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 JDâ
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