BAWA'S LAW

Chapter 4-1

Those words!

Someone had murmured them to him, the very first time they made love!

Take me, Chris-Love, please, now…

More than a decade ago, a sweet woman, a lovely woman, a woman he craved...and she had whispered those same words to him!

The only woman he had ever cared about!

Elaine!

His Elaine!

The woman he had left in Little Rock and spent a decade from!

 She was in Little Rock, waiting for him.

Only she should have him! Only she should slake his thirst because he loved her, and she loved him! He had to wait for Elaine.

His love…his only love!

The girl in his arms was trying to impale herself on his erection, but he moved back from her, his face pained, and shook his head at her.

She stood panting, naked and filled with desire.

“What?” she whispered tremulously.

“Out,” Chris whispered, and her face was pinched with pain immediately.

“You want me!” she whispered fiercely, pointing at his still hard member. “You bastard! You want me!”

“Out...please,” Chris whispered again.

"Bastard!" she whispered fiercely. "We'll meet again, mister! Adios! And I wish your damn balls fall off!"

She sizzled with fury at him, her fists tight with wrath, and then she reached down, grabbed her gown, and stormed out of the door.

 Chris pushed it shut and locked it, and then he sat slowly on the floor with his head back.

This time he could not stop his memories.

Memories of them, of Little Rock, of Elaine…his Elaine!

Painful memories!

This was it. This time he did not fight it. He allowed the memories to take shape, to crystallize, to hurt.

As always it began with the blast of a gun!

...

Three horrible gunshots!

Three muzzle sparks in the darkness behind him!

The jarring tingle of kerosene lamps shattering, then the sound of a bullet ripping through flesh, the squeal of the child, a terrible sound that had stayed in his memory for more than a decade!

Who had fired?

Who had shot the poor child?

For a moment Chris’ breathing was laboured inside that hot hotel room in Temple Town, and his fists were clenched tightly, bunching up the sheets on the bed and causing permanent damage to the fabric.

The cool wind filtering in through the wide windows could not cool the heat sizzling in his soul, and thus sweat ran freely down his agonized face.

 And then, as he went through the breathing exercises he had forced himself to learn in prison, and relaxed groups of muscle in his body, the heat and the agony began to cool, leaving only the cold boiling fury, and he forced his mind to go back a final time, way back when he had been but a boy in Little Rock…

O pain… welcome pain…

He remembered Little Rock, his home…

Back then, at eighteen years old, Chris Bawa had already been his own man.

He was a huge youth even then standing well above six feet, and he was fat. He would have been considered ungainly and even ugly, but his good facial looks, his sheer enigmatic presence and charisma made him a most fetching young man.

 Maybe it was due mainly to the reputation that followed him. He was considered a killer even then, maybe justifiably so because he killed for the first time when he was seventeen years old…and his victims had been three deadly gunslingers.

Of course, killing those murderers had not been intentional or premeditated. It had just crept up on him, forced upon him more like, and for him, there had been no turning back but to stare down death in the eyes and make a stand.

The last of three sons of the hardest rancher on the range, growing up in Little Rock had not been easy.

Ted Bawa, Chris’ father, had two older sons, Jamie and Ato, two years separating them. There was an only daughter, Ruth, who came four years after Ato, and finally, there had been Chris who came along much later and was almost six years younger than Ruth.

Ted Bawa had been the hardest father, and he had no soft spot in him; indeed, he had no soft spot for any of his children. He considered them as a natural progression, something that came after marriage and established the power and authority of a man. He had respected and tolerated his two older sons because they made themselves useful on the ranch.

This attitude of Ted was neither cold nor unfeeling; it did not mark him as a beast. Indeed, as far as fatherhood went, he discharged his responsibilities with as much dedication as he did everything else he was passionate about.

Ted Bawa had grown up living on the edge, fighting for every little morsel of food, and saving most of the money he earned either through fair or foul means.

When he came to Little Rock it was still no more than a wild country with no prospects. He had seen the land, fallen in love with it, and claimed much of it. It had not been easy taming it, but he had.

Two hundred acres of good land had been his, and his spirit had fought with the cruel resistance of the land. Man had won in the long run, and by the time little Chris Bawa was born the Circle T ranch was one of the most prosperous in the region.

Little Rock had grown and had attracted other moneyed ranchers, and soon huge stores and business ventures rolled in.

Of course, riff-raff troublemakers had drifted in, sometimes proving almost impossible to dislodge. Ted Bawa and some of the ranchers had come together, thrown money down, and invited the legendary Nick Grant and his two deputies to make their headquarters in Little Rock. That had been the only solution needed, for Nick and his Death Angels, as they were known, had a reputation as long and as colourful as a rainbow.

 They were painfully efficient and heartbreakingly merciless. Troublemakers had learnt in a hurry to avoid Little Rock like a plague. The town had flourished, and in time had become the place people sought refuge; the ordered lifestyle in Little Rock was thus legendary.

The Bawa ranch had known a level of order and discipline before little Chris came along. The cowboys on the ranch learnt in a hurry that big Ted Bawa was not a man to mess around with.

He was fair but firm. His disputes were always settled quickly either with guns or fists, and he wasn’t shy of any.

His immediate family had learnt this lesson well; all of them had experienced it on more than enough times the physical side of Mr Ted Bawa.

His wife, Francine, bore the mark of it. Once a proud woman, her sombre face now reflected that of a tamed spirit. Many times she had experienced the hard edge of her husband’s hand. She had lived in fear of his every step, shivering whenever she saw his shadow.

Their children had been treated the same way. Ted Bawa was never one to spare the rod, which in this case were his hands and that long leather strobe he had personally designed.

 Ruth, of course, had suffered the most because her father had no time for a daughter. To him, daughters were an inconvenience, and a daughter was worse than a curse, an unwanted piece of possession who would grow up, get married and move on, maybe with a chunk of his wealth.

Constantly Ted Bawa had reprimanded his daughter, and rarely came to her rescue when she was abused by others.

Everything in its proper place, that was Ted’s motto.

He loved to see order and discipline and revelled in it. It showed that he was in charge, and ensured that his life continued on an upward trend.

Then Chris came along.

 Ted had known his little son was different from the very first time he set eyes on him. Unlike his three siblings who bore the stamp of their father in every way, the only thing Chris Bawa took was his father’s bulk.

Chris’ face was sculptured along the fine lines of his mother, and even before he was a year old everybody had known he was going to grow up into a most handsome man. Also, unlike his siblings who always strove to win the love of their father, Chris had evidenced quite early in life that it was his mother he preferred.

Then, when he was just about seven years old, his parents had one of their arguments. Of course, it had not been so much an argument since it was a one-sided verbal abuse of Francine by her hard husband.

It had been around that time when the woman occasionally chipped in a word or two, not like the present times when she had learnt to become a deaf-mute, taking her husband’s tirades with calm resignation.

Her little son, Chris, had been holding on to her skirts that day, and instead of a fearful and tearful expression, he had been pouting angrily at his father.

 When the woman could no longer take the humiliation – it had happened in front of about a dozen cowboys and her two older sons – she told her incensed husband that she felt it would have been better if he had waited until they were alone before insulting her so harshly.

As usual Ted Bawa had taken her words as an attack on his thinking capabilities, and he had smashed her with a hard backhand which had settled her hard on the dusty ground.

Little Chris took a bad fall because he was still holding tightly to his mother’s skirts even as she was spiralling out of control, but with a little cry, he got back on his feet, moved forward rapidly, and sank his sharp little teeth into a fleshy spot on his father’s left calf.