Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

Of course not. Freddy had planned it all out. He would have been thinking of this for years, probably from the day he’d learned of the affair. He would have seen months ago on their blog that Roger and Della would be attending the conference at Lascaux, and started his plans. He’d found the perfect cave, trucked stone and gravel to the hill above it, studied the original paintings and mimicked them in his drawings here. He then signed up for the conference under the name Trevor Hall and waited until he could get to Roger alone and plant the seed of the hidden cave.

  “Honey,” she said in a raw, panicked voice that echoed through the small chamber.

  “It’s okay.” He shone a beam on the entrance. “It’s mostly gravel, I think. We can dig our way out. It’ll take some time. But we can do it.”

  They propped the flashlights up, pointed toward the pile of rock, and began to grab the larger pieces and fling them aside and dig away at the gravel with the small shovel.

  They got about two feet forward when Roger felt himself growing dizzy from lack of oxygen.

  “I don’t think . . .” Della began.

  “It’s okay. We’re making good progress.” He began choking as he inhaled the dusty, thinning air. Not enough, not enough. . . . It was like drinking salty water when you were thirsty. “We’ll just take a break. Need some rest. Just for . . . just . . . for a bit.”

  He lay back against the wall. Della dropped the rock she held and crawled to him, flopping to the floor, resting her head against his shoulder, gasping.

  One flashlight faded to yellow and went out.

  A moment later he felt his wife go limp.

  Good, good, Roger thought, his thoughts growing fuzzy. Conserving her strength.

  He said, “We’ll just take . . . a . . . little . . . rest.”

  Did he say that before?

  He couldn’t remember.

  “Just five . . . minutes. We’ll just rest a little. We’re as good as out already. Just . . . some . . .”

  His head lolled back against the rock.

  Roger stared at the remaining flashlight, the beam turning to yellow, then dimming, amber. Like the sun growing low on the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, where Howard Carter had found Tutankhamen’s tomb.

  Just a few more minutes and we’ll get back to work. It’s going to be fine.

  He said this to Della. Or maybe he didn’t.

  The light went out, and blackness filled the cave.

  JOE R. LANSDALE is the author of more than forty-five novels, twenty-five novellas, and four hundred short pieces, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. He has written screenplays, and TV and comic scripts. He is Co-executive Producer on the Sundance TV show, Hap and Leonard, based on his Hap and Leonard series of crime novels. Other films and TV episodes have been made from his work. Among them, Cold in July, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, which was made for the Showtime TV series Masters of Horror. He has written for Batman: The Animated Series, as well as Superman: The Animated Series. He has received more than twenty-five writing awards and recognitions, including ten Bram Stokers, the Grandmaster and Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, the Spur from the Western Writers of America, and numerous others. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, along with a cat and a very nice pit bull.

  The Haircut by Norman Rockwell

  CHARLIE THE BARBER

  BY JOE R. LANSDALE

  Charlie 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 one 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, some 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 windblown 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 compl
ained; 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 waste basket 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 who 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 begin 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 human kind. 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 gone only 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 studied him only 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 awhile, and it was at that point that he couldn’t think about what had happened afterward 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 interment camp of Palawan, but he had brought it hom
e 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 who his mother brought in. The boy had long locks, and he was a fighter in the chair, oversize 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 some place 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. 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.