Terrible Tad Meets The Malodorous Mudpit 1 to 2

By PatrickNaked

Copyright 2022 by PatrickNaked all rights reserved

Tad, an overly energetic twelve year old, leaps before he looks one too many times and ends up mired in a very messy predicament. Can he and his three female friends clean up his latest disaster before they all get in trouble?

Terrible Tad 1: The Mud Bath

The year was 1962. The location was Hammond, Texas. Hammond was a middling sized town separated from the rest of civilization by miles and miles of scruffy, scrubby Texas woodland and dirty pastures choked with crabgrass and spiky thistle. (The word ‘civilization’ was used in a relative way, this being Texas.)

That year, a drier drought than usual had killed off all the green grass that had once added the only bit of allure to an otherwise ugly part of the state. Everyone’s lawns were a crispy brown.

My name is Teresa. I was thirteen years old at the time and was ignorant of the world outside of Hammond. Hammond WAS the world. Any indications of something beyond were just words in a newspaper I barely glanced at or scratchy, distorted reports on the television of riots and wars that seemed so far away as to be fiction.

The internet hadn’t been invented. That television had one channel with poor reception. We actually had a local radio station, but it played only a narrow and repetitious selection of country music and equally monotonous religious programming. I had little use for either.

There was one theater. It could be years late in receiving the latest offerings, but more than made up for the delay by hanging onto what it had for months at a time.

Outside of the small school, there were hardly any books. There weren’t that many inside of the school, either.

If kids my age wanted to learn anything beyond the dry, boring school curriculum, they had to work at it. Hard. We were like the gold pan miners who sifted through water and dirt for the rare nuggets of gold. Except we had to sift through speculation, uneducated guesses, rumors, and outright lies to hopefully find a few nuggets of truth.

And, of course, at my age a large portion of the truth we sought involved the subject of sex. More specifically, the opposite sex. And sex was most definitely not in the school curriculum. Our parents, usually too uncomfortable to discuss such matters with their children, only supplied the tiniest morsels of information for our starving brains. To be fair, most kids didn’t want to discuss that kind of thing with their parents either. The reluctance ran both ways.

We kids were awash in waves of hormones, unable to swim, with no life rings in sight.

Once or twice every year a local boy would run away from home, probably to one of the bigger cities… Dallas or Houston or just anywhere that wasn’t Hammond. Here one day and gone the next. Trying to imagine leaving everything and everyone I knew for the inscrutable unknown overwhelmed me with a feeling of loss and loneliness. I vowed I’d never leave Hammond. It wasn’t much, but it was mine.

I had quite a few friends, but the ones I hung out with the most were Tracie and Ellie, both twelve years old. I saw more of them than others because we lived on the same street. Our street was very short, with only seven houses. It was a bit removed from the rest of the town by a band of pastures on one side and a stretch of woods on the other. We were as isolated within Hammond as the town was from the rest of the world.

Besides Tracie and Ellie, there was…Tad. The only boy in our little group. He lived on our street too, right next door to me. The only reason he became part of our group was his proximity. Since he was right there in our small island of homes, we could hardly ignore him, so we ended up accepting him. To a degree. Tad was twelve, too.

It was inevitable that we’d all be friends since we were the only four kids on that street and we’d known each other all our lives.

Being the oldest, I was the de facto leader of the group. Not that the others always listened to me. Tad NEVER listened to me. I was the tallest by quite a bit. That one year difference in ages added a lot of inches in height. My hair was brown and quite long. I wanted to see if I could go my entire life without cutting it. I liked to read; an ironic, futile pastime in that town. And I had a big shaggy, happy dog named Barney that was stupid as a stump and I loved him all the more because of it.

Ellie was the next oldest. She was blonde and pretty. Pretty in a nice way, not like some other girls at school who just KNEW they were gorgeous and were SO far above everyone else because of it. Ellie had recently received a Polaroid instant camera from her grandfather. It used the peel-apart film. You just had to take a picture, pull out the film and wait a minute. Then peel off the top to reveal the photo. It was like a magic trick, but much more practical. We eventually put that camera to good use. Or bad, depending on what side of the camera you were on.

Tracie was the next oldest. She had thick black hair and was a little on the stocky side. Some of the meaner boys at school called her fat. A few of the girls, too. But I didn’t think she was fat. She was just bigger around than some of the other kids. Tracie obsessed over glamour magazines. She had stacks of them covering every surface of her room.

Then there was…Tad… the youngest of the group, having only recently turned twelve. He was also the smallest, which wasn’t unusual at our age. He kept hoping a growth spurt was just around the corner so he could rightfully be taller than us mere girls. Tad was blond like Ellie, but his hair was so blond it was almost white. I had to admit he was a cutie, with his button nose and big blue eyes. The other girls thought so, too. But he was also a source of constant irritation.

Tad was boisterous, always looking for some kind of adventure. Always getting into trouble. Always getting US into trouble. He wasn’t BAD. He was just too energetic and reckless for his own good. Or ours. I’d heard his mother say he never looked before he leaped. He never looked AFTER he leaped either. Tad never walked when he could run. Even indoors. And no amount of scolding from all the parents on the street could slow him down.

He was also a prankster. When I opened the cardboard cigar box I kept my school supplies in, I never knew if that was all I’d find or if there would also be a frog or garden snake to liven things up. We all suffered his “hilarious” practical jokes. And he endlessly teased us about anything he could. If he ran out of tease material, he’d make something up. It didn’t matter to HIM. Granted, we teased him too, mostly about his height. But we did it in self defense.

Strangely, he never teased Tracie about her weight. Maybe he had a little bit of kindness in there somewhere. Or he was just so self-obsessed that he never even noticed.

Tad was a bundle of such contradictions. There was a major one in particular that would play a huge part in the events of a certain Saturday that year. Despite being so wild and unrestrained, he was definitely not the uninhibited type when it came to the area of modesty. He was very bashful about his body.

One example: He didn’t like going to the local swimming pool with us. When we dragged the reason out of him, he sheepishly admitted it was because swimsuits left too much skin uncovered. People could see his nipples. This sent us into hysterical fits of laughter. He didn’t talk to us for days.

I had a second circle of friends. A larger group who were really more than friends. They were… colleagues. But I’ll get to them later.

On that previously mentioned Saturday, my parents were going to an antique auction way out of town. They wouldn’t be back till almost nine o’clock that night. I didn’t want to go to a boring auction, and they didn’t want to leave me home that long by myself. All of the other parents on our street would be inconveniently engaged elsewhere that day, so mine decided to drop me off at my Aunt Martha’s house, then pick me up on their way back.

I enjoyed going to my aunt’s house. It was just outside of town. Kind of secluded, but not TOO far away. It didn’t take HOURS to get there. There was a beautiful stream running through the woods behind her house. The stream wasn’t deep enough to swim in. It wasn’t very wide either. But I liked it, if for no other reason than it looked pretty in a town that had little else you could use that word for.

There was a large fallen tree across the stream you could use to cross to the rest of the woods on the other side.

I asked my mother if Tracie and Ellie could come too. She made a few calls and got everything arranged with their parents.

About half an hour later, Tracie and Ellie arrived at my house. Ellie was bringing her new camera to take some nature pictures in the woods. As we were getting into the bed of my father’s truck, Tad showed up. I hadn’t included him in the plans on purpose. He’d been extra obnoxious lately and I needed some Tad-free time to get over my irritation with him. We all did.

It turns out my oh-so-helpful mother had called ALL the parents on the street. Including Tad’s.

Thanks, Mom.

It was a short but pleasant ride to my aunt’s house. My mother and father were up front in the cab and all of us kids were in the back. The day was miserably hot, as usual, but the wind blowing over us felt good. Even Tad sat back silently and enjoyed the ride.

When the asphalt streets gave way to dirt roads, we knew we were near Aunt Martha’s house. The house was small, about a third of the size of mine. But it was neat and tidy and reminded me of a little doll house I had when I was younger. It sat at the intersection of two roads that saw little use. That was how my aunt liked it. She was a recluse.

Aunt Martha was quite the opposite of her tiny house. She was big and imposing. I loved her, but was a bit scared of her, too. She wasn’t just big around. She was big-tall. She was almost as tall as my father, and he was six feet. And her poundage wasn’t just fat. There was muscle in there. She looked STRONG.

She wasn’t actually my aunt. She was a more distant relation. Fifth great cousin on the whoever’s side, or something like that.

I never knew how old she was. She could’ve been fifty or seventy-five. To my thirteen year old self, both of those were ancient. Her short, curled hair was iron gray. Her jowly face looked like an old bulldog’s and she had the gruff, grumpy disposition to match. She said what she thought and too bad if you didn’t like it.

All the kids called her Aunt Martha, even though I was the only one actually related to her.

My mother told me Aunt Martha used to be a blocker in a roller derby team. If you’ve never seen roller derby, it can be a brutal sport. I wouldn’t have wanted to face that big, stout, irritable woman in a physical contest.

We had all been to her house many times over the years, since before I could even remember. To be honest, I think our parents used Aunt Martha’s as a dumping ground for inconvenient kids. When they had things to do, or were just tired of having us underfoot, to Aunt Martha’s we would go. She had fed us, bathed us, changed our diapers. She liked to remind Tad of this. It always brought a blush to his face.

As much as we all loved her, she was a formidable presence. With her size, face and demeanor, I could well imagine her as an ogre straight from the pages of a book I had recently read. Tracie and Ellie were intimidated by her. Tad was terrified of her. She had little tolerance for boys and less for one boy in particular. Even though Tad actually tried to be on his best behavior around her, his best wasn’t all that good.

Even so, he usually couldn’t wait for the next visit to her house because he loved exploring the woods behind it as much as the rest of us. Those woods were deeper and thicker than what was behind our own homes. The trees were older and exuded an almost mystical ambience that enthralled us three girls. Tad was oblivious of such things. He just knew he could always find ADVENTURE there.

On that Saturday, he managed to antagonize my aunt right from the start. I had already warned him to be good on the way there, and he did try. But within ten minutes of our arrival, Tornado Tad had left a path of destruction.

Shortly after we arrived, my aunt got lemonade out of the refrigerator for the kids while she had coffee brewing for herself. We all sat down in her living room at the back of the house. Except for Tad. He said it looked too much like a tea party and went outside to find adventure in the back yard.

Aunt Martha’s living room was small, but it had a huge window next to the back door overlooking the backyard. The window had blinds, but they were pulled all the way up. Without the blinds to act as a shield, a large window like that would normally turn the room into an oven as the hot Texas sun burned its way through. But my aunt had covered the window with a thin, reflective film. This kept the room much cooler. What fascinated me about of this setup was that from the inside, you couldn’t tell the film was there, but from the outside it was a mirror. You could see out, but no one could see in. This allowed us a wide open view of the small backyard, a fenced in area for the few pigs my aunt kept, a small coop for the chickens, and surrounding countryside. At the moment, the view included Tad, who was apparently fighting off an invisible foe with an equally invisible sword.

Soon the coffee was ready. Aunt Martha heaved her bulk up out of her recliner and went to pour herself a cup. As she was returning with it to the living room, Tad came bounding through the back door like a cannonball. We girls saw what was about to happen, but were powerless to stop it.

Tad barreled into my aunt at about fifty miles per hour. As big as she was, her mass wasn’t enough to absorb such an impact. She almost fell completely over, but managed to right herself. In the process, though, her arm raked a stack of newly washed and dried dinner plates off the kitchen counter. The plates exploded on impact with the floor, sending shards of ceramic shrapnel flying in every direction. Her coffee cup flipped backwards and doused her with hot liquid.

As for Tad, he bounced off my aunt like he’d hit a vertical trampoline. He rebounded into the living room. I just managed to rush forward in time to throw myself over a delicate shelf of tiny, fragile figurines. Tad slammed into me, spun around and fell backwards on his butt.

The sound of exploding dinnerware could probably be heard back in town. Tad stared around himself in shock at the devastation he had wrought. The floor of both the kitchen and living room was covered in the remains of what turned out to be my aunt’s only plates. Tad looked up into Aunt Martha’s livid face. As her jowls quivered with anger, his look of shock turned to one of terror. “I’ll… I’ll clean it up,” he squeaked.

“NO!” my aunt bellowed. That could probably be heard in town, too. She turned to me. “Get that heathen out of my house before I pop his head like a pimple! Don’t let him touch another thing.”

Why me, I wondered. I’m not responsible for the hellion. I didn’t even want him here today. But I knew better than to say anything aloud. The quivering in her jowls had spread to her whole body. She was shaking with barely suppressed rage. One wrong word could trigger a detonation that would take us all out.

I reached down and grabbed Tad’s arm, pulling him to his feet. I told him to MOVE, but he was still too stunned by the magnitude of his latest catastrophe to think straight. Not that he did much straight thinking even in the best of times. He just stood there, stupefied.

“Why is that savage still in my house?” my aunt thundered.

Ellie rushed over to help and we half-dragged, half-carried the little nuisance out the back door. “Stay there,” I ordered. “Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t exist.”

While my aunt stomped off to the bedroom to change her sodden blouse, we girls started sweeping up the debris. It took a while. Tad had really turned the destruction dial all the way up this time.

Ellie fiercely whispered at me, “This isn’t fair. We didn’t even do it!” I shushed her. I was in complete agreement, but there was nothing to be done at the moment. Later though, Terrible Tad would feel our wrath.

My aunt had returned while we worked and glowered over us with her hands on her hips. Once we finished to her satisfaction, she took her truck keys from a hook on the kitchen wall. “Come with me, girls.” She seemed surprisingly calm now. I wondered if that should worry me more.

She led us out back. Tad stood at the furthest end of her backyard, looking ready to bolt if a murderous roller derby queen came his way.

“Relax, boy,” she called to him. “You’re safe. For now. I may not look it, but I’m still mad as hell. If I walloped you now, I wouldn’t be able to stop until you were bone meal and mush.”

She walked directly up to the frightened boy and stood towering over him. “You and your friends go play in the woods. I’m going into town to buy some new dishes. There’s nothing left to eat lunch off of. When I return, I’ll be handing you the bill to take to mommy and daddy. I’ll expect recompense by Monday.”

She bent down to stare Tad directly in the eye. Tad couldn’t stare back. He dropped his gaze to look at his tennis shoes instead. “You got it, you pint-sized miscreant?” He nodded his head, still looking down.

“Let me hear you say it,” she demanded.

“I understand, Aunt Martha.” he complied in a tiny voice. He looked and sounded like a small child at that moment.

“Good,” she said. She bent down further to whisper in his ear, perhaps thinking the rest of us couldn’t hear, “Don’t think you dodged a bullet on this one. I’ve had you over my knee before. I’ve blistered your bare butt quite a few times. What’s coming will be worse than all that combined. I have a few tricks even YOU haven’t seen, little boy. And I may just wait. Let you worry on it. Retribution tastes better when it’s simmered for a while.” Tad shuddered. I felt a chill as well, but decided my aunt was just trying to scare him. Maybe a good scare was what the wild child needed.

As Aunt Martha straightened back up, Tad touched his cheek where her jowls had rubbed against him.

My aunt turned to us girls. “Go and play. Be back in time for lunch.” She jerked a thumb towards Tad. “Try to kept that one in line. Smack him if you have to.”

That sounded like SUCH a good idea.

As she turned to leave, she added, “I have a few other errands to run, so I’ll be a couple of hours or so.”

As we entered the woods, we heard the old truck start up and drive away towards town.

I thought my aunt had been amazingly restrained, given the level of damage Tad had produced this time. She had basically let him off with a warning. I hoped he appreciated it.

Fifteen minutes later, we were all standing on the rocky shore, staring down in disappointment and despair at what had once been my beautiful stream. The drought hadn’t been kind to it. It was about two feet lower than it used to be. And instead of clear water rushing over the rocks, it was a stagnant swamp of mud. Foul smelling mud at that. It absolutely reeked.

The old fallen tree that had been our bridge to the rest of the woods had deteriorated, too. Since the last time I saw it, which wasn’t that long back, it had rotted and fallen into the sludge. Our way across was gone.

A few yards further down the shore was another, smaller branch laying across the expanse about three feet above the surface. It didn’t look rotten, but it wasn’t very wide at all. Traversing it would be a balancing act worthy of a circus tightrope walker. I declared it to be off limits.

"I'll bet I can do it," Tad bragged. His cockiness and confidence had returned during the walk through the woods. We had all lectured him the whole way about things like looking and leaping, but he had just laughed it off in that irritating manner. I think he was trying to forget, and make US forget, how chagrined he had been earlier when he had cringed and cowered under my aunt’s steely gaze.

Ellie told him to not be an idiot. The branch was barely wider than his tennis shoes and didn't look very sturdy besides. But just as tigers can't change their stripes, idiot boys like Tad can't NOT be idiots.

Besides, he had been diminished and humbled by my aunt in front of us GIRLS, so he needed to reassert his standing as the fearless and daring BOY.

I repeated that it looked too dangerous. He told me he was MADE for danger.

Tracie asked him, “Let’s say you actually manage to make it across without falling in and getting sucked to the bottom of that stinking mess. You’ll be on one side and we’ll be on the other.” She was as exasperated as the rest of us. “WE’RE not going to follow you across. What are you going to do then?”

“That’s obvious,” he replied in a tone that suggested he was talking to a very thickheaded child. “I’ll just come back.” He looked at her like SHE was the crazy one.

“Aaaargh!” Ellie screamed. “Just let him do it. After that catastrophe in Aunt Martha’s kitchen, I don’t even care anymore.” She glared at him. “WE had to clean up your mess. As usual.”

Tracie gave in, too, and told him, “Go ahead, Tad. Let’s see if your abilities measure up to your boasts.”

Tad looked over at me to see if I had anything to add. I had nothing that didn’t involve words my parents had told me never to use. I just gave him a slight bow and swept my arm towards the branch of doom, silently telling him, “Be my guest…”

He stepped up to the branch and hesitated briefly before tentatively stretching one foot out. His words had been big and brave, but now that he had to follow through, he was obviously unsure of the wisdom of his decision. All that confidence was a facade. He glanced back at the rest of us quickly before finally setting his foot down firmly on the branch. He was NOT going to let a bunch of girls see past the facade to the uncertain boy beneath.

Holding his arms out for balance, he brought his other foot around to place it on the branch ahead of the first one. Now both feet were on the skinny, unstable surface. The branch bent beneath his weight and creaked alarmingly. It swayed and shifted beneath him. He waved his arms about and twisted his body in unnatural ways to compensate for the movement. I could tell that this would soon end in disaster.

Ellie and Tammy were making little noises of dismay every time his windmilling arms and twisting torso almost fell short of saving him from an ignominious fall. Despite their anger at him, they still feared for his safety. I'm sure even Tad now knew this was a foolish enterprise that would surely come to a calamitous end. But being a boy, he couldn't admit defeat in front of us girls. That would be degrading. And his pride had already taken a hit that day.

Besides, trying to retreat at this point by going backwards along the unstable branch would probably be more difficult and dangerous than his perilous path forward. He wouldn't be able to see where he was stepping. And trying instead to successfully turn around on the swaying, wobbly, rickety surface so that he could walk frontwards to the shore he came from would be an act of agility he was surely incapable of.

A few more precarious steps took him further towards his fate. He was about halfway across the expanse, and the branch had bowed down almost to the surface of the foul-smelling mud. It swayed from side to side like a playground swing. Tad could barely retain his balance, even with all the comical gyrations he could muster. In the end, his ability to balance or not became moot.

He looked towards us with real panic in his eyes. He had finally conceded this was the worst idea in a twelve year career of bad ideas. Just as he started to say, “Uh, y’all…” there was a startlingly loud CRACK, and the branch split into two halves right between Tad's feet. Both sections dropped away into the muck below. There was a long moment while Tad seemed somehow suspended in the air. Then, with a despairing yowl, he too dropped down into the rank mud pit that had once been my sparkling stream.

As he fell, he pitched forwards to land face first in the quagmire. He floundered about, trying to regain his feet. When he was able to stand, the soupy mess he was mired in came up over his knees. Thankfully, he didn’t get sucked down into the muddy depths never to be seen again.

His face and entire front were completely covered in muck. He looked like a mud monster rising from the marsh. We girls were too shocked to react at first, but as we watched poor Tad staring down at his profoundly soiled self, we burst into laughter all at once. He jerked his head towards us, sending big globs of muck flying from his face and hair. "Shut up!" he screamed, his voice breaking. He was asking the impossible. All the pent up tension of watching him work his way across that perilous bridge exploded out of us in uncontrollable laughter. It didn't help that he looked so comical in his coating of mud.

Just as our laughter was beyond our control, so too was his anger at looking so foolish in front of the girls he had been trying to impress. "I said shut up!" he raged. "You... you BITCHES!"

Oops.

That last word DID shut us up. Instantly. The silence stretched uncomfortably. Tad realized that even though he got what he demanded, it wasn’t going to be an outcome necessarily to his advantage. He began to stammer out an apology. "I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I don’t know where that came from."

I coldly told him, "Tad, don't even bother. Just drag your butt out of there. We're going back." All my concern for the well-being of this foolish boy had turned to stone. It only took a glance at Ellie and Tracie to know they felt the same.

Tad began to make his way back to the shore, slogging slowly through the muck. Though the top layer was soupy, the mud beneath was thicker and sucked at his feet. It wasn't till he was on shore that he realized his tennis shoes had been sucked right off his feet and were now irretrievably lost to him. His mom was going to be MAD.

But before reaching the shore to discover this, he had one more calamity in store. Namely, ME. I hadn't forgotten that word he had thrown at us. When he reached the edge of the rocky shore and started climbing up the small incline to where we stood, I reached out both hands and shoved him in the chest. With a howl of protest, he staggered backwards to land once again in the evil-smelling, marshy mess. He lay back in it and stared up at me in shock and outrage. It was amazing how much emotion he could convey with only his eyes and mouth visible through the dripping mud mask he was wearing.

He started to yell, “You, bi…“ I cut him off with a warning, "Say that word again and I’ll whip your filthy ass all the way back to the house. Don’t think I won’t. My hands are already muddy now. A little more won’t hurt.” Ellie and Tracie looked at me in shock. Despite all the trouble Tad caused through the years, they had never heard me threaten him that way before. Tad had never called us bitches, either. It was a day of firsts.

He usually was good natured and not easy to anger. On most days, a dip in the mud would’ve left him laughing at the absurdity of it all. But that day he seemed off. On edge. Even his earlier bravado seemed a bit forced. It must’ve been those dinner plates.

Tad hadn’t moved, still laying in the stinking slop. Which was just as well. I wasn’t finished yet. “Then I’ll tell Aunt Martha what you said and we’ll all get to watch her wash your mouth out with soap. And you know what’ll happen after THAT.” She had actually done that once before when he was eight years old. He had stubbed his toe on her back doorstep and repeated a word he had heard a man in town use in a similar circumstance. I won’t repeat the word, but it began with F and ended with UCK.

Aunt Martha had scooped him up and carried him into the bathroom under one arm. She bellowed, “Get in here, girls. I want you to see what happens to foul mouthed little boys.”

She turned him around to face the sink, then pinned him against it with her vast body. She grabbed a bar of wet, softened soap from the soap dish and rammed into into his mouth, twisting it around to reach every possible area. Tad had fought and gagged and retched, tears streaming down his cheeks. His feet drummed against her legs. Trying to escape, he gripped the edges of the sink and pushed his bottom against her midsection, trying to force her back. She shoved forward in return, bellowing, “The more you fight me, you young hooligan, the worse this gets.” She kept shoving forwards, almost rhythmically, pushing his pelvis into the edge of the sink over and over.

A brief, disorienting image flashed through my mind. An early memory. Two horses in a pasture, one seemingly trying to ride the other. Confusion. Horses don’t ride each other. People ride horses. Thrusting. Shoving. My mother pulling me away, saying, “Don’t look at that.” But as with those horses, I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

Aunt Martha continued this for a long while. Tad’s strength had finally failed or he had just given up, and he was slumped into the bowl of the sink. He was no longer fighting, but my aunt seemed unaware of this and kept shoving her pelvis into his bottom. She continued to slide the bar of soap in and out of his mouth, twisting and turning it. Tad continued choking and retching. Thick, soapy drool ran out of his mouth into the sink.

When Aunt Martha decided Tad’s dirty mouth was sufficiently clean, she lifted him off the sink and set him down roughly, keeping her grip around him, holding his small body to her big one. She was breathing heavily and sweating from the exertion. She had a strange look on her face… intense and ecstatic.

Tad was facing us, eyes wide. Tears ran down his face and drool down his chin. He was still gagging at the foul taste of the soap. He hated for us girls to see him be punished. Especially when the punishment made him cry. Even so, it never seemed to curb his behavior for long.

We had all thought this particular punishment was over, but that had only been phase one. She forced Tad’s body around till he was facing her. She pulled him into her with his face pressed into the vast pillow of her belly.

Still holding him with one hand, she reached around his front with the other and began fumbling at his belt. Tad realized what was about to happen. He let loose a series of muffled cries. “No, please. Please, no.”

We girls all turned to look at each other in surprise and delight. My aunt was about to pull his pants down for a spanking. It had been a while since we had witnessed that. Too long. We were going to get to see Tad in his underpants again.

Aunt Martha got everything in front undone and jerked his pants down to his ankles, revealing his little white underpants to our eager eyes. Another muffled, “Noooooooo!”

We had seen my aunt give Tad a spanking quite a few times, but only about half of those involved pulling his pants down. That only happened after his most extreme misbehavior. Apparently, the F word counted as extreme. His embarrassment whenever we saw him in his underpants was extreme, also. We always compounded it with teasing and reminders for days afterwards. Sometimes for weeks.

I expected the spanking to commence at that moment, but Aunt Martha wasn’t finished with the preliminaries. She grabbed his underpants in front as she had done with his pants. Looking at us girls, as if to make sure we were watching, she pulled them all the way down.

Tad let loose with a wordless shriek this time. His bottom had just been fully exposed to three girls. As for us, the smiles were shocked from our faces. We all turned to look at each other in open mouthed astonishment, but quickly looked back at Tad’s bottom. Still shrieking, he had started fighting my aunt, trying to free himself. His fists drummed against her massive bosom to no avail. She didn’t even seem to notice. She was still staring intently at us girls. The corner of her mouth twitched, almost forming a lopsided smile.

I should’ve been delighted at seeing a boy’s bare bottom… and Tad’s at that. But instead I was suddenly uneasy. Sometimes my aunt scared me, and always in vague, indecipherable ways. This was such a moment. That half-smile was so unnerving, I dreaded ever seeing it fully formed.

Tad’s little white butt cheeks jiggled as he ineffectually battled my aunt. She finally took note of his efforts. Still holding him tight with one massive arm, she raised the other up, then brought it down. The smack of hand on bottom was startlingly loud in the small bathroom.

Tad let out a yelp and instantly ceased struggling. My aunt smiled. “Stings, don’t it? Skin on skin makes all the difference. No more over the underpants spankings for YOU, little devil. That hasn’t done a damn thing. From now on, whatever you do, THIS is what you’ll get.”

She proceeded to demonstrate what ‘this’ was… a spanking like none I had ever seen her deliver, and not just because Tad’s bottom had been bared to receive it. The initial rosy handprint she had left with that first contact quickly spread till his entire bottom was an angry, livid crimson. Tad’s cries became one long anguished wail.

When it finally ended, my aunt leaned her head back and let out a long, wavering sigh. Her hands dropped to her sides. She stood that way for a long while, eyes closed, sweat rolling down her face.

Tad’s muffled crying gradually decreased, becoming soft sobbing, then finally little hiccuping sounds. Though he was no longer trapped in her iron grip, Tad still had his head buried in her bulk, hands clutching her blouse, holding onto the one who had delivered the pain.

My aunt shuddered, a wave rippling through her. Her eyes opened.

She looked down at the small boy in front of her and stated in a mild, matter-of-fact way, “If I ever hear you use that word again, or any foul language around those girls, I’ll make you EAT that bar of soap.”

The disgrace of girls seeing his bare bottom hurt Tad as much as the spanking. Later, he gravely asked us if we’d actually seen it.

“Of course we did,” I told him. “She pulled your underpants down right in front of us. Just three feet away.”

“But you didn’t actually SEE me, did you?” he persisted.

Tracie told me, “Don’t bother, Teresa. You know what he’s like when he gets like this.”

But I could be persistent, too. “Tad,” I said in my most reasonable voice. “We were right there. Three feet away. We saw your butt. Deal with it.”

He considered. Then decided, “No. No, y’all didn’t see me.” He was all smiles again. This was typically Taddish irrational rationalizing.

We had watched Tad’s soaping and spanking with conflicting emotions. We felt sorry for him, but also took some pleasure in his anguish. Even at that tender age, he had a lot of payback coming for all the trouble he continually caused.

That night as I lay in bed, I kept replaying the scene… seeing Tad’s bare bottom as it was unveiled… seeing it redden under my aunt’s assault. I wondered what my aunt had felt when she touched it, ‘skin on skin’ as she said. I thought of my aunt’s promise that all future spankings would be as revealing. Would they ever be MORE revealing? Would we get to see more than just his bottom?

I had often wondered what that ‘more’ would look like. The only boy I had seen in his entirety was a friend’s baby brother as he was being bathed by his mother. What did those strange, fleshy attachments look like on a boy Tad’s age? What did Tad’s look like in particular? What did Tad look like with his entire body exposed? Nothing but bare skin from head to foot.

These thoughts made me feel funny. Kind of itchy and excited. And very, very naughty. That feeling was disconcerting, but it wouldn’t go away. I slept very little that night. What sleep I had was marred by a disturbing dream…

I walked into my aunt’s bathroom, but it was huge. The white tiled walls faded away into the distance. And it was filled with boys. Dozens of them. They had their backs to me. The bathroom was humid and steamy. I started to sweat. The boys already had sweat running freely down their bodies.

I realized then they were all naked. I was horribly embarrassed, as though I were the one exposed.

The boys all turned around to face me. They stared directly at me, seemingly in accusation. I was an outsider who had invaded their private space and saw more than I should see. I tried to tell them I had seen nothing. The steam obscured the details. Their bodies were blurred like I was looking at them through smeary glass. Tad was there now, nude like the others, walking towards me. He was becoming more clear the closer he got. I could almost…

I woke up shaking and sweaty and didn’t sleep again.

I treated Tad terribly all the next day, much to his confusion.

After that first bare-bottomed spanking, it was like the floodgates of corporal punishment had been opened. For the next two years or so, any new transgression was as likely to be met with a spanking as not. Sometimes standing, sometimes over her knee. Always with pants and underpants down.

The sessions weren’t as violent as that first one. Tad’s mother had inspected his bottom that first evening. The red was turning to purple. Tad told us he overheard his mother on the phone with Aunt Martha. His mother said she completely understood the need for spankings… she had to deal with his behavior on a daily basis. And baring his bottom in front of us girls was acceptable. Maybe that added embarrassment could accomplish what the spanking alone obviously couldn’t. But, she implored, if my aunt could just spank a little more lightly… maybe for a longer length of time to balance it out.

By the time Tad was ten, we’d seen him spanked about a thousand times, but never got to see more of him than his ever abused buttocks. Sometimes we’d catch just a hint of something else as my aunt pulled him over her lap, but it was only enough to taunt and tantalize us.

Tad never got used to us seeing him that way. We knew because of how nonchalant he attempted to act when we teased him about it. His usual response was, “I don’t CARE.”… the emphasis on ‘care’ showing how much he really did. Even complimenting him on how clean and white his underpants were could make his face turn as red as his bottom had been.

The year or so before Tad’s mud bath had seen fewer spankings. He wasn’t getting any better behaved. He had just been to Aunt Martha’s with us less often, having found some other pastimes to engage his interests. As troublesome as he was, I found I enjoyed exploring the woods a bit less when he wasn’t with us to inject his sense of silly adventure into the activity. If nothing else, Tad kept things lively.

And as for my wondering if we’d ever see more of Tad than his bottom, the answer was a resounding YES. That day would indeed come. It took a while, but the wait was oh so worth it.

Tad had never cursed around my aunt again. He remembered the taste of that soap. And he was aware that it was the F word that had introduced the practice of the bare bottom spanking. What horrors might another such word invoke?

So my threat of telling Aunt Martha about the B word was a potent one.

Tad remained silent as he pulled himself up out of the muck again. The muck wasn’t silent, though. It made disgusting sucking and squelching sounds as it tried to pull him back in. Some of the noises sounded like really wet farts, which was appropriate given the smell.

Once Tad was back up on shore, he was quite a sight to behold. Between his initial dunk in the muck and my forcefully propelling him back into it, he was covered completely in nasty, fetid gunk. It dripped and dropped from him in blobs. Ellie and Tracie couldn't stop giggling at the smelly, filthy, unfortunate boy. He kept looking down at himself as if he still couldn't quite believe this had happened. "What am I going to do?" he bawled. "I don't have any extra clothes. Aunt Martha's going to kill me. She’ll really kill me this time! I’ll be DEAD!” He looked to me, as the oldest, for guidance. “What do I DO?” he repeated.

"Don't know," I replied. "Don't care." Ellie and Tracie may have been finding humor in the situation, but I saw none at all. I was still seething at that word BITCHES.

"And my tennis shoes are gone," he continued to whine. "My mom just bought those. They were expensive."

“Well, dive back in there and get them," I told him. "WE are going back to the house."

I couldn't tell because of all the mud on his face, but it sounded like he was about to cry. “Teresa, please," he begged. "What am I going to dooooo?" When all that cockiness was knocked out of him, there wasn't much left but a pitiful, helpless little boy. I watched him forlornly scooping mud off his face and trying to dig it out of his hair. He eventually lost his battle with the tears that had been threatening to come. He began crying openly, not even trying to hide it. He bent over and put his hands on his knees, sobbing loudly.

The other two girls stopped giggling, now looking chagrined that they had been doing it at all. Even I finally gave in and took some pity on the brat. True, he didn't deserve any sympathy. He had brought all this on himself with his foolish actions and his thoughtless words. But if I couldn't soften my stance, if only just a little, then maybe I was the bitch he accused me of being.

"Ok, stop crying," I told him. In a pouty voice, he said he WASN'T crying, then sobbed some more.

“There's a hose by the back door. Maybe we can hose you off before Aunt Martha sees you. You'll still need to dry off. That’ll take a while. If she gets back before you’re dry, we can tell her that you just got REALLY sweaty out in the woods… swinging from the trees or something.”

I looked down at his muddy, shoeless feet. "As for the expensive tennis shoes your mom just bought, you're on your own."

We headed back down the trail towards the house. Ellie, Tracie and I chatted amiably the whole way. Tad slumped along dejectedly behind us. We made him walk WAY behind us. He smelled really bad. He continued fussing all the way back. “This stuff is all inside my clothes. Oh god, it’s even in my underwear. I can feel it squishing around. This is GROSS.” I think he was talking to himself, not us, and just didn’t realize that we could hear him from way back behind us. I couldn’t imagine a boy like Tad telling three girls that stuff was squishing around in his underwear.

When we arrived back at the house, the truck was still missing from the driveway. If my aunt really stayed gone for those two hours, we just might be able to pull this off. I knew that if she found Tad in this condition, we’d all get the blame. Again.

Tad scurried for the faucet. It was on the back wall of the house near the living room window. The garden hose connected to it was spooled up on the ground below. The hose had a nozzle at the end with a big trigger you squeezed with your hand. He turned the water on, then knelt on the ground and began washing the mud from his hair.

“God, it’s freezing!” he cried. Nevertheless, he continued, desperately hoping to finish the job before my aunt returned. But even though the big blobs of mud were running off onto the ground, his white-blond hair remained almost black.

I told Ellie to run into the house and get a bottle of shampoo from my aunt’s bathroom. When she returned with it, she squirted a large portion of floral scented shampoo on the top of Tad’s head. While he frantically scrubbed his hair, I briefly took the hose to wash the mud from my hands. After they looked clean, I sniffed at them. They still stank of that vile muck. We needed soap. Tracie ran inside to get it this time.

After applying shampoo two more times, Tad’s hair was eventually back to it’s normal color. His face was partially clean from the water’s runoff from his hair. But the rest of him was still unadulterated mud monster. He started spraying his shirt and pants with the hose. I told him, “Tad, that’ll never work. You need to take all that stuff off.”

He jerked his head around towards me and stammered, “W…what?” Ellie and Tracie stared at me too.

I explained to him, “You said it yourself. That mud got everywhere. Even in your underpants. You can’t just hose the outside of your clothes off.” I realized I hadn’t been thinking this through sufficiently. Fixing this was going to be a lot more complicated.

“You won’t get clean that way, and your clothes won’t either. It took a lot of shampoo to do your hair. Plain water isn’t going to do it. We need to put your clothes in the washing machine. And we need to do it NOW. It’ll take over an hour for them to wash and dry. There’s no telling when Aunt Martha will be back. While they’re washing, you can use the soap and water hose out here to clean up.” I added, “And use a LOT of soap. You stink.”

The implications of my plan weren’t lost on the others. It involved Tad taking all of his clothes off.

“No way!” he bawled. “I can’t take my clothes off out here. I can take them off in the bathroom in the house. And I can wash up in the bathtub. Then I can stay in there till my clothes are done.”

“And track fifty pounds of putrid smelling mud all through Aunt Martha’s house?” I asked. “Besides, we wouldn’t be able to get the smell of YOU out of the bathroom. I don’t think you realize how rank this is.”

Tad stamped his foot, sending mud flying. “I’m not going to strip out here in the backyard,” he yelled.

Why did he always have to be so stubborn. I wanted to yell back at him, but I took on a reasonable tone, “You need to get them off here. We can hose the worst of the mud off of them, then we take them in while you use soap and water to clean yourself up. And we need to move NOW. It may already be too late.”

“She did say she’d be gone for two hours,” Ellie told me.

“She was guessing. We don’t know HOW long it’ll be,” I countered. I turned to Tad, “So you need to get undressed. Now, dammit.”

He still balked, even as afraid as he was of my aunt and her wrath. I put all the authority of our group’s eldest into my voice and demanded, “Strip, Tad. NOW!” I then added, in a softer tone, “Or you could just wait for my aunt to get back and sort out the situation. The spanking you get for THIS, after what you did to her dishes, will be worse than all the others combined.”

That did the trick. With a sob he began struggling his way out of his filthy t-shirt. It was thick with mud. When he finally managed to pull it over his head, his newly washed hair was muddy again. Great. His torso was almost completely sheathed in mud. Very little of his pale, pink skin showed through.

“Pants,” I told him. “Now your pants.” He hesitated, looking like a trapped animal. So I said, “Aunt Martha hasn’t spanked you at all this year. Do you really think now that you’re twelve years old she won’t? She’d probably spank you if you were twenty.”

He unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants. He gazed up at us, pleading with his eyes, “Don’t look.”

Tracie cried out, “Oh, for God’s sake. Just do it. You’re going to get us all in trouble.” Meanwhile, Ellie was hosing the thick mud from Tad’s discarded shirt.

Tad let out a whimpering sigh and unzipped. Pulling the pants off proved more difficult than the shirt. He fell over twice while trying to extricate himself. He had shown more balance on the branch. Once he managed to drag them off each leg, he was clad only in his socks, his no-longer white briefs, and that layer of foul-smelling muck.

Under normal circumstances, seeing an obviously embarrassed boy, especially Tad, in only his underpants and socks would have been a titillating thrill. But I was too frantically aware of the clock running out. Besides, there wasn’t much to see since he was still clothed in a layer of mud that acted as a shield for his modesty. Not that he appreciated it. He looked like he could actually die of mortification at any moment.

He tossed the pants over to where Ellie was finishing up the shirt. The shirt was by no means clean and it’s original color was indecipherable, but it was safe enough to take through the house without leaving an incriminating trail of blobs and globs of mud in its wake.

Ellie began hosing the pants while Tracie wrung out the excess water from the shirt. Tad had gotten the socks off and was now down to his filthy underpants. I looked at them, then up to his face. “I can’t,” he whined. “I really, really, really, really can’t.”

“Ok,” I told him. “Calm down. We’ll turn our backs, you get your underpants off and throw them over with everything else. We won’t turn around and look. I promise. No one will see your little winkie. We’ll take your clothes in. We’ll stay inside where we can’t see you. You wash up. With soap. Shampoo your hair again. While you’re doing that, we’ll try to figure out what to do with you till your clothes are ready. Sound good?”

“I guess so,” he replied. “But it isn’t a little winkie,” he added sullenly.

“Ok, then. Girls, turn your backs. We have a bashful boy in our midst.”

It was at that point, when everything seemed to be coming together and there was actual hope we might succeed, that Aunt Martha, far too early, came around the corner of the house with her arms full of shopping bags. We had been so involved in getting Tad separated from his clothes that we hadn’t heard the truck return.

She stopped and stood there, frozen in speechless shock. Actually, we were all frozen in speechless shock.

I don’t know how long that moment lasted. Long enough for me to realize how this all must look to my aunt. There was one girl caught hosing off a boy’s pants. One wringing out his shirt. There was me, just standing there looking stupid. Then, of course, there was the very dirty boy clad only in his grubby underpants, his thumbs tucked into the waistband about to pull them down. All of us with our mouths and eyes as wide as they could open. We must’ve looked like a small herd of deer caught in the headlights. One in grubby underpants.

Aunt Martha broke the spell. “What in tarnation is going on here?!!” she bellowed. Dozens of birds took flight from the nearby trees. “What are you kids doing?” She glared at Tad specifically. “Why are you practically naked? And have you been wallowing in the pig sty?”

Tad suddenly burst into tears, then lifted one shaky arm to point in my direction. “She pushed me in the mud.”

The other two girls grabbed me in time as I lunged for the traitorous little louse. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I had reached him, but it would’ve been unpleasant and permanent.

Pandemonium erupted with everyone shouting and gesturing at once. Aunt Martha finally bellowed louder than everyone else combined, “SHUT UPPPPPP!” We all stopped instantly.

She continued at a lower volume, “Everyone keep your mouths shut. Except for you,” she pointed at me. Why always me? “You will tell me, from the beginning, clearly and concisely, just what the bloody blue hell is going on.”




Terrible Tad 2: The Backyard Bath

After the tale had been told, my aunt stood thinking for a while. “Alright. You girls gather up all the boy’s clothes and put them in the washer. Now.”

We grabbed the pants, shirt and socks and started for the back door. “I said ALL his clothes,” she admonished. We were all confused for a moment, till Tad said “Wait… you don’t mean…”

Aunt Martha said, “Yes, I do mean. Take off those nasty panties. Now.”

“What? I can’t. Please, no, Aunt Martha,” Tad begged. “Not in front of everyone. Not the girls.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” she grumbled. “What makes you think you have anything anyone wants to see? Believe me, those girls aren’t interested in what you’ve got. You boys obsess over your own peckers more than any girl does. As for me, I’ve seen my share of the damn things, including yours, and I could easily go to my grave not seeing another.” I was shocked. My aunt had said “peckers”.

Tad’s face was showing increasing alarm. Good. He had traitorously turned on me when the going got rough. I hadn’t mentioned the B word to my aunt in my recital of the day’s events. But maybe I should’ve.

My aunt seemed to have partly reconsidered. “I guess these girls don’t need to be subjected to the sight of your thingee.”

Tad almost collapsed in relief. “Thank you, Aunt Martha. Thank you.”

She continued, “So you can turn your back when you take the panties off.”

Tad sputtered out a “but… but…but.” It didn’t matter that we had already seen his bare bottom a thousand times before. Each one of those times had been as embarrassing for him as the first. Maybe even more so in a cumulative way.

I smirked internally. Tad’s “but… but…but” was appropriate, because that was exactly what we were about to see. And more. This time, he’d be wearing nothing else, mud notwithstanding. We’d see him entirely naked from behind.

I looked over at Tracie and Ellie. They had looks of rapt anticipation.

Seeing that Tad had not yet complied, my aunt told him, “If I don’t see that dirty bottom of yours really quick, it’ll soon be redder than that blush across your face. You have until 3…2…”

Before she reached 1, Tad had spun about and yanked his underpants down to his ankles. He then stepped out of them and kicked them back behind him in the general direction of his other clothes. He quickly put his hands behind him over his bottom in a futile effort to hide his nakedness. I heard him whining to himself, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

My larger circle of girlfriends traded real life accounts of just this type of scenario… boys being embarrassed. Preferably by being caught naked in some way. It was a favorite topic of conversation.

These stories usually involved someone’s brother, cousin, male friend, etc. Tad, with his inability to properly behave and all the consequent spankings, was frequently featured… completely unbeknownst by him, of course.

His latest escapade was quickly becoming the best Tale of Tad yet. This was so much more than his pants and undies around his ankles. He had no t-shirt, no shoes and socks. He had nothing on at all, and he was standing outside in the bright sunshine where the whole world could see him. And that world included Tracie, Ellie and me.

And it wasn’t just any boy. It was Tad, the thorn in our collective side… the boy too embarrassed to go to a public pool because a big, baggy bathing suit was too revealing. This was so good.

I wondered if I told my aunt about the B word, would she make him turn around as punishment? I was so tempted, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even after his recent betrayal. I was the oldest and so should act more mature than the others.

“Alright, girls. Into the house with you now. I’ve got a boy to bathe.” Tad made a little squeaking sound.

“You’re going to bathe me? I can do it myself. Aunt Martha, please. I really, really can.” He craned his neck around to give her a desperate look.

“I’ve bathed you plenty of times before, as you well know.”

“When I was a little kid!” Tad wailed.

“You’re STILL a little kid,” my aunt reminded him. And are you really going to talk back to me, boy?” she asked. “After what all you’ve done today, including destroying a set of dinner plates I’ve had for over thirty years, I’d think you’d have a stronger sense of self-preservation. And besides,” she continued, “If you had any concept of cleanliness, you wouldn’t be in the sorry state you’re in right now.”

She turned around and noticed that we hadn’t yet moved. “You girls, git. You aren’t exactly innocent in today’s events. Don’t make me turn my attention to YOU.”

Tad plaintively begged my aunt again. “Don’t make me do this, Aunt Martha, please. Anyone can already see me from the road. And the girls could still see me, even in the house. They could watch through the window.”

“You silly, conceited boy,” she exploded. “I already told you those girls don’t want to see what you’ve got. Not that you’ve got much to see at your age anyway.” She sighed. “But just to keep your caterwauling down…” She turned to us. “Go inside, put the clothes in the washer, then go sit in the kitchen till I say you can come out.”

She turned back to Tad, addressing his bare backside, “There. They can’t see out the window from the kitchen table. The fridge is in the way. Are you happy now?”

He replied in a miserable little voice, “Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t SOUND happy.

We girls scampered inside, each holding some of his rank, filthy clothing at arm’s length. We loaded everything into the washer. It dawned on me that I had been holding Tad’s dirty underpants. Nasty.

Once Tad’s clothes were taken care of and we had washed our hands in the bathroom, Tracie and Ellie and I started down the hall towards the kitchen. “We don’t have to do everything we’re told, you know,” I whispered conspiratorially. “Traitorous Tad really crossed the line today. I say we do what he’s so afraid we’ll do. Watch him from the window.”

The living room window’s reflective film would insure we could sit comfortably on the floor in front of it and watch everything that happened with no fear of being caught. That huge window would be a movie screen showing the naughtiest movie we’d ever seen.

Tracie and Ellie had big, evil grins on their faces. They appeared to like the idea. Before we could head into the living room, Ellie said “Wait. Remember, I brought my new camera. I say we take a few mementos.” Now we ALL had big, evil grins.

When we got to the living room, the show had already started. Tad and my aunt were no more than three feet away from the window. He still had his back to us because she was scrubbing it with a big, soapy washcloth. A bucket of soapy water sat at her feet along with a wooden stool. It looked like she had already worked on his hair. It was blond again and heavy with shampoo.

Tad was positioned right in the middle of our movie screen, every detail evident in the bright sunshine.

He was fussing, as usual. “I can bathe myself. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m twelve years old. You shouldn’t see me naked. And you saw my THING. You shouldn’t see it anymore at my age. It’s private.”

She replied, “I’m going to do more than see it. I’m going to scrub it clean. It’s just as filthy as the rest of you. And if you don’t stop your griping, I’ll scrub it raw. You won’t be able to play with it for weeks.”

Tad made a little sound of embarrassed outrage, but said nothing further.

I hadn’t realized that when you see the backside of a naked boy from a low vantage point like we had sitting on the floor, you can see EVERYTHING, not just his bottom. We could see his ballsack, then just the tip of his thing hanging down.

Tracie turned to us with an excited whisper, “Those are his balls! We’re seeing Tad’s BALLS.”

Soapy water ran down his back and over his bottom. Ellie snapped a picture.

This day that had started out so wrong had turned into the best day ever.

“Alright,” we heard my aunt say. “That’s it for your upper back. Now let’s work on that dirty bottom. Bend over and grab your ankles for me.” As she said this, she sat down heavily on the wooden stool. Luckily for us, it was slightly off to the side so she didn’t obstruct our view. Fortune wasn’t just smiling at us that day. It had a big, evil grin too.

Tad was making little whiny noises, but not arguing outright. He didn’t want to end up with a raw wienie. He slowly bent over and assumed that extremely undignified pose. Since he was facing directly away from the window, we had the best seats in the house.

I realized that I had been incorrect before. We hadn’t been able to see everything, after all. When he bent over, his butt cheeks spread open, revealing what they had hidden. His bottomhole was right THERE, fully visible. NOW we could see everything.

Tracie, ever the one to state the obvious, whispered, “That’s his butthole. Oh my god. His BUTTHOLE.” She was somehow hopping up and down while still being seated crosslegged on the floor. Ellie snapped another picture.

I thought, ‘It doesn’t matter in the future how much you irritate me, Tad. I’ve seen your little pink bottomhole. The most private part of your person. I’ll always have THIS’.

I still felt a bit sorry for poor Tad as he was bent over, unknowingly showing us so much of his self. This was degrading stuff. I tried to imagine myself in his position, and my mind quickly and violently recoiled. I actually physically jolted, drawing curious glances from my companions. Won’t go there again, I thought.

As Aunt Martha scrubbed one of his butt cheeks, then the other with the soapy rag, his balls jiggled and bounced around. His barely seen peter flopped left and right. And his little bottomhole was still displayed for us like a shameful secret that had been uncovered. Then she scrubbed between his cheeks, vigorously rubbing the washrag up and down his crack. That had to be hell on his hole. He whined and wriggled, but she ignored his distress and continued her assault. “I’m cleaning especially good there to make up for all the times you didn’t. Oh yes, I know boys.”

Tracie took another picture with her Polaroid. I asked her in a whisper, “Are we going to show these to the others?” Tracie and Ellie both turned to me as one with those big grins on their faces. So far our group had only traded stories… fodder for the imagination. Now we’d have something much more substantial to share.

“Oh, yeah,” Ellie replied. We held a whispered conference, deciding on our game plan. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have considered doing that to a friend. And Tad WAS a friend, albeit an extremely annoying one. But he had crossed not one, but two lines today… the B word and his attempt to blame me for his predicament. I was still seething inside.

Besides, the girls of our group were discreet. The stories we unearthed and exchanged never spread beyond our select few. Usually. Tad’s body would be seen by no more than ten or eleven, maybe twelve, girls. And he would never know. So where was the harm?

He might wonder why some girls kept giggling when they saw him at school. He wouldn’t know that they had REALLY seen him. Every bit of him, including that little hole that was currently on display.

I’d warned Tad repeatedly over the years that paybacks were hell. Being Tad, he never listened. but it was payback time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t proper payback unless he knew about it… something that could never happen.

I fantasized about letting Tad know about the photos some day when he had been especially obnoxious. Show him the Polaroid proof. Threaten to show them to a wider audience unless he did everything we told him to.

We had seen him, but we hadn’t gotten to touch him like Aunt Martha was doing. We hadn’t gotten to soap him up and scrub him down. Wash him like I did my dog when he came home all dirty and stinky, much like Tad had done. He probably thought being bathed at twelve years old by my aunt was the most humiliating thing that could befall him. It would be nothing compared to being bathed by girls his own age. Maybe just Tracie, Ellie and me. Maybe our whole group. Maybe it could become a regular activity.

I told myself it was just fantasy. I could never actually do that to Tad. Or any boy. But that germ of an idea had already started to grow within me. Soon, it would BECOME me.

For the moment, the show was still in progress.

Aunt Martha continued to bathe the blushing boy. She had let him stand upright again. He still had his back to us. She was washing his legs with long strokes from his bottom down to his feet, then back up again. First one leg, then the other. She did the back of both legs a number of times each. As we were to find out, Aunt Martha was thorough. She did everything many times over. Tad probably was going to be cleaner than he had ever been in his entire life. Or at least since the last time Aunt Martha had bathed him as a much younger child many years before.

Still sitting on the wooden stool, she told him turn around. He mumbled something unintelligible. “What was that?” she demanded. “Speak up!”

He plaintively said, “I can’t. I can’t turn around.” There was a desperate edge to his voice.

She commanded him again to turn around and face her. She was obviously losing her patience with the obstinate boy. He begged her not to make him do it. He was nearly crying.

I couldn’t understand his refusal to turn around. She had already seen his thing and everything else besides. Why was he making such a fuss?

Aunt Martha had had enough. She smacked him on his wet bottom, grabbed him by the outside of each leg and twisted. He had to turn around or risk falling over. Now we could all see the reason for his reluctance.

While he had been turned away from us, while Aunt Martha had soaped up and scrubbed his backside, his thing had gotten hard. No longer hanging in front of his ballsack, it now pointed up to the sky. Our first, full look at his thing and it was hard. This day just kept on giving. And as with its increase in size, his embarrassment at Aunt Martha seeing it in that state was greater too.

Tracie gasped. “His wiener is hard! I knew they did that, but…” Her words faded off.

Ellie couldn’t even manage that much. She was speechless. But she still had the presence of mind to snap another photo.

Strangely, my aunt didn’t seem surprised, or even outraged, by his arousal. She stated mildly, “You horny little deviant. You always DID like it when I soaped up your bottom.”

Tad tried to cover it with his hands, but Aunt Martha spatted them away. “I’ve seen it before like that. Never a bath time went by you didn’t get a little stiffy. And I mean little. You ain’t much bigger now.”

This finally reduced him to tears. He was already humiliated, and her dismissive attitude and comments about his size stung even more. He had probably been boyishly proud of what his twelve years had given him. But with just a few words, Aunt Martha had brought that pride to ruin.

With his thing standing at attention, it completely exposed his ballsack hanging below it. Now we had seen his little bag from the back and the front. Ellie snapped a picture.

My aunt was still scolding him. “Go on and cry, boy. That’s not going to stop me from doing what needs done. You’re a dirty little boy and you need a good scrubbing. You’re a dirty boy in your mind, too, or your thingy wouldn’t be sticking up like that.”

She slipped the washrag into the soapy water, then told him, “Since it’s right there and ready, we’ll do it now.” Then, to our amazement, she took the head of his thing between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and started washing the shaft with the other. He gasped and lurched backwards. But she quickly changed her hold on his thing, grasping it firmly in her hand, and pulled him back towards her.

There was a look of pure shock on his face. None of the indignities he had suffered so far had prepared him for being pulled by his peter like a rebellious dog on a leash.

She looked up at him. “Any more of your shenanigans and I’ll yank it even harder. And I’m not talking about the kind of yanking you boys do all the time.” He looked mortified. Boys his age always seemed to think no one knew the things they did. His face contorted with shame. What kind of person was I that I delighted in his shame? Maybe just one who was tired of his troublesome ways.

Aunt Martha continued, still holding his thing in her viselike grip, “No, it won’t be a yanking you’ll enjoy. I’ll yank it right off.”

She gave it an extra hard squeeze. “You understand me?” she asked. “You going to be good, or are you going to leave with less than what you got here with?” He grimaced in pain and hurriedly told her, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be good.” He repeated it, “I will. I’ll be good. I will.”

She released the death grip, but took the end of his thing once again and resumed washing it with the rag. Tad closed his eyes and turned his head away. He looked like he was still silently crying. His chin trembled and he kept sniffing. He was certainly crying a lot that day.

Aunt Martha asked him, “What’s the matter, boy? You always liked this part of bath time before.” I thought that was an odd thing to say. But the whole day had been odd, so it fit right in.

I’m sure Tad felt like this woman had reduced him to a child of no more than five years old. He had once told me that he didn’t like being referred to as a boy anymore. He was a “young man”. But Aunt Martha had stripped him of his young manhood. He was just a boy again. A little boy who needed to be bathed.

Aunt Martha had a way of zeroing in on weaknesses and exploiting them. She could sense vulnerabilities. She had used this often on Tad. She used it on him that Saturday.

She continued to berate him. “It’s a good thing those young girls aren’t out here to see you with your pecker in such an indecent state. I’ve long known what lecherous, lustful degenerates all males are. Those girls in there are still innocent of all that.”

She stopped cleaning his peter and reached around behind him to gave his bottom a loud, obviously painful smack. He gasped at the pain. “You feel that, you nasty little goat? If I ever hear that you showed your stiff pecker to those girls, that swat I just gave you will be nothing compared to what you’ll get! I’ll turn you over my knee and spank your ass purple!” I thought of the F word incident. She had already purpled his ass.

Tad was rubbing his wet bottom where she had smacked him. She grabbed his hands and pulled them away. “Let it sting,” she said. “In fact, here’s one for the other cheek.” She smacked the other side of his bottom. Hard. She then pulled the boy forward so she could look around him for a closeup inspection of her handiwork. “Good,” she declared with satisfaction. “Now they match.”

She started to return to the job of bathing the nasty little goat, but then stopped, thought a moment, and suddenly stood up. She grabbed Tad by the wrist that was closest to her, then dragged his arm around behind him. Somehow she managed to ensnare his other wrist with the same hand. With both of his wrists in her grasp, she used her elbow to put pressure on his back, forcing him to bend over. She then pulled him firmly up against her hip. He was trapped in a vise. She had effectively immobilized the boy using only one arm. It had all happened so fast, Tad barely had time to let out a startled yelp.

Holding him in that position, she used her other hand to begin smacking his already stinging bottom again and again, alternating from one cheek to the other. I counted at least fifteen smacks per side. Tad’s abused bottom was glowing red. He wailed and cried. He struggled against her, but she vastly overpowered him. His efforts only served to make her more angry. And you don’t want to anger the person who is currently spanking your butt. The last few smacks were harder and louder by far.

Aunt Martha was certainly making up for all the spankings she couldn’t give this year due to Tad’s absences.

She released him and sat back on her stool with an air of satisfaction. “I almost forgot in all of this hullabaloo,” she stated. “If you’re going to do a job, do it right.” She looked up at the miserable, sobbing boy in front of her as he rubbed his blistered bottom. “Don’t you agree, young Tad?”

I looked over at my fellow voyeurs. Both of their mouths hung open in awe at the spectacle that fate, in its infinite generosity, had allowed us to witness.

Tad was an irritating little snot. We all counted him as a friend, kind of, for some inexplicable reason. But he could be SO annoying. He was constantly on the verge of being ostracized by our group for his pranks and his juvenile escapades. Those escapades almost always ended badly, though never before on the level of today’s disaster. And half the time, WE would get into trouble right along with him, even though it was never our doing and we had warned him repeatedly of the possible consequences.

So we were all enjoying seeing Tad, the pain in OUR ass, receive a pain in HIS ass. And seeing him receive it stark naked, not just pants and undies down, was just icing on the cake. I guess the day’s disaster wasn’t so disastrous after all. At least not for Tracie, Ellie and me.

Through all of this, Tad’s peter had somehow still remained standing at attention. This was a testament to its tenacity. I wondered if, when a boy’s peter got hard, it had to stay that way until he… you know, squirted his stuff. Would it stay hard forever if he didn’t? That could be very inconvenient. Was Tad going to have to masterbate once my aunt finished with him? Surely, she’d never allow that? What would he do? I obviously wasn’t an expert on the physiology of boys. That would soon change.

My thoughts went down a more daring direction, lost in fantasy again. Would my aunt make him do it in front of her, and therefore US, as punishment for being such a dirty boy? Would he cry piteously while he tugged away at it? I was starting to get lightheaded thinking about this scenario, and decided I had better stop.

Once Tammy, Ellie and I had learned about how a boy who has reached puberty will play with himself, we had spent many hours discussing the subject. We knew it was called masterbation and that it felt really good when he did it. So good that many boys did it all the time. We knew that when he did it, his stuff would eventually squirt out of his thing from the same hole his pee came out of. This was the stuff that would make a girl pregnant if she was foolish enough to “go all the way”.

But we still had lots of questions.

… Did every boy do it?

… What happened if they didn’t do it? Would they go insane? Would they die in an explosion of accumulated boy goo?

… Did they chose to do it or was it an uncontrollable compulsion?

We knew that grownups said it was bad. It was immoral. It would turn the most virtuous boy into a crazed sex fiend. And, of corse, it would make him go blind. We had serious doubts about that last one. The connection between peter and eyes wasn’t all that obvious.

We had heard that sometimes the urge was so strong that doing it to himself wasn’t enough and boys would do it to each other. A girl in our group claimed she had discovered her cousin and another boy, pants down and stroking each other’s peter. They had screamed like little girls when they saw her. Those nasty, nasty boys.

We had debated whether or not Tad played with himself, but all quickly agreed that he did. He was so impulsive and disobedient that we couldn’t imagine him NOT doing it. We had talked about spying through his bedroom window at night to see if we could catch him in the act, but we were too afraid to try. In the future, though, after being emboldened by this day’s events, we’d no longer have such qualms.

We also had wondered if Tad had any hair between his legs yet. The revelations of the day had answered THAT question. The “young man” was still a bare little boy. We already knew his armpits were bare of any hair. I had seen him recently in his backyard shrugging out of a sweaty t-shirt after mowing the grass. He had seen me looking and had yelled, “Pervert!” before running inside.

But back to the drama playing out in Aunt Martha’s backyard. I began to wonder why Tad’s thing had gotten hard while my aunt bathed him. It was quite obvious that he wasn’t enjoying the ordeal.

I had heard recently that being embarrassed could supposedly make a boy get hard. A lady from the garden club was talking to my mother in our kitchen. I overheard her saying how she had just taken her son to the doctor for a physical. She always insisted on staying in the exam room, even though her son had gotten old enough to be uncomfortable with this. He pleaded with her to stay in the waiting room. She thought he was just being silly.

For most of the exam he was only in his underpants. This was apparently embarrassing enough for him. His face was so red the doctor rechecked his blood pressure. Towards the end of the exam, the doctor pulled her son’s underpants down to his ankles to examine his privates. The boy complained loudly about this assault on his modesty. He repeatedly told his mother not to look. He was too old for her to see him like that. She replied that she had seen everything he had a thousand times when she had bathed him and changed his diapers.

Then, while standing there exposed to his mother and the doctor, the boy had gotten hard. He was so mortified that he began to cry. The doctor assured him that this was normal. It happened a lot to boys his age. The doctor then embarrassed him further by telling his mother that her son had reached the stage in his development where she should keep watch for semen stains on his bedsheets.

The lady said she had lectured him all the way home about impure thoughts. He had told her that sometimes it would just happen. He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t need to be having those thoughts. It was like his peter had thoughts of its own. He further told her that being really embarrassed could bring on that reaction. Which embarrassed him even more.

She asked my mother what she thought about her son getting hard like that. Was he a pervert? My mother repeated what the doctor had said and told her there was nothing to worry about.

I knew the boy from my class. His name was Andy. He was cute. And, of course, I told all my girlfriends about his day at the doctor’s office. He still got the giggle treatment when any of us saw him at school and he always looked totally confused. Why did these weird girls keep laughing at him???

Was it embarrassment that caused Tad to get hard, like with Andy. It just didn’t make sense for either of them. It was supposed to be sexy, pleasurable thoughts that aroused boys in that way. Not unpleasant experiences. There seemed to be more going on than what I could understand.

Whatever the cause of it, Tad was still crying and still hard. The pain and humiliation of Aunt Martha spanking his bare bottom had done nothing to diminish it.

Aunt Martha returned her attention to washing his wiener. She took her time. He didn’t try to pull away from her again, but he couldn’t seem to stand still. His face kept contorting through a variety of grimaces while she rubbed the washcloth up and down the length of his thing. Sometimes it even looked like he had a strangely desperate smile.

He kept saying in a halting, hesitant way, “Um… uh … Aunt Martha?” She ignored him till she finished with what had to now be a very, very clean peter. She then used the palm of her hand to push the stiffened appendage further upwards, holding it in place against his belly. She dipped the washcloth into the pail again and started to work on his ballsack. She cupped her large hand, covered in the wet cloth, around his bag to squeeze and work it up and down. From Tad’s reactions, she wasn’t being gentle, but even though he squirmed and made little noises, he still didn’t try to pull away. He had learned his lesson. THAT was a miracle.

Now we knew what it took to get something through Tad’s thick skull, and it was so obvious. A spanking. We weren’t nearly as big as my aunt, so it might take all three of us at once to hold him down and spank his butt the next time he thought up some insane antic and refused to listen to reason. I looked forward to his next insane antic.

I envied Aunt Martha. Her face was just inches away from the boy parts she was bathing. Tad had to be all too aware of this, too. This had to make his mortification so much more intense. Not only was she seeing and handling him while he was unwillingly, embarrassingly naked, but she was seeing it all in extreme closeup, too. And she didn’t even appreciate the view as I would. To her, he was just a dirty boy to be cleaned, in much the same way as she would polish the furniture or vacuum the carpet.

Finishing up his on his little bag of balls, Aunt Martha declared, “There, now it’s clean. Boys never keep themselves clean in their crotch. This should be a new experience for you.” Tad’s face took on a look of outrage, a much different look than the one of pure mortification it had been wearing. But he didn’t dare say anything in his defense.

Aunt May dipped the washcloth into the bucket and stood up. She began to wash his face. He sputtered and snorted as soapy water got up his nose. She then held him by the bottom jaw and stuck her finger, wrapped in the wet cloth, into one of his ears, twisting it roughly around inside. She switched hands and did his other ear. It didn’t look like a pleasant procedure. Tad whimpered like a puppy through it all.

I wondered at the order in which she was bathing him. She was washing his face with the same washcloth she had so thoroughly used on his bottom and his privates minutes before. She should’ve started at his top and worked her way down. Had that been intentional, another small way to demean him? I was really starting to question the motives behind her actions.

She moved on to his neck and shoulders. Then to his chest.

“Uh oh,” Tracie said. “It’s nipple time.” We all knew Tad was VERY sensitive about people seeing those nipples. Would he be the same about my aunt touching them?

My aunt seemed to realize his self-consciousness about that part of his body. Was it that sixth sense she had for detecting vulnerabilities? She took her time washing them so as to torment him more. She circled them over and over with the wet, soapy washcloth. Round and round. I could tell from where I sat that his nipples had become erect. I knew mine did that. I hadn’t known boys’ did too.

Tad’s face took on a look of alarm. He squirmed about again, unable to hold still. She had to anchor him in place with a big, heavy hand on his shoulder. He was REALLY self-conscious.

She spent an inordinate amount of time on those little pink buds. Tad looked like he was in agony the whole time, making those faces again as he had when she worked on his peter.

Once she finally finished there, she did the rest of his chest, then his belly. He relaxed quite a a bit, but still looked apprehensive. Like he knew something was coming and he dreaded it’s arrival.

My aunt then took one of his wrists in hand to raise his arm and begin washing the armpit. Tad’s look of alarm instantly returned. He fidgeted and twisted, doing a little dance with his feet. Apparently he had weird inhibitions about his armpits much as he did with his nipples. Aunt Martha apparently sensed this too, and once more took her time tormenting him. She slowly slid the soapy cloth up and down his armpit, in an almost languid way. Then she moved over to the other side, holding up that arm up with one hand while sliding the cloth up and down, over and over with the other. Tad squirmed about frantically. He looked up at her, begging, “Aunt Martha, please don’t.”

Even though I couldn’t see her face, I somehow knew it was wearing that unnerving smile.

As she worked on his second armpit, Tad had moved onto making little gasping noises. He was trembling. I was starting to feel embarrassed at the ruckus he was making. I was surprised my aunt wasn’t scolding him for it. Instead, she seemed to be intentionally provoking it.

Suddenly, Tad looked panicked, saying “Aunt Martha, Aunt Martha.” He clenched his eyes shut and threw his head back. What was happening? We girls all looked at each other, perplexed. Tracie mouthed a silent “What?”

As he started to arch his back alarmingly, my aunt slid the washcloth from his armpit on down his torso towards his boy parts again. She had already washed him there, though. Why was she going back?

She then moved over in front of the boy, her vast bulk blocking our view for a few long moments. We could hear Tad exclaiming, “Ah, ahh, ahhhhh.” I guessed she had finally had enough of his nonsense and was using the death grip again. Tad’s poor peter.

She moved back, leaning down to swish the washcloth around in the bucket, squeeze out the water and swish again. She inspected it closely, then gave it one more swishing. She was turned to the side, so I could see her smirk at Tad, saying mildly, “You randy little devil. Have you no shame?”

Tad was panting like a dog. His naked body was crouched in an almost defensive stance. He looked anxious and confused and fearful as he stared back at her. All those looks quickly combined to form a new kind of resentment in his eyes. His chin jutted forward defiantly as his stare became a furious glare.

Aunt Martha sat back down on her stool and pulled him over by one of his legs. He stumbled up to her. She began to wash the leg calmly as though that whole strange, confusing interchange hadn’t just happened.

I turned to the others, shrugged at them with a puzzled look. They were completely bewildered, too. Something had happened right in front of us, but we had no idea what. It was like watching two people converse in a foreign language. You see, you hear, but you don’t understand a bit of it.

My aunt washed the front of Tad’s legs the same way she had done with the back. Long sweeping strokes up and down. Her hand would nudge his ballsack on the upstrokes, seemingly on purpose. Tad would just grimace each time.

Ellie suddenly whispered “His thing is soft!”

And indeed it was. I had been so absorbed in his humiliation as a whole, I hadn’t noticed when it happened. Apparently, his peter couldn’t stand up for long to that formidable woman. The poor thing had wilted before her.

We had a whispered conference. None of us knew when it had happened. How could we have missed it? Maybe Ellie’s photos would solve the mystery later.

Aunt Martha made Tad lift each foot to be washed. He would wobble precariously and wave his arms about each time he had to balance on the foot not being scrubbed. Just like he was back on the branch again. She spent a long time on each foot. He did a lot of wobbling. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought she wanted him to fall.

Aunt Martha stood up and declared, “That’s it for the wash cycle. Now on to the rinse .”

She walked over to get the water hose.

While she was doing this, I looked Tad over again. He was wet and soapy, with suds sliding slowly down his slender, pale body. He stood with his head down, sodden hair hanging over his forehead. He had his hands clasped over his groin, as though he still had something to hide from Aunt Martha. I thought of one of her sayings. “That ship has sailed.” Well, Tad’s ship had certainly sailed. And it had taken his clothes with it.

He looked so small and bare standing there with everything he had exposed in the big, bright backyard. I could almost imagine how he felt. Being naked outdoors had to be a whole new experience. If Aunt Martha had bathed him in the house, in the bathroom where baths normally take place, it would’ve been embarrassing enough for the poor kid. But she had bathed him outside, in that big, wide open place most people aren’t usually naked in. The feeling of being exposed not to just Aunt Martha, but to the whole world, had to be overwhelming.

Adding to the general discomfiting feeling of being nude outdoors, Tad had to have the specific fear of being seen by others. There was no fence around my aunt’s backyard. It was open to the world. And her property sat at that intersection, so there were roads on two sides. Anyone walking, driving or pedaling their bicycle down either road, especially the one that went by the side of her house, would have a clear view of her backyard and the naked boy standing in it. And since her house was small and fairly close to the road, the backyard wasn’t all that far away from that hypothetical person’s vantage point. The boy being exhibited wouldn’t be just a vague figure in the distance. He’d be obviously naked, obviously male, with all his particulars on display. And he’d be readily identifiable to anyone who happened to know him. The fear of being seen had to be at least as excruciating as the shame of being bathed so thoroughly by Aunt Martha. I had observed how he kept casting anxious glances towards the roads throughout the whole ordeal.

And, of course, there wasn’t just the possibility of being seen from the road. Tad had already voiced his fear that we girls were going to spy on his bath time from the window. Which is exactly what we were doing. How could he be his usual arrogant self in our presence anymore if we had not only seen him naked, but watched him being bathed like a baby?

Aunt Martha returned with the hose. Tad stood before her, slick as a seal under a layer of soapy suds. She told him to close his eyes and raise his hands up over his head so she could hose him down. As he slowly raised his arms up, he looked even more naked than before. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. How can someone be more naked than naked?

I think it was because he looked so vulnerable. He was just a small, defenseless boy under the power of a strong, imposing woman. His lack of hair anywhere on his body made him look even more bare. It wasn’t that hair under his arms and between his legs would’ve covered some of his nudity. It was that the absence of it revealed how young and immature he was.

I felt sorry for him again. This wasn’t the cocky, irritating prankster I had to put up with every day. This was a small, intimidated boy, naked and ashamed, with barely twelve years of experience behind him to toughen him to this type of treatment.

Aunt Martha told him, “Let’s do your front first.” She began to hose him down, starting at the top, washing the shampoo out of his hair, then working her way down. He got more water up his nose when she sprayed him in the face. Again, he snorted and sneezed. Once she got past his face, it looked like she started using the nozzle at full force. The water didn’t flow from it. It blasted out as if from a water canon. And if I hadn’t already known from before that the water was ice cold, I would’ve now surmised it from Tad’s reaction. No longer silent, he began howling. “Stop your squalling, you big baby,” she snapped. She directed the torrent of icy water over him again and again, head to toe. Still voicing his anguish, he twisted and turned and danced about under the icy assault on his tender flesh. His peter and balls flopped about comically the whole time. My aunt would occasionally reach out and smack him on his bottom, yelling at him to behave himself. It did no good. Tad obviously couldn’t control his cavorting.

He looked even more absurd than he did when he was gyrating around and windmilling his arms while trying to balance on that branch earlier in the day. No doubt because this time he was doing it with no clothes.

If his thing hadn’t already gone soft, it surely would’ve when she turned the spray onto the area between his legs. He howled even louder at that point. She paid particular attention to that location, getting in close with the nozzle to wash out all the nooks and crannies. She grasped his poor little peter again to lift it up and wash the underside. Then she grabbed his ballsack, lifting it also to spray up behind it.

Once she had rinsed off his front, she told him to turn around so she could do his back. When the back of his torso and legs were rinsed, she made him bend over again, revealing his hole. She laughingly told him she’d try not to give him an enema as she directed the blast of water up and down his crack.

Once he was thoroughly rinsed, he stood shivering with his arms clasped around himself. His peter had shrunk noticeably. That verified another bit of trivia I had been told: wieners shriveled up in the cold. Boys’ equipment certainly came with lots of associated problems.

“Wait here,” she commanded, then turned to enter the back door. We were caught by surprise and didn’t have time to hide. Aunt Martha immediately saw us sitting by the window. We were too shocked to even move. What would she do to us. Did we face some kind of horrible, humiliating punishment at the hands of this strict, no-nonsense disciplinarian?

She didn’t seem surprised, just stared at us for a moment, then muttered to herself, “Kids… so predictable.” After that, she continued into the house, coming back in a moment with a big, fluffy white towel. She didn’t even glance our way as she went through the door.

She took the big towel over to Tad and began to rigorously dry his hair. When she finished, it was spiking out in every direction. I thought of a cartoon I had seen where a man had stuck his finger into an electrical outlet, giving him much the same hairdo.

She dried his face, then worked her way down. Neck, arms, armpits, chest and belly. When she got to his peter and ballsack, Tad gritted his teeth as she roughly rubbed them dry. His poor boy parts had seen such abuse at the hands of my aunt that he probably wouldn’t touch himself there for days.

She dried his legs and feet, then told him to turn around. She did his back, then his bottom. She made him bend over again to dry his crack, giving us a third view of what should’ve been his most private, unseen area.

“There,” my aunt declared. “You’re completely clean now. At least your body is. There’s nothing I can do about your mind.”

Tad looked down at himself. He covered himself with his hands. Even after Aunt Martha had seen and bathed every part of him, he still felt embarrassed to be so exposed in front of her. I had wondered if he’d get used to it, and I was hoping he wouldn’t. I enjoyed his embarrassment. It looked like my hopes had won out.

“What do I do now?” he asked meekly. The defiance had faded.

“Well, since you’re too timid to let those girls see what you got and what you don’t, you’ll just have to stay out here till your clothes are done.”

Aunt Martha wasn’t letting on that we had watched his whole humiliating ordeal. She was keeping our secret. She had seen the camera, too. And the photos scattered around us on the floor.

I guess she really, REALLY didn’t like boys. Especially ones who destroyed her dinnerware.

Strangely enough, I felt a bit angry at my aunt and protective of Tad. A grownup should step in and address the situation. A grownup should’ve confiscated and destroyed the photos so a twelve year old kid wouldn’t be humiliated by his classmates seeing pictures of him naked. Especially pictures as revealing as what we took of Tad. Aunt Martha was not a responsible adult.

I was glad she was playing along, of course. But I was angry about it, too. Part of me loved seeing this naked boy, even more so because he was embarrassed by his nakedness. It gave me a feeling of power. Part of me wanted revenge on Tad for all his past reckless acts that got the rest of us in trouble along with him. But another part of me knew that Tad was just being Tad, and there was no malicious intent. And that he was, despite it all, my friend. I should take the high road and destroy the photos myself. I WAS the leader of the group, after all. But I knew I wouldn’t. So, the low road it was.

Ellie snapped another picture. She had quite a lot of them now. She had brought four photo packs, and had almost used up the last one. We had the entire map of Tad’s terrain.

I wondered again about my aunt’s motivations. Was everything she put Tad through genuinely in the pursuit of cleanliness and discipline? Or had she used his unfortunate situation as an excuse to humiliate the boy. She had certainly seemed extreme in some of her ministrations. Especially in making him repeatedly bend over in such a revealing way, the last time knowing that three girls were watching from only a few feet away. Maybe she had known every time. She hadn’t seemed surprised to see us gathered at the window. And she had stood off to the side, and placed her stool to the side, while she was bathing him. Almost as though she was intentionally not blocking our view. Except for that one moment when something weird seemed to happen. I was still pondering that.

I was quite conflicted. I both enjoyed his embarrassment and also felt it was unfair that he was being put through it.

I thought it was unjust and inappropriate for other girls at school to see all the photos documenting his humiliation, but I still had plans to introduce them along with his latest story.

I was being pulled in two directions and it wasn’t a very comfortable feeling. So I decided to leave it all for another time, and just sit back to enjoy the show.

Tracie turned to me and asked, “How big do you think Tad’s peter is?”

“When it was hard, I think it looked about three to four inches. Soft, I’d say maybe two.”

Ellie added, “Maybe one day, we can threaten to show the pictures around. Make him stand there while we measure him. Soft and hard for comparison.” It was interesting how alike our minds were.

Tracie said, “Ooooo, nice. And we can make it a regular thing. Measure him every month to see how fast it’s growing.”

I told them, “You better be careful. When he has a growth spurt, it might spurt all over YOU.”

Ellie thought a moment. “Is four inches big for a peter? Is it big for a boy Tad’s age?”

We all had to admit we had NO idea. We had no other naked boys for comparison. Maybe we could rectify that. We could bring other boys from our school to Aunt Martha’s house. Show them the mudpit in the woods. Dare them to walk across a slender branch to the other side. Then wait for the fun to begin. We could start with Andy. We could see what his mother and doctor saw when he got embarrassed.

Outside, Tad was begging my aunt to let him at least wrap himself up in the big towel she had dried him with.

Her answer was a firm, “No. Have you forgotten why you’re in the state you’re in? It was your own foolhardy behavior in the woods. And then you dragged your little girlfriends into your delinquency with you. You made them accessories. So now you’re being punished. For all of that and my dinner plates, too. Naughty boys who are being punished don’t get niceties like towels.” She paused to take a breath. “They get to stand out in the middle of the backyard buck naked so the whole world can see what they truly are.”

Tad continued to stand there, shielding his not-so-privates. My aunt barked, “You heard me. The middle of the backyard.”

The flustered boy said, “But people on the road will see me more there. Let me stay here. It’s not as open right behind the house. Please. I’ll wait here till my clothes are done. Please please please?”

Aunt Martha silently pointed. Tad sighed and trudged to the middle of the yard, where there was no cover at all for him.

“Now,” she said. “Turn and face the house and put your hands on your head. Stay that way till I tell you otherwise. If we were in the house, I’d make you stand in the corner. But since we’re out here, you can stand right where you are. If anyone sees you, maybe you’ll think about that before your next crime spree.”

She wasn’t through, yet. “You’re going to learn a lesson today. I’ve watched you grow up unmanageable and out of control. Like a wild animal. Well, today you get tamed. I’m going to do what your parents should’ve done years ago. I’m going to reign you in. And if you argue one little bit, I’ll spank your bare butt again. And if you move from that spot, if you move at ALL before I say you can, I’ll spank your butt. I’ll turn you over my knee to do it this time.”

“But people can see me from the road,” Tad persisted. “And there’s TWO of them! Two roads. Twice the chance somebody sees me.”

“I don’t care if a Thanksgiving Day parade marches by the house, you don’t budge an inch or try to cover up.” She paused. “Bet you thought you dodged that bullet, didn’t you.” She gave him that smile again. Tad shivered. I shivered too, watching.

“Wow,” Ellie said in wonder. “She’s really letting poor Tad have it.” She snapped a picture.

Standing there with his hands clasped over his head, he looked like a naked scarecrow in the middle of the yard. He didn’t move. He didn’t twitch. He was too scared to.

My aunt sat in a lawn chair watching him, waiting for any deviation from her instructions. Probably hoping for one so she could unleash her fury on his bare bottom again.

It took another hour for Tad’s clothes to wash and dry. He stood there for the duration, hands on head, the only sign of movement being an occasional tear rolling down his cheek. We heard the sound of a few cars on the road in front of the house while he was playing scarecrow. We saw quite a few more on the side road that was visible from the living room window. Tad’s streak of bad luck was holding strong. Normally the roads around my aunt’s house had very little traffic.

Some of the cars noticeably slowed down as they passed the house, no doubt to get a better look at the unusual sight in my aunt’s backyard. I wondered if anyone in Tad’s audience recognized him. THAT would be hard to live down. Stories about a naked Tad sighted out in the wild might be making the rounds at school on Monday even before we got a chance to share our photos.

Nowadays, Child Protective Services would’ve been called within five minutes. But in Backwater, Texas in 1962, things were a bit looser. The idea that kids could have rights, including the right to privacy, would’ve been laughable.

My aunt left her lawn chair a few times to come inside and check the laundry, to get another cup of coffee, to just stretch her legs. Each time she passed us, she made some comment. “Watch that your eyes don’t pop out of your skulls.” “What you girls find so fascinating in that boy, I just don’t know.”

I wondered if his thing might get hard and start sticking up again, and if my aunt would count that as movement. But it didn’t. I think Tad was just too miserable and beaten down for it to give a repeat performance.

While we continued our illicit observation, we held animated, wide ranging conversations about the ramifications of the day…

We marveled at how much more intimately we knew Tad than the day before. About how much more we knew about boys in general. We had been around boys all our lives, but they had always remained an enigma, an inscrutable alien species. Tad’s unhappy ordeal had brought enlightenment to our ignorance…

We wondered if the universe had looked upon our continual suffering beneath his reign of chaotic misconduct and, taking pity, granted us retribution in the form of my boy-hating, authoritarian aunt…

We discussed how we could use Tad’s latest misadventure to our advantage. Once we let him know all we had witnessed, all we had documented proof of, he would be fully within our power. The boy who had been our playmate would become our plaything. We thought up increasingly outlandish and embarrassing scenarios to subject him to, knowing all the while that we were just letting our imaginations run riot. We’d never actually follow through on MOST of them…

We discussed every part of the anatomy on display. He was our first naked boy (babies don’t count) and we were making the most of every moment before the curtain dropped. As all too soon it did. We were still glued to the window when my aunt walked by on her way outside with Tad’s clean clothes. “Show’s over, girls,” she said in passing.

She gave Tad his clothes, saying “Cover yourself, boy. Lunch is in twenty minutes.”

When she said this, I realized it wasn’t even noon yet. It seemed like we had been at this all day long.

We watched Tad get dressed. I enjoyed seeing him briefly in just his briefs. A boy in his underpants was its own special treat. Then we quickly gathered up the photos, hid them in Ellie’s camera case, and raced to the kitchen as he made his way towards the back door. He walked slowly, showing none of his usual boundless energy. I worried that my aunt had succeeded. That he had actually been tamed. I found that I didn’t want that. I wanted Tad the Terrible, with all the aggravations and irritations that came with him. He at least kept things interesting in our boring town.

Please, oh please, don’t be tamed.

When he entered the kitchen, we were all sitting at the table, engaged in conversation about the upcoming school play, just like we’d been there talking the whole time. I don’t think he was fooled. When he sat down across from us, he asked, “Did you look?”

“Look at what?” Tracie asked brightly.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he answered, his voice subdued. “Guess I can’t blame you.”

I detected the fresh scent of floral shampoo and soap. Tad smelled pretty. I didn’t tell HIM that.

Aunt Martha came in and bustled about the kitchen getting lunch ready. She refused any help. She said she wanted it done right.

As she passed behind Tad, she bopped him on the top of his head. Just a little too hard for it to be playful. Tracie and Ellie both looked uncomfortable.

Tad didn’t react to the bop. He just sat there. Like a tame dog. Oh no.

Aunt Martha grabbed some potatoes from the cupboard and set them on the counter to start peeling them. Tad looked up at her broad back. I saw a tiny glint in his eye as he raised his closed hand up towards her and slowly and deliberately extended his middle finger.