The Barber

Number nine was in Theo’s hand, and it was impossible.

Frederick knew it on Saturday morning at eight, at the kitchen table, looking up at the refrigerator door, at the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme held up by the magnet shaped like the State, with eight ticks on it now, down the side, in the short pencil, and two lines without. 9. Get my hair cut by somebody who doesn’t know. In Theo’s big slanting hand, in the King’s sitting room, five weeks ago, because the King’s hair was cut once a month by a man called Mr Lorimer, in the King’s bathroom, with a sheet, who had cut his father’s, and Mr Lorimer knew.

“Everybody knows,” said Frederick.

Nobody at the table said anything. It was true.

“Everybody in this county knows,” said Frederick. “Every single person. Darlene knows and Mr Pettit knows and Mrs Sixkiller knows and Mr Baggett knows and Kaylee knows and Bonnie knows. The postmistress knows. The librarian knows. Tucker knows. Officer Hummingbird and Deputy Tidwell know. Mr Rowe knows.” He looked at the list. “Mr Vollmer knows. Mrs Truesdale from Muskogee knew. Rae-Ann knew. The woman at the Baptist taco stall knew. Five hundred people in a grandstand knew and laughed about Alaska.” He put his coffee down. “There isn’t anybody in Craig County who doesn’t know.”

“There’s the cabin people,” said Marcus.

“The cabin people know now. It was on the news. With the swings.”

“There’s a barber in Vinita,” said Felix. “On the square. With a pole. Red and white. I saw it the first day, from the van.” He looked at his coffee. “Maybe he doesn’t watch the news.”

“Everybody watches the news,” said Theo, gloomily, from the other end of the table, with his camera round his neck, on its strap, where it had been since Sunday, at meals, in bed, on the porch, in the lake, held above his head. “Except Earl.”

He stopped.

They all stopped.

“Earl’s not a barber,” said Felix, after a moment.

“No,” said Theo, slowly. “No. Earl drives a van.”

---

They tried the barber in Vinita.

Castellanos drove them, on Saturday morning, at nine, in the cold, because there was no van on Saturdays; and parked on the square under the courthouse trees, by the bench where the van stopped at two-forty, beside the soldier, who had come through the storm untouched in the middle of a fallen tree, and still had a branch lying across his plinth that nobody had moved.

The barbershop was on the corner opposite the pawn shop. It had a pole outside it, red and white, in a glass case, turning; and a window with FLOYD’S - CUTS - SHAVES - SINCE 1961 painted on it in gold; and inside, through the window, he could see two chairs, the old kind, red leather and chrome, that went up and down with a pedal, and a long mirror behind them, and a man in a white coat sweeping the floor.

He went in. The bell over the door rang.

The man in the white coat looked up from his broom.

He was about seventy, thin, with very little hair of his own, combed carefully across, and spectacles, and a pair of scissors in the breast pocket of the white coat; and he looked at Frederick in the door, in his shorts and a T-shirt and the bandage on his arm, and his face did the four seconds, all of them, slowly, all the way to the end; and then, at the end of them, instead of deciding, it went white.

“Oh, no,” said the barber.

“I’d like a haircut,” said Frederick. “Please. If you’re open.”

“Oh, no,” said the barber. “No, no. I can’t.” He put the broom down. He put it down against the wall very carefully, as if it might break. “Son, I can’t. I’m sorry. I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are. I’ve known since the fair.” He looked at his own hands. “I couldn’t. My hands’d shake. Look at them.” He held them out. They were shaking already. “I’ve cut hair in this chair for forty-four years and I’ve never once cut anybody’s ear, not once, not a nick, not even Clifford Baggett’s, and Clifford Baggett’s got ears like the handles on a jug.” He put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “I’d cut yours off. I know I would. And then where would we be.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I’d mind,” said the barber. “I’d mind for the rest of my life.” He looked at the chair. “I’m sorry, son. I’d do it for anybody else. Anybody at all.” He looked at the floor. “That’s the trouble.”

---

They tried the salon at Grove.

It was twenty miles, the other way, round the top of the lake, and it took forty minutes, and it was called SHEAR ELEGANCE, which Felix read off the sign in the car park twice, with pleasure; and it had a pink door and air conditioning and a smell of something sweet and chemical, and three women in pink overalls, and a girl at a desk with a telephone; and the girl at the desk looked up as he came in through the pink door and her mouth fell open and stayed open.

The oldest of the three women came out from behind the chairs. She was perhaps fifty, with a great deal of blonde hair, piled up, and long pink fingernails, and she put her hand on her chest.

“Honey,” she said. “Oh, honey. Oh, my Lord.”

“I’d like a haircut,” said Frederick. “Please.”

“Of course you would,” said the woman with the pink nails. “Of course, honey. Sit down. Sit down. Cheryl, lock the door. Lock it. Put the sign round.” She turned to him, shining. “We’ll close. For the morning. For you. Nobody’ll come in. Nobody’ll know. Cheryl, ring Donna and tell her not to come at eleven, tell her the boiler’s gone. Honey, would you like a coffee? A juice? We’ve got the little cakes.” She looked at his hair with an expression of rapture. “Oh, I’ve dreamed about this. I’ve dreamed about this hair. On the news. In the paper. I’ve said, Cheryl, I’ve said, that boy needs a proper cut, they’re doing him all wrong at the Palace, it’s too long at the back and the parting’s in the wrong place for his face, and look…”

Frederick stood in the middle of SHEAR ELEGANCE with the girl at the desk running to lock the pink door, and Cheryl on the telephone telling Donna the boiler had gone, and the woman with the pink nails looking at his hair as if it were the grand champion steer.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think it counts.”

---

“It has to be somebody who doesn’t know,” said Theo, in the car, in the cold, going back round the top of the lake. “That’s the point. That’s what I wrote. Somebody who doesn’t know. It’s not about the hair. It’s about the person.” He looked out of the window at the water. “Mr Lorimer knows. The man in Vinita knows. The lady with the nails really knows.” He leaned his head against the window. “It’s the only impossible one. I wrote the only impossible one.”

“Number one was impossible,” said Felix. “You said. On the first Monday. With the directory.”

“Number one was a van.”

“It was still impossible. Until Kimura.”

In the front seat, Kimura did not turn round. She was looking out of the window at a heron on a post.

“Number eight was impossible,” said Marcus. “With the turtle.”

“Number six,” said Felix, “was a pig.”

Theo did not say anything. He sat with his head against the window and his camera on his chest and looked at the lake going past, blue and gold in the late morning, with the boats on it; and after a while he took a piece of paper out of his pocket, folded small, and unfolded it on his knee.

It was a list. In pencil, in his big slanting hand. Barbers and hair, Craig County, from the telephone directory. Eleven names, with addresses. FLOYD’S, Vinita. SHEAR ELEGANCE, Grove (not Craig, Delaware, but close). CUT ABOVE, Vinita. NANCY’S, Welch. THE CLIPPER, Bluejacket. DEB’S CUTS, Afton. And so on, eleven, down the page. And beside nine of them, already, in the same pencil, a line through, and a word. KNOWS.

Frederick looked at it over Theo’s shoulder.

“When did you do that?”

“Thursday,” said Theo. “On Mrs Sixkiller’s telephone. While you were at the pool. I rang all of them.” He looked at the list. “I said, hello, I’m ringing for a friend, he’s sixteen, he wants a haircut, he’s from New Westminster, he’s staying at Loretta’s.” He looked at the window. “Every single one of them said oh.”

He crossed out FLOYD’S. He crossed out SHEAR ELEGANCE. He wrote KNOWS beside both. He folded the list up again, small, and put it in his pocket.

“That’s all of them,” he said.

---

Mrs Ledbetter was on her porch.

They saw her from the car as they came through Ketchum, on the main street, past the post office and the Methodist church; a small white house on the corner, with a porch, and a rocking chair on it, and in the rocking chair, very upright, in her lilac dress and her cardigan, with her handbag on her knee held in both hands and her enormous thick glasses, Mrs Ledbetter, rocking, slowly, looking at the street.

She saw the car. She lifted one hand off her handbag and held it up.

Castellanos stopped.

He did not say why. He stopped the car at the kerb outside Mrs Ledbetter’s porch, with the engine running, and sat with his hands on the wheel, and looked straight ahead; and Frederick looked at the back of his head, and then out of the window at Mrs Ledbetter, who was holding up her hand, still, the way the man in the tractor cap had held up his at the café the evening of the bicycle; and he got out.

He went up her path, between two beds of something tall and orange, and stood at the bottom of her porch steps.

“Mrs Ledbetter.”

“Hanover,” said Mrs Ledbetter. Her eyes behind the thick glasses were enormous and shining. “Theo rang me on Thursday.”

He looked back at the car. In the back window, Theo had put both hands over his face.

“He didn’t ring me for a haircut,” said Mrs Ledbetter. “He rang me to ask if I knew anybody. Because I’m old, and I know everybody.” She rocked. “I told him I’d think about it.” She stopped rocking. “And I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

Mrs Ledbetter looked at him through her glasses for a long time.

“There’s one man,” she said. “In this whole county. Who cuts hair. And who doesn’t know.”

---

Earl’s house was at Big Cabin, at the end of a dirt road off the highway, past the bridge.

They went past the bridge on the way. They had to. It was on the road, county road 4510, and the road went down a hill to the creek and there it was: concrete, grey, old, with half its parapet gone into the water, and barriers across both ends, red and white, with a sign that said CLOSED, and under it, in paint, SINCE 2017 THANKS A LOT, and under that, newer, in different paint, in a different hand, OPEN BY XMAS (HE SAID); and beside it, on the bank, three trucks, and a crane, yellow, standing still on a Saturday, with its arm over the creek, and a hut, and a pile of new steel, and a sign of its own on two posts, fresh, white, with the State’s green and gold at the top. HIGHWAYS (RURAL BRIDGES) ACT 2029. BIG CABIN CREEK, COUNTY ROAD 4510. WORKS IN PROGRESS. COMPLETION: DECEMBER 2029.

Castellanos slowed the car.

Nobody said anything. They went past the bridge, slowly, on the detour, on a gravel track that went round through a field and down to a ford and up again, with the creek water splashing up round the wheels; and Frederick turned round in his seat and looked back at it, at the crane with its arm over the creek, until the trees took it.

“December,” said Felix, softly.

“Ten minutes off the dialysis run,” said Theo. “Each way.”

---

Earl was on his back porch, and so were the old men.

It was a small house, white, frame, with a tin roof dented all over from Thursday’s hail, the way Mrs Sixkiller’s was, and a yard of brown grass with a pickup in it and Earl’s car and, at the side, parked very neatly in its own place on a square of gravel, the county’s van, white, with the blue stripe and PLEASE CALL A DAY AHEAD, resting, on its day off; and round the back, on the porch, which was screened, there was a kitchen chair.

It was an ordinary kitchen chair, wooden, with a cushion on it, standing in the middle of the porch boards on a square of linoleum; and beside it, on a small table, there were scissors, and combs, and a pair of clippers with a cord, and a bottle of something blue with combs standing in it, and a jar of something white, and a brush with soft bristles; and on a nail on one of the posts of the porch, at the height of a sitting man’s face, a mirror. Small and round, with a crack across one corner. And on a row of other chairs, along the wall, under the screens, four old men in caps, sitting, waiting, talking about rain.

And in the middle of the porch, with a sheet over his arm, in a short-sleeved shirt with the transit company’s badge on the pocket, and his grey moustache, and his straw hat hanging on another nail by the door, Earl.

He was cutting a man’s hair.

The man in the kitchen chair was ninety, perhaps, very thin, with a sheet tied round his neck, and Earl was standing behind him with a comb in one hand and the scissors in the other, cutting, slowly, carefully, a little at a time, at the back, at the neck, with his head on one side and the tip of his tongue between his teeth, the way he looked at the road; and the scissors went snip, and snip, and the white hair fell on the sheet and on the linoleum, and on the radio on the windowsill, very faintly, a man was singing about the river Jordan, over a steel guitar.

Earl looked up.

He looked at the four of them at the screen door of his porch, and at Castellanos behind them, and at Kimura behind him, by the pickup, looking at a bird.

“Well, now,” said Earl, delighted. “Hanover plus three.”

---

“Mrs Ledbetter said,” said Frederick, at the screen door. “That you cut hair.”

“On Saturdays.” Earl went back to the old man’s neck. Snip. “Have done for twenty years. Since my daddy passed. He cut hair on this porch on Saturdays for forty-one years, for the old men, for fifty pence.” He looked at the man in the chair. “Three pounds, now. Same cut. Same chair.” He looked at the mirror on the post. “Same mirror. Somebody cracked it in 1979 and it’s been cracked ever since, and nobody’s ever complained, because it’s free, and you don’t complain about a free mirror.” Snip. “Bud, hold still.”

“I am holding still,” said the old man in the chair.

“You’re not. You’re listening. You always move your head when you’re listening.” Snip. “These boys are from New Westminster, Bud. Staying at Loretta’s. They rode the van.” Snip. “You remember, I told you, on the dialysis run. The boy who asked me about the train.”

Bud turned his head, very slowly, under the sheet, and looked at the four of them at the screen door. He was ninety and he had been on the machine, Frederick thought, three times a week, for years, and his face was thin and grey and his eyes were pale and very bright; and he looked at Frederick, at the screen door, for a long time.

Then he looked back at the mirror, on its post, with the crack across the corner.

“Huh,” said Bud.

“Hold still,” said Earl.

---

“I’d like a haircut,” said Frederick. “Please. If you’ve got time.”

“Got all day,” said Earl. “It’s Saturday.” He looked at the row of old men along the wall. “You’ll have to wait your turn, though. There’s Bud, and then there’s Walt, and then there’s Harold, and then there’s Pete, and then there’s you.” He looked at Frederick. “That all right?”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Yes. That’s all right.”

He sat down at the end of the row of old men, on a kitchen chair under the screens, beside a man of eighty in a cap with a seed company’s name on it who was Pete, and waited.

Theo sat on the porch steps with the camera. Marcus and Felix sat on the grass below them. Castellanos stood at the corner of the house with his arms folded. Kimura was by the pickup, looking at the bird, which was blue on the back and rust on the front and was sitting on the fence post by the van, looking back at her.

It took an hour and twenty minutes.

He did not mind. He did not mind at all. He sat on the kitchen chair at the end of the row on Earl’s back porch at Big Cabin, in the heat, with the radio on the windowsill playing hymns and the scissors going snip in the middle of the porch and the old men talking about rain; and he listened to them. Walt, in his vest, who was the Walt from the pool, who swam his stately breaststroke in adult swim with his chin up and his eyes closed, and who had a hip, and who sat down in the kitchen chair when it was his turn and said the usual, Earl, and closed his eyes, the same way, as if he were in the water. Harold, who said nothing at all, the whole time, and tipped Earl a pound. Pete, beside him, who talked to him about seed. He talked about seed for twenty minutes without stopping, about corn and beans and the price of both and what the dry month had done and what the storm had done and what it would do next year, and Frederick listened to all of it and understood almost none of it and said yes and really and I didn’t know that, and Pete said well, you’re from the city, kindly, and went on.

Nobody looked at him. Nobody on the porch looked at him once, except Bud, who looked at him in the mirror on the post, while his hair was cut, for a long time, and said nothing, and when Earl took the sheet off him and shook it out over the porch rail, got up out of the chair, slowly, with his stick, and stood for a moment by the post with the mirror on it; and looked down at Frederick, on the kitchen chair at the end of the row; and put his thin grey hand on Frederick’s shoulder, for a second, very lightly, the way Kaylee had put hers on his bandage, and took it away, and went down the porch steps to the yard, with his stick, past Theo and the camera, and sat in the pickup, and waited for somebody to drive him home.

---

“You’re up,” said Earl.

He sat in the kitchen chair.

Earl tied the sheet round his neck. It was a white sheet, soft, worn, smelling of soap and of sun, and Earl tied it at the back with a knot, firmly, not too tight, the way you tied something you had tied ten thousand times; and stood behind him, and looked at him in the mirror on the post. Frederick could see him, in the mirror, over his own shoulder, with the crack across the corner going through the top of Earl’s grey hair.

“What’ll it be?” said Earl.

Frederick looked at himself in the mirror.

He did not know. He had never been asked. Mr Lorimer did not ask; Mr Lorimer knew, and had known since before Frederick was born, because he had cut his father’s, and there was a way it was done, and he did it. He looked at his own face in the small round cracked mirror on the post on Earl’s back porch, with the sheet tied round his neck, and his hair too long at the back, the woman with the pink nails had been right, after five weeks in Oklahoma without Mr Lorimer.

“What do they have?” he said.

Earl looked at the row of old men. Walt, and Harold, and Pete, all three with their caps off now, all three with the same cut, short at the back and the sides and a little longer on top, neat, combed, with a parting.

“The regular,” said Earl.

“Then the regular,” said Frederick. “Please.”

---

Earl cut his hair.

He did it slowly. He did it carefully, a little at a time, with the comb and the scissors, with his head on one side and the tip of his tongue between his teeth, the way he looked at the road and the way he read his clipboard; and the scissors went snip, and snip, and the hair fell on the sheet and on the linoleum, brown, too long, five weeks of it; and the radio on the windowsill went from the river Jordan to the sweet by and by to the old rugged cross; and Earl talked.

He talked about the bridge.

“Crane come on Wednesday,” said Earl, at the back of his neck. Snip. “Twelve men. Three trucks. I seen them every day on the dialysis run, from the detour. Working. In this heat.” Snip. “Commissioner come out on Thursday, after the storm, in jeans this time, and stood on the bank and looked at it for an hour with his hands in his pockets. I seen him.” Snip. “Never seen a commissioner look at a bridge for an hour. Not in forty years.” He combed. “Somebody must’ve told him.”

“Told him what?”

“That folks’d notice,” said Earl. “If he didn’t.” Snip. “Somebody must’ve stood him on it in front of a camera and made him say Christmas. And now he’s got to.” He considered. “I’d like to shake whoever did that by the hand.”

Frederick looked at himself in the mirror and did not say anything.

Earl talked about the train. He talked about Bud, and the machine, three times a week, and how Bud never complained, not once, in six years, and how ten minutes was a long time when you were on it. He talked about Loretta’s oak, and how it would grow. He talked about the storm, and the Baxters’ field, and how the little one had come down and gone up again and hadn’t hurt a soul, which was a mercy, and how the trailer at Loretta’s had moved two foot, he’d heard, which he would have liked to see.

And then, at the front, combing the top, with the scissors in his other hand, he said:

“You hear what they’re saying? On the news?”

“What?”

“About the King.” Snip. “Folks are saying he’s round here somewhere. Craig County. On account of some pictures of the fair, and the Prime Minister on a bus.” Earl shook his head, slowly, in the mirror. “Bud’s daughter says she saw it on her telephone. Some swings.” Snip. “I don’t believe it.”

“No?”

“What would a King want in Craig County?” said Earl. He combed the parting, very carefully, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. “There’s nothing here. Loretta said so on the radio. Nothing happens here. And Loretta Sixkiller never told a lie in her life.” Snip. “He’ll be somewhere with air conditioning. Like I said. With a pool. And somebody to bring him his lunch.” He stood back and looked at Frederick in the mirror. “Wherever he is, I hope he’s having a good time.”

Frederick looked at himself in the small round cracked mirror on the post on Earl’s back porch at Big Cabin. At his own face, with the sheet tied round his neck, and the regular, short at the back and the sides and a little longer on top, neat, combed, with a parting, the same as Walt’s and Harold’s and Pete’s; and behind him, in the mirror, over his shoulder, Earl’s kind grey face with the moustache, looking at him, and not knowing.

“I think he is,” he said.

“Good,” said Earl. “Good.” He untied the sheet. “There. That’s the regular.” He shook the sheet out over the porch rail, and the brown hair went down into the yard, five weeks of it, and the bird on the fence post by the van flew away. “Three pounds.”

---

Frederick paid him. Out of the brown wallet. Three pound coins, which he counted into Earl’s hand, one, two, three; and Earl looked at the coins in his palm, and closed his hand on them, and put them in the pocket of his shirt with the transit company’s badge on it.

Then Frederick took out another coin, a pound, and held it out, the way Harold had.

Earl looked at it.

“Harold tips,” he said. “Harold’s tipped me a pound every Saturday for twenty years. Nobody else does. It’s Harold’s thing.” He looked at the coin. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I want to.”

Earl looked at him for a long time, with the coin between them, in the heat, on the back porch, with the radio on the windowsill singing about the beautiful shore.

Then he took it.

“Well,” he said. “That’s kind of you, Hanover.” He put it in his pocket with the others. “You come back next summer, I’ll do you again. Same cut. Same chair.” He looked at the mirror on its post. “Same mirror.”

---

On the porch steps, Theo had used eleven exposures.

He showed Frederick in the car, going home, in the cold, past the bridge with the crane, on the detour, through the ford; not the photographs, which could not be seen until they were printed at the pharmacy in Vinita, and then it would be too late to take them again; but the little window on the top of the camera, by the dent, with the number in it.

11.

“What did you take?”

Theo looked out of the window.

“Earl,” he said. “Cutting Bud. And Walt in the chair with his eyes shut. And Pete talking about seed. And the mirror.” He was quiet for a moment. “And you. In the chair. With the sheet on. And Earl behind you, in the mirror, with his scissors, talking about the bridge.”

“How many of me?”

“One,” said Theo. He looked at the number in the little window. “I only needed one.” He looked at the ford going by, the water splashing up round the wheels. “You don’t know till it’s printed.”

---

At four o’clock, at the kitchen table, under the box fan, Theo stood up and went to the refrigerator with the short pencil.

He stood in front of the list for a long time. Then he made the tick, beside number nine, in his own hand, the one he had written; small and neat, pressed hard into the paper.

“Nine,” he said.

He stood back and looked at it. Nine ticks, down the side of the back of page fourteen, held up by the magnet shaped like the State. One line without.

10. Do nothing all day.

In Frederick’s hand. The last thing written. Five weeks ago.

“One left,” said Felix.

Frederick looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time from the kitchen table, with his new haircut, the regular, cold at the back of his neck where the hair had been, in the breath of the box fan; and he did not say anything at all.