Chapter One

I woke up in Fresno one morning next to a woman and I had no idea who she was. My head was throbbing; I must’ve had too much to drink that night. Where the hell was I? It looked like I was in a cheap motel. The carpet was brown. Brown? Who the hell lays down brown carpet? The curtains were shut, they were orange. Who designed this room? The woman next to me moaned as I sat up. I couldn’t see her face, but it looked like she had short reddish hair. I tired to get a better look at her face. I leaned over her and just as I did she moved and I saw…it can’t be, I thought to myself. Not her. Not her.

    Let me take you back in time.

    My name is Neil Stewart. I was born in Bakersfield in 1964. I was the son of a WWII veteran and a nurse. My father, Thom, was the son of a Scottish immigrant. He was drafted into the army when he was 18 in 1942. He fought in Europe against the Nazi’s. He once told me, while we still talked, that he killed an entire German Infantry battalion single hand idly. Some 75 men. I never believed him. He was wounded at the Hurtgen Forest and sent to an army hospital in Ireland where he met and fell in love with a woman, Colleen. He was now 20, she was 16. She was his nurse and she helped him recover from his wounds. When the war was over my father had a choice, go back to New York and work for his father as a longshoreman, or stay in Ireland with a woman who made him happy for the first time in his life. He chose to go back to New York. He later said that it was the biggest mistake of his life. When he returned to New York he took a job on the docks in Brooklyn, his job was to haul cargo off the ships and then put other cargo on another ship. Not exactly the most challenging job in the world for a war hero. After five years of working for his father on the docks he had had enough. He told his father that he could’ve had a meaningful life with Colleen, he could’ve been happy. He told his father that he was going back to Ireland. His father ordered him not to go. He left the next morning.

    He had no idea where to find Colleen, before he left her she mentioned something about moving back to Dublin. When he got to Dublin he rang up every number that had her last name, none of them had ever heard of her. Once he got hold of some information that told him to go to this house on the outside of town, he went there and what he found would break his heart. It was now 1950, he was 26 and she was 21. She was married and she had a son, Andrew. He didn’t know this as he walked up the pathway to the little house in the outside of Dublin. He knocked on the door and he took a deep breath. A large man in a dirty tank top tee-shirt answered the door. He glared at Thom for a moment.

    “Yeah? What the hell do you want then?” he asked through his monotone Dublin accent. Thom was taken aback. “Well?’ the man, getting impatient, continued.

    “I’m sorry, but is uh, is Colleen at home?” The man got this look in his eyes as if to say: how the hell do you know Colleen you f****n’ American? He didn’t say that of course, but he might as well have.

    “Why? Who wants to know?”

    “Please, is she here?”

    “Who the hell are you?!” Just then he heard her voice, as he remembered it being in the hospital.

    “Ian? Who’s at the door?” And then there she was. Her radiant red hair, her gorgeous green eyes, “her perfection in its entirety” as he told me later on in his life. “Oh my God.” she said with utter shock and amazement.

    “What? You know him?” her brute of a husband replied.

    “You could say that. Ian this is Thom, an…an old friend of mine. Thom this is Ian, my husband.” He told me that when she said those words he could actually feel his heart tear in two, “it was the worst thing I had ever heard in my life” he said. The pain of the moment caused him to gulp back a few tears, now understand something here my father never and I mean never cried under any circumstances. Never. Not even when he got shot, twice, in the legs. So if he had to restrain himself from crying then, that means he was truly hurt for the first time in his life.

    “Husband?” he said with a quiet dignity.

    “Yeah, that’s right mate.” Ian gloated. He stood there, on their front step, trying to compose himself. He thought of a hundred million things to say, he decided on:

    “I couldn’t be happier for the two of you.” It was such an obvious lie, obvious to everyone except Ian.

    “Well, thanks. Would you like to come in for a drink then?” My father wrestled with the thought of breaking bread with the woman he loved and her husband.

    “Uh, no. I really should be going. I have a boat to catch in the morning.” Another lie. “It was nice to meet you Ian.” Ian nodded his head and took Colleen back inside, the door shutting behind them, shutting in my father’s face. He left Ireland the next day. He went to England for a few months, then to Scotland where he checked up on some old family. After a year or so of roaming he went back to America, but not to New York, not to his father.

    William Charles Stewart came to America in 1920 with his wife, Kathleen. They had nine children, my father was the ninth. He was born on March 3, 1924 in his parents’ apartment. William was your typical 1920’s immigrant, always on the verge of poverty, always on the verge of suicide. When the Depression began he became increasingly hostile towards his wife and his children. He would beat his wife practically every night. And when alcohol was made legal again, he drank until he couldn’t drink anymore. He was a violent alcoholic. He beat his family even worse when he had taken a drink. One night in 1938 while my father was listening to the radio while doing his homework William came home, drunk (which was an everyday occurrence) and he began screaming at my father.

    “Why the f*****g hell are you listening to that goddamn radio for?! Don’t you f*****g know how much money that f*****g thing costs me?! Do you pay the goddamn bills?! Turn that f*****g thing off now!” When he didn’t William went over to him, picked him up and he threw him against the wall. “You little s**t! You f*****g do as you’re told!” he threw him to the floor. “Why couldn’t you have died when your mother was having you?! It would’ve saved me a world of trouble! She should’ve died too, the f*****g useless b***h!” My father, who was 14 at the time stood up to his father. “And what do you think you’re gonna do, huh?! You think you’re man enough to fight me?! Huh?! You little p***y!” My father threw a punch like he had never thrown a punch before, which was because he hadn’t. He hit his father square on the left cheek, it did very little. “Call that a punch, do you?” He reared back and crushed my father with a right cross to the chin. He went down right away. He didn’t stop beating my father that night until he (William) passed out from his drunkenness. So, you could say that when my father was drafted it was one of the best days of his life.

    Knowing full well that he could never return to New York, my father went out to the west coast. This was in 1952, right around or right before the time that most of the country moved out there. He lived in Los Angeles for a few months, but he left because he found it “extraordinarily boring”. He went up the coast to San Francisco, where he lived for eight years. He liked the city, he enjoyed the people and it was as far away from New York and Ireland as you could get in the lower 48 states. He took a job with the San Francisco Police Department as a patrolman. It was the perfect job for my father. He loved the power of the job, he loved the fact that he could put people in prison. I always thought it was a way for him to get back at his father. To be able to put people away for doing the same kind of s**t that he did to his family. In 1960, while he was on patrol he saw a robbery taking place. He chased after the thief for fifteen blocks, he chased him into an alley. It was a dead end. The robbery pulled out his gun, my father pulled out his.

    “Drop the gun! Drop it now!” The robber began to shake. “Hey, it’s alright. Just drop the gun, and we’ll work this out.” The robber was becoming more and more nervous. “Come on man, drop the gun.”

    “No! I ain’t going to jail man! I ain’t going back to jail!”

    “Put the gun down.”

    “I-I-I can’t.”

    “Yes. You can.” he started to come towards the robber.

    “Don’t! Don’t you f*****g come near me man!”

    “Drop the gun and I won’t have to.”

    “F**k you man!”

    “If you don’t drop the gun, I will shoot you. I don’t want to have to do that. And I don’t think you want to get shot, right?” The robber didn’t answer. He just kept shaking. He clicked the hammer back. “Don’t! I will shoot you! Drop the f*****g gun now!” The robber fired once, he hit my father in the leg (near where he had been shot some sixteen years before in Belgium). He returned fire; he hit the robber in the chest, killing him. My father fell to the ground. “Goddamn it!” he yelled as he saw where he had been shot. He switched on his radio. “Officer needs assistance. Officer down. Officer down by the wharf. Hurry.” He blacked out after a few minutes. He dreamt that when he woke up he’d be in a hospital and Colleen would be his nurse again. When he woke up he had a 67 year old zaftig German woman for his nurse. “There is no such thing as fate, it’s all bullshit.” he told me later on in his life.

    After the shooting he was forced to take an early retirement. He hated the idea of being retired at 36, but he could no longer function fully as a police officer. And so he moved down to Bakersfield, “just to see what it was like” he said. When he got there he would receive the biggest surprise of his life.

    He arrived in Bakersfield in the winter of 1960, and he stayed at the home of someone he had met while he was in Los Angeles.  He took a job as a construction worker (this was when the mass exodus to California began), so he built homes for other people. That February a man walked into the office of my father’s foreman and roommate, John Davis. The man inquired as to exactly how much money it would cost him to have a house built for his wife and child. The man was told a very reasonable price so he accepted. Construction began the very next day.

    My father, uncharacteristically, showed up late for work that day (too bad for him, he would’ve been happy), and he ran up to Davis.

    “Morning, Thom.” Davis said while sipping a cup of black coffee. It was cold that morning, about 50 degrees (that’s cold for Bakersfield).

    “Hey, why didn’t you wake me?” Davis chuckled as he took another sip.

    “I’m not your mother Thom. You’re a big boy, you can wake yourself up.”

    “You’re funny, you know that John. You should go on the Sullivan show.” Davis chuckled again and took another sip. “So, what’re we doing today then?”

    “Building a house for this Irish guy and his family.” It seemed like a meaningless statement at the time. “If you had gotten here on time you could’ve met them.”

    “What? The whole family was here?”

    “Uh-huh. The wife was a looker I tell ya. “

    “Really?”

    “God yeah. The most beautiful head of hair I had ever seen on a woman.” Still nothing.

    “What colour was it?” he asked without thought as to what the answer would be.

    “Red.” There are times in a person’s life where everything changes. For some it’s when they move to a new place, for others it’s when a loved one dies, for my father it was hearing that one word come out of John Davis’ mouth. “When he said that,” he told me once “it was like my world had meaning again.” It may have seemed that way at the time, but he wasn’t quite sure if they were talking about the same woman.

    “Was her name-was her name Colleen?” Davis gave him a look that said how could you have known that?

    “Yeah, yeah it was. You know her?” my father almost fell down from the joy.

    “Yes, I know her.”

    “How?”

    “When I was wounded in the war, she was my nurse. I can still remember the first day I was in the hospital in Ireland. I had been shot in the leg and I woke up in the bed with this amazingly beautiful woman standing over me…”

    He laid in the hospital bed with his leg in one of those harness-type contraptions. He had forgotten what happened to him, but when he saw his leg it all came back to him. He let out a painful groan and the nurse came over to him.

    “Oh, you’re finally awake.” She said in a positive, warm, caring Dublin brogue. “How do you feel today?” He cleared his throat as he tried to form a sentence.

    “S****y” he said, she tried to stop herself from chuckling. “I’m not gonna loose my leg, am I?”

    “No. You’re lucky though.”

    “Howcome?”

    “Well, another few inches and it would’ve ripped through your knee. Then the doctors would have to take it. But, no, you should be fine.”

    “That’s good to know.” He tried to sit up but he let out a groan as he did.

    “Let me help you.” She held his shoulders as she pulled the pillows closer to his back. “That better?”

    “Much.” He said, as he looked deep into her emerald green eyes. “I hope you don’t think me too forward, but may I ask you your name?”

    “Of course you can. It’s Colleen.” He said that it was the most beautiful name he had ever heard in his life. “And what might yours be?”

    “Neil, Neil Stewart.”

    “Stewart? So you’re a Scot then?”

    “Well, I’m American, but my father’s from Scotland.”

    “My mother was from Scotland. Aberdeen, I think.”

    “Well, he-my father-came from Glasgow. So, you’re half-Scot, half-Irish?”

    “Aye. My father always said that we got the best of the British Isles in us.”

    “I take it that your father’s not a big fan of the English.”

    “Oh blessed Jesus no. He hates them. As a matter of fact, he once fought alongside Michael Collins, until they had him killed. He lost everything because of that.”

    “Why didn’t he go to America then?”

    “Because he thinks the Americans are just as bad as the English. He didn’t even want me to work in this hospital. ‘Let those limey b******s die’ he said. But, I don’t do everything my father tells me. If I did, I’d be married by now. And I’m too young for that.”

    “Why? How old are you?”

    “Take a guess.” He took a long hard look at her, he liked this game.

    “I’d say, 20.”

    “I’m only sixteen.” He was shocked.

    “You’re only sixteen?”

    “Aye. I appreciate the compliment though.”

    “You can’t be sixteen.”

    “And why is that?”

    “You’re too beautiful to only be sixteen.” A smile crept onto her face.

    “You think I’m beautiful?”

    “Very.”

    “Thank you.” she began to walk away.

    “Where are you going?”

    “I have other patients you know.”

    “Will I see you again?”

    “Everyday.”

    And he did she her everyday, everyday for four months. Over those four months they told each other everything about one another. It took my father about a week to fall in love with her, my mother fell in love with him the first time he said she was beautiful. Then came that day when my father had to decide what he was going to do. He was now walking with a limp that would stay with him for the rest of his life, and only got worse when that robber in San Francisco shot him. He met her in a park, he had been discharged from the hospital three days before. She was sitting on a bench, he looked at her, he knew that he was about to break her heart ( and his own). He came over to her.

    “Colleen?” he said in a serious tone. She stood  up and kissed him.

    “Hello.” They sat down. “So, have you decided what you’re going to do?”

    “ I have.” he tried to form the words in his mind, tried to make them sound as painless as possible, but it wasn’t.

    “Well? What are you going to do?”

    “Colleen,” he said quietly “I can’t stay. I have to go back to New York.” he looked at her, she looked like she had just been hit by a tornado, she was devastated.

    “Is this-is this your final decision then?” she said as she tried to hold back the tears. He couldn’t even look at her, he hung his head lower than he had ever hung it before. He was quick and to the point, no sense dragging it out any longer.

    “Yes.” She began to sob, ever so slightly.

    “I-I-I don’t understand.” she said through her pain. “I-I thought that you loved me.” He raised his head and finally looked her in the eyes.

    “I do. I do, very very much.”

    “Then why are you leaving?” He tried to think of a way to answer to answer that question. Not just to her, but also to himself. About a week before he left the hospital he received a letter from his father. This was not an ordinary letter. His father ordered him to come home, he threatened him. He wrote that ‘if you don’t come home, then one of us might not be here anymore.’ My father took this as a direct threat to the life of his mother. He couldn’t in good conscience stay in Ireland. But the question was, how to explain that to the woman he loved.

    “If I stay here-if I don’t go back to New York-then my father, he’ll probably kill my mother.” she looked at him.

    “What?”

    “Remember the letter he sent me?”

    “Yeah.”

    “He told me that if I didn’t come home, then she wouldn’t be there anymore. He’ll do it, Colleen. He’ll kill her.” She sighed as she processed that statement.

    “How can you be sure of that?”

    “Because he beats her everyday. There were times when he beat her so badly that she couldn’t walk for a couple of days afterwards. I can’t let him hurt her anymore. I have to go back to make sure of that. To make sure that he never hits her again.”

    “If you have to go, you have to go.”

    “Don’t be like that. You know that I want to stay with you-I want to be with you.” Suddenly an idea came into his head, a crazy idea. “Why don’t you come with me?”

    “What?”

    “Come with me to New York.”

    “Thom, I can’t leave here. This is my home. Plus I’m only sixteen.”

    “But you turn seventeen in a couple of months.”

    “Thom, I can’t.” And that was the end of that. They sat quietly for almost an hour. Neither one of them could think of anything to say to each other.

    The next day Colleen escorted Thom to his boat.

    “I’ll write to you, everyday.” He told her. She nodded her head.

    “You better go, you’ll miss the boat.”

    “I don’t want to say goodbye to you.”

    “Then don’t. Just say, until I see you again.” He looked into her eyes.

    “I love you more than anything on this Earth. I will always love you, and I will come back for you.”

    “And I love you.” They kissed. He boarded.

    “…and that was the last time I saw her until I went over there.”

    “You went over there?” said Davis.

    “Yeah. I couldn’t be away from her anymore. So , I went over to Dublin to find her. I found her all right. Her and her family.”

    “And now you have to build them a house.” Davis chuckled.

    “You think this is funny?”

    “No, I’m sorry.”

    “How am I going to do this? How can I build a house for her husband?”

    “I don’t know.” Davis walked away leaving my father alone with his thoughts.

    The next day the construction began. My father dreaded the idea of seeing the woman he loved with her husband, so he managed to stay out of the way. But when they showed up, with their son, at around two, he felt like flinging himself off the roof. They didn’t see him, didn’t even know he was there until…

    “Well Mr. McEwing, as you can see the construction of your house has begun very nicely.” Davis said to the Irish brute. He scoffed.

    “Aye, it better be. If we was back in Dublin it’d been built already, and I coulda had me breakfast by now.” Davis looked at him with an eye of irritation, as if to say ‘f**k off you stupid drunk mick.’

    “I assure you Mr. McEwing, the house will be completed by the end of the month.”

    “The end of the month? Typical American work ethic! Maybe if you didn’t take so many breaks.” Colleen knew how Ian could get so she stopped him.

    “Ian, calm down already.”

    “Mind yer tongue woman.” He said as almost raised a hand. Davis looked up to where my father was sitting, he saw rage in his eyes. And in that split-second John Davis made one of the best decisions he had ever made in his entire life.

    “Mr. McEwing, I assure you that I have my best workers building this house for you. As a matter of fact-how would you like to meet some of them?” My father heard this and his eyes opened as wide as the sky, he had no place to run, no place to hide. This was going to happen. He was going to see the love of his life again, and her husband. “…and this is Hank  Genderson. He rivets, right Hank?”

    “Uh, yes sir Mr. Davis.” The confused and distracted man said.

    “Good, back to work Hank.” Davis faked a chuckle as he brought them closer to my father, closer to their fate. A few more workers and then they’d be there. My father tried to hide behind something, anything, but there was nothing. Nothing. “…and this…” Davis said as he approached my father, who had his back turned. “This is my best worker. My favourite one, as well as my best friend. Mr and Mrs. McEwing, meet Thom Stewart.” Never before in the history of the world has a woman made the gasping noise that my mother made at that exact moment.

    “What’s wrong with you?” her brute of a husband uttered.

    “Nothing, nothing at all.” She said, short of breath as my father turned around to face her. Her scumbag of a husband didn’t remember my father, so that was a positive thing.

    “Hello, ma’am.” He said as though he didn’t know her.

    “Hello.” She said as if they had been friends for a thousand years. Davis, saw an opportunity for his friend.

    “Uh, Mrs. McEwing, why don’t you have a seat here while your husband and I go down to my office.”

    “Alright.”

    “Mr. McEwing, is that alright with you?”

    “Aye, it’s fine.” The brute must’ve had the memory of a snail. And so John Davis took Ian McEwing down to his office, leaving the old lovers to reminisce. Colleen sat on a roll of insulation.

    “How have you been?” she inquired. My father sighed.

    “Awful.” It was now 1961, he was 37 she was 32. It had been eleven years since they had seen each other, but to him she looked just as beautiful as that day on her front step.

    “Why?” she asked with pure honesty and compassion.

    “Well, I was a cop in San Francisco, and I got shot about a year and a half ago.”

    “Oh my God, are you alright?”

    “Yeah, I’m fine now. It’s just that-you’re not gonna believe this but-I took it in the same leg I got shot in during the war.” She sighed, then chuckled. “Oh, so it’s funny to you huh?”

    “No, no, I’m sorry. I was just remembering when we first met. How young we both were.”

    “Yeah, we were young alright. Not young enough to be in love though.” She looked at him as if to say ‘we can’t love each other any more’.  She nodded her head. “I never stopped loving you, you know.” This time she gave a more pained look ‘don’t tell me that, not now’.

    “Thom-.”

    “I know. I know, you’re married. You love Ian.”

    “Yes, and no.” My father’s entire universe changed after she said those words.

    “You mean, you don’t love Ian?”

    “No, I don’t think that I do.”

    “Do you still love me?”

    “I’m not sure if I do or not.”

    “What?”

    “Thom, you walked out on me-.”

    “I told you why I couldn’t stay, Colleen.”

    “I know you did.”

    “Don’t you know that nothing would’ve made me happier than to stay in Dublin with you for the rest of my life? Don’t you know that?”

    “I know that.”

    “And I told you that I’d come back for you. I told you that Colleen, and you didn’t wait for me. You married Ian and had your son-.”

    “That’s not how it happened.”

    “Not how what happened?”

    “I married Ian-I married him because he-he-.”

    “He what? Did you have sex with him before you married him?”

    “No.” she said the following so quietly that it was almost inaudible, but not to my father. “He had sex with me.” His face turned into one giant constricting mass of flesh, his eyes blazed with the fires of hell.

    “He did what to you?!” he said as restrained as he would be that day.

    “He raped me.” The hatred kept building inside my father.

    “If he raped you, why did you marry him?”

    “It was his idea. He said that if we were married, then nobody would suspect anything. He said he'd kill me if I ever told.” The rage and hatred and misery came to the surface.

    “I’m gonna kill him! The m**********r!” It was the first time in his life that he ever uttered the phrase ‘m**********r’, it wouldn’t be the last, especially on that day.

    “Thom, don’t. He can’t know that I told you.”

    “Colleen, he raped you. He forced you to marry him, he threatened to kill you.” and then it hit him. “Does he beat you?” she nodded.

    “B*****d!” He ran down towards Davis’ office, Colleen followed. My father kicked open the door and he picked Ian up by his collar and he pushed him up against the wall. “You like to hit women huh?!” He punched him in the stomach. “How does that feel?! Huh?! You piece of s**t! You like to rape women, huh?!” He threw him on the floor, spread his legs and he forced his foot into Ian’s groin. “You like that, m**********r?! Huh?!” he kept kicking and beating him as Davis, Colleen and the other workers all just looked on. As he was beating Ian senseless, my father finally understood what it was like to be his father. He was becoming the man he hated more than anything else in the world, but at the same time he saw Ian as another manifestation of his father. Regardless, the task had been completed. Ian was all but unconscious. After the beating my father looked at everyone in the room, the only person that was not perplexed and mortified was the one person that should’ve been happy that this had happened, but Colleen was not happy. She was afraid. Afraid of what Thom had just done and afraid of what Ian would do to her when he woke up. She turned and walked out, my father followed. “Colleen, where are you going?” she turned and screamed at him.

    “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done? When he wakes up, he’ll kill me!”

    “No, he won’t.”

    “You don’t know Ian, Thom.”

    “No, I don’t. But I knew my father. Every single day he’d tell my mother that he was going to kill her. The entire time they were married he pulled that s**t, even after I came home. He never did it though, she did it herself.”

    “What?”

    “One night, about a year after I came home, she put a gun in her mouth. She blew her brains out right in front of the son of a b***h. The first thing he said afterwards was, I should’ve done it for you. I am not going to let this piece of s**t hurt you anymore. I won’t let him touch you every again.”

    “How do you plan on doing that?”

    “I’ll kill him.”

    “What?”

    “You heard me. I was a cop, I know how to do it so that I won’t ever get caught. I could make it look like suicide.” Fear grew inside my mother.

    “Have you lost your mind? You can’t kill my husband Thom.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because you just can’t! You can’t just go around killing people!”

    “He is not a person. He is a monster. You kill monsters.” She let out a sigh, she couldn’t believe what was happening. That Thom wanted to do this, and even more horrifying, that she was considering it.

    “Tell me how you would do it.” A smile crept onto his face. He escorted her away, and told her of his plan.

Reviews

[smalltownsympathies]

Seems realistic, plausible, but definatelly needs to be spiced up. Your job is to not only pull readers in, but KEEP them there, hooked.
Good luck and welcome to WC!