Chapter 5

When I woke up Tuesday morning, my covers were folded back, my morning wood was sticking up through the fly in my boxers, and Mom was kneeling by the edge of my bed, her chin resting on folded arms, studying my cock intently—so intently that I could feel her exhalations as gentle puffs of warm air.

"Mo—!"

"Sa—"

"—mantha! What the heck are you doing?"

"I'm looking at your thingy."

I cricked my neck up so that I could look at Mom more directly. "Looking at my thingy is an inappropriate activity for a four-year-old girl."

"I'm not four anymore," Mom said, looking at my face with her best attempt at childlike innocence.

"You're not four any more? How old are you, then?"

"I'm ten."

"Ten?"

"Yes."

"Why ten?

"Because I'm growing up, silly," Mom said, giggling.

"So why is it all right for a ten-year-old girl to look at my thingy?"

"Because ten-year-old girls are very curious about little boys' thingies." Mom reached out, grabbed my cock, and steered it around like a joystick. "Vroom, vroom," she said.

That one touch from Mom's hand was almost enough to make me come on the spot. "Samantha! Stop that! Looking is one thing, but touching is quite another. And I'm not a little boy."

"You sure aren't," Mom said, giving my cock two squeezes. "Honk, honk. It must be fun to have a thingy."

"Ten-year-old girls don't have to know about boys' thingies," I said, "especially about their responsible person's thingy."

"Did you know that some ten-year-old girls are already starting to get boobs and stuff?" Mom let go of my cock and gave her bare breasts a jounce. "They have to start learning about boys' thingies. Boys' thingies can do nasty things to girls, you know." She gently wrapped her hand around my cock again and gave it one pump. "Ooh, that's so smooth," she said.

As I flopped my head back down on the pillow I came awake enough to fully comprehend what was going on. "Samantha!" I snapped. "Let go of my penis! It's not for you to play with. And why don't you have a shirt on?" Besides, that one pump felt way too good, and I didn't even want to think about discussing thingy juice with Samantha. And my mother shouldn't be playing with my cock, and I shouldn't be enjoying it. At all.

Mom withdrew her hand and made a pitiful moue. "You're responsible for my education," she said.

"Get yourself together and get to the kitchen for breakfast," I said firmly. "Then we'll talk about your education, little missy." Mom stood and scurried her panty-clad bottom toward the hall. "AND PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!"

Before she reached the door, she stopped dead in her tracks and looked over toward my desk. "Cameron, do you have a cold?"

"No, I don't have a cold," I said. "What makes you think I might have a cold?"

"Your wastebasket is all full of Kleenexes," she said. Mom made a production of sniffing the air. "Your room smells funny." She walked over to the waste basket, picked it up, and held it up to her nose. "Eew! That's what smells funny. I think you'd better go dump this in the garbage can."

I buried my face in my pillow and beat my fists on the mattress. When I looked up, Mom was gone.

Mom really dragged her heels getting down to the kitchen. By the time she arrived, I'd got dressed and dumped my waste basket and was ready to get on with the day.

"What's for breakfast this morning?" Mom demanded.

"You ate such a good breakfast yesterday that I thought I'd give you a treat and let you have Cocoa Puffs this morning," I said, feeling munificent.

"Cocoa Puffs?" Mom said, looking at me like I had holes in my head. "Cocoa Puffs? Yuck! Cocoa Puffs are for little kids."

I resisted the urge to smack my head against the cupboard and instead cut up some fresh fruit and made toast wedges.

Mom polished off a chunk of honeydew. "Can we go to the mall today?" she asked.

"Nope," I said, "today we're going to go to the zoo."

"The zoo?" Mom said. "I think the mall would be a lot more fun."

"I'm responsible for your education," I said. "You just said so yourself, so I'm going to assist your education by taking you to the zoo. You can't learn much at the mall. Except maybe for a bunch of bad lessons. If you're finished eating, brush your teeth and go to the bathroom, and let's hit the road."

Standing at the entrance to the zoo, I drew a deep breath and swept one arm out expansively. "Well," I said, "here we are. Is there any animal you'd particularly like to see?"

"Yes," Mom said. "I want to see the capybaras."

I'd never heard of capybaras. "What's a capybara?"

"The capybara is the largest rodent in the world," Mom said. "Its closest relatives are agouti, chinchillas, coyphillas, and guinea pigs. Native to South America, the capybara inhabits savannas and dense forests and lives near bodies of water. It is a highly social species and can be found in groups as large as 100 individuals, but usually lives in groups of 10-20 individuals. The capybara is not a threatened species, though it is hunted for its meat and skin.

"Adult capybaras grow to 3.5 to 4.4 feet in length, stand 20 to 25 inches tall at the withers, and typically weigh 77 to 150 pounds, with an average in the Venezuelan llanos of 108 pounds. The top recorded weights are 200 pounds for a wild female from Brazil and 162 pounds for a wild male from Uruguay."*

I looked at Mom in utter astonishment. "Holy cow," I said. "I'm impressed. Where did you learn all that?"

"I know how to do my homework," Mom said.

"I wouldn't think a four-year-old would even know how to spell capybara," I said.

"C-a-p-y-b-a-r-a," Mom said. " And I'm not four any more, I'm ten, remember? But I'm a very precocious little girl at any age." She curled a smile and touched a dimple in her cheek.

"Precocious would be one word for it, I guess. So tell me: why do you want to go see the capybaras?"

"Because they look like giant guinea pigs," Mom said.

So off we trotted off in search of the capybaras—which weren't difficult to find because the path around the zoo passed right through their habitat.

"Ooh! Ooh! Look!" Mom said. "There they are!"

And sure enough, there were ten or a dozen giant guinea pigs wandering around in a little meadow, browsing on grass and muttering and chirping to one another.

"Aren't they cute?" Mom said. "Can we get one for a pet?"

"Capybaras are wild animals, sweetie, and wild animals are better left in the wild. Let's see what else we can learn about capybaras," I said, stepping over to the informational plaque at the edge of the walkway.

"Hmm, let's see, capybaras are social animals and live in groups of ten to thirty individuals. It looks like we couldn't get just one capybara anyway—we'd have to get ten."

"Ooh, that sounds even better," Mom said, with child-like enthusiasm.

"And, it says here," I said, "water is essential in a capybara's life. The scientific name for the animal—Hydrochoerus—means 'water pig.' They hide in water when they're frightened and they mate in water." I pointed to a pond at one edge of the capybaras' meadow.

Mom walked over and looked at the plaque. "Mate?" she said. "What's 'mate' mean, Cameron?"

A young mother with two small children who'd come to read the informational plaque gave Mom kind of a funny look and dragged the kids away from us.

I raised my eyebrows at Mom. "Do you mean to tell me that a precocious ten-year-old such as yourself doesn't know that 'mate' means?"

"Uuuuh-huuuuh," Mom said, drawing out the syllables.

I cupped my right elbow in my left hand and put my fingers to my chin. "Hmm. Well, mating is when a mommy capybara and a daddy capybara get together to make baby capybaras."

"Mating means having sex?" Mom asked, in an incredulous way, much louder than I thought she should have. The woman with two kids glanced our way.

"Yes," I hissed, tucking my chin down, "mating means having sex."

"Well, why didn't you say so?" Mom said, slapping me on the arm and admonishing me as if I were the child. "C'mon, let's go see the other animals!" She grabbed me by the hand and started tugging me along the path.

She went on by the bears without pausing and didn't even slow down much for the sea lions, which are usually entertaining with their barks and antics nearly airborne exits from the water. Her next stop was the kangaroos. She curled her fingers in front of her and made a couple of kangaroo-like hops, then stopped and surreptitiously cupped her breasts. They must still have been tender from our afternoon of hopscotch.

I tried to imagine what the first Englishman to encounter a kangaroo must have thought when he saw it. Capybaras are kind of funny looking and not native to England or the United States, but they follow the common mammalian pattern of furry critters with four legs that walk around and do whatever they do. But kangaroos? They're not shaped like anything else in the world, and I had a vision of that Englishman finally accepting what he saw—and then seeing a baby pop its head out of the pouch.

When Mom saw the sign pointing toward the petting zoo, she took off at a run.

"Ooh, Cameron, look at the cute little goats! Can I go feed one?"

We bought an ice-cream cone full of pygmy goat crunchies, and Mom went into the pen with the goats and little kids who were giggling and getting buffeted around by the little four-legged kids. Mom got down on her knees so that she was about the same height as the children and offered a palm of food to one of the goats. Her goat buddy was an aggressive little fellow who wasn't satisfied with the samples Mom was giving him: he put his hooves on her thighs and lunged for the whole cone. When Mom raised the cone over her shoulder to get it away from the goat in front of her, another one came up from behind and snatched her food supply—cone, crunchies, and all—right out of her hand. The little guy standing on her legs reached up and licked her mouth.

"Bleargh!" Mom shouted, scrubbing at her face with the back of her hand. "Goat spit!" Standing quickly, Mom sent the goats running and made straight for the gate. "That's enough of that," she said. "I think I'm ready to go home."

On our way to the exit, we came to Monkey Island, a lump of landscaped earth surrounded by a moat. The idea was that the monkeys could run free in something like a natural environment but be safe from both escape and their human visitors. If someone approaching Monkey Island today had called out, "Holy cow, look at all the fucking monkeys," he would have been absolutely correct. Virtually every monkey on the island was engaged in the act of reproduction. As soon as parents with children caught on to what was going on, they dragged their kids away with offers of ice cream or cotton candy to quell the children's protests. One older couple stood looking on wistfully. Two pairs of teen-agers fidgeted and giggled and pointed and tugged at their pants.