Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  But what if it doesn’t? What if this is true only of film and film-related products? Because I have done my research, have paid close attention as we strolled from bedroom to bedroom; I have felt Lizzie’s bedspread (“Concerning the bedspread,” the tour guide tells us, “it’s not the actual bedspread but a close reproduction; feel it”), looked through her now-empty closet, flushed the toilet in the hallway bathroom, and then flushed it again; I’ve watched Catrine flit in and out of my line of vision, from room to room, have tried to discern some meaning behind her flitting, some message or signal. And what have I found? What has my research and my looking earned me? Nothing. And now we’re in our room, the last room of the tour, the room where the stepmother was killed. Our bag is on the fainting couch, our clothes draped over the chair and desk and bed, and it looks much like our bedroom at home, where I have also looked and researched and found nothing useful, nothing that will help us.

  “Concerning the stepmother,” the tour guide says, “she was sleeping at the time of her demise. And since this was in the summer, and it was hot, and it was a time before window screens . . .”

  “Back in the day,” the thin fraternity boy says.

  “. . . people slept in tents of netting. To escape the mosquitoes.”

  “To escape the mosquitoes,” the chain-smoker repeats.

  “Concerning the netting,” the tour guide says, “whoever killed the second Mrs. Borden chopped right through the netting on the way to the second Mrs. Borden.”

  “Swiss cheese,” the fat fraternity boy says, and then, anticipating our bewildered looks, says, “Holes in the netting and the second Mrs. Borden. Swiss cheese.”

  “Concerning Swiss cheese,” the tour guide says, “there are snacks in the kitchen downstairs.” Everyone except me applauds, as if they’ve gotten exactly what they came for, and the tour guide takes a little bow, her arms flat against the top of her high-waisted skirt, before walking down the stairs. We all follow her, even Catrine, who appears suddenly from another room and silently takes my hand as we descend the stairs. Since the staircase is narrow, she is close, so close her arm and hip are rubbing against me. She smiles, looks like she’s happy to be rubbing up against me, although I don’t know why and I don’t ask. I don’t ask where she’s been or why she’s been floating from one room to the other instead of sticking with the rest of the tour. I don’t ask any of the questions I want to ask, such as: Why are we here? What am I supposed to have learned, and how can it save us? I don’t ask anything, don’t know anything, either, except what I knew before tonight, which is this: Catrine will die, and I will be alone and I will never love anyone as much as I love her and I will never stop missing her. That is all I know—that and how the rest of the night will unfold. We will eat a cracker or two in the kitchen to be polite, and because I know I won’t sleep, I will drink one cup of coffee, then another, and I’ll feel my heart racing and I will want it to get louder and stronger and bigger until it cannot be contained by its cavity, until it gets so big that it will leave my body and surround us, protect us, the way the mosquito netting was supposed to protect the second Mrs. Borden but didn’t. Then Catrine and I will go to our room, the room where the second Mrs. Borden was killed, where Catrine will sleep and I will watch her. After a half hour, I will want to wake her, to make sure she’s alive, to make sure she hasn’t left me yet. But I won’t wake her; I won’t. I will stay on my side of the bed, and from there I will try to listen to her heart and I will let her sleep.

  Good Night

  And even after all that, even after everything I’d said to him earlier, he still came to say good night before he went to bed, the way he had every night, pretty much, since he was a little boy. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, fourteen years old and taller than I am, and I say this not by way of bragging, because I’m not that tall. Anyway, he knocked on the bathroom door. I was brushing my teeth, and said through my mouthful of paste, “Yeah?” I spat into the sink, and when I turned around he was standing there in the doorway. He was bare-chested, wearing the sweatpants he wore to bed every night, which were not much distinguishable from the sweatpants he wore to school every day. This was one of the things we tended to argue about, although I can’t remember if that was one of the things we had just argued about or not. We might have argued about the way his armpits or breath stunk, or why he chewed his fingernails so incessantly, or why he then put those chewed-off fingernails in his shirt and pants and coat pockets, or whether he was planning on saving his chewed-off fingernails for some special occasion, or whether he was capable of telling me the date and time of that special occasion, or whether he was capable of communicating in something other than one-word sentences, or why he didn’t look me in the eye, or why he was so weird sometimes, or whether he was not actually weird but rather living in another universe, not a distant universe, just a universe, say, five seconds behind our own, because why else did it take such an odd amount of time for him to respond to the questions I asked him, any question, like “Do you have any homework?” questions that weren’t tough, not even if you were a moron, which was another thing we sometimes argued about, whether he was a moron or not. “I just wanted to say good night,” he said, looking from the floor, his sky-blue eyes trying to meet mine, and I thought, not for the first time, not even for the first time that day, or hour, Oh God, what is wrong with me? You’re such a sweet kid. I love you so much, and I took two quick steps forward and hugged him, and he hugged me back, sort of. I mean he put his left arm around me, but he kept his right hand up, sort of pushing at my chest with it, making it hard for me to hug him back, even with both arms, which was what I was trying to do. Had he always hugged like that? Would he always hug like that? What kind of person hugs like that? These, I knew, were exactly the things I shouldn’t say, and I almost didn’t.

  Our Pointy Boots

  The reporters stand between us and our transport; they put their microphones and cameras in our faces and say, “You’re going home for Christmas. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”

  We ask, “What are our choices?”

  “The usual two,” the reporters say. “Are you going to hold your sweet babies real tight? Or are you going to lay your fallen comrade to rest while the chaplain conveys the gratitude of the president and the entire nation and then prays to God for the state of your comrade’s immortal soul?” Then they consult their notes and ask, “You do have a fallen comrade, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” we say. “Sanders.”

  “Well,” they say. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? Are you going to bury him? Or are your going to hold your sweet babies real tight?”

  “Neither,” we tell them. “The first thing we’re going to do when we get home is put on our pointy boots and parade around the Public Square.”

  BEFORE WE GRADUATED from high school, before we met and married our sweet babies, before we had babies with our sweet babies, before we got the jobs that we didn’t want to work at for the rest of our lives, before we realized that we probably would work at them for the rest of our lives if we didn’t do something about it, before we did something about it and joined up, before we went to Iraq, before what happened to Sanders, before any of this happened, we were sitting around on a Friday just before graduation, skipping school which, as graduating seniors, we were of course expected to do, feeling bored, feeling like we were missing something in our lives. And so we decided to go to the Public Square, to the Bon-Ton, which had a little of everything, to see if they had what we were missing.

  They were terrified of us at the Bon-Ton. Because we were young and noisy, and we seemed even noisier than we were because we were the only customers in the store, because the store was the only store left on the Public Square that hadn’t pulled out and moved to the mall, and because we couldn’t, at first, find what we were missing, and this disappointed us and so we let them know about it. They tried to sell us fedoras in the Men’s Depa
rtment, and we put our fists through their tops and then wore them around our wrists like bracelets. They tried to sell us stirrup pants in the Ladies’ Department, and we said stirrup pants were an abomination and so we liberated the stirrups with our hands and feet and teeth, and then reshelved what remained with the other, normal pants, thus diminishing all of their retail value. They tried to sell us nonstick pans in Housewares, and we took the pans in one hand and took the gum out of our mouths with the other and stuck the gum to the nonstick pans and then wondered what the people at the Bon-Ton would have to say about that. The people at the Bon-Ton didn’t have anything to say; they scattered, hiding in dressing rooms and locking the slatted doors behind them; or crouching behind checkout counters, armed only with their bar code guns. And so there was no one to help us when we entered Footwear and saw the rows and rows of boots, their pointy toes pointing at us, as if to say they wanted us as much as we, we realized, wanted them.

  ONCE WE’VE FINISHED talking to the reporters, we get on the transport that takes us to Germany and then another one that takes home. We get off the transport, and there, standing on the base’s tarmac, are our sweet babies, waving at us. We can see that our sweet babies don’t have our babies with them, for which we are grateful. The tarmac has been cleared, but the snowbanks surrounding it are ten, fifteen feet high, high enough so that you can’t see the electric fences somewhere on the other side of them. It’s sunny out, the sky is crystal blue, but it’s so, so cold that our eyes start to water immediately, the way they did when we first got to the desert and sand got into our eyes and they started to water immediately. This is one of the things we’ve learned: not that people are the same wherever you go, but that we don’t change, no matter where we are. We shoulder our duffel bags and walk toward our sweet babies. As we get closer, our sweet babies stop waving, run toward us, arms out in front of them, preparing to hold us. Their faces look hopeful but nervous. Because they know that Sanders is dead, and they also know about the usual choices, know that we could choose him instead of them. When they get close enough, they put their arms around us and hold us real tight. But we don’t hold them back. We keep one arm to our side; the other holds on to our duffels. When our sweet babies realize this, they push themselves away, like they’re the ship and we’re the shore.

  “You bastard,” our sweet babies say to those of us who are men. “You bitch,” our sweet babies say to those of us who are women. “You chose Sanders, didn’t you? You chose burying Sanders over holding us real tight.”

  “We didn’t choose Sanders,” we say.

  “Well, you obviously didn’t choose us,” they say.

  “That’s true,” we say.

  They look at us, confusion displacing anger on their faces for a second before they figure out what’s going on, before they figure out what we’ve chosen. “Oh no,” they say.

  “Oh yes,” we say. And then we ask them to please take us home, where our pointy boots are in our closets, waiting for us to put them on and parade around the Public Square.

  WE HAVE SEEN and done some things: when we first killed an enemy, we were glad, because for the first time ever we found that we could actually do what we were trained to do; when we first killed someone who we weren’t sure was an enemy, we were happy that the word “enemy” existed so that we could call him one anyway; when we first saw one of our own comrades killed, we were ecstatic that it wasn’t us; when we first saw one of our own comrades killed by a bullet that might have been fired by one of us, we were angry he was dead so he couldn’t exonerate us, unless one of us had actually killed him, and then we were grateful he wasn’t alive to say so. We’ve seen and done all of that. Plus, there’s Sanders. But we’re truly ashamed of only one thing: that when we first saw the pointy boots in the Bon-Ton, we had a fight over what kind we should get.

  Those of us who grew up on a farm refused to buy Luccheses, for fearing of being mistaken for wops. Those of us who were Italians refused to buy Fryes, for fear of being mistaken for rednecks. Some of us didn’t want to get Acmes, because they sounded like joke boots. Some of us didn’t want to get Bearpaws, because the name was too close to that of the pastry. Some of us had no trouble getting Durangos, except for those of us who had trucks that went by the same name. We all, finally, agreed on Sanders, except for Sanders, who said it was a stupid name for a boot. It was like giving a dog a human name, he said. “I would never name my dog Sanders,” one of us said, and then Sanders wanted to know what the hell that was supposed to mean. And how does life turn out this way? How does the thing that promises to be different, the thing that promises to make you feel good, end up making you feel as bad as everything else? And when that happens, do you take it out on the thing that has promised so much, or do you take it out on yourself for believing the promise?

  We did both: we took it out on ourselves, and the boots. We hurled them at each other, at close range; we gouged each others’ eyes with the pointy toes; we clubbed each other with the hard heels; we put the boots over our hands, like gloves, and then boxed each other with them; we fell on the floor and wept at how pathetic and ridiculous we had become, how pathetic and ridiculous we always had been and always would be. And then, after we wept but before we could figure out what else to do that we might later weep over, we were quiet, just for a moment, just long enough to hear one of the salesladies say meekly from inside her locked, slatted dressing room door: “What I’m hearing is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of boots you’re wearing, just as long as they’re pointy.”

  It was like hearing the voice of God: not a vengeful God, but a practical, reasonable God, a God who didn’t keep tabs on all the bad things you did, but who listened, really listened to you while you did those bad things, so as to help you get what you wanted so you’d stop doing them. When you hear that voice, you don’t stop and ask how it got so wise, or question its wisdom. You just do what it tells you to do. We did what the saleslady told us to do. We gathered up the boots, found their partners. We located our size and our preferred brand and put them on, no matter how damaged they were, how damaged we had made them. We returned the boots we didn’t want to their boxes and put the boxes back on the shelves. Then we lined up and proceeded past the locked dressing room doors; as we went past the saleslady’s door, we put our mouths to the slats and thanked her for her help. “I guess you’re welcome,” was her blessing. And then we left the Bon-Ton and went out onto the Public Square.

  ONCE OUR SWEET babies figure out what we’ve chosen, they say, to themselves, “Poor Sanders. Poor us.” And then to us: “You fuckers can just go ahead and walk home,” and then they run to their cars and lay rubber out of the parking lot before we can force our way into the cars. So, we reshoulder our duffel bags and start walking.

  Just outside the base, on the other side of the street from the entrance gate, are two protestors. They are both dressed head to toe in insulated camo, layers and layers of it, with only their faces uncovered. One, a woman, her cheeks round and fiery red, her gray hair peeking out from under her camo ski hat, is holding a cardboard sign with the words NO MORE WAR written on it in red marker, with a green peace symbol drawn underneath. The other protestor is a man. Ice hangs from his gray beard, and snot from his red nose, like Christmas tree ornaments. He chants, “No more war!” into a bullhorn, drowning out whatever it is the woman is chanting, which is also probably “No more war!” They are exactly like us: there should be more of them, and they should have better ideas, and they should have better ways to tell people about their ideas. When they see us walk out of the gate, they stop chanting and come over to talk with us.

  “Welcome home,” the guy with the bullhorn says, although not through the bullhorn, which he’s holstered. The holster looks to be made out of an enormous widemouthed wine sack, held in place by an orange power cord around the guy’s waist. Instead of a normal belt buckle, this is held in place by the cord’s prongs and holes. There are other wine-sack-looking vessels of various sizes
attached to the cord, spaced a few inches apart. One is holding a thermos. One is holding a cell phone. One is holding something that actually does look like it might contain wine but is probably only a hot water bottle. One is holding something in tinfoil, probably lunch. We’ve never seen anything like it.

  “Would you look at those holsters,” we say.

  “Well, I made them myself,” the guy says, obviously so proud. He seems like he’s on the verge of telling us all about how he made them and why when the woman, who is probably his wife, who has probably heard about this guy’s homemade holsters a thousand times, interrupts and says, “We’re proud of you. We feel it’s important you know that.”

  “OK,” we say.

  “This”—and here she taps her sign with the hand that’s not holding it—“this doesn’t mean we’re not proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” we say.

  “We know you don’t want to be there any more than we want you to,” she says.

  “But we volunteered,” we say.

  “You didn’t think you were volunteering for this,” she says. She looks at her sign and points to the word WAR, so we know exactly what’s she’s talking about.

  “What did we think we were volunteering for, then?” we ask. We know the answer, and she doesn’t, but even if she did, she’d look at us the way she looks at us now—in huge disappointment, as though we’re not the people she thought we were, not the people she needs us to be. Still, she’s not quite ready to give up on us. We know this, because we know her. She really is the kind of person who wants to give peace a chance, and since she’s giving peace a chance, she figures she might as well give us one, too. “We,” she says. “You keep talking about yourselves as ‘We,’ and not ‘I.’ You poor people. I bet the Army taught you to talk like that, to think like that.”

  “Actually,” we tell her, “we’ve talked and thought this way ever since the day we first put on our pointy boots and paraded around the Public Square.”