Blaze of Glory

CHAPTER 11

“I don’t want to die.”

“Me neither, boy. And I don’t intend on letting anything happen to you. Look at me. If it comes down to choosing who will live or die and the choice is me or you, I promise that you’ll live. So help me now. Where’s that horn of yours?”

“Right here.”

“Okay,” Buckley said, pinching the Maggie in two then sprinkling salt on the pieces. “Here’s the way I see it. That song you played scared them away. I seriously doubt they’re afraid of Rocky seeing how he’s not only fictional, but an actor of some questionable skill as well. So it must be one of the notes. I read somewhere that every piece of glass has a frequency that can shatter it. There used to be these commercials of a woman opera singer who would shatter a glass with her voice. Are you with me?”

Little Rashad nodded, but his eyes gave away confusion. His mouth was pressed into a firm line though as determination attempted to focus his young mind on the task at hand.

“What I’m saying, boy, is that it’s not the song that scared them. It’s one of the notes. So it seems plain to me that all we need to do is figure out which note is the right one then we’re home free. Are you with me now?”

Little Rashad wiped his nose and reached under the table. He opened up the box, pulled out a beat-up brass trumpet, put the mouthpiece in place, cleared the spit valve on the floor and began to play scales.

Buckley had a few ideas himself. Not only would he cauterize his wounds with salt, but he’d drink salt water until he puked. If he could somehow manage to raise the level of sodium in his body, he might even make it out of this alive. This was one case when ingesting too much salt might actually save him.

After only about thirty seconds there was a reaction with the maggie in the jar as it suddenly ceased its attempt to devour the glass and instead, began to race along the bottom trying desperately to escape. As Little Rashad continued up the scales, however, the nasty little beast eventually slowed then resumed its impossible feast.

“Wait a minute. You had it. You were going too fast, though. Let’s do this. Try a note then wait. Then try another one, then wait. See what I’m getting at?”

Little Rashad nodded and began again.

Suddenly, a gut-wrenching scream came from the other side of the apartment, followed by a gurgle of blood-bubbling death the likes Buckley had only heard at a Sergio Argento double-feature. Buckley grabbed the shotgun, rumbled through the living room and down the hall to the bathroom. Instead of a long drawn out scream, the whine of pain came in steam engine gasps. Skidding to a stop, Buckley took in the gory scene.

Samuel straightening up, a knife clenched in his hand dripping blood…Sissy standing beside him in the cramped quarters of the bathroom with an empty bucket in her own trembling hands…Bennie dead in the tub, his throat cut, salt upon his body, a thin trail of smoke drifting up from his open mouth, glassy eyes staring back at a past that fucked him over and a future that would never be.

“Holy Christ! What the hell did you two do to him?”

Samuel stared through Buckley, past him, to a place where murder was common and easy. “Bennie had the maggies in him. Had to kill him before he killed us. Wasn’t a thing I could’ve done for him. That's all there was. That’s all there was.” The large black youth pulled a towel down from the bar above the toilet and began to wipe the blood from his blade. “Wasn’t a Goddamn thing else to do.”

Sissy began to shake. She opened her mouth several times to speak, but nothing happened. Whatever she had to say, her brain was on the other side of it.

“Easy girl. Tell me what went wrong.” Buckley slid beside her. He removed the empty bucket from her trembling grip, placed it on the ground and grasped her hands which disappeared in his own immense right hand like twin white doves in an eclipse. Her skin was alabaster pale.

“I’ll tell you what the fuck happened,” Samuel said. “Boy sat down so we could stop the bleeding that you caused when you broke his nose, then he started shaking and twitching like he needed a fix three days ago.”

Buckley stared at the body. The only place to sit was either on the edge of the old fashioned tub or the toilet.

“Then he sticks his tongue out at us, only it ain’t his tongue but this muthafuckin’ green-skinned maggie what decided to pop its head out at us and wave. Jesus is a one-armed dictator, but I had to go Nazi on his ass, you know? You understand? I had to."

"I understand."

Sissy moaned beside him. Buckley leaned the shotgun against the wall and placed his other arm around her.

At the mention of the green-skin, Buckley finally understood. Bennie had been killed by a swimmer-those nasty things that crept through the pipes only to inject themselves up an unsuspecting ass. He’d seen them at work once, and it hadn’t been pretty.

“Was he sitting on the-”

“Yeah,” Samuel replied, “But it wasn’t like he was using it or nothing. He was just sitting.”

“And there was no salt in the water.”

“Guess not.”

“Damn,” sighed Buckley.

The bucket of salt in the bathroom had only one purpose. When someone used the toilet, they were to add salt to the water so the next person wouldn’t have an uninvited guest. The plan was golden. The only problem was that someone had forgotten to add the salt and this wasn’t one of those things an I’m sorry could fix. It wasn’t as if a guy left the toilet seat up so a young lady got her ass wet on the rim. This was about death, and someone made the gangbanger be that way by forgetting.

“But Sissy sure jumped in with the salt. I held the bastard down as he was jerking like he O-Deed. I tried to cut the damn thing out of him, but never did find it. Hid in his chest somewhere. Might still be there for all I know.”

Buckley glanced at the girl, ready to deliver a what the fuck were you thinking, but stopped as he saw that the fear in her eyes had been married to a deep and lonely shame. If he had to guess who’d forgotten the salt, he’d place his money on Sissy. By the way she stared at Bennie’s dead body, he’d also place his money on the fact she’d never do it again. What was condemnation in a city of the dead, anyway? They all knew they were gonna die. All that remained to make life interesting was the knowledge of when and where.

Buckley squeezed her shoulder tightly as he shook her. “You done good, Sissy. Hear me girl? I said you done good. Things happen and there's little we can ever do about it. Now, go on out and fill up the bucket again, I need to figure out exactly how we’re gonna get rid of this body with ten thousand hungry maggies hanging around outside like Mormons at an all night exorcism.”

She stared for a few more seconds, then pried herself free from Buckley’s steely grip. She grabbed the bucket and stalked away, a new hardness to the set of her jaw.