Stephen Laws
It was a hotter than hell day in July when we pulled up outside the MacInlay State Penitentiary. We’d used the pickup that day ’cause the family car was still in the garage getting her brake cable fixed. No air conditioning then, and even with the windows down the kids complained all the way there.
I parked the pickup on a vacant lot just opposite the main gate and sat there for a while just looking.
Big steel door, with a little steel door down at the left. No one came out and no one went in, and the heat seemed to be beating off that big door right at us, like there was a blast furnace on the other side or something.
Renee hadn’t said much since we set out. Just kept popping soda cans from the Koolbox on the back seat for the kids because of their complaining about the heat and such, and for the first time I could remember not saying anything about what it might do to their teeth.
I wish I could come with you, she’d said. In the back, Torry and Pete started squalling about how hot it was again. Both nine. Twins, see? But they don’t look alike. Like they should be in different families, almost.
Mail man and grocery delivery boy, Renee would say, and we’d laugh.
No laughs today, though.
Renee bawled at the kids, told them to play games or get out and walk around, stretch their legs, look for rocks or something – and the way her voice sounded made me realise how strung out she was. Strung out for me, that is. And even though it made me love her even more, right at that minute I couldn’t take my hands off the wheel or keep from staring at the big prison door.
The kids got out of the pickup, kicked up some dust looking for something, anything interesting. After a while, I realised that Renee was looking hard at me; not knowing what to say or do.
You don’t have to stay here, I said.
I know, said Renee.
Why don’t you take the kids into town, find a diner or something? Get outta the heat.
No, said Renee. I want to stay here and wait for you. Plenty soda in the Koolbox.
Okay. Maybe a half hour.
Half hour, okay.
Or an hour. You know, by the time I get in there and everything.
An hour, okay.
Okay, I said again and found myself getting out of the pickup, like someone else had made the decision and my body was just doing what it was told.
I’m gonna go straight in, Renee.
Okay.
You sure you don’t want to…?
No, baby. You go in now and we’ll be waiting here for you when you’re done.
An hour.
As long as it takes.
All right, honey.
Not sure why, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back at her. Like the sight of her might change my mind. The beautiful, long black hair. Those big eyes. Dark skin, damp with sweat. Powder blue shirt, tied round her tight waist. Loved her when we met fifteen years ago. Love her more now. But just looking at her and maybe thinking too much about what I was going to do and why, might make me climb back into the pickup and take us back home.
I set straight off, wiped the sweat from my face, took off my hat, ran my fingers through my hair and set that hat tight back on top with the brim low. For a while it was like I was walking on the spot, not moving forward at all. When I looked up, those steel doors just seemed to be as big as they were when we first saw them. That seemed to mean something, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t look back, but I could hear the kids squabbling with each other again. Renee didn’t say anything to quiet them.
And then I was at the door – the little one.
Only it didn’t seem so little now.
The heat seemed to get worse. Part of me wanted to stop right then; another part wanted to go on. Now I was aware that Renee would be watching me as I walked and there was some kind of knot inside me about that. Was she waiting for me to stop? Waiting for me to go on? I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew that it was something about what I felt as a man and as a father, particularly because of the man I was going to see behind those walls.
The request had come out of the blue.
I’d not heard a word from him in twenty years.
Not since he’d finally been caught, tried and put behind bars for the rest of his life.
But now – this handwritten message on prison-headed notepaper. Apparently, he’d refused to have an email or other message sent to me, preferring the ‘personal touch’ – said the formal typed letter from the Governor that arrived in our mail. The prison people had my home and email address and all my other details. But I’d had no contact with them or from them. Why should there be? I wanted nothing to do with him and even if he had reached out to me, I would have denied him. I wanted no contamination. Even the thought of him was contaminating.
But now, the handwritten ‘letter’.
And in that formal typed letter from the prison the Governor also told me that my father was dying.
It was leukaemia, and he had been receiving treatment for some time. In a matter of months, perhaps weeks, he would be bed-bound until the end.
Now or never seemed to be the top and bottom of it.
This was his letter.
I no you hate me.
Thats OK.
Lots of people do.
But they tell me Ill be dead in a little wile.
Thats OK, to. The thing is thers somthing you shud no about me and you. Somethin that is important and cud change the way you think. Not about me. Im gessin that aint changed much since Im gessing you will all ways love yor Mama and hate me for what I done. But somethin I lerned may change yor thinkin and if you com Ill tell you. If you dont well thats on you.
But this thing is about you, me and everbody it seems.
Cum see me, youll lern.
If not well lyk I say thats on you.
Lyk it or not Im yor father.
So that’s the note or the letter or whatever that I got, and without getting into the whys and wherefores of whether a letter (or whatever) should be sent from a prison by a man like that, even to his son – not to mention the official covering letter – well, let’s just say that I talked with Renee long and hard about whether I should reply or not, never mind whether I should go and see him – or not. Renee knew about him, of course. This had all happened when I was a boy and he’d been long locked up and forgotten when she and me got together. If I’d wanted to, I needn’t have mentioned a thing about him. But there had always been the possibility that she’d come across the story eventually. I mean, it’s not like I changed my surname nor nothing. Meeting Renee was the best thing that ever happened to me, and being honest with each other was just about the most important thing we shared; that, and our love for each other and for the kids, of course. But I guess this is all tied up together. So – she knew about everything. Not all of the details at the beginning, I guess; but enough about how my father was a killer and he’d come home one night when I was a kid, covered in blood, and my mother had scooped me up and fled the house. We’d been on the run for three weeks when he found us in a motel. She made me run out the back into the desert. A police patrol car found me a day and a half later, out of my mind with thirst and bad memories.
He’d killed my mother, of course.
Telling Renee – well, telling her the other details – came out when some television people came around saying they wanted an interview for a documentary they were doing. Turns out he’d been killing people for years. Twenty-seven of them. Or at least the killings he admitted to eventually, although they reckon there were more. I never gave an interview and I never watched their television documentary.
Renee and me discussed whether I should go see the monster that was my dad.
A lot.
Sometimes I felt no, sometimes yes.
Sometimes Renee felt yes, sometimes no.
Leukaemia was going to finish him soon.
Seemed like what they call ‘poetic justice’, doesn’t it?
A killer like him, with so much blood on his hands, being killed by his own blood.
And so here I was, standing in front of that big old-fashioned iron door. My legs had done the walking on their own, like they hadn’t been told what to do, and damn it if that door – still bleaching its heat at me – was just like the big front prison door you see in those old black and white gangster movies on TV.
Now what was I supposed to do?
Knock?
There was a blast of noise from behind me and I spun around to see Renee with her hands up to her mouth, and in the next second a truck seemed to appear out of nowhere, trundling straight towards me in a red dust cloud. I skipped the hell out of the way as the driver, hidden by the dust but now his face an orange blur through the windshield, flicked on the windshield wipers. There was more noise now as the big steel door seemed to split down the middle and began opening up. That first blast of noise that had scared the hell out of me I now knew to be the truck’s horn, and it seemed to have been the signal to whoever was behind that door to open up and let it in. Had I got the wrong damn public entrance to this place? Did prisons have tradesman’s entrances?
The big door opened up wide down the centre to let the truck into some kind of forecourt area, amid the billowing of more dust as uniformed guards seemed to appear on all sides, one of them waving at the truck to slow down, be inspected and escorted. Maybe a whole bunch of cons in a truck were trying to break in? And then the smaller door was suddenly opened and as the dust cleared I could see that this was the main security entrance for members of the public. Two other uniformed guards were standing there as if they had been expecting me. This whole…thing seemed wrong and unsettling.
I walked on ahead, into the security entrance, taking out my paperwork, my ID and the ‘special’ pass that had also been included in my envelope from the prison Governor.
Inside, the heat was instantly gone and I walked into a kind of grey coldness on all sides. The first guard checked my ID, took my hat, belt, watch and keys in a plastic tray, like I was passing through customs on my way to an airport lounge. I was told I’d get them back when I left. And then the full ‘check-in’ began. I soon lost track of the gates, the manned plexiglass booths, the electronic barriers, the scanner checks and the grey faces of the guards who checked my ID, patted me down, waved me through or walked me on. It seemed to go on for a hell of a long time. Sometimes I seemed to be walking straight ahead; other times, it felt like I was on an incline headed down. At some point, I don’t know when, I was aware there were other ‘visitors’ like me, also being ‘processed’ but I can’t tell you anything about them. I know that sounds weird. But it was like I’d walked into a different world, concentrating hard on what was ahead.
A voice called my name.
“Yes?” It was a tall guy with a round face and close-cropped hair. Uniformed again, but he looked more ‘military police’ than prison guard.
“Follow me.”
Now it was just me, following him down a stone corridor. There was no one else around. He stopped at a door marked ‘Utility – Waiting’, and held it open for me. I walked in.
“Make yourself comfortable. Someone will be here for you soon.”
The room inside had a plastic table and a chair. There were no windows and nothing on the bare plaster walls. One single strip light buzzed from the ceiling.
The door shut behind me, and I was alone.
I’m not sure, but I think my escort locked it.
I sat.
After a while, I wondered if I was ever going to get out of this place again. Crazy, I know; but a part of me wondered if some new law had been passed – a law that meant anyone related to a serial killer would now be automatically locked up forever if they turned up at a prison for any reason whatever, even as a visitor.
With no wristwatch or clock on the wall I had no way of knowing how long I waited in that room.
When the door opened again, it seemed like a long time.
A different uniformed guy walked in.
This guy was big, black, smiling and confident as hell. I can’t say why, but he seemed somehow superior in rank to the other guy who had brought me here. His uniform was certainly different. He checked my ID again, asked me politely but firmly about the reasons for my visit (like he’d asked many times before, and making me also feel like I was being read my rights). When I seemed to have given the right answers, he smiled again and asked me to follow him.
The breeze-block corridor made me think of Death Row, our footsteps ringing loud and bouncing back from that high ceiling. All the way, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the deeper I went into this concrete maze, the more likely it was that I’d never be coming out again. Like I said before, crazy.
More security cages and checks.
More bars.
And yet more pat downs and body searches. What were they expecting to find on me that the scanners couldn’t pick up? Every time, I felt that this time someone would find something on me that would have klaxons blaring, guns drawn and a heavy cell door clanging behind me as I was thrown into solitary confinement for the rest of my life, never seeing my wife and children again.
The big black guy stayed by my side all the way this time, while other security people checked me over. On another long stretch walking down yet another concrete corridor, I jumped a little when he spoke, like he’d been reading my mind or something.
“We’re taking you in through a different route.”
We?
There were two of us in the corridor, but clearly eyes following us all the way.
“He’s in solitary,” he said, striding ahead. “But you’ll see him in a separate visiting room.”
When he suddenly stopped, I almost ran into the back of him.
He turned to face me, sidestepped and reached to the wall, tapping out numbers on a small keyboard that I hadn’t until that moment seen, set head-height into a door that I’d also missed, being the same colour as the wall. Red LED lights flickered on the keyboard and the guy with me gave his name and ID. When a tinny voice said something I couldn’t make out, my escort stiff-fingered more digits into the keyboard and the door opened.
We walked into a small room not unlike the one that I’d previously been in, except that this one had a single glass window in the wall facing the door and a white plastic chair in front of it. I could see some kind of microphone monitor set into the window. My escort closed the door behind us.
“Did anyone tell you that you’d have to have an officer present for the duration of the meeting?” asked my escort, with a smile that was so polite it was chilling.
“Yeah. In the Governor’s letter.”
“Okay, well that officer is me, and I’ll be over there.” He pointed to the closed door. There was no chair, so I guess he’d be standing to attention. “Your father will also have a guard. On the other side of the glass.”
I nodded my understanding and he moved to a keyboard intercom in the wall by the door, stabbing at it with a forefinger.
“Prepared for visitor,” he said into the intercom, flat and business-like – now waving a polite hand to the chair in front of the window.
I crossed the room and sat as my escort took up a straight-backed stance in front of the door, hands behind his back, looking into space.
The room on the other side of the glass looked identical to the one I was in, with the same chair facing me and with grey and featureless walls. As I watched, a door opened and a guard with the same uniform as my own escort stepped briskly into the room, and then aside as a man in red overalls entered. The guard stood with his head down as the man shuffled forward a few steps, enough for the guard to close the door, point at the chair and window on their side before taking up the same pose as my own escort. Head still down, the man in red shuffled to his seat, and now I could see that he was manacled and chained at the wrists and ankles.
He sat, but kept his head down.
I cleared my throat and looked back at my escort.
He just looked straight ahead.
What the hell was supposed to happen now?
I looked back at the prisoner.
Just before I could say something, he looked up.
I did not recognise him.
This guy was almost bald with a thin haze of hair behind his ears. His face and pate were very white and heavily lined. The small eyes were deep set and barely visible but with a mean, beady glint in them. The moustache was ragged and the heavy, dark stubble on his cheeks and neck made a startling contrast with his paper-white features.
“Hello, son,” said the stranger.
As a boy, I remembered the imposing physical size of my father; the thick and darkly curled hair, the even white teeth and the muscled frame. It had been twenty-five years, and I’d known there would be changes. Of course there would be changes. I’d expected that. But there must have been some mistake, because this man in front of me bore no resemblance to the man I remembered.
“What? Not even a hello-how-are-you for your old man?”
Even his voice was unrecognisable.
“I’m not surprised. Been a lot of water under this old bridge.”
I couldn’t find anything to say.
“So – what? You want us to take a blood test or something? Think there’s time for that? Maybe hook me up to a lie detector? Something like that?”
I searched his face again and recognised nothing.
“Hey – this is good.”
“Good?”
“Don’t you get it? Maybe all the time I’ve been in here, they got the wrong man. Sure. Tell that to the Governor. Miscarriage of justice. Mistaken identity. Make me a claim against the state. Get a shitload of money. Spend the rest of my days in style.”
He laughed then.
And I knew.
I recognised that laugh. God help me, I did.
“Give me a million dollars and I still wouldn’t have time to enjoy it. Hey, I might leave it all to you when I croak. Which won’t be long from what they tell me.”
“I recognise you.”
He leaned forwards, toward the glass.
“Really? I don’t recognise you. Last time I saw my boy he was a skinny runt clinging to his momma. Now what I see is a full-grown man.”
“Right, that’s it,” I said. “Visit over.”
I began to rise.
“Hey! No, don’t. Hey, man. I’m just messing with you. Don’t go.”
“You don’t get to talk about my mother. Not after what you did.”
“All right, all right! I’m sorry. I won’t say nothing else about your mom. But please, sit down, son. I know it’s you. And I am your pa, dad – father, whatever.”
I sat again.
“Just tell me what you want.”
“That’s it. That’s it, son.”
“Don’t call me ‘son’.”
“Okay…okay… I won’t. But please, just sit down and let me say why I asked you here.”
I looked past him, at the guard in his room. He hadn’t moved an inch. I didn’t have to turn to know that my own ‘guard’ hadn’t moved either. Not knowing how this was going to play out, but knowing I could end this any time, I sat back and stared at this guy who was my father and waited for him to play his cards.
He took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling.
Exhaling, he looked down and at me again.
“You’re looking good,” he said, at last.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. I got some information over the years. You know, your wife and family and things. Nothing detailed. Just – like – basic stuff.”
“Right.”
“How’s…?”
He struggled to remember my wife’s name.
“Renee? Fine. She’s fine.”
“Good. That’s good. I heard you got…”
“Yeah, we’ve got two kids.”
“Two, yeah. That’s right. That’s what I heard. Boy and a girl, right. That would be…”
He waited for me to give their names. I said nothing.
“Good, good. But a boy and a girl, eh? So that makes me – what? Grandpa? Grandad?”
“That makes you a grandfather.”
“They know about me?”
“No.”
He nodded then, as if he was being reasonable.
“That figures.”
Silence.
“Didn’t expect to hear from you. Didn’t expect no…” He made a sign with his fingers that I think was supposed to be speech marks. “No family ‘updates’. Not after…”
“Not after what you did, no.”
“Right. But, just shows you. First time we’ve spoken in more’n twenty plus years, but I know you’re married and you got a son and a daughter. Me in solitary. No guards ‘palling-up’ to me. But I still get to find out stuff. Neat, eh?”
“Very neat. What do you want?”
He laughed then. I didn’t like it. It felt like he thought he was taking control of the situation.
“You got nothing I want, son. What the hell you got that I’m gonna want? You gonna get me out? I’m not getting out of here breathing, that’s for sure. When the time comes they’re gonna put me in a pine box, burn me and scatter what’s left in the dirt outside.”
He paused, waiting for some kind of response that didn’t come.
“Unless you want to ship me out,” he continued. “In a fancy coffin. Put me in some nice see-ma-tery with flowers and a stone cross and shit. Think that might save my soul if you did that?”
“You haven’t got a soul.”
“Now that’s the truth.”
“So what do you want?”
“Like I said, nothing.”
“So why send me a letter after all these years?”
“Ah, there you are! Sent the letter but don’t mean I want something from you. Maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe I got something for you.”
“What could you possibly have that I might want from you?”
He started to make a noise that was something like a laugh, but quickly stopped himself when he saw my reaction and knew it was hair trigger whether I walked out on him. He took a deep breath again, closed his eyes and calmed something inside him.
“Your granddaddy was a special man. You never knew him. Killed by the cancer ’fore you were born. But he showed me lots of stuff. Showed me lots of truths. Secret truths. Now, don’t get…riled, when I tell you this. There were some killings off the interstate close to Byersville when I was a boy. That was your granddaddy.”
Behind him, I saw the guard raise his head. Even though nothing had been said in the Governor’s letter, I wondered if someone was recording this conversation.
“He used to take me up in the hills there, overlooking the highway. He had a high-powered rifle with a scope. He’d ask me to pick the cars, and then he’d pop them. Pop, pop, pop! Then we’d hightail it. He’d make sure to take the empty cartridges. They never caught us. Later – there was other stuff, but I don’t need to go into that here. He was a much better father to me than I was to you. Know why? ’Cause he never got caught. My trouble is, I was stupid and kept getting caught. Not for the important stuff, not for the big stuff. Not for the kind of stuff I’d want to share with you in the same way my daddy shared stuff with me. But for the pissy little stuff that used to keep me away from home. Either locked up like this or on the run.”
“Or Mom on the run from you, with me. She did a good job, keeping me away from you.”
“By God, she did. A real good job. But that’s why I wasn’t able to share what I wanted with you. That’s why you’ve got big holes in your education. Your granddaddy told me about the Great Mystery. Told me what he’d been searching for all his life.”
“Is that it? Because I’m going now.”
“Don’t you want to know what he was looking for? What I’ve been looking for?”
“No.”
“You know I’m dying. If I could turn myself inside out I’d show you what’s going on inside me. It’s the blood, boy. It’s all about the blood.”
“All about the blood. That I believe. Goodbye.”
“Please! Please…if you give me just two more minutes I’ll be done. And then you can be done.” He held his hands wide in a plea. “Please?”
“Two minutes.”
“Okay, okay.” He took a breath to catch and put together his thoughts and then he launched right in. “One of the things I have in here – have had in here – is plenty of time. Time to think. But more important, time to read. There’s one hell of a prison library in here. And I can read pretty much anything I want. Not fiction. No, sir. Not any of that made-up stuff. Textbooks with facts. Facts!”
Those small, beady eyes were wide back there in the white slits of his face.
“Medical textbooks. Full of facts. So I started looking. Reading everything I could get my mitts on. But I still couldn’t find the answer that I was looking for, that your granddaddy had been looking for. I kept reading, though. Kept searching. Lotsa big words I didn’t understand, so I used that dictionary a lot.”
He was filled with some kind of energy now. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking up and to the side, as if he’d started giving a lecture or a speech in a preacher’s tent somewhere.
“Here’s some facts.”
He cleared his thoughts and pulled something out of his mind, something he’d committed to memory.
“Why are veins blue when blood is red? It’s a wonderment, it truly is. Con…sul…sultant…cardy…” This wasn’t coming easy to him so he started again. “Consultant cardiologists at the…Tayburn Cardo…Cardovascular Society…” He smiled then, because he’d got it right. “They say that red blood cells travel from the heart out to the body’s extreme-ittys.” Another smile. “Where they give up their oxy-gen. The dee…de-oxygenated…deoxygenated blue blood cells then travel back to the heart. So why, I say why do we only see the blue veins? That’s because the arteries pumping the red blood cells out at a higher pressure have thicker walls than the veins that carry the blue blood back. Veins have thinner walls, see? And they’re closer to the surface of the skin.”
He stopped then and looked back at me, eyebrows raised as if he’d made some incredibly important point. He continued.
“So why don’t we bleed blue blood?”
I just looked at him.
“We do if we cut a vein,” he went on. “But it doesn’t stay blue. It’s blue-red when it comes out. The deeper you cut the darker blue it gets. But when it comes out – the air gets to it, and it turns red. See?”
Something turned inside me. My stomach rolled.
“I said two minutes…”
“Sure, that’s what we agreed. And this has been one minute. Another minute left. Ever heard what people call ‘Blue Blood’? Came from Spain years ago. Spicks used it to explain the difference between…” He struggled again to remember the exact phrasing he’d committed to memory. “The diff’rence between ‘pale-skinned Yooro-peings and darker-skinned North Africans’. Did you know, back in those olden times, them meddy-evil times, those Royal Family types, those Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses – they suffered from this disease called…”
He paused again, intent on getting the word right.
“Argy-rosis. That’s it – argyrosis.”
A smile. He was pleased with himself. When he looked at me dead straight again and no smile came back, he cleared his throat, looked around and went back to lecturing again.
“They used lots of silver in their medicines and stuff back then. Can you believe that? Silver! Lots of silver in them Royal Family medicines - and it turned their skin blue. Blue! And you heard about them Royal Families having ‘blue blood’, right? Gotta be a connection, right? Then there’s what those others say in the books, about ‘Blue Bloods’ – Royal Families, I mean. They were so damned rich, they could afford to have them peasants working for them all day long while they stayed indoors and got waited on and stuff. Never got no sunlight, see? So ’cause they never got no sunlight, their skins got real pale and them there peasants, when they come begging and scraping, they could see that pale white skin and underneath that skin – underneath – they could see those blue veins running deep and bluer than blue. That’s why they called ’em ‘Blue Bloods’. Still do in foreign places like England.”
There were drops of sweat on his forehead and he wasn’t looking at me anymore. Deep down in his face those eyes were somehow inside-out and looking at a place deep inside him that was completely mad.
“That’s your two minutes now,” I said. “For definite.” I stood up.
It refocused his inward-looking eyes.
“Sorry.” His smile was thin and sickly. It reminded me of the expression I’d once seen on a wild dog that had been lying dead in the underbrush back of our garden lot years ago. “Thing is…” he said, and I turned to look back at the guard by the door. “It’s a family thing. My daddy knew – just knew – that the real colour of blood is blue, not red. Blue. He knew it. But he also knew that it’s got a magic to it. And it can hide that magic and its secret even from them scientist guys and those doctors and those so-called experts. It hides the secret that it’s blue. And when things are – opened up – it turns red. That’s why he did what he did, trying to catch it out. Find out why it keeps that secret. Maybe the biggest secret ever. He passed that on to me, and after he passed away I kept looking. Kept searching and a-hunting. Kept on opening them up and digging deeper, trying to catch it out. But it hangs on to that secret hard, son. Turns red in the first openings, but then – later – just when you think you’re getting somewhere, it turns brown and black in the drying. Like it’s laughing at you.”
“Get me out of here,” I said to the guard, who was now looking at me. I couldn’t make out what was in his eyes, but I knew that he didn’t want to be in that room anymore either.
I stood up and turned my back on the man behind the glass.
He said: “Heard the saying, ‘It’s in the blood’?”
I didn’t look back at him as the guard turned and began finger-stabbing numbers into the wall-set keyboard next to the door.
“Well,” my father continued. “That need to know the secret about the colour of blood – what it all means – that was in your granddaddy. And he gave it to me, that need in our blood, see? Needing to know. In our family. In our blood. And it’s in your blood too, boy! Blood will out. Blood is blue, not red. Pretty soon, you’re going to want to know why that is. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow. But soon. And when your blood sends you out to follow in my footsteps – in your family footsteps – you’re going to want to know why it hides that secret from us all, more than anything else in the world. It’ll come, boy.”
Why the hell was it taking longer to get out of this room than it took to get in?
“When I’m gone, you’ll carry on what Granddaddy started and I continued. You won’t be able to stop from looking for it. And if you don’t find out and they get you? Well, your boy will just take over from you, and maybe the boy that comes after him. Thing is, you just got a heads-up from me.”
When the door to my interview room finally opened and the guard stood to one side to let me pass through, I did look back at him.
“Blood’s blue, boy. Not red. When you find out why, it’ll be the most important discovery in the world. You’ll be a big man.”
“Your own blood hates you, Dad. What you have in those veins of yours is going to kill you.”
“It got me beat, that’s for sure. But you’ll carry on what we started. You’ll find out. It’s in our bloodline.”
I turned and walked out.
I don’t remember much about my walk back out of that prison block, but it seemed like a weird reverse of the way they walked me in. I remember the clashing of gates and doors, the high echoes of voices far away – some of them jeering, but not at me as far as I could tell. The flat sound of my footsteps on cold concrete floors. More security questions that didn’t seem to make much sense, but my answers seemed good enough to not have me slapped inside a cell. The beeping of security lights. I just seemed to let it all happen. Somebody asked me to raise my hands once, which I did. Don’t know why. But I did.
When I was properly aware again, I was standing outside the prison and I was suddenly aware that all the stuff I’d handed in for security when I went in – my belt, my wallet, the stuff in my pockets – was all back with me again, although I couldn’t remember being given it. That great steel door was behind me and the sun was still high in the sky. Only now, that big door seemed to be giving off a wall of coldness – the complete opposite of that blast furnace heat when I’d first arrived. That just didn’t make any sense at all.
I walked away from that big door towards our pickup, seeing the driving door open as Renee saw me coming and began to climb out.
I waved and kept walking towards her, feeling that cold on my shoulders and back.
The last image of the man who called himself my father was still burned in my mind.
The true colour of blood is blue, not red.
Now I could see the look of real concern etched on Renee’s face, waiting to see how I’d react and what I might say.
It’s in the blood, boy. Sooner or later, it’ll come out in you. You won’t be able to help yourself. You’ll have to take it on, keep looking for the answer.
Both of the pickup’s back doors opened, making little swirls of dust in the dirt around the wheels. Pete and Torry tumbled out and ran toward me. Torry was running just like the time she’d won the sprint race on school sports day. Elbows tight into her side, forearms like little bronze pistons. Pete was running his gangly scarecrow way, arms all over the place. Renee called to them, but suddenly the kids were on me and I managed to sweep them both up in the crooks of my arms. The kids laughed and wriggled, but there were shadows in Renee’s smile when I reached her. When I leaned down to kiss her, both kids still wriggling in my arms, she kissed me back hard with both arms around my neck.
When she stood back to look at me and I lowered the kids carefully down, I could see the unasked questions in her eyes.
“It’s okay,” I said.
But the questions were still in her eyes.
“Later, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied, and her eyes were that startling blue.
The kids were pulling me to the car and making noises about previous promises of a new ice-cream parlour visit in the middle of town somewhere, ten miles away.
Their eyes were the same startling blue as their mother’s.
I laughed, and when I wiped sweat from my brow and looked up at the sky above – it was cloudless.
And beautiful.
A beautiful, beautiful blue.