“Mine! Mine!” I heard.
“I want a haircut!” I heard.
“The Haircutter—over here! Cut my wife’s hair!”
“I’m coming!” I screamed. I ran through the crowd cutting hair and throwing locks up into the air.
“Do yours!” they told me.
I cut my own hair and threw the lock up into the air where it separated like a firework.
AND THEN
FARMHOUSE
A little boy plays with a wolf cub in the sun on fifty acres of land. Before the sun comes up, I put on my robe. To build a fire downstairs in the dark.
The house rattles in the wind like we live on a tongue behind chattering teeth.
You can hear her height when she’s walking down the stairs. She picks up a yard cat if one has walked in for pettings. Its tail flicks on her hipbones that protrude on pink silk from beneath her nightdress. Her wedding finger crushes sleep crumbs in her eyes. Her top lip flips up on her buckteeth and would hide the tip of her nose if her nose didn’t swoop to a tip finely drawn as if with a feather pen by an Englishman sitting in a garden. One swoons when Anna-Patrick’s overbitic lips pronounce the word “forest.” Bowl, fire pole, fowl lunch, oxygen, linen, time. Anna-Patrick peeing sounds like wind chimes. When she’s done with a blow job, she pokes her head out of the covers like Mother Mary to gaze at me.
“The Haircutter” is gone completely and all that’s left is all he thought he’d never get to be: nothing, but happy. And he’s a regular barber now.
My wife: knitting in her rocking chair in a strip of sun. The barren windows in her barren childhood bedroom express their to-fro capacities to see golden grown-up Anna-Patrick Reilly or the golden virile land slanting toward the purple mountains, and seem to be beholden to more than just their frames. Anna-Patrick during storms of spine-chilling design, where the mountains sound like they’re exploding and falling on the house in chunks, sits and knits—unflinching. And when she moves she is the movement, rather than a woman who’s being subjected to having to move. She’s like a semi going so fast it seems stagnant. Water being so cold it feels hot. She’s not doing, rather, she is Doing itself. Ease, purity, mushroom, lamp, resurrected, nurture, moon.
On Sunday mornings, Anna-Patrick plays piano expertly and has never had to practice. I wash the windows and hum along loudly, too shy to open my mouth and sing as my untapped talent. John Junior watches sleepy-eyed with half an overbite. Wild horses run through our front yard. John Reilly Junior the Third. He is like holy oil poured on my head, running down my beard, down the folds of my neck. We sit in the watch room to look out the windows and let the sun make our eyes close. We blend heartbeats holding hands. For Christmas, we gave John Junior a wolf cub named Jenny who howls at the field fog that rolls in under the front door. She disappears into the fog when John Junior opens the door for her.
Anna-Patrick waves to us from the field as we drive away toward town, where John Junior J.J. goes to school and where I work at the Barber Shop. Sun-bleached tips of wheat wave and wave with white hands saying, “That’s the Reillys!” I pick up J.J. at the end of the day and we drive past the cemetery as he tells me about school. At home, we let him run free with Jenny while we “go make Mommy and Daddy’s yin-yang.” I’m not talking 69. Anna-Patrick said it felt good with that dirt all around her, so I bury her beside my writing woodshed every day after work. She sits under the earth like a fetus for an hour while I write lists in the shed—we’re a yin-yang doing our thing.
When we first moved in, she had a metal triangle that she’d ring if we were outdoors when her meal was ready. Then became: Anna-Patrick is outside gathering eggs from the coop, the wind is blooming her floral skirt, and a yard cat runs out from under it when she screams, “MEAL’S READY!” There’s a velvet painting of a sea storm above the family dinner table. Field mice scuttle and squeak along the baseboards like gull throats cut out and thrown at our feet. If she weeps while eating (often), Anna-Patrick’s nose will get clogged and she’ll have to chew with her mouth open. The white space below her blue irises reddening. The woman can’t stop being impressed by our good fortune. John Junior is three, nine, seventeen. On wet nights in Spring, we watch Westerns with our dinner plates on TV stands and make a vocal racket about finding plot flaws using clues from each other’s intelligence. “BOOM!” John Junior says when we discover one. The kitchen faucet drips the ghosts of diamonds past, and the yard door is always open for chicken feathers to drift in to gather in parasitic clumps on the floor. A draft reaches back to us in the TV room to lend the smell of fresh ranch rain. When it picks up and batters the windowpanes, it sounds like a room full of people clapping. “Ahh,” says Daddy, as he recalls how he made all this money. When J.J. climbs the fire pole to go to bed, Anna-Patrick gets our marijuana kit from the mantle. The sound of our house cracking in half. Anna-Patrick on the TV room side of it calling Miracles Found, me in the kitchen eating a fourth piece of mushroom pie, the house splitting and the sea flowing down the part—violently and majestically, as when you get a glimpse of the way reality really is when you’re washing the dishes and see your automatic hands and know for certain that their divine intelligence is yours and also all there is. Flowing downhill, separating us, frothing out over our field to soak it, Carol, doing the dead man’s float, flicks by on that chunk of ocean. I open my mouth and sing.
THE END
POSTSCRIPT FROM LESLIE CHRISTMAS
The day of the opening for The Headstone, The Haircutter arrived at the warehouse, as he described. He privately dined, had a shower, and then oversaw the installation of his work. He noticed that the work had collapsed on the road. It was a box filled with dirt. People were already starting to arrive. He went out to his truck and came back with two shovels. He stuck them into the dirt and told me to tell the viewers to dig the work out. He said that there was a “sick surprise” at the bottom. I had Quick modulate how many people could be in the box at once, and how many digs they could do with their shovels. After half an hour, the sick surprise was found by Elyse Kowalewski and Raphaela Fernandez. The Haircutter was over talking to Carol. The ladies made like archeologists as they smiled and brushed off Anna-Patrick Forth’s deceased head. They thought it was part of the work. Quick allowed a few more people into the box to help unearth the corpse. A lady screamed, her uvula undulating. The Haircutter was arrested. He went to trial for murder and was acquitted. He was then hospitalized for a depressive episode during which he developed a compulsive tic. “Bleebadableebadablee—That’s all folks!” he said five times a minute. Upon his discharge, he drove south. I received this manuscript a year later under a Post-it that said, “My next piece. Dedicate it to Anna-Patrick.” It was sent from Miami Beach. I assume he’s cutting hair again, and Miami Beach seems a fine place to do that in. Thank You® for reading.
Leslie Christmas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Haircutter (born Jonathan Reilly Jr., September 17, 1962) is a self-taught artist from the American West. His work speaks to the heat of a midnight neon sign down the block on 34th street. Instead of offering our opinion on his work, let us turn an internal 180 degrees to face that which squirms. Let there be peace.
The Haircutter Page 26