The Bad Lady (Novel) (2 page)

“I have to be home at around five o‘clock. My mother is having company for dinner.”

“Oh, anyone important?” She twisted the top off the beer. Then, after peering out the opening in the truck, where customers go to buy ice cream, Nancy took a sip. She had glanced out the opening to make sure that there was no one was outside.

“Her boyfriend is stopping by,” I explained. “That means I have to set the table.”

“Sweetie, does your mother know you’re with me?” Nancy leaned over and put her hand on my knee.

I looked down, swallowed the jitteriness in my throat. “Yeah, she knows. And she’s probably glad.”

“Glad, why do you say that?”

“Because,” I answered, “this morning I messed up.”

“How?”

“I accidentally broke a fancy table lamp.”

“Really?”

“Yup. And my mom got so mad, she told me to stay out of the house until she calmed down.” I had not just been saying that to be dramatic. When I had broken the lamp that day, my mother had gone totally haywire. I had been kicking a Nerf football inside the house, pretending to boot field goals, something that I wasn’t supposed to do. The football had gone off course and had knocked the costly light off the table.

When my mom had come storming into the living room and had noticed the crystal lamp on the hardwood floor, shattered in a hundred pieces, she had screamed at me for what seemed like forever. One thing about my mother, she had a nasty temper. And with her metal pancake spatula, she could really put a whipping on your backside. Oh yes she could. There were many unpleasant nights when I could not sleep on account of my butt being so sore. Or should I say my fanny, as Nancy liked to term our backside.

Suddenly her eyes became dark and brimming with mystery. “Billy,” she says, “what makes you so sure that your mother knows you’re with me? At noon, when I drove up to your cottage to pick you up today, I didn’t see her.”

“As you were driving up,” I said, “I think I saw her peeking out the screen door . . . Then again, that could have been a shadow. I‘m not sure.”

“So there is a chance that she might think you’re with one of your friends, right?”

“Maybe.” I was thinking what difference did it make who I was with? All I knew was that my angry mother did not want to see me until dinnertime. One thing you need to understand is that she and Nancy Sutcliffe were not friends in the sense that they hung out together. Like most of the other parents who lived in the neighborhood, my mom only knew Nancy from seeing her come by in the Good Humor truck. No one and I feel that I need to emphasize this; none of the parents of the small kids in the immediate area would have ever suspected Nancy Sutcliffe of being a sexual predator.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before she had her flimsy, see-through blouse completely off, begging me to kindly massage some sort of lotion on her back, a pharmaceutical product that had been designed to soothe painful sunburn.

Of course, I said I would.

“Wow! That stuff feels like cold butter,” she says, as, with a hesitant hand, I began to apply the creamy lotion to her back, which was as red as a lobster. Nancy flipped her long black hair off to the side. She had tossed her blouse onto the driver’s seat.

“How much do you want me to rub on?” I ask.

“Just keeping smoothing it on until I say stop. Thank you very much Billy. That feels so wonderful. I hate being this sunburned.”

I could not believe how incredibly soft her skin was. I felt the pins and needles in my body intensify. That’s when it dawned on me that this sensation was much different from what I had experienced when Bianca Flowers had kissed me on the cheek at school. This sensation was more powerful, more erotic.

Nancy saw that I had begun to breathe heavily. She smiled, an exceedingly sensuous smile, and then asked me if I would like to fondle her breasts.

“Go on,” she urges, after removing her bikini top. She threw that onto the front seat as well. “It’s all right, Billy. Don’t be afraid. It’s only natural for you to want to touch them.” She grabbed my hand. “My goodness, Billy, you’re trembling like crazy.” She placed my hand on one of her big boobs. Her nipples were stiff. “See, there’s nothing to be nervous about . . . I‘m not going to hurt you.”

“I know you‘re not gonna hurt me, it’s just-”

“It’s just what?” she asks, giggling, and taking another gulp of Miller Lite. She continued to pilot my hand, made me tweak her rigid pink nipples.

“I uh-”

“Kiss them. Go on.”

“What?”

“Kiss the girls. They want to be loved.”

While simultaneously frightened and excited, I proceeded to smooch her perky breasts. When Nancy, who kept ‘ooing and ahhing’, got tired of that, she unzipped her Khaki shorts, slipped them off in a highly provocative manner, as if she was performing a striptease. Then she took the bottom half of her bikini off. She had no pubic hair.

“Remember, Billy, just like with those photos I showed you, you can’t tell anyone that we were doing this either.”

“I won’t.”

In a gentle, soothing voice, she instructed me to get down on my knees. I did.

“You know I love you, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“I do, Billy. You’re my boyfriend.”

“I am?”

“Yes. And I’m your girlfriend. Someday, when you’re older, maybe we can get married; buy a big house together, on a beautiful desert island. How would you like that?”

I did not say anything. I merely nodded.

“C’mon, slide closer,” she coaxed. “A little bit more. That’s it. Wonderful. Now put your hands on my legs.”

“Like this?”

“No.” She grabbed my hands and put them where she wanted them. “Like that. Both your hands.”

“Okay.”

Now I am not going to detail what happened next. All you really need to know is that what Nancy would have me do her (and what she would eventually do to me), had been clearly inappropriate. Although, she kept telling me it’s what two people did when they cared about one another. Nancy had also told me that she had been exceptionally lonely lately and something about having had absolutely no luck with men ever since her divorce.

“Billy, that’s why you’re so special to me,” she says, caressing my head. “Men my age, like my ex. husband, can be extremely difficult to get along with. They can be so unadventurous, so boring. So consumed with their careers-”

I giggled.

“That’s it,” she praised. “Be tender. Just like the way you were kissing my breasts. Oh, yeah! That’s more like it. Now you‘re getting the hang of it.”

***

In a little while, Nancy, apparently satisfied, and wanting to put an end to the sexual foreplay, gently pushed me away from her nude body. Then she started to give me a speech as to why she did not want me to reveal to anyone, especially my mother, what we had just engaged in.

“And do you know why I don’t want you tell anyone what we just did, or that I showed you those Polaroid’s?”

I shook my head. “No. Not really.” I was being honest. I wasn’t sure. I wanted her to be specific.

“Because Billy, people won’t understand.”

“Why?”

“They just won’t,” Nancy explained, putting a strong sense of importance in her tone. “You’re just gonna have to trust me with this. Okay?” She had taken my T-shirt out of the freezer and had it given it back to me. “Now put your shirt back on. It’s nice and cool. And can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” I reply, as I fitted my garment over my head and then casually yanked it down over my chest and stomach. “What do you want me to do now?”

“Will you be a doll and retie my bikini? I broke a fingernail and can’t seem to do it.”

“I would. Except I don’t know how to retie a bikini.” I meant that too. I figured there were probably many older men who did not know how to fix together the top of a woman’s bikini or a bra either. No pun intended.

“Billy-”

“I‘m listening?”

“Don’t worry. You know what you’re doing. You’ve proven that already. You know your way around a woman’s body.”

“No I don’t. I just did what you said.”

“You silly little thing, you.” She turned her bare back, so that I could work on retying her teensy purple bathing suit. Eventually, somehow, I got lucky and managed to make an adequate knot. “See, you’re a natural. You might have butterfingers, but you definitely know how to tie a woman’s top.”

“I guess.”

“Now would you please hand me my bottoms?”

“Sure.” I tossed them to her. “I don‘t know why they‘re so wet.”

“Thank you.”

“Is your bikini wet because your legs were sweaty?”

“No.” She cracked up, as she effortlessly slid her string bottoms up to her shapely thighs. “It’s not from perspiration. The ’Keeper of the Clam’ this afternoon just wouldn‘t stay dry . . . And guess what?”

“I don’t know?”

“I have you to blame for that, Billy.”

Whatever she was referring to, I had no clue. Yet, based on the way she grinned, and put her finger up to my lips, I knew it must have been a private joke. A dirty joke.

***

Once we had our clothes back on, it did not take long for Nancy to put the ice cream truck back into action. Again, with a laidback melody playing from the loudspeakers, this time, ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel’, we exited the isolated Dead End Street and went on the hunt for business.

Soon, a jubilant group children, about a half of dozen of them, whistled and hollered for us to stop. Nancy pulled over.

“Hello,” she says to a bubbly blonde girl who had eyeglasses, braces and a ponytail. “What can I get for you today?” I was surprised by how easily Nancy could spring from our forbidden sexual encounter, back to her regular course of business.

“I want a Rocket Pop,” the little girl broadcasts vivaciously, while jumping up and down.

“Did you hear that, Billy? This endearing child here would like a Rocket Pop.”

“Who’s he?” the girl asks, gesturing, with a tilt of her head, in my direction. She flashed me a flirty smile.

“This is my handsome assistant,” Nancy replies gleefully, putting her arm around my shoulder. “I call him ‘Billy the Kid’, because he’s a young outlaw.”

“He’s cute.”

“Yes he is,” said Nancy, with her busty cleavage overshadowing her considerate manner. “So what did you want dear, just one Rocket Pop?”

“Uh huh.”

“Excellent choice.”

“I want a Chocolate Chip Cookie Sandwich,” a chubby boy who looked to be roughly two years older than me, hooted from the crowd. He wore cut-off shorts and a camouflage army shirt that could have used ironing, it was that wrinkled.

“That’s another good choice,” Nancy whooped. “Billy, can you grab a Chocolate Chip Cookie Sandwich from the freezer?”

“No problem,” I answer, rummaging through the vast assortment of ice cream. The freezer was stocked. “There you are,” I said to the kid, stretching my hand through the open window and then putting, into his plump palm, the order.

“That’s my assistant Billy’s all-time favorite,” Nancy told the boy. “He loves to lick Chocolate Chip Sandwiches.”

“Me too. They’re the best.”

Yes, if you’re thinking what I was thinking, you’re right. Almost everything Nancy had been saying seemed to have a sexual undertone. It almost appeared that she was getting off on teasing these children. I did not like that. Not one bit. In fact, her wicked sexual innuendo made me especially uneasy.

Once we had finished selling this animated bunch of youngsters their cold sugary treats, Nancy wanted to get rid of me. She did not actually say that she had wanted to get rid of me, it was more of the nagging gut feeling I got. Nancy shut down and her normally upbeat personality became aloof.

“I’m sorry,” she announces, as she counted a stack of money, presumably that day‘s profits. “I have a lot of things to do, Billy. My shift is just about over. So I’ll have to drop you off now. Again, it has nothing to do with you; I just have a lot of things I need to take care of. Household chores, that sort of thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”

Her next question put me on the defensive.

“By the way, you’re mother doesn’t really think you’re at your friend’s house, does she?”

“Yes,” I lied. “She does.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“Yes she does, Nancy. I swear. I’m just a little afraid to go home right now because my mom might hit me again.”

“Whoa! Does she beat you all the time?” Nancy had switched the truck’s loudspeakers off, cutting off the festival-like music, as if she had officially closed down business for the day.

“No. She only spanks me when I do something to make her upset.”

“Do you misbehave often?”

I shrugged. “Not too much.”

“Let me ask you this, Billy, do you even like your mother?”

“No . . . I mean, of course I like her.”

“Listen honey, you either like your mother or you don’t like her?”

“Most of the time I like her.”

As she expertly steered the commercial motor vehicle down the road, Nancy glanced over her shoulder and probed my eyes. I sat on top of the closed flattop freezer, twiddling my thumbs.

“I know you told me that you had accidently broke the living room lamp this morning. Other than for something like that, why else would your mom spank you?”

“I said she punishes me because sometimes I make her mad.”

“I get that. If you could be more specific though, what else is it that you might do that would compel her to physically strike you?”

I looked down. Had to think for a moment. “Just stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“It could be anything.”

“Are we talking about serious stuff, more serious than kicking your silly Nerf football around inside the house, and breaking a lamp?”

“She doesn’t like it either when I get cookie crumbs on the couch,” I elaborated. “Or when I leave dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, or leave my dirty laundry on my bedroom floor. Things like that. That’s what gets her angry. But it’s always different.”

While leisurely guiding the Good Humor cream truck around another sunny residential block, Nancy says, “Your mother doesn’t sound like a very nice person. Which I find rather odd, because on the few occasions when I’ve spoken to her, she seems awfully polite. Then again, that could just be an act. A performance. It sounds to me like she has some serious anger management issues. But I’m here for you, Billy. Anytime you need a safe place to go, just look for my truck, I’ll always be waiting with open arms.”