Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  “What?” she says, but she doesn’t wait for any answer. She slowly backs away from us, to across the street, where she stands holding her sign over her chest with both hands, as though out of modesty. “Are you coming, Harold?” she shouts. But Harold is not coming, not quite yet.

  “Tell us something about what it’s like over there,” he says eagerly. We know him, too. He’s the kind of guy—with his camo, his questions, his bullhorn, his homemade holsters, his gear—who spends every minute he’s not protesting the war fantasizing about what it’s like to be in one. “Tell us something we might not have heard from someone else.”

  “Well,” we say, “one of the things you might not have heard is that when we’re interrogating someone we say that if they don’t tell us what we want to know, we’ll cut off their heads and then fuck their skulls.”

  “Always?” Harold asks.

  “Every time,” we say.

  “Has anyone ever told you what you wanted to know?”

  “No,” we say.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” he says, then glances at those of us who are women, then looks away from them before they see him looking. It’s too late; they see.

  “What?” those of us who are women say. “You got some kind of problem?”

  “No, no problem,” the guy says, his hand moving instinctively to the bullhorn in his holster. “I just have a hard time imagining it, that’s all.”

  “You have a hard time imagining us saying that we’d cut off someone’s head and fuck their skull?”

  “No, I can imagine you saying it. But can, you know, a gal actually do that? I mean, physically?”

  “Harold, put a sock in it,” his wife says from across the street.

  “You should listen to your wife, Harold,” those of us who are women say.

  “You should listen to those of us who are women, Harold,” those of us who are men say. But he doesn’t listen to any of us.

  “I mean, it’s not much of a threat, is it?”

  “That’s it,” those of us who are women say. They drop their duffel bags and charge Harold. Those of us who are men have to restrain them while he retreats across the street. He stands next to his wife and shouts through his bullhorn, “It’s kind of funny, if you think about it,” and then his wife snatches the bullhorn out of his hands and tucks it into her parka.

  “Sanders wouldn’t have thought it was funny,” we say.

  “Who is Sanders?” Harold’s wife wants to know.

  “Sanders is dead,” we say. “We’re going to lay him to rest tomorrow.”

  “I bet Sanders didn’t think he was volunteering for that,” the woman says.

  “No, he didn’t,” we say as we start walking home. Because we know what Sanders thought he was volunteering for. He thought he was volunteering for the same thing we did: for the chance to feel the way we felt when we first put on our pointy boots and paraded around the Public Square.

  IT WAS LUNCHTIME when we got out of the Bon-Ton and onto the Public Square. It was sunny, hot, almost summer. The county courthouse workers were sitting in the shadow of the statue of our locally significant Revolutionary War general with their bagged lunches, struggling to unwrap their cellophane-wrapped meat-and-cheese sandwiches. The guys from the halfway house were lying back-down and shirtless on the grass, wolfing down their cigarettes and then lighting their new butts with the remainder of the old without once opening their eyes. The bail bondsmen stood near their storefronts, sipping burnt coffee out of their Styrofoam cups, eyeing the cuffed as they were led into the courthouse, making bets on how much their bail would be, on who would end up jumping and who would not.

  And then there was us, fifteen teenagers, boys and girls, standing in front of the Bon-Ton. For a while, we did nothing but look down and admire our new pointy boots. There is no love so true as one’s love for one’s new pair of shoes, and we loved our pointy boots even more truly than that. We turned our feet this way and that, watched as the boots glinted in the sun; we squatted down and traced our fingers over the stitched patterns, or, if we’d chosen boots with no patterns, we ran our fingers over the smooth, stitchless surfaces; we stuck our toes into the smallest sidewalk cracks and marveled at how pointy the toes really were. We looked around the Square, and saw that no one else was wearing anything remotely like them. We pitied these people. Because this is what it means to be in love: you feel sorry for people who aren’t. And then you feel happy that no one feels sorry for you. You feel so happy that it’s not enough to just sit there and admire the beloved. You have to do something that shows the beloved how much you love it. And if you love your pointy boots the way we loved ours, you show them so by parading in them around the Public Square.

  We did that. We proceeded loosely, not in formation as we learned to do later at the base; not single file, or on our hands and knees, as we learned to do in the desert; but some of us in twos and threes, some of us by ourselves, some of us stopping, momentarily, to admire our boots in the windows of the empty storefronts, or to wipe some dust or dirt off of our pointy boots, and then moving on again. Around and around we went. We did it for the joy of the thing, and not necessarily to be noticed by the poor people who were not us. But they noticed us anyway. The county courthouse workers looked away from their sandwiches; the bail bondsman, from those who might soon be bail bonded. The guys from the halfway house actually sat up and opened their eyes and let their butts die out without lighting another one. One of the most fully gone of the halfway house guys even got up and started parading with us. He wore sweatpants, with one sweatpant leg down to the ankle, the other pushed up to the knee, and beat-up white leather high-top basketball sneakers with no socks. He brought his knees up high as he marched, and waved his unlit cigarette like a baton. He was mocking us, probably, and we let him, rather than kicking his ass, which we could have done, easily. We could have kicked his ass, no problem. But instead, we practiced restraint. We figured ass-kicking was unnecessary, figured he’d get tired and sooner or later return to the grass with his halfway house brothers. Which is exactly what happened. After a lap or two around the Square, he went back to the grass and sat down and watched us. Everyone did. We knew what they were seeing: they were seeing fifteen teenagers, some boys, some girls, parading together but not together, all wearing pointy boots but not the same pointy boots. Fifteen individuals but also a group, a group people could identify and admire: those kids who paraded around the Public Square in their pointy boots. They could see what we—and they, and everyone—were told in school was all around us: a nation of individuals, united. They could see the promise of America, in other words, made flesh by us and our pointy boots.

  IT’S DARK BY the time we get home. We knock on our front doors, and our sweet babies unlock them and let us in. But before we’re able to get our boots out of our closets and on our feet and start parading around the Public Square, our sweet babies try to stop us. We keep trying to go to the bedroom, to the closet where our pointy boots are waiting for us, and our sweet babies keep edging in front of us, keeping between us and the room, asking us questions. They ask us if we want something to eat. They ask if we want to take a rest, or watch some TV, or maybe play a board game. They ask us to admire the Christmas tree (there is a Christmas tree, in the corner, next to the TV, a pretty, droopy Scotch pine with colored lights and presents piled underneath it and a wooden Nativity scene with baby Jesus and his mom and dad facing outward and the donkeys and wise men facing the presents). They tell us that they were waiting for us to get home to put the star on the top of the tree. They produce the star, which is silver and which they’ve been hiding behind their backs. They ask us if we’d like to put the star on the top of the tree now or a little bit later. Because a little bit later would be fine, they tell us. “Why don’t we do it a little bit later?” our sweet babies say. But for right now, would we like some hot chocolate? We know what they’re doing. We know they’ve taken a seminar, at the base, about what to do when your soldier co
mes home. We know they’ve been warned to expect us to be a little different. To be a little off. We know they’ve been told to be patient with us, to not force us to talk about things we might not want to talk about. We know they’ve been told to be solicitous, to ask us what we’d like to do and not tell us. We know they’ve been reminded they have only two weeks with us before we’re shipped back, and not to ruin our little time together by trying to rush things. We know this because we were made to take a seminar at the base in Iraq, telling us to expect the same thing about ourselves, to treat ourselves with the same caution, the same care.

  When we don’t answer any of their questions, our sweet babies put their hands on our shoulders and look into our eyes and say, “We missed you.”

  “Yes,” we say.

  “I bet you miss Sanders,” they say.

  “Yes,” we say.

  “Poor Sanders,” they say.

  “Yes,” we say. And then: “About those pointy boots . . .”

  “Fine,” they say. They take their hands off our shoulders, step to the side, and make a sweeping motion with their arms in the direction of the bedroom, the closet, the boots, as if to say, It’s all yours. We can see the hurt on their faces. We can see what we’ve done to them, what we’ve always done to them. We are not heartless, and to show we’re not heartless, we say, “Sorry.”

  “You’ve always cared more about your pointy boots than you’ve cared about us, haven’t you?” they ask.

  “Yes,” we say, and run past them into the bedroom.

  AT THE END of lunch hour, the county workers finished their sandwiches and went back into the courthouse. The bail bondsmen finished their coffee and went back into their storefronts. The halfway house guys finished their cigarettes and went back into their halfway houses. And we finished our parading and sat down at the foot of the statue of our local Revolutionary War general. We’d paraded for almost an hour, but we didn’t feel at all tired, not even our feet, which would have been expected, considering we’d been parading in brand-new pointy boots. But we didn’t have one blister, one strained arch, one bruised heel, one rubbed-raw toe. We felt good. And if we felt so good, some of us wondered, if we weren’t tired, if we weren’t footsore, then what did we think we were doing, sitting down? “Let’s get up and parade, for crying out loud,” some of us said. But others of us said no. Because hadn’t we felt good before? Hadn’t we felt good on the basketball court, or smoking cigarettes behind the art room, or drinking beer on the dirt roads outside town while sitting on the hoods of our parents’ second cars, or doing things to each other in the cornfields next to the dirt roads that we’d always wanted to do but couldn’t get up the nerve to without the help of the beer? And hadn’t we then ruined those good things? Hadn’t we then taken and missed a terrible shot we had no business taking at exactly the worst possible moment and lost the game, or smoked an extra cigarette and got caught doing it by the art teacher, or drank ten beers too many and then later wrecked our parents’ cars, or, before we wrecked those cars, done things we shouldn’t have with each other in the cornfields and then regretted it afterward? Hadn’t we ruined good things before? some of us asked. And it should be said that Sanders was one of us who asked it. You would think, after everything that had happened, that Sanders would have been one of us who wanted to get up and parade and ruin our good feeling, but no: he was one of us who spoke eloquently about not ruining it. He was one of us who said that we should always keep the memory, the vision, of our parading around the Square in our pointy boots, but we shouldn’t ruin it by going out and parading in our pointy boots around the Public Square whenever we felt a little sad, a little lonely, a little useless. He said that we should try to find that feeling somewhere else—through our work, through our marriages, through whatever—that we should go looking for that feeling everywhere. And even if we never found it, even if our lives ended up as lousy as they had been before we put on our pointy boots, then at least we’d have the memory of that time when it wasn’t lousy, when we felt good; at least we’d have the memory of the one good thing we didn’t ruin. And no matter what, we should agree to do this together, to do everything together, as one: we should marry our sweet babies as one, join up as one, speak as one, remember our parading and our pointy boots as one. Then those of us who hadn’t wanted to parade again asked, “Agreed?” And those of us who had wanted to parade again said, “Agreed.” Then we went home and took off our pointy boots and put them in our closets. We polished them regularly, religiously, treated them more tenderly, more lovingly, than we ever did our sweet babies, which our sweet babies never failed to notice and comment upon. Whenever we moved, we took the boots with us, moved them from bedroom closet to bedroom closet, but we never put them on again, not once, until now.

  WE’RE SITTING ON our beds, trying to put on our pointy boots, when our sweet babies peek their heads into our bedrooms. They have crazed, determined I’m-going-to-try-one-more-time smiles on their faces. “I have a surprise for you,” each of them says, then their faces disappear again. We don’t respond. We just sit there, on our beds, trying to put on our pointy boots. This is difficult, more difficult than we remember, more difficult than it used to be, because our feet have been in round-toed boots for so long they’ve stopped being the kind of feet that will slip easily into pointy boots. A few seconds later, we hear soft, muffled, thumping coming toward us. Then the sounds stop. We look up and see our sweet babies standing in the doorway, and in front of them, in front of us, our babies. They’re wearing overlarge T-shirts that read DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL, or MOMMY’S LITTLE BOY, OR DADDY’S LITTLE BOY, OR MOMMY’S LITTLE GIRL, depending. The lettering on the shirt is brightly colored and badly written, as though actually written by children who are only eighteen months old, which is how old our babies are. They’re so much bigger than the last time we saw them; they hardly even look like our babies anymore. Our babies turn to look at our sweet babies, who nod; our babies turn back to us and wave with their white, sticky, pudgy fingers. They smile at us in their shy, distracted, happy way. We knew this was going to happen. On the transport, we warned each other about this moment, the moment when our babies would be produced, when our babies and sweet babies would conspire to melt our hearts. “Be strong,” we told each other on the transport. We reminded each other that our hearts had melted when our babies had first been born, too. We reminded each other of how we had each said to our newborn babies, “You are mine. You are mine and you melted my heart, and I will never let you down.” And then, of course, we did let them down, in thousands of small and large ways, every day of their lives, including by leaving them to go to Iraq. We resented them because of it—there is no resentment so pure as that for the people who you love and who you have let down, and our resentment was even purer than that, because we were comparing our babies to our pointy boots, who we had never let down after we’d first put them on and who we had never resented—and our hearts hardened; they became even harder than before, to compensate for melting in the first place, for believing that our babies could make us feel as purely good as our pointy boots had. “There is no sense going through all that again,” we told each other on the transport. We look away from our babies and pull even harder on our boots, trying to jam our feet into them.

  “Don’t you want to hold your baby?” our sweet babies ask as we pull and grunt, pull and grunt. We look at our babies again, almost involuntarily. They’re closer now. They are on the verge of calling to us by name, or at least by title. Their lips open and close, open and close, as though practicing to say the word. It is almost impossible to resist a baby who is on the verge of saying your name for the first time. Still, we resist. Still, we struggle with the boots. Still, we don’t talk to our babies. Still, we do not move to hold our babies. This infuriates our sweet babies; this pisses them off. They pick up our babies and pull them away from us, to their chests, as though we’re not worthy of them. This is another thing the seminars have taught them: that they will become
infuriated by us; it’s inevitable, natural, totally understandable. And no matter how infuriated they get, they should never, the seminars tell them, never ever act as though we’re not worthy. But what if we aren’t worthy? What do they do then? On this, the seminars are silent. Figure that out for yourself, the seminars seem to say.

  Our babies start to cry; they start to struggle in our sweet babies’ arms. They want to get down; they want to come to us. But our sweet babies won’t let them.

  “Jesus, what kind of person are you?” our sweet babies want to know.

  We stop trying to put on our boots, and look at our sweet babies, wondering if they really want to know. Do they really want to know what the two protestors know: that we are the kind of people who, when interrogating someone, shove our rifles in his face and say, “If you don’t tell us what we want to know, we are going to chop off your head and fuck your skull”? Do they want to know what the two protestors don’t know? Do they want to know that we are also the kind of people who then, when it comes down to it, will not do what we’ve threatened? Except for Sanders, once, kind of. We say “kind of,” because the woman was already dead. She was already dead. We had killed her while storming the house, or someone in the house had shot her beforehand, or during, or she had shot herself. In any case, she was dead, slumped against the wall. There was a small hole in her chest, and there was a lot of blood still coming out of it and staining her robes. She was wearing so many robes, so many layers of clothing, even though it was so hot; her headscarf had slipped down and was covering her face. We removed it. Her face looked like ash; she looked dead, but we put our hands inches from her mouth to feel if she was breathing; we put our fingers on her neck to see if she had a pulse. She wasn’t and didn’t; she was dead. Her son (we assumed he was her son; he was the right age, around ten or so) was still alive, facedown on the floor, hands behind his head. There was no one else in the house; we’d checked. We assumed we would do what we normally did: we would tell the boy who was still alive that if he didn’t tell us what we wanted to know that we would cut off his head and fuck his skull. And then, when he didn’t tell us, we’d bring him to the people who did the real interrogating, the people we knew nothing about, except that they used better threats than we did. Or they used the same threat, just more effectively. But before we could say what we usually said, Sanders blurted out, “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going fuck your dead mother’s skull.” And then, before we could give him hell for deviating from the script, Sanders dropped his pants and tried to do what he’d threatened. Do our sweet babies want to know that? Do they want to know that when Sanders started to do it, we laughed? That all of us laughed? Maybe because we were so startled that he’d deviated from the script, or that he tried to do what he threatened. Or maybe because he kept saying, “It’s not working, it’s not working,” and we said, “Well, of course it’s not working, Sanders. She’s dead.” “That’s not what I mean,” Sanders said. “I’m talking about it. It isn’t working.” “Well, Jesus, Sanders,” we said. “Of course it isn’t working.” And then we laughed; we couldn’t help ourselves. Because Harold the protestor was right: it was kind of funny, if you thought about it. Do our sweet babies want to know that? Do they want to know that we are the kind of people who laugh at Sanders trying and failing to skull-fuck that dead mother? That we are the kind of people who laugh harder when Sanders, his pants still around his ankles, the it that wasn’t working hanging out for anyone with eyes to see, waddles over to the son? The son is lying facedown on the dirt floor of his house—if it is his house, or if you can call it a house; it’s just a stack of cinder blocks with planks of wood resting on top, really. The son is crying, the dirt getting wet around his head from his tears, his hands still clamped behind his head, keeping his head still while the rest of his body shakes and writhes and convulses, like a snake with its head nailed to the ground. “Look at me,” Sanders, his rifle in his right hand, says to the son. He turns his head in Sanders’s direction. “You’re next,” he says, cupping his crotch with his left hand, and we laugh harder. That’s the kind of people we are.