The Bad Lady (Novel) (8 page)

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 glanced 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.

“Bridgette, this isn’t your fault.”

“I know it isn‘t my fault.” My mother now wailed hysterically. “Except I never should have let Billy hang around with someone that I didn’t know that well. I‘m so ashamed of myself.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Rudy tried to console. “No one in a million years would suspect that this sort of thing could take place.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she agreed, using a crumpled piece of Kleenex to dab her weepy eyes. “The thing is if Nancy Sutcliffe was a man, I never would have permitted Billy to drive around with her. I would have exercised more caution.” She and Rudy hugged mightily, like a couple of doting panda bears.

“Did this woman hurt Billy?”

“Not physically, no. Psychologically yes . . . For Christ sakes, my son is ten-years old. What could that piece-of-shit whore possibly see in someone so young? He’s not even developed. He’s not even in puberty, for crying out loud!”

“C’mon babe, calm down.” Rudy massaged her back.

“How am I supposed to calm down? Someone like that pervert Nancy Sutcliffe should not have a job around children. She’s filth. She needs to stay as far away from kids as humanly possible. That‘s another thing I‘ll do, I‘ll get the sick bitch fired. She has no business catering to minors in fucking Good Humor truck.”

Suddenly looking more stunned than he had already looked, Rudy released his embrace and then walked to the back of his flatbed truck. He picked up one of the air conditioners. I guess he wanted to try to get my mom‘s mind off the issue. “Bridgette, could you open the front door for me, please?” he called to her. “These air conditioners are heavy.”

“Yeah. Hold on.” Putting her drink down, my mother stood up and then pushed the door to the house ajar.

I watched Rudy lug the air conditioner up the paved walkway, before I had no other choice but to scamper back to my room, or be snagged red-handed eavesdropping.

***

Again, as soon as I lay down on my bed, I swiftly tugged the covers up to my head. Perspiration had formed on my body, especially on my hands and forehead, from both the sticky summer heat and the apprehension I felt.

I heard Rudy carry the first air conditioner into my mom’s room, his hard-soled black shoes thumped steadily across the hard wood floor. “Bridgette, at least you’ll be cool tonight.”

“Thanks for bringing the air conditioners over.”

“I told you I would. You’re my sweet honey muffin. You know I’d do anything for you.”

“Please, not now Rudy. As you could well imagine I’m not in the mood.”

Unlike when my mother had been conversing with the bad lady, it was not difficult for me to hear what she and Rudy, in her bedroom were saying, since Rudy had what I like to call ‘a wall-piercing voice’. And my mom, whenever she was in her boyfriend’s presence, would elevate her tone to match his.

“Sorry Bridgette. Okay, plug it in.”

“Does it work?”

“Yes,” he said. “Can’t you feel the cold air?”

“Now I can,” my mother replied. “Wow! That feels nice.”

“What do you want me to set the thermostat at?”

“What’s it on now?”

“Seventy.”

“Set it on sixty-five.”

“You’ve got it. Should we put the other air conditioner in Billy’s window, or would you rather wait until tomorrow?”

“We might as well put it in his window now,” my mom decided. “Billy’s been through enough today. No sense in letting him bake in this dreadful heat . . . But please just try to keep your voice down. Okay? I don’t want to wake him.”

“Sure,” said Rudy. “I’ll try to be as quiet as a mouse.”

It turned out that my mom would be the one who would make the most noise. When she opened my window, it made a bang. However, I still lay as still as a statue. Acting as if I were lost in dreamland. I even faked as though I was snoring.

“Look at how innocent my boy is,” my mother whispered to Rudy. “Look at how peacefully Billy’s sleeping. I just can’t help but wonder if his father was still around, if he never ran out on us, if something like this would have happened.”

“Bridgette, I told you to stop beating yourself up. This could have happened to anyone’s child.”

“Maybe so. Except it didn’t happen to someone else’s kid, it happened to my kid.”

“I understand that. But getting annoyed at yourself isn’t going to change the situation.”

Even though they were whispering, I wanted to put my pillow over my head to drown out their words.

***

“Well,” Rudy declares a few minutes later, “Billy’s air conditioner is in. Except there’s one problem.”

“What?”

“I don’t think the plug will reach the outlet. Do you have an extension cord?”

“I’m not sure,” my mom answers. “Hold on a second.” I heard her saunter into the kitchen and rummage through the junk drawer near the sink, where she stored tools, sandpaper, batteries, all kinds of stuff. “Unfortunately I don‘t. Do you think you might have an extension cord in your truck?”

“It‘s possible.”

“Want me to look?”

“No. That‘s all right,” Rudy replied. “I’ll go out there. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I might have one under the seat.”

As he went to check, I was stunned to hear my mother, once more dial Nancy’s phone number.

“Miss Sutcliffe, don’t you dare hang up on me again.” This time she did not turn the intercom on; therefore, I could not hear Nancy‘s response. “Do you realize how repulsive a person you are? Yeah, I know I told you that before. It‘s true . . . What? Get out of here. Are you fucking with me? Do you think it’s fair that you won’t even discuss this matter? Don’t shout at me. What am I supposed to think? Why would a ten-year old boy make something like this up? No, no. Why don’t you just shut the hell up? Before my son met you, he didn’t even know what sex was. How could he?”

It was quiet for a long tense moment. I thought my mom might have slammed the phone down in frustration, or that Nancy, like before, had been the one who had abruptly ended the call.

“Listen to me, Nancy. Your unwillingness to address this issue only serves, in my opinion, to render you guilty.”

Again, silence reigned. I sensed that Nancy was giving my mother a ferocious earful.

“No, no, no! I said don’t you dare hang up on me again. And stop calling my son a liar . . . Yeah is that so? Then why did you ask Billy to feel your tits? Told him to not be afraid? That it was only natural for a young boy to want to touch them?”

I wished to God that I could hear Nancy’s side of the story.

“Don’t you understand,” my mom resumed, “that a boy Billy’s age doesn’t have the intellectual or emotional capacity to imagine something so perverted like this? Listen lady don’t talk back to me. Don’t you get it; your disgusting, inappropriate behavior may have scarred my son for the rest of his life?”

There was another uneasy hush. I wondered what was taking Rudy so long to find an extension cord. I wanted him to come back inside fast, and tell my mother to get off the phone.

“Yeah. Go ahead and hang up,” she raged on. “Nancy Sutcliffe, you’re a coward. A despicable human being. And regardless of what you say, what you deny, this isn’t over yet. You’ll be hearing from me again. And soon!”

This fiery resentment caused me to shudder. I did not understand how what Nancy and I had done could possibly scar me for the rest of my life?

Just then, I heard Rudy finally return. “Bridgette, we’re in luck, I found one. I actually had two extension cords in the truck, the other one was too short, so I brought this one in.”

My mom, who I speculated must have still been in the kitchen, did not say anything.