Finding Billy Boy

By Burr Cook

A teen age boy (Billy) with abusive parents runs away from his tenement home in Brooklyn and hides out in a tent near the Appellation trail in Massachusetts, meets up with a tramp (Bud) and has an adventuresome summer camping out with his new friend. A detective is hired to search for him. Billy Boy's mother, an alcoholic and addict gets straightened out while he is away and gets reunited in a happy ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312152885

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Finding Billy Boy

Finding Billy Boy

Copyright 2014 Burr Cook

All rights reserved

978-1-312-15288-5

Preface

This story came to me in a dream one night even though I had something else in mind to dream about. That being said I have decided to write it down since it has been dancing around in my head ever since that restless night.

I have deliberately neglected to mention the ethnicity of the main character –Billy— in this story, even though I have been asked to do so by several of my friends. I leave that up to the reader. To me it makes no difference; I have nothing in mind on the issue. I see Billy simply as a thirteen year old boy from the ghetto.

Chapter 1 Billy Gets an Idea

William Bradford was thirteen years old and was quick to add that he was soon to be fourteen. Billy was a quiet kid, kind of a loner. For at least a year now he had an interest in girls. He was well liked by members of the fairer sex. They liked his muscular build and his black curls and big brown eyes. Even though his clothes all came from the Salvation Army Stores he looked good in them. He lived with his mother and step father. His mother had been divorced and remarried more than once so his name was different from his parents. They were Edward and Susan Mosher. They lived in a dark and dirty tenement in the Bedford–Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. His bedroom used to be a closet. There was just room to stand up next to the cot and he kept his few possessions in a box underneath.

It was early on a Saturday morning and Billy was still in bed trying to think of something new and different to do. His body ached from the beating he took last night. His step father was very abusive and was drunk last night and even though Billy was sure he could have given his step father the beating he didn’t do it because that would just mean he would get a worse beating later on when the guy was halfway sober.

Billy knew that his mother was a prostitute and his step father was a pimp. Both parents were also addicts, which was the main reason there was never enough to eat in the house. He knew where his mother hid money and when she came home drunk and high she never knew how much money she had and it wasn’t hard to take a little as long as it wasn’t too much. He was still dressed from the night before. After being beaten he had crawled into bed without undressing so that he would not be noisy. His step father soon passed out and his mother hadn’t come home yet.

When he finally slipped out of bed in the morning he found the house to be silent. His parents were still sleeping. As he passed through the kitchen on his way out of the door he found two dry slices of bread on the table. He was hungry so he ate the stale bread on his way down the hallway leading to the two flights of stairs which ended at the sidewalk below. He walked to a park nearby and sat on a bench. It was almost the first of June and the sun felt good on his face. Even this early in the morning he could observe a group of men hassling over a crack pipe.

There was a playground in the park which Billy ambled over to. He was too old, he felt, for swings and slides but some kids his age hung around there. He sat on a bench in