The Haircutter

by Dana Thompson

  “My mom had short hair like a ball around her head,” she said. “She was short and fat but same lips as me. And my dad was tall like me. He had my teeth. This was my room.”

  There was a cold white room with dead birds in it. Three windows looked out on the front yard slope. There was a rocking chair facing them.

  “I sit here when I visit,” Wendy said about the rocking chair. “My mother watched my father and me tend land in this.”

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “My mother lives in Reno and my father died. She sent me a letter years ago saying he died like one of those oversized dogs with short life spans. She said the same thing will probably happen to me.”

  “Do you ever see her?” I said.

  “No, I don’t care about seeing her, and she doesn’t either. They were weird folks,” she said.

  She brought me across the hall, “This was their room.”

  There was an iron bedframe with no mattress.

  “The wind sleds down that back hill and freezes you out. I spent half my life under covers.” She pointed to the bed. “For a period of time, my dad was so scared of standing up that he only crawled around like a seal. I remember the sound of him getting out of bed in the morning.”

  “What’d it sound like?!” I said.

  “Like a bag of bones falling on the floor.”

  “Why the hell was he scared of standing up?!” I said. “Now what’s all this?! Why’d they go crazy?!”

  She took me down the hall to the steep wooden stairs that she said went up to a watch room. There was a big hole in the floor at the foot of them.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  We looked through the hole and saw the sitting room downstairs.

  “For home repairs we just couldn’t do some. This spot here was rotted from the rain that came down these stairs from the watch room windows. One day, my mom fell through it and landed on my dad who was down there sitting in his chair watching Miracles Found. They were both knocked unconscious and I was out in the yard at the time tilling, so I don’t know how long they were lying there—it could’ve been two hours or two minutes. When I came in, I woke them up and then they started laughing really hard.” Wendy put a hand up, “I’d never seen them laughing, let alone hard. My mother was holding a cup of tea when she fell and it burned her face so she looked like half a gargoyle and never went to the hospital for it. They stopped going to the church or leaving the house altogether. My father took the underwire from my mom’s bra and stuck it up his nose to scramble his brain, and my mom was cheering him on. And they started having sex a lot, which they never had done much of. My father hee-hawed like a donkey when they were doing it.”

  “Eew! Dang, Girly, this is yuck!” I said.

  She stepped over the hole and ascended the steep little stairs that lead to the watch room.

  “Come up,” she said.

  I thought, Hell, why not.

  There were two chairs up there.

  “I’ve always wanted to show this place to someone and I never have,” she said, sitting down.

  There were six little windows in a circle around the watch room that saw out over the treetops and over the land to the far-off mountains.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” she said.

  “This is my kind of watch room,” I said. “Am I gonna fall through the floor if I sit in that chair?”

  We sat there shivering. The sky was bloodless and the windows rattled in their rotted frames. We could hear coyotes yipping. Like a pack of sixty-year-old women getting tickled by Brad Pitt.

  She sniffed, “They just went nuts, is what. My father smashed a lot of the windows saying nothing matters. But smiling while he did it, you know? I saw him in a corner licking the wall talking about Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. If they saw me crying they’d say they never wanted kids so it’s not their fault. The deal was, it was always my father who had all the hobbies and interests and ideas, and my mother adopted each one of his and pretended they just happened to be her interests too because she didn’t have any and desperately wanted some. I think he got brain damage from when she fell on him, and my mother just went along with it as her new thing. For a period of time, he said that he felt suicidal, and so, low and behold, she goes suicidal too. She always climbed up on the roof in the middle of the night and she’d get down on her stomach to tap on my bedroom window with a stick to wake me up just so I could get scared watching her threaten to jump. She spoke in a Lucifer voice I’d never heard her use. God, I love the sound of coyotes. I was too naïve to know to go get help or call Miracles Found. Anyway, I couldn’t tend the land by myself and without supplies, so the crops dried up. I ate the chickens. My parents didn’t eat unless I tricked them. I had to pretend I wanted to put on a play for them and part of the performance was audience participation where they ate a bunch of corn. They went along with it. Called it ‘my performance.’ They talked a lot about my performance if they hadn’t eaten in a couple days.”

  I huffed and said, “Eccentrics.”

  “I’m lucky I stayed sane. My mom would trance-up all the time and say the roof just blew off before I walked in the room. She said she saw Hell where Heaven should be. My father nailed live animals to the ceiling to keep the lid on. I slept in the woodshed, it smelled so bad in the house. They would fight all the time over nothing, and smile while they did. As if it was glamorous to fight.”

  “Psh!” I said. “Idiots,” I said, lifting my nose at the landscape before me.

  “Well, yeah!” she said. “You get the gist. And then one day they left on foot and never came back. And I remember I petted a yard cat so hard its body touched the floor with each stroke. I was almost horny about eating it. I was so hungry I thought its purrs were loosening leaves from trees so I went out and ate leaves off the ground to spite my mother thinking they were dropping down from Hell. I finally got the clarity to walk myself into town. Went to the old church and they let me get fed and showered. Thawed out. I puked up all these leaves. Got my first waitressing job.”

  “Man alive,” I said. “I hate eccentrics.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Just don’t get ’em!” I said.

  “Same here.”

  “My gallery owner is like that,” I said.

  “Is he? Well I’m glad you’re getting out of that racket.”

  This was the first and best conversation I’d ever had. Wendy was the first person I ever never disliked. This was my farmhouse moment, and I’ll never forget it.

  “But I still like this house,” Wendy said.

  “It’s a great house!” I told her.

  “All I need is a family for it,” she said.

  I coughed like a dog. It made me hiccup and push a long burp out. The burp’s terrain had boulders and streams on it, which The Haircutter traversed.

  ...............Alls I need is a family for it, she’d said...............

  We sat uncomfortable.

  I noticed my teeth were chattering.

  I noticed that steel butterfly was awakened somewhere in the sticky abused piping of my stomach.

  I noticed: Wendy.

  I smiled.

  “Dang, Girly,” I thought, jiggling my legs.

  “It’s cold up here,” she said.

  We went back down the little stairs and stepped around The Hole That Changed Everything.

  “Oh, the bathroom,” she said and we walked in. I immediately went to the tub to see if there were any dead animals, and saw a rat’s nest cuddled up cozy at the drain. When I turned around to show Wendy, she was staring at the mirror in shock.

  An owl hooted on the roof like her mother trying to get her attention.

  I said to her reflection, “I, ah—I seen that sheet taped up over your mirror at the motel.”

  She gasped and snapped-to. She pointed at the toilet, “That’s where I was when I first learned about Toxic Shock Syndrome if you leave a tampon in too long. It’s my biggest fear.”
r />   “Not a bad face, if you ask me.” I pointed at her reflection. “I don’t get about why you wouldn’t want to see it. Your overbite’s pretty, I swear.” I raised a brow and put my hands in my pockets.

  “They were rags, not tampons, let alone maxis,” she said.

  I sniffled and looked at my shoes, letting her have her way.

  “Now that I’ve looked in the mirror I might as well use it to put my makeup on. I’m going to get it from the truck,” she said.

  I waited downstairs while Wendy put her makeup on in the mirror by her old period. I heard the little compacts snapping shut through the ceiling hole and it reminded me of Carol. Thoughts of Carol—like walking room-to-room in a dilapidated house with a bucktoothed gravedigger, saying what used to be here. I tried to imagine Wendy’s parents going nuts, but instead I thought about what a nice house it would be if it were fixed up. You could put in a fire pole down from the ceiling hole, or a spiral staircase. Curtains with frying pans and chickens printed on them for the kitchen. A painting of a sea storm beside the front door. Anchored land under your feet, wildflowers in your fist. Better Homes and Gardens in the mailbox on the road. A telescope for wolf packs in the watch room. Rugs that Wendy could beat with a wooden spoon, or that John Junior could beat with a baseball bat. Whoa—what?! Wink, wink. Talk about a stiffy for the gravedigger.

  I opened a door off the sitting room and saw it was a little mudroom with a door to the yard.

  “I’m going outside for a bit,” I tried.

  “… Okay,” I heard.

  I thought about getting up on the roof with a stick and tapping on the bathroom window as a joke, but thought against it.

  Behind a pine tree, I found the woodshed. I opened the rickety door. It was a small, perfect room that smelled like the periodic table. A desk would fit perfectly in here for a summer office, I thought.

  I left the woodshed and walked toward the land in front of the house, inhaling hard on the cold bright air. Crunching on the crystalized straw underfoot. Wild turkeys ran across the field fog garbling like computer geeks. Crows cawed like they didn’t know anything about technology.

  I was standing in the threshold to the kitchen imagining a mushroom pie steaming on the woodstove when I noticed the height marks on the wall. Starting at my knees and reaching all the way to the ceiling were notches carved into the stone. They said Anna-Patrick next to them. There was one near my shoulders that said Donna and one all the way up that said Silas. All the rest of them said Anna-Patrick. Not one said Wendy. My legs shot straight erect, making me grow notches taller as a jolt ran through me when I thought, “This isn’t her house.”

  The world tightened in on me and seeped into my pores to squeeze my heart. A dead bird had its neck broken near me and was looking at me like That’s Right!

  I heard Wendy coming down the stairs.

  “I’m done, we should go, I want you to curl my hair in the cemetery office,” she said.

  “Aaaaah!” I shrieked.

  She was in a long purple dress with long sleeves—and her face!

  I said, “Who are you?!”

  “What’s going on?!” she said.

  I remembered a broom in the mudroom and hustled to get it.

  “If you don’t tell me what’s goin’ on, I’m gonna make this hole bigger!” I said, putting the broom handle through the ceiling hole.

  “What’s wrong?!” she screamed.

  “Why’s all those height marks say Anna-Patrick?” I said, and when I had to look at her to ask the question, I felt puke rise up my neck. She’s so beautiful!, I thought.

  “I’m gonna vom,” I said.

  If someone in the field had been watching with binoculars, they would’ve seen me open the front door with a broom and projectile puke like I’d been slapped on the back.

  Blaaaaarg!

  “You’re vomiting!” Wendy said.

  I once saw a Golden Retriever gag when his owner hit a high note on the subway.

  “You look different!” I said.

  She gave me her grey T-shirt to wipe my mouth with instead of licking the puke off my lips like a dog—“Gimme that!” I said, and snatched it.

  “My name is Anna-Patrick,” she said.

  “No, it’s Wendy!” I shouted, and threw her T-shirt at the ceiling hole and it went through.

  A rat ran down from upstairs, interested in that pile of puke.

  “Get me outta this freak storm!” I said.

  “Wait!” she said.

  A vein came out on her forehead.

  Her facial features relate to each other like beautiful people selected from each continent getting along better than anyone would’ve imagined on such close quarters as a face.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know my real name. I wanted a fresh start,” she said.

  I said, “Okay? What, are you supposed to be interesting or something?”

  “I’m sorry?” she said.

  “I don’t really do fancy,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you!” she said.

  I farted to put a cloud of distance between us (it rattled like thunder).

  “Excuse me! That smells awful!” She pinched her nose and moved to leave, her dress flowing out behind her like exotic fins. “What’s with all the toilet humor?” she said.

  “What toilet humor?” I shouted after her, abusive.

  She slammed her truck door and honked for me to get in.

  I blushed until blood came out of my pores.

  I went to the truck and got in, being careful not to grunt. The golden light lay over the land and lay in our laps like our future children. She started the engine, and I said, “Wait, stop.”

  She shut it off and we sat there silent. She reached forward to coochy-coo some dead flies on the dash with her tan, elegant fingers. I noticed that I missed her.

  “Your name’s Anna-Patrick?” I said.

  “Yes. Sorry I didn’t tell you, I sort of forgot.”

  “I don’t wanna fight,” I said.

  “Well it looks like you do!” she said.

  “I don’t care about your name. I’m just like, ‘Where’d that face full of makeup come from?’”

  She sniffed and wrapped her teeth in her lips.

  I was vulnerable as a schoolboy with lice crawling on his forehead as I said, “You look SO pretty.”

  A blond butterfly fluttered into the cab like it was Carol being jealous. I clapped my hands on it, then wiped it on my penis. I saw a bucktoothed smile in my periphery. I slowly looked into her eyes.

  Christ! I bit my hand white.

  She laughed and it sounded like geese.

  She started up the truck and we drove toward our cemetery.

  I saw a man walking the hills holding a dead bird by its foot for the dead bird I’d ordered. From the little stone hut’s window, I watched him toss it into my sinkhole. Dale and Kurt were polishing the mahogany to make it gleam for The Mannequin Ceremony.

  “It’s ready,” Anna-Patrick said.

  I turned around and she had the curling iron in her hands. She set it on her desk and sat in a chair facing the open door. The crickets were doing a call-and-response from one side of the cemetery to the other. I lifted a chunk of her hair and it immediately felt like I was going to cut it. I picked up the curling iron instead.

  I said, “Carol used to do this.”

  Carol curled her hair before going out for a romp with Harp. Came home late with an upper lip raw from his midnight shadow. Her hair was cold and smelled like smoke. The Haircutter literally turned the other way—he rolled over in bed and let fire truck sirens redden him back to sleep. A swine’s smile on his lips for a happy little pig in a blanket. Carol smoked a cigarette, ashing in her bedside fern, thinking, “Oh my gosh, Scott. Oh my gosh I can’t wait to see him again.”

  Each chunk of hair that I wrapped around the iron sprung down as a curl. I heard the distant men calling each other pussies. I peeked at the side of Anna-Patrick’s face and saw her
eyelashes blink.

  “Look,” she said, pointing out the door.

  Patty was walking up the truck ruts toward us from the cemetery gates, and three men were rolling a lumpy boulder up the lawn toward my work of art.

  “They’re ruining the grass,” Anna-Patrick said.

  “Oh, sorry!” I said.

  “No,” she said, “It’ll give me something to do while you’re away.”

  I said, “You’re sure laying it on thick, Girly!”

  She said, “I don’t care.”

  I licked on my bottom lip, smiling.

  “Knock, knock!” Patty shouted from one hundred feet out. She had her keys in her hand and they jangled as if by our ears.

  “Hi,” we said.

  “Gol! Do you ever look pretty!” Patty shouted, astonished at Anna-Patrick and forcing her legs forward to get a closer look.

  “Thank you,” Anna-Patrick shouted.

  “I wish I cleaned up that nice!” Patty said, now fifty feet away.

  I released the final curl from the iron-hot rod.

  “Did you bring it?” I asked my mom.

  She held out a trash bag and kept walking towards us, panting.

  “I like your Unit,” Anna-Patrick said about a new maroon sweat suit Patty was wearing beneath a yellow blanket shawl.

  “Thank you!” she said, twenty feet away. “I liked yours, so I thought it was inspiring. What can I say?”

  “Is Darron here?” I said.

  “Yep. We’re ready when you are,” she said, and finally arrived at the door of the stone hut and handed me the trash bag.

  “Why don’t you put your earrings on to top that outfit off?” I said.

  She blinked and said, “Well good idea, son,” and took them out of her pocket and clipped them on.

  “Go and get everyone ready and gathered round,” I said.

  “Alrighty,” she said and went away up the hill. I saw she had a Romance with her to read while she waits because she doesn’t do nature, like me.

  Me and my gorgeous giant alone in our stone hut. I opened the trash bag and pulled out Carol’s lace duster dress.

  “This is what she used to wear all the time,” I said.

  “Was she wearing it when she died?” Anna-Patrick asked.

  “No, she was wearing camping clothes, but this was in her long backpack and everything in there got bloody. So it’s bloody—look out. But the point is, everyone in the art world knows this dress. They know it represents Carol.”