The Other Mr. Bax (21 page)

A fire
?

He searched for a better vantage point, found a large boulder positioned near the edge of yet another dark chasm, climbed up, and carefully rose to his full height. There it was, maybe a quarter-mile away, a campfire. He climbed down, slowly felt his way to the bottom of the gully, testing each step before committing to it, and then worked his way up the opposite side.

A short while later, he was close enough to see flames licking up from a mound of charred wood and glowing embers. And just beyond the dying fire was an old house trailer. Its chalky white aluminum siding seemed to shift one way then another in the flickering light. Its windows made him think of a pair of eyes—dead, dull, and nearly as dark as obsidian. He listened for voices, but heard none, so moved closer… then closer still. With the door of the trailer just yards away, he said, “Hello?”

He stood there, concentrating on the sounds in the air. Other than the chatter of his teeth, the occasional snap from the fire was all he heard.

“Hello,” he repeated.

A folding chair lay collapsed on the ground near the fire, along with a couple of empty beer bottles and a small pile of gnarled branches and twigs. Roland moved a few of the branches to the fire, then again turned toward the trailer door; a plastic jug, which appeared to contain water, sat on the wooden steps below it. Next to that was a metal cup and a plate with food crumbs upon it. “Anybody here?” The desert seemed to hush in response.

Returning to the fire, Roland held his hands out over it, rubbed them together, then rubbed their warmth into his arms. He regarded the trailer—a weather-beaten old thing with a single door about a third of the way from the front end. Painted directly above two, small, curtainless windows—one to either side of the door—was a series of three symbols. The left was the reverse of the right. Pima characters, Roland assumed. Hanging below the trailer’s chassis, about midway along its length, was a pair of rusty hubs, missing their wheels. Stacks of flat stones had been placed at the far ends of the trailer and beneath its double-axle, serving as a foundation.

Keeping an eye on the door, Roland approached the steps, grabbed the jug and the cup, then returned to the fire. He lowered himself to the ground, placed the cup down before him, tipped the jug over it, and took a sip.
Water
. He tipped the cup back and emptied it. Little by little his shivering subsided.

As the fire died down, he moved closer. His mind drifted, skipping from memory to memory as he watched the thin blue flames dance hypnotically across the bed of coals. It came to him that he was lost, but too tired to pursue an explanation—too tired to care. So, he lay down on his side, the glow of embers on his eyelids, and allowed his fatigue to take him.

D
ana rolled to her side,
slid a hand under the blanket, then drew it back as details from the night before began to emerge. Roland did not come home, and she did not have the first clue why.

“Allow,” she whispered.

Letting go of the fear fermenting in the pit of her stomach was a bigger challenge than she was willing to admit. It was her profession, “allowing”—pain management through meditation; she was one of only two certified therapists in the county. The same techniques she taught cancer patients should be effective against her fear, she figured. It didn’t appear so, at the moment, however. She looked up at a portrait, hanging above the nightstand to her right—a pen and ink Roland had made, sixteen years earlier, of his little sister, Kate. The face was that of a little girl, seven, maybe eight. The calmness portrayed on her face was usually contagious, but the eyes now seemed two dimensional and powerless.

Seven years old
… She tried to recall being that age.
Was it easier
?

An image popped into her head, a photo she remembered seeing of herself: long, dark, curly hair, two blue plastic butterfly barrettes holding it back, one above each ear—a thin little girl who had an uneasy sense that the world was much too big to comprehend, and she was its only pawn. She rolled over, closed her eyes, and counted breaths.

After a quick shower and breakfast, Dana climbed the stairs to the spare room on the second floor to check for missing luggage. It was all there however. It was time to do something about it—call someone. She telephoned her sister.

“What’s up?” Mary said.

“Roland didn’t come home last night, and I haven’t heard from him.”

“Oh?”

“He left a note, saying he’d gone for a walk. But then he didn’t come home.”

“Is his car gone?” her sister said.

“No.”

“Huh.”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you ask Ed to call his buddies at the police station and see if they know anything?”

Along with her husband, Ed, Mary and her two boys lived in half of the double-family home that Dana’s mother and her late father had built five-miles east of Akron. Through his work with the Newstead News, Ed had become acquainted with a few members of the Akron Police Department, and a few with the State Police.

“Did you two have another fight or something?”

“No. There’s absolutely no reason for this. I wasn’t even here yesterday.”

“You don’t know where he went?”

“He went for a walk.” The note Roland had left was still lying there by the phone.

“You sure?”

“Would you please just ask him?”

“Of course I will.”

“Mary, he’s never done anything like this.”

“You weren’t fighting?”

“Jesus, no,” Dana huffed. “We don’t fight near as much as you think.”

“Do you want to come over and hang out here for a while?”

She stepped up to the back window overlooking the sunlit backyard—a nice, clear, fall day. “Yeah. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Half-way across the yard, Dana stopped and tipped her face back toward the sky. Heat from the sun soaked into the black T-shirt she wore. For some reason, at that moment, she felt closer to Roland, as if the sun or its warmth had evoked the feeling. Maybe it was the awareness of being in the same continuous space, connected by earth, air, and water, under the same blue sky.
Perhaps a synchronicity
, she thought—a notion which gave rise to an equally hopeful possibility that an answer, a sign, or clue, was right then floating about in the ethers. She closed her eyes and took a series of slow rhythmic breaths. The air carried the sound of a neighbor’s TV, the swish of wheels on pavement, voices in the park, a dog yapping, birds twittering, the hum of a car engine. She stood there, listening, then not listening, letting the sounds recede to the back of her mind. Still, nothing came to her.

By the time she arrived at her sister’s house, Ed had talked to Captain Attler, of the Akron Police, and Sergeant Waterman, a state cop. Aware of nothing that seemed in anyway related to Roland’s disappearance, they promised to call, should anything come to their attention.

Dana sat at the kitchen table with her mom, Mary, and Ed—everyone contributing possible reasons for Roland’s absence, each one hiding a piece of history, an accumulation of opinions, and thinly veiled doubts regarding his integrity. At some point, Ed tried to assure her that she had nothing to worry about. “If anything serious had happened, you would’ve heard something by now.” But she could imagine a number of scenarios in which Roland’s whereabouts might go unnoticed and he’d be unable to reach help. She kept her skepticism to herself, convinced that verbalizing it would only strengthen the possibility.

Gaps in the conversation seemed to correspond to a lack of plausible ideas. Though nothing, which had so far been suggested, satisfied her, the exercise nonetheless acted as a pressure valve, easing her anxiety.

After a stretch of silence, in which everyone’s gaze, one by one, seemed to shift inward, Ed cleared his throat, and said, “I need to finish mowing the front lawn.”

“Alright…” Mary nodded. “I’ve still got a little laundry to do.”

As Dana’s family went back to the chores they were engaged in before her arrival, she wandered out onto the wooden deck overlooking her mother’s backyard. Bordered by woods on three sides, the yard instilled an impression of seclusion. The air was fresh and smelled of autumn and apples; two trees loaded with fruit stood to her right. A variety of other small trees were scattered at random about the lawn. A garden in the far-left corner appeared spent; weeds had taken over. She leaned back into a white plastic chair, closed her eyes and tilted her head back—her face toward the sky. Sunlight penetrated her eyelids with a bright red glow. She imagined tiny bundles of energy soaking through her skin, entering her blood, then darting and dodging past the cells flowing throughout her body. A feeling much like the one she had earlier in her backyard came to her—that sketchy awareness of connectedness.

The glow then dimmed. Dana opened an eye as a dark-gray cloud crept before the sun.

R
oland woke from a dream
in which he was lying on a cracked, sunbaked lakebed—naked but for the burlap sack that had served as his sleeping bag. It was midday. The heat of the sun had turned the gunnysack into a scratchy sauna. The relentless sun, the humidity, and the hard ground had kept him tossing and turning, in search of a tolerable position. Finally, giving up, he pushed through a layer of grogginess, the dream encasing his dream, only to again awaken, this time to an even more aggressive brightness—his eyes rebelling with tears as sweat dripped from his temples. Clamping them shut, his eyelids quivered against the sun. His ears buzzed in his effort to block it out. For a brief moment he had it in his head that he was camping, though he couldn’t remember where, and had overslept. But then the mismatch between this picture and what his waking senses collected startled him, and all at once
nothing
made sense. He sat up and squinted toward the intense light reflecting off the side of a nearby building.

“Good morning,” a deep voice said.

Roland’s attention shifted toward an old man seated on a stool by the door of a drab little trailer. The knees of the man’s faded jeans were ripped through; the hems tattered. Gripping the handle of a wooden spoon, he stirred the contents of a large, blue, clay bowl. His red and black plaid, flannel shirt was open from the neck down, revealing a brick-colored chest sprinkled with twisting, gray hairs. On his head, in sharp contrast to his otherwise ratty wardrobe, sat a cowboy hat—its wide, spotless brim curling up on either side, a perfect crease dividing the top, and a band of tiny, colored glass beads hugging the crown. As he gazed impassively toward Roland, his left hand steadied the bowl in his lap while his right continued stirring.

Confused at having placed himself in such a conspicuous position, Roland returned the old man’s greeting with an awkward casualness. “Uh… good morning.” He recalled arriving the night before, but could not remember why he had come or how he had gotten there. “I didn’t realize”—he grimaced at a stinging pain in his hand—“anyone was here.” He glanced down at the jug lying on the ground to his left. An ant, crawling alongside it, struggled with a crumb of bread it’d found nearby.

“Like Goldilocks, huh?” The man’s lips twisted into the beginning of a smile.

“What?” With each passing moment a new pain came to his attention, further fueling his confusion. “I guess maybe I was lost.”

A thoughtful expression replaced the old man’s smile. “You know where you are now?”

Roland turned to his left, studied the terrain, then his right. “No.”

“You’re still lost then.”

He glanced toward the window, to the left of the door. “You live here?”

The man looked from the bowl in his lap, toward Roland, his focus falling somewhere between the two. He twisted to his left, as though seeking something near the end of the trailer. “Yeah, it’s been my home forever, I reckon.” His eyes panned the landscape as if the life he recalled there might still be found among its bleakness.

“Sorry.” Roland nodded toward the empty jug. “I drank your water.”

The old man shrugged. “A man gets thirsty.”

He suddenly recognized the old man—from a dream he’d recently had. He’d nearly forgotten about it—the man offering help.
Was he
?
Or was he only suggesting
—

“You don’t know if you’re coming or going, do you?”

“I’m sorry… what’d you say?”

“Looks like you had a misunderstanding with the laws of physics.” He grinned. “Stubborn stuff, gravity.” He nodded in Roland’s direction. “I’ve got somethin’ might help though. An old family recipe,” he said, indicating the bowl in his lap.

Roland’s forehead creased as he squinted against the glare of light reflecting off the side of the trailer, then lowered his chin and regarded his pants—dirt, sweat, and dried blood—a small, blood-encrusted tear around his right knee, and another at the hip.

“You might want to get out of those britches for a bit, if you want to do this right.” The old man laid the wooden spoon on the step to his left, then rose from his chair.

“Uh… what?”

“Fine… You want gangrene? It’s up to you.” The man shrugged.

Roland bent forward and examined the gash in his knee. “I am
not
going to get gangrene.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Take my pants off? Here?” Roland twisted his head.

“My nearest neighbor’s three miles away.”

“What is that stuff?” Roland pointed to the bowl.

“Are you not listening? An old family recipe.”

“Oh…”

The old man chuckled. “I’m jus’ fuckin’ with you. It’s a mixture of weeds I found pokin’ up around here. Maroposa, stick leaf root, gumweed buds… drives out the demons.”

“Demons?”

He laughed. “Oh, so, we’re not very religious, are we?”

Roland took a quick peek over his shoulder before bending down to remove his shoes and socks. He couldn’t tell if the old man was watching or not, but was now near the point of not caring. He unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants. His legs were scratched and bruised more than he’d realized. The gash in his knee and the one in his hip were oozing an orange colored mix of puss and blood. He inspected a cut in the palm of his hand and found a pebble, about half the size of a pea, lodged in the wound.

The old man rose from his stool, placed the bowl on it, and disappeared into the trailer. Roland again glanced about to satisfy himself that no one was watching. The man returned, carrying a plastic pail of soapy water, which he placed at Roland’s feet.

“Ya have a name?” he said.

“Roland Bax.” He lifted the wet, soapy sponge from the bucket, then, grimacing from the stinging detergent entering his wounds, began wiping down his legs.

The old man returned to his chair. He removed a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one partway out, then pulled it from the pack, clasped between his lips. He fished a pink disposable lighter from the front pocket of his jeans and lit his cigarette. “You smoke?” he said, exhaling a cloud of white smoke.

“No.”

“They say you shouldn’t.”

“So, what’s
your
name?”

The old guy tipped his head forward—“Mahtociqala Makamnaya”—then reached down for the bowl at his side.

“Uh… Mantaco-igala? What’s that mean?”

“The way you pronounce it, small farting bear who wears a tutu.” The old man took a draw on his cigarette, sucked smoke into his lungs, then exhaled it through his nostrils. “I’m jus fuckin’ with you. Fred Pinetree. That’s my name.”

Roland studied the man’s eyes. “Really?”

“Really. My name’s Fred.”

“Pine-tree?”

“That too weird?”

“No.” Roland dropped the sponge into the pail of, now, rusty-gray water.

“Ready for the main course, the mean stuff?” Fred carried the blue bowl over and set it on the rug. “This may burn some.”

“The soap was no picnic,” Roland said.

Fred took the sponge from the plastic bucket, wrung it out, then dropped it into the bowl, where it floated in a milky-gray liquid with little specs of plant-debris drifting about. As Roland lifted the sponge, the liquid ran into the gash in his hand.

“Jesus!” He quickly transferred it to the other hand.

“No picnic?” Fred said, returning to his stool by the door.

Roland applied the sponge to the scrapes and cuts on his hip, gritting his teeth, dancing from foot to foot. “Do you have any bandages?”

“You loosing blood?”

“Well…” He examined the more significant wounds.

Fred shook his head. “You don’t need bandages. You need air and sun.” He shrugged. “You hungry?”

Roland nodded.

As Fred again disappeared into his trailer, Roland gingerly worked his legs down into his pants, then patted his pockets, checking for the bulge of his wallet and the jingle of his keys. His recall of the day before was still a mush of confusion. He remembered being in his car, stopping along the roadside—a flat?—but couldn’t make the connection between that and leaving the house.
A flat
…
He stared down a dirt lane, which meandered south, then disappeared over the top of a gentle rise. He thought of Joyce—sure she’d be worrying over him. Stepping up to the trailer, he called through a screen door, “Mr. Pinetree?”

“Fred.”

“Fred, do you have a phone?”

“No.”

He turned, gazed off toward the dirt lane, then back to the door. “Do you know Mineral Butte?”

“Yup.”

“Where is it from here?”

“Three, four miles north, I reckon.”

A short while later, Fred appeared at the door with a plate of food in his hand, which he handed to Roland. “Have a seat.” He nodded toward the stool by the door. Once more he went into the trailer, then, returning with his own plate, lowered himself to the steps.

Roland eyed his breakfast—scrambled eggs folded into flatbread. “Smells good.”

“Eggs and bread,” Fred said, his mouth full. “A li’l bit of peppers.”

“It’s good.”

“Cumin… in the bread, that’s what it is, a shake of cumin. My daughter taught me that… after my wife passed. You taste the cumin in there?”

“I wouldn’t have known what it was.” Roland wiped a hand across his chin.

“Been eatin’ this stuff for too long, I reckon.”

“She live nearby, your daughter?”

“Olberg. The Trading Post. That’s her place.”

“I’ve been there. I might’ve met her.”

Shoving his fork into his mouth, Fred nodded.

Roland took a bite from his plate and scanned the horizon. “Where’d you say Mineral Butte was?”

Fred studied Roland as if he may not have understood. Though he did. “Behind us.” He threw a thumb up over his shoulder. “Around back. You’ll see it. Once we’re done here, we can take a walk up that way, if you feel up to it.” He turned back to his meal and chopped off a chunk of bread and eggs with his fork.

“I probably should get going. My wife… She doesn’t know where I am. She’s probably worried about me.”

Nodding, Fred produced a low grunt. “My daughter’ll be out this way later. She’ll give you a lift.” His gaze shifted about as if he were searching his mind. Then pointing his fork toward the plate of food in Roland’s lap, he said, “What were you doing, wandering around out here in the dark?”

Roland looked down at his plate. “What are you talking about?”

“Not the eggs, you.”

“Oh…” Roland nodded. “My car… I had a flat.” His gaze turned inward. “I can’t remember what happened after that.” He tried to arrange bits and pieces from the previous twenty-four hours into a logical sequence—a lot of vague starts and stops and baffling gaps, none of which made sense. “The truth is, I don’t know what’s been…” He shook his head and frowned. “I don’t even know when… How’d I get here?”

“A rough night, huh?”

Roland searched his memory for details. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“You up for a walk?”

He gave Fred a puzzled look.

“It’s easier to think sometimes when you’re distracted from your thoughts. You too sore to walk?”

“Where’d you say we were going?”

The path he and Fred hiked meandered somewhat as it crossed the first few shallow gullies, but generally headed east. After a while, they veered toward the north. Moving at a relaxed pace, Fred questioned Roland about his work, places he’d lived, places he’d visited, how he got there, the weather. On the surface, the questions appeared mundane, but Roland had the feeling Fred was fishing for something, perhaps without his knowing what.

“You have any interest in science… nature?” Fred pointed toward the ground.

“I do, though I’m pretty much a novice,” Roland said. “You know a lot of the plants around here?”

“It’s been my life’s work. My grandfather was the tribal medicine man, and then my father, and now I reckon I am, though I don’t call myself that. It scares people.”