The Birth of Bane (8 page)

She stared at
her daughter from the corner of her eye, obviously contemplating
whether or not she should give her a good
tongue-lashing.

The silence
droned.

Elijah frowned,
and then brightened like a Roman candle in the night sky. “I think
the house is awesome!”

Valerie reached
out to muss his hair, which he easily avoided by blocking her
offensive hand with one of his own. “You would think that, you
weirdo.”

“
I’m not a
weirdo. You are,” shot back Elijah, wrinkling his face at
her.

Above them, I
couldn’t help but notice the look of concern on my mother’s face.
These odd happenings had got her thinking.

Three days
later, the day before Halloween, was when the dishes began to
rattle in the sink. Anything we didn’t get around to washing the
night before, rattle periodically throughout the night.

I think it was a
message.
Hey, clean up over
here, will ya?
But I was never
completely certain and this is no more than pure speculation on my
part. And yet, it sure as hell felt that way when I’d being lying
in bed, on the cusp of a dream, and I’d hear the damned cookware
clinking and clanking against one another all the way down the
hall, around the corner, down the stairs, through the back
porch,
from the
kitchen
. Someone had to be
saying, “Yo, get your shit together and clean this shit
up.”

Then, the lights
would come on.

And I’m not
talking they’d turn on abruptly like you’d see in the movies as if
some magical electricity had “crossed-over” and was now capable of
turning on the lights. No, this was different. One by one, every
wall-switch was thrown, every nob upon each lamp was twisted. The
lights came to life as if someone were walking about the front room
brightening the way as they went.

Invariably,
either my Mom or Valerie would have to climb from the warmth of
their covers and undo what seemed to be occurring all on its’
own.

I would
sometimes hear their disgruntled mutterings and heavy feet as they
shuffled about, darkening the downstairs once again.

After a while,
it was apparent to us that washing
everything
before we went
to bed was easier than getting up, time after time, to turn off the
lights. It was simple, if the kitchen was clean – nothing
happened.

You
see?

“…
clean this
shit up!”

*****

In the middle of
November, Myra and I finally went there.

Well,
almost.

We had, over the
course of our relationship, reached the point where making out
wasn’t enough. We’d petted heavily, satisfied one another every
which way possible without intercourse and had hit a sexual wall we
wanted to batter down like there was no tomorrow.

Not really sure
who’s idea it was first, we’d come to the conclusion it was finally
time we had sex.

So, we picked a
day where neither of us had much to do at school, waited until
after Homeroom and ditched during nutrition. We walked the mile and
a half to my house, excited, antsy, the world sparkling like living
crystal everywhere we looked. We were in love. We were ecstatic.
And, we were going to lose our virginity, together!

As it turned
out, though we had plenty of time, were never rushed or
interrupted, we didn’t quite finish the act. Simply, Myra had been
too small. Not that I’m some Mandingo straight from the wilds or
anything remotely like that. I’m saying she was small for a woman.
I really didn’t understand what had happened at the time. I only
had a notion it would take a few more times before we’d get things
working well in that department.

We weren’t put
off or embarrassed. Myra and I were never that way with one
another. For the most part, all of these years later, we’re still
fairly honest with our feelings. Yes, if you haven’t guessed by
now, though we began our sexual exploits when we were teenagers, we
did in fact marry. After meeting, there was really never anyone
else for us. I counted myself lucky, and I hope she feels the
same.

She must’ve,
right? She’s still here trying to read over my shoulder as I write
this.

Now, she’s
pulling my ear, telling me not to put this in the book.

Too bad, babe!
Y
ou shouldn’t be peaking in the
first place.

So, we finished
one another orally, sated, but still curious if we could figure the
whole sex-thing out with a second try. We laughed about it, holding
each other tight, loving the feeling of our naked bodies against
each other. We talked as we fondled, expressed our dreams,
touching, luxuriating in the sensations of others’ body. We kissed
and caressed until late in the afternoon, content to stay nude and
enjoy the moment to the fullest.

Finally, Myra
got up and said she had to go.

I asked her if
she needed for me to walk her home, but she said no. Her friend
Feline was going to pick her up, so it would look like she’d spent
time at her house, instead of mine.

“
I don’t want my
mom to get the impression I was out all day getting boned,” she had
said playfully, even though that wasn’t quite true.

When she stooped
to pick up her clothes, we were surprised when we couldn’t find her
panties. We searched everywhere in my room. When Feline had honked
for the fourth time, we were still looking.

Exasperated,
Myra left holding down her min-skirt, hoping she wasn’t going to
flash the neighbors, as she made her way down to her friends’
car.

I watched her
leave from the kitchen windows, sad over her having to leave and
also a little sad we were no longer kids anymore. Something had
changed within us both. Though not fully consummated, the intent
had been there. I’d been poised before the gates so to speak, but
her physiological “smallness” had made that
impossibility.

I’m not a boy
anymore
, I remember thinking
just as my mother came up behind me and hugged me tight.

It never even
entered my mind that she wasn’t due home for a few more hours. She
still had to stop and pick up Eli from his afterschool program
before she would drive home. In fact, Valerie wasn’t even due home
for another half hour.

The embrace had
been so warm and loving. It was precisely the way my mother hugged
me from behind, which she did from time to time. She would do it
when I wasn’t expecting it, but when
she
was feeling her love
for me in her heart. I know this, because I was always able to feel
her emotions from her body traveling into the back of
mine.

It felt exactly
the same. She was telling me it was ok. I had to grow up
sometime.

And yet, it
should’ve dawned on me my mother would never have given me a hug of
this sort if she knew the topic wherein my feelings were based. She
would’ve never approved of me and Myra having sex. Therefore, she
would’ve never hugged me over losing my innocence.

All of this was
going through my head when I turned to tell ask her why she would
hug me like this, knowing the root of the change within
me.

There was no one
there.

I was alone, and
not just in the kitchen. I was the only person in the house. I was
the only person standing on the property.

And yet, someone
had hugged me. I could smell the residual perfume on my
clothes…

I realized then,
eyes widening. It wasn’t a scent my mother wore. Though this person
had embraced me in precisely the same manner, had conveyed love and
care in exactly as my mother would’ve, this was a different person
altogether.

Someone else had
touched me. Someone else was in the house with us. That, I could no
longer deny.

The following
morning, I found Myra’s teeny, tiny bikini panties stuffed within
the cap of my deodorant can. How they got there, I couldn’t tell
you. It was another one of those things I was never able to figure
out.

When I gave them
back to my girlfriend sometime later, she asked where I found them.
I lied about it, saying I found them under my bed, stuffed near the
headboard.

Lying about it
was easy. The truth was becoming a little too scary to
explain.

There was
something lurking about our new house.

Chapter Five:
Daddy’s Home

About three and
a half months after he left, in mid-December, my father came back
home from Central America. The climate within the house was
immediately different than it had been all the weeks before. The
affect was the most noticeable on my mom, whose demeanor changed
dramatically. She no longer walked about light-footed with a smile,
her eyes alight with the next project in mind. She became
withdrawn, sullen and spoke in muffled tones like there was a
blanket pulled over her head.

We kids just
stayed out of his way, which wasn’t all that hard to do, because he
immediately delved into his old routine – leaving before seven in
the morning and coming home after ten. He seemed more tired than
normal as if he’d actually exerted himself over the course of his
day, which was absurd. He detested anything overly physical, so his
fatigue seemed unusual. I mean, he was a pencil-pusher, what was
physical about that? Still, I couldn’t help but notice the slowing
of his gait, the dark smudges under his eyes and the increased
slackness of his face.

Of course with
the exhaustion came an additional layer of surliness, if not
downright bitchy-ness, keeping the rest of us at bay. Thus, our
interactions were kept to a minimum. We all knew he could explode
over the tiniest misstep and, like always, he proved true to
form.

It was toward
the end of the first week when I overheard my mother ask him what
seemed to me to be an innocent question.

“
Who’s
Roxanna?”

“
What?” he had
replied with a question.

“
Roxanna, she’s
been calling all week. Is she a new colleague of yours?”

I waited,
feeling a wince about to form at the edge of one my eyes. This
could be good, or this could be bad.

“
She’s none of
your god damned business. Do you hear me, Pillar?”

It was bad.
Whenever he called my mother by her first name, it wasn’t
good.

I breathed a
weary sigh, not wanting to hear yelling in our new house. It seemed
like a deflowering of sorts. I wanted no part. So, I got up, turned
off the TV in the living room and went to my room.

I had just
enough time to close the door to my bedroom when I heard him start
to yell at my mom. I hated the sound of his voice when he spoke to
her in that manner (if you want to call it “speaking”. Speaking was
a form of communication. What he did to my mother was dominating,
something entirely different).

I could already
sense why he was angry in the first place. It was something he did
when he felt cornered, backed-up against a wall of his own
manufacture. Roxanna was most likely his latest “fuck” in a long
line of “fucks” he’d had over the duration of his marriage. How he
managed to do so well with the ladies was anybody’s guess. He
wasn’t, at least from my perspective, a particularly good looking
man.

Already, I was
taller than him by a few inches and I was no more than five foot
nine. His body tended toward lassitude, and this wasn’t due to his
age. Like I’ve said numerous times, he was physically lazy, shunned
anything cardial. And, because of this, his physique had suffered.
His hairline had been receding for years, even at thirty-nine. The
remaining hair was almost all white. Premature, yes, but white
nonetheless. He had light-brown, beady eyes that could burn with
fury within seconds. His nose ended in a bulbous knot and his lips
were much too wide for his narrow face. This was accentuated by
their color – somewhere between a deep pink and a washed-out red
that made them all the more noticeable, out of place. His chin was
squared and cleft deeply. So much so, my sister had often commented
it looked like he had a pair of butt cheeks on the lowest portion
of his face.

“
Dad’s such an ass, because he has one on his face.
Hahahahaaa!”
she’d been found of
saying for years.

So, you see, to
me, he wasn’t overly attractive, and yet he seemed to get more
pussy than your average guy.

Now, I called
his women “fucks”, because I could never imagine my dad making love
to a woman. He was just too taut, pulled too tight to express any
emotion in the proper fashion. His filtering mechanisms were
twisted beyond repair. I couldn’t see him “wooing” or “sweeping”
any woman into bed on a wave of sensual romance. No, he’d just want
to fuck, plain and simple, and somehow he managed to find females
who were ok with that. And, this wasn’t the sixties or early
seventies when “free love” was the motto and sexual partners were
passed about like hard candy. No, that age had passed. AIDS was the
name of the game now. Fear of the unknown and the concept of a
modern plague ruled supreme. Still, my father managed to get women
to go to bed with him. I know, weird…