Cal got.
Galvanized, he shot across the room, in a cowboy shamble, two of him, one in the mirror faster and brighter than the real one, yanking the piano lid up to show all that yellow dentistry just aching to have its music pulled.
'Listen to this, son. You ever hear anything, ever, ever in life, ever hear anything like this?'
'No, Cal,' I said, waiting in the chair with my head half-ruined. 'No,' I said, honestly, 'I never did.'
'My God,' cried the old man coming out of the morgue a final time inside my head, 'who gave him that awful haircut?'
I saw the guilty party standing in the window of his barber shop, gazing out at the fog, looking like one of those people in empty rooms or cafes or on street corners in paintings by Hopper.
Cal.
I had to force myself to pull open the front door and step in, gingerly, looking down.
There were curlicues of brown, black, and gray hair all over the place.
'Hey,' I said, with false joviality. 'Looks like you had a great day!'
'You know,' said Cal, looking out the window, 'that hair has been there five, six weeks. Ain't nobody in their right mind coming in that door save tramps, which isn't you, or fools, which isn't you, or bald men, which isn't you, asking directions to the madhouse, and poor people, which is you, so go sit down in the chair and prepare to be electrocuted, the electric clippers have been on the fritz for two months and I ain't had the cash to get the goddamn things fixed. Sit.'
Obedient to my executioner, I bounded forward and sat and stared at the hair-strews on the floor, symbols of a silent past that must have meant something, but said nothing. Even looked at sidewise, I could figure no strange shapes or imminent forecasts.
At last Cal turned and waded across that forlorn porcelain and forelock sea to let his hands pick up, all by themselves, the comb and scissors. He hesitated behind me, like the axeman sad to have to chop some young king's head.
He asked how long I wanted it, or how ruined I wanted it, take your choice, but I was busy staring across the glaring white Arctic emptiness of the shop at…
Cal's piano.
For the first time in fifteen years it was covered. Its gray-yellow Oriental smile was invisible under a white mortuary bedsheet.
'Cal.' My eyes were on the sheet. I had forgotten, for a moment, the old Venice ticket office man lying cold with a terrible haircut. 'Cal,' I said, 'how come you're not maple leafing the old rag?'
Cal let his scissors snip-snip and then snip-snip around my neck.
'Cal?' I said.
'Something wrong?' I said.
'When does the dying stop?' said Cal, a long way off.
And now the bumblebee buzzed and stung my ears and made the old chill ripple down my spine, and then Cal got busy hacking away with his dull scissors as if he were harvesting a wild wheat crop, cursing under his breath.
I smelled a faint whiskey odor, but kept my eyes straight ahead.
'Cal?' I said.
'Shoot. No, shit is what I mean.'
He threw the scissors, comb, and dead silver bumblebee on the shelf and shambled across the ocean of old hair to yank the sheet off the piano, which grinned like a big mindless shape as he sat down and laid his two hands like limp paintbrushes on the keys, ready to paint God knows what.
What came out was like broken teeth in a mashed jaw.
'Damn. Hell. Crud. I used to do it, used to play the living guts outa that thing Scott taught me, old Scott… Scott.'
His voice died.
He had glanced up at the wall above the piano. He glanced away when he saw me looking, but it was too late.
For the first time in twenty years, that picture of Scott Joplin was gone.
I lurched forward in the chair, my mouth dropped wide.
At which time Cal forced himself to hurl the sheet back over the smile and return, a mourner at his own wake, to stand behind my chair and pick up the torture instruments again.
'Scott Joplin ninety-seven, Cal the barber zero,' he said, describing a lost game.
He ran his trembling fingers over my head.
'Jesus, look what I done to you. My God, that's a lousy cut, and I'm not even halfway in. I ought to pay you for all the years you let me make you run around looking like an Airedale with mange. On top of which, let me tell you what I did to a customer three days ago. It's terrible. Maybe I made the poor son-of-a-bitch look so bad someone killed him to put him out of his misery!'
I lurched forward again, but Cal put me gently back.
'I should give Novocain, but I don't. About this old guy. Listen!'
'I'm listening, Cal,' I said, for that was why I was here.
'Sat right where you are sitting now,' said Cal. 'Sat right there, just like you're sitting, looked in the mirror, and said, shoot the works. That's what he said. Cal, shoot the works. Biggest night of my life, he said. Myron's Ballroom, downtown L.A. Haven't been there in years. Called, said I'd won the grand prize, he said. For what? I said. Most important old resident of Venice, they said. Why's that a cause for celebration? Shut up and primp up, they said. So here I am, Cal. Short all around but don't billiard ball me. And some of that Tiger Tonic, shake it on me. I cut until hell wouldn't have it. Old man must've saved up two years of high, snow mountain hair. Drenched him with tonic until the fleas fled. Sent him out happy, leaving his last two bucks behind, Iwouldn't wonder. Sitting right where you are.
'And now he's dead,' Cal added.
'Dead!' I almost shouted.
'Somebody found him in a lion cage submerged under the canal waters.
Dead.'
'Somebody,' I said. But didn't add, me!
'I figure the old man never had any champagne before or it was a long time back, got loaded, fell in. Cal, he said, the works. It just goes to show you, right? Could be me or you in that canal, just as likely, and now, hot damn and old breakfasts, he's alone forever. Don't it make you think? Hey, now, son.
You don't look too well. I talk too much, right?'
'Did he say who was going to pick him up and how and when and why?' I said.
'Nothing fancy, far as I could tell. Someone coming on the big Venice Short Line train, pick him up, take him right down to Myron's Ballroom door. You ever get on the train Saturday nights around one? Old ladies and old gents piling out of Myron's in their mothball furs and green tuxedos, smelling of Ben Hur perfume and nickel panatelas, glad they didn't break a leg on the dance floor, bald heads sweating, mascara running, and the fox furs starting to spoil? I went once, and looked around and got out. I figured the streetcar might stop at Rose Lawn Cemetery, on the way to the sea, and half those folks get out. No, thanks. I talk too much, don't I? Just tell me if I do…
'Anyways,' he went on at last, 'he's dead and gone, and the awful thing is he'll be lying in the grave the next one thousand years remembering who in hell gave him his last awful haircut, and the answer is me.
'So it's been one of them weeks. People with bad haircuts disappear, wind up drowned, and at long last I know damn well my hands are no good for nothing, and…'
'You don't know who it was picked the old man up and took him to that dance?'
'Who knows? Who cares? Old man said whoever it was told him to meet him down front of the
