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By Root 520 0

crew cut and blue eyes. But he wasn’t handsome. The thing about Billy was that he had a lopsided head. Bertha Whitefoot, a half-Indian woman who lived in a shack near the depot and kept about fifty dogs fenced in her yard, said it was because Billy’s mom hadn’t turned him over at all when he was a baby. He just lay there in the same position day in and day out, and the side of his head that was pressed against the mattress got a little flat. You didn’t notice it all that much unless you looked at him straight on, and not a lot of people did, because Billy was always moving around like he was itchy. He kept his Marlboros rolled up in one of his T-shirt sleeves, and he lit his cigarettes with a Zippo lighter stamped with a picture of a naked lady bending over.

Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and corrugated tin, down the tracks from our house. He never mentioned his mom and made it clear that you weren’t supposed to bring her up, so I never knew if she had run off or died. His dad worked in the barite mine and spent his evenings at the Owl Club, so Billy had a lot of unsupervised time on his hands.

Bertha Whitefoot took to calling Billy. “the devil with a crew cut” and. “the terror of the Tracks.” She claimed he set fire to a couple of her dogs and skinned some neighborhood cats and strung their naked pink bodies up on a clothesline to make jerky. Billy said Bertha was a big fat liar. I didn’t know whom to believe. After all, Billy was a certified JD—juvenile delinquent. He had told us that he spent time in a detention center in Reno for shoplifting and vandalizing cars. Shortly after he moved to the Tracks, Billy started following me around. He was always looking at me and telling the other kids he was my boyfriend.

“No, he’s not!” I would yell, though I secretly liked it that he wanted to be.

A few months after he’d moved to town, Billy told me he wanted to show me something really funny.

“If it’s a skinned cat, I don’t want to see it,” I said.

“Naw, it ain’t nothing like that,” he said. “It’s really funny. You’ll laugh and laugh. I promise. Unless you’re scared.”

“’Course I’m not scared,” I said.

The funny thing Billy wanted to show me was in his house, which was dark inside and smelled like pee, and was even messier than our house, although in a different way. Our house was filled with stuff: papers, books, tools, lumber, paintings, art supplies, and statues of Venus de Milo painted all different colors. There was hardly anything in Billy’s house. No furniture. Not even wooden spool tables. It had only one room with two mattresses on the floor next to a TV. There was nothing on the walls, not a single painting or drawing. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, right next to three or four dangling spiral strips of flypaper so thick with flies that you couldn’t see the sticky yellow surface underneath. Empty beer cans and whiskey bottles and a few half-eaten tins of Vienna sausages littered the floor. On one of the mattresses, Billy’s father was snoring unevenly. His mouth hung open, and flies were gathered in the stubble of his beard. A wet stain had darkened his pants nearly to his knees. His zipper was undone, and his gross penis dangled to one side. I stared quietly, then asked. “What’s the funny thing?”

“Don’t you see?” said Billy, pointing at his dad. “He pissed himself!” Billy started laughing.

I felt my face turning hot. “You’re not supposed to laugh at your own father,” I said to him. “Ever.”

“Aw, now, don’t go get all high-and-mighty on me,” Billy said. “Don’t go and try and pretend you’re better than me. ’Cause I know your daddy ain’t nothing but a drunk like mine.”

I hated Billy at that moment, I really did. I thought of telling him about binary numbers and the Glass Castle and Venus and all the things that made my dad special and completely different from his dad, but I knew Billy wouldn’t understand. I started to run out of the house, but then I stopped and turned around.

“My daddy is nothing like your daddy!” I shouted. “When my daddy passes out, he never pisses himself!