“Grew up an orphan,” he says, eventually, his voice just above a whisper, just this side of a normal speaking volume. Smooth again, now, deep and leonine once more, rather than ragged and rough like it was earlier. “Grew up in the system, bouncing from foster home to foster home.” A glance at me. “Know anything about what that’s like?”
I shrug, shake my head. “Not really. I grew up in a very small rural town where that’s just not how things work.”
“New Orleans. Not the tourist part, the slum part. Foster homes meant folks who were mainly doin’ it because they got paid to do it. They’d take a kid in, get money from the government. Technically speaking, there’s supposed to be oversight. In reality, there ain’t. Means most foster homes…ain’t great places to be.” He sighs. “I’m paintin’ it better’n it was. It was absolute fuckin’ hell every single moment. My first memory, very earliest thing I can remember is the foster dad shootin’ up smack. Next thing I really remember is being hungry. Always fuckin’ hungry. Always. If they weren’t shootin’ up, they were smoking rocks. If not those, then they were drunks. And I don’t mean regulars at the local watering hole, I mean slugging a bottle of vodka from sunup to pass out. I preferred the smack junkies because once they shot up, they left me alone. Crackheads were about the same, though they could be unpredictable between hits, just like the junkies. Meth-heads were second worst, because those fuckers were…crazy. Fuckin’ violent crazy, unpredictable crazy, just plain bugshit nuts. Drunks were the worst. Hammered all the time, and the more hammered they got, the worse I got it.”
“Worse you got it, how?”
He snorts. “Kicked the shit outta me, Myka, whaddya think? Every place I lived, I got beat to shit.”
“Rev,” I breathe.
“Just gettin’ wound up,” he says. “That’s just the lay of the land. Longest I spent any one place was four months. Guy named Gus, lady named Beth, two kids, real vicious fuckin’ twats named Liza and Lisa. Twins. Real godawful nasty evil horrible fuckin’cunts, those girls.”
I hiss in shock at the vehemence in his tone. “Rev!”
He ignores my outburst. “Gus was all right. Decent guy, for a fallin’-down drunk. He’d backhand me if I was in his way, but never went too crazy. Never broke nothin’, just some bruises here an’ there.”
“He neverbrokeanything?” I wheeze.
“Myka. I said I got the shit kicked outta me on the regular. I don’t mean I got smacked around. I mean literally, kicked the shit out of. Kicked till my ribs broke. Punched like I was a fuckin’ heavy bag, nose broken more often than not, always had a shiner. Gus wasnicecompared to most places.”
“My gosh, Rev.Why?”
He barks a bitter laugh. “’Cause I was there. I was nobody. I was dogshit under their feet. Nobody cared. Wasn’t anybody that would do dick about it.” A shake of his head. “Beth was the top bitch in the house, and her girls learned how to be cunts from her. She didn’t just smack me with her ring hand, she fucked with my head. Acted halfway decent for a spell, a few hours, a day, sometimes two, lulled me into thinkin’ she’d mellowed out, some. And then she’d crank up the evil. She locked me in their basement all the fuckin’ time. Shithole. Dark, damp. Infested with fleas and mice and roaches and centipedes. Creepy as fuck. Left me there with no light, no food, nothin’. Just for the hell of it.”
I don’t move, don’t breathe. Just listen, my heart breaking.
“Passed out down there, once. Came to with a rat chewing on my toes.” He huffs a laugh, almost amused. “Finally got shifted outta that hellhole. I was…six? I think six when I finally got out of their place.”
“Six?”
“Yeah, thereabouts.”
I blink at him, shocked into silence. “Rev,what?”
“Mother was Jane Doe. Homeless. Crawled into the ER, giving birth. No name, no way to know who she was, where she came from, obviously no clue who my sperm donor was. Probably a rape, maybe a trick for drugs or food. She died giving birth. Only thing she told the hospital was to name me Rev. No reason why. No last name. My birth cert says last name Smith, I’m told, but they just put that for there to be somethin’ there. I dunno for sure, I’ve never seen the actual document myself.”
“My goodness, Rev.”
He inhales deep, lets it out slow. “I had two pairs of jeans, one pair of socks, three pairs of underwear. A stuffed crocodile named Al. A pair of shoes. One coat. One blanket, and a pillow. That’s what I owned. I wore those shoes till my toes busted out the front. Stole new ones. Grew out of the clothes, had to steal ones that fit. Spent a couple weeks in juvie for theft because of it, but it was the only way I’d get clothes that anything like fit. I carried my shit around in a garbage bag.”
I swallow hard. “A garbage bag?”
“Mmm. That’s what I was, garbage. I said fuck it and hit the streets when I was ten or so. My last foster was…” he trails off, eyes closing briefly. “Real bad. Beat me so bad I almost died. And that was it. Figured I was better off on my own, so once I could stand upright and walk on my own, I snuck out. Took my trash bag and walked away. That’s how I met Chance. He was like me, only he’d had parents till he was eight. They were murdered and he got tossed into the system. Like me, he bounced out of it. It was him and me, after that. Met him on a court, shooting hoops. He was already six feet tall then. He’d been on the streets for a while already, so he showed me the ropes. Where to snag scraps, where to sleep, which corners to avoid.”
“Gosh, Rev.” I don’t know what to say. I imagined a lot of scenarios that would lead to someone like Rev, but none came close to the truth.
“We got mixed up with a gang after a couple years. They just sort of took us in. Not good dudes. At fuckin’ all. But they had a place, an abandoned house that they’d taken over. It was a place to sleep that was inside. They had food. They didn’t let anyone fuck with us. Seemed like a good situation for a couple street rats like us. So when they asked us to do things, we did it. Jumping kids from other gangs, picking up shipments of dope, mugging tourists, knocking over liquor stores.”
“You mugged people?” I ask.
“And a lot fuckin’ worse. I never jacked over anyone too bad, like I never killed anyone I was holding up, but if they got scrappy, I’d fuck ‘em up. Most of the rough shit I did was rumbling with the gangs.Thatshit got ugly. Chance and I always rolled together, and by the time he was thirteen or so,nobodyfucked with Chance. I wasn’t someone you’d fuck with either by then, but Chance was…well, you see him. Came to a point we were the top soldiers.” He looks at me. “Make no mistake, Myka. I was a straight-up thug.” He pauses. “How deep you wanna go?”
I shrug. “As deep you care to share.”
“Spooked yet?”
“Do I seem like it?”
