Voodootown

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Bambi

If she could do it perfectly, Chuck would live another day.  Bambi stretched her neck and shoulders, shook the tension from her fingers.  The solo was barely fifty seconds long, even with the breaks.  "It's just a sprint," she said to herself.  "You can do this."

She looked at the picture of her brother that she had taped on top of the left bass drum.  She thought of the piece she was working on and then about Keith Moon's "Pictures of Lily" drum kit and how it had been decorated.  That was gross, but Chuck was her brother, so putting a picture of him on the drum was different.  She had put it there for luck, luck that Chuck would need.  She tapped his picture three times with her right drumstick and twice with her left then sat up straight on the stool and felt the snare between her knees.

The metal sides of the drum were warm on her bare legs.  That was her signal that it was time.  She ran through the music in her head one more time, heard Pete Townshend's penny whistle in between Moon's short solos.  There were five of them, only five.  She had practiced each one by itself fifteen times.  That was enough warm up and it was time to put them all together.  If she could make it through without a mistake, without one missed beat, then she would have done everything she could to keep her brother safe for another day.

She knew that Chuck was in Afghanistan, that she couldn't physically help him, but she could store up the luck that he would need to make it through another day.  That had been their deal.  She would send him luck to keep him safe, and he would keep her sane by getting her away from their parents when he got back.

Chuck hadn't called or emailed in two weeks.  She knew he was on a forward operating base and that she'd often had to wait longer than three weeks without hearing from him, so she still thought one solo a day was enough to protect him.  But if she didn't hear from him soon, she'd have to start doing two or three every day.

As the opening music of "Cobwebs and Strange" played in her mind, she checked the toms and cymbals, made sure they hadn't been knocked out of position during her warm up. 

She leaned over, closed her eyes and started.

The first solo was mostly tom toms.  Her hands switched back and forth between them.  By the second section, she felt as if her awareness had moved out from behind her eyes, where it usually was, and had settled somewhere in her arms.

By the third solo, sweat beat down onto the top of the snare drum, almost audible over the growing sound of the cymbals.  She leaned hard into the cymbals on the fourth, yelled along with the music in her head, waited a five count, then slammed the sticks down for the last seconds of the solo.  She worked her way across the toms and drove the last beat down hard.  Her right drum stick cracked on the metal edge of the drum, broke and the tip flipped up in the air.

Eyes still closed, she reached out, two fingers still holding the butt of the stick.  She caught the broken half and leaned forward, rested against the drums.  She was completely still a moment, except for the sweat that dripped from her.  She felt the drums resonate against her, heard the echo of the cymbals quiet down.  She had done it.

Bambi smiled, pulled in a deep breath, turned her head sideways on the sweat-covered snare and opened her eyes.  "Stay safe, big brother."  Inside, she felt herself relax.  The pressure to do it again wouldn't start until the next day, and Chuck might call or send her a note before then.

She threw the broken stick in the corner and turned her stool around to reach into the bag of spare drum sticks.  For years she had wanted to make some kind of holsters to keep spares in.  Maybe her brother would make her some when he got home.  He had joked once about making her a set of sticks with pompons on the ends.  She had punched him in the stomach for that idea.