by bc woodsMy mother and Mike had had a blowout three months prior to my meeting with Billy. After finding out that she'd been having an affair with his brother, Mike retaliated by trying to strangle my mother to death. After the cops pulled him off, my mom decided that while this was not serious enough for her to press charges, she had no choice but to kick him out. Mike moved to Boise to work as a truck driver.

The bruises were still on her neck when she decided, "Oh come on, who are we to judge?" and forgave Mike for trying to choke the life out her. The next day she decided to go see him and, as she loaded the car, demanded that I go with her. Fearing that she might, in fact, be murdered if I wasn't there as a witness, I reluctantly got into the car.

After a half-day drive, I found myself huddled in a small, two bedroom apartment, face-to-face with a snaggle-toothed, half-retarded, all-crazy, thirty-five year old man by the name of Billy. Mike had introduced him as his roommate before disappearing with my mother into his bedroom for "undisclosed reasons." After the door shut, I heard an animalistic groan and realized that I was going to be there for a few hours at least.

Billy sat on the couch across from me, a rat-tail dangling softly down the nape of his neck, his legs crossed Indian-style on the couch cushion, eating a piece of celery while regarding me with two eyes that held all the reasoning power of a stoned koala. His tight red shirt hid the sight of his sagging man breasts with an action-posed image of the Red Power Ranger, while leaving the milky white of his lower stomach fully exposed. I knew without a word being spoken that he wasn't the kind of person I wanted to have a conversation with.

There was no television in the small living room, and it was a great mental labor to find something to look at other than Billy's slack-jawed, celery-chewing face. Finally, after my mother had been gone for half an hour, and the groans showed no signs of abating, the silence became unbearable. My core humanity demanded I converse, if only to drown out the sounds coming from the background.

"So... uh...how long have you been living with Mike?" As he continued to slowly masticate, I realized that conversing with Billy was the equivalent of trying to play catch with a pool of stagnant water.

With an expression like a cow chewing a piece of cud, Billy continued to chew his stick of celery, ignoring my query. I nodded for no particular reason. Everything I knew of etiquette made no mention of people whose primary form of communication was chewing celery. I found a magazine and distracted myself with the lives of celebrities. Every few pages, I looked up to make sure he hadn't crept up on me with a knife...just because he looked like the sort of person who might.

Just as I managed to lose sense of my surroundings, I heard several lip-smacking sounds. At first, I thought they were coming from Mike's room, until I realized they were far more proximal. I dropped the magazine into my lap and looked up. Billy was sucking the ends of his fingers, relishing every last bit of his stick of celery. He leaned forward, looked conspiratorially to either side of him, and whispered, "They're after me, you know."

I wilted around my magazine, like a flower around its stem. "Fucking hell," I muttered, and then sighed. I had no idea how much longer my mom was going to be "talking" to Mike. Trying to kill time, I asked, "Who's after you, Billy?"

"Them." Billy grabbed another stick of celery, dunked it into a nearby jar of peanut butter he had previously left untouched, and resumed chewing. Around either side of the stick, Billy moved his lips to ask, "I heard you were a smart kid. Do you think you could help me?"

"Help you with what?"

"The Colts," he said, and I sat confused until I realized no man so strange could possible have a hobby as normal as sports. There was only one word that sounded like colts.

"What cults?"

"They travel the country, organizing pedophiles to molest children."

"Wow." In all of my life, the only theory I have ever heard as good as Billy's was the hobo I met in college who thought that Hillary Clinton was a seventh level Illuminatus Warlock, trying to protect the United States from Mason Wizards.

Realizing that Billy was waiting for my permission to continue I said, "Okay, go on. Tell me about the cults." Billy lifted his ass cheeks off the sofa like he was going to pass gas, only at the last minute to pull out a map from under the cushion. He held the celery stick in his mouth like a cigar as he unfolded it before me. It was covered with crayon scribbles.

"Wow." I said and Billy nodded, feeding himself another inch of his favorite treat through use of his tongue and cheeks alone. His fingers were stubby and covered with dirt. His nail-ends were filled with crayon wax. Crayon markings traced over the map with the deliberation of a surgeon wielding a scalpel.

"They started back East, coming over here from Europe. They began by molesting village children, until they were chased out west by the Salem Witch Trials." He had the tone of a college lecturer. Pointing at a tornado-like circle of blue scribbles over Missouri, Billy said, "That's them trying to make their way back across the country, to reclaim the east coast. The western states aren't enough for them anymore."

I cleared my throat, and turned my head to the side. Closing my eyes in exasperation, I asked, "You were molested as a child weren't you, Billy?"

He responded by scraping a thick brown arrow over Montana with his fingernail, and muttering under his breath. "They're after me now. I've been looking into them for too long. I'm close to penetrating their inner sanctum. It's all here on the map." Billy pulled a short black crayon out of the pocket of his mesh shorts and handed it to me. I took it from him and regarded it for a moment. The other end had teeth marks in it. Someone had bitten it in half. It didn't take much imagination to figure out who had bitten it. I was just intrigued to know whether or not he had swallowed.

"Show me where the rest of them are at," Billy commanded.

For no particular reason, other than that I didn't want Billy to freak out and kill me, I drew a star over Albany. Billy gasped, and flapped his hands in a manner that was either excited or hostile. I abruptly decided I should go to the bathroom for a few hours.

Leaving Billy to stare at my profound black star in total awe, I entered the bathroom he shared with Mike, and took a seat on the toilet. After a second thought, I locked the door. Thinking I could pass the time reading a book, I picked up a few of the volumes in a basket by the toilet. They were all about Satanism and witchcraft. "Well that sinks that," I muttered.

Remembering a class I had taken in psychology, I opened the medicine cabinet to see several orange plastic pill bottles. They were all full, and the razor-sharp edges of their labels indicated they had remained unopened for some time. I picked up one and read the label. "Thorazine." Billy was schizophrenic and off his meds. No surprise there.

I sat on the toilet for an hour, waiting till it was time to go home. Somewhere in the middle of that time Billy came to check on me by knocking on the door and asking if "they" had gotten to me. I assured him that I was just wrestling with a bit of corn, and that I would be out shortly. "I'm going to stand outside the door and wait, to make sure you're okay."

"Well, as long as there's a locked door between us, I suppose that's okay."

Billy said nothing. I sat on the toilet and began to hum. Billy joined me so I stopped. Humming with Billy felt too much like giving into his insanity.

"Did they get you now?" he asked, startled at my sudden silence.

"Please just leave me alone, Billy."

"Okay."

Hearing a door open, I realized that either my mother and Mike were finished with their "discussion," or Billy had gone to his room. Either way, I was free to go out of the bathroom.

Upon opening the door, I saw Billy standing just a few short inches away from the door frame. Barely a foot separated his body from me. He was holding his map, tightly against his chest. "Thanks for helping me out, BC."

"No problem, Billy." Next time my mother asked me to make a trip, I was just going to feign appendicitis, and she could suffer the consequences of her own bad judgment.

My mother stood at the end of the hall. Her face was covered in a sheen of sweat, and her hair flailed wildly every which way. "Ready to go, BC?" she asked, breathlessly.

In response, I grabbed the keys from her purse, and ran outside to the car. I heard Billy's footsteps blunder after me, like a colossal slow-moving dinosaur. As quickly as possible I opened the driver's side door, slammed it shut, and hit the auto-lock. Billy stood in the driveway for ten minutes, waving good-bye with his short, stubby, crayon-stained fingers. Until my mother finally left the house, I stayed as still as possible, and prayed that Billy's vision was based on movement.

Several months after our introduction, Billy was committed to an insane asylum. A few months after that he managed to escape, believing that he was placed there by the Sex Cult Over-Lords to try to stop him from striking at their inner sanctum. A month after that, with no explanation whatsoever, Billy was found in a ditch. He had been dead for approximately a day, was wearing no clothes, and didn't have a mark on him. They may be traveling across the country molesting children, but if the Sex Cult Over-Lords are responsible for Billy's death, I'm not sure that they're such bad people.

Posted by BC Woods at 12:00 AM

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