There was a spreading pool of blood on the street, with the overhead halogen lights making bits of cranial bone shine like cold white stars. But that is not the beginning of my story. It's the end.
My story began years before that moment, in the St. Louis No. 3 Cemetery in New Orleans, late one October night. It was only hours till Halloween, not that the holiday of candy and goblins meant anything to me anymore. I was just another homeless runaway living moment to moment off the scraps in the gutters. Why was I in a graveyard at night?
To acquire things to sell in a pawn shop.
If I have to tell you from where ... you have lead too gentle a life and should stop reading this now. But if you're content to be led where I'm going to take you, then feel free to keep reading.
The police dogs were howling, the red and blue lights and that damn spotlight were flooding the night around me as I ran, sucking in panicked breaths. I kept slipping on the wet grass, stone, and gravel surrounding the old tombs. With a bag that would not be quiet, giving my position away like ringing funeral bells as I ran. I ran till I had to turn in another direction, and then would I run some more. All around me, lights, dogs, the long shadows of uniformed men. I was a rat in a fucking maze of marble and the more I gasped for air, the more I knew I was going to be caught. Red-fuckin'-handed at that!
No. No, I'm not going to be that dumb.
Turning towards the distant corner, I sprinted to a stone crypt that I had been to earlier and found easy to open. One of the older ones, with a hinged, stone door, not bricked in like most of these, I had been disappointed to find it empty. But now it was perfect. The dogs were right on my heels when I got to it, flashlights were closing on me as I pushed the door open enough to drop my bag inside then pulled it back shut. I didn't manage ten steps from that old crypt before the first officer was screaming for me to freeze even as the second tackled me into the cold, wet ground.
With my face embedded into crushed stone and old trash, they sat on me, cuffed, chained at the heels when I wouldn't stop fighting. Then a deep voice, so very cold, low and uncompromising that it chilled me, warned me to a stop or I was going to learn what a taser to the testicles felt like.
**
The toilet smelled of old piss.
The gray-bearded drunk passed out next to it, smelled even worse.
I'd been playing with dead things for half the night, which means there was some debate as to what in that holding cell stank the worse on the morning of October thirty-first. My money was on the toilet. Least ways till the door opened and my dad followed the officer into the outer room. That Old Spice cologne he must have bathed in beat out everything with eye-watering force.
The look of disappointed disgust on his face was a familiar one. It was a look I returned tenfold. As the guard unlocked the door, I sat there on my steel bench and watched it open. Uncaring that here was my release from the mindless boredom of this stinking cell. Not if it came from this disapproving man dripping in the stench of cheap cologne.
"Grave robbing, Tomas? Grave Robbing!" he spat at me as he stepped inside the metal doorway. My father looked me up and down then at the drunk nearby. "I think I would rather call him my son."
"And I would rather he was my father than you, so we're even. Better a drunk for a dad than a cocaine junkie for a father." I looked to the waiting guard and pointed at my father. "That's why he has on so much cologne on, you know? So the drug dogs won't smell that he has more coke up his nose than a drug cartel mule has up his ass."
The guard looked to my dad and the two men exchanged a shake of heads. "You sure you want to take him?" the officer said. "We can hold him for a few more days. At least till his arraignment hearing on Monday."
That my father didn't consider the offer for longer was a surprise. "Get up, Tom. Your mother has been worried sick."
Standing up, I took two steps and spat in my father's face! "Don't you dare call that whore you married my mother. That fucking cunt is no mother to me!"
I was expecting a slap, asking for it, begging for it. Planning for it really. I figured the officer could not release me into my father's custody if there was evidence of parental abuse, no matter how much the cop might think I deserved it. When my father looked at the officer and the cop simply smiled and looked away, I knew I was in trouble.
Gasping for breath that would not come, I dropped to my knees from the gut punch.
"Glenda loves you, Tom. She has been worried sick for a month over what might be happening to you out there on the streets." My father's voice was calm, his tone even. He knelt down next to where I was still trying to draw in air in empty lungs. "Now if it was up to me I just might leave you here, after that comment. See I love her, no matter what you feel or think about her. I love Glenda as much as I loved your mom before she left."
"She didn't leave," I spat or tried to. "She died! Died because you were too busy fucking Glenda to see to Mom when she said she was in pain. Mom was in pain for a year and all you did was tell her it was just migraines! Some fucking doctor you are. You fucking piece of shit. Then you didn't even wait a year to marry that murdering --"
"Enough, Tom! More than enough." My father stood up and brushed off his knee. "Your mom died of an inoperable brain tumor and Glenda's not losing that x-ray would not have saved her life. Do you not think that your step-mother doesn't carry enough guilt over that? Now get up, come on. Let's go home."
"On your feet, boy. Go home with your dad," said the officer, standing by the open cell door.
"I have no such place." Crawling over next to the drunk, I sat down and leaned myself into his side. "I haven't had one in years. And as far as a dad goes ... I prefer to stay with this guy."
The bearded man, awakened by all the yelling, smiled and patted me on the shoulder, an endearment that felt more heartfelt than any my father had ever given me before. His yellowed eyes looked on me with a pride that made me want to weep. Or that might have been his breath. With eyes watering, I looked up at the man that once fucked my mom and made me.
"Give, Glenda my best. Her and the twins ... tit one and tit two." I moved the old drunk's hand off my upper leg. He chuckled in an evil drunken way. "But I'm staying here."
Of course, since I was under eighteen, I wasn't given that choice. Taken out of the cell in handcuffs, by the officer, and then placed in my father's car with a suitably dire warning about "Next time, young man."
So, of course, I ran away again two days later.
** **
My bag was right where I had left it three weeks back.
The crypt, however, was not as empty as I remember it being. But then I had been in a rush that night and not I hadn't really wanted to turn on my flashlight too much. Using that light from my bag now, I moved over to the corner of the crypt where I saw what, at first, I had thought to be a pile of leaves.
However, a gleam of bright gold told me differently.
