The men who collect here, whether they need a haircut or not, are a good cross-section of small-town folks: farmers, blue-collar workers, merchants, a newspaperman or two, and a fair number of retirees.
Pipes, cigarettes, cigars are smoked. Dirty jokes are told. Gossip is exchanged. And politics are argued.
I happened to need a haircut, so after visiting the morgue to learn what I could about Rachael Todd’s death, I spent part of the early morning sitting in a barber’s chair, soaking up not only the commentary but also the wonderful timeless scents of the barbershop — the hot foam for shaving, the aftershaves, the hair tonics, the powder, the smell of the bristles in the whisk broom when the barber is cleaning off your neck and shoulders.
The talk itself this particular morning took a roundabout way of becoming political, traveling from the particular to the general — from the murders of Leeds and Neville to the civil rights struggle on the tube every night.
The only thing that didn’t figure into the mix was Rachael Todd’s death. They’d heard about it but they didn’t know yet that it had some undetermined connection to the murders.
“landed at an odd angle,” the new county medical examiner showed me after tugging out the drawer in which Rachael resided. “Broke her neck.”
His name was Dr. Henry Renning and his duties were part time. He had his own practice to tend to the rest of the time. He was best known for wearing one of the most hilariously lousy toupees in town history and for driving a 1951 cherry MG that everybody, including me, envied the hell out of.
I hadn’t seen Rachael much since handling her divorce. She’d put on considerable weight. In death, at least, she appeared to be much older than her calendar years. She looked sexless now, and she’d been one of those women who made up with an erotic air what she lacked in looks.
“Her blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit. The way the accident looks to have happened, I’m not even sure the driver was sure he’d hit anybody. It’s pretty dark on that stretch of highway and she might just have lurched into his headlights.”
“I didn’t know she was a drinker.”
Renning nodded. His rug moved a half inch down his forehead. “The woman who identified her, her sister, said that Rachael here was in AA and had been up to that clinic for alcoholics in Mason City. Twice, in fact.”
First her husband had beaten her up with his fists. Then she’d beaten herself up with liquor.
I became aware of where I was. The bodies in the drawers. The terrible cold stench of the place. The hum of gurney wheels as corpses were moved around, the efficiency of it all as depressing as the sight of a man and woman weeping on the other side of a glass door as I’d come in. Weeping silently because I couldn’t hear them, a scene from an ancient silent movie.
But mostly I was aware of poor Rachael, the left side of her face almost black with bruising from her accident. And various other bruises and small cuts up and down her body. Meat now. Just human meat. I wish Dylan Thomas had been right about death not having dominion. But that was just a poet’s fancy to put up against eternal darkness. Death has plenty of dominion. Plenty.
“Got a suicide I need to check out,” Renning said, his toupee looking like a squirrel sprawled over his bald pate. “We about done here, Sam?”
If there were a list of Top Ten Barbershop Topics over the past few years it would include the birth control pill (“Shit, why didn’t they have somethin’ like that when I was young; McCain, your generation’s got it knocked!”); the Berlin Wall (“Who gives a shit? After what the Krauts did, screw ’em!”); Ernest Hemingway (“All the money and all the broads that guy had and he kills himself?”); the recent trip by Rick Paulson to the Playboy Club in Chicago, the first of our townspeople to enter those sacred doors (“Hefner just walks around in his tuxedo with that damn pipe of his and the gals are all over him!”); and the recent murder of Medgar Evers (“I think the colored people are pushin’ it pretty hard these days but I don’t hold with no murder.”).
“That wife of Williams’s didn’t look so snotty when I seen her at the post office yesterday, I’ll tell you that much.”
“’Bout time we got a Democrat in there, anyway.”
“I had a daughter seein’ a colored boy, I’d whip her ass good.”
“I can tell you I’d take a couple of colored boys I used to serve with in Korea over some of the white boys around here.”
“They say in France they treat Negroes just like white people.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the French. We had to save their ass in the big war and they never have thanked us.”
“I don’t want to be nowhere around ’em. I don’t like lookin’ at them or talkin’ to them or even thinkin’ about them.”
“Segregation’s good for them. They do better when they’re with their own.”
“Ike was the one who named that son of a bitch Warren to head up the Supreme Court. He’s the one who started all this.”
“My son in Des Moines says my grandkids go to school with colored kids and they all get along just fine.”
“Look at Sammy Davis. He don’t care who knows he’s married to a white woman.”
“Well, they fought in the war just like I did. They shouldn’t get shoved around the way they do. You see them little kids when they get them hoses turned on ’em? I went south one time and you can keep it. Didn’t care for one bit of it.”
“I’ll take Nat ‘King’ Cole any day. He’s my kind of colored man. A gentleman.”
“I hear a couple of those bikers really had it in for that Leeds kid.”
Somehow, if you listened long enough and carefully enough, you heard the kind of prairie debate that was going on, in a more sophisticated way perhaps, all across the country. You heard the men good and true and the men confused and struggling and the men who hated, one or two of them who might even be capable of violence against Negroes in the great wrong moment.
And once in a while, no matter what the subject was — and it could be anything from did Marilyn Monroe really commit suicide to why Roger Maris really was entitled to that home run record after all — once in a while you really learned something specific and useful.
In this case, it had to do with David Leeds.
“Hey, Karl, where’d you hear that?” I asked just as Mike was using the whisk broom on me.
“About the bikers and the Leeds kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Out to Savio’s, getting a tune-up. One of the bikers was in there. The one wears the bandana around his head like an Indian? Name’s De Ruse, you know the one I mean? After he left, Savio told me that when De Ruse was drunk he talked a lot about killing Leeds. He doesn’t go for white gals and Negroes gettin’ together. Savio said he saw De Ruse out in that area near those cabins when he was driving home around the time Neville and Leeds got killed.”
“He really said that about De Ruse wanting to kill him?”
“He sure did.”
One of the old gents laughed. “You’re forgetting you’re talkin’ to a private investigator, Karl.” And then the inevitable: “I always thought Mike Hammer was taller’n you, McCain.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m a lot handsomer.”
That got the kind of laughs and smiles a wise man uses as his exit line. Old vaudeville truism.
“Hey, McCain, didn’t one of them bikers get arrested already?”
“Yeah, but as usual Cliffie arrested the wrong one.”