Death Is a Lonely Business Page 7

  It was my chance to escape, but I failed.

  Shrank’s gaze had returned to me, as if I could save him from that invasion just beyond. In a moment he might seize my elbow for support.

  The pier shook. I shut my eyes.

  I thought I heard my secret office telephone ring. I almost cried out, my phone! It’s for me!

  But I was saved from that by a tide of men and women, and a few children, hurrying the other way, not toward land but rushing toward the sea end of the pier, a large man in a dark cloak and a floppy G. K. Chesterton hat leading the way.

  “Last ride, last day, last time!” he yelled. “Last chance! Come on!”

  “Shapeshade,” whispered A. L. Shrank.

  And that’s who it was. Shapeshade, the sole owner and proprietor of the old Venice Cinema at the foot of the pier, which would be ground underfoot and turned to celluloid mulch within the week.

  “This way!” called Shapeshade’s voice from the mist.

  I glanced at A. L. Shrank.

  He shrugged and nodded, giving permission.

  I ran off into the fog.

  The long chattering clack and grind, the ascending slow clang, rattle, and roar, like some robot centipede of immense size scaling the side of a nightmare, pausing at the top for the merest breath, then cascading in a serpentine of squeal, rush, and thunderous roar, in scream, in human shriek down the abysmal span, there to attack, more swiftly this time, another hill, another ascending scale rising yet higher and higher to fall off into hysteria.

  The rollercoaster.

  I stood looking up at it through the mist.

  In an hour, so they said, it would be dead.

  It had been part of my life as long as I could remember. From here most nights you could hear people laughing and screaming as they soared up to the heights of so-called existence and plunged down toward an imaginary doom.

  So this was to be a final ride late in the afternoon, just before the dynamite experts taped explosives to the dinosaur’s legs and brought him to his knees.

  “Jump in!” a boy yelled. “It’s free!”

  “Even free I never thought it was anything but torture,” I said.

  “Hey, look who’s here in the front seat,” someone called. “And behind!”

  Mr. Shapeshade was there, cramming his vast black hat down over his ears, laughing. Back of him was Annie Oakley the rifle lady.

  Back of her sat the man who had run the fun house; alongside him was the old lady who spun the pink cotton candy machine and sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese food.

  Back of them were the Knock a Milk Bottle and the Toss a Hoop team, everyone looking like they were posing for a passport photo to eternity.

  Only Mr. Shapeshade, as coxswain, was jubilant.

  “As Captain Ahab said, don’t be yellow!” he called.

  That made me feel like a sheep.

  I let the rollercoaster ticket-tearer help me into the coward’s back row.

  “This your first trip?” He laughed.

  “And my last.”

  “Everyone set to scream?”

  “Why not?” cried Shapeshade.

  Let me out, I thought. We’ll all die!

  “Here goes,” the ticketman yelled, “nothing!”

  It was heaven going up and hell all the way down.

  I had this terrible feeling they blew the legs out from under the rollercoaster as we descended.

  When we hit bottom I glanced over. A. L. Shrank stood on the pier, staring up at us lunatics who had willingly boarded the Titanic. A. L. Shrank backed off in the fog.

  But we were climbing again. Everyone screamed. I screamed. Christ, I thought, we sound as if we mean it!

  When it was over, the celebrants wandered off in the fog, wiping their eyes, holding on to each other.

  Mr. Shapeshade stood beside me as the dynamite men ran in to wrap their explosives around the girders and struts of the great ride.

  “You going to stay and watch?” said Mr. Shapeshade, gently.

  “I don’t think I could stand it,” I said. “I saw a film once where they shot an elephant right on screen. The way it fell down and over, collapsed, hurt me terribly. It was like watching someone bomb St. Peter’s dome. I wanted to kill the hunters. No, thanks.”

  A flagman, anyway, was waving us off.

  Shapeshade and I walked back through the fog. He took my elbow, like a good middle-European uncle advising his favorite nephew.

  “Tonight. No explosions. No destructions. Only joy. Fun. Great old times. My theater. Maybe tonight is our last cinema night. Maybe tomorrow. Free. Gratis. Nice boy, be there.”

  He hugged me and plowed off through the fog like a great dark tugboat.

  On my way past A. L. Shrank’s I saw that his door was still wide open. But I didn’t step in.

  I wanted to run, call collect on my gas station telephone, but I feared that two thousand miles of silence would whisper back at me of deaths in sunlit streets, red meats hung in carnecería windows, and a loneliness so vast it was like an open wound.

  My hair grayed. It grew an inch.

  Cal! I thought. Dear, dreadful barber—here I come.

  Cal’s barber shop in Venice was situated right across the street from the city half and next door to a bail bond shop where flies hung like dead trapeze artists from flypaper coils that had been left in the windows for ten years, and where men and women from the jail across the way went in like shadows and came out like uninhabited clothes. And next door to that was a little ma-and-pa grocery, but they were gone and their son sat on his pants in the window all day and sold maybe a can of soup and took horse-race telephone bets.

  The barber shop, though it had a few flies in the window that had been dead no more than ten days, at least got a washdown once a month from Cal, who ran the place with well-oiled shears and unoiled elbows and spearmint gossip in his all-pink mouth. He acted like he was running a bee farm and afraid it would get out of hand as he wrestled the big, silver, bumbling insect around your ears until it suddenly froze, bit, and held on to your hair until Cal cursed and yanked back as if he were pulling teeth.

  Which was why, along with economics, I had my hair cut only twice a year by Cal.

  Twice yearly, also, because of all the barbers in the world, Cal talked, sprayed, gummed, cudgeled, advised, and droned more than most, which boggles the mind. Name a subject, he knew it all, top, side, and bottom, and in the middle of explaining dumb Einstein’s theory would stop, shut one eye, cock his head, and ask the Great Question with No Safe Answer.

  “Hey, did I ever tell you about me and old Scott Joplin? Why, old Scott and me, by God and by Jesus, listen. That day in 1915 when he taught me how to play the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ Let me tell you.”

  There was this picture of Scott Joplin on the wall, signed in ink a few centuries ago and fading like the canary lady’s message. In that photo you could see a very young Cal, seated on a piano stool, and bent over him, Joplin, his big black hands covering those of the happy boy.

  There was that joyous kid, forever on the wall, captured on film, hunched over to seize the piano keys, ready to leap on life, the world, the universe, eat it all. The look on that boy’s face was such that it cracked my heart every time I saw it. So I didn’t look at it often. It hurt enough to see Cal looking at it, gathering his spit to ask the age-old Great Question, and, with no begs or requests, dash for the piano to maple leaf that rag.

  Cal.

  Cal looked like a cowpuncher who now rode barber chairs. Think of Texas cowhands, lean, weatherbeaten, permanently dyed by sun, sleeping in their Stetsons, glued on for life, taking showers in the damn hats. That was Cal, circling the enemy, the customer, weapon in hand, eating the hair, chopping the sideburns, listening to the shears, admiring the Bumblebee Electric’s harmonics, talking, talking, as I imagined him cowhand-naked dancing around my chair. Stetson jampack-nested above his ears, crave-itching to leap to that piano and rak
e its smile.

  Sometimes I’d pretend I didn’t see him throwing those mad stares, shuttling his love glances at the waiting black and white, white and black keys. But finally I’d heave a great masochistic sigh and cry, “Okay, Cal. Git.”

  Cal got.

  Galvanized, he shot across the room, in a cowboy shamble, two of him, one in the mirror faster and brighter than the real one, yanking the piano lid up to show all that yellow dentistry just aching to have its music pulled.

  “Listen to this, son. You ever hear anything, ever, ever in life, ever hear anything like—this?”

  “No, Cal,” I said, waiting in the chair with my head half-ruined. “No,” I said, honestly, “I never did.”

  “My God,” cried the old man coming out of the morgue a final time inside my head, “who gave him that awful haircut?”

  I saw the guilty party standing in the window of his barber shop, gazing out at the fog, looking like one of those people in empty rooms or cafes or on street corners in paintings by Hopper.

  Cal.

  I had to force myself to pull open the front door and step in, gingerly, looking down.

  There were curlicues of brown, black, and gray hair all over the place.

  “Hey,” I said, with false joviality. “Looks like you had a great day!”

  “You know,” said Cal, looking out the window, “that hair has been there five, six weeks. Ain’t nobody in their right mind coming in that door save tramps, which isn’t you, or fools, which isn’t you, or bald men, which isn’t you, asking directions to the madhouse, and poor people, which is you, so go sit down in the chair and prepare to be electrocuted, the electric clippers have been on the fritz for two months and I ain’t had the cash to get the goddamn things fixed. Sit.”

  Obedient to my executioner, I bounded forward and sat and stared at the hair-strews on the floor, symbols of a silent past that must have meant something, but said nothing. Even looked at sidewise, I could figure no strange shapes or imminent forecasts.

  At last Cal turned and waded across that forlorn porcelain and forelock sea to let his hands pick up, all by themselves, the comb and scissors. He hesitated behind me, like the axeman sad to have to chop some young king’s head.

  He asked how long I wanted it, or how ruined I wanted it, take your choice, but I was busy staring across the glaring white Arctic emptiness of the shop at—

  Cal’s piano.

  For the first time in fifteen years it was covered. Its gray-yellow Oriental smile was invisible under a white mortuary bedsheet.

  “Cal.” My eyes were on the sheet. I had forgotten, for a moment, the old Venice ticket office man lying cold with a terrible haircut. “Cal,” I said, “how come you’re not maple leafing the old rag?”

  Cal let his scissors snip-snip and then snip-snip around my neck.

  “Cal?” I said.

  “Something wrong?’’ I said.

  “When does the dying stop?” said Cal, a long way off.

  And now the bumblebee buzzed and stung my ears and made the old chill ripple down my spine, and then Cal got busy hacking away with his dull scissors as if he were harvesting a wild wheat crop, cursing under his breath. I smelled a faint whiskey odor, but Kept my eyes straight ahead.

  “Cal?” I said.

  “Shoot. No—shit is what I mean.”

  He threw the scissors, comb, and dead silver bumblebee on the shelf and shambled across the ocean of old hair to yank the sheet off the piano, which grinned like a big mindless shape as he sat down and laid his two hands like limp paintbrushes on the keys, ready to paint God knows what.

  What came out was like broken teeth in a mashed jaw.

  “Damn. Hell. Crud. I used to do it, used to play the living guts outa that thing Scott taught me, old Scott—Scott.”

  His voice died.

  He had glanced up at the wall above the piano. He glanced away when he saw me looking, but it was too late.

  For the first time in twenty years, that picture of Scott Joplin was gone.

  I lurched forward in the chair, my mouth dropped wide.

  At which time Cal forced himself to hurl the sheet back over the smile and return, a mourner at his own wake, to stand behind my chair and pick up the torture instruments again.

  “Scott Joplin ninety-seven, Cal the barber zero,” he said, describing a lost game.

  He ran his trembling fingers over my head.

  “Jesus, look what I done to you. My God, that’s a lousy cut, and I’m not even halfway in. I ought to pay you for all the years you let me make you run around looking like an Airedale with mange. On top of which, let me tell you what I did to a customer three days ago. It’s terrible. Maybe I made a poor son-of-a-bitch look so bad someone killed him to put him out of his misery!”

  I lurched forward again, but Cal put me gently back.

  “I should give Novocain, but I don’t. About this old guy. Listen!”

  “I’m listening, Cal,” I said, for that was why I was here.

  “Sat right where you are sitting now,” said Cal. “Sat right there, just like you’re sitting, looked in the mirror, and said, shoot the works. That’s what he said. Cal, shoot the works. Biggest night of my life, he said. Myron’s Ballroom, downtown L.A. Haven’t been there in years. Called, said I’d won the grand prize, he said. For what? I said. Most important old resident of Venice, they said. Why’s that a cause for celebration? Shut up and primp up, they said. So here I am, Cal. Short all around but don’t billiard ball me. And some of that Tiger Tonic, shake it on me. I cut until hell wouldn’t have it. Old man must’ve saved up two years of high, snow mountain hair. Drenched him with tonic until the fleas fled. Sent him out happy, leaving his last two bucks behind, I wouldn’t wonder. Sitting right where you are.

  “And now he’s dead,” Cal added.

  “Dead!” I almost shouted.

  “Somebody found him in a lion cage submerged under the canal waters. Dead.”

  “Somebody,” I said. But didn’t add, me!

  “I figure the old man never had any champagne before or it was a long time back, got loaded, fell in. Cal, he said, the works. It just goes to show you, right? Could be me or you in that canal, just as likely, and now, hot damn and old breakfasts, he’s alone forever. Don’t it make you think? Hey, now, son. You don’t look too well. I talk too much, right?”

  “Did he say who was going to pick him up and how and when and why?” I said.

  “Nothing fancy, far as I could tell. Someone coming on the big Venice Short Line train, pick him up, take him right down to Myron’s Ballroom door. You ever get on the train Saturday nights around one? Old ladies and old gents piling out of Myron’s in their mothball furs and green tuxedos, smelling of Ben-Hur perfume and nickel panatelas, glad they didn’t break a leg on the dance floor, bald heads sweating, mascara running, and the fox furs starting to spoil? I went once, and looked around and got out. I figured the streetcar might stop at Rose Lawn Cemetery, on the way to the sea, and half those folks get out. No, thanks. I talk too much, don’t I? Just tell me if I do—

  “Anyways,” he went on at last, “he’s dead and gone, and the awful thing is he’ll be lying in the grave the next one thousand years remembering who in hell gave him his last awful haircut, and the answer is me.

  “So it’s been one of them weeks. People with bad haircuts disappear, wind up drowned, and at long fast I know damn well my hands are no good for nothing, and—”

  “You don’t know who it was picked the old man up and took him to that dance?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? Old man said whoever it was told him to meet him down front of the Venice Cinema at seven, see part of a show, have a dinner at Modesti’s, the last cafe on the pier still open, boy howdy, and head downtown to the ballroom. For a fast waltz with a ninety-nine-year-old Rose Queen, what a night, hey? Then home to bed, forever! Rut why would you want to know all this, son? You—”

  The telephone rang.

  Cal looked at it, his face drai
ning of color.

  The telephone rang three times.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it, Cal?” I said.

  Cal looked at it the same way I looked at my gas station office phone, and two thousand miles of silence and heavy breathing along the way. He shook his head.

  “Why would I answer a phone when there’s nothing but bad news on it?” he said.

  “Some days, you feel that way,” I said.

  I pulled the apron from around my neck, slowly, and got up.

  Automatically, Cal’s hand went palm out for my cash. When he saw his hand there, he cursed and dropped his hand, turned and banged the cash register.

  Up jumped NO SALE.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and almost barked like a seal at what I saw.

  “It’s a great haircut, Cal,” I said.

  “Git outa here.”

  On the way out, I put my hand up to touch where the picture of Scott Joplin used to hang, playing great stuff with fingers like two bunches of big black bananas.

  If Cal saw this, he didn’t say.

  I slipped on some old hair, going out.

  I walked until I found sunshine and Crumley’s buried-in-deep-grass bungalow.

  I stood outside.

  Crumley must have felt me there. He yanked the door open and said, “You doing that again?”

  “I never did. I’m no good at being out scaring people at three o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  He looked down at his left hand and shoved it at me.

  There was a small clot of oily green seaweed on his palm, his clench marks in it.

  I held out my hand, like someone trumping an ace, and opened my fingers.

  My identical clump of seaweed, drier, and brittle, lay in my palm.

  Crumley’s eyes moved from both our hands up to my eyes, my brow, my cheeks, my chin. He exhaled.

  “Apricot pie, Halloween pumpkins, backyard tomatoes, late summer peaches, Santa Claus’s California son, you look like all of them. With a face like that how can I yell guilty?”