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Authors: Chris Lynch

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BOOK: Little Blue Lies
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He lets the balls drop and bouncety-bounce on the ground between us. He stares at me.

“I think it probably is the juggling, man. I'm with you now, though.”

“Thanks. I'm talking about Junie. Where she is. Where we are. And, literally, where she
is
.”

“To be honest, I don't know the answers to any of that. To be also honest, maybe you need to stop obsessing about Junie Blue and just get on with stuff. Like figuring out what you're gonna do with the next critical phase of life. Junie will be fine, man. She's as tough as nails and hotter than the sun's ass, and if there is a more winning combination than that, I would like to know where it can be purchased. You, on the other hand, are currently lacking in dynamism.”

It's true enough. I am lacking in dynamism. It's also true that Junie is hard and together and probably a whole lot less
in need of me than I am in need of being needed—so, what, honestly, am I worried about?

Myself, maybe?

“Let's go home, Mal,” I say.

“What?” he says when I hop to my feet in a burst of negative dynamism. He follows me off the courts, and we head up the road together. “Did I say something wrong? Are you going to banish me from your life again?”

“I never banished you. And I'm sorry. It won't happen again.”

“Cool. Though, come Labor Day you're gonna be the banished one when I head off to college. Unless you come with me. Come with me.”

I could. We were accepted to the same college, and we both accepted our acceptances. The difference is, Malcolm always intended to go, and I just needed something to show my parents to keep them from talking too much about what I was going to do. It wasn't a wildly successful plan, since I don't think it fooled anybody. But still, it's there.

“We'll see,” I say.

“You know, O, you're not really believable even when you're trying. And that one was just lifeless.”

We both laugh at my lameness. Then he drifts behind and sticks the butt of his racket into the small of my back like a gun.

“Come on, you,” he demands, “make a move. Or else.”

I almost wish it were as simple as a shotgun life.

We walk more or less like this all the way back to my place. Not the gun-in-my-back part, but still in the style of escorted prisoner. I don't know what's in it for him—a laugh, probably—but for me it serves the purpose of allowing me to be on my own without being alone. Good man, Malcolm.

“Thanks, man,” I say, pivoting in front of my house in a crisp, military way that says clearly there will be no invitation inside. Even though he deserves one. Even though I could really use him. “I had fun.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Fun. It's written all over your face.” He points at my face, in case I've forgotten where it is.

“Really?” I say.

“No,” he says. “You look like flaming crap, Oliver.”

That's crossing a Rubicon there. Even my parents almost always call me O, or Son, or something like that. If I get called by my actual name once every six days, that's going at quite a clip, and since Malcolm hasn't been around, the clip has been clipped to nearly nothing at all. It always means something when he uses it, even if I rarely know exactly what that something is.

“I don't,” I say with exactly the conviction a flaming-crap face would give it.

He puts all the tennis gear down, right there on the sidewalk,
where any old type of harm could come to his precious racket—also a blue-moon occurrence. He puts both hands heavily on my shoulders.

“Go inside. Watch a movie. Eat. Have a bath. Google yourself. Google yourself until you go blind, in fact. Then change the sheets, have another bath, or maybe a shower this time. Then get some real sleep. You need a shave and a haircut.
Don't
do those things for yourself. Tomorrow a.m. I'll come by and we'll go get buffed up, all right? Sound good? All right?”

I'm thinking about all the various constituent parts of that plan, or at least I'm trying to think of the various constituents.

“All right,” I say.

But truth is, all I can hear inside is
Junie Blue, Junie Blue, Junie Blue, Junie Blue
echoing like a cuckoo's call around the vast forest of my skull.

Mal collects up his stuff and walks off silently.

“Thank you so much, Malcolm,” comes the whisper-voice from behind the screen.

“Jesus, Mom!” I snap, and march inside.

Four

Malcolm was right about my
being pathetic. He must have been. Otherwise why would I have gone into the house and followed his instructions to the letter? Most of them, anyway, as I was pretty tired and too distracted to be really up to much.

“Appearance is half your problem, O,” he says as we turn onto Ocean Boulevard. “Maybe even more than half.”

“Is that so?” I say.

“That is so. Trust me, you're gonna be a new man after this. Then you can dispose of that old man you got going there, because he frankly stinks.”

“So, a trip to Santo's is going to change everything?”

“Everything.”

This is a remarkably bold claim, since not only has this establishment had previous opportunities to make a new man of me, but it is as responsible as any other place in the world for the me that I already am. On the outside, that is.

I got my first ever haircut at Santo's. I don't remember it, but I know this to be true, because I got all of my haircuts
here, and the first haircut I do remember, I was maybe four years old and Santo himself hauled out this wooden plank and laid it across the arms of the barber chair to make a booster seat because even with the chair pumped up as high as it could go, the old duffer still had to stoop to clip me.

And an old duffer he was. Santo was an old man when I was four and twelve and fifteen, until he retired or whatever it was he did, but it didn't matter because he always worked side by side with another old guy just like him—and two or three rotating other old guys when times were good and all four chairs were buzzing. Then he retired or whatever it was and he was replaced by another Santo, and it was like there was this workshop someplace where they just turned out replicate barber Santos, which suited everybody fine.

And the place was never actually called Santo's, because it was and still is officially called the Beachcomber Gentleman's Barbershop. Perfectly named. Great big front windows as big as the mirror wall, and if you look to your right from one of the chairs, you get the most spectacular view of the beach, and if you look to your right to see the beach while getting your hair cut, Santo would always sharply grab the point of your chin and whip you back around to proper haircuttee position.

Almost everybody who came into the place had sand in his hair, especially on a windy day, and this is possibly why all
the combs and clippers and hair tonics and whatever Santo would attack you with always had the grittiness.

A gritty kind of place, to be sure.

Because the smells of sand and salt and the seaside stuff and the smells of the barber business, circa 1927, always swirled together in the atmosphere of Santo's in such a reliable balance as to suggest somebody on staff was tasked with the job of creating exactly this olfactory singularity. Singular. It exists nowhere else, I am certain.

Also gritty because that's how Santo's sees itself. A little bit dangerous, a little bit fringes-of-society atmosphere is part of the charm of the place. Even if it's not entirely believable, not always charming.

“Heya, kid,” the old guy says, springing out of his chair on a quiet Monday morning.

We're all kids and we always will be. Kid, kidnik, kiddo, regardless. It was this way with the original Santo, and it is this way with Santo IV or whoever we have here.

“The kids, kid and kiddo,” he says, just as happily as if we were his actual grandchildren coming to see him for the first time in a year.

“Hey, Santo,” Malcolm says, giving the old boy a big hug. “I saw you, sitting there staring out at the waves.”

“Of course I was staring out at the waves. They're waves, for cryin' out loud. They're frickin' beautiful. Does that make
me a bad person? I don't think that makes me a bad person. First customers of the week, you kids. Sure I stare at the waves. Gets me in the mood, in the spirit, so I can do my best work. For you. All for you.”

“Hey, and we appreciate it. That's why we come back, right?”

“Right,” he says. “And what are we in for today?”

I step up. Malcolm points at me with his thumb.

“Kiddo,” Santo says, taking me by the arm like I'm the little old guy and he is helping me into the chair, “how did you let it get like this?”

Malcolm laughs out loud, throws himself into a chair with a newspaper and a good angle to see me in the mirror.

Santo does this thing—I suppose the same thing a sculptor does when he starts on a project. He clips, a tiny bit, a nothing bit, then steps back and looks. Goes to a whole other part of the head, snips a clip, steps back, looks, tilts his head, looks, comes back in for more. Like he is waiting for the proper image to suggest itself to him, to emerge from the chaos that is my currently configured head.

I forgot how long this takes.

The step-backs get less frequent, the clippings more so, and something like progress is happening when the bell over the door clinks and I see the men swagger in.

They are a type. Junie always hated it when I saw things
this way, so I stopped talking about it mostly, although I never quite stopped thinking it. Types. A type. All three men are big guys, two big-bigs and a short big, and all have suits on. Middle aged. Slicked hair, big rings, neck and wrist chains. Cologne. Dear lord, the cologne. Colognes. It's the cologne wars as the guys' scents fight it out for the air space as they take up three wall seats next to Malcolm, and then the colognes join forces to defeat all the old-timey barber aromas, and pretty much wipe out the beach smells entirely.

“Whew,” Santo says to the guys, pausing just to make the
Phew
wave in front of his nose with his scissors hand. “What'd you boys, swim here through a sea of Avon ladies?”

“Harrr-hahahahaha,” the boys all howl. Good-time boys. They like to laugh. They love a laugh and they love to be the subjects of a good gag that doesn't cut too close but doesn't miss their specialness either. A type. Junie would kill me. Malcolm laughs, long and loud. He's a different type.

The three men talk in loud voices, about what they read in the day-old newspapers and month-old magazines they pick up off the seats. Like the long line of Santo barbers, these guys have been here and have been doing this for forever. They rarely get haircuts, occasionally shaves, but their presence is as much a part of the place as the swirling barber pole out front.

Malcolm waves at me in the mirror, shakes his head and
rolls his eyes at the men. I wave back, raising my hand under the big nylon bib, causing the whole thing to tent up and send hairs sliding away to the floor. Santo slaps my hand back down. Malcolm laughs.

Suddenly the whole thing feels so melancholy, I don't know what I'll do. It comes over me in a wave, and really, I'm so blindsided by it, I don't have a response for it, for me.

It's Junie, of course. It's her. And everything. What am I doing here, in the barbershop of my whole life? What am I grooming for? I'm supposed to be high-diving into big life right about now, but I'm . . .

I'm what? I don't even know that?

But I do know that if I let what wants to happen happen and I start getting all misty-faced here, I will be skinned like a fish by the crowd, by the old pal, and by the barber himself. When I cried once in this chair, I was certain from the look that Santo was going to beat me up. And I was four.

I look to my right, out the window, out past the thrilling crashing waves and the infinite potential sea. This, this is better.

Santo whips me by the chin tip back in the direction of the mirror with such force that my eyes don't focus again for three or four seconds. When they do, I see Malcolm laughing again. Santo squints and resumes intensely sculpting me back to respectability. As he finishes the right side of my head
and works his way around back, I gradually let myself rotate in the direction of the beach again. The place that's always there for me. All the elements combine just so to re-right me when I breathe it in, take it in.

Only, something's in the way.

Ronny Blue is standing there, all wide-boy wide stance, wide grin as he stares in the window and into me.

“Ronny Blue, Blue Ronny!” comes the triumphant call of the masses as Ronny comes through the door.

“Hello there, boys,” Ronny says as he swaggers in. He stands there, in front of the row of chairs, as the men all burble greetings and gentle ass-kisses. Malcolm—my Malcolm—actually rises to his feet, goes to shake the great man's hand.

“Are you
kidding
me?” I blurt as Malcolm anxiously waves me off.

“Hey, why ain't we out playing tennis, a day like this?” Ronny bellows as if Malcolm were in another barbershop two towns away.

“I don't know, Ronny. Why aren't we?” he answers.

Malcolm stands there, stupid, as if he expected a real answer, and is left to look as foolish as he deserves when Ronny just walks away to come and greet Santo.

“Santo, my brother, how are we doin' today?” Ronny says, slapping my well-armed haircutter firmly on the shoulder of his clipping hand.

“Ouch,” I snap, feeling at the spot behind my ear that isn't bleeding on the outside but might as well be.

“Santo,” Ronny says, mock-scolding, “be careful. You gotta go extra easy on these delicate rich boys. They ain't like you and me.”

Sigh. It's going to be like this.

“What are you doing here in my neighborhood, in my shop, anyway?” Ronny says as he leans right into my face with a polished fun-house smile bearing down on me.

BOOK: Little Blue Lies
2.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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