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Disinherited Son

Posted on October 30, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He had a real glint in his eyes when he spoke, as if he was the favourite son saying something mischievous and adorable at the same time, “You always said, ‘family is everything.’ Do you remember that?” The old man in the wheelchair with the cane for walking and the assistant for helping him stand up, get into bed or pull his pants down before he sat on the toilet flashed his own eyes and there was neither mirth or humour in those eyes that had watched the world turn for eighty-one years. He knew a thing or two about bad seeds. He had read about them in the Bible and he had crushed a few underfoot during his early years as a man who coaxed food out of the land he inherited from his father. His eyes flashed with an anger he had thought long under control, only because he had failed to recognize the bad seed in his own family tree.

Jacob had always been the troublemaker. Ever since he was a baby. He somehow picked up the instinct to cry when an adult walked into the room and he was with one of his siblings. The adults always assumed that the jealous older child had done something to the baby so depending upon who it was and what mood they were in at the time, the older child was slapped, rebuked or sent to bed without dinner. Little Jacob always cooed with pleasure when he was then lifted up into the arms of the adult and assured that he would be fine now that Mommy or Daddy or Uncle Frank or Aunt Felicity was there.

When he turned three and actively lied to get his older siblings into trouble, Walter his older brother grabbed a hold of him once and bent him over the side of the bed, determined to search his entire head until he found the mark of the Devil and showed it to his mother. He didn’t find anything, because little Jacob was a squirming, slippery little toad who managed to look in the greatest peril when their mother happened to walk past the kids’ room. She took one look at the uncomfortable position Walter had his younger brother in, yelped in dismay and made up her mind to send seven-year-old Walter to boarding school even before she had freed Jacob from his grasp.

At thirteen he discovered the power of his penis. Somehow that seemed to make him even worse than he had already been when people had to simply fall for his honest-looking eyes and open-seeming smile. By age fifteen, seven girls in the neighbourhood had visited an abortion clinic before moving away for good, because of him. Something he said to them after he made it clear that getting pregnant was a problem they had to handle themselves made them keep their mouths shut about who the father of their discarded foetus was. It wasn’t until he was caught in a compromising position with a much older maid that anyone in his family even suspected that the boy who sat obediently in church with neatly combed hair and a pristine suit was sexually active. The maid was fired. And as an added bonus his father slapped a sexual assault charge on her. She was arrested but Jacob managed to make some evidence disappear so Consuela the maid was deported instead. He was the type of hunter who kept tabs on animals he had wounded so it was with great satisfaction that he cherished the news of Consuela’s death in Juarez at the hands of drunken tourists who didn’t feel they got their money’s worth when they bought her for the night. He made his informant repeat the story of Consuela’s death three times before he disconnected the disposable cellphone he had acquired for just that set of correspondence and crushed it underfoot before kicking the pieces into the valley.

In the engineering of evil Jacob was inventive, meticulous and capable of great harm. Until it all caught up with him when he tried to frame his own sister in an elaborate trap that involved drugs, a married man with influential connections and his sister without the correct amount of clothes on when the influential man’s wife showed up on an anonymous tip. Unluckily for him, events had shifted around on his meticulously ordered timeline so that his sister and the influential man were not in the room when his wife burst in. In the ensuing commotion the wife made a call to the disposable cellphone he was using for that particular mission. Turned out the FBI were watching the influential man too. They knew there would be drugs in the room. They knew there would be at least one woman in there with the influential man who wasn’t his wife. They didn’t care about any of that. All they were interested in was placing the man in the presence of a large enough stash of drugs to put him and then his other influential friends away for a long time. So when the wife made the call, they recorded it.

And then their voice-recognition software went to work on calls referenced or indexed from across the country over the past six months. It took nine weeks but they found a match. And then they dug a little further and the Consuela call turned up in an archive and before long they realized they were dealing with a person exhibiting extremely evolved sociopathic tendencies. So they decided to bring him in for questioning. And that’s when his eighty-one-year-old father heard about it from the friends he had made among the people who walked various corridors of power.

The old man took off his glasses and polished them on his silk tie, put them back on and squinted into the face of his least favourite offspring. After a moment’s silence, just for himself, he said, “Family is everything and I should have drowned you at birth. To protect mine.”

Nobody made any move to so much as offer him a comforting pat on the shoulder on his long walk out of the family home and towards the waiting car. Under his breath his father muttered as the front door shut behind his son and his captors, “You’re dead to me boy.”

Unfortunately for his family and all of mankind, a secret branch of the government had very different plans for a man of his unique ‘talents.’

Jacob’s not dead.

You can start feeling scared now.

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