The Other Mr. Bax
Authors: Rodney Jones
Rodney Jones
The Other Mr. Bax
Rodney Jones
Copyright ©2015 by Rodney Jones
Cover art ©2015 by Rodney Jones
All rights reserved.
Rodney Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as an author of this work.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, storied in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction, names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Kindle edition, May 2015
A very special thanks to:
Gabriela Sadek, Myra Ann Rutledge, Cindy Philips, and Donna Hoffman.
Chapter five – a synchronicity
Chapter eleven – seed of conspiracy
Chapter twelve – the horse before the cart
Chapter fourteen – new morning
Chapter seventeen – my past our past
Chapter eighteen – leaving somewhere
Chapter nineteen – the thinning fog
Chapter twenty-one – blue stone
Chapter twenty-two – how many dreams
Chapter twenty-three – smoke on the water
Chapter twenty-four – the blue hole
Chapter twenty-six – a tear in reality
Chapter twenty-seven – sticky note
Chapter twenty-eight – four flats
Chapter twenty-nine – the world apart
Chapter thirty-one – John and Clinton
Chapter thirty-two – broken message
Chapter thirty-five – coincidental day
Chapter thirty-six – connections
Chapter thirty-seven – a better reality
Chapter thirty-eight – lost days
Chapter thirty-nine – the mojo fairy
Chapter forty-one – above water
Chapter forty-three – the edge
Chapter forty-four – entanglement
Chapter forty-five – little Miró
To the memory of Arlene Ehmka
(*)
MR. BAX
Selma
T
he squeals of girls,
the grunts of boys, the groans of the merry-go-round, squawking teeter-totters, rattling chains, an argument—“I was here first!” “No you weren’t!”—chaos, the beginning of the afternoon recess, fifteen minutes of glorious chaos, September, 25, 1963—a day hardly any different than any other at Selma Elementary.
Gripping a cold, three-quarter inch steel pipe, Roland Bax held tight to the bottom rung of the witch’s hat and ran—the Earth a blur, three feet below. The goal was to get the thing spinning fast enough that he could lift his feet from the ground and fly. Though being the tallest kid in class meant that his were usually the last to leave the ground—a handicap the other kids benignly took advantage of, begging him to continue.
“Faster, Roland, faster!”
He huffed and puffed—“One more, that’s it, one more”—then finally let go and stumbled away.
“Oh, come on, don’t be a sissy!” came a shout from nearby.
Ignoring the challenges and taunts, Roland wandered off across the playground in search of calm, eventually arriving at the opposite end, where two sets of swings patiently grazed like giant stick-figure horses with children swinging from their stirrups. Of the twelve swings, six per set, only one was available, and sitting in the swing to the left of it was Kathy Goodman, a girl he saw nearly every day—her desk being directly behind his. The other girl, the one to the right of the vacant swing, he’d not seen before.
Selma Elementary had twelve classrooms, two for each grade level, one through six, and allowed each level, one at a time, onto the playground. Roland was pretty well acquainted with the faces from the other class, but not this girl’s; he would not have forgotten hers. Framed by a pair of blond pigtails, hers was an exceptionally symmetrical face, painfully sweet, the epitome of innocence. He was instantly infatuated by her.
At first, he maintained a respectable distance—the unknown girl, seemingly off in a world of her own, pumped her swing higher—but then, finding it impossible to keep his eyes from her, he moved closer. The swing to her right remained motionless and empty, as though waiting in reserve for someone else, and so he hesitated. More than anything, he wanted to stare. He wanted to sear her image onto the back of his mind and possess it. He fantasized having the power to stop time, imagined himself standing before her, invisible, where he might satisfy this thing, this urge to look and get closer yet—examine her eyes, her cheeks, her hair, her nose, her lips, and perhaps determine just what it was that compelled him to want this.
She caught him. He turned away—quick and obvious.
His reticent peeks, like smelling but not tasting, only fueled his hunger the more. So again he glanced her way; the swing to her right miraculously had not yet been claimed. It was now or never, he realized. He quickly scraped together enough courage to approach the empty swing and sit. Then, pushing back as far as the chains would allow, he lifted his feet and began pumping. After a couple of self-conscious passes, he turned toward the girl flying by an arm’s length away, swallowed, and, with a simple greeting that felt unnatural and rushed, he split the universe in two. “Hi.”
The little girl threw a glance his way as she swung by.
Did she hear
? She may have returned his greeting, and the surrounding pandemonium interfered. Trusting that he somehow missed her response, he waited until she made another pass, swinging by from behind.
“Are you new here?” he said.
The girl leaned back, her legs stretched out before her, an elfish smile on her upside-down face, pigtails flapping to either side of it. She gave a reply that could easily have meant “What’s it to you?” Roland, however, took it as an affirmative.
“Yeah?”
He pumped his swing to the same height as hers, finding himself as far out of sync as possible, her backside coming as he was going, and vice versa.
“What’s your name?” he asked, as they again scissored past each other.
“Joyce Rubens.”
He began dragging his feet, kicking up sand and dust with each pass. Bringing himself to a stop, he twisted his seat around, positioning himself so as to face her. From the toes of his shoes, he pushed himself back and forth, studying her through casual glances as she flew by—
Joyce Rubens
—back and forth.
The other girl, in the swing at Roland’s right, jumped to the ground and ran off. “Debby. Debby. Wait up!” She chased after a skinny girl with a Bob cut, wearing cat-eye glasses and a pink tunic, the seat of which was stained with dirt.
Joyce stopped pumping, and simply coasted—each pass bringing her closer to Roland. He worried that she might run off as Kathy had—a show of disinterest, annoyance, rejection. But as her swing settled to a stop, she turned to him with a smile. “So… what’s
your
name?”
The following day, Roland headed onto the playground a changed person. He now carried within himself an ounce of hope and a pound of desire. He scanned the faces of the screaming girls holding tight to a spinning merry-go-round, turned toward a group of kids playing tetherball, then, to their left, the swings. And there she was, sandwiched between two other kids. Again, he maintained a shy distance, pacing about, stealing frequent peeks, as Joyce and the girl in the swing to her left giggled and chatted.
Roland had so looked forward to this moment, dreaming of it throughout the morning—high, prodigious, but reasonable dreams. Unfortunately, reality fell unfairly short of that mark, leaving the conspicuous weight of disappointment pressing on his heart.
The day before, following his timid introduction, she spoke to him. She shared with him that her father was an officer in the military, and that she’d been born in Germany while he was stationed there. While fascinated by her exotic origin, and thrilled by the novelty of their intimacy, Roland coaxed her for more. Through exposure to TV and movies, he’d developed the impression that Germany was America’s enemy. How exciting it was that she’d lived in such a foreign and infamous world, that she had actually been born there.
“Does this mean you’re a German?”
“Uh… I don’t remember living there. I was little. I was only two when we moved to Virginia. I guess I’m an American. But I know how to say thank you in German.” She then produced the most beautiful grin he’d ever seen. “Danke.”
Regardless of her tenuous relationship to Germany, the link, however weak, held a substantial mystique for Roland.
The girl in the swing to Joyce’s left began dragging her feet. Avoiding eye contact, Roland approached as nonchalantly as he could manage, then positioned himself so he could claim the empty swing before anyone else. The girl leaned toward Joyce, said something, which he could not distinguish, then ran off giggling. He stepped up to the abandoned swing, lowered his butt onto it, then, after wrestling with the same unwarranted fears that had handicapped him before, he spoke. “Hi.”
Emboldened by her smile, he added, “Do you have a TV?”
She seemed puzzled by the question. It had never occurred to her that there might be people on the planet who did not have a TV sitting in their living room. She didn’t admit as much though, but instead said, “Yeah.” And just as she did, the bell, mounted above the doors at the back of the school, rang louder and longer than ever before.
It was not unexpected. In the past, the sound of the bell would trigger a degree of resignation; fifteen minutes was barely enough time to get settled into a game, or wound up over some roughhousing, which was nearly always cut short of resolution. What Roland now felt was not mere resignation, but something deeper and dispiriting. He watched in frustration as Joyce ran off toward the school’s back entrance, the seat to his right twisting, squeaky, and empty. He rose from his swing and shuffled off toward the teacher holding the door, shouting, “Come on, move your feet!”
A few days later, he arrived at empty swings. His class was rarely let out before Joyce’s. Up to this point it had been him seeking her—him repeating his ritual timidity. She seemed okay with that, leaving Roland with the impression that she actually enjoyed his company.
This
, however, his waiting for her, was an entirely different matter. He sat there doubting she would choose to join him. There were two separate sets of swings, after all—and a large number of other options. She would surely choose one of those. But was he willing to risk the pain of certainty? He considered leaving the swings, standing off to the side somewhere and waiting, but before he had a chance to act, her class spilled out onto the playground.
He spotted her toward the center of her dispersing classmates. She stopped for a moment and looked about, as though searching for a friend. She caught his eye, then stepped purposely in his direction, a smile upon her face—a smile that seemed to convey more than just a good mood. The warmth in her eyes enveloped his anxious heart, melting away his doubts as though the act of smiling represented a commitment. The gravity of the earth weakened, and Roland found himself on an unfamiliar pinnacle from which all else sloped gently downward. Her smile could well have been a vow of friendship, of loyalty, of love. Any question of any significance that may have existed up till then was answered with her smile.
In the days that followed, the two spent their school recesses at the swings—always the swings—sharing stories of their pasts and exploring a variety of topics, in search of common interests. “What’s your favorite song on the radio? Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah?” Roland began singing the opening line; Joyce joined in on the second, but then both slipped into mumbling as their memories of the lyrics were limited.
“I hope I never have to go to Camp Granada,” Joyce said.
“Me too. But I like the song,” Roland said.
“Do you ever watch
The Twilight Zone
?”
“Oh, did you see the one where that weird creature gets on the wing of an airplane?” Roland said.
“Ooo… yeah, that was really, really scary,” Joyce said. “What about the one where the old woman kept getting phone calls in the night, from her dead husband?”
“Shoot… I missed that one.”
“He was buried, but the phone… the wire fell on his grave.” Joyce provided a detailed synopsis of the story while shifting from side to side and back and forth, sometimes twisting around and around again. The swings—there was something magical about them—the other kids and their ruckus seemed to recede, as if he and Joyce were in their own separate universe.
The following winter was especially hard. Due to inclement weather, school recesses were more often than not spent in the classroom. Though on days when the kids
were
allowed out, Roland would invariably seek Joyce’s companionship.
But then, one early-spring day in ‘64, Roland ventured out onto the playground only to conclude, after a long and disappointing search, that Joyce must have stayed home sick. The next day, however, was no different. The weekend passed with Monday arriving cooler than usual; the day, overcast and damp. Again Joyce did not show up. Her absence continued into the week, each day bleaker than the one before. Roland tried to ignore his apprehensions, directing his thoughts elsewhere, but could not find a sufficient distraction. He wandered the playground, feeling strangely as if he was no longer the person he thought he was or had wanted to be. Purpose had abandoned him.
There was a boy in Joyce’s class by the name of John Dawl, who Roland typically avoided, as he was rather apish in build, temperament, and intellect. John, unfortunately, was the only other kid in Joyce’s class he was acquainted with. After wrestling with the fear that asking about Joyce (or any girl, for that matter) was an invitation for ridicule, he caught John alone, leaving the jungle gym.
“Hey, John…”
The kid stopped as Roland approached, and regarded him with curiosity and suspicion.
“You know that girl in your class, Joyce Rubens?”
A smirk appeared on the boy’s oversized face—“Yeah, why? You wanna kiss her?”—which then twisted into a stupid, oversized grin.
“Uh, no.” Roland frowned, shaking his head in adamant denial. “I was just wondering where she’s been, is all.”
The boy spat the words out. “She’s sick or somethin’.” Then wiped the back of his hand across his apish lips.
Another week passed with no sign of Joyce. Unaccustomed to anyone being ill for more than a few days, Roland grew increasingly anxious, while the “sick” scenario grew increasingly unlikely. The truth, as he’d always known, was within reach, but it would take all the nerve he could muster to confront Joyce’s teacher, Mrs. McCutcheon, the other second-grade teacher. For some reason, asking a teacher other than his own for help, with anything, felt like a breach of some unwritten law.