Oh, the life and times of young Vegas Deqour were always a festive tale to be told. You just had to watch your back whenever it was told.
As the story goes, if you speak his name he was bound to find you sooner rather than later and cut that tongue right outta that pretty little mouth of yours. Yes, Vegas had made quite an impression on the life of the folks down in Atlanta, GA. A long month of tension and one night of unexpected turns whilst intoxicated turned into Georgia's biggest story to tell beside the campfire. He was a legend. I suppose that's the irony in his last words to his sister; "LEGENDS ARE MADE SO THAT PEOPLE HAVE SOMETHIN' TO BE SCARED OF. SO THAT PARENTS HAVE A STORY THAT'LL KEEP THEIR LITTLES IN STEP WITH THE OTHER FOLKS. SO THAT THE LITTLES HAVE SOMETHIN' TO STAY UP FOR EVERY NIGHT. THEY'RE MADE TO FILL FOLKS' NEEDS, NOT THE TRUTH."
As a child, Vegas was born into a very Christian family, and one of relative poverty at that. His father was the head preacher down in Georgia, prized for his efficiency in converting the nonbelievers into the way of the Lord. Despite his father's seemingly high profession, there was little to no income for the Deqour family. The majority of it was pissed away by his father on lone weekends of binge drinking with the harlots down at the bar by the water. But that's how preachers are; do as I say, not as I do. Vegas had always thought that was ****. For people to convert folks to one lifestyle, while living the other behind the shades. His mother was a quiet woman, spending most of her days working on a quilt with the Sunday school children in her Sunday best. She was a woman of little speech, who always sat at the front of the pews to watch her husband speak, in her modest white best. With two children the whole town wondered how she could manage to control.
The only things Vegas can remember from the year hosting his thirteenth birthday was the tragic death of his older sister. She'd been sneaking out for months before the incident happened with the police chief's son, Tommy. Their father had warned her for years about that boy, but she'd done it anyway, as most preachers’ daughters do. If you are told to walk a line to the right, you will always walk it to the left. And so had she chosen her path to the lake. Three months proceeding and she was pregnant with his baby. Vegas could still faintly remember the first night she found out and he was the only one she told. He fell asleep with his ear pressed to her stomach, trying to be closer to his soon to be niece or nephew. He liked the idea of someone younger than him. But he'd made the mistake of slipping up to his mother, who, like the good Christian wife she was, went on to talk it over with his father. Vegas can remember all the screaming of the later hours of that night as though it'd been yesterday. The word HARLOT being screamed over and over again over his sister's unstoppable crying. His father knew how to break anyone down into submission with his lectures. He'd done it to Vegas when the boy had merely stolen a mere piece of candy when he was five. The boy had been so whipped he didn't make eye contact with his father for a week.
He doesn't quite remember exactly when the screaming turned into silence, and the headlights in the driveway glared into his window and through the blinds, creating yellow stripes across his face. He only ever remembers his mother's crying, his father's undeserved pride when their neighbors helped fish his sister's body from the lake. His sister had done the only option she could think of in such a situation; she had committed suicide in the lake where her father baptized newborns. It was her ultimate beg for his forgiveness in her sins and he would never accept it. After the incident with his sister, he would never forgive his father for the cold heart he kept inside his chest. There was something so cold blooded about the way his old man operated that he wanted absolutely no part of his **** any longer.
Things in the Deqour household from there out where always tense, and Vegas had a sneaking suspicion that his mother felt the guilt of his sister's death on her conscience just as much as he did. They would bare the empty pain for the remainder of their lives. Sometimes when his mother cried, he would go in to comfort her and sleep with his head on her stomach. They both needed the comfort of any sort of ghost memory they could keep their hold on. But with time, all those memories seemed to blur into the wind, blowing off into other cities. When he was in his senior year of public high school in the Atlanta area, he was surprised to find himself face to face with a complete stranger in his English class; a new teacher that immediately clashed heads with him. The man was from upstate New York and talked at long length about how he was down in Atlanta out of the goodness in his heart to educate the underprivileged inhabitants of Georgia, such as himself. He demanded the respect of his students, and Vegas was never planning to give him what he wanted without some sort of fight. He'd become a very aggressive person ever since he began drinking when he was sixteen. He didn't care where he was going, but he didn't want people making those decisions for him, either. Which was exactly what this new teacher was trying to do.
But there are always two sides to every story, if not more. To most of Vegas's classmates it appeared that the spite between the student and the teacher was most equal, in the way he always seemed to pick at Vegas. If he came in to class with an obvious slur and a sway in his step he was whipped worse than he'd been as a child. His grammar was atrocious and his behavior was vicious as any boy who had too many problems beneath the surface coat. But to the only two occupants in which this seemingly malicious relationship involved, there was another layer that went unseen by the unaided eyes of his peers. Vegas staying late after school took place for several of hundreds of reasons, the most obvious being that something had begun to develop between the two. As repulsive as they found each other, the attraction only grew with time. Vegas grew to love the way his teacher reacted when he spoke in the incorrect tense. There were so many versions of what really happened after all of that trouble, but nobody but Vegas knew exactly what that was. There were suspicions that he killed his lover's mistress in a crime of passion, and there were others that guessed that he was just plain trashed because of the news, and had just completed a simple equation; LAMP ROD + THIS KID = PROBLEM SOLVED.
He'd grabbed his things and fled before the word got out, disappearing out of reality and being replaced in Georgia's history as one of those stories that people would pass down on their cliché little camping trips and their "family outings". He'd be that shadow that the kids would see against their tent as they tried to sleep with their blankets up to their noses in fear. It didn't matter who Vegas really had been, but what people had made him into. Landing out in New Orleans eventually, Vegas settled down around his 20th birthday and started to cozy on up into the city lights. There was a city of people who knew nothing about him. They didn't know the story of him; they didn't hear the whisper of a legend trailing on his heels when he'd walked into town with just a satchel over his shoulder. He went on to pursue fixing cars, not being able to deny the draw of such a raw profession. And though he'd had no previous experience on the matter, it was hard to tell this was true in the ease in which he fixed cars back up to their prime condition. Some of his work had been showed off in auto shows, though he tended to keep to himself whenever he went. He was just a roughneck boy from Georgia, here, he had no past. And that was the way he liked it.
