I lost my father when I was sixteen. It sounds tragic, doesn't it? I beat his head in with a baseball bat.
He had only himself to blame.
When I was ten he told me to always protect my big sister. She was two years older than me, but of slight build like our mother. For her eighteenth birthday, Sara went out with two of her friends to celebrate. We didn't hear from her for two days. I watched my father stew and simmer for every second of those two days.
Now our father was raised in the South where obedience is taught with a belt. He has a heavy hand for a man of God. Sorry, he had.
When Sara came home I was in the yard cutting the grass. I didn't hear her because of the mower so I didn't know she was there till I came around the corner of the house. I saw her car in the drive and, shutting off the mower, I ran for the back door. I heard my sister screaming as I came inside. It was coming from upstairs.
At the time I don't remember my mother grabbing at my arm. I must have pulled out of her grasp without ever feeling her hand touch me. When I hit the top of the stairs I saw the open door to my sister's room. Through that door, I could see her and my father.
He had her by the back of her head, his left hand an iron grip in her brown hair. Sara's shorts and panties were down around her ankles, hampering her trying to get away from him. Father had his belt in his right hand and he was swinging with everything he had at her bare ass and thighs. Dozens of red whelps already marred her pale skin from the small of her back to the bend of Sara's knees.
She was screaming with tears running unchecked down her face.
My bedroom door was open.
He kept swinging that damn belt. Even when Sara's skin split and her blood ran in red lines down to her knees.
My bedroom door was open.
My baseball bat was by the door. The autopsy report said the cause of my father's death was blunt force trauma to the base of his skull. I hit just at the top of his spine with enough force to sever his brain stem!
Death was instant. All I remember was holding my sister as she cried. I don't remember my mother's screams, or the ambulance, or the police arriving.
They pulled me from my sister. I fought that. Not to get away, but so I would not be parted from Sara. Two large officers held me down, with their knees on my back, while a third put the handcuffs on me. My sister flung herself onto me as they tried to take me out the front door. I stood there with Sara's arms around my neck looking at all the neighbors on their porches. Their faces lit red like demons.
My sister thanked me.
They tried me as an adult. My court appointed attorney pleaded me guilty. He asked the court to show leniency due to my age, that the act was done in the heat of the moment, and that I had swung without the intent to kill. They gave me twenty years. I guess that's lenient.
After that, I did a year and a half at a max juvenile prison and then they gave me to the state. Now any of you who might be thinking I got raped in prison you would be wrong. See I got put in a cell with a man named Chris Tyler. A burly biker looking fella who was coming back for his second stay in prison. He was there to show me the ropes. Where not to step, who not to talk to. He kept me out of a lot of trouble.
Now on the inside, they called him 'Ink'. He was a trained tattoo artist with a dozen years of
paid
work to show for it. Ink had been running his own shop when one night, in frustrated anger, he put a gun to the head of a customer who had refused to pay.
They called it armed robbery. Chris got handed ten years by the judge like he was handing out candy. But my cellmate Ink would only serve six of them and, in that time, he taught me the trade.
We made our machines from cassette motors and coat hanger wire. Our ink was burnt toilet paper mixed with shampoo. Or, when we could get an ink pen, we would strip it down for our tubes and use the ink in the tats.
As the years so slowly passed I came to spend my days in the weight corner of the yard. Lifting iron, with the muscle heads. Having the biggest strongest guys in the house respect you -- even if you can't lift as much as they do -- doesn't hurt. My nights were I spent learning how to tattoo.
At first, I wrote letters to my high school friends. Trying to keep in touch with the outside world. They were the ones who told me my sister had moved out of our parent's house even before my trial was over. Sara vanished not long after. No one knew where she was. Not my friends, not hers. I tried to write to our mom twice. Both letters came back unopened. I took that to be answer enough.
Poor mom. She lost a husband, son, and a daughter all on the same day.
My buddy, Ink, got his parole after six years. When he left, I hardly resembled the eighteen-year-old boy that Chris Tyler had first shared a cell with. Thanks to him I have some beautifully dark tribal work across my shoulders, down to my elbows. From there shadowy fills of spiders and webbing run down to my wrists in full sleeves on both arms. Off the tribal flows blue Celtic knotwork, which runs down my back following my spine? And then, to round it off, I have Japanese style shaded feathers that appear off the Celtic work and wrap around my ribs. Ab wings, Ink called them.
Long days with those weights had left me cut. Dangerous looking. It's not good to look like prey when surrounded by predators. By carrying two hundred pounds of tatted muscle on a six-foot frame, and coupled with the fact I killed a man at sixteen with a baseball bat, got me generally left alone.
Of course, what I could do with ink helped as well.
I had just turned twenty-six when a parole board sat my case. Overcrowding, a good record inside, and the fact I had a job waiting outside got me out with half my sentence served, and ten years parole. I took my last shower and did my best to scrub the stench of the place from my skin. Dressed in clothes that no longer fit right, and with personal possessions I hadn't needed for a decade, I was processed out...
In my pocket, I also carried a wad of cash that I had made inside. My hand checked that as I walked through the last locked door and out into the light again. The guard told me good luck. That was nice of him. Most of those
screws
say see you soon.
As I stepped outside, blinking in the bright light, a car pulled up with a blonde at the wheel. She blew the horn as I started to walk towards the bus stop. The blonde slammed her car into park and jumped out. Then, as I stood there dumbfounded, she sprinted across the road and threw herself into my arms!
I was numb with shock.
Then I noticed how she smelled, how soft and magically female she was. My bag hit the ground by my feet as I wrapped her scented heat against me. However, it wasn't till she spoke that I knew who she was.
"Oh, god Kevin!"
"Sara?"
My neck was growing wet from Sara's tears as she clutched me tightly, her face buried in my shoulder. I held her to me wanting to cry myself but I was too shocked to do so.
"My god Kevin, it is so good to see you."
She eased up then and I reluctantly let her pull out to the end of my arms.
