The Other Mr. Bax by Rodney Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    “Indiana.”
    Brenda gave her sister a puzzled look. “Jesus, Joyce, Selma? Nineteen… thirty-four? That Selma?”
    “Sixty-two, I believe it was.”
    Brenda bent down to straighten the flipped up corner of a rug. “That rules out Robert Redford… and Harrison Ford. Sixty-two? Bozo the clown comes to mind.”
    Joyce held onto her dead-pan face.
    Brenda snickered. “Okay, okay, I gave it my best. So, tell me.”
    “Forget it.”
    “What? Hey! Wait a minute. You were the one who came in here with your stupid—”
    “ You didn’t even try.”
    “I did.”
    “Phhh… whatever!”
    “You going to tell me or not?”
    Joyce rolled her eyes and let out a huff. “All right, but wipe that smirk off first.”
    “It won’t come off. Just tell me.”
    “You remember that boy I liked in the second grade?”
    “The one you liked? You mean the one you obsessed about… until The Monkees came along?” Her brows furrowed. “Him?” she said, distorting her face in mock bewilderment. “Does he still wet the bed?”
    “I hate you. I do. You are the most evil, wicked, slimy, hate worthy—”
    “Oh, he does.” Brenda shook her head. “Lots of trips to the laundry mat.”
    Joyce glared at her sister.
    “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” Brenda said. “I’ll play right… really.”
    Joyce gave her sister a bland, apathetic gaze.
    “So it’s him. The kid from elementary?” The smile Brenda had been suppressing was gone from her lips but still evident in her eyes.
    “Yes, and I don’t recall him ever telling me of a bed wetting problem. And if he did, if he had somehow felt compelled to share that with me, I’m absolutely positive I would never have passed it on to you.”
    “Uhh… how’d it happen? How’d you guys manage to recognize each other? That’s been… twenty years now, right? He was just a kid. And you were, well, not quite a kid.”
    Joyce produced a thoughtful, sober expression. “I probably seemed like a goofy school girl.”
    Brenda shrugged. “Goofy, anyhow.”
    Joyce’s shoulders dropped with a sigh.
    “Does he still have it? That suave, whatever it was?”

    “Miss… Miss,” the flight attendant attempted to arouse her attention. Joyce’s gaze remained lost somewhere out the window—in that other world. Mr. Barburg touched her shoulder. She turned. A package of peanuts awaited her in the attendant’s extended hand.

Chapter six – awakening
    R oland peered into the shadowy corners of an abandoned warehouse, lit only by the light of dusk filtering in through its grimy, gray, industrial windows. He could just make out an open door at the far end of the building—the only way out of that cold and lonely place—a hopeful passageway to something familiar.
    “Mr. Bax.”
    He squinted into the corner from where the voice seemed to have come, but no one was there.
    “Mr. Bax.”
    He cracked an eyelid open to a starkly lit room, and pushed his way through the muck separating him from this new and equally unfamiliar world. Grogginess tugged at him as though he was harnessed to the purgatory he had just left.
    “There’s someone here to see you.”
    He turned toward the voice—a vague impression of someone standing at the partly opened door to his right. But then it slipped off to the side; the dream pulled him back, held him in its somnolent vapors, and attempted to incorporate the sketchy data his senses had just collected.
    Something nudged his shoulder.
    “Mr. Bax?”
    Fighting the gravity of sleep, he forced his eyes open and struggled to understand the form moving about at his side. It seemed to change as it came into focus—a woman, dressed in white, with blond hair, cut pageboy style. She had a small chin, thin lips, and squinty, blue, unsmiling eyes. Roland tried to move his arms, but couldn’t.
    “What?” he said.
    “You have visitors. Do you feel up to it?”
    He tugged at the restrains hidden beneath his blanket.
    “Oh,” the nurse said, “you were a bit too