The Orbit: The Online Drive-in of Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale

Charlies Richards, who thought of himself as a better-than-average barber, was lean and bright-eyed with a thin smile, his hair showing gray at the temples. He loved to cut hair and he loved that his daughter Mildred, Millie to most, worked with him. They were the only father-and-daughter barber team he knew of, and he was proud of that. He was also glad that she lived at home with him and her mother, Connie, at least for now.

Next year she was off to the big city, Dallas. Graduated high school a couple years back, hung around, cut hair, but now she was planning to attend some kind of beauty college where she could learn to cut women’s hair, as well. Planned to learn cosmetology, too. Claimed when she finished schooling she could either fix a woman up for a night out or spruce up a dead woman for a mortuary production. Charlie had no doubt that would be true. Millie learned quickly and was a hard worker.

Charlie snapped the towel loose from where it rested on his customer’s neck, applied talc so liberally that particles floated in the air like an early morning mist. As the man stood up and unlimbered his wallet from his back pocket and paid his bill, Charlie called out, “Next.”

Outside of the customer Millie was finishing up in her chair, there were only two others left. Mr. Weaver, a retired postal worker who looked as if he was born to be old, and a teenage boy, Billy Thompson, a young man known as a fine quarterback and a good kid.

As Charlie waited for his next customer to settle into the chair, Charlie glanced at Millie. She was tall and lean and pretty with dark hair and dark eyes, like her mother. She was hard at work on her customer’s mop, an eleven-year-old boy reading a comic book and chewing a mouthful of bubble gum.

Outside the fall wind whistled. Leaves blew across from the park and rattled against the wide front window and the smaller windows behind the waiting chairs with a sound like someone wadding cellophane. It made Charlie feel nostalgic. It was that kind of day when he had his first date with Connie, many years before the war, back when he was a young barber and she worked as a secretary at a used-car lot.

Their first date was a picnic in the park, but the fall leaves blew so furiously that day, they had to go to his barbershop to escape them. That shop had been smaller than the current one, a place he shared with a tire-repair business. He had a corner, more or less, and he could hear the hydraulic car racks lifting and dropping, hoisting cars in and out of the pit where the tires were taken off, replaced, rotated.

In the corner of the shop, their hamburgers and colas resting on top of the magazine table, they ate, and finally, surprising to both of them, they had kissed. The moment their lips parted, they both knew. It was like a movie. Something like that happened, you didn’t fight it. They had been inseparable ever since.

Except for the war.

He didn’t like to think about the war. His quick smile went away then. It was better to not think on it too much.

Millie finished with the kid, and he stood up from the chair and fished a dollar from his pocket and paid her, then he was out, passing outside the big window of the shop like a wind-blown specter.

Charlie glanced at the clock. It was near five. He would cut Billy’s hair, and Millie would cut Old Man Weaver’s white ring of fuzz, and that would be it for the day.

Millie patted the back of her chair like a pet, said, “Mr. Weaver, you’re next.”

Old Man Weaver rose slowly from the waiting chair, placed the copy of Life he had been reading on the table, and moved toward her as if wading through drying cement. Charlie wished he would hurry, because they had a rule: You came in the door before five, they stayed to give you a haircut. But at five they locked the door and pulled the window blind over the big window and closed the curtains over the smaller ones, and when they finished with any late arrivals, they left.

Charlie considered locking the door right then, but it was still a few minutes to five, and he wanted to keep his ritual. But at five on the dot he would wander over to the door and turn the sign and flick the lock.

He let his mind drift to the thought of a cold beer and then dinner. Connie was making pot roast tonight.

Billy came and sat in Charlie’s chair. They exchanged a few pleasantries about football, and then Charlie went to work. Billy’s hair was a little tricky, due to a front-and-back cowlick, but Charlie had enough practice now to make the cowlicks lay flat. The trick was not to cut the licks too close. Did that, they stood up like spikes.

As for Old Man Weaver, his hair, though short, was actually trickier. Cut it too close, he complained. Didn’t cut it enough, he complained. Sometimes, when you got it just right, he complained. Millie usually had better luck with the old man, so Charlie was glad he had gravitated to her chair.

Charlie touched the electric razor switch, and nothing happened. The clippers were dead as last July. He had used this Chic brand clipper so long, it had almost become a friend. It had sputtered and warned of its upcoming demise a few times recently, but now the inevitable had happened.

Charlie unplugged it, feeling as if he were unplugging a friend from an iron lung, and allowed it to check into that great barbershop in the sky, via the wastebasket near his barber chair.

Charlie said, “Hold a moment, Billy.”

Already Charlie was starting to sweat. He had to do something he dreaded, something he thought about correcting by changing where he kept his new equipment at the ready, but so far he hadn’t. To do so was to admit something he didn’t want to admit. To do so was to let the war and the past win.

Seemed silly when he thought about it, but not when he was confronted with it. He had to go to the back and open the storage closet door and go inside, reach on the top shelf for the new electric clippers. That wasn’t the problem. It was the confined space. It was dark in there until he stepped inside and reached up and pulled the cord that activated the light. But even then, those walls seemed close and the light seemed dim and it felt like ages before he turned off the light and was out of there.

His walk to the storage room was his own personal Bataan Death March. When he arrived at the closed door, it seemed to him that he was willingly opening the door to hell. It was then that he told himself each time that he had to find shelf space in an open part of the shop, keep supplies out of the closet, and to hell with trying to beat this thing.

But he never made those changes. That would be giving up. Charlie took a deep breath and felt the sweat on his forehead and palms bubble up and grease him.

I can do this, he told himself. It is not a hut on Palawan. It is not a tight grave.

Charlie opened the door and looked across the six-foot length to the rows of shelves at the back. On the top shelf was the box that contained the clippers. He had the man who brought the supplies put them there, perhaps as a kind of test to himself. He couldn’t really see them in the darkness of the closet, but he could visualize them and their location clearly.

In the prison camp, the shelter, as it was called, had been about the same size as the closet. It was dug into the side of the rocks, and part of it was made of wood. It was where he was kept with two other soldiers, a very tight living arrangement. There were other shelters and other prisoners, but that shelter was where he and his two companions were kept. It was bad then, but now that the war was over, the memory of it was worse; his mind wore it like a torture device.

One night the Japanese decided to rid the camp of prisoners. Orders from on-high. They boarded up the narrow one-way exit to the shelter and set it on fire. Smoke filled his lungs and heat licked at his flesh. He and the others had rushed the door, the only way out, and slammed against it with their shoulders, knocking it loose.

When he and his two companions were outside, there had been bayonets, and gasoline was tossed on them. He was able to dodge being lit on fire, but his companions did not. Their bodies were licked by orange tongues of fire that slavered up gasoline as well as flesh. Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could still see them, bright torches running wildly, falling down to be consumed by spirits of fire. The stench of their deaths was still in his nostrils. Shelters were blazing. Men that had remained trapped inside the other shelters were screaming like women. Charlie tried to escape, but was bayoneted in the abdomen. The pain consumed him and he passed out. He awoke to darkness all around, the sound of scraping. He could barely breathe. Didn’t have the strength to move. A great weight was resting on him. Gradually he realized his fate. They thought him dead and were burying him alive.

Then there was a call to dinner. He knew that call. He had heard it many times, and it was not for the prisoners. It was for his tormentors. When the soldiers got around to it, they would bring bowls of buggy rice cooked to the consistency of a loose bowel movement to the prisoners. Tonight, however, even that was finished; he and his fellow prisoners had been served their last meal.

When the dinner call came, the soldiers stopped burying him, tossed their shovels aside, and went away, assuming what they thought was a dead body would be there when they came back.

Charlie found that he could still breathe because the dirt was loose on his face, his nose and mouth were exposed to the air.

He managed to wiggle his head loose, opened his eyes.

It was still night. He had not been out long. It was darker than before, without the bright light of burning shelters and bodies. It was as if during his time unconscious, the night had fallen down on him like an avalanche. The soil was tight and damp against his body. He could only move his feet and hands a little. He wiggled them, flexed his fingers until they began to come free of the dirt and he could sit up and scrape it off his lower body with his hands. He had not been buried deep, but another five minutes of shoveling and there would have been no escape.

As he came free from the grave, the pain in his abdomen intensified. He couldn’t pull his legs loose. He bent forward and dug the dirt from around his legs. A hand rose up between his feet, the fingers spread, as if reaching for something. One of his comrades was lying across his legs. A dead comrade.

Charlie worked himself free. His wound, and the exertion it took to free himself, sapped him, but he forced himself to crawl out of the grave. The dirt had actually filled his wound and stopped the bleeding. A silver lining.

Only strong enough to crawl, he reached the jungle, lay there for a while. He could hear the Japanese laughing and enjoying themselves back at the camp. Someone was singing. It was like when American soldiers told him how they enjoyed cutting trophies off Japanese soldiers, ears and noses, and sometimes genitals. War was not a friend to humankind. It changed you, even if you thought it didn’t.

But he wasn’t thinking about that then. Fear gave him strength to keep crawling. He crawled into a thickness of trees, headed toward where there would be rocks by the sea. He had only gone a few feet into the trees when his hand landed on something. It was a boot and there was another boot, and legs. Charlie looked up, and looking down at him was a Japanese soldier. The man had a rifle in his hand with a bayonet on it. He raised the rifle. There was a flash of gritted teeth, and then… Slowly he pulled the rifle away and stood with it clasped to his chest.

The soldier squatted on his haunches, put his face close to Charlie’s lifted head. Charlie couldn’t really see the soldier’s features. It was too dark.

The man only studied him briefly, then rose and stepped aside. Charlie started crawling, expecting the bayonet, but that didn’t happen. When Charlie had the courage to turn and look back, the soldier was still there, and he motioned with his hand, a waving motion, an invitation for Charlie to proceed, and then the soldier walked away, favoring a limp.

Charlie started crawling again. After a short time he stopped to lie on his belly and rest. It occurred to him later that the soldier may have been hiding from what had been going on in the camp, not wanting to be involved, probably in shock. Whatever his reasons, he had spared Charlie.

In time, Charlie managed to reach the rocks, even stand and stagger. There were the bodies of American soldiers in the rocks and along the shoreline. A number had made it this far only to be caught and killed, burned alive or bayoneted.

Charlie stayed in the rocks a while, and it was at that point that he couldn’t think about what had happened afterwards any longer. He had to jump over that memory and let his mind go to a day later when he was found by Filipino civilians who treated his wounds and helped him survive.

He was one of a very few who lived through the massacre at the internment camp of Palawan, but he had brought it home with him along with the darkness and confinement of the shelter and the grave.

And now he stood before the closet, its interior like a dark memory he had to enter into.

It’s a closet, he told himself, but recognition of what it truly was turned into cold comfort when he had to go inside.

Way he went in there, every time, was he remembered before the war, when he was a young barber, the first head of hair he cut. It was a young boy that his mother brought in. The boy had long locks, and he was a fighter in the chair, oversized and strong for his age.

If it hadn’t been his first official given haircut, he might have told them to walk, but he had to start somewhere, and why not someplace difficult? So he concentrated on holding the boy’s head firmly and talking to him softly, clipping away with the old-fashioned squeeze clippers. Trying to cut the boy’s hair was like conducting a bombing raid. He dove the clippers down when the kid quit moving, clipped, then waited until a new target presented itself. It took him an hour to cut the child’s hair. From then on, even in war, when he needed to concentrate, he first focused on that unruly kid’s noggin, a dive of the clippers, and then he took a deep breath and was ready for whatever was at hand. It was simple and silly and to some degree effective.

Charlie imagined the boy and opened the door to the dark closet, felt the walls move in close, the ceiling fall down, the floor rise up.

Entering the closet quickly, he grabbed the cord, turned on the light, but even with it brighter in there, it was for him bright like the first flames of the fire the soldiers lit up the shelter with. He froze, and his nostrils filled with smoke and burning flesh.

Again, he thought of that kid, his first haircut. It gave him enough focus to reach the clippers off the shelf, pull the light cord.… Oh hell, the horrid dark, and then he made for the light of the doorway, a finer light, and was out of there, almost at a run.

At home, at night, he had to sleep with the lamp on by his bed. Connie had grown accustomed to him rising up at night, saying, “Don’t do it,” over and over. Then she would touch him, and then she would hold him, and it would pass. For a time.

Back at his barber chair, Charlie plugged in the clippers and went to work.

Millie paused in cutting Old Man Weaver’s hair, said, “Dad, are you hot?”

“What?” he said.

“You’re sweating.”

“Oh,” Charlie said, reached up and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his barber’s coat. “I’m alright. It’s warm in the back.” Millie nodded, then smiled, and that made a lot of things okay.

Charlie turned his attention back to Billy’s hair, the clippers hummed pleasantly while he cut, and now again he paused them and used the scissors from his coat pocket to clip at the cowlicks. The scissors worked better for that, keeping the licks even with the rest of the cut. When he felt he had the problem hair controlled, he returned the scissors to his pocket, picked up the clippers again, and went at it.

He and Billy talked about sports some more, Billy’s family. Old Man Weaver and Millie talked about the weather, the tomato festival earlier that year, and about how Weaver’s granddaughter had gone off to Tyler to teach high-school history. It was the usual barbershop experience, and Charlie enjoyed it.

Charlie was almost finished with Billy’s hair when the bell over the door clanged, and two young men entered.

One was nice-looking in a street-tough kind of way, and the other wasn’t so nice-looking. He had a face that looked as if it had been set on fire with a blow torch and the flames had been beat out with a garden rake.

Charlie could feel their attitude right away. It went before them like trucks pulling trailers. They sat in waiting chairs, reached magazines off the table, started thumbing through them. Now and again they looked up at Millie, and that bothered Charlie.

Charlie understood Millie was pretty. He understood that as a dad he was overprotective, and he knew nearly every male below the age of forty that came into the shop took note of her, and a lot of them above the age of forty. But these boys made him start to hurry Billy’s cut. He almost decided to break a long-standing rule and tell them he was closing up and they had to go. Old Man Weaver was finished. He climbed down from his chair, paid up and went out. After he was gone, Millie turned the sign on the door from open to closed.

She walked to the big window and looked out. “You fellows walked here?” she said, turning to look at them.

“Yeah,” said Inflamed-face. “We like to walk.”

“Walking’s good for you,” said Nice-looking. “I read that in a magazine, maybe in a barbershop. I forget.”

“I don’t recognize either of you,” she said.

“Visiting relatives,” said Nice-looking.

“Who would that be?” Billy said.

“Don’t be nosey,” said Nice-looking.

“Sorry,” Billy said. “Didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Don’t mean we didn’t take something from it, though, does it,” said Inflamed-face.

“Let’s stay civil,” Charlie said. “It was an innocent question.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Inflamed-face, “civil. That’s how we want to be. Civil.”

Millie went back to her chair, said, “Who’s next?”

“That will be me,” said Nice-looking.

“I got to let him cut my hair?” Inflamed-face said, “and you get the good-looking girl?”

“Get what you deserve in life,” said Nice-looking.

Nice-looking put the magazine on the table and climbed into Millie’s chair.

“How would you like it?” she said.

“Like it is, only shorter.”

Millie went to work. Charlie continued to cut hair, but he checked on Inflamed-face from time to time, glanced over at pretty boy in Millie’s chair.

“Barbers, they do right smart business in a small town, don’t they?” Inflamed-face said.

“We do all right,” Charlie said.

“I’m thinking you might do better than that. Bet you bring in plenty. Men got to get their hair cut to stay respectable, don’t they? You like them respectable, don’t you, Dad?”

Charlie paused the clippers, looked at the one with the wrecked face. “Let me explain this where you understand it. Don’t call me Dad, and leave my shop. Both of you. I don’t like the way you talk.”

“Well, that’s all right, because we don’t like the way you talk,” said Inflamed-face, and he didn’t move. Nice-looking stayed in Millie’s barber chair.

“Want me to go with my hair partly cut?” said Nice-looking. “I can’t do that.”

“Yeah, you can,” Charlie said.

Millie had ceased to run the clippers and had stepped back from the chair. Nice-looking didn’t get up. He said, “Tommy, lock the door.”

Inflamed-face, Tommy, stood up and locked the door. He went over to the big window and pulled down the blind. He started for the smaller windows.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Charlie said.

“We’re helping you close up,” Nice-looking said. “Finish the haircut, doll.”

“You’re leaving,” Charlie said. “Buy yourself some clippers and do it yourself.”

“I could do that,” Nice-looking said, “but I won’t.”

Nice-looking stood up from the barber chair and opened his jacket. There was a .45 automatic in his waistband, a military pistol.

“What’s this all about?” Charlie said.

“Easy, Dad,” Millie said.

“Yeah,” Inflamed-face said. “Easy, Dad.”

“You got some money here, and we need it,” Nice-looking said. “I think that’s the best way to stuff it in a nutshell, though sometimes I like to talk and couldn’t put it in a bushel basket. Today, though, I’m feeling less talky. Here’s so you rubes will understand us. We’d like your money. We’ll take the money, and we’ll hole up here for a while.”

Tommy laughed.

Nice-looking eased the pistol out of his waistband and held it alongside his leg, tapping his thigh gently with the barrel. “You’re all right with that, aren’t you … Dad?”

“Take the money and go,” Charlie said. “Take it all, but leave.”

“Naw,” said Nice-looking, “we kind of got a situation on our hands. Made a run at the bank here. Didn’t work out so good. Cop came in while the gal was handing me the money, someone yelled. I had to shoot the cop, and Tommy here had to shoot the one who yelled.”

“Didn’t have to shoot anyone after you killed the cop,” Tommy said. “Just wanted to.”

“I stand corrected,” Nice-looking said. “Okay. Here’s how we start. Give us the money, Dad. Now.”

“And you,” Tommy said, pointing at Billy. “You got some money, don’t you?”

“Enough for a haircut,” Billy said.

Tommy grinned. “Like the old lady who peed in the ocean said, every little bit helps.”

Billy stood up and fished in his front pocket and came up with a few dollar bills. Tommy came over and took them. “Hell, you got enough for a haircut and a shave. If you shaved. Go over there and sit in a chair and be still. You get nervous, we’ll shoot you and tell God you died.”

Billy went over and sat in one of the customer chairs. “Now you, doll,” Nice-looking said. “Finish cutting my hair. And you, Dad, you sit in the barber chair and be nice, or we won’t be nice. Dig? Same goes for you, what is it, Billy?”

Charlie moved around to the front of the chair and sat in it. He could see Billy in the chair across the way. Billy was fuming. Charlie feared he might do something silly.

“I’m thinking I’ll give you a haircut,” Tommy said to Charlie, and wandered behind the chair where Charlie sat. “Little off the top first, then maybe I’ll part your hair with a bullet. I got a gun, too, Dad.”

Tommy turned his attention to Millie, standing with the clippers in hand. Nice-looking had climbed back in the chair. “And you, girlie,” Tommy said. “We might do some hair parting of a different kind with you.”

“Leave her alone,” Charlie said, and he moved to come out of the chair.

Tommy slapped Charlie over the ear. Charlie’s head rang like a bell. “You shut up, Dad, unless you want to get the party started.”

“Let her and the boy go,” Charlie said. “Keep me. They won’t say a word.”

Tommy slapped him over the ear again. Charlie winced. “Like we believe that,” Nice-looking said, leaning back in the chair, shifting into a comfortable spot, resting the gun on his knee. “No one leaves. Not until we leave. Besides, you people make nice company, don’t they, Tommy?”

“Damn nice company,” Tommy said. “I think girlie could be nicer company than these two, though.”

Billy started to rise out of his chair, Charlie lifted a hand off his knee and patted the air. Billy stopped trying to rise up.

“That’a boy,” Tommy said. “You get excited, want to play the hero, you’ll get dead.”

Billy’s face turned bright red, but he kept his seat.

Nice-looking turned in the barber chair and looked at Millie. “You don’t look like any barber I ever had,” he said. “Look here, girlie. I’m going to need you to say a word or two. Not too much, but you can say something.”

“Something,” Millie said.

“Oh, a smart-ass,” Tommy said. “We can fix that.”

“Naw, it’s alright,” Nice-looking said. “I like them a little feisty. It’s more fun to bring them down. The higher something is, more the fun to watch it fall. You got a purse, doll?”

Millie nodded.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Yes. I have a purse.”

“That’s good. You got any money in it?”

“A few dollars.”

“Tell them what you think about that again, Tommy.”

“Like the old lady that peed in the ocean,” Tommy said. “Every little bit counts.”

“That’s your cue, doll,” Nice-looking said. “Give me your purse.”

Millie turned and reached under a shelf and brought it out. Tommy came over and took it, as he did, he ran his hand over her hand. Millie recoiled.

“Ah now, sweet girlie, I’m not so bad,” Tommy said.

“Yes he is,” Nice-looking said. “He’s bad.”

Tommy took Millie’s chin in his hand and said, “I think you ought to give me a kiss.”

Tommy snickered, let her go, went back to stand behind Charlie. He began looking through the purse. After a few minutes he found a small wallet. He dropped the purse and opened the wallet. He took out some bills and put those in his pocket, tossed the wallet on the floor with the purse.

“Where’s the barbershop money?” Tommy said, leaning over Charlie’s shoulder.

“Behind you, in the shelf, a cigar box,” Charlie said.

“No cash register?” Tommy said.

“No,” Charlie said.

“You see a cash register, Tommy?” Nice-looking said.

“No.”

“Then what’s the point in asking?”

Tommy shrugged, found the cigar box, opened it, thumbed through it. “What, a hundred dollars, some change? You might as well take Green Stamps.”

“That’s all we have,” Charlie said.

“What’s in the back?” Tommy said.

“Barber supplies, bathroom, back door and the parking lot.”

“Money?”

“No,” Charlie said.

“Had to leave our car behind,” Nice-looking said. “Or someone’s car. We stole it. Now we got to have another one, so that one in the back I saw, that yours?“

Charlie nodded.

“We’ll be taking it,” Nice-looking said. “Having the keys is better than hotwiring some car. Neither of us are too good at it. Give me the keys.”

“There on that hook by the front door,” Charlie said.

“Tommy,” Nice-looking said, “get those keys.”

Tommy got them, gave them to Nice-looking who was holding out his hand. Nice-looking shoved the keys into his coat pocket.

“Finish my hair, doll,” Nice-looking said.

Millie lifted the clippers and began to cut. Her hands trembled slightly.

* * *

When Millie finished cutting Nice-looking’s hair, he climbed out of the chair, looked in the mirror. He went over to the shelf in front of the mirror, found a comb and a bottle of red hair oil. He dripped a bit of oil into his palm, slicked his hair back with it, combed it.

“We could just lay low here a while,” Tommy said.

Nice-looking nodded. “We could, but they don’t go home, and we’re here, someone might come looking for them.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Tommy said.

“Ask me if I’m surprised.”

Tommy’s forehead wrinkled. “You don’t have to talk that way.”

“I don’t have to is right,” Nice-looking said. “Now, we’re going to need the three of you to go in the back.”

Charlie and Billy stood up from their seats, and Millie started to follow.

As Millie passed and came up close to Charlie, Tommy said, “Honey, I’m going to need to pinch that butt. I been wanting to do that since we got here.”

Tommy reached out to pinch her, and when he did Charlie stepped back and hit him in the face with an elbow. It was a sharp blow and Tommy staggered, his nose spouting blood.

Nice-looking moved quickly, slammed the gun barrel into the side of Charlie’s head. It was a good blow, but Charlie only moved a little. Nice-looking seemed surprised by that. He started to hit Charlie again, but now Tommy was there, and he had drawn a small revolver from inside his coat. He said, “Let me do it.”

“Alright,” Nice-looking said.

Tommy brought the revolver around to hit Charlie, and when he did, Billy grabbed Tommy’s wrist, yelled, “Stop it.”

Tommy jerked his hand free, pointed the revolver.

Nice-looking said, “Don’t make noise unless you got to.”

“I got to,” Tommy said.

“No, you don’t,” Nice-looking said.

“Okay,” Tommy said, and stuck the pistol in his waistband, reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a knife, and clicked it open.

Before Billy could move Tommy stabbed him in the gut. Billy fell back against the barber chair. Charlie grabbed him, pulled Billy away from Tommy, stepped in between them.

Billy sagged to the floor. Blood leaked out of him like spilled motor oil.

“Better move, ’cause I’m not finished, and I can cut you too, old man,” Tommy said.

“I been cut,” Charlie said.

“That’s enough,” Nice-looking said. “Got time for that later, we want it. Get them in the back. Might want them for hostages, and if we do, it’s best they’re alive. Except Billy there. I don’t want him. He don’t look so good, and he’s wet. We’d just be dumping him beside the road somewhere, have to clean up after him.”

“Cowards,” Millie said. “You sorry cowards.” Her body shook.

“Easy, baby,” Charlie said.

“Yeah,” Nice-looking said. “Easy, baby.”

“In the back, now, and get that son-of-a-bitch off the floor, or I’ll finish him here,” Tommy said.

Charlie bent down, slipped his arm under Billy’s arm, lifted him up. “Sorry, son,” Charlie said in his ear.

“I ain’t,” Billy said, but he had turned pale and his face was beaded with sweat.

Charlie grabbed the barber towel off the back of his chair, folded it and pushed it against Billy’s wound. “Hold it there, son, press tight.”

Billy pressed on the towel. When he did, he groaned. The towel began to turn red.

Millie came around and got on the other side of Billy, and they helped him walk to the back.

* * *

“It’s not so bad,” Billy said, as they went.

“Good,” Charlie said, but from experience, he knew Billy was wrong. A stab like that felt like a punch in the gut at first, but then it felt like the fires of hell blazing through your belly. Pain would come, and Billy was leaking a lot of blood; his life was running out of him like water down a drain.

“It’ll be okay, Billy,” Millie said.

When they got to the rear of the shop, Nice-looking went to the back door and cracked it open. He looked out for a short time then eased the door shut.

“There’s a park back there,” Nice-looking said. “There’s a lot of people out there. Go out with them, someone might look and know better.”

“What now?” Tommy said.

“Billy there, he isn’t going, that’s for sure. Put them in that closet, let me think on it.”

A great shadow moved inside of Charlie. Of all the damn things, a confined space. It was one thing to will himself to grab clippers off a top shelf, but to be closed in, that was beyond what he could manage.

Charlie glanced at Millie. Her eyes were wide, her lips tight and thin. He knew that look. He had seen it on the face of soldiers about to enter into battle; he had seen it every day on the faces of his fellow prisoners.

Tommy got a chair from the front of the shop while Nice-looking pointed his gun and a smile at them. Tommy brought a customer chair in, placed it by the closet, opened the closet door. “All of you, get inside.”

“Dad,” Millie said.

Charlie hadn’t moved. He still had one arm around Billy, Millie on the other side.

“Inside, I said.”

With more will than Charlie thought he possessed, he began to trudge toward the dark opening.

I’ll be alright with the light on, he told himself. It won’t be good, but it won’t be as bad. As long as I have a light, that will make it better.

At the doorway, looking into the darkness, Charlie almost broke and ran, but he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t. Not with Millie and Billy here. He had to go inside. As they entered the closet, he reached up quickly, pulled the cord and turned on the overhead light. They eased Billy to the ground with his back against a shelf.

“No,” Tommy said, and he entered into the closet, hopped up and broke the light with his pistol. “Let’s keep it dark. And you, girlie, we get ready, we’ll take you with us. We can have a party somewhere.”

Tommy stepped back, framed by the light of the outside room, and closed the door, plunging them in the darkness. Then they heard Tommy scraping the chair across the floor, sticking it under the doorknob to hold them in.

Charlie took a deep breath. All he could do was sit on the floor of the closet and tremble. He knew he was in the closet, but he felt he was in the grave.

Why can’t I move? he thought. Why can’t I do something? I did something then. Why can’t I now?

Because you know how it could end, for you and Millie and Billy, but you know too it will end that way anyway. You know what you did back then, and if you let yourself loose, you may do what you did before, and that’s not how you want to be. Not like that. Never like that.

“Dad?” Millie said.

She touched his arm. He was embarrassed that she would feel it trembling, and that he was already so beaded with sweat his clothes were wet.

“What do we do, Dad?”

He thought about that first haircut again, but that still wasn’t working. That worked when he knew he could leave, but now the dirt seemed to press against him, and if he broke from the grave, it would be dark, and there was the woods, the soldier and the rocks, and then there was what he had done.

Charlie told himself, You got to stop worrying about what you did, think about that thing you did instead, let it come out, let that rage rush to the surface like a missile. He could hear the soldiers talking outside of the shelter. No. Not the shelter. It was the thugs, and they were talking outside of the closet. Just a damn closet, not a shelter, not a grave.

“I go outside with the girl,” Charlie heard Nice-looking say. “We go cool, and she drives the car around front and we pick you up there.”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said.

“You don’t know what?”

“What if you keep going?”

“Why would I do that? You got the money in your pocket, right?”

“Yeah, but what if you just kept going anyway. You and her. You could have some fun with her, dump her somewhere, keep driving. And here I’d be.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Tommy.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Tommy said.

Then they must have moved across the room, because all of a sudden, Charlie couldn’t hear them anymore.

Inside the closet, Charlie felt Millie push up against him, grab his arm and hold it. “Oh, Dad. What if they take me?”

“It’ll be okay,” Charlie said. A kind of cool had settled over him, and it made the sweat on his body turn cold. He remembered something. The scissors in his barber coat. He reached and took them out.

And then he let himself remember how it was, how he had crawled and then hid in the rocks. The part he wouldn’t let himself think about before, he thought about now. It was the part about where the soldier who had let him go, came back later, maybe an hour later. Charlie had reached the rocks by then and he could hear the pounding of the surf and through a split in the rocks he could see other rock heaps and the sand on the beach, and it was all bathed silver by the moonlight.

There was a soldier with rifle and bayonet walking along the beach, looking left and right, crouched a little. The soldier had a limp like the one who had let him go. He had no doubt it was the same man.

Charlie didn’t know if the soldier had been sent to look for stragglers, or if he had thought about what he had done, letting a prisoner go, felt bad for it, and had come to finish Charlie off. A rage swelled up in Charlie, and though his wound was bad, he felt strong then. The dirt in the wound had lessened the flow of blood and clotted it, and Charlie was touched with madness. It was like a crawling thing inside of him; a den of twisting, poisonous reptiles. He had picked up a rock then. It was heavy and one end was a little sharp, and he could hold it firmly in his hand.

The soldier worked his way among the rocks, holding his bayonet tipped rifle at the ready. The moonlight danced on the blade. The soldier passed the split in the rocks where Charlie hid in shadow, and before the soldier could look his way, Charlie sprang.

Charlie had felt in that moment like a panther. He landed on the soldier, knocked him to the ground. The soldier squeaked like a rat. The rock went up and the rock came down. A wet warmness splashed against Charlie. Some of it splashed into his mouth, and it was hot and coppery, and it tasted like vengeance, and the rock went up and the rock came down, and there was a sound like someone stepping on eggshells after a while, but still the rock went up and the rock came down.

Straddling that soldier, the one who had let him go, all he could think about then was the months of cruelty, the beatings, the starving, the fires and bayonets. The rock went up and the rock went down.

When Charlie paused from exhaustion, the soldier no longer had a head. It was a puddle of blood mixed with sand and bone fragments. The light of the moon had changed, and the shadows were different, and the shadows covered Charlie and the dead soldier. Charlie realized he had been striking the soldier for a long time. He could hardly move, he was so exhausted. In that moment Charlie knew what was inside of him, and it had gone on beyond the need to kill the man. It had turned into the same kind of wicked vengeance as the American soldiers he knew who had cut pieces off dead Japanese soldiers and kept them as souvenirs, or who mutilated bodies, or enjoyed burning men with flamethrowers. The same sort of men he had been captured by. The same kind of man he had become.

Charlie sprang up and rushed the closet door. There was a jar to his shoulder, and he was bounced back, but he went at it again, and this time he heard the chair scrape and go scuttling along the floor. Charlie let what was inside of him come out in full, the thing he feared and had tamped down after that time with the soldier in the rocks. The door sprang open as the hinges creaked out of the wall. Charlie stumbled out into the light with the scissors clutched in his fist, slamming into something, and that something was Tommy.

Charlie hit him like an express train. Tommy went back and tripped over the chair Charlie had dislodged, smacked his head hard on the floor, and his gun came loose from his hand and went skittering across the tile floor.

Nice-looking, standing near the back door, panicked, fired his gun. The shot missed Charlie, slammed into the wall, but Charlie felt the bullet ruffle his hair. Nice-looking was trying to fire again, but the gun was jammed, and he was struggling with it, and Charlie was coming, the scissors raised.

Nice-looking let out a noise that reminded Charlie of the soldier that night, and then Charlie was on him.

The scissors flashed (the rock went up, the rock went down) and there was a scream, and at first he thought it was Nice-looking, but then realized it was him, and that what was coming out of him was pure rage. Blood spattered against his face, and for a moment he was in those rocks, and then heard Millie scream, and he was sure this time it was her, not him.

“Dad, don’t, please don’t,” she said, and her voice broke through the roar in his ears. He sagged slightly. The haze in front of his eyes faded.

Looking down at Nice-looking, who he was straddling, his hand raised with the bloody scissors in his fist, he saw that he had stabbed Nice-looking through the cheek, and had struck him in the shoulder and chest. He could see the swelling red spots there, leaking through Nice-looking’s shirt and jacket, streaming down his face and onto the floor. Nice-looking was crying like a child.

When Charlie looked back over his shoulder, he saw that Millie had picked up Tommy’s revolver and was pointing it at him. Tommy was in a heap on the floor, but he was starting to stir.

Charlie stood up. He put the scissors in his barber coat pocket, picked up Nice-looking’s gun where it lay next to him on the floor. He saw the problem, worked with it briefly, cleared the chamber. It was the same kind of gun he had carried in the war.

He pointed the gun at Nice-looking, stepped back where he could see both of the men. “Don’t get up, punk,” he said to Nice-looking. “And you, Tommy, get over here and sit down beside him. You can hold hands if you like.”

“I’m hurt,” Nice-looking said, and he whimpered after saying it, like a mistreated dog.

“Yeah, you are,” Charlie said. “But believe me, if not for Millie, you’d be dead.”

And he would have, and worse. Charlie would have let what was inside of him keep coming out, like that time with the soldier in the rocks, but Millie’s voice had cut through it all, and even the burning need to kill had been defeated by that small but wonderful thing: his daughter’s voice.

I didn’t kill because I didn’t need to, Charlie thought. I am human. I am a husband and a father. I gained control. That was war and that was then and this is now.

Tommy shuffled over, still looking dazed. He sat on the floor by Nice-Looking. He didn’t look up to see that Charlie was smiling at him.

Charlie took a deep breath. The demons were still there, but they were smaller now, and maybe in time, he could defeat them, or at least make them so small as to no longer matter. He wasn’t fixed, and maybe never would be, but he was better and felt as good as he had felt in a long time.

“Millie, darling,” Charlie said, pointing the gun at the pair on the floor. “Go up and call some law, and tell them to send an ambulance for Billy. Everyone lives today.”

Story Notes

When I was nine or ten, I discovered my mother had an entire mass of magazines she had collected and hung on to, among them Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, National Geographic, and others. I was excited beyond reason, and dove into their dusty piles.

Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and I believe it was Look Magazine that contained The Old Man and the Sea. I remember, as a kid, being disappointed that in The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago didn’t get the fish and I felt he should have. Later, when I re-read it, I knew it was better for the story that he did not. A ten- or eleven-year-old mind versus an older one. I love the younger one, but things don’t always come out the way you want. That’s a tough lesson. That and learning that life isn’t fair.

I read in this mass of magazines stories about Alexander Botts, the World’s Greatest Tractor Salesman, and so on, westerns, humor, you name it. Those were the days when you never knew what you were going to find. I find that sort of thing invigorating.

My mother also had volumes of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, and some of Ellery Queen. I read all of those, and the old magazines had grittier stories than later editions, though they were always less gritty than the hardboiled school. I like the hardboiled school far better, but now and then I pull out those old anthologies. I used them to teach me how to construct stories, and not just crime or mystery stories.

There was a tone to those stories in those old magazines and in the later Hitchcock anthologies that has for the most part vanished. I suppose you could call it an after-World War II tone. That says something and really means nothing, but I know that tone when I encounter it. I liked that tone. I like Norman Rockwell paintings as well.

I had previously written stories for Larry Block, and now he was asking us to pick an artist and write a story based on a chosen painting. I had in my mind an old Rockwell painting, perhaps it was for the Saturday Evening Post, about a kid getting a first haircut. At least that’s the way I remembered it. I finally located it, though it wasn’t quite what I remembered. It was fantastic. A side note, in the ARC version they printed the wrong painting, a beauty shop painting. They got it right in the actual anthology, however.

I wanted to capture the tone of the old Saturday Evening Post stories, the paintings of Norman Rockwell, while maintaining a somewhat modern view. This is the result. Another of my favorites. Larry seems to bring out the best in me. He says he’s retired from editing anthologies, as it is a lot of work, and as a sometime-anthologist, I agree, but I say, “Larry, don’t do it!”