Page 31 of Hard Corps (Selected Sinners MC 7)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Summer 2014, Austin, Texas, USA

The MC rode back to Kansas, leaving me in Texas. It was understood when the time came to start a chapter in Austin, I would be the president of the chapter. After a few trips back to Wichita to get my truck and most of my belongings, I was happily living in a rental house in the sunny state of Texas.

I found the people of Texas to be quite different than the residents of Kansas, primarily due to their hospitality. While riding my motorcycle down less traveled county roads, off of the highways and interstates, everyone waved at me as if they knew me. While walking past someone in the grocery store I was generally met with a howdy or how are you doing? At first, I dismissed it to the people I was encountering being intimidated by me and their hospitality, at least in person, was done in an effort to comfort themselves. After multiple daily trips to the store to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, and seeing nothing change, I realized it wasn’t done out of intimidation or fear, but simply out of kindness.

I quickly developed a friendship with Ripp, finding him to be someone who caused me to feel comfortable in his presence. His offered friendship was genuine, and although I would have guessed no one could be, he was funnier than Teddy. It was our common bond of dealing with the taking of life, however, that immediately brought us together.

I found another friend in Shane Dekkar, and the old man that managed the gym but claimed to be nothing more than a trainer, Kelsey. Kelsey was gruff, unwilling to smile, and had an all business attitude, but as difficult as he probably was for most people to understand, I felt I knew exactly how he felt.

His stern attitude was a front. He cared deeply about the men he trained, and he took their success or defeat as his own, leaving him no room for an outward friendship. Personally, I admired the man greatly. I found it entertaining that every time he saw me in the gym training, he asked what I was doing there. He fully realized what I was doing there, but his opinion was that I wasn’t going to stay in town for long, leading him to antagonize me about it.

I felt a slight guilt, at least initially, about being away from Kansas, which I had always considered to be home. As time passed, I realized as an adult, I had spent all of my time at war, and if I had to claim a place as home, it would be in the war-torn country of Iraq. For the time being, I accepted Texas as my home, and did so without reservation.

My mind seemed to quickly clear itself not of the images of war, but of thoughts of Suzanne. After considerable thought, the love I had always believed I felt for her was dismissed as comfort. I met Suzanne when I was young, and although I wouldn’t consider myself as ever being a foolish man, I came to believe I attached myself to her to replace what I was missing in my mother’s absence.

Suzanne supported me. She comforted me when I came home from the war after each deployment, cooking me meals, holding me in her arms, and providing me an ear willing to listen and a mind hoping to understand, rarely challenging me or my thought processes.

In short, she was a motherly figure to me.

In the days leading up to and including Ripp’s trial, I felt different. I would never be able to change who I was or what I had done, but my mind, soul, and spirit felt as if they had opened up, revealing a new me. A person who had, in the almost two years since I had left Suzanne, become willing to allow myself to once again feel emotion and become more human and less mechanical.

I knew I would always remain methodical, and slightly OCD in my behaviors, but I hoped the way I was feeling would remain for a lifetime, allowing me to be at peace with myself, the war, and the decisions I had made.

I learned in the time I had spent with Shane that he met a woman who was in an abusive relationship, and that she eventually left, but only after her partner of ten years decided to beat her unconscious. At the time, Shane and the woman were simply good friends, and Ripp, as any true friend would, refused to let Shane react to the situation.

He insisted on handling it himself, for fear if Shane tried to resolve it, it may tarnish his career as boxer, and more than likely would land him in jail. A true friend, doing what he felt needed to be done to protect his friend and brother.

In dealing with Shane’s wife’s abuser, Josh, Ripp lost his temper and hit the man in the face with a hammer, knocking out almost all of his teeth. He followed up by cutting off the man’s index finger with a pair of shears, and took the finger home as a prize.

Hearing the story, I couldn’t help but laugh, because it sounded exactly like something I would have done. Now, however, with Ripp seemingly winning his trial against the charge of murder, the prosecution was calling the former lover of Shane’s girlfriend, the man with the missing finger, to the witness stand.

It appeared the prosecutor felt the fingerless fool’s testimony would convince the jurors of Ripp’s desire to resort to violence in an effort to solve problems. The problem, in my mind, was not Ripp. It was the two men who had abused the women. One Ripp’s sister, and the other Shane’s girlfriend.

The comparison between Ripp and me came easily, me protecting my Marines, and him protecting his sister and best friend. He was willing to go to any length, including taking a life to protect the people he loved.

And so was I.

Very few men shared our opinions, ability, and willingness to act. Although I had no experience in losing my freedom, I likened being in prison to being dead, and believed if someone like Ripp was going to spend a lifetime in prison for protecting his sister, the sentence should just as well be death.

Watching a friend die wasn’t something I could ever do.

I sat in a park south of the South Congress Bridge and waited for sunset. 750,000 pregnant female bats showed up every spring, each giving birth to one offspring. For the entire summer, 1.5 million bats lived under the bridge, coming out on a nightly basis to hunt for their food. The sight of the bats leaving the bridge was peaceful for me, horrifying to some, and a ritual for others.

There was no doubt people’s perception of the nightly event was different. Each night, the bats flying out from underneath the bridge by the hundreds of thousands at the same time darkened the still sunlit sky to black, providing a perfect comparison between dark and light. Many considered the bats evil, carriers of disease and transmitters of rabies. I found them to be far from it – a necessary evil of this earth – ridding the planet of bugs that were a greater nuisance than the bats themselves.

As the sun lowered itself over the tops of the downtown buildings, a wave of bats blackened the sky as they flew in formation off in the distance to find their meal of a few flies or other flying bugs. I thought of the bat population doubling, and that for each adult bat, there was an offspring. Each year, from what I had learned, the mother bats returned, but the offspring did not; leaving the parent and the child separated for a lifetime.

As much as I distanced myself from some, distancing myself from my true friends or family for a lifetime seemed like an impossible task, and as I watched the last of the bats flying out over the river, I realized I had, although not necessarily intentionally, separated myself from my father since the end of the war.

Be it from embarrassment or from a desire to keep to myself regarding the events of the war, I differed very little from the bats. I sat, staring at the bridge, realizing the bats would soon return to their home – but wondered when, or if, I ever would. After a few more minutes, the sun went down completely, and the sky darkened into blackness.

I stood, walked to my motorcycle, and once again felt as if I was right where I needed to be.

In the home I had created for myself.