I went up to Father John and handed him the keys to the car that Darron and I shared at the time. “Drive yourself home, I’m gonna walk—it’s a nice night out.”
“WALK?” he squawked.
We went to her motel room—104—and like I said, I was blind with lust. Literally—I could barely see. I definitely don’t remember her body. Don’t remember her being so tall. I remember her hair covering her face as she drove to the motel shifting gears. I remember her thigh muscles lifting when she went to brake or clutch. I remember her turning on lamps in Room 104 to show how lived-in it was. I remember knocking my hand on the TV screen when I spread my shirt open. I remember lying on the bed and wishing upon one of those stars—it wasn’t even glowing yet because it was only six o’clock—Please let me know what to do.
Four blocks from Brother and Son’s, ten blocks from Blue Bear, and twelve blocks from my childhood home, I lost my virginity. So what!
She squinted in the crack of cold that smelled like deer dander. She looked away from it and her profile shimmered in the lamp’s light. She had goose bumps on her arms as she lifted her triangular hashbrown and took a bite. I tried to remember the color of her triangular bush hairs, but couldn’t remember because I’d been blind.
She said, “I’ve found God since then.”
She put the hashbrown down and it went “Shht” on its paper sleeve.
I said, “That’s always sounded boring.”
The sound of the cute little hashbrown sleeve made me come-to and dig in.
“Maybe it’s boring if you have other stuff to do, but I don’t,” she said. “I had to brainwash myself into trusting it and then it took over. Like chasing God until he starts chasing you back. And then you don’t have to do anything but run to the scriptures. It feels good to read them. Probably feels like love, but I wouldn’t know.”
I saw Carol smiling at me, saying, “Ooooh, I love you,” cooing like a dove. I saw her littlest, pinkest heart get smashed by a rock by a little boy playing Dissect-the-Dove under a pine tree on Christmas.
“Well you seem completely different than the girl from that night,” I said. “Sorry if I didn’t act like a gentleman, I remember being pretty much blind.”
“That’s more than fine,” she said.
“I remember when I was walking home I was flinching at every car that passed me on the road.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She closed her mouth and looked down.
“Hell no, Girly!” I said. “I’m the one who didn’t leave my number and what. I was just scared of you, kind of.”
She parted her lips and her teeth sprung out of her mouth to cut into her breakfast sandwich. “So what’s life been like for you since then?” she said.
I said, “Well, they think I’m an artist.”
She said, “Oh? What kind of artist?”
“Just pieces and paintings,” I said. “When I was thirty I stabbed my dad’s dog in order to save my girlfriend’s leg from being chewed in half, so my father took me out to New York and left me there to become a man. But that’s not really my thing, so in my free time I would cut little locks of people’s hair on the street when they weren’t looking.”
She held up a tip of her hair and stopped chewing.
“Yeah, I cut off their hair.”
She swallowed a hunk.
“I was all alone. So it felt like we were makin’ that board together, like I’d always want to show a person their hair lock after I cut it off. Like, ‘Look what we did! You didn’t even notice!’ Some sort of cat-and-mouse aspect where the cat actually liked the mouse? Hell, I’m not even gonna guess. But it was the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Wendy shook her head and sincerely said, “I entirely understand.”
“Okay? Well, it gets better. So I made a big board of these hair locks and called it my Hairboard. It’s still my Hairboard, but these old people have it. I had around three thousand locks on there dated and noted, and it was just my thing, but then this gallery owner got wind of it and ended up telling me it was a piece of art.”
I saw Christmas shooting a contract with his pistol on the dotted line. I saw myself signing it “The Haircutter” and then crossing it out when Christmas said, “We need your legal name there.”
“He sold it for $XXX,XXX.XX dollars. Then he made me make other art pieces after that, and now all I want is to have my scissor back so I can go back to being happy.”
“Did he take your scissors?” Wendy asked.
“No, they turned my apartment over to this fanboy Finn, and I’d completely forgotten about my scissor till he called me last night to say that my rival stole them and he’s cutting hair with them.”
“Ooh!” Wendy said, sympathetic.
I told her more—all of it. The wolf job. I told her about Carol as my gimmick and girlfriend, I told her about Private Particulars, which sounded really dumb. I told her about Hush, Howler—Hunt. About Carol’s hog trough she cooked for Harp and then her violent death. Wendy gasped.
“So that’s what you’re mourning about,” she said.
I said, “Ach. She probably thought it was artistic to die.”
A house on TV exploded with the sound on mute. I saw the reflection of it burn in the galloping horses print above the bed that I lost my virginity in.
“I’ve never met an artist,” Wendy said.
“Well, I’m a fake one,” I said. “And no one knows. Christmas would just tell me it’s time to make another piece and I’d make one.”
“So why do you have to get those scissors back? Why not just buy another pair?” she said.
I farted hard and it made her jump.
“I don’t want another pair.”
“Okay, I can understand,” she said.
“I’m not giving him my scissor like they’re some wolf,” I said. “Plus, I should do another art piece and get a bunch of money while I’m there. Then I won’t have to work again for years and I could start a new life somewhere cutting hair.”
“Well, it sounds to me like you’re going back to New York,” she said.
“Well, what kind of piece should I make though?”
She said, “Say! I am not helping you with that.”
I said, “Huh?”
She said, “You haven’t come up with an art piece on your own yet without help or without being told to.”
I said, “That’s not the way it works! You have to force me to make something! What do you think I’m here for, to see your flower scrapbook?”
She said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” standing up for herself.
I felt guilty, so I shot another fart out of me so hard it made me have to catch my breath. She looked like I’d thrown a drink in her face. A bug fluttered inside the lampshade behind her like her mind trying to decide what to do. She simply opened the window crack wider to let more wind in. A man walked past smoking on the lawn and she said, “Hey Duane.”
I thought, “Who’s Duane?! Stay away from my gravedigger!”
I looked back to the bed that I’d lost my virginity in and wondered if there was a word for someone who took your virginity. I wanted to ask her if I was that word for her too, but I knew that I probably wasn’t, and the thought of her humping on someone else made me jealous. I looked back to her and she was looking at the clock on her VCR, with her overbite sticking out of her face the length of a canned green bean.
“It’s time to catch the bus to work,” she said. “But why don’t we drive my truck there? I haven’t driven it since last April.”
“Dang, Girly!” I said. “Why not?”
“Because, I told you—it’s just me. I don’t need a big truck. And there are other people on the bus, so,” she said.
“Hmm,” I grunted. “Lonely,” I said, pointing at her.
Wendy’s truck was parked by the dumpsters and had morning glories covering it. It was a tan pickup with a blue stripe. The morning glory blew like hair as we drove toward the cemetery. I bounced and held o
nto the roof while Wendy steered the self-possessed wheel, her skeleton bouncing beneath her Unit in her blood, her head floating in time with us. I noticed that her hands were tan and her fingers were elegant. She had long nails off the ends of her long fingers like ten ellipses pointing toward …
“Why are your nails so long?” I asked.
“Oh!” Wendy looked at them. “They grow like wildfire.”
Carol’s hands were chapped and narrow like a rabbit and her fingernails were chewed with stress. I smiled, glad that she was dead.
We drove a pleasant road of trees with butterflies and Wyo wildlife hopping out of our way. When we arrived at the cemetery, Wendy got out to unlock the gate and I saw how tall and pretty she was and it put me in a good mood knowing she was attracted to me.
I said, “Do you know anything about Lit?” when she got back in the truck.
“Is that a drug?” she asked.
I said, “For some people, yeah. I’m talking Literature. I used to think it was interesting, but now I’m not sure. I think it’s just listing who wrote what and when they wrote it that attracts me.”
Wendy drove her old truck ruts to the little stone office hut, not caring about my special talent.
“I love Better Homes and Gardens,” she said as if I’d told her she didn’t.
We parked and I smiled like, “Hey, this ain’t bad.”
Instead of going to Carol’s grave I followed Wendy around on her daily routines. The first thing she did was use a key to open the little stone office shack. There was a desk and two chairs and a woodstove. She threw some logs in and started a fire.
“Where’s the old man who hired you?” I asked.
“He lives up the road.”
A cloud of smoke obstructed her body like back when I thought she was a ghost.
She sat down at the desk and opened a logbook, “This is where I schedule digs.”
She pressed a blinking red light on the telephone and picked up a pencil.
Hello this is Stan from Bauman Funeral Home and Crematory calling to confirm a hole for a funeral on Wednesdee at 1:00 p.m., please call me back at your earliest.
“So now I call him back to confirm.”
I watched Wendy talk to Stan and noticed how her overbite works attractively with talking. Her lips bob on her teeth, cleaning them, making them gleam. A pulse on her neck creaturely ticked while she penciled-in the dig, erased something, swept the eraser crumbs off the page, said, “Okay.”
We walked the hills with garbage bags picking up trash that had blown in. Breeze lifted her hair off her neck as I walked behind her. “After I use the riding mower, my body vibrates for almost the whole day afterward,” she said, and my loins awoke to take note of it. We warmed our hands periodically back in the stone hut to check new messages. A pimply sounding kid said his family has a plot there and does it have room for his mom. Wendy checked a registry and called him back to say yes. There wasn’t a single task left undone, unless left undone intentionally. Yellow leaves covered half the cemetery and we raked them up. Wendy shared her lunch with me. We ate on a bench by a cedar tree. Dried apricots, sardines and buttered bread, half a store brand Twinkie for dessert.
“Is this store brand?” I said.
“They taste the same,” she said.
They did, and people at the store saw her pick them out and pay for them and didn’t know her like I did. Smoke was stretching out of the stone hut’s chimney like twisted pantyhose taking off into a hard blue sky.
After lunch we went to the machine shed and she mounted her backhoe.
“How’d you learn how to drive that thing?” I shouted as I walked beside it over the storybook hills.
“I just played with it till I figured it out,” she answered down.
I watched her dig the grave Stan ordered. The CAT tucked the earth under its chin to carry it from the hole to the pile of dirt. She used a ladder to get down into the grave to clean it tidy with a shovel. Then she removed the ladder and draped sod over the mound of dirt to make it look nice. Her face flushed as she took off her upper Unit to show a yellow T-shirt wet in the pits. I stood squinting in the wind that whipped my hair around idiotically.
“How deep can that thing dig?” I said, pointing at the CAT.
“There are all kinds of sizes. Some have longer arms to dig deeper. This one is set at six.”
Wendy was sexually panting when she came to stand beside me, taking a tissue ball from her pocket and sopping her nose with it.
“Now we distribute the extra dirt around the property in any place that needs it,” she said.
“No, save it!” I said. “We’re gonna need all the dirt we can get.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Just how dumb is that old man?” I said.
See a freight train split through Ten Sleep screaming. See the neon flashing sign for the Rodeo Inn. See how the Boston Baked Beans are all stuck together in a gumball machine beside the 24-hour tenant in the lobby. See the peephole on the weather-warped door to Room 104. Hear the words “Yes! Yes!” coming from the other side of it. Move to the mustard curtains and put an eye up to a moth hole to peep H.C. pacing in the blood-orange lamplight, talking out his plan. Wendy sits on her bed, hands in her lap, saying, “Yes! Yes!” H.C. bites at McDonald’s sandwiches and tosses them at their wrappings on the bed—he’s got four going at the same time. Gripping his hair and leaving it standing out on end, he says to Wendy, “And someone will paint a vagina on the twat of the mannequin. Will you do that?”
“I will not do that,” Wendy says, boundaried in her support of him.
That night, I went to Father John’s La-Z-Boy and found him kicked back watching football on a tiny portable TV set on his belly. Since his thing was to wait for calls about hired jobs, I walked past him and into the kitchen and dialed his cell phone number, which was on a chalkboard. He made a happy grunt when it started ringing.
“This is John Reilly,” he answered.
“So’s this. Can I hire you and your hired-work friends to build my next art project?” I said.
“…” he said, angry.
I poked my head around the corner, “Tell you the truth, I’d be shocked if you’re able to pull it off.”
“Psh! The hell is it?” he said, and then swallowed like a pussy accidentally.
I’d said the magic words.
I pulled out $X,XXX.XX dollars cash. “Here’s what it pays,” I said.
“Where the fuck’d you get that?!” he said.
“I didn’t make art for free.”
He put his footrest down. The TV toppled to the ground.
“You gonna let me sell a wolf this time? I still got that guy in Rainer.”
We hung up our phones and did our first meeting.
And so it came to be: I knocked on the country door of one Heath Millcrawford one Ten Sleep afternoon with a clipboard in my hand.
Heath Millcrawford opened his door, making a sound like an old man grunting a shit out, which he very well could’ve been. I’d borrowed my dad’s windbreaker for a professional feel. Heath looked like a turtle crawled out of its shell and into a white T-shirt and briefs.
“Hey Randy,” he said to Wendy.
“Hi,” she said. “This is John Reilly, the man I told you about.”
Heath stepped onto his porch and held out a hand that looked like a bunch of carrots he’d found forgotten in the back of his fridge.
“What’s the weather doin’?” he asked as I was squeezing his carrots.
“It’s nice out,” Wendy said as Heath stood in her shadow.
I said, “I’d like to use a corner of your property and one of your CATs to build an art piece that will be transported to New York City on a flatbed once it’s done.”
I showed him my clipboard and the drawings I had drawn up on what I planned to do.
There was a drawing of a steel ramp that Father John would haul in for the CAT to climb.
There was a picture of a sixteen-fo
ot-by-sixteen-foot-by-sixteen-foot wooden box stained dark to resemble casket mahogany. The box was on a flatbed truck, with nearby chains ready to strap it down.
There was a picture of the CAT on the ramp puking dirt into the box.
There was a picture of the box brimful.
There was a picture of a team of men stomping the dirt to pack it in.
There was a picture of a fourteen-foot-by-ten-foot hole dug into the box of dirt, with the CAT behind it with some dirt on its mouth to suggest it dug it.
There was a picture of myself inserting a ladder down into the hole.
There was a picture of a team of men rolling a boulder up the ramp and then a picture of it in the bottom of the hole on the head of a mannequin. The mannequin’s arms and legs were up in the air and it was wearing Carol’s lace duster dress.
I said, “It’s called The Headstone. I’ve been hired by an art guy in New York to create this, but trust me the money is right here—”
I turned the page on the clipboard and showed the check for $X,XXX.XX that I’d clipped to it as the final page.
“—And we’ll be out of your hair in less than two weeks, hopefully. And no funny business,” I said.
Heath stood panting on his age. Cotton drifted past. He looked up from the clipboard and said, “Randy, what’s this?”
“He” said, “Yes sir, I’ll make sure they stick to their agreements.”
“Okay. Now get a haircut,” Heath said.
“You have been telling me that for ten years, and I’m sick of it. I’m a woman,” my brave gravedigger said.
Heath must’ve thought we were talking about women, because he said, “My wife is dead, otherwise I’d be porkin’ her right now.”
“Thank you,” we said.
One week later, at our family dinner table, Father John and I sat covered in dirt. Patty and Darron were clean. Father John and I hogged on spaghetti and drank milk and left streaks of mud on our glasses. I’d watched Father John and his team of men crest a cemetery hill on the first day of The Headstone construction—I was on my apple tree hill looking through Carol’s binoculars—and I’d inhaled a pansy little breath and held it. Father John used to go off on mysterious hired jobs and I’d pick him up at Willie’s after a long day’s work, and for all I knew he had just gone behind the bar and rolled around in the dirt. But here he was with six men I’d never seen before, all in their jeans and dungarees with tool belts on and flannel sleeves rolled up. Cigarette butts behind their ears, pine trees balanced on their erect dicks. Father John took my clipboard and hid it from his friends as soon as he saw my childish drawings. They didn’t ask why they were building, they just asked what. They had their meetings around a cooler of beer; they had their names on their belt buckles. Father John used fresh sheets of paper to draw up plans. They somehow got the flatbed semi I’d demanded. They somehow got the mannequin, too. Every single permit I would need to drive cross-country with a sixteen-foot cube. I’d never been as impressed by anyone before, and it was my own father. I didn’t know how to feel about that, so I just joined in, standing around as The Arteest, saying “that’s what I had in mind” when they showed up with six sixteen-foot squares of wood and pointed at their craftsmanship with sharpened pencils.
The Haircutter Page 19