“'Lo,” Dickie said.
“I got a customer!” Harriet called.
“I see you do,” said Dickie. Garp nervously touched his hair, as if he could suggest to Dickie how important his hair was to him—to have come all the way to North Mountain, New Hampshire, and NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON, for what must have appeared to Dickie to be the simple need of a haircut.
“He wants a curl!” called Harriet. Dickie kept his red cap on, though Garp could plainly see that the man was bald.
“I don't know what you really want, fella,” Dickie whispered to Garp, “but a curl is all you get. You hear?”
“I don't trust barbers,” Garp said.
“I don't trust you,” Dickie said.
“Dickie, he hasn't done anything,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. She was dressed in rather tight turquoise slacks, which reminded Garp of his discarded jump suit, and a print blouse full of flowers that never grow in New Hampshire. Her hair was tied back with a scarf of unmatching plants, and she had done her face, but not overdone it; she looked “nice,” like somebody's mother who bothered to keep herself up. She was, Garp guessed, a few years younger than Dickie, but just a few.
“He don't want no curl, Harriet,” Dickie said. “What's he want to have his hair played with for, huh?”
“He don't trust barbers,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. For a brief moment Garp wondered if Dickie were a barber; he didn't think so.
“I really don't mean any disrespect,” Garp said. He had seen all he needed to see; he wanted to go tell the Fields Foundation to give Harriet Truckermiller all the money she needed. “If this makes anyone uncomfortable,” Garp said, “I'll just forget it.” He reached for his parka, which he'd put on an empty chair, but the big dog had the parka pinned down on the floor.
“Please, you can stay,” Mrs. Truckenmiller said. “Dickie's just lookin” after me.” Dickie looked ashamed of himself; he stood with one mighty boot on top of the other.
“I brung you some dry wood,” he said to Harriet. “I guess I shoulda knocked.” He pouted by the stove.
“Don't, Dickie,” Harriet said to him, and she kissed him fondly on his big pink cheek.
He left the kitchen with one last glare for Garp. “Hope you get a good haircut,” Dickie said.
“Thank you,” said Garp. When he spoke, the dog shook his parka.
“Here, stop that,” Harriet told the dog; she put Garp's parka back on the chair. “You can go if you want to,” Harriet said, “but Dickie won't bother you. He's just lookin' after me.”
“Your husband?” Garp asked, though he doubted it. “My husband was Kenny Truckenmiller,” Harriet said. “Everybody knows that, and no matter who you are, you know who he was.”
“Yes,” Garp said.
“Dickie's my brother. He just worries about me,” Harriet said. “Some guys have been messin' around, since Kenny's gone.” She sat at the bright counter of mirrors, beside Garp, and leaned her long, veiny hands on her turquoise thighs. She sighed. She did not look at Garp when she spoke. “I don't know what you heard, and I don't care,” she said. “I do hair—just hair. If you really want somethin' done to your hair, I'll do it. But that's all I do,” Harriet said. “No matter what anybody told you, I don't mess around. Just hair.”
“Just hair,” Garp said. “I just want my hair done, that's all.”
“That's good,” she said, still not looking at him.
There were little photographs stuck under the molding and framed against the mirrors. One was a wedding picture of young Harriet Truckenmiller and her grinning husband, Kenny. They were awkwardly maiming a cake.
Another photograph was of a pregnant Harriet Truckenmiller holding a young baby; there was another child, maybe Walt's age, leaning his cheek against her hip. Harriet looked tired but not daunted. And there was a photograph of Dickie; he was standing next to Kenny Truckenmiller, and they were both standing next to a gutted deer, hung upside-down from the branch of a tree. The tree was in the front yard of NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON. Garp recognized that photograph quickly; he had seen it in a national magazine after Jenny's assassination. The photograph apparently demonstrated to the simple-minded that Kenny Truckemniller was a born-and-raised killer: besides shooting Jenny Fields, he had at one time shot a deer.
“Why Nanette?” Garp asked Harriet later, when he dared look only at her patient fingers and not at her unhappy face—and not at his hair.
“I thought it sounded sort of French,” Harriet said, but she knew he was from somewhere in the outside world—outside North Mountain, New Hampshire—and she laughed at herself.
“Well, it does,” Garp said, laughing with her. “Sort of,” he added, and they both laughed in a friendly way.
When he was ready to go, she wiped the slobber of the dog off his parka with a sponge. “Aren't you even going to look at it?” she asked him. She meant the hairdo; he took a breath and confronted himself in the three-way mirror. His hair, he thought, was beautiful! It was his same old hair, the same color, even the same length, but it seemed to fit his head for the first time in his life. His hair clung to his skull, yet it was still light and fluffy; a slight wave in it made his broken nose and his squat neck appear less severe. Garp seemed to himself to fit his own face in a way he had never thought possible. This was the first beauty salon he had ever been to, of course. In fact, Jenny had cut his hair until he married Helen, and Helen had cut his hair after that; he had never even been to a barber.
“It's lovely,” he said; his missing ear remained artfully hidden. “Oh, go on,” Harriet said, giving him a pleasant little shove—but, he would tell the Fields Foundation, not a suggestive shove; not at all. He wanted to tell her then that he was Jenny Fields' son, but he knew that his motive for doing so would have been wholly selfish—to have been personally responsible for moving someone.
“It is unfair to take advantage of anyone's emotional vulnerability,” wrote the polemical Jenny Fields. Thus Garp's new creed: capitalize not on the emotions of others. “Thank you and good-bye,” he said to Mrs. Truckenmiller.
Outside, Dickie wielded a splitting ax in the woodpile. He did it very well. He stopped splitting when Garp appeared. “Good-bye,” Garp called to him, but Dickie walked over to Garp—with the ax.
“Let's get a look at the hairdo,” Dickie said.
Garp stood still while Dickie examined him.
“You were a friend of Kenny Truckenmiller's?” Garp asked.
“Yup,” Dickie said. “I was his only friend. I introduced him to Harriet,” Dickie said. Garp nodded. Dickie eyed the new hairdo.
“It's tragic,” Garp said; he meant everything that had happened.
“It ain't bad,” Dickie said; he meant Garp's hair.
“Jenny Fields was my mother,” Garp said, because he wanted someone to know, and he felt certain he was taking no emotional advantage of Dickie.
“You didn't tell her that, did you?” Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.
“No, no,” Garp said.
“That's good,” Dickie said. “She don't want to hear nothin'like that.”
“I didn't think so,” Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly.
“Your sister is a very nice woman,” Garp added.
“She is, she is,” Dickie said, nodding fiercely.