Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten (27 page)

I placed my left arm around her waist and felt her small hands come to rest on my forearm.  I stretched my other arm out toward Ramona who gripped my hand in both of hers, bringing it up to her lips and kissed it gently over and over again, her eyes closed.  “I would consider myself the luckiest man alive to have either one of you, but I
’m not sure I am worthy of the sacrifice you are both willing to undertake just to be with me.  I’m not sure I’m that special, in fact, I know that I’m not.  Why would you two want to do this?”

“Because, I love you”, “Because, it is best this way”, they said it simultaneously
.  To this day, I never knew which one of them said which.

I like the think they both said both phrases with two throats that, for one second, became one.  When things got hard, got desperate, this was one of those perfect moments, in time, that always uplifted my spirits and pushed me to my feet.  I could always fight on, even when things were at their worst, because of them.  That memory always drove me to do what needed getting done, fuck the odds, fuck the consequences.  I was always strong enough, because of what those two teenage girls had said to me that bright and sunny day in the summer of 2018.

I remember asking them, once again, if they were certain they wanted to do this.  I remember Katie had squirmed from my lap and grabbed my face with both hands and gave me a kiss so sweet on the lips, I cried beneath her tender touch.  A few seconds later, she backed away and Ramona repeated what my cousin had done.  Then, we were all on the couch hugging and crying like babies, just holding onto one another, rejoicing in what we’d just formed.  Out of hatred and fear, loneliness and despair, the three of us had come together and decided that love, trust, and security were more important than anything else in the world.  It would prove to be the cornerstone of our existence – we lived it each and every day we’ve been together ever since.

T
here have been many other extremely important people in our lives over the years.  Some of which were integral to our very survival.  But the cornerstone of me, of Katie and of Ramona has always been the twisted covenant we forged that day in my parent’s house.  It is the fundament driving our little band.  It keeps us going.  It keeps us whole.  Though the struggle has become something we can more readily control – even manipulate – if it hadn’t been for our openness, our willingness to share, we would all have died long ago.  We would’ve died right alongside
all
of our families, and more importantly, we wouldn’t have been able to fight back, because, plainly put, there had never been anything like us…

Not ever.

{ ¹The Lakers:
an American professional basketball team based in old
Los Angeles
(Angel Free Town),
California
. They play
ed in the
Pacific Division
of the
Western Conference
in the
National Basketball Association
(
the old NBA). }

~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Summer – 2018)

Cojones

We had
- by the time the doorbell rang twenty minutes later - composed and straightened ourselves to the point we almost looked normal, though our excitement and wonder was difficult to contain.  When I opened the door and saw Jacob standing there with a sandwich bag two thirds full of weed outstretched before him, I was nearly myself.  He never even caught a whiff that the girls and I had decided to become a trio-in-everything.  He was so preoccupied with the score, I doubt he would’ve noticed if I had answered the door in my boxers with each of the girls draped on either side, wearing nothing but their bras and panties.  He would’ve walked right passed us as if all was perfectly normal.  He would’ve begun rolling joints by the hundreds on the dining room table, if I would have let him.

Instead I said, “Dude, do you really need to flaunt the fact that you have a shit load of weed to the entire fucking neighborhood?!?  Fuck, Jake, sometimes I think you’re retarded or something.”

He stuffed the bag under his shirt as fast as he could, glancing around to see of anyone had noticed he was carrying enough marijuana to put us both in jail for five to ten, especially now.  The NIA had been ruthless with drug trafficking and usage.  They had gone so far as to rescind the legalization of marijuana in the fifteen states that had already passed laws ratifying its’ legality.  In some cases, those resolutions had been on the books for more than six years like in Washington state and Colorado.  No, it was best not to take chances.  Of course, Jacob was either too stupid to be aware of this or had a mind too muddled to remember. 
It was a matter of common sense, right?  What a douche!

I backed up and let him in.  He looked ridiculous with his hand up his shirt clearly hiding something underneath it.  I followed him into the TV room were the girls were sitting on the couch,
one at each end.

He glanced from one to the next, waiting to illicit some kind of response.  When neither of them looked his way, he turned back to me with a bewildered cast to his countenance
. It was the classic “don’t they know I have the weed?” sort of expression.

“Well, ladies, Jacob has returned with the goods and the food should be arriving any second now,” I announced.

Both girls turned to me and smiled widely, completely ignoring Jacob. 
Man, if that was ever a freeze out, then I’ve never seen one in my life! 
It was like the dude wasn’t even there.  I covered up his unease by continuing.  “So, I say we get what we need from the kitchen and set up camp upstairs in the Loft that way, should any of my family members come home earlier than expected, we’d have ample time to put away or hide whatever contraband we’d have out at the time.”

“Good idea, my love,” agreed Ramona as she bounced up off the couch and twisted toward Katie.  “Come on, sweetie, let’s go get organized.”

Katie shut off the TV and followed my girlfriend out of the room through the other door.  Both of them talked loudly about the food that was coming.  I myself was sort of looking forward to it as well.  Katie had ordered pizza, a few very good Chinese dishes
and
four pastramis, one for each of us.  There was no way we were ever going to finish all of that food.  But, practical as always, my cousin had mentioned should we partake of some of the marijuana, we were gonna get the munchies, so we might as well be prepared in advance.  Ramona had laughed, mentioning that smoking pot only made her horny, which made all three of us laugh nervously.  The room had turned anxious as we eyed each other warily.  This was going to be weird until we figured out what the ground rules were exactly.

Nonetheless, we had a shit load of food coming our way, so the girls went to get what we would need, leaving me and Jacob alone.

“You guys gonna need any help?” I yelled after them just make sure when I heard Katie reply in the negative, so I motioned for Jacob to follow me.  He stood there for a second longer still trying to figure out what had just happened.  He trailed after me as I began making my way up the stairs.  “So, Jake, how’d we do on the weed?”

That seemed to shake him out of his discomfiture in almost an instant.  “Dude, my boy hooked us up, ‘cuz. He gave me like, fuck, I don’t know like two
ounces free when I told him I wanted to spend the two fifty.”

“Really?” I was somewhat surprised, usually drug dealers were stingy motherfuckers, fucking way worse than any penny squeezing Vieja, and that was fucking-a, god’s honest truth!
 
I know, because I was one of them.

“Yeah, bro, he hooked us up!  Look how much fucking shit we have!  He gave me like a five percent markup from his price, which is unheard of on the streets. But
, homeboy’s got my back, ‘cuz, you know, ever since I got his little chivato out of a jam and shit”, he explained, holding the bag in front of him, admiring it, as though he had a bag full of diamonds.

What the fuck, Jake, why do you always talk like a fucking Cholo every time you got weed in your hand?  You sound so stupid, because you are not a Cholo!

“Well, then I’ll make you a deal, a quarter of that shit is yours to keep,” I told him, thankful he hadn’t screwed the entire thing up.  Plus, I felt magnanimous enough to give him a little something in return, in light of what Katie and Ramona had agreed to give me.  You know, Karma – the Ying and the Yang.  That shit’s important!

“No shit?” he asked even more excited.

“No shit, Jake, call it a finder’s fee or whatever, you earned it.”

“Thanks, Eff!” he bellowed and put his hand up so we could high five.

I came up to the first landing on the second floor and smacked his hand, which he clasped within his own.

“There’s a reason why I like you more than all the other
mamones
in our fucking family,” he said.

That made me laugh, knowing he was speaking about
the Marquez’ branch of my family.  They were the miscreants and washouts that had sprouted from my biological father’s lineage, people born under so many strange and incredible social circumstances, any attempt to explain a fraction of the truth… well, it would be very hard to believe.  That’s a whole story onto itself. 
But fuck those assholes, this is my story!

“Not all of them are as fucked as you make them out to be,” I inputted my opinion as I walked passed my parents’ Master suite on my way up to the third floor.

“Oh yeah, did you hear about Tita, right?  Aunt Irene’s oldest?” he asked.

I nodded, recalling w
hat my mother had told me a few months ago when my Grandma Trina had called and filled her in on the goings-on with that part of the family.  Something really bad had happened to Tita that no one could comprehend.   One day, she was the same old twenty-seven year old woman she’d always been - your traditional, statuesque Cholita.  She had the lacquered hair, stiff with hairspray and tattoos on the small of her back, her arms, and even one rumored to be just outside the left side of her vagina that read something like, “You Get This Far and Its Por Vida”.

Then, within half a year, she was deformed and mangled like she
’d been in a horrible car wreck.  She was so changed and unrecognizable, her own children would run from her in fear, screaming aloud, “mommy is a monster that wants to eat us alive”.  A few months after, she disappeared.  She’d taken no clothes, no food, not even toiletries.  She just left, and since then, none of us had seen her. 
Yeah, I had heard about Tita.

“Yeah, my mom told me,” was all I said.  I didn’t really want to talk about it.  It was hard, because I couldn’t get it out of my mind how pretty Tita had been to me when I was young boy.  She used to go out of her way to play with me at family gatherings.  Her hair had always been so perfect and
matched her eyes to a tee.  It seemed like she’d painted it that way.  To me, she was my fun cousin, Tita, who always came out of her room when we visited, even when she was a more of a woman than a girl.  She always said hi to me and showed me all of the cool things she was into at the time.  I had watched my fist Blu-Ray movie with her, one her boyfriend, at the time, had bought for her.  To this day, I have no idea what was the movie we had watched, because she kept asking me question after question about my life.  She even filled my short responses with tales and experiences of her own.

I just couldn’t
comprehend what had happened to her.  I found it real, real hard to envision her as one of those ‘things’ that people on the news called the “violently mutated”.  The rest of us referred to them as “trolls’.  Now, Tita was one of them.  I didn’t want to remember her that way.  Trolls were horrid.

“Truth be told, ‘cuz, what happened to Tita just goes to show you that entire portion of the family is cursed,” he surmised as we gain the third floor and entered the Loft.

“I don’t know, Jake, that’s kind of a hard judgment to consider. I tend to think they were just uneducated and rash, and shit happened.  That’s what came back to bite them in the ass.”  I grimaced with new thoughts of old memories.  “I mean, no one told Grandpa Juan to go and knock up a fourteen year old girl when he was already married and had kids already.  That was a decision he made on his own and for the rest of his life he paid the price for it…”  I stopped, because the notion struck me that I might be more like my grandfather than I ever had imagined in the past. 
Fuck!

“I guess you’re right, Eff,” he said as we attained the Loft and walked in.  Jacob glanced around and, like a hyena on someone else’s kill, he spotted Katie’s belongings on the bed far to the right of the doorway.  “Holy fuck, Eff, your parents got Katie up here with you all alone?”

“Yeah, so?” I replied, trying to act it like it was no big deal.  I knew exactly what he was thinking, because it was exactly what I had been thinking the day before. 
A gorgeous, sexy, tight-assed teenage girl sleeping in the same room as me, when do I get to fuck her?!?
  “My mom said it would be good for her to be around… how did she put it…?  Oh, I remember now, she said, I’d be good influence on her.”

“Good influence my ass, man, if your mom knew just half of what you’ve done, she’d have kicked your ass out of here so hard, you’d bounce on your ear,” Jacob responded, incensed.

What he had said, though, was pretty close to the truth.  I just made sure that’s all.  I went out of way to make sure I never got caught red handed doing something I wasn’t supposed be doing.

“How can you stand it, ‘cuz?”

“Stand what?”

“Sleeping so close to her and not wanting to creep over and at least touch her, man?”  His eyes were hooded already.  I was sure if he had been alone he would’ve starting beating off right there.

“That’s because I’m not all perv’ed out over her, you jerk.  Besides, you dick, she’s my
cousin
.”

There was always a time for some well-placed indignation to stave off the ignorant, especially if you wanted to do precisely what the ignorant wanted, right?

“Who cares, bro, I would, at least, try and get some…,” he drifted into a thoughtful silence and from the look on his face the thought he had might’ve already tried it with some of our other cousins popped into my head.  But who though?  Only Melanie was old enough, she was the oldest child of my Uncle Andrew Marquez, which was Jacob’s mother’s brother on my father’s side of the family, but shit, she was fifteen now, so…  Of course, he could be talking about one of the older girls from my Grandpa Juan’s first marriage.  They were cousins as well, but only by half.  Maybe he had gone after one of them? 
Damn!
I thought,
all those girls were out in the streets a lot, just like their parents had been before them, no telling how many times those bitches got passed around the neighborhood.  Yuck!
  Jacob’s dick was probably only halfway attached by now.  It might have already fallen off, if he had stuck it into one of those
Strawberries¹
.

“Get some what?” came a female voice from behind us and made us both jump out of our skin.

“Jee-Zuz, Ramona, did you have sneak up on us like that, I nearly shit my pants!” complained Jacob.  He walked deeper into the room, then edged his way toward my dresser and placed the marijuana on top of it.

I smirked Ramona’s way.  “I’ll give you one guess.”

“Shit, I don’t even need one.  It is
truly
all he ever thinks about.  You should’ve seen him when I turned fourteen and he and some of his friends came to my birthday party.”  I slid my head to the side.  I hadn’t heard this story before.  She handed me a bag full of warm boxes with the logo of a laughing Buddha stenciled on the outside. 
Looks like the Chinese food was here!

She continued, talking in low tones.  “That d
ickweed comes up to me, asking me if I’d had my period yet, which was stupid, because I got my period when I was like eleven.  He kept asking me if I’d been broken in or some shit like that.  He was creepy as fuck, and kept following me around the entire time.”

“What made him stop?” I asked, really interested, because as far as I knew, my cousin
never
took “no” as a rejection.  For him, “no” meant the game was merely afoot.