what was bothering her. Wasn’t Dr. Malik going to help them?
Dr. Malik came in the room and closed the door. He stepped to one of the metal cabinets and began gathering medical paraphernalia.
“Are you feeling the medicine yet, Billy?” Billy said he was so the doctor came to him with stuff in hand. “If you relax and let me do this, it will be over in about five minutes. You’re going to feel a lot of tugging and pulling, but it’s for your own good. It needs to be done. OK?”
Preparing himself for the worst, Billy said he was ready. He wrapped his hands around the edge of the bed and closed his eyes.
Through the haze of powerful painkiller, he felt tugging and pulling and grinding and gauze pushed up his nose. Then he heard tape ripping and felt the doctor’s thumbs pressing around his nose.
“OK,” said the doctor. “I think that will work.”
Billy opened his eyes and saw the doctor leaning right and left like a sculptor looking for flaws in a statue.
“Well, Billy,” he said. “You are going to be very sore for a few days and you’ll have two beeee-uuuu-tttt-iii-ful black eyes. But, in a couple of weeks you’ll be good as new. Your nose might be a little crooked but that adds character and the girls love it. Don’t they, Mrs. Harold?’
Billy looked at his mother. Her arms still held her breasts in the vice-grip and her back still crushed the paper heart.
“You bet, Dr. Malik, girls love it.” Billy no longer saw worry in his mother’s face. Instead, he saw determination. Billy’s mind filled with relief because he knew she had decided to send his big idiot father to prison with Spike and Lefty and the cannonball and he, his mother, and Dr, Malik would all be happy, maybe not in Nevada, that would be too good, but someplace. He knew that his mother would marry Dr. Malik and that he would get the new baseball mitt and Dr. Malik would teach him how to catch and hit and run.
“Come and look at yourself, Billy,” said the doctor, and helped Billy off the table.
He looked tentatively in the mirror. All the blood had been cleaned away and tons of gauge and bandages and tape were covering his character building, babe-attracting nose. His two beeee-uuuu-tttt-iii-ful black eyes were already metamorphasizing, and his whole face was swelling to stay-puffed marshmallow man proportions.
Billy looked at his mother. She looked tired and just plain worn out. Billy put his small hand on her folded arms. “Do OK Momb?”
After a few seconds, she brushed a strand of hair back from his eyes and said, “I’m OK, baby. Glad you’re better.” Without moving anything but her eyes, she looked at Dr. Malik.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harold, I’m going to have to tell the police.”
There was a resounding ‘yesssssss’ in Billy’s mind but, as new fantasies began to articulate, he felt his mother’s hands on his shoulders forcing him to move toward the door.
“Wait outside, Billy. I need to talk to Dr. Malik alone.”
Billy imagined they were going to discuss strategic ways of arresting his father and readily agreed. He went through the door and sat down in the hall and listened. He heard low mumbling. Medical people dressed in white occasionally passed and smiled at him. He listened with all his might but couldn’t hear anything. After a few minutes, he thought he heard some moaning but couldn’t imagine what caused it. The door handle turned and Dr. Malik stepped out. His doctor coat was unbuttoned and he was smiling. He put both hands, fingers spread wide apart, on each side of his rib cage and took a deep breath, like he was inhaling wonderful, clean Nevada air. Dr. Malik looked down at Billy and winked.
“Take care of yourself, young Master William. See you in about ten days.” Then he turned and walked down the hall whistling what sounded like “Oh, Bury Me not on the Lone Prairie.”
Billy looked in the room and saw his mother in front of the sink. The water was running and she had wet her handkerchief and was rubbing a spot on her blouse. Her lipstick was smeared and her face looked flushed. And this was one of the few times he had seen her with her hair out of place. After a few more rubs, she held out the blouse so she could see it. Satisfied, she grabbed a paper Dixie cup by the sink, filling and drinking it three times in quick succession. Then she looked at herself in the mirror.
“Mamba?” said Billy.
“Come in and close the door. I have to fix myself before we leave.”
Billy came in and closed the door. “Whad happen? When is Ndanddy gooing to prisond?”
“Daddy’s not going to prison. Nothing is changing. Everything is all right.”
“But Ndanddy hurt bme. He alwaysd hurts bme, and he hurts you, doo. He dneeds do go do prison!” Billy was crushed. What was happening? He had never been more confused in his life. Tears began running down his face and catching on the strips of white medical tape.
His mother turned from the sink and knelt down until she was eye level with Billy. She grabbed his shoulders and shook them. Pain shot through his head.
“Don’t you understand? We need him! We need his money! He’s gone most of the time, anyway. Without him, you’d be pretending you were blind begging quarters and I’d be turning tricks in the red light district.”
Fear, pain, and confusion were writhing in his brain like three greedy, fat snakes fighting for position. “But…but…”
His mother’s voice turned into a controlled, whisper/yell. Her smeared lipstick made her look almost clownish. “For a smart kid, you’re dumber than dirt. Don’t you understand? I’d end up being a prostitute!”
A small light in his brain flickered. He knew what a prostitute was. It was a person who sold her body in exchange for something. He began to make the connection. His father wasn’t going to prison. Dr. Malik wasn’t going to the police; his mother had sold him out for money and a thunderbird and nice clothes. He knew she cared more about a nice house than what kind of abuse she and her son suffered at the hands of a maniac. He knew she was the thing she was trying to avoid. The Neverborne loved the Harold family. It was a home in which they felt comfortable. In a home like the Harold’s’, they only had to apply an occasional nudge to keep the family going in the right direction. As the Neverborne would say, the Harolds were very accepting of their nature.
Billy started spending more time with his sister, Grace. Neither his father nor his mother tried to stop him. Eventually, when he was about sixteen, after an additional concussion, a knocked-out tooth, and a scalded left hand, he completely moved out of his father’s house and in with his sister.
About the same time, his mother left her husband for a jazz musician hooked on heroin. She soon took up the habit and overdosed someplace around Chicago. She was thirty-eight years old and had already begun to lose her looks. Billy never bothered to find out where his mother was buried.
His father choked to death on a chicken bone about two months later. He willed all his money to Reverend Popejoy and the church, where an expensive funeral was held. Only three people came, the Reverend Popejoy and two ushers paid ten dollars each.
Chapter 5
Two hundred and seventy miles southwest of Moscow
