The Haircutter

by Dana Thompson

  I jumped off the pack and pulled myself up by a branch, but it turned to soot in my hand—I landed Oof on my back—you know. My head was cricked to the side and I saw a dead bird in the darker part of the hole with flies swarming on it. I hoped Carol didn’t see. She was busy with her moaning.

  “Carol? Do you have a concussion?”

  “Prolly,” she managed to say.

  “Do you wanna use my first aid kit?” I said.

  After a long while I heard: “I don’t think nothin’s cut.”

  She had fallen asleep.

  I said, “Okay,” all gentle, and turned the page on the flare gun instruction booklet.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Shh, it’s no time. It’s okay, Carol.”

  “No what time is it, Dummy? What time is Darron supposed to come?” she said.

  I said, “I don’t think he’s coming.”

  “Well that doesn’t mean he’s not coming! What time is it?” she lifted her head and it slapped back to the ground, covering her head with a fresh cloud of soot.

  I looked at my watch and it was three minutes till I had told Darron I’d shoot the flare off.

  “It’s three minutes till one,” I said.

  “Shoot it! Shoot the gun off!” she screamed.

  “I can’t jump high enough!” I said. I probably even still had traces of makeup on my face.

  “You gotta try shooting it off!” she said again.

  “What if he’s looking down when I shoot it?”

  “Well it makes a firework doesn’t it?” she said.

  I tried to find a picture of a firework in the instruction booklet.

  “So what’s your other plan then?! You just gonna eat me when you start getting hungry?” She started coughing and fell quiet. “What’s gotten into you?” she said.

  I realized in a buck of panic that she was right. What had gotten into me?! Darron seeing our flare go off was our only shot at survival! I remembered a section on Emergency Situations in the final pages of the survival book. I got it out of my backpack and read:

  Adrenaline is the most conducive conductor for emergency energy when it’s most needed. Suggested, is to find a source of anger from deep within, or to ask a peer to anger you if you know them well enough. This might invoke a measure of adrenaline that could save your life.

  And then it talked about drinking piss and eating plants.

  I put one boot up on my backpack and then the other. I braced myself with one hand out on the “wall.” I had the flare gun in my other hand.

  I was like, “Hey, Carol.”

  Carol was a crumpled body like some hag in a horror movie. She sat up and said, “I can’t move.”

  I said, “I know. But hey, look at me.”

  Two white eyes showed.

  “We’re hurt real bad, Carol. And we’re stuck in this hole unless I jump off this backpack high enough to get this gun past these tree branches so I can shoot it off, okay?”

  “That’s what I’ve been sayin’!” she said.

  “So I have a question for you. I need you to tell me what you were just doin’ in New York.”

  Her face flickered on like a fortune-teller machine. Her jaw dropped—her cheeks hollowed. A fly buzzed into her mouth and ate from one of her molars and she didn’t even notice.

  “Me and Darron followed you. I cross-dressed for it. What’d you do over there?” I said, “And lay it on me hard cause I need some adrenaline to get us out of this hole, Girly.”

  The fly flew out of her mouth well-fed off McDonald’s, and she started heaving breaths like her heart was growing with each beat. She started whimpering, “Whuuuut?! Whut?!”

  I said, “Carol, we got half a minute for me to shoot this flare gun off so’s Darron can see it.” I said, “Come on and piss me off.”

  She exhaled long and choppy, “I didn’t go to—”

  I tried once without adrenaline—I jumped off the pack and caught a branch I’d picked out and lifted my body so I could stick the gun through a gap, but I couldn’t lift myself high enough. Plus, the branch broke, and I landed, “Ah! My back!”

  I stood up and saw on my watch that it was time.

  “Come on Carol! Come on! You can do it, come on, time’s up! We need to get out of this hole—”

  And she cut me off, “HE BROKE MY HEART!”

  I froze.

  She gulped, “He knows I’m not lovable!”

  She wailed, “He’s so smart!”

  I dropped the gun.

  I said, “Who broke your heart.”

  She said, “SCOTT!”

  I said, “What the hell are you sayin’ to me.”

  She crawled to the center of the sinkhole, clutched her heart, fell to her back in a fluff of ash, and screamed toward the tree, “I went back to cook for eem! I told eem I’d be there for eem when he got outta the starve box and I’d cook eem a feast! He called me Co-Co, and it was called Co-Co’s Kitchen! I made each table be from another country! Chinese on one! Italian on one! Ethiopian! Southern! I cooked my ass off and I don’t even know how to cook! And he never came! And when I called eem he said his art project worked! He said he didn’t love me anymore cause all the heartache got out!”

  I jumped my fatass off the pack and simply grabbed a branch a foot higher than I’d expected, and stuck the gun through a gap and shot it the fuck off. It shot me back down into the hole.

  Commotion came off the tree. The boulder fell from its net of branches.

  I looked to Carol in time to see it drop onto her head so hard her body came up off the ground and popped.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HEADSTONE

  I lived in my old room again and my brother lived below me in his, tuning his radio to all the ballad songs and looking up at the ceiling. He encouraged me to grieve. He’d walk around on his boot heels like a little kid, feeling shysies about how proud he was to be helping. In the mornings, I’d awaken my prick from its mourning slumber, and it’d lift its shrunken head to spew Carol’s memory out into the dusty-pink bathroom sink. I labored at it like a panicked bird with a broken wing, until Clarity tapped that clean, naturally-filed fingernail and said, “She cheated on you. She didn’t love you.” The inertia of those words shook loose the romantic content of my mind, it seemed. I loved her less and less. Carol Mary Whogivesashit. Aloneness: at least I trusted it. I went to the cemetery every day to sit on Carol’s headstone to crush her harder. Sun rose red on the distant mountains she had died in; I used to crush Carol in our red-curtained Chambers when I orgasmed on top of her. At five o’clock, my mother picked me up to bring me home where a neighborhood kid would coast by in a puffy coat on his bike taunting, “Where’d you go?” My childhood freezer was full of the same old foods—the little claws on chicken wings were stacked frozen in the dark with only barking dogs as their late-night company. Patty and Father John cracked peanuts with their life-stained fingers in front of another new TV. Pictures of my art pieces framed it in frames. Darron had recently gotten a tail approved at a faculty meeting. Our house continued to not give a shit about the people inside of it, as our hearts and brains continued to rot as we minusculey aged.

  Carol’s long backpack was blood-crusted and still stuffed with her bloody camping equipment. I kept it under my bed, and every night I dreamt it was her dead body wrapped in a sheet. I dreamt that there was a devil in the closet reading and pretending not to be interested in the delectable dead body under my bed. I saw his legs sticking out of the closet wearing pants that looked like he’d gotten them from a church donation box. I lay listening to him softly turn the pages of his book. He cared as much about messing with me as he cared about Carol’s body. I’ll never know what he was reading.

  One morning, I woke up to see maple leaves falling through the bland view of brain-dead sky out my bedroom window. Darron’s downstairs radio was saying that Fall’s officially begun. As if the time were right, I got the bloody backpack out from under my bed and took it to
the cemetery.

  Carol’s grave was on a hill under an apple tree. The wind made the leaves shimmy, which sounded like the sound toilet paper made on her pubic hairs when she scruffed them dry in the hollow bowl of a john.

  Under the apple tree, I scalped the grass, creating a hole in which I put a pair of her panties, then I covered it with my hands and patted the mound nice and foo-foo. I did this for each item in the pack. I talked to myself as I buried her things, doing a fake conversation between me and someone really nice who didn’t know the whole story.

  “A boulder fell on her head,” I said.

  “Oh you poor thing! Are you serious?!” I did a high voice for the woman.

  “Yes. Her body popped and there were holes in her legs with steam coming out of them.”

  “Steam?”

  “I know—nature, right? Her blood splashed under my hiking boots when I stood up and went to her. How could I have known that Carol’s blood would be splashing one day? It’s lucky I haven’t lost my mind.”

  “Well you must be a genius.”

  “Ach. That’s what they all say.”

  I buried Carol’s clothes, toiletries, and camping things until I buried the backpack skin itself. A lot of people had to be buried standing up in their coffins with pools of skin around their feet because the cemetery was so hilly. Apples scattered drunk on the ground around me in Fall fermentation. They stunk and lured a groundhog over to eat. He looked like me, so I ignored him, not letting nature have its way with my psyche.

  At the funeral, Carol’s mom Trish had stood staring at me like Old Auntie. I was wearing a black veil on my forehead, cooperating with how serious I was supposed to be.

  Spiders flitted like froth on a headstone close to Carol’s in a fast-forward funeral.

  “We are gathered here this morning to put to rest Carol Mary Mathers,” some pastor said.

  Jesus Christ, I thought.

  I thought, Let’s just get this over with.

  A female gravedigger spun a crank that lowered Carol into the ground instead of lowering her from the ceiling of Carnegie Hall. The gravedigger had a bucktoothed overbite and was seven feet tall.

  At sandwiches time after the funeral, it was only my family and Christmas and Charlie Quick in my shitty childhood home. Father John was on the couch sitting up straighter than I’d ever seen him sit before. He held a bottle of beer on his knee like it was his country’s flag.

  “His work is very well-received,” Christmas said, passing around glossy pics of my pieces.

  “I could do that,” Father John said to almost every picture in the stack.

  Darron was leaning against the wall near his senior high school portrait, and he looked exactly the same as it, and was wearing the same shirt.

  I said, “You shoulda seen it.”

  I got down on the brown carpet and asked my mother to hold my legs up in the air.

  “Imagine if my mom weren’t holding my legs,” I said. “This is what she looked like after the rock dropped on her head. But with her arms up too, like this—everything shot up and stayed. And a honk shot out of her cooter.”

  My mother let go of my legs in disgust, and when they hit the floor a honk shot out of my mouth like Carol’s banshee cooter. I could see through the glass coffee table Father John looking down on me like he’d looked down on us in the hole—he was revolted.

  Christmas waved from the passenger’s seat of a red rental car when Quick drove him away toward the airport. Who was this well-mannered man?, I thought. Standing and sitting quietly abiding in his role as Funeral Guest? He’d even brought a Western-themed hanky to wipe his head with instead of a Christmas one. The only sign left of the real him were some microscopic snowflakes on Charlie Quick’s shoulders.

  “Or were they dandruff?” Darron asked, lifting his chin like a teacher encouraging me to consider the right answer.

  On my apple tree hill, I saw the gravedigger come out the mouth of her machine shed on her CAT backhoe, so I dug up Carol’s binoculars to watch her dig a grave. From that day on, I unburied the binoculars whenever I wanted to watch her work, because I deserved to be entertained.

  She had headphones and a Walkman, and she never looked at me. She mowed a circle around me on her riding mower. Her overbite was so extreme she only closed her mouth against grass clippings. I saw her drool when she walked past me with a weed whacker once and it blew in the wind like a spider’s web before disconnecting from her mouth and slapping to the grass. She touched her teeth and blushed, and then whacked the grass with the weed whacker where the drool had landed as if she knew a pro tip about spit, grass, and weed whackers going together like bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

  One day, a series of waves of wind blew through the cemetery. They rolled ribbons and flowers and teddy bears across the lawn and made tornados out of leaves. I looked at my groundhog and he was holding onto the grass with his translucent fists like it was the mane of a horse he was riding. My grass scalps started blowing off, revealing Carol’s things, so I rushed around reburying. Then I found the gravedigger in the binoculars and grabbed an apple to eat.

  A wave of wind lifted a bouquet of flowers off a grave and hit her in the head with them. She screamed and spun around to fight. She bent out of my circular sight and cranked back up holding the flower bouquet—colorful petals blew off it toward me. She stiffly walked to her little stone office hut in the middle of the cemetery and I watched her through a window. I saw her put the flowers into a bronze vase on the wall, then she stood staring at the floor with her eyes bugged. Then she did a routine of reenacting how she’d spun when the flowers hit her head—she did four reenactments until she nailed it and sighed in self-disgust. I lowered the binoculars knowing that she knew I’d seen her get hit in the head with a stupid bouquet of flowers, so I thought I should go talk to her in case she was going to try to kick me out now like ripping the bird pages out of her encyclopedias if she were a hermit embarrassed about being caught looking out the window by a bird who accidentally flew into it.

  I chucked my apple at the groundhog and he took the blow. I walked the hills of my cemetery. The gravedigger came out of the stone hut to trim rose bushes that grew against it. The wind died into a breeze and the sun shined violently.

  I approached her with a finger pointed at her and asked, “Why’s there a female gravedigger?”

  She spun around and her face went rose-red.

  She said, “What’s wrong with that?”

  Her voice was deep and clean like a cello. She looked the same age as me.

  I said, “I’m surprised your arms aren’t more muscular if you’re doing all that work. Wouldn’t it go faster with a man?”

  She did an athletic flinch and a tissue ball shot out one of her sweatshirt sleeves and landed in her hand. She used it to pat her dry forehead.

  “I use a CAT for excavation,” she said.

  Her eyes were enormous and had a lot of white space below the blue irises, making her look dumb. Her lips were enormous and seemed useless. The top lip flipped up on her buckteeth and almost hid the tip of her nose.

  She said, “I think the old man who hired me thought I was a man. He can’t see or hear well.”

  I said, “Oh? Well, what’s your name?”

  “Wendy,” she said, but with her overbite it sounded like she said, “Randy.”

  I said, “It sounded like you just said Randy. And you’re seven feet tall. He does think you’re a man.”

  She said, “I know. He calls me Randy, but I pretend he’s saying Wendy.”

  A bee swarmed around her sheers and she caught it between her pointer and thumb and squeezed it till it popped. She wiped it on her turquoise sweat suit. She had the Walkman clipped to the waistband of her sweatpants and it caught my eye. I saw through the little plastic window that she doesn’t have a tape in there.

  Oh my god!, I thought. My bowels started rumbling.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I said, “I’m mourni
ng,” and walked back to my apple tree hill.

  The groundhog was in the depths of a bush, but he puckered his eyes when he saw me, like a karate teacher.

  “Hi,” I said to it for the first time, so grateful for its company.

  “Why’s she not have a tape in there?” I asked.

  His eyes puckered harder, telling me you know why. I remembered a show on ghosts I’d seen in a TV megastore on 34th Street. Twenty different-sized screens told me about how ghosts can’t hear music. So when you think you’re hanging out at home listening to Toby Keith, they think you’re just snapping and doing mouth exercises. I’d never been one to fool around with people not-of-this-world, but I wasn’t going to let “the gravedigger” run me out of my graveyard with whatever trick she was trying to pull with that Walkman.

  A final wave of wind blew through slow and retarded, like a caboose full of ghosts having a party. It went, WooooOOOOoooo!

  Every day, she would leave the cemetery when she felt like she was done, and she’d walk the broken sidewalk chunks to the bus stop on the highway that I could see from my hill. So, that day, I followed her.

  I buried the binocs in their spot when I saw her lock up the stone hut. I looked back at my groundhog and said, “Wish me luck, sensei.”

  He screamed, “HEI!” and it pushed him further into the bush. I never saw him again after that.

  I hustled over the hills, my butt seeming like a rump for the first time ever because I’d never had to hustle before.

  The street that led to the highway was under an oak tree canopy. The gravedigger’s stride was so long, she could’ve been floating off the ground. She passed a house where there was a little kid jumping on a couch in his front yard and he said hi to her because everyone knows that kids see dead people.

  When I passed the house, I put my finger to my lips to shush the kid, and he yelled, “Hey lady watch out!”

  Wendy spun around and saw me.

  “Oh, hello,” she said.

  “Are you walking to the bus stop?” I said.

  “Yes?” she said, pausing.

  “How’s it feel?” I said.