by Laird Hunt
I hadn’t seen it before but there was a sign, hanging by one nail, behind a mess of half-dead ivy.
GOODY’S BEAUTY PARLOR, the sign read.
I shuddered a little.
“Step on forward,” said the old woman.
“Are you Goody?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I bought the sign from her.”
“That’s a old sign.”
“I still keep my hand in. I retired a while back but I still got clients in the neighborhood.”
“You cut hair?” I said.
“Cut, comb, and curl. You need some attention,” she said. “You need some freshening up. A woman gets to a certain age and the whole shop starts to sag.”
“I ain’t that old,” I said.
“You ain’t that young either.”
Whether she was onto something or she wasn’t I didn’t like hearing it. Still, I put a finger to my head, moved it around under my hat. It felt like my scalp was about to start sprouting mushrooms.
“You heading to the show, you don’t want to walk in like that,” she said. “The whole wide world will be there to see them boys strung up and you want to look according. Anyone who’s anyone going to be there. Lord, the governor, for all you know.”
I thought a minute. What I thought of was those bloodhounds with neckties on.
“I keep the parlor all ready to go; we can step right in,” she said.
I must of peeked up at her own hair, which looked like plain old road tar poured out of a bucket, combed a little, and painted gray, because she said to me that she didn’t care to use her talents on herself, only turned them outward, offered them unto others, thought of it as her sacred mission.
“They’ll be coming back around soon,” I said.
She came down the steps, crossed the yard, took my arm. “They’re still at it,” she said. “Don’t you worry, they’ll be at it for a good long while.”
The parlor was the first room in the house and it looked like it had been soaked in water then spread with mayonnaise and left to turn. There was mold and dust and lumps and sags and strips of flypaper blackened up with flies. There was some pictures of presidents tacked up to the walls and an old stereoscope with a bent picture holder lying in a corner next to a spilled box of its cards on the floor. The swivel chair had cracked its leather many a year before, but I was worn out to the bone and the thought of plunking down a minute was a happy one. I unpinned my hat and set it on a counter next to a pickle jar. The jar had some good fat pickles in it and when I’d got myself settled into the chair, my hostess offered me one. I was more hungry than I’d thought about and before I knew it I’d thrown the whole thing down the hatch. She held the jar out again and, when I shook my head, took one for herself.
“I got a cellar full,” she said. “Secret to my longevity. That old thing out on its crutch won’t touch a pickle. Says they give him the hives. They might too.”
She cackled a little about this then told me where he claimed to get them, his hives. Her sharing this location didn’t help the pickle I’d swallowed settle down any too gently and I wasn’t sorry when she set the jar aside and looked to my hair.
You can say what you like, but mold on the premises or no mold, there isn’t much else like some fingers know their business working at your head. The old woman pulled out combs and brushes and scissors and clippers. Lined them up neat between my hat and the pickle jar. Said she’d put my mess all straight. Said there was nothing to set you up for an evening in Marvel town like getting your hair fixed.
“You’ll be winning beauty pageants when I’m done. You got some head of hair on you, I’ll say that,” she said and clucked her tongue.
I didn’t tell her this but I had as a matter of indisputable fact won a beauty pageant back in my time. I’d have been about a junior in high school. Living with my father. They’d had a little stage set up next to an exhibition tent at the town fair. We stood and danced and shimmied and jiggled on the stage for about three weeks it felt like, then the judges cast their votes. Candy Perkins had been on that stage with me. About every chance she had as we did our gyrations she told me my chest was too saggy or my arms were too long or my legs were too soft. I gave back as good as I got and knew there wasn’t anyone in that tent, including Candy, could take their eyes off my hair, but even so, just to make sure she was clear on the score, after I’d got my crown I went straight off into the field with the boy she was sweet on. After we had got ourselves good and dirty, he told me his name was Dale. He was older than he looked. He’d come into a spread had a big mortgage on it but it had potential. He told me he’d always thought, seeing me around, I was awful pretty but hadn’t ever dared talk to me before. Well, we’ve talked now, I told him. Seeing Candy Perkins’s face after we come back out of the field holding hands had been awful pleasant. I know it’s not nice to say that, but I’m saying it. They’d given her a dingy sash to wear said RUNNER-UP.
It was hot in the parlor and the old lady hummed a tune like Sally had while she worked and by and by I left off thinking about beauty contests and Candy Perkins and started in to drift. I don’t know if you ever drifted when you were riding across the countryside in a vehicle and even though you are dreaming it seems like you never shut your eyes. I have it happen to me here sometimes and that’s what happened to me in that chair. I was asleep but my shut eyes kept looking out at the old lady’s beauty parlor, at her fly-worried windows, at her row of bottles and brushes and crusty jars. The stereoscope was sitting on the counter now. It had been restored and had a card loaded up to be looked at but I couldn’t tell which one. While I was sleeping like this and feeling like I was still awake, the old lady, or the version of her was in my head, told me a story.
“Once upon a time in the old days before you and me, and way out in the hinterlands, there was a man.” She sighed once and then continued. “He had two daughters by a slave and he kept the two daughters to do his work after the slave died. Then he got married to a girl not much older than the daughters. The girl didn’t give him any children but he worked on it every night just the same. When he got tired of the girl he started in on the daughters. The girl saw this and instead of helping the daughters she got jealous and made it harder on them. She gave them extra work and whipped them when they stepped wrong. Then one morning the man came up dead with a pigsticker in his neck and the daughters set the girl to work. They worked her all day and set a shackle to her at night. One of the daughters had found herself pregnant before the man had got himself his pigsticker present and she blew up like a balloon all those months they kept the girl at work. The pregnant one would sit outside the shed where they kept the girl shackled and sing at her stomach: That’s the way of the world, baby child, that’s the way of the world. Then one day the weather turned fair and the daughters both walked off.”
“What happened to the girl?” I said. My voice in the dream sounded flat, like it was far off or someone else’s.
“No one knows,” the old woman said.
“What happened to the daughters?”
“No one knows.”
“What about the child?”
“No one knows.”
“Should I go up to Marvel and see the show? I got a map now. Sally Gunner said no.”
“’Course you should.”
“But it’s wrong.”
“Wrong is the way of the world. Didn’t you know that? Take a look at your map if you don’t believe me, Ottie Lee.”
I woke then. The old woman was standing next to me, humming, working her combs and clippers on my wet hair. The broken stereoscope was back on the floor with its box of spilled cards. I stood, ran into the yard, and heaved up her pickle and what was left of the catfish and the slaw and the two slices of peach pie.
“Come on back in, I ain’t finished,” she called when I’d stood up.
“I’m done,” I said.
I swallowed hard, wiped my mouth and face, ran to the shed, and found the boys standing around
the old man, who had a noose tied to his crutch. He had the long end of the rope thrown over a ceiling beam and was pulling the crutch up into the air like a puppet.
“We got to go, it’s getting late,” I said.
“So it is,” Bud said.
“We don’t want to miss the show,” said Pops.
“Hell no, we don’t,” said Dale.
So those two had changed some of their tune. Drink and a late hour will do that.
“I’ll just set out here a while longer,” said the old man, looking up at his crutch with a grin on his face. The old woman was standing in the middle of the front yard with her hands on her hips. I reached into my purse and pulled out a dollar, but she just folded her arms over her chest and turned her head to the side. First thing I did when I was back up on the wagon bench was reach down and grab at the map and clutch it to my chest.
“What happened to your hat?” Dale said as we rode away.
“Never you mind. Never you mind at all.”
Dale nodded and, smart fellow that he was, didn’t say another word. I had expected to have a posse of dead drunks on my hand after all the time the boys had spent with the old man but if anything they looked a good sight better than when they had went in. The mule too looked the better for its nap and after we had bobbed along a while it hit me that whether or not that old lady had fed me a bad pickle or made her way into my dreams and ginned up a story to steal away my heart, I was feeling better than I had since we had started out. Mrs. Spitzer had always preached the virtues of a good purgative. And it was the one piece of her advice I had carried off when my father had taken me away that last time. In fact, I had taken it as we had ridden down one bumpy road after another, my father’s cigar smoke slithering its way down my nostrils, though he did not appreciate it when I splattered both his shoes. I had felt better, though, after I had purged in that car of his and I felt better now. Maybe purging was all I needed. Carve the lamb chop out of the chicken. The turkey out of the tomato. The bean out of the corn. The coffin out of the pig. Never mind that there are some things can’t be carved out.
You would have thought we would have reached Ohio by that time of the night but there were still a few last miles lay before us. I knew they had probably gotten started on their business over at Marvel, but the idea of almost being there in all that bright light to help me see forward, whatever else it was we would find, made the pill that we had missed something easier to swallow down. I had the map now. I’d seen where it meant for us to go. For all of us to go. Marvel and its marvels. There was the stringing-up and then there was all the rest of it. Who knew what fearsome wonders would populate the night; who knew how long it would all go on?
The mule went clippity-clop and pulled us across the dark earth. Every now and then a bat or big moth would come close and I would miss my hat. But it wasn’t time for thinking of hats now. The outskirts of Marvel were approaching. There was business at hand. We had to be like those bloodhounds. The boys had the feeling too. Once in a while they would take a sip from one of the jars they’d gotten at the old man’s, but it was just smart little sips, the kind to keep your courage up. Maybe that old man had talked some sense into them with his rope and his crutch. You could see they knew we were coming up on Marvel and that it wasn’t the time anymore for fooling around.
Riding along behind that mule in that dark, going where we were going, I thought about the map and got the fancy idea that we were a ship crossing the waters, that we were captains on the high seas. The boys didn’t say it, but I could see they had sat up straighter and were keeping a sharp eye out for when we would make land. I decided as our mule boat took us across the deep waters of the Indiana night that even chaw-cheeked as he was, old Dale had some noble line to his jaw, some slick purpose to the cast of his eye. I liked looking at him and thinking that kind of thought. He even gandered back at me once or twice and I could tell he liked what he saw. Which was me. That’s all it was. Ottie Lee Henshaw. Married to little Dale Henshaw, who she had met one happy day in a cornfield. There were surprises everywhere. Not just down dark wells, not just in countryside churches. To hell with Bud Lancer and his groping and his big dumb broken-down car. I’d quit my job the next day and stay home and help Dale. We’d get the farm squared away right. Let that fat Sassy win us a prize. Pay down the mortgage and buy some more land and put it under cultivation. Maybe we’d travel. Get down to Indianapolis. Even make it to Kentucky. It wasn’t just juggling and turkey suppers there. I’d heard they had caves in those parts that were ten miles deep. You could take a boat down there along streams they had underground and see special kinds of fish didn’t have any eyes. Maybe see an angel. Find some light. Find the moon in its sleep. Forget about lynchings. Long walks in the heat. Forget about autumn-night visits from toothless ladies. Get deep down dark into the earth and forget it all. Forget enough.
It was with that notion in my mind that I climbed down off the wagon to pay a visit to the bushes. The boys got the idea they all needed the bushes too so I stepped a good way down the road to keep myself clear of them. It might have been dark as grave dirt, but it doesn’t take much to disturb you in your private pastimes. Which is why when I heard a kind of cough couldn’t have been fifteen feet away I jumped up and back out of my squat and dropped the map I had been holding tight and landed my foot badly against a root and fell down and pulled up my undershorts. “Shit goddamn,” I said. It took me a minute to find the map in the dark. I was ready to say a good deal more and begin to lay about me with my feet and free fist if I hadn’t caught sight of who it was had done his coughing at me. He was lying in the middle of the quiet road, flat on his back, but not entirely blended into the pale gravel because of the color of his suit.
“I am gazing at the stars and intended no interruption,” said the speechmaker. “The cough was meant to express as much.”
“You could have coughed before I got started,” I said.
“I’ll confess to you that I had dozed. The minute and most delicate sounds you made woke me. I have ever been a light sleeper. In my schoolboy years my mother and father used to run half a mile down to the road when they wished to parley after my bedtime hour.”
“I do not know the word parley,” I said. I had come over closer to him. I had thought he might sit up now that he had announced himself but he didn’t.
“Fish a little, you will find it.”
I fished a little and found it. It was not the most unhandsome word I’d heard that evening.
“It derives from the Cajun. I heard it said all the time when I made my visits to New Orleans.”
“You’ve been all the way down there?”
“And farther, madam.”
“You don’t need to madam me.”
“I assure you, it is my deepest pleasure to accord you the respect it does seem to me you so well deserve.”
“Anyways,” I said. “What in hell?”
“My presence must intrigue you, madam. It intrigues me too. I cannot easily account for it.”
“I figured you for a man in the front row of the festivities. Sitting surrounded by your brethren from the buses. Getting bathed in all that beautiful light.”
“What light?”
“From the torch of clarity. You said that yourself.”
“So I did, and the image pleases, but figure, madam, that instead of taking that bath of bold light, I have been lying here on the road for some time imagining you reclining in the dappled moon shade of one of the trees.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” I said with a snort, just a small one.
“Ah, but the beautiful thing about it is you don’t have to believe it or not believe it. It is a part of the universe and part of this night and will never leave it now.”
“We’re all drunk,” I said. “We haven’t got over there yet and we lost our car. We got a wagon now, though. It came with a map. This one right here. I had my hair fixed. In a beauty parlor. Well, some.”
“A map,
you say.”
I waved it around. I couldn’t tell if he saw me doing it.
“I have not had a drop this night,” he said. “My faculties are alert, my vision unimpaired. I have my good legs and a sound heart, but I have not yet made it to Marvel either.”
“This map is a map to Marvel. We can’t miss it now.”
“I don’t believe in maps.”
“What does that mean?”
He put his hand on his sound heart like that was his answer and I thought maybe he was being romantic after all his complimenting, but it was too dark to tell so I let it go.
“What happened to the buses?”
“Ah,” he said. “The buses... ”
He got quiet and the quiet was a long and shuffly one and as it went on I had a crazy idea spring into my head.
“Tell you what, you want to dance?” I said.
“Dance, you say?” he said.
He looked confused and I could understand why but didn’t know how to explain it to him. I thought he was fixing to clam up and start in to shuffling again but then he jumped up off the ground and made me a bow, one hand on his stomach, one on his back. Then he took his hand off his stomach and held it out to me.
“I do, madam,” he said.
“You don’t care that we don’t have any music?”
“We don’t need music. Why should we? We have the music of the night, of the spheres.”
I took his hand with the one wasn’t holding the map and he gave another little bow, then twirled me over to him and took me in his sweaty arms. Up and down the gravel we went. He moved like he had been made in a music factory; everything about him was creamy and smooth.
“I’ve been wanting to dance half the day,” I said into his ear.
“As have I, madam, as have I.”
“Do you think it’s bad to want to dance?”
“I do not.”
“Sometimes I want to just dance.”
“It is a natural inclination.”
“We have a Victrola at home. My husband hired himself out every Saturday for a year to pay for it.”