Page 32 of Resist
“You’re called ‘boss’ because youarethe boss. It’s like if you were a doctor, you’d be called doc.” He nodded toward my blazer. “Want me to store that as well?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you.”
Barry opened the door to the bus and climbed aboard.
I followed. “So what you’re essentially saying is I should call you ‘driver’?”
He slumped into his seat and belly-laughed, his mouth so wide the sunlight streaming through the windscreen lit up two gold teeth. “No, you should call me Baz.”
“Just like you should call me Helena.”
“Helena it is then.” Baz reached forward into a basket of Granny Smith apples wedged between the bus’s dashboard and window. “Here … take one for the trip.”
I waved off his kind offer. “No thanks, I had a large breakfast.”
“You sure? Because once Cori and Josh arrive, there won’t be many left.”
“I’ve noticed they have a thing for apples, what’s with that?”
“Dunno.” He put the apple he was going to give me back into the basket. “But it’s a good thing; an apple a day keeps the dentist away.”
Unable to look away from his metallic smile, I thought his statement ironic.
“Might help to prevent them getting one or two of these,” he added, tapping his fingernail against a gold tooth.
I smiled, stepped onto the final step in the bus, and placed my hand on his shoulder, giving it a light squeeze. “You’re a good man, Baz. And if you keep looking after my crew the way you do, I may have to give you a raise.”
“No raise necessary. But Bertha here … Bertha might need one.”
“Bertha?”
He ran his hands lovingly over the giant steering wheel. “That’s her name. Been driving her for Wild Nights since she was a newborn.”
I gathered he was talking about the bus. “For how long?”
“Ten years.”
“Well, anything Bertha needs, Bertha can have.”
“She mentioned she’d like a jacuzzi at some point,” he said with an eyebrow waggle.
“Did she just?”
“But I told her she was dreaming.”
“Wise advice.” I dropped my hand from his shoulder. “But dreaming never hurt anybody.”And I should know!
As I took a seat two rows from the front, Patsy — the revue’s manager — sprung aboard. “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” she hollered, the rasp in her voice near grating my eardrums.
Patsy looked as if she’d just stepped out of an eighties pop music video; aqua blue eyeliner, asymmetrical t-shirt with a lightning strike across it, and a cropped, peroxide, David Bowie hairdo.
“Mornin’, Patsy.”
“Mornin’, Baz.”
“Apple?”
“Not today.”
