The Other Mr. Bax

by Rodney Jones

  He nodded.

  “You need anything else, just holler.” Stepping past him, she headed back toward the kitchen.

  Roland set his clothes on the toilet seat and closed the door. To the left of the door was a small sink with a mirror mounted above it. Watching as his hand came up to his stubbly chin, he stared at the reflection peering back at him as if he was looking into another world and the person gazing back was not him. Turning away, he emptied the pockets of his tattered jeans, dropped a set of keys on top of his clothes, then stepped into the cramped shower and pulled the plastic, fish-covered curtain shut. He looked at the showerhead, two inches below his chin, and pictured Anna rinsing suds from her turned-up face.

  Feeling renewed, he returned to the kitchen. “Do you have something I can cut this tag off with?” He walked in carrying the wad of grimy rags that, minutes before, were his only clothes. “And some place I can toss these?”

  “To your left.” Anna pointed to a small trash can. She got up from the table and pulled open a cabinet drawer by the kitchen sink. Small, metal hand-tools clattered and clinked as she rummaged for a pair of scissors. “Here, turn around.” She clipped the tag from his belt loop. “Still want to go back to my dad’s?”

  A shower and new clothes—it seemed he once again had a foot in the real world, the world he shared with Joyce. He recalled the bare, miserably-hard ground he awakened upon, earlier that day, but then realized he’d be just as uncomfortable spending the night in Anna’s apartment—though for different reasons. “You don’t mind giving me a lift?”

  Anna brought her truck to a stop at the end of the long, dusty lane that served as her father’s driveway. Fred sat in the glow of a fire, about forty-feet away, poking and prodding it with a stick. Anna climbed down from the truck, pushed the door shut with a grating creak and a thud, then went off to join her father. Roland followed, stopping midway as he caught the movement of an airplane or perhaps a satellite high overhead. The sky was filled with stars, impossible numbers, the same as it had always been, the same as it was when, as a young boy, he and his siblings shared a blanket in the backyard, lying on the ground, sending up secret wishes—every single star, almost precisely as they now were.

  Anna said something to her father, speaking too softly for Roland to hear. He was nearly certain it had something to do with him, but let it go. With his back to the fire, he watched the stars, finding Taurus low, near the horizon.

  “Pull up a chair.” Fred pointed toward the trailer where a folded chair leaned near the door. “Nice duds,” he added.

  Roland joined Anna and her father by the fire. No one seemed to have much to say though. Fred shoved his stick into the embers at the base of the fire and twisted it; a flame sprouted from the end. Moments passed, marked only by the snaps and occasional pops from the fire.

  Anna cleared her throat. “I’ve gotta work in the morning.” She stood. “Maybe I’ll stop by later tomorrow. Anything you need?”

  “I’m about to run out of smokes,” Fred said. “A couple steaks would be nice, while you’re at it.”

  “I just brought you enough groceries for a week. There’s some sliced baloney in the fridge. Fry that up.”

  Fred turned to Roland and winked. “Indian steak.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll get you some smokes.” She stood and started toward her truck.

  “Anna,” Roland said.

  She stopped and turned.

  “Thank you.”

  She shrugged, walked away, then climbed into the cab of her truck.

  Half-a-minute later, the red, hazy glow of lighted dust dimmed as the truck disappeared down the lane. Roland listened as the low rumble of its engine faded to nothing, leaving behind, once again, the crackle of the fire and an occasional snap. A small glowing ember landed near his foot. The fire held his gaze while his mind wandered to a camping trip he and his brother, Keith, had once shared—a lake in southern Ohio, a cold, clear October night, three years back. He recalled the extravagant fires they’d built—their warmth enveloping their entire campsite.

  “You have family? Brothers, sisters?” Fred said.

  Roland’s lips parted.

  “Bad question?”

  “I was just thinking about them.”

  Fred’s gaze returned to the pulsating coals of the fire. “They’re here. Your wife too, I believe.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Fred turned and looked at Roland. “Just listening… to the fire, and the desert.”

  “Oh.” Roland listened to the quiet—another pop, another snap—the faint note of a distant train horn. “Here, where?”

  “Your family. Yeah, I think they’re looking for you.”

  “You mean in Phoenix?”

  “No… but maybe. No. Probably not.” Fred turned toward the fire. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, I don’t understand. You said...” Roland stared at Fred. “How do you know this?”

  “We’re not talking about the same wife.” Fred pried up a piece of burning wood with his stick. “Not the woman I told you about, from the dream.”

  “What do you mean it’s not her? I’ve got only one wife.”

  He pushed a branch up over the top of another. A noise came from the east—like laughing. It stopped, but then, a few moments later, returned. A barely audible reply came from somewhere to the north of it. Elf owls… Roland had heard them before while camping up on the butte with Joyce—the tiny owls would sometimes nest in holes dug into saguaro cactuses. He turned to the east. The distinction between the horizon and the sky was barely discernible there. Another call arrived from the direction he was looking.

  Fred peered off past Roland. “East… they’re looking for you in the east.”

  “Okay… what makes you think that?”

  The old man prodded the embers with his stick, shifting chunks of wood this way and that, coxing the dying fire back to life. “You went to the place where your home was?”

  Roland closed his eyes and drew in a breath. “There’s nothing there.” An image of the towering pine tree, black against the stars, came to mind. “I’ve lived there for the past five years. Yeah, in a house. But now there’s nothing there.”

  Fred grunted. “Mmm…”

  “I went to my neighbor’s house. They didn’t remember me.” His eyes followed a spark drifting up from the fire. “I know that was real… my life… what I remember.” The spark hesitated, then died. “There’s nothing else. That’s all.” He turned toward Fred’s flickering face. “If I live somewhere else, then why am I here? And how is it I know the people there, the Browns, I mean?”

  “I don’t know how these things happen, but they do.”

  Roland traced back through recent memories, searching for a particular moment. “The noise in the kitchen…” He described the incident, what he could remember everything from the strange noise, to his ending up at Fred’s place. “I know it’s not real, it’s crazy, but it’s what I remember.” He shook his head. “Houses don’t disappear like that. It’s a dream.”

  “Houses don’t, no, but people do. The same world, but different people… different lives. We ignore these lost souls when they wander into our world with only their crazy stories. Your house didn’t disappear, it never existed. Though I think you did.”

  “Disappeared?” Roland lifted his eyes to the sky, turning the idea over in his mind. “But I’m here.”

  “And no longer there.”

  “What are you talking about? Like alternate realities?”

  He shrugged. “Something like that.”

  Roland tried to imagine two worlds, himself in both, two distinct lives swapping places, and slowly pieced together a workable, however unlikely, scenario. “Really.”

  “I believe so.”

  “So, you think my family’s searching for me? Right now, in a… this—?”

  “This is the only reality I have any certainty of.”

  “But you said you saw Joyce and me… at t
he cactus.”

  Fred nodded. “A dream, like you said.”

  “I don’t get it.” Roland’s gaze drifted inward. “Why would they be looking for me, if I wasn’t here to begin with?”

  “Maybe they’re not looking here… in Arizona, but somewhere else.”

  “You mean looking for a different person? The one… like another me that existed here before me? Like a switch?”

  He nodded. “A switch.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Fred repositioned a charred piece of wood with his stick. Flames began to flick up around it. “My grandfather once told me this story. It happened a long time ago… in his time.” He poked at the embers; a small chunk of wood fell, sending a shower of sparks rising toward the sky. “A woman vanished.” Fred pried another piece back. “Her husband, a respected man and a member of the council, claimed he’d witnessed her disappearance. He swore she vanished, like magic, right before his eyes. The same woman was later discovered stumbling around the village, hysterical, babbling, dressed in strange clothes… this, while her husband was giving his report to the chief. Everyone was convinced the man and his wife were crazy. She claimed her lodge had vanished, while also claiming her husband was not the council member they all knew she’d married, but a man who everyone knew had been dead for years. She was convinced the man had only just disappeared, along with her lodge. My grandfather, though, was not among those who thought they were crazy.”

  The fire, mostly a pile of dying embers, produced a dull pop.

  “That really happened?”

  “I was told it did.”

  Chapter thirty-five – coincidental day

  Tiny sunlit particles floated within a shaft of light angling down from the window above. Roland pushed himself up from the sagging couch, a few inches short of his height, dropped his feet to the wolf rug, then sat there trying to ignore a dull pain in his lower back. He stretched, yawned, then reached back and rubbed the sore spot. Fred stood over the stove in the next room, pouring a yellowish mixture into a hissing, hot skillet. The smell of cooking onions filled the room.

  “Sleep okay?”

  “Better than last night.” Roland again yawned, then stepped up to the screened door and squinted into the brightness beyond it. He turned and watched as Fred turned scrambled eggs in the skillet. “Need help with anything?”

  “Nah... I make this stuff every morning.” Fred scooped a pile of scrambled egg onto a piece of flat bread lying on a plate, then handed that to Roland. “There’s salsa in the fridge.”

  Roland grabbed the salsa, then slid onto the bench where he’d sat the night before. Fred scooted in on the opposite side. “Same as yesterday,” he said.

  Forking a chunk of bread and eggs into his mouth, Roland nodded his approval. He glanced toward the stove and scanned the counter. The aroma of coffee was there in his mind, but then vanished upon the realization there was no coffee. He pictured the coffee maker on the countertop at home—a morning ritual, he and Joyce and coffee. He imagined her in a T-shirt, no make-up, no bra, yet a little sleepy-eyed, her unbrushed hair held back by her ears.

  “You paint?” Fred looked at him from across the table, chewing on his breakfast.

  “Yeah…”

  “Whaddaya paint?”

  Roland struggled to describe his work—abstract ideas, which were mostly intuitive. Fred showed a polite interest, though the only art he’d ever owned, as he casually pointed out, was the portrait of Elvis he had hanging in the front room. “Bought it thirty years ago… five dollars. I can’t recall the painter’s name. The guy had his pictures set up in a parking lot in Phoenix, across the street from Harold’s Hamburgers… where it used to be, anyhow. What’s in there now?”

  With the last crumbs of food forked from his plate, Roland scooted out from the bench and started on the dishes.

  “I’m goin’ out for a smoke.” Fred nodded toward the door.

  A minute later, cigarette smoke drifted in through the screen door. Roland wiped down Fred’s old propane stove—five bulbous knobs along the front, no extras, not even a clock. He scanned the walls of the kitchen. “Fred, do you have a clock?”

  “It’s about eleven.”

  “You don’t have a clock?”

  “I never needed one ‘til now.”

  Roland set the last fork on the drain board, dried his hands, then went to the door. Fred was there sitting on the stool to the right of the steps.

  “You think Anna would mind if I used her phone?”

  “Now that’d be a stick in the butt, wouldn’t it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She won’t mind.”

  “Stick in the butt?”

  “Well, a stick in something, right?”

  “Yeah, a stick in the butt.” Roland pushed the door open. The spring popped and twanged. He took a seat on the steps, and squinted into the bright, late-morning light. “How far is it to her place?”

  “Little over five miles. You thinkin’ of walkin’?”

  “It’d take me two hours, I think. Maybe I can get a ride back with her when she comes out later. She was planning on coming, didn’t she say?”

  Fred nodded. “Ain’t a bad day for a walk.”

  Roland gazed out over the desert, rippling with heat. A flock of vultures circled high in the distance, gliding, rising, falling, as if playing. “That story you told me last night… What became of the woman? Do you know?”

  Fred took a final drag from his cigarette, smoked nearly to the filter, and flicked the butt away. Smoke leaked from his nostrils and mouth as he spoke. “She was cast out by her husband and family… divorced, you might say. My grandfather gave her shelter and eventually took her as his wife. She was my grandmother… a quiet woman, as I recall. I knew her for only a short time, but I never felt she was crazy.”

  The sun was high, a little beyond its zenith when Roland tied the arms of his shirt around his waist and started down the dusty lane leading to the road to Olberg. As he reached the top of the first rise, he turned and looked back. The trailer appeared small against a landscape spotted with bushes, cactuses, and gnarly little trees. Mineral Butte was visible in the distance to the right of it.

  The lane, for the most part, ran parallel to a deep gully, a few yards to the left of it. At one point the two drifted close together, and there, where they were closest, a series of rocks, nearly as regular as steps, descended to the floor of the gully. Roland stopped for a moment and gazed off toward the monotony of desert, divided by the set of tire tracks he’d been following, then glanced down into the ravine, where a lizard scampered from the shade of a rock to the shade of another. Roland climbed down, stepping from rock to rock, to a sandy path at the bottom of the ravine. A roadrunner darted from behind a small boulder, paused, then sped down the path ahead of him. The bird again hesitated, turned its head to the side, then scurried on some ways further. A movement near Roland’s foot caught his eye. A large, shiny, black beetle waddled over an obstacle course of pebbles, and just inches from it was a speck of blue. Roland stooped and brushed sand away, revealing a stone roughly the size and shape of a date. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. Half of it was covered in a matrix of dark-gray, sprinkled with tiny flecks of rust, the other half was the color of turquoise. He peered down toward the spot where he’d found it, stirred the soil with the toe of his shoe, but saw only the common red and pink sandstone.

  Perhaps a flood had carried the stone there from a vein farther up the gully. How long had it been lying there waiting for someone to claim it? He studied the area again, and then, keeping an eye out for other treasures, continued his hike.

  The ravine widened before coming to a large culvert passing beneath the road that would take him into Olberg. Roland climbed in to enjoy its shade before continuing down the hot pavement above. Leaning against the corrugated metal wall of the culvert—its cool ribs pressing into his back—he shoved a hand into his pocket and rubbed the surface of the stone
he’d just found. As a boy, his father had given him a binder to keep postage stamps in—a hobby. Some years later he began collecting coins, and in his late-teens, rock and roll records, then, more recently, art—always collecting something, accumulating more and more. As he rested in the culvert, a strange thought crossed his mind. What if it was all gone? What if the stone was his only possession? He lifted the rock from his pocket, turned it one way then another, rubbed its smooth blue surface, then dropped it back in. “No,” he whispered.

  Continuing up the road, the desert ahead appeared no different than that behind him. Mineral Butte was about four miles off to the right. Ponds of glistening blue air stretched across the road ahead, quivering as though hiding behind a thin sheet of running water. Two cars passed—one from either direction. He turned at the sound of a third vehicle approaching from behind. An old Chevy pickup truck pulled up alongside him. The driver leaned toward the open passenger window. “Need a lift?” He was clean-shaven, thirtyish, and dark-skinned, his black hair trimmed so neatly it appeared fake.

  “Thank you.”

  The man leaned farther and opened the door. The thumb-button below its handle was missing—a dark oval hole attested to where it once was. Roland climbed in, pulled the door shut with a firm tug, but it didn’t latch. The truck accelerated. With a couple hesitant jerks, the driver pushed the long gearshift lever forward.

  “Flip the little gear on the side.” He gestured toward the door.

  Roland looked down at the side panel, expecting to find some unusual, exposed gear mechanism.

  “The latch.” He pulled the stick shift down, right, bumped Roland’s knee, then pulled it down again. “Where it latches… the edge of the door.”

  “Oh.” Roland felt for the mechanism the man was referring to, flipped it to its open position, then pulled the door shut. Slam!

  “Where’ you headed?” the driver said.

  “Just a little way up the road… The Trading Post.”

  The driver glanced at Roland, then turned back to the road. “Long walk for a souvenir.”