The Haircutter Read online

  Finn said, “There’s no drinks allowed,” pointing to her coffee. “It’s on the second floor in Children’s.”

  “I just wanted to browse with a coffee,” she said and walked away.

  “I know,” he called after her.

  He came down off the ladder, “But I told him about you and he trusted you right away, so he’s got you, right, he’s got your back—you’re in if you wanna be in. So don’t fuck it up for me either, cause this guy’s the best contact to have. But I trust you—I can tell you’re honest no matter what you seem like. I’m a people person—I like hooking people up. I like everybody so don’t worry, even though I’m twenty-one I can tell what’s going on, I went to Oberlin, but you probably don’t even know what that means. From what I understand, it’d basically be about you just driving the wolf in the art haul van and then opening the hatch when you get out to the mountains—really easy, and I’m sure he’d pay you at least a grand. I would do it, but I’m afraid of dogs.”

  The Haircutter was dry heaving. He unbuckled his belt a notch.

  Finn said, “He was like, does your friend wanna drive my wolf out there for cash when we’re done with it? I was like, I’ll ask him and let you know.”

  Why had it never occurred to me before?

  The Haircutter said, “It just hit me I realized I could see someone there. Someone I sort of left behind,” saying more about his personal life than he’d said in the past eight years.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Hooking people up,” Finn said.

  “And plus, I’ll show up in front of my father with a wolf.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. He’ll be like, Whoa, he totally surpassed my expectations,” Finn said.

  We were two scientists falling calmly into a black hole sharing a cigar as I said, “A quick wolf job. I’ll tell him: I don’t have much time … I’m just in town for a quick …”

  In an alley on 135th and 5th, Leslie Christmas lifted his left arm and cocked a pearl-handled pistol in its hand. He fired eight holes into the haul of a moving truck. He walked around to the other side of it—repeated the act while howling. In an art gallery on 20th and 10th, Charlie Quick, Christmas’s right-hand man, ran a palmful of wolf slobber through his light, European-grade hair—a cigarette in his lips, a caged wolf behind him—as he told a reporter on speaker phone, “The wolf was rescued from an abusive domesticated situation and will be returned to its natural habitat as soon as we’re done with it!” In the basement of a law office on Broadway and Reade, The Haircutter’s suction tubes were at rest as ten inanimate objects. On 37th and 6th, his fitted mattress sheet sat tinted dark where his farts go, and on Broadway and 12th Street, The Haircutter accepted the strange and prestigious offer of driving a wolf cross-country to release it in the wild, to parade the wolf in front of his father and “see someone” that he’d “left behind.”

  The day of the wolf job, I smiled at myself in my bachelor-dirty bathroom mirror. I had on my good outfit—my collared shirt with the ducks flying on it and my good forest green belt. I got out a frying pan for breakfast and did up everything I had left in the fridge. I ate at the table where I’d laid out the US map and the set of truck keys I’d picked up from Finn at Biggest. He’d also made me sign a legal document promising I’d drop the wolf where I said, and that I’d drive the speed limit and accept all responsibilities. I picked up a pen and put a big X on Wyoming with my chest puffed out. Then I struggled to fold the map up (which I did every time after that till I lit it on fire in a dirt lot in Ohio and it folded itself). I hooked my jean jacket around my finger and slung it over my shoulder, I picked up my suitcase of clean clothes, and left to do the wolf job! Happy as an exclamation point, innocent as a space.

  On 20th and 10th, I approached a mini semi-trailer truck with a long whistle sliding out of my teeth. The cab part was sun-faded red and the haul was white with bullet holes shot into it so the wolf could breathe. I used the keys on the gigantic driver’s-side door and hoisted myself in. The first thing I saw was a note on the passenger’s seat. It wasn’t ripped out of something; it was a clean sheet of paper with a name at the top in gold: Leslie Christmas. And there was a typewritten message for me:

  Mr. H.C.,

  I am Charlie Quick, the first assistant to Mr. Christmas. I will contact you at a later date to make his acquaintance.

  There is a per diem in the glove box along with vehicle registration. There is a peephole drilled in the wall above the back bench. Remove the peg stopping it and use the funnel found in the food bag behind the passenger’s seat to funnel food through to the wolf. You are not responsible for cleanup. To release the wolf, press the yellow button with the back-door symbol on it. Under this letter you’ll find an issue of Wolf Fancy. Read it to find where best to deposit the wolf so that he might find his pact again. The truck should be returned to the neighborhood in which you found it and the keys should be discretely left under the floor mat.

  Mr. Christmas wants you to know that the wolf was used in an art piece that commented on the struggle between the adult ego state and the child ego state.

  Thank you for a swift delivery.

  Charlie Quick

  Of course I crawled right in back with the note still in my hand and unstopped the peephole and stopped it right back up again when I saw a werewolf slurp up his long phallic tongue and look at me.

  It took me a good hour to figure out how to drive the machine and in retrospect the entire scheme was highly dangerous for everyone involved. But since I didn’t know that at the time, I just enjoyed it.

  I felt on top of the world. I thought, What an easy way to feel on top of the world!—ride in a tall truck looking through a tall windshield, bowling down the freeway on an endless lane. I rolled down the windows and turned the radio up and stopped to get road snacks. I used the per diem on postcards of the states I liked. I howled and waited to hear if the wolf howled back. I sang along to songs in the low operatic voice I hadn’t used since high school choir. I heard stories on the radio at night that brought me to tears, and I cried freely cause it was dark out. I masturbated freely cause it was dark out. I slept at motels and I slept at gas stations on the back bench with the peephole over my head.

  One night I took out the peg (it was a cork with a red wine stain on the bottom) and looked in on the wolf with a flashlight. He scrambled up, his claws slipping on the metal floor. His prey-stained teeth snapped at the rod of light that shone dust and wolf hairs curlicuing as he advanced. He licked the peephole and whimpered. His whimpering seemed to ask, “Why are you doing this to me?” He sounded like he had milk stuck in his throat. It was all so human—I funneled a pinch of gummy bears into the hole so he’d think it was weird, so he’d (hopefully) figure it was a sign I knew he was trying to talk. Later I used the flashlight to fart and read Wolf Fancy like a teenage boy. I learned that my wolf was an “Arctic Tundra Grey” according to his extra-large size, but there was no information in the mag on finding pacts, unfortunately. All the wolf did was pace by that peephole the whole trip. A pact with hunger is all he had.

  Did I think about jostling the wolf? Of course I thought about jostling the wolf. I winced at every bump in the road. I wished that Mr. Christmas had given him a tranquilizer for the trip. The least he did was give him a three-sided wooden crate to sleep in, the opening of which faced the front of the truck. So through the peephole I could see him curled up pouting in there, the blanket provided ripped to shreds and pushed in frustration with, I’m guessing his snout, into a corner of the haul. It was a wolf. A live, pungent wolf.

  One day I had a misfortune when I paid for gas at a Common Cents and it slipped that I had a wolf in back.

  The Haircutter slid a hundred-dollar bill across the counter. “Red-and-white semi on pump four. The one with the wolf in back,” he said, chuckling.

  The male gas station attendant, wearing rose-colored glasses like some sort of pervert, took the bill and put it through the necessary hoops and ladders.r />
  “This seems like a nice town, what I’ve seen of it,” The Haircutter said, pocketing his change and keeping his hand there to jingle it.

  “Got a lot of goons running through here,” the attendant said, and he sat back down on his stool and looked at a small TV on the counter. It was tuned to a show in a courtroom.

  The Haircutter stuck his head over the counter and looked, “Ooh! What’s the verdict?”

  The attendant spun his toothpick around in his mouth.

  The Haircutter wiped his brow and did a long whistle. “Yeah, I’m haulin’ a wolf,” he said.

  The attendant kept his head pointed at the TV, but his eyes flicked to H.C.

  “I said I’ve got a wolf in back.”

  The attendant yanked his face in toward his neck.

  The Haircutter folded his arms and scuffed his shoe and it made a high pip! sound. He drew some snot into his throat and swallowed it. He said, “I’m, ah. I’m drivin’ it from Manhattan over in New York. It’s for an art dealer over there who’s got this art wolf he wanted me to release in the wild. We’re doin’ it all under the radar since it’s not exactly legal, so.”

  The attendant took his toothpick out of his mouth. “Well is that right,” he said. “Hell, I’d like to see it to believe it.”

  “You’re welcome to, actually! There’s a peephole.”

  The attendant snarled and pronounced, “A peephole?”

  The Haircutter slapped the counter. “Come on. Come, I’ll show you.”

  The attendant dazzled a grin.

  I was like, “You just remove this peg here. Pardon the mess. Call it a road trip. Hey, and watch the smell. I recommend you don’t put your nose up to the hole.”

  The attendant said, “Well I’ll be fucked. That’s a wolf.”

  “Told you!” I screamed, delighted.

  I’d never had a big responsibility like that, and something so fun. I fondled the steering wheel and said to the attendant, “And see I don’t know if this is Italian leather or what, but I’ve only seen somethin’ this big used for drivin’ a boat.”

  And he said, “What else?”

  I said, “Well, he’s got a food bag there if you wanna funnel some feed in and watch him wolf it down.” I said, “Hell, they thought of everything.” And that’s when I said, “Here!” and popped the glove compartment. I waved the thousand-dollar per diem in the attendant’s face like I’d just won it as a prize for being dumber than a box of rocks. I said, “Cold hard cash.” He grabbed it faster than you can say What just happened?

  “Now let me tell you something about laws,” he said. “It’s illegal to transport a wolf in the way you’re doing. And it’s cruelty to animals on top. So I’m actually gonna keep this cash and you’re gonna get the hell outta my station or I’m calling the cops.”

  I said, “Well fuck you!” It was the first time I’d ever told someone that.

  He got out and walked back up to his place of work, stuffing my wad in his wallet and spitting before he opened the door. Didn’t look back at me once. I just sat there like, Whoa!

  I replaced the peg in the peephole and grunted on back to the driver’s seat. I drove on, my hair whipping in the wind. That wasn’t the point—money. The point wasn’t even that my father thought I wasn’t a man and now through my very own contacts I was showing up after eight years of estrangement for a quick wolf job. The point was: the woman I’d left behind.

  May I introduce: Carol Mary Mathers. I was slicing down the road towards her. I kept having to stop to sit on toilets because my stomach held that old steel butterfly that was ripping up my guts. I honked into john bowls across America. The last time I’d seen her was eight years before when I’d looked up from Jenny’s twitching body and Carol was gone.

  When I lived in Ten Sleep I started going every night to watch Darron dance at the Blue Bear Saloon because Carol worked there. She was a bartender, so I could sit and talk to her. I tipped her in car wash tokens and she waved at me with her fingers grouped like batting lashes. She was in college at the time studying Lit, so we discussed whatever she’d learned that week, and I liked it very much. And when I started falling in love with her, whenever I went to Blue Bear was the only time I felt calm. Otherwise when I wasn’t “with” her, I’d have that steel butterfly nonstop and I’d have to go shit all the time, cursing her for the cause. I couldn’t eat for the first time in my life. She probably thought I was a monster fatass since all I’d do is come in there and order up a bunch of food cause I was starving and, like I said, finally calm cause my “girl” was right there. And in case you’re thinking I was delusional, she liked me back.

  The Haircutter’s puffy white sneaker pressed pedal-forth on the old open road. The Haircutter drank coffee and smacked his lips. Sun broke yolk on the horizon. Grassy plains bordering the black strip before him laid memories of Ten Sleep out to view.

  Ten Sleep got its name because it took ten sleeps to get there from an Indian camp. Now all Ten Sleep has left of Indian culture is hunting. Everyone’s got elk or deer in the freezer and everyone’s got guns—even one strapped to the foyer wall in case a hoodlum rings the bell (even though a common belief in Wyoming is that the wind keeps the riffraff out). In Wyo, men leave bars and families leave restaurants walking tipped back at a slant because the wind pushed them to walk that way over time. Talk about a weather system.

  I left behind a family of three: my mother, my father, and my brother Darron.

  Darron’s my really nice younger brother, who’s only ever been good to me. The only thing he ever did wrong was keep a dead baby bird in a shoebox under his bed because he wanted to watch it decompose. He’s always had the same unisex haircut and a rat-like quality to his face, which matched the rattail he’s had his whole life at the nape of his straight neck. My mother used to say, “Yank his till!” all the time for me to yank his tail if she wanted to tease him but couldn’t reach. Before entering nicer places, he always tucked it in his collar. It was a family member, as well as a family member’s member.

  My mother is “Just Plain Patty,” who’s got a stack of Romances on the back wall in the basement so she can lick her fat finger and trace down the line till, “Ooh Larrisa’s Crystals! It’s been a while since I’ve done that one,” followed by her wet, barking coughs which to me is a comfort sound. She looks like her shoulder bones were just plain removed—they point to where the wall meets the floor. Her face is so stretched out from frowning and being old it ripples when she dries her hair. She’s always worn a blanket as a shawl, and the fringes will dip into your Campbell’s when she’s bending around the kitchen and she’ll say, “Gol dang it!” and suck it off. She drives a van called Fair Fare, and she’s driven that van for thirty years servicing drunks from 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. who pay her whatever they think is a fair fare.

  And my father, we for some forgotten reason have always called Father John even though he makes a point to litter something out of the car if he passes a church. He has a jaw that looks made by two swings of an ax, and he wears a tan cowboy hat that I’ve never touched. Growing up, it was the only thing in the house that was kept clean. He has a heartthrob quality that looks like he’s squinting in the sun. Him and I have the same long-lashed girly eyes that my mother always couldn’t shut the hell up about. (“My Baby Blue Eyeses!”) She’s real in love with him, even on the shy side about it. At the family dinner table he’d tell us what to fix about ourselves, and my mother would nod and say, “Father John knows. Trust eem.”

  I left behind my childhood home on Lardy Street, which we all lived in, pretending I wasn’t thirty and Darron wasn’t twenty-eight.

  I left behind a job at Brother and Son’s Carwash, which had a giant cowboy spinning in the lot, waving in a howdy pose. He wore a yellow suit and yellow hat and was taller than a tree. At work I’d hear his gears squeak each time he completed a circle and it felt like a little mock on his part, like, “Hey, I’m up here laughing with this great view.” Which is not to say I
hated my job at Brother and Son’s—the opposite. I was happy with my Wyo life, it’s my father who wasn’t.

  I left behind Jenny’s dead body; I just killed her and walked away.

  I left behind the only woman I’d ever loved. Now if that ain’t either romantic or pathetic, I wouldn’t know which one.

  To get to Carol, I barely slept. I ground against the speed limit. New York to Wyoming took three days. I remember cornfields and velvet cattle. I remember the smell of manure and skunk taking turns like snickering cousins. I remember the low sexual sound of radio hosts when night wind cooled my neck, and their loud breakfast sound when I could smell dew drying. I remember the sky looking just like heaven: the clouds beading up, spreading; the sun somewhere lending light to edge the clouds in gold. The road did a design of dipping down and drawing itself up—like wings.

  I thought about if I’d changed in the eight years since I’d seen her. I thought, Well, I’ve got some new clothes. I don’t wear cowboy boots or hats anymore. I’ve got my jean jacket and my collared shirts now. I thought, My hair’s the same. It’s always been the same brown color in the shape of the hair you snap onto a plastic man. I thought, You’ve probably gained a few pounds from age and you know it. I thought, Hey, you’re The Haircutter now! You’re a new man with a new name! I said, “Haha!” out loud and the wolf finally (meaningfully) howled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE YELLOW-SUITED COWBOY SPINS

  It’s eleven o’clock p.m. All is quiet on the Midwest sprawl, save for a drawn-out rumble in the clouds. In the desolate parking lot of the supermarket, a lone goose’s beadular eyes pucker against a wet wind blowing extravagantly in its “face.” Lilacs bray on their branches, their aroma flung and wasted on the alley behind my childhood home. A rottweiler jangles by, sniffing for bitches in heat. A couch rots and a raccoon steals the stuffing, his burglar mask on. Antlers sit by back doors as tokens with the velvet half-gone. Wind licks the gutted stomach of a still-steaming buck, hung and slightly swinging in the neighbor’s garage. Wind perks the black body hairs of my mother, Patty, as she smokes a Salem standing before the breast-high brittle weeds that fill the chain-linked confines of my old backyard. Little does she know, as rain collapses down upon Ten Sleep like the clouds are cumming (collapses so hard and so suddenly it hits her Salem out of her hand), that her long-lost eldest son is asleep at a gas station 150 miles out in Warner and, come tomorrow afternoon, will be at her bell with a wolf.