Finn

by Matthew Olshan

  We finally found an unlocked door. It was a barbershop, with an old fashioned red, white, and blue sign outside. The sign wasn’t lit or spinning, so I thought the place might be closed, but then I saw a barber inside, an old guy with a spiky flattop and a shriveled red nose. A loud buzzer sounded when I opened the door, which surprised me. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe jangling bells.

  The barber stood between the two red barbershop chairs, the nice old kind with leather and pretty metal, with one hand resting on each, as if the chairs were his kneeling servants, ready to attack at a single quiet word. A ceiling fan squealed crookedly above his head, its blades black with grime. I smelled pomade and cigars and cooking grease.

  The barber growled at Silvia.

  “Men only,” he said. Then he unfolded a big rubbery apron, shook some hair off it, and held it up as if he was a bullfighter. “Well?” he said to me. I wanted to get out of there, but the cruiser was still lurking outside, its flashing blue lights reflecting endlessly in the barbershop mirrors. The barber balanced his sodden cigar on the edge of an ashtray. “You want a cut or what?”

  He thought I was a boy!

  “Okay,” I said. “Yeah, whatever,” I added, in case the “okay” sounded too girlish.

  “Your girlfriend’ll have to wait over there,” the barber said, jabbing at Silvia with his fingers, which still looked like they were holding an invisible cigar. Silvia obviously wanted to leave, but I said, “She won’t mind. You’ve got magazines.”

  “The ladies do like their magazines,” said the barber. “What’ll it be?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had never had a boy’s haircut before.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something different.” Apparently, that was exactly the wrong thing to say, because a look of disgust spread over the barber’s pug face. He wrapped a paper towel around my neck and then buttoned the apron around it—much tighter than he had to.

  “Okay pretty boy,” he said, snorting. “Just tell me. You want a Zero, a One, or a Two Point Five?”

  I thought about that for a while. It seemed like a big decision. The barber got impatient. “Don’t tell me you want a Four,” he said. A Four seemed like a bad thing, so I shook my head and said “How about a One?” A One sounded better than a Zero, which I figured was the opposite of a Two Point Five and possibly as undesirable as a Four.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” the barber said. “A One it is.” He plugged in a big electric tool that looked like a hedge clipper. Then he stood behind me and looked at me in the mirror as if my head were a lump of clay. He tugged at my hair disapprovingly and said, “Who did this, a lawnmower?” He was being needlessly rude, and I felt like telling him off, but he looked like the kind of person you’d have to explain your sarcasm to, which takes all the fun out of it, so I just said, “No, I was in a play.”

  “A play, huh? Interesting,” the barber said. “Velly intelesting.” He put on a smudged pair of reading glasses, leaned over to a round wire rack on his counter, and spun it slowly, as if he was roasting a suckling pig. “Let’s see. A Zero. A Two Point Five. A Triple Zero. A Four. Hello. What have we here?” he said. He turned and gave me a significant look. “A One.” It was a tiny black plastic comb, just like all the other tiny black plastic combs on the rack. He took off his glasses, set them back down, and then dipped the One into a glass dish full of blue liquid. He dipped in the One several times, studying the blue film which formed momentarily across the plastic teeth, then dunking it completely and stirring it around the bottom of the dish with his hairy pinkie. When he was finished with that, he dried the One on a stained washcloth tucked in his belt. “That’ll git it,” he said, clipping the One to the electric tool. “Now, let’s cut some hair.”

  I’m not saying that I go to fancy hair salons like my grandmother, but in the past, the person cutting my hair had always used scissors. It was strange to feel the hedge clippers going through my hair. The vibrations tickled my teeth. The barber hummed a song while he was cutting, but he had an awful voice, full of cigar phlegm.

  I watched long strips of hair peel over my forehead and fall into the apron. It reminded me of a TV show I had seen once about the wool harvest. Sheep cowboys squeezed the trembling sheep between their legs and ran electric shears all over their bodies. I had been amazed by the sheep’s enormous black eyes, which followed the path of the shears, as if they understood what was being done to them but couldn’t fathom why anyone would do it.

  My head was a lot smaller than a whole sheep. It only took a few strokes with the shears to take off all my hair. It was even a pleasant feeling, a kind of lightening, which I might have been able to enjoy if I hadn’t been so fixated on the word “baldy.” After my hair was gone, the barber slathered the back of my neck with hot shaving cream, which he got from a crusty electric dispenser on the counter. He took up a straight razor—the horror movie kind that swings open and has absolutely no safety features—and flicked it back and forth for a while against a leather strap.

  I have to admit that having the back of my neck shaven felt great—the combination of the hot lather and the cool air on my freshly shaven neck added to the nice gentle scratching of the razor. The barber slapped on some green liquid when he was done, which stung but gave off a nice pine tree smell, and then he stood behind me, holding up a hand mirror. I didn’t really want to look, but the barber made me. What I saw didn’t look like me, not in the least. I said, “Wow, great.” Then he finally put the hand mirror down.

  Now I absolutely looked like a boy.

  I caught Silvia looking at me in the mirror. She had been pretending to read an old girlie magazine. “It looks good,” she said, trying to stifle a laugh. “No, really.” It was almost worth looking like a boy to see her smile again.

  “The jury has spoken,” the barber said, sweeping the apron off my lap. “Course, now there’s less to hang onto.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it was definitely not nice. He said it quietly, as if I had just joined a secret club, which, being a boy now, I guess I had.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Seven plus tip,” he said. I gave him a ten dollar bill and waited for the change but he just closed the register and said, “We thank you for your business.”

  It was time to go. The whole haircut had taken five minutes.

  Silvia slipped her arm through mine when we were back outside. “My new boyfriend,” she said, laughing. I told her to cut it out, but as we walked along and I caught sight of my square head reflected in the soaped-up storefronts, I started to pretend I really was a boy. I swallowed a lot of air and belched. Silvia said that was gross, so I did it again, this time saying her name while burping. Afterwards, I said, “Nice one,” the way boys do after a juicy burp. “Check this out,” I said, swaggering along and scratching my armpits.

  “You’re a boy, not a monkey,” Silvia said. “Boys don’t walk like that. They do it like this.” She leaned back as she walked, her hands stiff and bent at the wrist, like a praying mantis. She was trying to look like a black street boy. “With attitude,” she said. She frowned and tried to look tough. Her big belly made the whole thing ridiculous.

  The streets were just as empty as before, only for some reason they didn’t feel quite so threatening. Maybe it was being a boy, but I wasn’t even scared when three chained Rotweilers started barking at us from behind a fence. They were low, thick-necked dogs, with plenty of saliva in their chops. I stopped in front of them and bowed—from the waist. I pretended to tip an imaginary hat. “Boys,” I said—I figured that anything that drooled like that had to be male —“don’t make me come in there and kick your ass.”

  Silvia pulled me away from the dogs, typical of a girl. She fluffed my buzz-cut. “Well, Mister, what do we call you?” she said.

  I thought about it for a minute. Names are serious. They can make or break what you think about yourself.

  “Call me Finn,” I said.

  Silvia had tr
ouble pronouncing it. She made it sound Mexican. “Finn” came out “Feen.” “Feen what?” she said.

  “Just Finn,” I said. “Like ‘Cher.’ Or ‘Sting.’”

  “Only one name? It’s strange.”

  An elevated train roared overhead, shooting off blue sparks like a wind-up toy. I watched the train until it disappeared around a corner a few blocks away. The way it curved down and away was beautiful, like something you’d do with your arm to mimic a bird. For some reason, Silvia and I started to talk about California again as if it was still a real possibility. After a block or two of dreamy chatter, I had to stop. Silvia was obviously getting her hopes up. I finally told her that, as a practical matter, there was no way we could make it to California.

  “Finn, you’re wrong,” she said, pointing at the ramp in the middle of the street where the elevated tracks came back down to the ground. We were near the end of the line. I had been so wrapped up in being a boy that I hadn’t noticed how far we had come—right up to the edge of the railroad yard.

  Silvia ran her fingers through my prickly hair and said, “We’ll take a train.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I had never seen a railroad yard at night, at least not from the ground. It was a place of the harshest light and the deepest black. I felt x-rayed under the yellow crime lights but invisible everywhere else. The power lines overhead hummed like cannibals. Signs everywhere said “Danger! Electrocution Hazard!”, to the point where I jumped every time I brushed up against something.

  An elevated highway towered over one edge of the yard on white concrete legs. I couldn’t see any on-ramps or exits, just the highway itself, swooping across the downtown skyline like the path to a forbidden city.

  I climbed as high as I could on a crumbling stone block wall. Every surface I touched was black—the stones, the metal, even the craggy outcroppings of rock—as if the friction of the trains’ endless comings and goings over the years had scorched everything. A monster freight train rumbled by, its bell tolling. I started counting the cars, but stopped at fifty-eight. I never got used to the way the ground shook under its wheels, as if the train was trying to pound the earth back to life.

  Silvia waited for me at the bottom of the stone wall. She was pressing her back into it, flattening herself, even though the train was passing at least twenty feet away. I understood her fear. It was easy to imagine you could drown in the train’s wake.

  After it passed, I jumped down and said, “Those are some big machines.”

  Silvia said, “They’re quite nice inside, probably.” We spent a reassuring minute brushing soot off each other.

  I wanted to discourage Silvia. “The railroad yard is a mess,” I said. “Tracks everywhere. Too many trains. It looks dangerous.” The thought of Silvia running for a moving train made me wince, because I couldn’t separate the picture of her running from the picture of her tripping on a stone and hitting her belly on the rails.

  “What about the trains for California?” she asked.

  “They don’t put signs on them,” I said. “Besides, we don’t have enough money for the train.”

  “Then we’ll take the other kind,” she said.

  “What kind?”

  “The kind you don’t pay for. Like this one.” We had to stop talking for a moment while the roaring engine of another freight train passed.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Do you have any idea who rides those things? Criminals. Hobos. People who like begging and murder.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s not everybody. Good people ride them, too.” She was getting a new tone in her voice, like someone in a lot of pain who’s managing to rise above it. She sounded almost saintly.

  “Well, you obviously know everything,” I said. Then I started looking for a way into the yard, so I wouldn’t have to stand there and feel like a big baby.

  If I’d been willing to walk along the tracks, we could have strolled right in with the trains. Silvia suggested it. It was tempting, because the trains were moving nice and slow, but I absolutely refused. The speed of things at night can be very deceptive, and there were places along the tracks where you couldn’t just step out of the way when the trains came through.

  There were tall fences everywhere, and plenty of razor wire, but the fences were old and mostly for show. I found a place where Silvia could walk right through a gap in the chain link and not have to climb over or under anything.

  As confusing as the yard looked from the top of a stone wall, it was a thousand times worse when you were sneaking around the tracks, because your view was blocked everywhere by trains or little houses or the sinister humming electricity towers. Trains were rolling in and out all the time, which was terrifying enough by itself, but even worse considering that each time a train arrived or left, the layout of the yard changed. It was like being on a stage with people constantly moving the set around. We never knew where we were. I didn’t like climbing under the trains, either. The rims of those enormous steel wheels gleamed like steak knives.

  I was scared, and ready to lash out at Silvia when she said, “Finn, look! California!” She pointed out a forlorn looking chain of boxcars.

  I had to hand it to her. The name painted on the sides of the cars was “California Pacific.”

  The boxcars were all padlocked. Silvia tried all the doors anyway, until she found one we could open. It had a padlock but wasn’t really locked. The latch must have been broken. She was so excited when I opened the door, you would have thought the boxcar was her dream house. It was dry and roomy inside. The floors and walls were smooth wood planks. I saw how much Silvia liked it, but I wasn’t giving in so easily. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of a mess.” But Silvia ignored me. She went right for the metal rungs and tried to claw her way up. I stood back for a while and let her go at it. I wanted her to ask for my help. She managed to get halfway to the second rung before she had to stop and catch her breath. She was sweating and gasping for breath. Her thigh muscles were trembling.

  “Wow. It’s slippery,” she said, as if the rungs were the problem.

  “Yeah,” I said, giving her an upward shove, “it’s definitely not your big fat belly.”

  As soon as we were inside, Silvia started straightening up the place. She made a bed out of some plastic sheeting and a few Colorado newspapers. Seeing her work so hard made me guilty, so I swept the floor a little with the side of my sneaker.

  Silvia settled down on her new nest. She rolled onto her side and asked me for help packing some crumpled newspaper around her belly for support, like when gardeners pack straw around a prize pumpkin to keep it from rolling away. I tried not to jostle her too much. Then I sat down with her. Somehow, her head made its way into my lap.

  I didn’t completely approve of the boxcar, or the freight train idea in general, but I found myself stroking Silvia’s hair with my good hand anyway. She closed her eyes and told me it felt nice. Then she told me that she hadn’t slept outside since crossing the border into Texas. She said how much she liked night air. I wanted to tell her she wasn’t sleeping outside, but I got the feeling she was talking just for the sake of talking.

  While she was lying in my lap, I realized I didn’t know very much about Silvia’s life before she came to my grandparents’ house. She had been there when I arrived, and I always thought of her as a fixture, like the refrigerator or the big comfy glider on the porch—something practically built in. I just assumed she had been there forever. Actually, back then I didn’t think about her much at all. I was pretty focused on my own problems.

  I asked Silvia what it was like crossing the border. She started by telling me that she had always heard awful things about the States, which surprised me because I always assumed that foreigners couldn’t wait to get here. I’d be the first to say that life in America isn’t exactly the greatest all the time, but I’d always imagined it was worse in other countries, especially in Mexico, with all the poverty. At least that’s what I’d heard.

&nbs
p; But according to Silvia, she was happy living in her Mexican town, which was actually a good-sized city. I kept asking her questions about it, like did they have buses and cabs, and was there an airport, etc. Silvia thought my questions were funny. She said I sounded like a Mexican trying to find out about America. I would have been insulted by that, coming from anyone else.

  Anyway, Silvia was happy to stay down in Mexico, but things changed when her mother died and her father started having health problems. I asked if he had gotten bitten by a tarantula, or if his lungs had been ruined in a silver mine, but Silvia laughed and said no, he just had high blood pressure, and it was getting more and more difficult for him to do his job as a civil engineer. This created a problem for his daughters, because they had gotten into the habit of spending a lot of money, using their credit cards—credit cards!—too much. One night, their father sat them down and spoke to them about money problems. Silvia was the oldest of three sisters. She said she decided then and there to leave to make it easier on her sisters, who were still in high school.

  All this talk of life in Mexico was a little bewildering to me, especially the details, which didn’t sound all that exotic. In fact, I envied the life Silvia was describing, on account of the sisters, and the credit cards, and a father who sat down with you to explain serious things. I said it must have been hard to leave, and Silvia said it was, but there wasn’t much choice. The family needed money, and there weren’t any jobs in her city, at least not for her. Mexico was pretty chauvinistic when it came to work. They gave priority to men. Her sisters’ weddings were going to be expensive, and so was taking care of her father. I didn’t ask Silvia about her own wedding. It was obvious that she had put the idea of getting married behind her. Suddenly, Roberto and his stuffed animals seemed a lot less ridiculous. No—they were still ridiculous, but in my mind, Silvia’s doomed feelings for Roberto made her more noble.

  So she decided to come to the States. When I asked her why she didn’t just do it legally, she laughed and told me it was almost impossible. The legal way involved some kind of lottery. Tons of people entered it, and besides, they gave preference to people with special skills. I told her I thought she was very skilled. She thanked me, but said they meant skilled, as in mechanic or animal doctor.