“That’s what Dad says too. But I know as soon as I get out there and start dancing, they’ll start laughing at me. You know, kind of whispering and all.”
“They laugh about me being short.”
“They do?”
“You bet they do.”
“Does it hurt your feelings?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me mad.”
“Yeah, it makes me mad sometimes too.”
We swung some more.
“What happened to your real mom?”
“Cancer.”
The phone rang inside. She got up and struggled to go get it. I pitched the water over the side of the porch and felt kind of dirty about it.
She was such a nice kid and here I wouldn’t drink out of her glass. It was like I was betraying her or something.
She came back and said, “The social worker’s coming out. I guess I better pick up the house before she gets here.”
“You like her?”
“Not much.”
“How come?” I handed her the glass.
She shrugged beneath her faded dress. “She always asks too many questions.”
“Like me?”
“Oh, you’re all right,” she said. Then: “I saw you.”
“Saw me?”
“Phone’s right by the window.”
“Oh.”
“Throw the water out. Dad says I should be more careful, the way I do the dishes. Mom, she used to get on me all the time too. She’d always wash her own dishes after I washed them. Said they were filthy.” She looked inside. “I better get moving.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.
Throwing the water out.”
She shrugged. “Stuff like that don’t hurt my feelings. It’s mostly stuff about my leg.”
I gave her a little hug. Nothing that’d scare her. Just a quick little hug. Then I kissed the top of her head and went down the steps and drove away.
Eight
“Doc Novotny asked me if I was going to see you today.”
“He did?” I said.
“Uh-huh. Told him you had a haircut scheduled at one.”
“He say anything else?”
“Said he’d been trying to get ahold of you all morning. Said he wanted to talk to you. Said you should stop over to his office at the morgue this afternoon. Said he should be around till about five or so. Said you probably wanted to see him too.”
Just the mention of the morgue filled my nostrils with the stink of death. The rot of flesh. The cold shadowy refrigerated room. I didn’t want to go.
Bill and Phil’s is the barber shop of choice in Black River Falls. All the important people go there. Bill cuts their hair.
Bill has what the nuns used to call aspirations. He’s been serving important people for so long, he’s started thinking of himself as important too. He and his Irma didn’t have any kids-in a town like this, there’s a lot of speculation about whose fault exactly it was-and he inherited a couple of farms, which he promptly sold before the ‘ec recession, so he’s doing pretty well for himself. He’s the conservative of the pair. You can tell that by looking at the photos he’s got up on his barber’s mirror behind the pump chair: Joe McCarthy.
John Foster Dulles. And the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, who wouldn’t let Negro students into an all-white high school. There are also American flag decals, American Legion decals, America First decals.
Phil is the Democrat. His photos run to Jackie Robinson, Fdr, and Adlai
Stevenson. He’s got lots of American flag decals too.
Whenever customers get bored waiting their turn for a chair, they bait one or the other of the barbers.
It helps pass the time. And it’s more fun than radio.
Take today.
Lem Fuller, of Fuller’s Hardware, was reading a Confidential magazine he’d bought at the newsstand before he came over. He said to Phil, the Democrat, “You ever read this magazine?”
“Wanda wouldn’t let me bring that trash into the house,” Phil said, knowing he was being baited.
“Well, here’s sure an interesting piece.”
Here it comes, I thought. Lem was more of a reactionary than Bill, unimaginable as that was.
“That little colored fella? Sammy Davis, Jr.?”
“Uh-huh,” Phil said, snipping away at my hair.
“Says here he dates white women exclusively. Won’t even give a colored girl a tumble. How do you like that?”
“I sleep fine at night,” Phil said, “No matter who Sammy Davis, Jr., is with.”
“You sure don’t want the coloreds messin’ with white gals, do ya, Phil?”
“Oh, heck,” Bill said, snipping away at his own customer. “Phil wouldn’t care if old Sammy took out every white woman in America. Phil’s all for integration, don’t you know. Colored and white mixin’ it up all the time.”
“I never said that,” Bill said. “I just said we should treat ‘em better.”
“Well, Sammy Davis, he’s sure gettin’ treated better, I’d say,” Lem said. “White gals with their tits hangin’ out of their dresses and holdin’ his hand and everything. Them white gals probably don’t even care he’s got one of them glass eyes.”
Phil winked at Lem. “Maybe he’s got somethin’ else that’s glass.”
Lem laughed and said, “You think, Bill? You think he’s got a glass dick?”
“I hear somebody else’s got a glass dick,” Phil said. He named another colored singer. “I hear he’s a queer.”
“Two for the price of one,” Lem said.
“He’s colored and he’s a queer. Lord God a’mighty.” But the whimsical tone stopped suddenly and he put the magazine down and his face hardened in a way I’d never seen before. It was like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, how when you became a pod person your face changed, too, to something not quite human. “I’ll tell you one thing. I got two daughters. Two nice, clean white daughters. I ever catch a buck nigger around either one of my daughters he’s a dead buck nigger, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Aw, hell,” said Bill. “I know some nice colored folks, don’t you, McCain?”
“Sure,” I said. “Lem’s dad, for one.”
“I’m gonna shut your goddamn mouth one of these days, McCain,” Lem said. We’d hated each other for a long time.
“That before or after you burn the cross on my lawn?”
“Now, now, boys,” Bill said.
I guess Lem was doing me a favor.
He’d made me actually want to go to the morgue. Anywhere to get away from him.
I was about two blocks from the morgue when a police motorcycle, a big Indian with a windshield and
