8
The barbershop was open. I stood at the window looking in. I knew all five of the customers as well as I knew the two barbers. They were looking right back at me. Usually one or two of them would have waved and smiled. There was none of that today. I was a pariah. There was another shop a block down. I thought about going there, and then I thought the hell with it. I’d been coming here since my boyhood, but the original barbers had retired.
By the time I crossed the threshold, the men in the customer chairs had made a point of reading. The two men under the striped covers got busy talking to Mike and Earle, their respective barbers. The Amish up the highway called it shunning, after someone went against the will of the tribe.
I sat down and lighted a cigarette and picked up one of those adventure-type magazines Kenny wrote for. “Forced Into Prostitution by Nazi Commandos!” seemed the most promising, at least judging by the illustration of an Amazonian beauty whose clothes were in tatters. Fortunately for her, she had a Bowie knife in her teeth and an Army. 45 in her hand. She also had an all-American towhead in similarly tattered khaki clothes pointing a submachine gun at the Nazi commandos pouring over a nearby hill.
Usually there was conversation. The snip of scissors, the hum of the electric razor, the squeak of the barber chair as it turned-these were the only sounds. The few things I could enjoy now were the familiar smell of the shop itself, the hot shaving soap, the talc, and the aftershave.
The door opened. When I looked up, I saw Ralph DePaul walk in. He was the retired fire chief, a gray-haired man in good condition who always looked ready for a golf game. After giving up the chief’s job, he ran for mayor. Local politics leaned Republican, but moderate Republican. DePaul was a Barry Goldwater man and a John Birch Society member. Some people were frightened by his thunderous speeches; others, the majority, just thought he was kind of silly, especially when he started in on his “Communists Among Us” speech.
“Well, McCain, I suppose you’re proud of yourself.” There were no empty chairs he could sit in. This served his purpose. He preferred to loom over me. This wasn’t our first run-in. As a Republican who thought Ike was too soft, he’d tangled with me many times before.
“Free country, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Yes, and you know who made it free? The men who fought the wars. If I had a son over there and I saw you and the rest of that leftwing trash running our country down, you know what I’d do?”
“Give one of your moronic speeches?”
“Hey,” Earle the barber said. “I cut hair here. I don’t referee fights.”
“Well, I don’t blame Ralph one bit,” said Larry Bellamy, a vice president at the town’s largest bank. “I was in Korea. I fought and risked my life. Why shouldn’t these kids do the same?”
“And anyway, Lou Bennett might be alive if he hadn’t done the right thing and tried to stop that meeting. That goddamn loudmouth punk Cliffie’s got in jail-I hear you’re his lawyer.” Byron Davies was the city auditor. Because the barbershop was close to the courthouse and city hall, it was a gathering place for those who imagined themselves to be in power. Reputations were made and broken here. And newcomers had to pass the inspection of these men or they’d have serious problems getting set up for business.
Earle finished with his customer. The man stood up, extracted his wallet from his back pocket, and paid Earle, flourishing a final bill and saying, “That’s a little extra for you.” He intoned this as if he was handing him a pirate’s treasure. All he got for his trouble was a little nod of the head from Earle. Everybody tipped the barbers here. It wasn’t anything CBS was going to cover. As the next man moved up to the empty chair, Earle snapped the barber cape a couple of times to get rid of the hair and then hitched up his pants, ready for his next customer.
DePaul was forced to sit next to me. He picked up the Des Moines Register, the state paper the right always criticized as leftwing. He started going through it and said, “They only covered your little rally on page three, McCain. I guess you didn’t get the publicity you wanted.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I just went on with my reading about large-breasted Nazi slaves who were being saved by the sweaty murder-crazed Yank who would soon enough be sampling them all.
“Look at this one, this picture of Berkeley. It’s sickening. These are supposed to be college students. But all they do is demonstrate and complain. They got rid of the loyalty oath at that university and they’re still not satisfied.”
He was baiting me, and everybody in the shop knew it. Even the barbers showed the tension. Mike frowned and Earle sighed. The students had succeeded in getting rid of the loyalty oath that dated back to the days of Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Swearing loyalty to the country as part of your admissions process was decidedly Un-American in itself.
I stopped reading. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to start in on him with politics. I was outnumbered.
Everybody sat in silence until the phone rang. Earle and Mike had trained us to be quiet while they were taking calls. In their past lives they’d been prison guards. The only exceptions were the Saturday afternoons when the Hawkeyes played football. They played the radio so loud, it didn’t matter if you kept talking. It also didn’t matter who called. The radio was never turned down. “Who’s this? The Pope who?”
The call was for DePaul. “I suppose my wife wants me to get something from the store for her.” He made a sour face and shook his head. He apparently hadn’t signed on for errands.
He took the phone from Earle and said, “Hello.” His expression changed from annoyance to wariness. He glanced around as if he was afraid one of us knew what the call was about. His fingers gripped the receiver so tightly, they were bloodless. “Uh, huh. Well, we’ll have to talk about this later. Obviously.” His blue eyes still continued to flick from face to face. Only a couple of us were interested. The rest read. The barbers barbered. Then he said, his voice tight and angry, “I said later. Now good-bye.” He didn’t hand the receiver to Earle. He walked it back to the phone himself. You could see him overcoming the urge to slam the receiver down so hard it would smash the phone into chunks of black. Then he turned and said to all of us, “Damned insurance men. They won’t leave you alone anywhere.”
His line didn’t work for me, but it did for Mike the barber and the man in his chair. They started on a marathon of insurance-man horror stories. A few of them even sounded true.
When my turn came to be shorn, I spent a good share of my time in the chair watching DePaul. The gaze was distracted now, the lips puckered in pique. At least he wasn’t in his judgmental mood. He was manly enough, I suppose, but there was a scold in him too, the maiden aunt who thought all little boys were naughty and all little girls were fools to associate with anybody who had a penis.
Then he surprised me. He slapped down the magazine he’d been holding and not reading and stood up. “Earle, I guess I’ll have to take a rain check. I just remembered an appointment I have in fifteen minutes.”
“Hell, Ralph, that’s too bad. Stop back. Things’ll probably slow down in an hour or so.”
He said good-bye to everybody but me and then left. His sudden exit had made the call he’d gotten much more mysterious.
9
The heat would likely kill somebody today. An elderly person probably, one of those who get overlooked by everybody and are found dead a few days later by the mailman when the smell gets bad. By the time I was halfway back to my ragtop, my white short-sleeved shirt was soaked. I walked under awnings as often as I could. And that was how I almost literally bumped into William Hughes. He came fast out of Flanagan’s Pharmacy just as I was crossing past the entrance. He jerked to a stop and said, “Sorry.”
I was moving pretty fast myself and probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t said anything. William- never “Will”-Hughes was a tall, thin, gray-haired man in his late fifties. His handsome dark face is dominated by brown eyes that don’t merely look at you. They judge you. The tautness of the gaze extends to the tautness of the entire body, as if he’s always prepared for the worst. It’s a defensive posture. Right now he showed no sadness or
