by Brian Hodge
In his pocket, sharp page folds pressing through the worn denim of his jeans to scrape his thigh, was the letter that had dragged him home. The type had smeared from sweat, too many creases, and too many readings. The return address was one he’d never seen before, and would likely never see again. Probst and Palmer, Attorneys at law. The address wasn’t local to Cedar Falls. Jeremy’s father had left him with two standard rules. Never do business with friends, and even if you break rule number one, never do business in your own back yard. The less people knew about what lay behind your smile, or your frown, the less likely they were to be able to find a chink in your armor and take you down.
Jeremy had never understood who in Cedar Falls would want to take him down, or his father, for that matter, but he understood the rules. Probst and Palmer’s offices were in Kingston, 100 miles to the north, and Jeremy had stopped through on his way to pick up paperwork, and keys. His father had left things in good order. The house was paid for, the taxes good for the year and the insurance caught up both on the property, and the ancient Chevrolet sedan he’d left behind.
The estate was ordered and neat, empty and far too bizarre to be handled all at once. Jeremy had driven to the house, parked out front, stared at the door and the windows for about fifteen minutes, and then driven away. He knew he should have gone in, checked the place over and unpacked. There were more papers to sign, and the utility companies would have to be notified that services should be restored. Jeremy knew, but he just couldn’t face it.
So here he was, head against the wooden frame of Brown’s Barber Shop, sweat trickling under the flannel collar of his shirt as he fought for balance against suddenly weak knees and a whirling panorama of memory and pain. He didn’t need a haircut, but he very suddenly needed to sit down, so Jeremy twisted away from the wall and slipped inside with a deep breath.
There were two bright overhead lamps, one swinging over each chair on a single stainless steel chain and funneled toward the floor by aluminum shades. The shades were yellowed and dusty, and Jeremy wondered, just for a moment, if some of that stain wasn’t tobacco from his father’s cigars.
Some things hadn’t changed at all, except in perspective. The once-giant sailfish, while still huge, seemed possible through adult eyes, the mongoose and snake seedy and dusty rather than mysterious and dark.
The room was empty, and though the lights were on, there was a sensation of – emptiness. Deep, dark emptiness that matched the hollow ache in the pit of Jeremy’s gut. He stepped in and let the door swing closed behind him with a squeak.
For a moment, he just stood there, taking in the room, the scent of old leather chairs and hair tonic, the slightly acrid scent of oil burned in the gears of Chrome and Bakelite clippers that should have been retired in the sixties. Whispered voices from his past spoke of presidents and congressmen long dead, bake sales and sea stories. Dust motes danced beneath the hanging lamps, and Jeremy turned to the wall at the back, taking a step deeper into the gloom.
She was there, just as he remembered. There were a few more photographs lining the wall to either side, some in color, which didn’t fit his memory at all, but Jeremy’s gaze was focused. The wood seemed to grow from the wall, curving and taking shape slowly as it built up to the deep-set holes that were her eyes. Long, flowing hair, deeply etched into the wood, each line darker in the center and lightening as it neared the surface of the wood. The longer Jeremy stared the more real she became, the room fading around her until all he could see was a woman, gazing back at him in quiet desperation. He stepped closer, one foot hesitantly sliding through the dust, then the other. Just as he reached out his hand to trace her cheek with his finger, a voice cut through the shadows.
“Can I help you?”
Jeremy spun, eyes wide and his mouth dropping open. The man who’d spoken leaned against the second barber chair on one elbow, watching Jeremy with interest. The cheeks had grown heavier, and wrinkles lined the skin beneath his eyes, but Jeremy recognized Terry Brown instantly. It had to be Terry. He was the spitting image of his Father, and in that instant the echo of Jeremy’s father’s voice, and the scent of smoke and leather nearly overwhelmed him.
“I …” his words caught in his throat for a second, then he turned, stepped forward and offered his hand shakily. “I’m Jeremy Lyons,” he said. “I used to come here with my father.”
In that moment, the other man’s face shifted through a series of emotions, surprise, a deep, impressive smile - a quick flash of insight, and ended in a sympathetic frown. “Jack Lyons’ boy?”
Jeremy nodded. “The last time you cut my hair,” he said softly, “was for my high school graduation.”
“Flat top,” Terry nodded, “high and tight, just like always.”
Jeremy turned back to the wooden woman mounted on the wall for just a second, then stepped away and walked toward the barber’s chair, extending his hand.
“I’m guessing you aren’t here for a trim?”
Jeremy grinned wryly. “I don’t know why I’m here, exactly. I went by the house, just wasn’t quite ready for it. When I came back into town, it just seemed natural. I don’t know how many afternoons and evenings I spent in here, reading – drawing – listening. Guess I thought it would be a little more like home than that empty house.”
“Not a lot of action these days,” Terry smiled. “I get busy about one or so, but by three or four it thins out. Only a few old-timers remember the way things were, and mostly they come around on the weekends. Not a one of them has needed a real haircut in years, but they come, and they pay, regular as clockwork.”
Jeremy smiled. “Just like always.”
The two laughed comfortably, and Terry moved away from the chair toward the front door.
“Let me lock up,” he said. “I’ve got a few bottles of beer in back. No one’s waiting up for either of us.”
Jeremy almost bowed out. He had no right imposing his depression on someone else. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made that he’d come to the old barber shop at all. It was a place to get your hair cut, and all the magic, if there’d truly been any, had long departed. He turned to the wall a final time. Almost all.
Jeremy had never been in the back room of Brown’s Barber Shop. He’d seen his father disappear through those doors countless times, but he’d never been allowed past the entrance. Even now, as Terry slipped in ahead of him and flicked on the dim light, he hesitated. It was like violating his father’s will beyond the grave.
“We had to move most of the social activities back here as the years passed,” Terry said conversationally, pulling open an aged refrigerator and grabbing two long-necks from the frosty interior. “Health inspectors were cracking down, mothers dragging their children in where father’s had always done so before, complaining about the cigarette smoke and threatening to close us down.
“Hell,” Terry chuckled, plopping into one of the old leather chairs lining the wall of the back room and twisting the top off his beer, “we even had animal rights activists protesting the animals on the walls.”
“I don’t know how you survived it all,” Jeremy said, shaking his head and taking a seat a few feet away. “I don’t know how you stayed here at all.”
“Well, the staying is in my blood,” Terry smiled. “Been a Brown in this shop almost as long as there’s been a Cedar Falls. Wouldn’t want to be the one to break a streak like that. The rest was easier than it seemed. They opened a new shop in the mall out Whitewall way. It’s got a big clown chair for the kids and a play room with Nintendo. That left us to the regulars and the few too lazy to drive that far. It’s enough for a living, and that’s all a man can rightly ask of life, I think.”
Jeremy thought about that for a moment, taking a long pull from the beer bottle.
“I wish I could have thought that way,” he said at last. “I wish I’d been happy to come here every week, get a trim and hear the old stories. I wish I could have been more like my father – at least a little.
I feel like it’s all been lost, and all I have to show for the years is an empty house and dreams I have no one to share with.”
“Never married, huh?” Terry turned away for a moment, then took another long drink, draining his bottle and rising for a second, glancing at Jeremy, who shook his head. “I never settled either. Never could find anyone I felt comfortable with, not after Dad passed on. There’s been a couple of times I thought I might be on the right track, but … “ he shrugged and opened his second beer. “Some men are meant to be alone.”
Jeremy nodded.
“I miss those days, sometimes,” he said softly. “I miss the stories. I miss hearing old Mulligan talk about catching that Marlin out there. I knew, even then, that he never set foot on the deck of a fishing boat in his life, but the words were magic. It wasn’t the truth, but the story, you know?”
Terry nodded. “I do. Don’t get much of that any more. Mulligan passed on about seven years ago, Billy Jensen shortly after that. Mostly they come and talk about those who’ve died, now, and wait for their own turn.”
“There’s one story I never heard,” Jeremy said suddenly. “I know there’s a story, because my father used to let bits and pieces slip. That figurehead on the wall out there, the woman? He said your father brought her back from the war…”
Terry grew suddenly stiff, and for a moment Jeremy thought the man would chase him out of the shop and lock the doors behind him forever. Tension rippled through the air and tingled along the hairs on Jeremy’s arm. His hand shook, and he forced it to steady.
“Some stories are best left to the dead and their memory,” Terry muttered, downing his second beer and rising quickly.
“Did I say something wrong?” Jeremy asked quickly, taken aback by the sudden reaction his words had brought.
“Not at all,” Brown said brusquely, “but it’s getting late. I know you need to get settled in. Maybe you could stop in during regular hours for a trim.”
Jeremy sat, stunned, staring at the bigger man and trying to figure out whether he was kidding. There was no humor in the barber’s slate-gray eyes, so Jeremy rose slowly, downed the beer and handed over the empty bottle.
“Nice to see you again, then,” he said, turning. “Nice to be back.”
Terry’s features trembled, as if he were fighting some inner battle. Maybe he wanted to say something, or take something back, but in the end, he held to his silence, only nodding as Jeremy slipped out of that forbidden room and into the shadowed barber shop once again. Jeremy glanced at the wall, and in the darkness, shadow cloaking the carved wood, it seemed a woman stood, watching him. He could have sworn her eyes glittered brightly and that a slender arm reached out – fingers beckoning.
Then Brown was at his side, ushering him toward the door with a firm hand on his back, mumbling something about the good old days. The air was cool, and the streets were deserted. Jeremy stood on the walk outside in confusion, then shrugged and turned to the road, and his car. Might as well get to some memories of his own.
The old home was full of stale air and dim memory. Jeremy had entertained vague ideas of cleaning up, arranging things and putting them back in order, but he should have known that his father would leave no such satisfaction. Everything was in its place. A very light sheen of dust coated the floor and the furniture, but beneath it the old place gleamed. The glass glittered – even the silver had only the faintest tinge of tarnish. The power was alive and waiting. There was a yellow note, hanging from the knob of the front door, to let him know they’d stopped and cut it on. “Just as his father had asked.”
Jeremy's room was much as he’d left it last visit home. He’d been in his senior year of college, and the remnants of that time littered the desk and the walls. His bed was turned down, as if expecting him. Too much. Jeremy closed the door on that particular set of nightmares and moved down the hall. He pushed and the door to his parent’s room swung open easily, hinges oiled. No sound. There had never been a sound. Jeremy had listened and listened, but he’d never been able to tell when they came and went. The room beckoned, dark and – inviting. It was a strange, exhilarating invitation, but an invitation nonetheless. For the first time since driving into the tiny, dirt-water town, Jeremy felt as if he were home.
The switch beside the door didn’t operate a ceiling fixture as he’d expected. A single, dim light pooled yellow illumination over the floor from the dresser to his right. Rather than cutting the deeper shadows, the lamp’s glow accentuated them. The bed was an expansive darkness, flanked by low-slung night-stands of still-darker wood. The windows were obscured by heavy drapes of indeterminate color, pulled tight across closed blinds.
Odd shapes hung from the walls, and a huge old mirror glittered across the back of the dresser. Jeremy stared at that mirror. He couldn’t make out anything in the silvered surface, but he stood, still and quiet, and watched the reflected glow of the lamp.
His mother had sat in front of that mirror, brushing her long hair for hours. Jeremy had never actually set foot in his parent’s room, but he’d watched her from the doorway, when she didn’t know he was looking. He wondered if a part of her might be captured there. If he stared long enough, would her face appear? Would he feel the soft stroke of the brush through his hair? And where had his father been when …
Shaking his head, Jeremy turned from the mirror quickly. Again, too much.
Moving to the bed, he laid his suitcase out and unsnapped it quickly. He needed to get his mind out of the past. There were a lot of things to accomplish, clearing out the house, gathering his parents papers and belongings, the lawyers. All of it loomed over him like the specter of his father, leering and poking, tugging him first one direction, then another, and the last thing he needed in the midst of it all was more illusion and memory. Illusions and memories had haunted him for too many years.
He opened the drawers of the old dresser and shoved his clothes hurriedly inside. It was nearly comical, the way the finality of the gesture washed through him in a wave of sudden relief. He was in. The dresser was his, not his father’s, not a thing he would be punished for violating. The room – the house – everything in it – was his.
With a sigh he pushed the drawer shut and turned, seating himself on the edge of the bed. The woman stared down at him, smoother than he remembered, and darker. Her hair seemed to drip from the polished wood surface.
Jeremy grew very still. His heart pulsed, slowing with his breath painfully until it felt as if it might stop altogether. The moment was identical to a hundred acid-tripping experiences in his youth, pulsing with the neon-beat of bar-lights and the sultry back-beat of strip clubs, pounding with the rhythms of a thousand songs. Still and silent.
Beside the window, sliding out from the edge of the heavy curtains was the wooden figurehead from the barber shop. He knew it couldn’t be the same one. He had just seen it – had reached out his hand and touched it – but the sensation it was there – that it was real and identical and WATCHING him was undeniable.
Mesmerized, Jeremy rose, stepping forward. He heard the soft echo of Terry’s words in his ear. “Some stories are best left to the dead, and their memory,” but the words flitted through his mind and away, as if whispered across a great distance.
Jeremy reached out one hand and let his fingers come to rest on the smooth, polished wood. His stomach lurched. The scent of hair tonic and musty leather assaulted his senses violently. His vision blurred, and then focused. The wall had changed. Lengthened. For just an instant, the floor pitched beneath his feet, and he clutched the wooden carving tightly for support.
“No,” he whispered.
Everything had shifted, and the pungent scent of tobacco smoke hung in the air. To his left, dim, yellow light flickered, and he heard the scrape of feet, the groan and squeal of old springs as heavy bodies settled into aged chairs. The shadow-forms of dead, mounted animals surrounded him, glass-eye stares too-high. As if he’d grown shorter. As if he’d become younger.
As if time had rewound like a video tape.
A heavy cough sounded, and then laughter, deep and guttural. Jeremy’s heart lurched. He knew that cough, and that laugh. He pressed into the wall, nearly collapsing, and closed his eyes so tightly that they squeezed shut on the heavy smoke, burning and tingling. He thought about the bed behind him. He thought about the door, still ajar, less than three feet away, and the hallway beyond. He thought about his father’s liquor cabinet, and with a sudden shove he pushed away from the wall and spun.
His knee banged into something hard, and he cried out. His eyes opened to shadows, flickering, and a huge, dark shape silhouetted against yellowed light.
“Who is it?”
The words hung in the smoky air, mocking Jeremy’s sanity.
Jeremy held his breath, pressing back to the wall.
“That you boy?”
Jeremy tried to remain silent, but it was too much. That voice, a voice he’d been conditioned from birth to obey, was irresistible.
“Dad?”
The world shifted again. Jeremy felt his mind whirl, saw the lights shift and heard heavy footsteps approaching like the beating of primal drums, timed with his heartbeat. He knew he was falling, but somehow he couldn’t react to it. Strong arms clasped him under his arms, hands too large, covering his shoulders, fingers gripping and lifting.
Then – mercifully – it was dark.
Jeremy woke next to the scent and cool caress of leather. He was curled in a chair. How was that possible? It was a single chair, club-style with brown leather and metal rivets. Voices droned, the sound shifting and growing clearer with each beat of his heart. He smelled smoke, thick in the air above him, and he saw that a single dim bulb hung from a bare wire in the center of the room.
