So, where'd I leave it off?
Yeah, Theriot, Louisiana. That Godforsaken place. My brother, Mark, daughters Alexis, Ashley and Vivica. And Mark's mojo.
I don't know exactly what the powder was that Mark sprinkled on my face. I, however, do know that if I were a drug junkie, that stuff would be better than anything I know of – think LSD, shrooms, ganja and ecstasy mixed together with an abundance of pure testosterone.
Whatever the concoction, it puts you in a conscious, dreamlike state. Meaning, you're asleep, and you're dreaming. But you're completely conscious of your dream and in your dream. You control every part of your dream. You even know that you're asleep and that you're dreaming. You can wake up whenever you get ready and still have vivid memories of everything that happened in the dream.
It's like tapping into your subconscious, visiting that vestigial state from which we all evolved.
That part is scary. Sometimes you don't really want to know yourself. We all think our souls are good and wholesome. That's not always the case.
And mine obviously wasn't, and I've known it for many years. But I also know finding that part of me required a trigger.
I'll take you back a bit. Like I told my lawyers and the judges, both of them, "You have know where I've been to understand what I am now.
----
Mark, older than me by 23 seconds, and I were a week shy of our 17th birthday when he introduced me to a part of me I never thought existed.
It was a tough time for our family. Mom and dad had died four months earlier in a supposed boating accident near Lost Lake over in Mandalay, the national wildlife reserve that surrounds Theriot. JB had custody of us. JB, short for Junebug, which was a nickname for Joseph, was kid himself. He was 24 years old and doing everything he could to keep together a family of him, twin 16-year-old boys and a sister who just turned 15.
Thinking back, JB sacrificed a lot for the three of us. He wasn't exactly putting his architecture degree to work in the middle of the bayou.
"Bruh," he would always say with a smile. "You family. When it's family, it's not sacrifice. It's love."
For us, nothing was more important than family.
So, when the state trooper unzipped that body bag, asking us to identify our sister – my oldest daughter's namesake – we all lost it. But you wouldn't have been able to tell from our outward appearance.
Inside we were exploding. Mom, dad, now Alexis.
"Yessir," JB told the trooper. "That's our baby sister."
We were standing on the side of state highway 56 a few miles north of Cocodrie. JB looked around and mumbled something about, "why was a Alexis so far from home." JB then fell to his knees, grabbed clumps of dirt and started apologizing to mom and dad.
Mark put his right hand on JB's shoulder and then grasped my right hand – for some reason I remember crazy little details such as that. They were both crying, tears generously streaming over their cheeks. I wanted to cry, too. I felt I needed to cry. But I couldn't. The tears wouldn't come.
I reached out to Alexis. She had been raped, beaten and strangled to death. I unzipped the bag some more. Then I reached for her neck.
"I'm sorry sir, but you can't ..." the trooper began. "Do that."
I didn't know at the time what came over me, but I stared at the trooper and he immediately began to stumble back. Mark yanked his hand out of mine and began rubbing it as if it were burned.
I unclasped the necklace mom and dad gave Alexis when she turned 10.
"Let's go," I told my brothers. "We have work to do."
"Sir, don't," the trooper started again.
"No! You don't! You don't say another fuckin' word. Don't you tell me what not to do. Don't you tell me a fuckin' thing. Look at this. No! Look at her! Look! She was 15 trooper! Fuckin' 15! She even wanted to be one of you guys. She wanted to be a cop, a fuckin' trooper, a fuckin' detective so she could find out who killed our parents. We all know that wasn't a damn accident! Don't we! You fuckin' racist bastards! She's gone. Look at her! She's number three trooper. Number three! Nobody else in my family dies. Nobody! I'll protect my family now trooper. You and your badge and your gun – you're worthless. You're all fuckin' worthless!"
My yelling brought several other troopers near. I stared at each of them. Then back to Alexis.
Leaning over, I kissed Alexis on her forehead.
"Bye bye baby sister," I told her. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for. And I know you wouldn't want me to do it. But baby sis, I'm apologizing now for what I have to do. I'll only apologize because I won't be sorry for any of. Please understand baby sis. This isn't a sacrifice. You're family baby sis. Every minute of it will be love."
I turned to JB and Mark. I reached out my hand for them. Mark looked at my hand, and I sensed fear in him. It was strange. He was my twin brother, and that moment, I never felt so far away from him.
The three of us walked back to JB's pickup. They climbed in the cab. I lay my body in the bed and stared at the burnt orange sky.
"Calvin, what happen to you out there?" Mark said later, while we sat in our living room. "What in the world was that man?"
"What are you talking about?" I said.
"You know what I'm talking about. That cop was effing scared of you. They were all effing scared of you. And me. Calvin, I couldn't effing touch you. Your hand was so hot. Look at this. My palm is red. Look at this. Look at it Calvin. What the eff happened?"
"It's FUCK Mark, not eff, not effing. It's FUCK. And I still don't know what you're talking about."
Actually, I did know what he was talking about. I noticed his fear, too. I knew what happened, but I didn't know how it happened. And that scared me.
I hated not being in control, and after looking at Alexis, I wasn't in control. Rage was. Rage is what yelled at those troopers. Rage is what made me order around my brothers. It had to be. That was the only explanation.
"Bruh, look at me," JB said. "I was scared, too. Bruh, you're my little bruh, and I was scared of you dawg. Calvin, bruh, what's up?"
"Look, you guys," I said. "It's me. It was me then. I just don't know what happened. I'm sorry. But I don't know."
I saw Mark come out of mom and dad's room. He walked straight toward me, held his fist to his mouth and blew white dust in my face.
As I fell to our sofa, I heard JB, "Mark, this stuff better work."
"It will," Mark said. "He needs to find out."
Next thing I knew, I was dreaming.
I was behind our house, about 300 yards out, near the swamp, teaching Alexis how to tie knots. Then I was showing her how to throw a football. We climbed the trees in our back yard and hunted for water moccasins in the swamp. We'd catch them and sell them to the biology department up at Nicholls State for spending money. The biology department used them for making anti-venom.
The folks at Nicholls always wondered how we caught so many cottonmouths. We told them our dad invented a trap. They bought it and Alexis and I always laughed about it.
The dream was just Alexis and me. It was our lives together. Everything we did from the time she was born flashed through my head. We just had a connection like that. I took her everywhere with me and she willingly came.
Alexis was a tomboy in the truest sense. She threw a baseball better than most boys. She was the best tree climber – male or female – in Terreboone Parish, the best swimmer, too.
Mark wasn't that much into athletics and outdoors stuff, and JB was off at a LSU, getting a degree in architecture. My pops went to junior college. He got into building boats and made a good living from that. So JB was the first in the family to attend a big four-year school. With him never being home, and Mark always reading his religion books, it was always Alexis and I.
The dream showed all of our highs, lows, funs and mishaps. The weird part about the dream is it was traveling through my head like an old 8mm film on fast forward.
The "film" slowed to a stop when it got to Alexis' 15th birthday party. It was as if Alexis walked off the frame, grabbed my hand brought me into the scene. She introduced me to a boy named Bryan. I already didn't like him. Alexis had talked about him before. I knew she liked the kid, had a crush on him.
I guess it was jealously. I was the boy in Alexis' life. We were partners, not remotely in a sexual sense though, so get that shit out of your head. We were just inseparable. And here was some person who was going to make me share her.
Alexis introduced me to all the people at party. Many she said she barely knew, they were just kids from school. Then she looked at a two boys who I knew as being seniors when I was in seventh grade. They were the Thibodeaux cousins. I knew they were not in school. They had to be 22 or 23, but they were at a party for a 15-year-old.
"I don't like them," Alexis told me. "They're mean."
Alexis said that, and everything around me went dark. Alexis disappeared. Her schoolmates did, too. There was no music. The food was gone. Our backyard had vanished. All that was left were the Thibodeaux cousins and me.
Something was happening. I didn't know what it was, but I was controlling the dream. I stuck out my hands, and all I had to do think about it and I had the necks of the Thibodeaux cousins in either of my hands. I started banging their heads together.
I banged. I banged. And I banged.
I banged until their heads were bloody masses of pulp in my hands. Their blood was all over my body.
Then I blinked, and they were standing there again, whole and healthy. And again, I thought about their necks in my hands, and it happened. Again I banged their heads to a bloody mess.
I did that three more times before stopping.
I was about to do it a sixth time. Instead, I grabbed their necks pulled them close and told them, "You're dead. You're both dead, and you don't even know it."
A moment later, I woke up.
I ran passed JB and Mark out the door. They yelled after me, but I was too fast, too far gone, seemingly too possessed.
For 13 miles I ran, never once feeling tired. I made it to Bryan's house, and he was sitting on porch, tears streaming over his swollen face. Somebody had paid him a visit. Either that or his deranged dad was back in town.
"Where do they hang out," I said.
"Who," Bryan said not raising his head and speaking through a swollen lips.
"Don't screw with me. Where are the fuckin' cousins?"
"I've heard them talk about their special spot over by Lost Lake."
"I'm taking your bike. It'll get back to you."
I jumped on Bryan's dirt bike and flew off to Lost Lake. I rode to a road that leads to a little spot where Lost Lake meets Four League Bay.
Off the bike, I ran off the trail, about a mile through parts of marsh. I caught two cottonmouths along the way. And held their hissing heads as a ran until I saw the signal, a black towel hanging from a small tree.
