Boy's Life (22 page)

     We made a few circles, descending one after the other like graceful leaves. The ground was a jolt under my heels, and I kept running as my wings and body adjusted again to earth’s grasp. Then we were all on the ground, running around the clearing with our dogs, first pushing the wind and then being pushed by it. Our wings folded up and returned to their hidden sheaths in our hollow shoulder blades; the dogs’ wings slid down into the flesh and sealed over with a rippling of hair—white, brown, red, brown and white spotted. Our torn shirts mended themselves, and no mother would ever know what had burst through them. We were drenched with sweat, our faces and arms shining with it, and as we became earthbound again we ceased our running and dropped exhausted to the grass.

     The dogs were upon us at once, licking our faces. Our ritual flight had ended for another summer.

     We sat around for a while, talking once our hearts and minds had settled down. We talked about all the things we were going to do this summer; there were so many things, the days wouldn’t be long enough. But we all decided we wanted to go camping, and that was for sure.

     Then it was time to go home. “See you guys!” Ben said as he wheeled away on his bike with Tumper in pursuit. “Catch ya later!” Davy Ray told us as he departed on his bike and Buddy sprinted after a cottontail rabbit. “See you later!” Johnny said as he pedaled away with faithful Chief loping at his side. I waved. “Alligator!” I said.

     I walked home, pausing to throw a few pine cones for Rebel to chase. He barked furiously at a snake hole he’d discovered, but I pulled him away from it before whatever was inside came sliding out. It was a mighty big snake hole.

     At home, Mom looked at me aghast when I strolled into the kitchen. “You’re drippin’ wet!” she said. “What’ve you been
doin’?
”

     I shrugged as I reached for the pitcher of cold lemonade.

     “Nothin’ much,” I answered.

2
Barbershop Talk

“LITTLE BIT OFF THE TOP AND THIN THE SIDES OUT, TOM?”

     “That’ll do me, I believe.”

     “You got it, my friend.”

     This was how Mr. Perry Dollar, the owner of Dollar’s Barbershop on Merchants Street, began every haircut. It never mattered how a fellow requested his hair cut; he always walked out with a little bit off the top and the sides thinned out. Of course, we’re talking about a real haircut here, none of that “hair-styling” stuff. For one dollar and fifty cents, you got the treatment: wrapped to the neck under a crisp blue-striped barber towel, scissors-trimmed and clippers-raked, hot lather applied to the back of your neck and the fine hairs there scraped off with a freshly stropped straight razor, followed by a liberal dousing from one of the mystery bottles of Wildroot, Vitalis, or Brylcreem hair dressings. I say “mystery bottles” because every time I got my hair cut at Mr. Dollar’s, those bottles, on a shelf above the barber chair, were exactly half full and never seemed to go up or down an inch. When the haircutting was done—“the scalping” was much the better term for it—and Mr. Dollar unpinned the barber towel from around your neck and swept the dead hairs out of your collar with a brush that felt like whiskers from a boar’s snout, the adults got to reach into the peanut-brittle jar and the kids got their choice of lime, lemon, grape, or cherry suckers.

     “Hot day,” Mr. Dollar commented as he lifted up Dad’s hair with a comb and snipped the ends with scissors.

     “Sure is.”

     “Known it hotter, though. One hundred and three degrees this day in 1936.”

     “One hundred and
four
degrees this day in 1927!” said Mr. Owen Cathcoate, an aged specimen who was playing checkers with Mr. Gabriel “Jazzman” Jackson at the back of the barbershop, where the overhead fan kept the place the coolest. Mr. Cathcoate’s wrinkled face was dotted with liver spots, like a map of some strange and foreign country. He had narrow-slit eyes and long-fingered hands, and his scraggly yellowish-white hair hung down around his shoulders, which must have been torture for Mr. Dollar to have to look at. Mr. Jackson was a big-bellied black man with iron-gray hair and a small, neat mustache, and he shined and repaired shoes for people who brought them in, his workshop being at the rear of Mr. Dollar’s place. Mr. Jackson got his nickname because, as Dad told me, he could “blow butterflies and hornets out of that clarinet of his.” The clarinet, in a well-seasoned black case, was never far from Mr. Jackson’s side.

     “Be a whole lot hotter ’fore July gets here,” Mr. Jackson said as he pondered the pieces. He started to make a move and then thought better of it. “Owen, I do believe you’re tryin’ to put me between a rock and a hard place, ain’t you?”

     “I wouldn’t dream of such a thing, Mr. Jackson.”

     “Oh, you sly old fox you!” the Jazzman said when he saw the simple but deadly trap Mr. Cathcoate had laid open for him. “Gonna skin me up and serve me for dinner, huh? Well, I’d be mighty tough to chew on!” He made a move that for the moment got him out of danger.

     Mr. Dollar was short and stocky and had a face like a contented bulldog. His gray eyebrows stuck out everywhichway like wild weeds, and his hair was shaved to the sandy scalp. He could make the neatest parts of anybody I’ve ever seen. He knew all there was to know about the history of Zephyr. Because he had been the only barber in town for over twenty years, he had his finger on the roaring pulse of gossip and he could tell you everything that was going on, if you had an afternoon to sit and listen. He also had a nifty collection of tattered comic books,
Field & Stream
s, and
Sports Illustrated
s, and I had heard from Davy Ray that Mr. Dollar kept a box of
Stag
,
Confidential
, and
Argosy
magazines in the back for adults only.

     “Cory?” Mr. Dollar said as he cut my father’s hair. “You met the new boy yet?”

     “No sir?” I didn’t know there
was
a new boy.

     “Came in here yesterday with his dad to get a haircut. Got good hair, but that cowlick about blunted my scissors.”
Snip
,
snip
, they sang. “He just moved here last week.”

     “New family rentin’ that house on the corner of Greenhowe and Shantuck?” Dad asked.

     “Yeah, that’s them. The Curliss family. Nice people. All of ’em got good hair.”

     “What’s Mr. Curliss do?”

     “Salesman,” Mr. Dollar said. “Sells shirts for some company in Atlanta. The boy’s a couple of years younger than Cory. I set him up on the horse and he didn’t squirm a bit.”

     The horse was a carved golden palomino that had been salvaged from a doomed merry-go-round somewhere; now it was bolted to the floor next to the regular barber’s chair. Only babies got their hair cut while sitting on the horse, even though there were times when I wished I might be able to sit on that horse again and put my feet in the stirrups while my hair was being snipped. Still, the fact that the Curliss boy—at nine or ten years of age, say—wanted to sit on the horse told me he must be a pansy.

     “Mr. Curliss seems like a decent fella,” Mr. Dollar went on, following the scissors across my father’s scalp. “Quiet, though. Kinda timid for a salesman, I’d say. That’s a hard row to hoe.”

     “I’ll bet,” Dad said.

     “I got the impression Mr. Curliss has moved around quite a bit. He told me all the places he and the family have lived. I guess, bein’ a salesman, you’d have to be prepared to go where the company says go.”

     “I couldn’t do that,” Dad said. “I’ve gotta have roots.”

     Mr. Dollar nodded. He left that topic and wandered through others like a man through high grass, not seeing anything but the next step. “Yessir,” he said. “If them Beatle boys came in here, they’d sure ’nuff leave lookin’ like men ’stead of women.” His eyebrows squeezed together as he wandered on in a new direction. “Communists say they’re gonna bury us. Gotta stop ’em while we can, ’fore they get to our country. Send our boys to bust their tails in that place over there… y’know, where they grow all the bamboo.”

     “Vietnam,” Dad supplied.

     “Right. That’s the place. Kill ’em there and we won’t have to worry no more.” Mr. Dollar’s scissors were getting up to speed. A new thought was being born somewhere between Mr. Dollar’s ears. “J.T. ever figure out who went down in Saxon’s Lake, Tom?”

     I watched my father’s face. No expression registered there, but I knew this question must be stabbing him. “No, Perry. He never did.”

     “He was a federal man, is what I think,” the Jazzman ventured. “Must’ve been lookin’ for stills. I think the Blaylocks killed him.”

     “That’s what Mr. Sculley believes, too,” Dad said.

     “The Blaylocks are bad news, that’s the truth.” Mr. Dollar switched on his clipper and worked on Dad’s sideburns. “Wouldn’t be the first man they’ve killed.”

     “Why do you say that?”

     “Sim Sears used to buy whiskey from the youngest boy, Donny. Oh—” Mr. Dollar looked at me. “I’m not talkin’ out of school, am I?”

     “It’s all right,” Dad told him. “Go ahead.”

     “Well, this is from Sim’s mouth, so I guess he’s come to grips with it. Anyway, Donny Blaylock used to sell moonshine to Sim, and Sim told me Donny and him got drunk up in the woods one night—the night that meteor fell up there near Union Town—and Donny told him things.”

     “Things?” Dad prodded. “What things?”

     “Donny told Sim he’d killed a man,” Mr. Dollar said. “Didn’t tell him the why, the when, or the who. Just that he’d killed a man and he was glad of it.”

     “Does J.T. know about this?”

     “Nope. And he won’t hear it from me, either. I don’t want to get J.T. killed. You ever see Biggun Blaylock?”

     “No.”

     “Big as a moose and full of the devil. If I told J.T. what Sim had told me, he’d have to go out and find the Blaylocks. If he
did
find ’em, which I doubt he could, that bunch would hang him up by his heels and cut his throat open like a—” Again Mr. Dollar looked at me, sitting there, all eyes and ears, behind a Hawkman comic book. “Well, I kinda figure that’d be the last of our sheriff,” Mr. Dollar finished.

     “The Blaylocks don’t own the county!” Dad said. “If they committed a murder, they ought to pay for it!”

     “That’s right, they should,” Mr. Dollar agreed as he returned to his clipping. “Biggun came in here last November to pick up a pair of boots he was havin’ resoled. Remember that, Jazzman?”

     “Shore do. Fine, expensive boots. I was scared to death of gettin’ a scuff on ’em.”

     “You know what Biggun said as he was payin’ for his boots?” Mr. Dollar asked my father. “He said they were his stompin’ boots, and anybody who got under ’em wouldn’t be standin’ up again. I figured that to mean he didn’t want anybody messin’ in his business. So who’s gonna be fool enough to go lookin’ to get killed by the Blaylocks?”

     “That’s what happened to that fella at the bottom of the lake,” the Jazzman said. “He was messin’ in the Blaylocks’ business.”
Bidness
, he pronounced it.

     “I don’t care if they brew up ’shine and sell it outta the back of their trucks,” Mr. Dollar went on. “No harm done to
me
. I don’t care if they fix the stock car races, because I’m not a gambler. I don’t care what they do to them fallen angels at Grace Stafford’s, because I’m a family man.”

     “Hold on,” Dad said. “What about Grace Stafford’s place?”

     “Ain’t her place. She just manages it. The Blaylocks own it, lock, stock, and hair curlers.”

     Dad grunted softly. “I didn’t know that.”

     “Oh, yeah!” Mr. Dollar applied lather to the back of Dad’s neck and worked a straight razor along the leather strop. “The Blaylocks are rakin’ it in, that’s for sure. Makin’ a killin’ off the Air Force fellas.” With a steady hand, he began shaving my father’s neck. “The Blaylocks are too much for J.T. to handle. It’d take Edgar Hoover himself to throw ’em in jail.”