Bang Bang

Bang Bang: Twiested Mercy. A Tale of Anger, devoltion to family and just how far someone will go for love
By: Lazarus S. Constantine
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I admit it. I shot him. Pointblank in his smug face right between his beedy eyes.

I
admit it, I shot my own father dead this morning. And I admit, I am not
sad or sorry about it one bit. I think the world is a better place with
out him in it. Monsters like him don't deserve to live, or to be
allowed near children. He deserved to die.

I remember when I was
young, after mom left us for her place in heaven, and my father had
nothing to do but till the fields and drown his sorrows in warm jim
beam till he was blind drunk he would start to holler and scream till
he made his way up to the third floor of our old farmstead where my
room was and start to throw fists at me wildly. He used to scream the
most odd things, sometimes he would scream out my grandfather's name
and say that this was payback and sometimes he would scream out my
mother's father's name and scream how he might not have been right for
my mother, but he was stuck with him, and sometimes he would just
scream jiberish. I took these beatings almost daily untill about a year
ago.

I started to work in the city at a photography studio, and
with my money I was making, I worked out a deal with my father, I rent
the third floor of our home from him, I could go as I please as could
anyone I happend to bring over, he bitched and moaned about t and
finally we worked out a deal with we would get some lumber from his
brother and the three of us would alter the landing to the thrid floor.
the open area would be made into extended floor and the door would be
placed on the floor simular to an attic or storm cellar door, and we
would make a stairway up to one of the balconies, that would be my
entrance, and the door in the floor would be locked and my father would
have have a key to it, for the better of both of us. He didn't like
this idea, but he agreed because he needed the money sence he was
starting to kill the land...

Things were alright for awile at
this point, I had my own place, 15 rooms of an old plantation house
that were all for me, lucky for me my great great grandparents thought
of putting a second kitchen next to their large formal dining room up
there and bathrooms on all floors. I was living like a king, like our
family did when they had a massive farm with workers being paid to do
everything from pick the crops to trim the trees, I felt abit smug
about it really, living better then my father was, with him just
downstairs. There were times I could still hear him downstairs at
night, screaming at himself, or out back with his old shotgun screaming
and taunting things that weren't there. It was at this point I stopped
hating my father for all the beatings he gave me for no reason, and I
learned to pitty him because whatever happend to him, he had truely
become insane. I'm not sure if it was the liquior that caused him to
be, or whatever it was my grandfather ahd done to him, but either way,
my father couldn't help himself and what he was doing, he didn't know
what it was.

Around this time I would start to make sure that I
made abit of extra food each night, I am a good cook my friends tell
me, and would open my door in the floor place enough of what I had made
that night to last him that night and into the next day if he felt so
inclined on a large tray on a table in the middle of the second floor,
I would holler down to him when I was about to shut the door that I had
left him something. Many times, he would come up to the landing and
yell up to my door that he was thankfull for what I had given him. I
just figured I was, if nothing else, making sure he was eating and not
living off jim beam, specially wile working in the north georgia sun. I
may not want my father in my life, but I didn't want him dead, well not
at this point anyway, but im getting to that.

Not long after I
started doing this, I met a girl, a lovely redheaded girl nammed Mia
Bella, she was half french and half aussie, she had this cute mixture
of the two accents, her father designed buildings and felt that moving
here to north georgia would be a challange for he had grown bored with
the large cities and their stuffy strict building codes, he wanted to
create art that people lived in, Mia and I started to spend lots of
time together here at my home, her parents were very europian that way,
believing to let young people in love go off on their own and let them
deal with whatever comes from their actions as adults. I used to love
to listen to her talk, she had this french accent that was so cute from
growing up in Paris mostely, she would come up with cute pet names for
me "Grande Montagne" was her favorite, it literaly translates to "Large
Mountain" a joke on my really tall and muscular farmboy build. She
never met my father.

Well that is untill the other night.

See,
I never call telling her the reason we always used my privite entrance
and never went downstairs, I would just say my father owns the rest of
the house, and leave it at that, normally the random screaming and
yelling and shotgun blasts were enough to make her not ask questions.
Well, the other night, I had to work late in the city on a shoot for a
very important client, and I could not get to a phone to call her
before she headed to my home to meet me. To this day, I have yet to ask
her why when she got here, and saw that my car wasn't on my side of the
front yard, why she didn't just park and wait for me, I have no idea
why she went to the front door, or why she walked right in when she saw
the door was ajar when she knocked on it.

I have no idea why she
didn't just grab something she could use to defend herself, i'll never
get these questioned answered, for I to this day still just can't bring
myself to ask her why when she came face to face with my father in a
drunken rage she didn't just run. I can't bring myself to ask her why
when he started to call her by my mother's name and started to try and
touch her in the way a man would touch his wife she didn't run, or yell
for help, or to tell him to stop, or just run... My drunken monster of
a father would have never beaten and raped my beautiful Mia Bella if
she had just ran. He wouldn't have kept yelling how she deserved all of
this for all the times she ran around on him with various men he named
off, all of a better social status then him, and he wouldn't have
beaten her so baddly that we can never have children of our own given
the damage. I never would have had to tackle him and beat him senceless
like a wild man when I heard her screams coming from inside the houe
when I arrived. None of this would have happend had she just ran.

I
took her upstairs through the door inside the house that lead to my
home, I locked the door tightly behind us and placed a heavy chest of
my grandfather's old army trinkets over it incase my father somehow
found the strength to attempt ramming the door till it opened. I then
carried Mia to the large iron bathtub and started running the water as
her and I both removed her ripped, battered and bloody cloths. She told
me what happend and kept telling me she was sorry and she would never
have even gone in the house, she should have known better, all these
other things, I told her that none of that was important now as I
hurrily checked her body for marks and bruses as I cleaned her blood
off of her body. I asked why there was blood all down the inside of her
legs, she simply replied "he kept calling me by your mother's name...
and not only did he beat me in the overy area but saying I would never
give another man a child but him, he.... took something I was saving
for our wedding night... Mon Amoureux.... he...." She looked away and
started to cry before she could finish the sentence.

This was
when I realised what she was talking about, and how it all fit, he must
of thought she was my mother they are near the same height and though
the hair color and build was different, in his drunken state he must
have thought she was my mother, and that he must have got mad when she
did finally pull away, so he forced himself on her. In that moment, the
understanding that I had thought I had for my father, this caring that
I felt for him on some level, it all washed away in a blood red
tidalwave of rage and anger. Mia Bella had never seen me mad at this
point, and I think the idea of her kind and gentle lover tranforming
into a 6ft 8in monster that wanted nothing but revenge scared her. I
realised something had to be done, and I had to do it. I wanted
revenge, revenge for what he did to Mia, revenge for probably beating
my mother to death, revenge for all the beatings he gave me over the
years, revenge for taking away my childhood, and revenge for all the
damage that he had done to Mia Bella inside, though we didn't know the
extend at that time we just knew she was bleeding more then she should
for having just lost her virginity forcefully.

"Mon Amoureux,
please, that look in your eyes, i've never seen that before, what are
you thinking... please baby tell me what you're thinking... we need to
pull together at this time, not pull away.." she says to me. "I'm going
to make him pay my love. I am going to make him pay for what he's done
to you, for what he did to me, for what he must have done to my mother
going by what you said he was yelling. All of it, He is going to pay
for it all." I say coldly."Merde! you can't.. he's your father,
he's..." she didn't get to finish her sentence "He's a monster, he
always has been, thats why I didn't let you meet him before today. He's
insane and drinks way to much for his own good, thats why our farm is a
mess, thats why no one EVER comes here from teh family, he beat my
mother to death when I was very young, and he tried to take you from me
as well..." I roar out with a rage I had no idea I had inside me. I
could hear him screaming and yelling again from downstairs. It was
right then and there I made my plan. Mia cleaned off the rest of the
blood and I took her to the hospital. As we were leaving my father
stold on the front porch and screamed out my mother's name begging her
not to leave him again, wile tossing old jim beam bottles at my car, he
was to weak to hit it, but still, means i'll have to clean those up
sometime soon, I hate doing that.

We get to the ER and a friend
of mine is there at the front desk, we explain what happend, him and
the doctor both being people that grew up locally and knowing of my
father didn't question if we were telling the truth adding to this that
i willingly showed the difference in the fist that left marks on her
body and my own which was almost two times as big. They gave us the bad
news, that we were unable to ever have children of our own, and made an
appointment with Mia to do more testing and to see what comes of it. I
tell them not to report the rape, I would handle it myself, we stopped
by Mia Bella's parent's house and explained what happend to them, they
screamed and hollered at me as if I could have stopped it somehow
sooner, after a yelling match with her father where I rather loudly
explained I was going to fix it all, and that even if she couldn't have
children, I wasn't going to leave her, we could adopt or something, but
we were still to marry and to live out our days,just as her and I had
said all along. He finally stopped when he could tell I was serious.

Mia,
and i stayed close these past few days, we are starting the whole
healing process that you hear about on TV and stuff, but I know that
what I'm going to do come morning will make it all go smoothly. I had
the day off, after working many days almost non stop with out breaks
and lunchs to get some photoshoots done, it was a reward of sorts, 3
days off for an insane workload being completed really fast. I let Mia
Bella sleep as I went into our kitchen and had some leftover fried
chicken from the night before as I perfectly mimiced my father's
handwriting and wrote out a note explaining what he had done and that
he was going to go and take his life for what he'd done, the guilt was
to much for him. I then went to the chest with all my grandfather's
army trinkets in them and pulled from it a german nazi SS special issue
Lugar pistol, one of 6 that my grandfather had taken off kills of his
there were other guns taken off other kills as well, but this one, this
one was special. This was the gun my grandfather had tought me to shoot
with, and had tought my father to shoot with as well. and it was also
the only one loaded.

I look it, and slowly walked down the
stairs to my father's bedroom. Now or never right? Gutcheck Lazarus
play the role and when its over all will be better.. I smack him as
hard as I can acrossed the face to wake him up. He jumps awake and is
about to swing at me blindly till he hears the sound of me cocking back
the lugar. He looks at me with shock in his eyes "You finally grew some
balls didn't you boy?" he says snering as he wakes up, "I always knew
you would snap just like I did I knew it, I guess fucking that tight
virgin pussy your little girlfriend had is what drove you of the edge
eh?" I just stare at him "Oh i'm sorry, its not virgin anymore. I saw
to that." he taunts. "Get up...." I said "put on the cloths on the
table there we're going for a drive." I barked. "Give a pacifist a gun
and he becomes James Cagney I see..." he laughs and then taunts me in a
James Cagney like voice "you dirty rat... you raped my girlfriend...
you dirty rat... you beat her like the whore she is.. you dirty rat...
hahaha... lighten up son, you need to see the funny here." he taunts.
"We're going, get your keys." I said pointing the gun at the door.
"Find, be that way ya stuffy prick." he laughs to himself. You know,
the closer this gets, the easyer this is gonna be he keeps acting like
this.

We get in his car and I drive us down the edge of our
land, both my car and his are seen down here alot so if someone sees
fresh tiremarks no one is gonna notice, we also bag alot of deer and
such down here, no one will call the cops if they hear a gunshot. I
walk him down to the riverside, the water is raging rather well this
time of year, he'll get swept down river and no one will ask because
they won't find him till the water lowers later this year, all they'll
have to go on is the note.


....con....

"Turn around. I wanna look you in the
eyes so you can see what you've made." I growl at him. "Aren't you a
big man now?" he says as he turns around, he starts to open his mouth
and taunt me more, but I put the lugar to his head right between the
eyes and he shuts up. "Do you have any last words before I make you pay
for what you did?" I say. "Remember to oil the tractor... because i'm
sure begging for my life wouldn't work would it?" he says "Nope." I
pull back the trigger "I HATE YOU SON!" he yells just as the hammer
strikes and the bullet splits a whole in his skull. He stands there for
a second, he blinks and with one final gasp of air falls back into the
river. the current sweeps him down river fast. I wash the blood of my
hands and face and the gun I wipe clean of any powder marks and blood
that got on it. I tuck it back into my pocket and drive home. I know
what I did was right, like I said, I shot that monster between the
eyes, and I would do it again in this same case.



Mia Bella is up
when I get back, she asks me what i've done, and I told her, she looks
at me and says "Was this truly what you feel needed to be done?" I
looked her and said "This wasn't just about what he did to you, or my
mom, or to me or anyone else, this was also about ending his suffering.
He was suffereing with a losing fight against the demons inside him, a
battle that I'm winning inside of me. He had given up the fight all
together. It was both revenge and mercy the way I see it." I said. She
looked at me "We move on from here then.." she says. I explain to her
the note and that we should call the cops and tell them we found it.
And thats what we do.



EPILOGUE:



Its been one year sence
that day, and I was right, the cops never bothered to look into things
and make sure that my father had killed himelf once they found the
body, and given my father's history around town, no one realy asked any
questions, and true to life, I was the only one at his funeral.



Mia
and I are living together in my family's home, we've been married now
for just about three months, we've returned the door from my part of
the house to the rest of it and now use all three floors for various
things, I have a photo studio here and she has a painting studio and
we've dusted off the other unused rooms and really fixed this place up.
Even my family comes to see us from time to time, and Mia Bella's
parents come by for dinner and games and stuff often.



We are
happy here, I've let the farm just die, my father killed the land so
baddly there is no real chance of it coming back in the near future
with out alot of work, we've just paid to have it tilled and grass
planted. We are happy, I don't really think about that day at the
river, I know someday at the end of my life I will have to face facts
that I killed my father, but for now, I'm doing what he never seemed to
be able to do, I'm living my life. I'm living my life happy and loved
and I am making the best of it all. I just hope that where ever it is
he is, that he's finally made peace with himself.



Well thats my story, I best be getting to gettting on, I hear the wife calling me for something or another, you take care now.