The Birth of Bane

by Richard Heredia

  I stopped cold. The lighting was, from left to right, illuminant to dark and cast a shadow beginning at the front of her cheek bones and grew progressively intense toward the back of her head. Her hair was in near-darkness. Though she was only thirty-eight at the time, it was like seeing her through a wormhole. As plain as if were written in the sky, I knew I was looking at the future. This would be my mother in forty years – old and frail, tiny and worn, especially if nothing changed. If I didn’t get her away from my father, this is what she’d become, a husk of the vibrant woman I had known as a child. The very woman I’d seen traipsing about the house almost form the moment we’d moved here would be dead.

  She turned to look at me.

  I was astonished.

  The woman I thought I was seeing was entirely different. She wasn’t broken or fragile. She wasn’t overburdened by a grueling life, downtrodden by a brute of a husband. Yes, she was crying. Yes, she looked small to me, but my mom was a petite woman. I’d grown bigger than her over the course of my thirteen year. I passed her in height right before my fourteenth.

  When her eyes met mine, when those dark, warm pools looked into me, there was nothing but strength within. There was nothing but resolve.

  “Mommy?” I ventured, my voice more like the boy I’d been than the man I was on the verge of being.

  “My marriage is over, son.” She said it succinctly as if her mouth needed less movement to utter the correct amount of syllables.

  I felt icy dread grip the center of my chest. It was suddenly hard to breathe.

  She noticed at once. “Nothing happened… well, outwardly that is.” She shook with a chortle, a weary, yet confident resonance of her mid-section.

  I was confused. “How do you -?” I tried.

  She finished, “I know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I’ve known for some time. I just needed someone to tell me what I was thinking was the right thing to do.” She pushed herself straighter in the rocking chair. “And not just for you kids, but for myself as well.”

  I was thrown off kilter as the import of what she’d said sunk in. I wasn’t always this slow on the uptake, but there was a lot of emotion to wade through. I know for a fact she’d talked with her close friends about my father. I know she confided in some of my uncles over the years, but none of those conversions had borne any viable fruit. What had changed? Who had she…?

  The thought burned away like film left to long on a projector. It dwindled into nothing, leaving only a clean slate, bathed in white.

  Our eyes locked.

  “When?” I asked, certainty growing like weeds.

  “Within the last hour,” she began. “I can’t be more specific than that. I was keeping track of the time.”

  “How?”

  She looked back toward the horizon made ragged by the tops of the trees. “On the sunlight.” Her voice was miniature. “I was watching the clouds change color, asking myself what I was going to do different this year.”

  I came forward, kneeling, putting a hand on her knee. It looked huge. “She told you?”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking, Jer.” Her hand came to rest upon mine. “I was staring at the world out there, thinking about things in here.” She brought her other hand to her chest. “And suddenly, she was with me.”

  “Just like that?” It seemed too simple to be true. Yet, I had no issue with the fact I was referring to a woman who’d been dead for more than fifteen years.

  It was a mothers’ knowing smile I received in return. “Yes, my beautiful boy, just like that.”

  “And now you know what you have to do?”

  She nodded, reaching out to stroke the stubble on the side of my head like she used to do when I was much younger and had longer hair.

  I grabbed her hand after a time, intent on kissing the back of it. Her scent registered before my lips made contact. She smelled different. I stopped to look up at her.

  She was still smiling. “It’s her. I know.”

  “Is she still here?”

  My mom shook her head.

  “You smell like great grandma,” I concluded, kissing her hand all the same.

  Another miniscule chuckle escaped her. “I love you, Jerry.”

  “I love you too, mama.”

  “Things are going to get dicey around here in the next few months.” Her hand gripped me for a moment.

  I nodded. I knew my father wasn’t going to take her leaving him without a fight.

  “But, I’ll wait until after your birthday before I do anything drastic. I wouldn’t want to mess up your party. Turning eighteen is an important milestone in anyone’s life. It should be experienced, celebrated.” She patted my hand a few times. “After, Jerry, after I will make the necessary moves to get us away from him.”

  “You sure you don’t want to do something right away?” I was already feeling anxious. If that asshole caught so much as fart on the wind of what she intended, he would make her life a living hell. He was such a vindictive sonofabitch, there was no telling what he’d do.

  “He’s got Roxanna to keep him busy.” She actually sniggered.

  “And you’re ok with that?”

  There was moisture at the corner of each eye. “My god, son, you have no idea how ‘ok’ I am with that.” She sounded so “hip” when she spoke those words, in the fashion she’d uttered them. In my ears, she was decades younger.

  On the vestiges of being sexually active myself, the innuendo of her statement wasn’t lost on me. I shook my head with mild nausea not sure I wanted to delve too deep into that particular subject, especially when it involved my parents.

  “Ok, well, you let me know when.”

  “Absolutely!”

  I stood, peering about the room. “Thank you, Mrs. Gates,” I said aloud.

  “She doesn’t need you to say it, son. She already knows.” She trailed off, then, as quiet as a mouse: “Call her Florence. She prefers it, you know.”

  I left my mother in her rocking chair. When I looked back, over my shoulder, she had resumed her vigil of the setting sun. There were only long streaks of indigo in the sky by then. The branches of the trees were weaving this way and that in the play of the wind.

  Again, I saw her as I would any years in the future, but not like before. This woman was old, but strong, proud of what she’d accomplished with her time on earth.

  I realized, Mrs. Gates – Florence - hadn’t left. She was still there. The moment I turned away, she and my mother were speaking to one another once more.

  They looked peaceful at first, sharing a single body. Yet, as my stare lingered, I could see something else, something I couldn’t quit place. I was too young to understand to the true depth of a woman’s heart at the time. I didn’t know plans could be laid and buried as if they’d never been.

  I had no comprehension that a woman’s heart can oftimes be a deep, deep well, where sometimes, awful things can be hidden as if they never were. You could know her for scores of years, her entire life possibly, and still not know what lies in those murky waters in the nethermost regions of her soul. They can be hidden so thoroughly.

  When I learned this - learned this for real - I think I was leery of all females for a time, even my Myra. I was never able to look at them the way I had before.

  ~~~~~~~<<< ᴥ >>>~~~~~~~

  Chapter Ten: Secrets

  I heard a noise in the middle of the night, not quite a month after my eighteenth birthday party. It had awakened me in my bed. It was late, on a Saturday; I knew this because I myself had come home late, after an exceptionally good date with Myra.

  Now, it was a few hours later.

  I glanced out windows of my room, facing the side of the house where the noises had originated, and saw nothing but darkness. I lay there, silent, waiting to see if I’d hear anything further.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  A high-pitched squeal came out of the night, followed by a deeper, huskier laugh. Both had c
ome from the side yard, most likely the deck. It was man and a woman, stumbling, laughing, on the ground floor right outside my windows. I frowned. There shouldn’t have been anyone lurking about. My mom and my siblings had left for Corona to spend the weekend with my mother’s side of the family. My father told me when he awoke me for school on Friday that he wouldn’t be around either. Something about a company retreat to Mandalay Beach. This was a Hotel and Spa on the coast, west of Oxnard, California. It was a place his company went for quarterly meetings, but he’d never gone at this time of the year in the past.

  I knew he was talking bullshit again. I knew the only retreat he was going to visit was the one between Roxanna’s legs. But, after the conversation with my mom at the beginning of the month, it didn’t bother like it would’ve before. Instead, I felt sorry and disgusted of him at the same time. Though he had worked hard to get himself where he was in life from a professional standpoint, he was a pathetic failure when it came to his personal existence. The way he conducted himself on a daily basis was crass. And, so was his dalliance with this other woman.

  I could say it had something to do with my love for Myra. Maybe I was so wrapped up in our relationship at the time that the idea of cheating was abhorrent. Though Myra and I have had a good marriage, it isn’t perfect. It’s just like the thousands of others out there in the world. We’re human. We have human needs, desires and moods. Sometimes, in the past, we’ve been out of sync. There have been times when one of us has flirted with the idea of being with someone else.

  And, let me say this, it’s not about time vested or children involved. It’s about knowing the moment, understanding what the other is going through, unearthing resentment and finding it false. It is a journey, a long, winding, curling journey. Some people don’t have the fortitude to deal with it. Some folks don’t look at marriage in the same fashion. Maybe to them it’s a status symbol or a corporate merging.

  When I look back, twenty-twenty being operative, I know my inability to understand what my father was doing was grounded on the basic incongruity of our minds. The thought of him being with that other woman made me writhe, made my skin crawl. I know I asked myself many times, how could he look at his reflection in the mirror and not be appalled by his own behavior.

  The answer is always fast upon the heels of that question. He didn’t give a damn one way or another. He wasn’t a sharp enough intellect to peruse such metaphysical musings. Those thoughts just didn’t elude him. They were virtually invisible to him. He had no capacity to think on that level.

  But, that still didn’t reveal who was outside…

  I crept from my bed, tip-toeing to the window sill. I remember I shivered violently, because I’d forgotten to turn up the thermostat. The downstairs gauge was something my mom had always monitored. It not being a regular part of my routine, caused it to slip my mind. I had gone to bed, and all the while the air within the house had chilled.

  I had just pushed those thoughts from my mind when I saw them. Only it wasn’t a man and a woman, it was a woman and two men. Who in the f-, had been on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t vocalize it, because I suddenly recognized my father as one of the party down below. That focused me immediately. I craned my neck, turned my head, trying, from my limited vantage to see more.

  The woman turned and said something to the other man. He replied. She laughed, her hand coming to her neck as she tilted her head back with mirth. There was no mistaking her. It was Roxanna.

  If there was an animal in the entire animal kingdom she resembled, it would be a raven. Everything about her was dark – her eyes, her hair, the cast of her face, her demeanor – all of it. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, making her an inch taller than my dad. She was big breasted and wide-hipped, what men would’ve termed ripe for mating back in the Renaissance. My father’s generation would’ve called her voluptuous. To me, she was the epitome of what Kool and the Gang would’ve said about a woman like her. She was a “Brick House”. She had pouting lips and big eyes, a broad forehead framed with big, looping curls of the deepest obsidian. She was wearing a leotard of some sort, skin-tight, as black as the night with four-inch heels, also black, though the soles were bright red. She had an elastic or spandex-type belt around her, which was purely cosmetic. She was using it to amplify the inches between her hips, her waist and her breasts. I could see that spongy flesh from where I stood. The leotard was cut with a plunging neckline, rounded along the upper edge of her bra, leaving very little to the imagination.

  Of her ancestry, I never had the time to find out. She looked Cubana, only she was of lighter persuasion, so it was difficult to pinpoint the wellspring of her genetics.

  I could see why my father had a thing for her. Watching her that night it wasn’t too difficult to see what kind of woman she was. She was what we High-Schooler’s would call a “freak”, and that didn’t merely translate to the bedroom. Although, it did imply she knew what she was doing there too. No, a “freak” was also a party-animal, someone hip to the latest scene, a mild drug-user, who chased the wilder side of life. A “freak” only comes out at night…

  I could tell as much as I watched her long neck arch, her long nails rake down her chest toward her big tits, while she laughed.

  She was “a freak… with long, long hair…”

  But what in hell was she doing here? Why had my stupid-ass father brought her to my mother’s house? Didn’t he know I hadn’t gone to Corona? I told the idiot I’d stayed behind, because Myra and I had plans. I didn’t say our plans included going to Planned Parenthood to arm ourselves with a little knowledge about safe sex, but shit, I’d told him I’d be around. Why was he bringing his fuck-slut to our house?

  To this day, I really don’t know why this angered me as much as it did. Here I was, newly eighteen, a young buck, and yet the idea he’d brought a woman (in my mind) as low and debased as her into our house pissed me off. This was my mom’s domain. This was Mrs. Gates sanctum. This place was special. Why would he soil it with her presence?

  Because, lame-o, he doesn’t see things the way the rest of the world sees things. Don’t you remember, the sun revolves around him…?

  Oh, yeah, stupid me, there was no Copernicus in his universe.

  I scurried back to the edge of my bed, feet searching for my slippers. I walked quickly, but quietly out of the room and down the hall once I’d found them. I was wearing old sweats and t-shirt. I stood at the top of the stairs and probably would’ve ventured no further, if I hadn’t heard something fall and break. I heard all three of them giggle, stumble some more. They were drunk, possibly wasted on something else too.

  The fuckers were messing up my mother’s house!

  Of their own volition, my feet moved me down to the first floor, through the back porch and the kitchen before I realized what I was doing. I stood there, leaning around the hutch, my neck stretched to the fullest, my eyes straining to see through the dark.

  I heard them closing the sliding glass doors, the unique clicks made when the locks engaged were unmistakable. They were in the Master Suite. They were in the same room where my mother slept at night, sometimes with Eli. How freakin’ gross was that?

  I edged my way to the door leading to the small hallway. It was halfway opened already, so I could use the crack at the end closest to the door jamb to see through. It hampered a wide-angled view, but, to my detriment, it turned out I didn’t need one.

  My eyes focused to the brightness of the room as they turned on the two bedside lamps. It was obvious, my father had forgotten I was there. There was absolutely no modesty in evidence.

  The man with them was black, about five-foot-eleven with close cropped hair and chiseled features. He was built as if he visited the gym a on a regular basis. Between his weight and his height he was at least twice the size of my dad. He was clad in a navy-colored, pin-striped suit without a shirt. Though I couldn’t see what sort of shoes he wore, because the bed was blocking my view from the top of his knees d
own, I could see he had on a thin, Louis Viton belt about his waist, what looked like a Dunn Hill watch on his wrist.

  He had money. I could tell by the way he held himself, they casual way with which he wore his expensive clothing.

  “Strip, both of you, now!”

  Her voice surprised me. It sounded so different than it had only moments before. I knew my face betrayed bewilderment as I blinked, my vision shifting toward Roxanna when they reopened. I hadn’t been paying attention to her, and was shocked to see she’d shed her leotard. She was standing on this side of the bed in nothing but a G-string. Her feet were bare, her skin honey-hued. Her hair was fixed in a bun as if she didn’t want it to get in the way. She held some sort of riding crop in one hand, the kind with a two-inch folded strip of leather at the end. I could just make out one of her full breasts. She had areoles as dark as her hair, her nipples constricted, rigid, as if she was cold. I knew she wasn’t though. This was a reaction to a different sort of stimulus.

  Repulsed, but unable to look away, I watched as my father took off his clothing alongside the hulking black man.

  What the fuck is this shit? I asked the silence in my brain. There was no reply. I was utterly dumbfounded.

  Within a minute both men were naked. The black man was limp, but still long against one of his legs. My dad was a whole other sort of visual.

  My mouth went dry. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what I should think. This was what he chose over my mom? My mother was gorgeous. What the heck was this idiot thinking? Some sort of sick ménage-a-trois was better, really? This was better? This is what got him off? This was better than us? This was something to choose at the chance he’d lose me and Valerie and Eli, because of it?