might say a few words about the weather.

     
This way if she was ever questioned she would review the past few days and say, "No, officer, I don't remember anybody unusual at all." She would not say, "Gee, yeah, now that you mention it there was this guy that ate here a few times. Real quiet. Never said a word. Kept his head down."

     
Never mind waitresses, though; here was a strong, direct witness: "Yes, officer, there was this guy in the mall who played RPM with him." And then would follow the description, the IdentiKit portrait, the poster.

     
Thank God for dark glasses.

     
He pulled out of his spot and sped to the nearest exit. Once on Lincoln Avenue he headed for the Burger King. Eating would pass the time.

     
He entered the order line behind a blue Camaro. Three girls 
were in it, ages sixteen to eighteen. He wished that he could say something to them about their smoking, offer them some help with their addiction. They were all so young!

     
He watched them order Whoppers, fries, shakes, desserts. Their blond heads bobbed as they talked, the driver's skin gleamed in the sun as she worked the microphone button.

     
If he got to a child in time, he was convinced that he could transform anyone of sufficient intelligence into a cultured human being. With the right care, the soul would bloom.

     
"A Whaler and a small dinner salad with blue cheese dressing,'' he said when his turn came at the order window. "And a glass of iced tea." Not "icetea," like they all said. "Iced. Tea." In the English language it was two words.

     
As the Camaro left the takeout window he drove up and got his things.

     
With his food on the seat beside him he accelerated into traffic. He fought the desire to go back to the mall earlier than was safe.

     
Please don't leave, son.
Dad had called him that, and he enjoyed pretending to be Dad. Power was the greatest aphrodisiac.

     
He made himself go out on the interstate to kill a little more time before he attempted to relocate the child and follow him home.

     
Grueling hours of search might be necessary this time around. He just didn't know. This was all new to him. And as far as getting the boy—his idea was more a fantasy than a plan. Would it work? He had no idea.

     
Driving along, nibbling nervously at the Whaler, his thoughts returned to the boy. Wasn't that a wonderful voice? Just exceptional. And that extraordinary face. The word "handsome" did not suffice, and "pretty" was demeaning. This boy had a quality of the miraculous about him.

     
Even to glimpse such beauty was a privilege.

     
Barton himself was not beautiful and never had been, but he had made himself into a worthy soul.

     
The rich white clouds reminded him of the past. He had looked for shapes in the clouds, and had seen the Flying Dutchman there, and his mother had said, "There's a gallows and an old man hanging, and the wind is tearing off his head."

     
High summer: heat waves coming up off the fields, mirages on the roads, girls in clingy cotton dresses. His friends would ride out into the hard land, and he behind them, Fat Royal pounding his old Huffy to keep up.

     
In the heat of the day they would take comic books and Cokes down by Salado Creek and read and sip their cold drinks and talk of the matters of those days.

     
The van hummed on the highway. The Whaler tasted of plastic, as if the heat of the day had melted some of the container into the bun.

     
A summer had come when he was the only child who hadn't moved away or gone to camp or gotten too old to spend time down at Salado Creek. Eventually he'd had to face a hard fact: childhood was not eternal.

     
When the flowers had blown from the trellis in the backyard that autumn, he had become possessed by a soft, cloying anguish that had never since left him. He did not pine for his childhood because it had been beautiful. It hadn't been. What he wanted was to somehow escape the pain.

     
Alone by the Salado, he had first experienced the sort of fantasy that could still make his stomach churn with revulsion even as it stirred his desire.

     
In the fantasy he was carried naked to the creekside by the other boys. They laid him face up on the bank, with his head dangling over the water. He could see the sky above and the gently swaying cypress trees, and then they would push his head backward until it went under. Desperate, fighting the water that was forcing its way up his nose, he would be dimly aware that somebody was handling him where they shouldn't be.

     
The fantasy was wrong, it was a sin. So intense were his efforts to suppress it, more than once he imagined jamming a red hot soldering iron into his brain.

     
What he wanted now was a pure relationship with a child to prove the goodness that was in him. He could be a good father and a very special sort of a friend. He had to show that to himself. By giving joy to a child, he could heal the wounds of his own childhood. That was his great quest.

     
So on and on he went, searching for the perfect relationship 
with the perfect child. He dreamed of looking back one day and saying of that child:
I made him happy.
Then all would be well.

     
The closer the boy was to perfection, the more he brought back memories from Barton's own past: the blowing trees, the voices, the easy laughter of the old days—and Fat Royal and Let's Fuck Leaky and oh God, if only he could repair the past! The saddest memories are those that just miss being wonderful.

     
To get closer to kids he became clever in their ways. He learned to form friendships with them using a combination of kindness and firmness. He learned about their fads and fashions. He was aware of the importance of Nintendo, and of the differences between Super Mario Brothers Two and Super Mario Brothers Three. He knew all about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

     
When it was good with Timmy, the child had kissed him as he might have his own father.

     
Dad had died as quietly as a moth rising into the sky. "I love you, Dad!"

     
Barton had stood over his father's still body, and spoken those exact words.

     
At the graveside he had read one of his own poems, and Mother had said, "What a lovely thought."

     
Each Sunday since the death she put a single sprig of lilac on the grave. Her grief had been so intense for so long that it had come to seem like a sort of grim pastime.

     
Again and again Barton tried to puzzle out why he did what he did. Was it Dad's fault, or Mother's? Was it his? Had something terrible happened that he had forgotten, or was it an accumulation of little disappointments that had done it? The other children had been awfully damn hard on him. Every time he thought about it, he got
so fucking mad!

     
But he wasn't dangerous.

     
He prayed for the new little boy. "God, let him survive."

     
If only the black room didn't exist, if only he never took them there, if only—

     
A child needed him.

2.

     
B
ecause he had other things on his mind, Billy wasn't really working at Space Harrier. The American Legion was sponsoring a short story writing contest with an Iowa theme, and he intended to win it. His main inspiration was that first prize was the amazing sum of five hundred dollars.

He also had an idea. It was stimulated by a summer reading assignment recommended by Jim McLean, his English teacher. The inspiration was Kafka's
The Metamorphosis
, and the idea was that your typical Iowa farmer would wake up one morning and discover that not only had he turned into a giant bug during the night, so had all the other farmers. And they were hungry for corn.

Billy was excited about his story, so excited that he'd failed to better last night's crop of teenage records in Space Harrier.

As far as digital games were concerned, he much preferred Dungeonmaster on his Amiga computer. He was already deep in level ten and the way he computed the probabilities he had a fair chance of surviving until the game ended.

He wondered what would happen when it did. When you beat Super Mario Brothers all Mario did was lie there and sleep. Not a very big deal considering the magnitude of the achievement.

He worked alone; deep Dungeonmaster levels were too hard to crack with a bunch of kids arguing about every spell you cast, and then getting pissed off when they weren't allowed to take a turn.

Jerry Edwards was already sulking over Billy's performance 
on Space Harrier. Acing games for the brain-dead like that was boring to Billy, but to Jerry it was the equivalent of climbing Mt. Amanda herself in the backseat of her parents' Vulva station wagon.

Being an undumb kid in a place like Stevensville was even more inconvenient than it had been in the last town, Iowa City. Iowa was not a state of genius, his dad said, but it made up for it with a big heart. Whee.

At least it was better than New Jersey had been, where drug dealers were always after you, sometimes even chasing kids down and forcing them to do crack.

Dad had been fired from the school in Jersey before he was fired from the one in Iowa City. That was how Billy ordered his past: from firing to firing. Dad had a mind of his own, and was therefore canned on a routine basis.

Dad could yell and wave his arms with excitement about LaFollette and Gus Hall and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was capable of scoffing openly at everything from the CIA Charter to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a Vietnam-era travesty only he had not yet forgotten. It was all pretty embarrassing, but the way he loved the hell out of you made up for it.

"Stevensville is a very tolerant, very midwestern place," Dad said. "I hope to last at least two full semesters."

Billy had disgusted Jerry by abandoning Space Harrier in midgame. Three minutes after Jerry grabbed the controls the game over sign came floating into the foreground.

Billy whipped through level after level in Afterburner while putting his short story together in his mind. Waves of planes came at him. He jinked and jigged, dove and climbed, and thought how great it would be to be really weird like Kafka. I mean, Gregor Samsa just plain turned into a giant bug. His mother hurled an apple at him and it got embedded in his back. He was even crunchy like a bug, but too huge to step on. His family was very embarrassed.

That was such a good story. When his own family went down to Des Moines in July Billy had taken a super-sharp Xerox of Kafka's picture to have a KAFKA LIVES T-shirt made at the Shirt-works.

His story was going to just totally turn everybody's stomach which would be incredibly fun. It would be the best-written submission, he was confident of that. But would it win? Only if the judges had the courage to recognize the best. It would certainly go into the fall issue of Stevensville Junior High's literary quarterly, the Biblion. Gum-popping goddesses would read it and say, "That was really, well, sort of unfiltered." They would also say, "That Billy Neary is so outa tune."

Suddenly Billy crashed. He stared at the screen, watching the smoke rise as his jet plowed into a town. That was what you got for plotting a short story while playing a game whose moves were measured in hundredths of a second.

To cover his embarrassment he instantly turned away from the screen. He had a reputation to protect.

"You screwed up, Neary. I saw you!"

"And you're gonna tell the world."

"Naturally!"

"I'll do you a favor sometime."

"You blew level ten. I can't believe it." Jerry grabbed Billy's head, rapped hard on the top of it. "Yep. I thought so." He rapped again. "Hear that? Sounds like there's wood in there."

The headlock was pretty painful, but Billy knew to give no sign. "Implying that I'm a woodenhead. I'm crazed with laughter."

"No, man, that sound means you have a brain tumor."

"My middle name is Melanoma. If you break my neck I'll vomit all over the warts on your chest."

Jerry dug his knuckles deeper into Billy's head.

"I will seriously retaliate."

Jer ought to know that Billy's threats were on the level.

"Remember the toilet caper, boy." Billy had flushed a Baby Giant down the toilet at Cinemas Three and gotten Jerry blamed for the explosion.

"I damn well do remember it, you smug son of a bitch."

"Now, now, children don't talk like that."

"The fuck they don't."

"Let me go or I put a time bomb in Lacy's mailbox and you'll take the heat."

"Lacy's in bed with my dad."

"So are most of the other men in town. You know you can't afford heat from Lacy."

Jerry released him—not because of the threats, but because something else had interested him. "There's that queer you pussywhipped on RPM."

"That's no queer, that's Lacy's twin sister."

"Don't speak that way about our police chief. It's unpatriotic."

The stocky man's eyes slyly turned. Billy felt himself being scrutinized.

"You could probably make a couple of bucks off that guy, you let him suck you off."

"Thank you, Jerry, but I can do without your kind of money."

"Your problem is, you got no head for business."

"Give no head for business, you mean."

"Is that funny, or just dumb?"

"Brilliantly hilarious."

"Dorked out."

It was lunchtime, and Billy was hungry. His finances were so low that lunches at Burger King or McDonald's had come to seem lavish, so he decided to head home for peanut butter and jelly or—if his mother was in her gourmet mode—a grilled cheese sandwich.

Billy left the mall, unlocked his spectacularly ancient Schwinn from the rack and went pedaling off. He loved this bicycle, especially the fact that it was old and rather low-tech. Reverse chic appealed, especially in a town packed with glittered Hard Rocks ridden by kids in glittered British Knights and Nike Airs. Also, riding a plain old bike and wearing plain old clothes pleased his plain old dad.

He took the usual route home, swerving briefly into the Burger King parking lot to spy out the society, even though he was fairly sure that Amanda and the other observables hadn't heaved their butts out of bed yet, knowing their established summertime routine. Most of them would be embarrassed to do their Egg Beaters before two-thirty at the earliest.

Despite the certainty of physical abuse, he intended to declare his love to Amanda at the next opportunity. He would 
then accept the beating from Jerry. Amanda had already made an observation about the enormous Jerome that was probably fatal to Billy's hopes: "He has hair growing on both sides of his chest."

"William, my little twelve-year-old super-dork," Jer had said, "give up. She'll never buy into your girlish looks."

"I'm sure she'll love your wit, your brilliance."

"She'll love the fact that I'm thirteen and a half and I can get a hard-on that works."

"Gee, does it work a lot?"

"Only when I make scuzzbags like you chew it. Look Billy, if you talk her up somehow or other, I'll eradicate your face."

"Why so worried? Feeling insecure?"

"I like to kill guys like you, Billy. I really do. The last thing Iowa needs is more brains."

"Brains mean money, dear child." Except, of course, in a case like Dad's . . .

"I don't have brains. I come from a dumb family. My dad can hardly even run an automatic elevator. That's why we live in a little town, because there aren't any around here. But he owns a piece of this mall and a piece of the Sears mall and about six thousand acres of corn. And never forget, schoolteacher's son, that he is on the Board of Ed."

"Which explains why the Board of Ed has nothing to do with brains."

"Why should it? Clearly, school isn't about learning. It's about winning basketball games."

"Will I have a sense of humor too, when my hard-ons start working?"

"They never will, junior. They never will."

So it went. The day would probably come when Amanda would forsake Jerry, but not for baby-faced Billy Neary with his old bike, old car, old clothes and cheap Walkman.

He would never admit this to Jer or any other living soul, but he was beginning to wonder what it was
like
to reach puberty. He knew all about it of course, thanks to his father's stentorian and incredibly embarrassing sex education "conversations." But what was it
really
like?

It was just noon when Billy wheeled into his driveway.

A single place was laid at the red Formica table that domi
nated the kitchen. Mother had indeed produced a grilled cheese sandwich, but it was for his older sister. He slid half of it into his mouth while an unsuspecting Sally was rummaging in the fridge for some Hi-C.

"You thieving creep!"

"Slip of the tongue." He laid open his cheese-filled mouth. "Excellent cheddar," he said.

She took a swipe at him with the ice-cream scoop, which had been lying in the sink. Then she stared at it, her eyes widening with horror. "My Heathbar Crunch!" she gasped and ripped open the freezer. "Dad," she yelled, "you've been eating my Heathbar Crunch that I bought with my own money!" Throwing the ice-cream scoop over her shoulder she flounced out. "I hate men!"

Dad had not stirred from watching the Orioles slowly if ineptly defeat New York. "One to nothing and it's the top of the ninth," he commented as Billy passed through the den. He was working on a huge bowl of Heathbar Crunch.

"I ate her lunch. You've got her dessert. Retaliation is possible."

"She's scared of me, I'm much too large and awful. She'll take it all out on you."

"I'm going down to the basement to work on my short story."

"Have a plot yet?"

"Iowa farmers turn into giant bugs."

"Didn't I read that headline on the Weekly World News down at the A&P?"

"Dad, it's based on Kafka."

"Throw Kafka at the American Legion. They're sure to give you five hundred bucks for that."

"Well, it would be fun to write."

"What about doing something topical? Flag burning, for example?"

"I'm scared of matches."

"My God, a player has hit the ball. Oops, it's a foul. Kind of an interesting half-second there, though."

Billy was careful to lock the basement door against a raid from his sister.

Sitting down before his beloved computer, Billy decided that 
his day was going pretty well. It was afternoon and the basement was cool and there was a large Butterfinger hidden behind his computer bench. There was also a beer there, but that was part of another scenario. Bring Amanda down, impress her with his ultra-boss computer, sip a little brewski, then, well, connect faces. Billy Neary and his Flying Fantasies. He sighed, then flipped on the computer and loaded Pro Write from the hard disk. The white screen stared at him. "It was a dark and stormy night," he wrote. Nah, not cliched enough to satisfy the American Legion.

"When Bob Hughes woke up one morning from dreaming about his corn, he found himself changed in his bed into a huge corn borer. All that was left of that farmer was his toupee."

'Oh, man, this would be an awful lot of fun, but Dad was right that it wouldn't win the American Legion contest.' He hit erase and sat staring at the blank screen.

"Young Freddy Krueger had a deep love of his country, and especially its beautiful flag."

A yuckish story idea, yes, but Dad had closed the loan window in July and Billy was down to smelling other people's breath after they ate their hamburgers. His last ever candy bar was two feet away from his trembling fingers. He had to write a winner.

"He would defend his flag with his life. To a true patriot like Freddy, it meant everything. And everything else, too."

Maybe he'd better change the Freddy Krueger. They probably wouldn't make the connection to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but why take the risk? He'd call his character Martin Bormann. They'd never in a million years pick up on the fact that he was one of Hitler's dearest, sweetest thugs.

While he stared at the screen, Billy's hand moved toward the Butterfinger.

The thing was, he wanted to have fun. A story about the flag was not fun; it was a chore. He killed ProWrite and played around for a while with the birdsong he had recorded the night before. All summer he'd been trying to get that bird to reply to him. Whenever there was enough moonlight to keep it awake, it sang on the wire behind the house. Billy sang back, but so far the bird had never responded. He had been record
ing its song in hopes of better imitating it. Now he was comparing the digital image of the birdsong to his own efforts. Slowly but surely he was getting closer to the bird's notes. It would be so extreme to have a conversation with a bird. Of course, it would just be sounds. He didn't know any vocabulary. He could imagine it translated:

Bird: "The moonlight-t-t-t is so sw-e-e-et!"

Billy: "I have a t-t-tortilla in my e-e-ear!"

Bird: "What an asshole is he-e-e-re!"

He became absorbed, and when he became absorbed the world around him just plain ended. Hours passed. His sister took down the bucket of water she had carefully positioned above the basement door and spent the rest of the afternoon making pecan divinity for the specific purpose of hiding it from both of the damn men.