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Hercule: Chapter 1

Posted on June 24, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Hercule Washington was not someone you wanted to fuck with. This is not to say that he wasn’t receptive to a good natured ribbing or that he cared too much about having his good name dragged through the mud. Far from it. Seventeen years and eleven months ago Deena Washington had named her newborn after the star of the mysteries she had read through her final trimester while she was confined to bed and advised rest, fluids and all the nourishment she could get for herself and her baby. Deena thought that she would honour the time she had spent in the company of the diminutive Belgian detective by giving her son his name. In truth she had given him a life-long curse to bear. If the soon-to-be-a-man Mr. Washington had a nickel for every time someone had hinted that he didn’t know how to spell his own name because he’d forgotten the ‘s’ at the end he would have been able to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with all that metal. Actually it was unlikely that a few million people had seen Hercule write his name but he liked the analogy and used it every chance he got.

Though she gave birth in Alabama, Deena moved to South Central LA not too long after her son’s first birthday. Not many months later she witnessed her first gang-related killing and ever since then she wondered how many birthdays her baby would get to celebrate before he became another tough-side-of-LA statistic. In the years that followed Deena made only one real attempt to move east, and that was when Hercule was around ten years old. One afternoon he came home from school with blood crusting around the neck of his t-shirt, a cut on his right eyebrow and the broadest grin a mother could ever hope to see on her only child’s face. As she ran the gamut of emotions from surprise to horror to fear to despair to awe to sadness and as she attempted to get him to sit still while she applied disinfectant to the wound and pulled the t-shirt over his head, Hercule told her about his showdown with the Ghetto Boyz.

Lattrell, Key-Lo, Bad Mouth and King James were the toughest quartet at the middle school Hercule went to. Even though they would be teary-eyed, snot-clogged senior bait the following year when they transferred to high school, at that point in their lives the four teenagers ruled the school. Younger kids lost lunch money, sneakers, wristwatches and even articles of clothing, given up willingly or taken by force, as ‘protection’. Parents had complained but there was no one within the faculty man enough to take on the four boys who looked way older than their thirteen years and seemed capable of dropping small birds out of the sky with their dead-eyed stares. This had been Hercule’s day to give up his Hostess Cupcakes and he would have gladly turned his snack-time treat over if one of the four hadn’t made the mistake of joking about his name first.

Over the years Hercule had learnt to let most of the jibes and taunts slide but even he took exception to single brain-celled near-neanderthals attempting jokes at his expense. To hear her son tell it, he had gone to an unknown dark place and when he emerged from it, two of his tormentors were lying bleeding on the playground, another had run away and the last one, catching the sudden look of surprise in his eyes had sucker punched him in the eye before bolting after his fast retreating friend.

It was while she was absorbing the obvious pride with which Hercule told his story that Deena was terrified in a way she hadn’t been since that day she witnessed her first night-time slaying over something inconsequential in South Central LA. She looked into her options but there was no work for a single mother with a ten-year-old that would improve their living situation in another state or town. So she stayed put and offered up prayers for her son’s soul, every night before exhaustion transported her through five hours of dreamless sleep.

The incident on the playground helped ten-year-old Hercule make his bones. For the first time in the week that followed one of the other seniors tried to christen him Little Herc but ‘the boy who had beaten the men,’ in a manner of speaking, was having none of it. “The name is Hercule bitch, hear it, learn it and learn to whisper it. It’s the name my mama gave me.”

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