The Midnight Purple Broomhandle

I

A slow contemplative jazz number was playing out. By the audience, the room was dim, as black as the ocean at night it was; by the stage, the performers were washed with vibrant indigo and blue colours. There were five of them, he saw. Two played the sax and clarinet, one the piano, another the double bass, while the last one was given the drums.

He took a seat in the back, away from wondering eyes, preferring to be a wallflower than a disco ball. He decided to wipe the blood off his hands on the crimson suede sofas. Good thinking, he thought, half his mind happy and another still lingering on what had happened.

Bishop had told him that if it happened it was best to not think about it. “Don’t chase the rabbit,” he had cautioned. But. . .but what if the rabbit chased you?

He didn’t need to close his eyes to see it. The blood, the distinct iron smell of it, the blank stare into nothing the supplier gave, the stench of shit as his innards let loose one final time, the piercing pop of the gunshot—it all rushed before him. Why’d he have to gimme some lip? If he agreed on what they all agreed on, then the supplier would’ve went home to his family and ate dinner and forgot a transaction ever happened this afternoon.

But no!

Why’d you do it? a voice asked. You could’ve talked your way out of it, like you always do. In truth, he had planned to but thought otherwise when he glimpsed the glint of the supplier’s revolver. He panicked. And panic was the cousin of stupid decisions.

“. . .good,” someone was saying. His hoarse voice sounded familiar.

He turned to find Bishop seated across from him. He was a lanky man of thirty-two, narrow of shoulders. His equally narrow face was hidden behind a forest of black facial hair and eyebrows. His grey eyes were sunken and hard to get a proper read of, his nose crooked from a rugby injury. Today he let his hair tumble to his shoulders, but on most occasions he had it tied.

“What did you say?” Toni asked.

“Everything good?” Bishop asked, softly.

He nodded. “Mm-hm,” he added. In this line of work, it was better to be a plastic Hulk Hogan than show any kind of weakness. So, he straightened his back out, raised his shoulders and tried to give a stern face.

“I’ve got no business with liars.”

He sighed, and felt a knot in his throat. “Can we talk. . .?”

“Are we not al—”

“In your office, I mean.”

Bishop’s “office” was a small four-by-four windowless room in the very back of the backstage area. Instead of a table, he had a small square sofa made of leather; instead of a drawer filled with paperwork, he had a bar fridge where he stored some other papers—of the legal kind, of course. It was in here that he managed the jazz club and the thing. But the room’s relative emptiness implied this was anything but the administrative centre of Bishop’s world. He liked it that way; “No one needs a paper trail,” he often said.

Bishop went to the side bar to prepare a drink while Toni sat by a yellow chair made of plastic. Bishop joined Toni with two glasses in hand. “Be careful,” he warned, handing him the brown stuff. “It’s got a jerk to it.”

The boy sipped and immediately winced. He forced it down his throat, feeling as if he swallowed a dragon. “What is this?” he demanded.

Bishop shrugged and sat beside him. “What happened? Why’s there blood on your shirt?”

Blood on my shirt. . .he looked and found splattered blood that had dried on his teal shirt. He hadn’t stopped to notice, to give himself a proper fix—all he did was run, better to put some kilometres between himself and that wretched place, he figured. He wondered how many people noticed and how many of them thought to call the police.

“Is it the supplier?” Bishop was asking.

He nodded, slowly.

Before he could ask some more, there came a knock and an entrance. The man who entered was the biggest Toni had ever seen. His veined arms were thick as tree trunks, his chest wide as a Mini. Ortega, he was called; really odd, given he was a red haired import from Edinburgh whose accent was as thick as you’d expect from a Scotsman. “Bishop,” he started, still catching his breath after seemingly to get here, “. . .have you heard? It’s about. . .it’s about the lad. . .”

He stopped when his emerald eyes met Toni. “He was just about to regale me,” Bishop said, smiling. He turned to the boy. “Go on.”

Toni took a breath and sipped. “I went there,” he started, “and. . .and he was there. I took the coke and he took the money.”

“Did you give it a sniff?”

He nodded. “I did. Only that’s when shit exploded. He cut it with something else—”

“That’s what they normally do,” Ortega pointed out.

“He cut it with something else,” he insisted. “Inositol maybe.” He sipped again. “I told him about it. . .I told him how this wasn’t the usual stuff he used to sell. That it was too weak. He said he had to cut some corners; one of his guys got busted, he said, meaning the product wasn’t going to be the same.”

“Then what did you do?” Bishop asked.

“I told him we have no deal. I told him it was either that or nothing. Then he tried to wise guy me. He told me that his higher ups wouldn’t forget this. He told me he had friends in the Italian Mob, friends in the Mexican cartels. He said he knew guys in the Russian Mafia and guys in the Yakuza. They all owed him shit, he said.” He gulped down the whiskey, feeling his fingertips go numb. “He said he could call them and do a number on me. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Scale of one to ten, do you think they’d hesitate to kill a nobody like yourself, kid?’ I saw him reach for his gun, then I reached for my own.

“I shot him once. Through the cheek. He went down like a dead tree. I ran and I ran. . .until I came here.”

“Where’s the gun?”

It was tucked in his pants. He dug it out and gave it to Bishop. German-made, the gun was finished in the darkest purple, so dark that it looked black in lowlight. Bishop had “gifted” it to him once he became a member of the gang. “It belonged to my father,” he had explained to the boy. The grip was wooden, its barrel long and its trigger positioned behind a square magazine.

“What now?” Toni asked.

Bishop sighed. “Don’t fret. I’ll swing by the cops tomorrow to see what they know.” He stood up and made for his bar fridge. He reached for an old coffee tin and opened it. Inside were rolls and rolls of money. Rolled fifties, rolled hundreds, rolled twenties, Bishop had it all. He threw a roll of fifties at the boy who caught it and gave it a read—two fifty for his troubles. “There’ll be more tomorrow,” the skinny man was saying. Toni wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed that a man’s life was worth two fifty.

“Tomorrow?”

Bishop smiled. “Yes.”

He licked his lips. He wanted to say something but his words were hidden behind his teeth and underneath his tongue. He knew what he wanted to say but. . .

“Is something wrong?”

The supplier’s blank eyes rushed to him again. “I don’t think I can do this,” Toni blurted out.

“Oh,” Bishop said. He saw him glance at Ortega; they were talking with their eyes. What it was they were saying Toni couldn’t be sure. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not a murderer.”

“You know the price of desertion.”

“Come on, Bishop. Please,” he pleaded.

Bishop smiled. “I kid, kid. It was good while it lasted.” He held out a hand for him to shake.

Toni shook it. “Yes,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Bishop turned to the Scotsman. “Ortega will drive you home.”

Ortega got him as far as the pharmacy, where he needed some painkillers for his mother. After, he walked on home, which was three blocks down to the south.  

II

He found his mother in the TV room, fast asleep. The room had the lights switched off; the static playing on the TV being the only producer of light. From the waist down, she was tucked in with a blanket. Natacja, she was named; her once silky hair was now reduced to nothing but silver strands of straw that were never combed. She had lost some weight, too. No more did she have that round face and plump figure. Her face was narrow and marked by prominent cheekbones, while the skin around her eyes was black. Her body was quite literally just skin clinging to nothing but bone. Yes, her illness had done its fair share on her.

“Ma,” he said to his mother, walking toward the TV to give it a whack.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, having been woken by the constant smacking of the TV.

He pointed to the table where he set her medication. “I’ve brought you presents.”  

She took a look inside the bag. “Did you buy the sleeping pill, like I asked?”

“No. . .um, they ran out. But I could quickly run to the one near the park?”

“No, no,” she insisted. “It’s too dark—you’ll go in the morning.”

He smiled, before going to join his mother by the sofa, making a great effort to ensure she wouldn’t see the blood on his shirt. “How was your day?”

“Fantastic.” She pointed to the TV. “I watched nothing all day. How was yours?”

Terrible, he almost said. Instead, he bit his lip and glanced at the TV; the reporter was making mention of heated tensions between two African countries. They were close to war, the scroll bar said. Oddly, the reporter looked like the supplier, with his black moustache as thick as a fat middle finger, and his small blue eyes.

“Mrs Randall came along,” Ma was saying.

“What did she want?”

“She came to see about me. She was not impressed,” she added, for comedic purposes.  

Toni had to chuckle.

“She brought a Tupperware of scones.”

“How’s Carlo?” he found himself asking, almost inattentively. Carlo was Mrs Randall’s only son—he and Toni were of an age and often spent afternoons playing pretend lawman-and-outlaw. Speaking frankly, he knew Carlo more in passing than as a proper friend.

“He’s not going to school,” Ma answered. “Instead, he spends his days messing around with teo bit criminals.” She looked at him with those black eyes of hers. “I don’t want you around that kind. If you see them walking down the road, I want you—”

“To turn and run the other way,” he finished. “I know, Ma.”

She put a bony hand on his cheek. It was chilly. “I raised you well. Now, come help me with this.”

He helped his mother in bed after she had her medication. After, he walked back to the TV room and watched some cartoons to ease his mind.

He fell asleep soon after, having a dreamless night.

He woke up to the sound of chirping birds, some car with the stereo on blast, and the distant wailing of a police siren. He gave himself a long and drawn stretch before going to brush his teeth.

His mother was awake when he came knocking. He helped her sit up in preparation for her meds. She took six tablets and washed them all down with tap water. “The radio,” she said, pointing to a chest that stood on the far side of the room. Set on it was a cell phone and a set of earphones. He plugged them in the phone and turned on the radio. After, he pulled open the curtains. “Thanks,” she said.

“I’ve got to run to the pharmacy,” he remembered.

“Be quick about it—I'm hungry.”

He left promptly, riding his BMX. The pharmacy was quite a distance; in total, it was an eighty minute ride, to-and-from the place. When he arrived, his back was slick with sweat, some beads of which collected on his forehead and his calves were burning. Riding uphill will do that to you, he thought, using a chain to lock his bike about a streetlight.

This pharmacy was larger than the one near his house and it was more peopled, too. It had every kind of medicine: in this aisle, you could find everything you needed in herbal treatments, a few aisles down the way, you could find every brand and type of downer medications, in another they had skin treatments and ointments. Such was the largeness of this place that it took Toni a good hour trying to find the specific sleeping tablets his mother needed.

It took just as long to pay for the stuff; of the four checkout tills, only one was manned, by a guy whose hair was as white as a cloud and his beard as black as a tyre. The snaking queue took its time too, for the man was painfully slow. Many grumbled, many swore and many others vowed to never shop here but none of them actually left the line, as much as he hoped.

To get home, he used the emergency lane instead of the bus lane. Lucky for him the going back home was easier because it was all downhill. But that didn’t stop him from double-timing it; his watch said it was 12:45.

12:45!!!

Surely his mother would be worried plus in crazy need for the sleeping pills. She couldn’t sleep without them and when that happened Natacja often grew irritable. So, he hurried as best and as quick as his legs would allow.

He threw the bike on their lawn and rushed for the door, huffing and puffing. He found the door slightly ajar, the handle dangling. Someone obviously fought their way in. Toni gulped the nervous knot in his throat away and pushed the door aside. Inside, all looked well; there was no sign that there had been a struggle, nor were any of their belongings missing.

Then he heard the whimpering.

The son rushed to his mother’s bedroom and knocked the door out the way. Firstly, he was greeted by the smell of metal which took him back to the alleyway with the supplier. Then, he found his mother still in bed, her sheets a dark crimson. What. . .he walked over to her and knelt beside her bed. “Ma,” he said.

His mother was staring at the ceiling. Her hand felt warm. He checked for a pulse and found a weak one—he never counted but the beats were far between.

“Ma,” he repeated.

Her eyes moved in her son’s direction. Her soul clung to her body by a single thread, he saw. He wanted to cry but no tears would come; what he felt, instead, was a black fury that grew ever darker with each passing second. Who would do this? Why break in their house, take nothing and stab a defenceless lady until she laid on the very limit of life? He could think of no one until—He’ll pay with his own life! If he got the chance, he’d rip Bishop’s arms and legs clean from his body, strangle him with his own intestines, gag his mouth with his own balls and prick. “. . .Bishop. . .” his mother muttered. “. . .he. . .he did this. . .this. . .”

He bowed his head and kissed her hand.

“This is all my fault,” he whispered.

He heard the groaning of wood behind him. Toni spun on his heels to find Bishop standing by the door. “You thought you could leave without a bye-bye?” he asked, jokingly.

“I’ll kill you!!” he shrilled.

Toni lunged for his old handler. He landed his fist on Bishop’s left cheek, the both of them crashing into the wall. Where Bishop was slow in gathering himself, Toni was quick. Bishop was still soothing his cheek when the boy was on him again. Another right landed on his cheek before a left crashed into Bishop’s nose. He heard a satisfying crack as his knuckles turned red. He was ready to launch another barrage of fists when Bishop punched him in the kidney.

The pain shot up his ribcage and it sent him backward, his right knee buckling under him. He clutched at his side; he felt something wet there. He saw the blade in Bishop’s hand, red with blood.

“You. . .you son of. . .” Toni said, clenching his teeth.

He struggled to rise. At first it was his right knee that slept on him. Then, as he lost more and more blood, it was his left knee. The fight had left him and the fight was lost.

Bishop trudged toward him. His placed one hand on the boy’s head while the other gripped the knife. He thrust it right through his windpipe. Toni tried gasping for air but all that came was blood. A spritz of red squirted out of his neck as Bishop jerked the knife out, sending Toni downward on his back.

As the world faded before him, he glimpsed the glint of Bishop’s broomhandle. The source of his fall, he realised.