The Haircutter

by Dana Thompson

  Carol’s buses stopped for sometimes half an hour to let passengers off, and we’d have to keep an eye on her so we could run to the john and purchase snacks. I officially found out that we were headed back to New York when we stopped in a town in Pennsylvania. We slid into a parking spot on Main Street across from the bus depot, just close enough to be able to watch Carol’s little wigged head on her bus. There was an old man hobbling up the sidewalk with a flyswatter, using it, and Darron and I laughed about it until we saw him enter a Salvation Army store. I looked at Darron and he was biting his lip, wincing badly. He wanted to go buy Imitation Cowboy supplies.

  I said, “You eyein’ that Salvation?”

  He said, “I could just duck in while those new passengers load.”

  I said, “Fine—you prolly got a half hour,” allowing him to go.

  The cornfield that the bus depot was build on stunk of grasshopper poop. The sky was the color of chicken soup. It was raining tenderlings that patted me on the hand as I reached out to Carol’s bus going, “Why, my Love?” A car pulled up next to me at a red light and blocked my view, and the woman driving was yawning and she looked like a demon screaming. If I were a kid I would’ve wet myself. I scoffed at her when she looked at me.

  “Close your mouth,” I said, looking away to see Darron come out the doors of the Salvation with ten bursting plastic sacks strung up on his arms and a few cowboy hats stacked on his head. He heaped his loot onto the back seat of the Golf.

  “Quit smilin’ so hard, she’s gonna sense it,” I said.

  “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’!” he said.

  “So close your mouth.”

  Carol stepped out of her bus and walked toward a picnic bench with a cig.

  “She wants a cig,” I thought, happy for her somewhere beneath my fat.

  Darron handed me a plastic bag, “Here, I got you this disguise.”

  I saw a blond wig, a white church hat …

  I said, “Huh?”

  He said, “You’re gonna need a disguise so no one recognizes you. What if someone tells Carol they saw you, or what if they rat on you guys that you didn’t do your project right? Why do you think she’s wearin’ a wig? Aren’t you supposed to be out in the woods? I got you a fat lady costume, no offense.”

  The bag was full of cross-dressing equipment.

  Once again, my little brother had proven to be worth having.

  I said, “She’s wearing a wig! Darron, you’re right! She doesn’t want anyone to recognize her! You know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “She’s prolly goin’ back to the woods after all this!”

  “I always used to wish you were a detective!” Darron said.

  I said, “I gotta hurry up and get into this now—who knows when the next stop’s New York.”

  The Haircutter stood up into the street holding his shitty plastic bag tight to his breast as the small-town air held him tight to its teat so he could get milk-fed. The rain fell straight, as if suicidal. Nobody watched me hustle to the bus depot, as they were used to fat people. Everyone wore sweatshirts or jackets or T-shirts with the names of sport teams or colleges or medical centers on them; everyone was Midwestern. In the Women’s Room, mosquitoes hung in the air like perfume. I went to the handicapped stall, deciding I’d come out drooling if I saw wheelchair wheels waiting under the door before I came out. The rain fell harder as I opened the sack to see what Darron had bought.

  Pantyhose …

  A floral muumuu …

  A pair of sea-green high heels …

  A gold bracelet—(worth something?) …

  White plastic flower earrings …

  A knit pocketbook with Christmas trees on it that said Warm Greetings …

  “Jesus Christ, Darron,” I thought.

  I removed my clothes. The floor was gritty and thunder gathered in the clouds.

  I sat down on the toilet and blew into the pantyhose to puff them out ready to get my legs.

  Then lightning struck hot pink through the opened door—

  Carol had entered.

  My atoms are sensitized to her. And her Bad Influence was so strong I could taste it. She plopped down in the stall next to mine and shat hard in an exhale. Her lighter flicked and a cloud of smoke billowed when it hit the floor. I bent over to look at her feet and saw her hiking boots that we’d paid $64.95 for. Her cig ash hissed at a drain in the floor between us.

  “Surprise!” Carol said.

  I gasped.

  “Oh sorry, I didn’t know anyone else was in here!” she said. “I’m practicing for somethin’.”

  I almost said, “Practicing for WHAT?” but quickly thought against it. Wrapped in a thin slice of time like a spring roll, I’d chosen the healthy option. “Don’t blow your cover yet no matter how bad you want it!” I heard Darron say in my head.

  Carol farted a plop of shit out.

  “Sorry,” she apologized for it.

  Our bodies are built to shit when we’re scared so that we’re lighter to run. Carol, what are you running from?

  Thunder cracked and lightning struck three seconds later—a tornado was three miles away. We could hear the bus driver’s walkie-talkie through a vent high up on the wall. And then he crunched away on the soupy gravel. The bus farted and Carol called, “Don’t leave without me!”

  Static electricity made its too-good-for-us-all way across the cornfield and gathered in the eyelashes of a cow for sparks to blind her when she blinked. I worked the pantyhose skin up my shin until my shin burst through them as Carol pulled on her paper roll beside me. She wiped as I spat on the earrings to get crust off them, and they were white flowers as I clipped them to my lobes. Carol was sixteen when I was twenty-four and our moms got our food from the same grocery store as these years later I stood up from the toilet and slipped a muumuu over my head—it fell down floral to my ankles to whisper a soap opera theme song at them. Carol dropped her cig into the drain and it hissed when it saw how hot I looked in the dress. The bracelet popped off my wrist and hit her stall wall. I was Cinderelly as I slipped into the sea-green high heels and they fit.

  “Swill that down, you’re used to it,” Carol whispered before she flushed.

  I sucked on the hook where women hang their pocketbooks while I waited for her to finish with the sink. The cold metal satisfied the sick instinct to cut her wig with my scissor (which was in NYC).

  She left the restroom saying, “Surprise!”

  The rain let up like a hand relaxing after casting a curse.

  The Haircutter didn’t even look in the mirror. He opened the door and steam had rolled off the field to cover the lot in fog.

  It looked like a nightmare.

  We pulled up to New York in the golden late afternoon—the same time of day that Father John and I had pulled up eight years earlier.

  Darron was driving and craning his neck around, pretending not to care.

  I said, “Go ahead—holler.”

  Then it was all, “WHAT! THIS IS NEW YORK!!!”

  I ticked my tongue. I flipped down the mirror to start putting some makeup on. I was sitting in the passenger’s wearing a white church hat placed on a blond wig; there were boob indentations on the muumuu where the owner’s boobs used to go; and I was applying purple shadow the way I’d seen Carol do it when she did.

  “Couldn’t you have gotten me a regular pocketbook instead of a Christmas tree one?” I said.

  “Well I thought cause of your art guy!” Darron said, defending.

  “I don’t care about Christmas!” I said.

  I emptied the contents of my pants pockets into the pocketbook. My green Velcro wallet, the change, the comb that I never used. The cell phone that should’ve been deep in my backpack in the woods. I turned the cylinder on a lipstick Darron had bought and the lipstick emerged pussy-pink and girly-smelling. I applied.

  “Big bro, I’m sorry, but you look like a man,” Darron said.

  “No, I look like a cross-d
resser pretending to be a fat lady,” I said. “It’s a perfectly normal thing to look like in New York City.”

  “Well you don’t look like The Haircutter,” he said.

  “Then that’s what counts.”

  When the bus disappeared into Port Authority Bus Terminal, we lost it.

  “I’ll call you on the cell,” I said.

  I stepped out of the car and slammed the door shut, holding my Sunday hat tight on my wig. Swooping seagulls overhead squeaked like sky mice. Passersby chatted on cells like mice. Where’s a broom when you need one? I bought a paper from a newsstand and the wind snapped my floral skirt like a flag. An orange cat ran out of the newsstand with a paw lifted above its head—it struck my skirt-flag rapidly. Meowza! Excuse me! The guy who took my quarter shouted, “Get off his dress!” and came round to get the cat. I cleared my throat and walked toward the entrance of Port Authority, my heels tick-tocking the concrete.

  I scuttled to the arrival door of the bus Carol had come in on. I waited behind the newspaper off to the side. The article I was hiding behind showed a guy looking out from the page like What the hell’s going on? I tried to read the headline for a clue, but I was so nervous my vision was blurred—it said MetgEsteOoNeyfler.

  I saw Carol come out the door.

  An idiot part of me had still doubted that it was her, but there she was, rabbity as ever but in an attractive brown wig. It was all I could do not to call out, Carol! What is goink ooon-uuuuuh?! I’d been dipping my very dick underneath those camping clothes into her hidey-hole, and there we were hours later—not allowed to be seen by each other!

  I followed her at a distance. The shouts from people saying, “Dang! That’s a dude!” would’ve caught her attention had I been walking right behind her.

  This is what she did: she hailed a cab. It took her to the grocery store by our apartment. She shopped, buying lots of food. I was afraid that she’d recognize my sea-green heels from below the Women’s Room stall, so I hid my feet behind a tower of chips and leaned my body out to watch her. She tossed things in her cart so fast she broke a jar of pickles. “What time is it?” she asked the zit prince who cleaned it up. The store manager told me to please leave when he saw me stalking her. She hailed another cab and had the cabbie help her load her many sacks. She shouted our address.

  I got out my cell and told Darron to count with the car to 37th and 6th.

  I walked to my apartment and as I turned the corner Doorman Diego was helping her unload.

  “Bring them upstairs!” she commanded, handing him bills of my easy-earned cash.

  I stood in the parking spot directly across from my building where last May someone got hit by a bicyclist and lay with his briefcase open until the ambulance came in case his spine was broken. (“Nobody touch me!” he’d screamed into the concrete, sending shivers down the perfectly healthy spines of everyone witnessing.) When Darron slid the car into the spot, he was in a long, fancy red dress. He somehow had makeup on, jewelry, and a brown curly bangs wig.

  I got in the passenger’s. When he saw my face he flinched, wondering what he’d done wrong, “It dudn’t look rill?”

  I hissed, “Where’d you get that?”

  “Same place I got yours! We don’t want her to recognize me too, duh!” he said.

  I said, “Now how the hell are we disguised right now?! We don’t look like friends, Darron! No one would ever believe we’re hanging out together!”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Well look at us!” I said. “You’re some prom queen? Couldn’t you have been a magician or something?”

  Darron bit a knuckle, “Oh no! I’m sorry! I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  I started crying, “It’s okay!”

  “Whoa, you’re crying!” he said.

  “My head feels weird!” I said. “What’s wrong with Carol?”

  “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

  “Now how the FUCK’S that gonna help?! Why don’t we head to the fuckin’ opera, Darron? I’m sure there’s a prom on the way!”

  A cop came by to find a reason why we couldn’t be two “women” in a car throwing a fit but he couldn’t find one so he moved on.

  We monitored Carol’s activity, which was none. No one I recognized or didn’t recognize came or went from my apartment entrance. Night seeped into the city. Streetlights made an octagonic haze around my little brother—there were diamonds glued to the tips of his eyelashes, glitter stuck in between his teeth. He was telling a story about the neighbor’s dog, saying, “Their daughter’s in ROTC so I always see her leave for school at 6:30.”

  We cranked our seats back and unzipped the backs of each other’s dresses.

  “I put perfume behind my ears and it stinks,” Darron said.

  I removed my bracelet and put it on a soda cup lid in the drink console. Darron picked the diamonds off his lashes. The Golf shook when cars passed it.

  “Why’d you go so far with the dress-up?” I said.

  “Cause it’s fun! I never get to do stuff like that,” he said, and I grunted.

  “You make me look like a poor hag next to you,” I said.

  On the back seat, on top of the Salvation haul, a sea-green high heel sat idiot-stiff with $4.99 written on it in red crayon.

  “I bet people would think you’re prettier. You have them eyes that Father John has,” he said.

  “Quit tryin’ to cover your buns,” I said. “You know how good you look.”

  Darron had to pretend to look out the window so he could hide his smile.

  We fell asleep.

  In the early dawn, I opened my door and found my penis under my dress to pee with, and Darron went to a coffee shop to pee in their john instead of in the gutter like a hog. I said, “Don’t stray too far!” saying “stray” on accident instead of “go.”

  I was slouched down grouching behind my makeup face when Darron tapped on the window—he was crouching like an action movie, pointing at my apartment. I jerked my church hat down over my eyes. I strained to look through the white weave. Carol was in her wig disguise throwing away two big bags of trash. She took her hanky from her camping shorts and blew her nose.

  “Crying, Carol?” I said in my deep voice.

  She went back inside. I put on the sea-greens. I got out of the car with my legs half asleep. See the fat lady have a hard time crossing the street. I opened the trashcan lid and the trash smelled really good—huh? I lifted a bag, but then I heard Doorman Diego singing Spanish to himself as he sauntered out to stand at the entrance! I dropped the bag and scuttled back to the Golf, my “high hills” making a racket.

  Darron socked my arm, “What were you thinking?”

  It was good that I didn’t look through the trash, because Carol came back outside, this time carrying two more bags, and she had her tampon backpack on her back. She threw the trash away and went to put her finger to her lips, telling Doorman Diego, “Shh!” I started the car and pulled out as Carol got into a cab.

  We followed her back to Port Authority.

  Darron said, “She’s goin’ back to the woods.”

  Darron and I parked the car, then walked the guts of the massive bus station. We had to split up, what with our mismatching looks that made no sense. I walked around hunchbacked and hunting, my heart on ice. I was one big goosebump. I checked the McDonald’s and gasped when I saw Carol’s backpack in line. I watched her place her order and wait. I watched behind a pole. I rubbed on the pole while I watched, and forgot I was in a dress until a little boy pointed at me and said to his mom, “There’s another one!” Carol was sucking on a Coke, waiting for her order number to be called. I saw she was crying. Carol! I started crying too—hiccups and blubbers—all that. I plucked some muumuu out of my stomach fat. “Ca-rooool!” I said quietly. People who saw me were moved so hard by compassion they covered their mouths from barfing, saying, “Life’s weird!” or “Oh my god, did you see that? That was so depressing!” or “There’s a cross-dresser over there
cryiiiiink!”

  Carol’s number was called, and she took a big bag of McDonald’s and walked toward the escalators with snot glistening on her upper lip. I followed her—we rode the same escalator—and at the bottom, Darron appeared coming at us through the crowd, his cherry-red dress falling down to expose a nipple on each side with each stride he made in his high heels. When he saw Carol, he froze.

  She walked right past him and went through a doorway marked Bus #309 Pittsburg.

  “Yep, she’s goin’ back,” I said.

  “My disguise worked!” he said.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” I said. “When I look in her eyes, it’s like looking in the mirror. I love her.”

  We stood breathing, having done our very best there in the city. Then it was like, “Let’s go back to the woods.” Darron’s dress had a train that made him need to walk in a circle in order to turn around.

  Why’d she have so much trash and why did it smell so good? Why’d she come back to New York, only to then go back to the woods? Why did she lie to me? Why did she want me to picture her impaled upon another man’s dick? Why did she like art and people so much that it made me on some level forget that I loved her? Why did I forget how lucky I was to have her? My heart went topsy-turvy down the rabbit hole of sadness. I hunched in my seat and cried on my fingers that squirmed in the air halfway to my face—they just couldn’t make it.