This War Paint

Butch


He had been drinking. Far too much. I could tell by not only his foul breath but by the way he had stood. So cocky and calm and confident. Usually, when sober, he’d be fidgeting himself into a job, keeping himself too occupied to have time to realise his life had gone to shit. And that his wife had left him for another man. And that his only son was the biggest disgrace known to man.

He didn’t want to remember a lot of things but, mainly, it was my mother. Especially the triumphant look she had sent him as she’d slammed the door behind her for the last time. She had been the happiest I had ever known her while looking her soon-to-be ex-husband straight in the eye and telling him that she wasn’t his any longer. He couldn’t lay a single finger on her without her having his ass hauled into jail like she should have done a hell of a long time ago.

My father had hit my mother. That was why she left. It would have been a wonderful story of breaking free complete with a happy ending if she hadn’t turned on her stilleto’d heels and walked out on me too. I was nine when she left. I could have squished in the backseat of her boyfriend’s Cadillac. I wasn’t a big boy back then; they would barely have noticed me sandwiched between Mom’s bulky luggage.

But she obviously didn’t think I could fit, or rather she didn’t think of me long enough to even contemplate this. Sometimes I hated her because she had left me with an alcoholic, abusive man as my father. I never really hated her though. She had given me one of the best things I had in my life and she had done so without even realising it.

It was because of Mom that I had found my love of tattoos. Her and the dragon coiling up her left foot, roaring, as if it was angry all the time. It probably was too, heck, if I had to experience what my mother’s body had to experience I would have been angry all the time.

The most defined memory I have of her is catching that dragon on her foot for the first time. If I screwed up my eyes now and concentrated hard enough I could still see her in that moment – so scared and innocent and young. I chose to overlook the black eye marring her. I chose to focus on the angry dragon, believing back then that it was furious at me for having let my eyes anywhere near it.

It was my mother in a symbol. It was her recklessness and fierceness and pride condensed into a patch of her skin. I was amazed that something so small could mean so much, and I had spent countless daydreams wondering how she had ever come to get it. I’d asked her only once, when I’d finally found some nerve in my tiny six-year-old body.

She was panting over me and her words were disjointed but I remembered them. Even now. As clear as day.

“One day, when you’re older, I’ll tell you.”

Dad hit the door again, his fists hammering into the wood as if his strength alone could break through. Mom was jittery and kept sweeping pieces of stray hair away from my face. I shook my head out to help but the hair just fell back onto the sweat collecting at my neck. One day, I pledged, I’d just shave it all off. That way Mommy wouldn’t fiddle with it. Maybe it would help calm her down, stop her hands from shaking too.

“Come out Lois,” Dad yelled “I’ve missed you!”

Mom rolled her eyes and muttered something about it only having been a few hours. Then she moved far away from the door, his banging starting up again, the sounds echoing terribly against a wall of nothing but silence. I followed her when she beckoned.

We moved onto her bed, my body instantly finding the crook in hers which fit me so perfectly. I closed my eyes briefly before turning to watch Mom’s teeth sink purposively into her bottom lip . The drunk yelling of my father was just a background noise now.

I turned my head and there was her dragon tattoo. Peaking out at me, the bottom of her work trousers riding up enough for it to rear its head. I wanted to know everything about it – and about her – so I could settle with waiting as long as forever because Mom’s secrets were worth it. Were worth it all.

It just turned out that, in the end, I wasn’t worth that much to her.

So that was how I found my father eight years later, drunk out of his mind and watching me coldly as if everything wrong with his life was my fault. As if my six-year-old self had forced my mother to leave us, as if she’d ever left for any reason other than him.

I had just gotten in from school, Max and I had skateboarded the way home after swapping our best how-to-pull-a-girl tips. This was before I had found Jane Hathaway, before I had fallen in love, and girls were still an unknown almost scary species. Max and baby weren’t going out and he was just as girl crazy as I was. Our tips back then had gotten us into a lot of trouble. A whole fucking lot of crazy trouble.

So when I pulled off my shoes and dumped down my bag, it wasn’t quite a shock to see my father standing, half swaying, in the hallway. Looking at me with those condemning eyes I had already become accustomed to.

What did shock me, however, was that he was holding a knife. A long, sharp knife. I recognised is as something which lived in our kitchen used to cut the toughest pieces of beef. In my fathers hands it didn’t look like a common household item anymore though. It looked like a weapon.

Oh sure, I screamed. I fucking yelled to the point where I was surprised the entire world didn’t combust just with my screaming alone. But nobody heard me. Or nobody wanted to hear me.

I was Butch, even when I was fourteen-years-old I was Butch. I had three tattoos on me (done illegally by Mariah but she had never seemed to mind the country’s laws much), and the beginning plains of muscles were starting to protrude. I had been a trouble maker my entire life and I had been their child since the beginning of time. Nobody liked my Dad. Fucking hell, I sure never did.

I didn’t go to school for two weeks after what he did to me, but then everything was back to normal. I crept around my house like it was haunted and avoided seeing my father for months at a time. I did my school work, was average at best, and tried to stay out of trouble. It just so happened that trouble didn’t seem to want to stay away from me all of the time.

On my sixteenth birthday I had bought a shitty old car with the money I had managed to save up from my part time mechanics job. As soon as I got it, I moved into it. It didn’t matter to me that I was physically stronger than my pathetic father at sixteen or that I could have done with the money for more practical things like food. All I needed was my freedom and some joints to forget the time before I’d had that freedom.

And especially his words. The words he had whispered to me as the knife had dug into my side and carved out that poisonous word. My fourth tattoo all thanks to my fuck of a father who could never hold his licker and never had enough intelligence to realise that drink didn’t make him forget my mother.

I swallowed the horrible memories down through a tight throat, placing the cigarette into my mouth to paint the illusion that I was calm. I was in control. I wasn’t freaking out that I couldn’t find Jane Hathaway anywhere.

She had disappeared. I hadn’t seen her since this morning in the hallway, when I’d made her late for class and she’d looked at me with her big, sad, blue eyes. It shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did, but then again, who was I kidding? I was so head-over-heels for her that just going one hour without her meant that I missed her.

The waiting game was made worse when I caught David Armstrong’s eye as the school sat outside, eating their petty lunches. My mouth snarled around the cigarette, baring my teeth to him like an angry dog. Threatening him. Warning him off more than just my turf. If he even so much as looked at Jane wrong I’d stick my fuming cigarette right into that pretty boy face of his.

Fuck it, I’d stick it there for a lot less than him looking at her.

“Butch, sweetie,” the annoying tones of Max’s girlfriend, Baby, dragged me back from my violent thoughts. “She’s not outside here at the moment so please, please, just sit down with us and eat something.”

I rolled my eyes and took a long inhale of my cigarette. Baby, whose real name was actually Serena, had made it her mission in life to straighten up her boyfriend and, for some reason, had included me in her little missionary ambitions. She had banned poor Max from smoking, both drugs and nicotine, and already had him on a tight little leash. I couldn’t say I didn’t like her so much as I didn’t give a shit about her. As far as I was concerned, Max would probably get bored of her within the next few months and find another Barbie to replace her with.

Hopefully, one who took a little less interest in me and my wellbeing.

“It’s fine, I don’t have anything to eat anyway.”

“Well take some of my lunch,” she already had her sandwich halved with one neat triangle being offered to me in a tanned outstretched hand.

“Baby,” Max leant close to her and kissed her cheek softly, their bodies almost wrapped around each others on the grass. “Leave Butch alone.”

She just sighed and fell back into him, bringing the whole sandwich with her. I hadn’t wanted it anyway. I just wanted to know where Jane was and if she was okay. By the triumphant looks David kept shooting me, I couldn’t help but doubt the latter.

Finally, I saw her, standing over the heads of the grazing student population. I stared at her. I just looked at her, probably making a complete fool of myself, as the cigarette dangling in my mouth burnt shorter. She looked sad, and scared, even if she was hiding it well to the rest of the world. She stood with her friend – the one she was usually with nowadays – with her body positioned warily behind her.

I caught the little glance she sent Armstrong’s way before her eyes settled on me. Even though she smiled and waved cheerily, I had seen it. And I swore right then David Armstrong was a dead man walking. And before I could even finish that thought, I was striding determinedly towards him.