Bugle Boy of Company B(Reveille)

“That’s the ticket,” Little Johhny thought as he carefully reached for the black case resting atop the stack of boxes lining the cellar wall. Gently, he retrieved his pa’s trumpet from the well-worn leather case and confidently headed to Lilly’s basement bedroom.

“Lilly’s lair,” his Da called it.

He knocked and, rudely, opened the bedroom door, giving his sister one last chance to rouse.

A grey glow of embryonic daylight bled through the thin curtains of the tiny basement window.

“Lilly, wake up! It’s time for school,” he shouted.

As suspected, the bed bump did not stir. A tangled mass of auburn hair lay splayed across the flattened pillow.

He approached the motionless mound on the bed. Six feet. Four feet. Two feet. Little Johnny inhaled deeply as he raised his Da’s horn to his mouth. Lips pressed tightly to the silver mouthpiece, he exhaled forcefully through pursed, vibrating lips. His cheeks, like those of a busy chipmunk, bulged as he blew warm air through the horn’s convoluted brass curves. Johnny pressed and released the pistons in rapid succession, for good measure, imagining that he played the bugle at dawn, as his papa had for the troops in the Great War.

Lilly rose from the dead in a flash. Every fibre in her body detonated, triggered by a sudden, unexpected surge of adrenaline. She exploded upright, shrieking, perched like a prehistoric raptor on her mattress, hunched and ready to pounce. Huge, bloodshot eyes popped from her ghostly-pale cheeks. Blind with fear and rage, she strained to focus, searching for the source of her sudden awakening. Sleep lines crossed her face like Celtic Rune Sticks, and a large purple vein pulsed in the middle of her forehead, ready to burst.

Little Johnny, feet glued to the ground, sensed an unfamiliar frisson of fear tingle the back of his scalp.

Lilly’s eyes narrowed and fixed on her prey. The shrieking stopped abruptly. A primal, low-pitched growl rose from the Banshee he had resurrected.

The tingling, nesting at the nape of Little Johnny’s neck, where his short black hairs stood at fearful attention, shot down to the tip of his tailbone, where his terror expressed itself as an undeniable, uncontrollable clenching of his sphincter.

The throaty moans quickly escalated into an ethereal wail as the Irish revenant from his nightmares proclaimed his impending demise.

The Banshee lurched towards him, and instantly, Little Johnny’s paralysis lifted. His small, terrified carcass turned and fled the bedroom like a bat out of hell, with a red-headed ghoul in lethal pursuit. Through the maze of boxes lining the cellar walls, Little Johnny sprinted upstairs.

Little Johnny’s Mam and her friends sat smoking and sipping their coffee around the tiny kitchen table. The ladies were gathered around the radio Missus Dooley had brought over, listening intently to WGM Chicago’s morning show when they heard the commotion. The women were startled and confused when Little Johnny erupted from the basement stairwell in his Brooks Brothers boxers and a bugle, followed by a screeching, spitting blur of white flannel and flaming ginger.

The murderous spitting spirit that raced after poor little Johnny, seeing potential witnesses in the home, quickly vanished, and, in its place, fourteen-year-old Lilly appeared and proceeded to collapse to the linoleum, sobbing and spent, in a trembling heap.

Little Johnny O’Conner lived to bugle another day.

In 1940, at the age of 22, he was asked to sound the wake-up call, as his Da had before him, as an enlisted recruit in the United States Combat Engineers Battalion, also known as… Company B.

D.C.Fortier