Bill and Phil’s is the barber shop of choice in Black River Falls. All the important people go there. Bill cuts their hair.
Bill has what the nuns used to call aspirations. He’s been serving important people for so long, he’s started thinking of himself as important too. He and his Irma didn’t have any kids-in a town like this, there’s a lot of speculation about whose fault exactly it was-and he inherited a couple of farms, which he promptly sold before the ‘ec recession, so he’s doing pretty well for himself. He’s the conservative of the pair. You can tell that by looking at the photos he’s got up on his barber’s mirror behind the pump chair: Joe McCarthy.
John Foster Dulles. And the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, who wouldn’t let Negro students into an all-white high school. There are also American flag decals, American Legion decals, America First decals.
Phil is the Democrat. His photos run to Jackie Robinson, Fdr, and Adlai
Stevenson. He’s got lots of American flag decals too.
Whenever customers get bored waiting their turn for a chair, they bait one or the other of the barbers.
It helps pass the time. And it’s more fun than radio.
Take today.
Lem Fuller, of Fuller’s Hardware, was reading a Confidential magazine he’d bought at the newsstand before he came over. He said to Phil, the Democrat, “You ever read this magazine?”
“Wanda wouldn’t let me bring that trash into the house,” Phil said, knowing he was being baited.
“Well, here’s sure an interesting piece.”
Here it comes, I thought. Lem was more of a reactionary than Bill, unimaginable as that was.
“That little colored fella? Sammy Davis, Jr.?”
“Uh-huh,” Phil said, snipping away at my hair.
“Says here he dates white women exclusively. Won’t even give a colored girl a tumble. How do you like that?”
“I sleep fine at night,” Phil said, “No matter who Sammy Davis, Jr., is with.”
“You sure don’t want the coloreds messin’ with white gals, do ya, Phil?”
“Oh, heck,” Bill said, snipping away at his own customer. “Phil wouldn’t care if old Sammy took out every white woman in America. Phil’s all for integration, don’t you know. Colored and white mixin’ it up all the time.”
“I never said that,” Bill said. “I just said we should treat ‘em better.”
“Well, Sammy Davis, he’s sure gettin’ treated better, I’d say,” Lem said. “White gals with their tits hangin’ out of their dresses and holdin’ his hand and everything. Them white gals probably don’t even care he’s got one of them glass eyes.”
Phil winked at Lem. “Maybe he’s got somethin’ else that’s glass.”
Lem laughed and said, “You think, Bill? You think he’s got a glass dick?”
“I hear somebody else’s got a glass dick,” Phil said. He named another colored singer. “I hear he’s a queer.”
“Two for the price of one,” Lem said.
“He’s colored and he’s a queer. Lord God a’mighty.” But the whimsical tone stopped suddenly and he put the magazine down and his face hardened in a way I’d never seen before. It was like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, how when you became a pod person your face changed, too, to something not quite human. “I’ll tell you one thing. I got two daughters. Two nice, clean white daughters. I ever catch a buck nigger around either one of my daughters he’s a dead buck nigger, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Aw, hell,” said Bill. “I know some nice colored folks, don’t you, McCain?”
“Sure,” I said. “Lem’s dad, for one.”
“I’m gonna shut your goddamn mouth one of these days, McCain,” Lem said. We’d hated each other for a long time.
“That before or after you burn the cross on my lawn?”
“Now, now, boys,” Bill said.
I guess Lem was doing me a favor.
He’d made me actually want to go to the morgue. Anywhere to get away from him.
I was about two blocks from the morgue when a police motorcycle, a big Indian with a windshield and chrome handle grips and chrome saddlebags and streamers half as long the bike itself, came right up over the curb and sent me flying and my briefcase skidding down the sidewalk.
Cliffie. Clifford Wilbur Skyes, Jr.
“Aw, gee, counselor, I’m sorry.
Guess I didn’t see you there.”
I’d like to say he only hurt my pride.
But he’d also given my left hip a hell of a jolt. “I can see how that’d happen, Cliffie.
Clear sunny day like this one.”
“I thought we had an agreement about that Cliffie stuff.” He had his Glenn Ford duds on, and he was looking fierce the way only an overweight bully with little pig eyes and jagged teeth can look fierce.
“Long as you keep pushing me around the way you do, the Cliffie stays.”
“Don’t forget, counselor, I could throw your ass in jail.”
“Yeah, and I want to hear your lawyer in front of the Iowa Supreme Court when he tells them that you threw me in jail because I called you Cliffie. They’ll get a good laugh out of that one.”
“Yeah, well, they won’t be laughing when my lawyer says you obstructed justice.”
“Cliffie learned a new term. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re messin’ again, McCain. And that’s one thing I won’t abide this time, and that’s messin’ by McCain. And there ain’t even a reason to mess in this one, McCain. Me and my deputies already figured out who the killer is.”
“This should be good.”
“That peckerhead Chalmers. He’s got it in for Squires-Squires sent him up-s he killed Squires’s wife.” He grimaced suddenly and leaned forward on his Indian, his butt off the seat.
“What’s wrong?”
“You ever get hemorrhoids?”
“Not so far.”
“Usually use Vaseline. But I tried this stuff on Tv. Like to set me on fire. Doc Baines says it’s ‘cause I’m worried all the time. You know, about little Kim.”
He wouldn’t even give you the satisfaction of letting you hate him 100 percent clean and pure. He had to mitigate your hatred by having a two-year-old daughter with water on the brain.
He was corrupt, violent, stupid, and yet he suffered. I’d seen him in the park holding her one day on his knee. I saw a tenderness and love I wish I hadn’t seen. Even bad guys have good sides. Sometimes that can get downright exasperating.
He set his ass back down on his seat and said, “You’ve been warned, counselor. This is our case and we’re just about ready to wrap it up and we don’t want no interference from you or the Judge. Understand?”
He got the motor gunning so loudly, he couldn’t have heard me if I’d answered him.
He wheeled the bike off the sidewalk and accelerated down the street, mufflers roaring.
Rita said, “She was a beautiful girl.”
When I was younger, I never appreciated older women. Rita Fahey is forty-something and what the paperback writers always call “lushly built.” She also has a lovely face, and eyes you just can’t keep from watching. Kind of green but then again kind of blue. She’s Doc Novotny’s secretary in the morgue. She keeps the rock-and-roll loud, as if its festive qualities push back the cold stench of the place.
“She sure was.”
“You know her, McCain?”
“No. But Mary Travers did.”
She yawned. I tried not to notice what her sweater did. She never wore them tight, but it didn’t really matter. “Cliffie’s moving in for the kill. Between us, I mean.”
As Doc Novotny’s cousin and tacit boss, Cliffie gets first dibs on all murder information. I have to give him one thing.
Cliffie’s great at finding the person who looks like the killer.
“Oh? Who?”
“Mike Chalmers.”
“God.”
“Cliffie laid it out for the doc this morning. You ask me, it was Amy Squires. I saw her slap Susan Squires one night in the face at the dance pavilion. Out in the parking lot.
My husband and I were walking to our car. She was screaming she wanted Susan to let go of her husband.”