Chapter 2
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
O ur basketball hoop didn’t have a net anymore.
The sun had disintegrated it to nothing more than a few cobwebby strands hanging from the rim.
When our school remodeled the gymnasium, they’d left the discarded backboards by the dumpsters.
It had taken both of us to drag it all the way home.
With some scrap wood and old rusty nails, we rigged it up against the little shed a few yards from our camper.
The basketball, which I kept in the only consistent shade for miles, beneath our camper, fared slightly better.
While our home wasn’t anything I’d remotely venture to call pristine , our mother never allowed the filthy thing inside.
Although discolored and a little rough to the touch, it still had some bounce.
I dribbled the ball and took a few halfhearted shots at the crooked hoop.
The temperature was still climbing, and the noon sun beat down directly over my head.
I looked forward to my mother concluding her business so I could go back inside.
The AC window unit wasn’t working again, but I had a small fan in my room, and at least I’d be out of the blistering sun…
until the next round of clientele came knocking.
The two men who had shown up a few hours prior to my impending heat stroke finally stumbled out of our camper.
I continued dribbling the ball in the dirt as I watched them proceed to their truck.
While wearing matching grins that seemed oddly satisfied, they both looked at me like they were privy to something I was not.
“Hey, kid,” the one guy said. He winked at me as he walked around the front of his companion’s truck to the passenger door. “Where’s your brother at?”
I only shrugged. Dom had ventured out on his own before I’d woken up.
“Come here a minute.” He waved me over, tugging a worn leather wallet from his back pocket.
Wedging the dusty basketball beneath my arm, I walked over to him, curious why he was peeling money off the thin wad of cash in his hands.
“You give this to your brother and tell him I’ll be by to see him soon.”
I peered down at the three twenties the man crushed into my palm. “What for?” I asked, raising my hand to my brow to form a visor with the bills. The sun was brutal, but I wanted to look him in the face.
“You a cop?” He laughed and playfully cuffed me around the ear.
“I’m a kid.”
“How old are you now?”
“Ten.”
His smile broadened. His large hand slid down from my ear to gently stroke the side of my neck before it curled around to rub my throat with the pad of his calloused thumb.
I swallowed hard.
“That’s good. That’s really good.” His tone turned softer, and the way he stroked my throat with his fingertips filled me with chilling apprehension.
Instinctively, I backed out of range from his immediate reach.
“Why don’t you keep that money?” He smiled as if I hadn’t recoiled from him. “Your brother is aging out anyway.”
The strange statement was beyond my comprehension at the time. He climbed into the old blue Ford, and I watched the plumes of dirt clouds kick up from the tires as they drove down the dusty, unpaved road between sparse Barrel Cacti and Saguaros, toward the highway.
I’d always been a most curious fellow. Though this time, I had a feeling, for once, I didn’t want to know the answers to any of the questions whirling around in my then-innocent mind.
After tucking the basketball into the shade beneath the camper, I made my way inside. Mom was zoned out on the couch, smoking and staring up at the ceiling. Per usual, she ignored my existence as I crossed the short distance to my room.
I splayed the three twenty-dollar bills on my bunk and waited for Dominick to return from wherever he ran off to without me again. Alone, with only my ignorance and nagging fear for company, I pondered over the man’s unsettling words.
M om angrily slapped at the pile of trash on the coffee table. A few crinkled pieces of burnt tin foil and her stack of Tarot cards were scattered onto the floor. “Did you take my smokes, you little shit?”
I knew Dom swiped her smokes and favorite brass Zippo before we left for school that morning, but I was no snitch. She’d take it out on me anyway if I did say something.
Nobody had been by to bring her any of what she’d called medicine , which always made her volatile. However, when the phone rang, her entire demeanor changed, like some switch flipped from nasty to nice. Or perhaps, desperate was a word more befitting.
Pretending not to eavesdrop on her conversation, I picked up her fortune-telling cards from the floor and stacked them on the table beside her mess of tin foil wads, half-empty Bic lighters, and over-filled ashtray.
“Hey, baby.” Her voice held a far more pleasant pitch as she stood, frail body hunched close to the wall.
“You coming over to see me tonight? I need it real bad , Daddy… Oh, you know… Everything.. .” Her finger twisted anxiously around the discolored cord of the old wall phone.
Wedging the handset between her ear and shoulder, her other hand raked through her long, frizzy, black hair.
After turning my attention back to the fortune-telling cards, I cut the deck in the middle and pulled the top card.
“He’s the one you told me about?” There was a strange edge to her voice. “Yeah, sure, bring your friend.”
I studied the dark image of the card, no longer listening to her go on with one of her many companions . I wasn’t interested in deciphering her negotiations. The ominous feeling I got from the card was more distracting.
The artwork depicted a skeleton Knight, clad in black armor, atop a black horse, stepping over the bodies of two young boys, one lying on the ground, one kneeling before him.
Death.
I didn’t like this card. I placed it on the table face up, so she’d see it when she finished her call.
My mother hung up the phone and took her usual place on the couch across the coffee table from me.
“Am I gonna die?” I asked, pushing the card toward her. I had pulled the Death card several times the past week alone.
“You will, if you don’t stay out of my fucking hair tonight,” she snapped, scratching at her thin arms. They were always peppered with small bruises.
“Mommy is having some friends over soon. I want you to stay in your room tonight unless your brother gets home at a decent hour for once . Then go someplace with him.”
“Dom has football practice tonight,” I reminded her. He wouldn’t be home for hours since he had to walk all those miles home from school. It would be even longer if he stopped anywhere along the way, like at a teammate’s house for supper.
I wished he would because he always snuck something home for me to eat when he did.
My stomach rumbled at the thought of real food. I hadn’t eaten anything since the free lunch the school provided for us poor kids earlier that day. Lunch was pretty much the only reason I looked forward to going to school most days.
Kids always picked on me when Dom wasn’t around.
Everyone knew we were dirt-poor, fatherless trailer trash.
Even some of the staff seemed to hate us.
I later realized it was because a few of their husbands frequented my mother’s couch.
.. Perhaps they wondered if we were their children’s half-brothers?
My mother’s side gig used to be tarot readings and meddling with spell work.
All that fell off for some reason, but it didn’t stop anyone from calling us Godless heathens , the demon spawns of the desert whore , Satan’s sons, or sometimes witch children.
Dom didn’t seem to mind at all, so it didn’t bother me much, either.
In fact, he seemed to take pride in it, especially if it meant sticking it to the mostly Catholic population of our student body.
He even stole books from the library about demons and witches.
Dom said that once upon a time , our mother had been a beautiful, powerful witch…
I have no memories of those times. It seems her decline happened shortly after my arrival.
Though I often imagined it was true… That in another life, my mother loved me, and my brother and I weren’t always insufferable burdens to her.
Yet even then, I doubted. Neither of us knew who our fathers were.
It was possible she didn’t either. I don’t think my mother ever saw the inside of a white-picket-fence.
My stomach rumbled again with a dull, ever-present ache, which drew my mother’s stormy grey eyes to me with a narrowed glare. “Go make yourself some ramen, then go to your room,” she impatiently snapped.
I glanced down at the Death card once more as I stood, and wondered why that card, of all cards, was the one I kept pulling.
W hile eating my bowl of soup outside on the camper’s metal step, I stared up at the night sky.
Way out in the desert without light pollution from the city, I marveled at the billions of twinkling stars in the inky blackness.
The Milky Way was visible to the naked eye, as well as the Andromeda Galaxy, discernible between the Pegasus constellation and the point of Cassiopeia.
In all my years, I’ve never seen the moon shine brighter than it does above the desert.
One could traverse the terrain without any manufactured light at all, and we had done so quite often.
A meteor blazed through the sky above me on this particular night, and I watched its brief but brilliant journey with a smile.
They are quite commonly seen in the desert with their bright hues of yellow, green, blue, and violet.
This one happened to be the rarest color to observe, a deep red.
Perhaps it is a lucky star, I’d pondered, and the thought prompted the utterance of a wish on the fly…
for my mother to love me… Perhaps I’d hungered for that more than anything.
After lifting the bowl to my lips, I sipped the remaining broth and headed back inside.
Since I preferred reading to being locked out for a good portion of the night, I decided to go into Dom’s box under his bunk and search for one of his demon books while Mom entertained her visitors.
I’d remembered scanning through one in particular, discussing planets and their correlation to summoning specific entities.
Dom never minded, but even if he had, he would knock on the bedroom window first. I always had plenty of time to put things back in their place before unlocking the window to let him crawl inside. Neither of us ever wanted to sneak past our mother at night if it could be avoided.
Inspired by my lucky star, I settled on the Doctrine of Demons as my bedtime reading material and inevitably fell asleep.
T he mattress seemed to shift beneath me. That had been what jostled me awake. A large, shadowed form loomed over me. Having fallen asleep on Dom’s bottom bunk, reading about summoning Demons, I was sure one had crept into the room, eager to devour my soul.
Before I could let out a terrified scream, a hot, calloused hand clamped over my mouth. A man’s large body crushed me into the mattress, pinning me beneath him.
“Shut up, little brat. Keep quiet and maybe you’ll even enjoy this, too…”
My heart raced, pumping ice-cold blood through my veins. A paralyzing fear I had never experienced took possession of me. He lifted his body off mine to stroke his rough hand down my bare torso in a sickening caress. My mind reeled while I attempted to comprehend what was about to happen.
“Such a pretty little thing , you are… Though I can feel your bones right through this pale skin… It’s sad, really, how you all live. You should be grateful I come around here. If you’re a good boy… if you don’t give me any trouble , you might find I can be a generous man in many ways.”
I didn’t understand what he was implying, but the odd way he spoke…that almost feminine lilt in his tone, disturbed me to the very marrow of my bones. That was not how male teachers, or other grown men, had ever spoken to me.
I tried to jerk away from his touch, to escape from the cage of his body. He laughed as he forced me to the floor, though I continued my efforts to fight him off in earnest.
“Alright, get it out of your system.” He chuckled, easily restraining my arms while I thrashed beneath him.
I cried out to a mother I doubted would hear me, already comatose on her couch. No one but a God I’d begun to pray to in sheer desperation—at first in my mind, then aloud—could have possibly heard me.
He continued to mock my efforts. His strong hands, vice grips around my forearms, kept me nailed to the floor. I was sure he could have snapped my bones had he a mind to do so.
“A little enticing struggle always gets me going.” He laughed above me.
The gold crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck dangled mere inches from my face.
His yeasty breath panted in hot waves across my tear-soaked cheeks.
The man yanked both of my arms above my head and pinned my wrists to the scratchy carpet with one hand.
I continued to cry out as I fought to no avail. The rug burned the naked skin of my back as I thrashed. I did not know what this vile man wanted of me, yet I instinctively knew it wasn’t anything good.
“Do you still have that money I gave you? If not, I hope you spent it well. You’re going to earn it tonight!” He laughed at me again while his large hand pulled at the waistband of my shorts…
It was in that moment I began to understand…although I wasn’t able to comprehend just how it could be possible… He viciously yanked down my pajama bottoms, and my body seized in horror.
“That’s more like it.” The sinister tone chilled my very soul.
God, please…please help me…and I promise to be good, forever! I begged over and over in my frantic mind…
But…
God did not save me that night… God…allowed …that vile creature…to demolish my innocence.
God allowed a child predator to brutalize me, time and time again, over the next few years of my miserable life.
Until one night… Something Else answered my prayers to end the Hell I’d been living in.