Incubus Dreams   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

There seemed to be a large group of women clustered around the nearest stage, though the stage itself was empty at the moment. But other than that one group of women, the rest of the customers were men. There were three blondes who could have been Ronnie, but when they turned, I realized they were so not Ronnie. The last blond was a man, who either liked the way he looked, or nature had been cruel.

He’d have made a lovely women, but junior high must have been hell for him.

Micah got us both moving down the little steps and into the crowd, a hand on either of our arms. We threaded our way through the happy, mostly drunken crowd, and finally made it all the way across the room to the bar. We paid our cover charge, mostly by pantomime, because the bar was too wide to get close enough to yell in the guy’s ear.

I tried to ask him where Ronnie was, but he just smiled, shook his head, and managed to hold an empty glass up, asking if we wanted a drink. Since I didn’t have a blonde to hold up to ask if he’d seen one of those, I just shook my head, and we moved far enough away from the bar so that we weren’t blocking those that did want a drink.

A man wearing only loose boxers and socks came out of a black-draped area to the side of the bar. That must be the dressing rooms.

We huddled, and I yelled, “Bathroom. I’ll check the bathroom.”

They both nodded, and we began to work our way around the bar toward the women’s bathroom, which had a large piece of cloth suspended from the ceiling, covering the door. Maybe it was to hide the fact that the women’s bathroom had a door, so the men wouldn’t feel cheated.

There was a commode in the middle of the room across from the sink. It was just sitting there, in the middle of the floor, no stall, no nothing. It held water, and seemed to work, but it was just sitting there. There were two stalls against the wall, one had an “out of order” sign. There was also a line. None of the women in there was Ronnie. The walls must have been thicker than they seemed, because I could hear myself, say, “Ronnie, are you in here?”

No answer. I finally turned to a tall brown-haired woman and said, “My friend called me for a ride home. Five feet eight, blond, gray eyes, attractive. Too drunk to talk right.”

The woman shook her head. A woman’s voice from inside the stall yelled, “Hell, that could be almost every blonde we’ve seen tonight.”

I explained that I’d seen the blondes in the bar, and they weren’t Ronnie and asked whether they’d seen her earlier. No one had.