Chapter 9

While we'd been more or less alone earlier that day, I'd told the Foole a bit of my history ... rather more than was at all sensible or wise. Still, he'd heard my toasts yesterday evening and knew, or thought he knew, where a few of the dots connected. Yeah, like him I'd had a very checkered past too, and done a thing or maybe two that I didn't think I could ever be forgiven for, but a wound you keep tearing open can never heal.

I'd taken revenge on Tori's killer. That was good, but it wouldn't buy me absolution by any means, however it might tip just a little bit of the heavy weight off of my karmic balance. If I could now somehow manage to remove both Norman Blackwell and Edward Watters from the world, it would be a rather nicer and more sanitary place. That had to be worth another 'good girl' chip or two. Another few hundred of those and I might be able to sleep at night!

This account below is more or less what I'd told him earlier. The Foole swears that there is redemption in this life ... but I still just don't see it for me.

My birth name was Ricki Irene King, but my nick-name for most of my life since childhood has been "RI" (pronounced 'Ree'). I got this name at the start of third grade when a new student to our rural Texas school was about to borrow (i.e. steal) a pencil from my desk while my back was turned. One of my classmates stopped him saying, "I wouldn't do that – you don't ever want to piss off 'Revenge Incorporated".

I didn't like hearing this nick-name at first – but it fit, it really did ... and it stuck like superglue. By the start of Junior High even my teachers were calling me 'Ree', although I doubt if they ever learned exactly why or what it meant. In fact, by then I think I was already wearing it as a badge of honor.

To say that I was a 'touchy' or 'overly-sensitive' child would be an understatement. Even my father said that I was 'excitable'. No slight or wrong, no matter how petty or seemingly insignificant went un-avenged – ever! Usually I got my payback near instantaneously, nastily and violently in a sudden pique of volcanic temper that would make the Furies wince. Revenge being a dish best served cold was not yet anywhere in my vocabulary or temperament.

This was a definite weakness that the skilled and patient could prey upon. A quick shove in the playground usually goes unnoticed by the watching teachers, but my swift and usually brutal retaliation only rarely was. Seldom did a week go by without a punitive visit to the Vice-Principals office. I led my school (and rural school district) in detentions and suspensions. Expulsion was a very near thing on several occasions.

I was not then nor have I ever have been a bully. Invariably my fights always seemed to involve at their core my sense of having to avenge some wrong done to myself or others. Invariably, I would champion the quietest girl or the weakest or smallest boy in my class; the sort of kid that wore glasses and usually sucked at sports and would have far preferred to read a book rather than being made to go play outside. I wasn't much for books myself, but I respected their right to sit quietly in a playground corner and read, bothering no one and not get sand or dirt kicked on them. That was me, the champion of the underdog! If there weren't any dragons to slay then I'd go tilting at windmills ... happily!

The odds against me didn't matter. I would charge just as fast into a group of three or four older kids taking a younger kids lunch money as I would just a lone bully. Losing, which I frequently did, didn't much deter me either, but I admit I was very slow to learn restraint (or tactics). I wasn't a stupid girl ... I could be smart and clever in class when I had the urge to behave, but I wasn't very patient, nor did I learn the right sort of lesson from my failures. Even by High School I was still as subtle as a bull in a china shop, and by then I had some serious long established enemies.

In fact the less I say about High School the better. Some idiots will tell you that these are supposed to be the happiest days of your life ... for some maybe, but not for me. My temper was already way out of control and the heaping addition of so-called teenage angst didn't help me one bit. I seemed to live every day in a fit of boiling overflowing rage. It also didn't improve the situation at all that starting the summer of my Freshman year I finally began to grow breasts (I was a late bloomer) and teen hormones now began to work in overdrive, making every trivial annoyance an opportunity for adolescent drama.

I loved my parents but I was an unceasing trial to them. They had secrets of their own and we (along with my younger sister) tried to live very quiet lives in a rural coastal area about six miles away from the nearest small town. They liked their lives really quiet and didn't miss anything about urban life. Despite running a small fishing pier and boat dock they never had much in the way of either customers or noticeable income, but yet we always had food on the table and money to pay for necessities that couldn't be otherwise traded for. Dad always used to joke that 'Captain Grimthrope the Thrice-Poxed' had paid for most of our unplanned family expenses.

Both of my parents had the hard look of people who had seen and done extraordinary things, and probably while using firearms. It's the eyes ... they mark you for life. I didn't recognize that particular look until I was in the Army in Iraq. They had never spoken to me of their own prior military experiences but I'd later recognized that his old SEAL tattoo on his right forearm was nearly the same as others I'd seen on some spec-ops acquaintances of mine years later. He'd vaguely mentioned once doing three tours in Vietnam, but he never spoke of anything that he did while there.

As for my mother, she was stone quiet, rarely ever seen in public or speaking much even to our few family friends. When she did speak there was a faint hint of some foreign accent, but her English was technically textbook perfect. I'm not sure where she was born but she seemed to be of mixed racial stock, perhaps part Middle Eastern, and she had obviously also had served in the military when she was younger. Israeli, I think, as she kept a Israeli passport hidden in the bottom of her desk drawer that I found accidentally one day. Like my father, she never spoke of the past. She also loved to sunbathe, usually in the altogether and I did emulate this one peaceful art from her. Physically, she worked out every day and she apparently had forgotten more about the martial arts than I will ever likely learn. Knowing my volcanic temper, she wouldn't teach me much other than a few purely defensive moves, but from my observing her daily sunrise workout routine it was obvious that my mother was an advanced black-belt in several disciplines.

According to vague hints, partial anecdotes and the occasional off-hand joke, apparently my parents had met each other on some sort of 'cruise from hell'. No matter how bad a situation or problem might be they'd just look at each and mutter, "Well, at least we're not at Sao Aynum-Dam!"

Guns were seemingly everywhere in our house and a shotgun, rifle and pistol were stashed near every door for 'emergencies'. Not to mention the additional arsenals in both the locked gun safe and a hidden emergency shelter underneath a sand dune about a hundred yards away. I learned to handle any sort of gun from a young age, early and often.

Why we needed to be able to know how to protect ourselves was another mystery ... one I still don't quite understand, but doesn't really pertain to this particular story. Who or what my parent's enemies were, I never quite discovered. I got the unstated impression that they were sort of the self-appointed guardians of the nearby small coastal town, a sleepy quiet sort of place filled with odd and peculiar but interesting people. I also clearly received the impression that my own future wasn't particularly tied here to our home and that a rather different sort of fate awaited me ... at least for now.

I ought to have paid more attention and listened more ... but in those tween and teenaged years I just didn't care.

Of my younger sister I unfortunately cannot say much. Being a few years younger than myself, she was still in middle school when I left for the Army. Sadly we were never close, as sisters ought to be. She was everything I was not, my utter polar opposite, being placid, happy and cheerful where I was mercurial, morose and taciturn, and although my parents loved me and never tried to play favorites, she had to be the one closest to their hearts. She married a few years ago but I didn't return home to attend the wedding. I hadn't returned home again since I left, about ten years ago.

I regret this now, but I am not proud of what I have done with my life and I just couldn't bear to have my parents or my younger sister look at me with sad disapproval.

My sins are too grievous.

I was a remote and angry child for little or no cause or reason and grew up to become even angrier - but living a life of increasingly splendid isolation. I'd decided that people, places and things always come and go and weren't terribly important in the first place. I'd decided that wasn't emotionally safe for me to make any long lasting attachments and sometimes this hurt while in middle school and later high school as I seemed unwilling or unable to even attempt to make any lasting friends. I never even bothered to buy the annual school yearbooks. If you showed me a classroom photo from any of those years today I would be probably unable to put many (if any) names to the faces. I can remember sitting next to a quiet red-haired boy in high school for three straight years but I haven't any idea now what his name was. It was obvious that he'd had a crush on me for the entire time but I just stoically pretended that he didn't even exist ... despite certain teen-aged hormone driven thoughts I might have had (and firmly suppressed) late at night in bed. I probably forgot his and every other classmate's name the minute I left school for good.

This driving sense of alienation and acute indifference to the world around me came back to hurt me later on in the worst possible way and caused me to make the greatest mistake of my heavily mistake ridden life, but I haven't reached that part of my story yet. As I was no one's favorite student either, odds are that everyone forgot all about me too. I can live with that. Probably I won't ever be going to any future class reunions anyway.

As I think I mentioned earlier, my major troubles with anger and self-control began during high school. Our small quaint rural county had too few inhabitants in those years to host its own high school so we were all bussed to one the next county over where the majority of students were strangers, and not my neighbors. It had a fairly wide racial and socio-economic mix, so it did have several social cliques and even some semi-organized gang activity. We had about equal number of whites, blacks, Hispanics and even a number of relatively newly arrived Vietnamese kids ... and they and I all disliked each other about equally.

After a week of fights in my first Phys Ed classes, I found myself being 'administratively transferred' into the student Army Junior ROTC program whose instructors surprisingly seemed to make it their primary goal in life to knock some sense into me. Well, it wasn't that much of a surprise. In my first week of my sophomore year I found myself sharing that P.E. class with one of my primary arch-rivals from Junior High and we'd resumed our brawling just about right where we'd left off.

She was a big strapping dark-skinned mixed black and Hispanic gal who lived in the worst part of our school zone in the dodgiest part of Refugio. She had belonged to a gang as early as I can remember – if you mostly lived on the streets in that area you probably had to. She was one of the main lunch money bandits and an all-around general petty thief. If anything at school went missing, hers was the locker the VP (Vice Principal) would unlock first. We were oil and water, both with short fuses and zero tolerance for any disrespect and after our third fight in less than one week of high school we were separated (almost) permanently for our own good.

I think with the benefit of about 20 years of hindsight that we could/should have been best friends from the start. Two troubled teens of mixed race each from non-conventional or troubled homes ... we were probably the only kids really capable of understanding each other's troubles. In time, we might have been able to work out an armed truce and maybe learn to respect each other, but my own history of troublemaking was already legendary. After I was immediately packed off and reassigned to JROTC instead of PE for the remainder of High School our paths didn't cross again until much later (my final day of school) and with some tragedy, not to mention drama.

At first I didn't like JROTC, or the severe restraint they had me under. "You need the discipline", I was told. Repeatedly; and by nearly everyone I knew at the time ... including my parents. They were all probably right, but I didn't understand this until a few years later.

I chafed for a good long while at first and outwardly resented being forced to learn to deal with the spit and polish of wearing a uniform every single weekday, learning to march, and stand in formation seemingly for hours for some pointless reason (I never became fond of any of this really, but eventually learned to put up with it). I did learn to appreciate the side benefits. I already knew how to shoot a .22 rifle even before JROTC, but soon I became enough of an expert that I represented our school at District and then at State competitions and won a few trophies (still saved at home, I hope). Also I learned how to camp and basic survival skills, and oddly I even learned the arts of ballroom dancing. They strove to create potential gentlemen and lady officer and NCO candidates, and in my case they nearly succeeded in spite of the endless amount of trouble that I created.