Chapter 31

For me, few moments were as tense and difficult as when I saw my brother, Hershel Duane Schumacher, again for the first time since my last visit so many years ago. Life in a federal prison, even a notoriously minimum-security, “Club Med” prison, was no picnic for my big brother. He had been away from his wife and his four daughters for too long (five daughters if one counted Shelby, but he never had). His wife, a rather petite Thai woman, had taken the American name of Elaine. She had suffered as badly as he, or so it seemed to me, though how much of that was due to Hershel’s absence and how much to his presence remained to be seen.

I felt most horrible for his daughters, the oldest being seventeen-year old Jane, followed by sixteen-year old Kendra, fifteen-year old Cecile, and fourteen-year old Natalie. Yes, Hershel had no sons, only daughters. I wasn’t sure how he felt about that, though personally it was never that big of a deal for me, either way. You just wanted happy and healthy children, right? I also wondered how it was that Elaine had so many kids consecutively, only to abruptly stop with Natalie. Was there a health issue that forced them to stop breeding, because it seemed to me that he was dead-set on maximum reproduction for at least a while? What had ended it? Well, breeding so often together was bad for a woman’s health, wasn’t it? Apparently, my brother didn’t care about Elaine’s own bodily needs as he did for his desire to reach whatever goal he had in mind (my suspicion was that he kept trying for a son).

Hershel was a bit anxious, to put it mildly, and even shook violently as Marcy finally let loose her tight grip on his arm, her nails digging very roughly into his skin. It wasn’t everyday that a naked ex-girlfriend with angel’s wings showed up at your prison, rescued you from a violent gang-rape (yes, even at his relatively nice prison, due to no women around, rapes happened), clawed your arm, and carried you to see your estranged family, including your wife, your daughters by her, your eldest daughter, your younger sister (whom you had raped, impregnated, and coerced into having an abortion), and your kid brother, who just happened to now be the leader of a growing new religion and nudist colony. This was going to be one hell of a day for him.

“Hello, Hershel,” I finally spoke to my big brother, who was pale, thin, and weak in appearance, a shadow of his old self. Prison had not been kind to him at all.

“Hello, kid brother. What the hell is going on, anyway? Are you in charge here?” Hershel looked me in the eye at last.

“Show some respect. He might be your brother, but he is also the Prophet and the Lawgiver,” Marcy instructed her ex.

“Very well. Hello, Your Holiness. Why is everyone naked around here? Is this a nudist colony?” Hershel blurted.

“Yep. It’s becoming one. Nudity is the symbolic embrace of the natural order of things and rejection of the corrupt, unnatural conventions of the previous society. Remember Marcy, by the way? It seems that she remembers you, bro. You broke her heart back then, but now she is free of you. Oh, and incidentally, it’s time that you met your daughter, Shelby. Takes after her mother, not after you, thank God! What do you think of that?” I asked him, confronting him about his treatment of her at last.

“Shelby? She’s not my daughter, you fool! I tricked you all! I took a condom, jerked you off while you slept, little brother, and then used your cum to impregnate Marcy with a turkey baster while she slept! Shelby’s YOUR daughter, Mark! Yes, I did it on purpose, too! You were a father while still a teenage virgin! How’s that for a joke? All this time, she’s wanted to know her father, huh? Well, sweetheart, you’ve already met him, and judging by the way that his hand is rubbing your fine ass, he’s fucked you, too! Oh, man, what a laugh!” Hershel roared with laughter now, and I got the sudden, gut-clenching sense that he wasn’t lying for a change.

Marcy looked upward and nodded, “He’s telling the truth, Mark. I didn’t know it either, but the Almighty has just assured me that Hershel isn’t deceiving us this time. Well, personally, I’m glad of it! I’m much happier to know that the father of my dear, loving daughter is you, Mark. You’re a much better father than Hershel ever could be.”

Shelby rushed to me and gave me several kisses now, tears streaming down her face, “Daddy! Oh, my sweet Daddy! I’m so glad that it’s you, that I’m really your daughter and not his! I really badly want to have your baby now! Max’s too, of course. Still not happy with Uncle Hershel here, though. He was mean to me, to Mom, and to my Daddy, by not letting us know that I was Daddy’s girl.”

“Hey, it was a nice laugh and I didn’t think that my kid brother was ready to actually raise a brat like you, kiddo. Nothing personal, of course. You really thought, all this time, that I was your father? My God, you guys are so dense! Look, it really wasn’t meant to be cruel, just a prank, that was all. I meant no harm, so no foul, right? I didn’t neglect your kid, Marcy. See that? You misjudged me all this time! I might be a lot of things, but never a deadbeat dad. So, are we square?

“Thanks, by the way, for getting me out of prison. Stuck in there, with the guards having fled, died, or been captured, well, it’s no day at the park, I can tell you that! I was about to become the bitch of Rufus Hawkins, and that I wasn’t looking forward to at all. That Canuck jock is meaner than most Americans, I can tell you that. We’re cool, right? Brothers and such?” Hershel reached out his hand, but I refused to shake it.

“Not yet, buddy. You putz, you schmuck, you absolute mamzer!” I began to cuss Hershel out, partly in English, some in what little Yiddish I knew, “You have the unmitigated chutzpah, after having deceived your niece about her paternity, thus keeping her and me from knowing that I am her actual father, to dare speak to me of things being square or even between us? Don’t apologize to me, you dickhead! Apologize to Shelby and her mother and grovel while doing it! Oh, and that doesn’t even count when you fucking RAPED our sister! Remember her, you cur? Our sweet Rachel here? Come stand next to me, Rachel! Stand while Hershel kneels and begs your forgiveness, and Shelby’s ... and Marcy’s, for what he did to you! Kneel, you filthy pig!”

Hershel was terrified now, and sure enough, he knelt before his ex-girlfriend, his niece (who until today we thought was his daughter), and our sister to plead with them for their mercy and pardon for his past crimes. Pride had been replaced by terror, as if he could sense that I was the real deal, that I had power from above, from Heaven itself. He wept and groveled when I finally recalled that his wife and daughters were there. They sadly turned away and wouldn’t look at him, either.

“I’m sorry. You and the girls can leave the mall for this. You don’t have to hear all this stuff. Very sorry, didn’t think of how this confrontation would harm you. Just had some pent-up anger left in me and they in them!” I told Elaine, who shook her head and refused to leave.

“No! Young ladies need to know that father is wicked man! Father evil, sick man who hurt people! Daughters need to know not to do bad things!” Elaine shouted in broken English. Elaine shook her finger at her husband in front of the four girls, “You and me done! You are not my husband anymore! Take ring back, jerk!”

Elaine then tossed her wedding band back at Hershel, before kicking him in the balls to make him double over in agony, “He raped me when we met! I was just fifteen! He forced himself inside me in Bangkok house! He hurt me bad! He bought me from Father, took me daily in Bangkok, and took me home when I was older to marry me. He rape me every day when I marry him! Every day! I don’t want him back! I want him dead or in prison where he belongs!”

“Beg forgiveness of Elaine, too, then, for raping her when you met her! Make it convincing, dick face!” I ordered my estranged brother.

“Sorry, Elaine! I didn’t mean any harm ... I just had to have you! I like Asian girls! I can’t help it! I like to fuck Asian girls! I loved you, Elaine! I love you still!” Hershel wept as his wife rejected him.

“I no love you, Hershel! You rapist! You hurt me! I hate you! Leave me alone and never talk to me again!” Elaine spat at him and kicked him again in the balls for good measure.

Then she finally took the girls to another room in the abandoned mall. Thank Heaven for small mercies. Thanks to their father’s crimes and the outrage felt by the rest of us, I just hoped that they weren’t scarred for life already.

“Jesus, what a prick! I knew that you were sick, but raping your own wife? Utterly vile! Despicable! Rachel, tell him how you feel now about what he did to you,” I urged her, “And you ... listen for a change! Go ahead, Rachel, you tell our brother what you think of him.”

“You swine! You filthy, disgusting, rapist bastard! I loved you as a sister, even had a little crush on you for a while! I respected and admired you because you were my big brother and I thought that you were a great guy! Instead, you’ve proven to be nothing but a rapist, crook, liar, and just plain bully! You don’t give a fuck about no one else but you! I’m so fucking over you, but I still have nightmares where you’re raping me! Go to hell, you turd!” Rachel slapped him hard, too, right across the face.

“And this is for my daughter, Shelby! And this is for ME, you prick, for making me love you when you didn’t love me back! You should have just told me it was a fling! And you drove me to suicide, you bastard! Why didn’t you just tell me that it was a fling?” Marcy slapped Hershel repeatedly about the head and face.

“Because I did love you, Marcy! For once in my life, I was in love and it scared me! It was normal, it was healthy! It was with an older woman! It terrified me! I like virgin and underage girls, because they’re sweet, innocent, and you can control them! I didn’t want to stay and be controlled again, as Mom did with me!” Hershel shouted in anger and pain, right before Shelby could slap him, too.

“What the hell does that mean, Hershel?” I demanded to know.

“Mom ... raped me when I was fourteen ... took me against my will. She knew that it was wrong, so she went out of her to favor me whenever she could. Dad just favored me because I was his firstborn, as you thought. With Mom, it was her conscience. Mom liked raping boys, you see. She did some sick, revolting things! Older women are trouble! The older they are, the worse they are. Virgins and underage girls can’t hurt you and you get to hurt them instead. That’s more fun! Dad either didn’t know or looked the other way. I’m not sure which. Mom was such a proper, upright, respectable model of a good Jewish woman, who would ever believe it?

“I was fifteen when I hurt my first victim. That was a neighbor boy named Sidney. He was fourteen, just a year younger at that time. The others have all been girls since then. I prefer girls, but he was a bit of a sissy. Mom and Dad paid them off. Swept it under the rug as usual, so I learned that I could just keep doing it. Mom was still using me, too, and I think that she secretly pushed for me to get away with a slap on the wrist, just because she was proud of me for being like her. Yes, proud! Deep down, Mom began to like me, not only because of guilt, but because she had made me just like her! Yet she also felt guilt and she killed that with pills and booze.

“By the time that I was eighteen, I had hurt a lot of girls already. So many that I lost count. By then, Mom was under more scrutiny, so she had to leave you and Rachel alone. Otherwise, you’d be her victims, too. That was when she started with the animals, of course. Lots of them. Some horses, but mostly dogs. Dogs don’t talk, after all. They don’t tell on humans. The perfect victim from her perspective. She never stopped with me, of course. She was somehow hooked on me.

“This lasted for a little while, at least until she got caught and Dad had to bail her out. He let her stay, but he never touched her again, though he might not have in literal years, anyway. She probably never told him about me or the other boys, but knowing about her and dogs was sickening enough to him. You know how Dad was. Easily disgusted. Didn’t like anything messy, from divorce to sex to pregnancies. Very squeamish guy. Why do you think that we never had pets? Dad, that’s why! Smart man, very hard-working, but had a rather weak stomach. Never went on roller-coasters, and he had heartburn long before he was forty. He had an ulcer by the time that he was forty-five. I don’t think that he ever cheated on Mom either, even once, just because he didn’t like the mess of an affair.

“Frankly, I don’t think that he enjoyed sex much at all for that reason. I suspect that Dad was asexual at his core. Anyway, their marriage was completely sexless after that, so Mom took other boys to her bed again. Legally adult boys this time, if barely, figuring that she could get away with that. It was no crime now. That was her logic, at any rate. She continued sleeping with me, in fact, and had to have an abortion to avoid getting caught.

“When I went to college and came back for breaks, summers, I turned to Rachel, and then to Marcy, among others, for my lusts. Mom got pushed aside, and I’m not ashamed to say that. She was a selfish bitch and she deserved to be discarded by me. Besides, she moved on to other boys, anyway, though she had never been faithful to me, anyway. She tended to get jealous when I pushed her aside, of course, and that was why she resented and hated Rachel so much. She blamed Rachel for stealing her ‘little man, ‘ as she put it. Same with Marcy, of course. I think that she wanted to push Marcy and Rachel off on you. Yeah, that’s how Mom thought. Sick, demented whore!