“I couldn’t go. A man died in my chair last week.”
He was referring to Greg Meers.
“Yes, I heard. Terrible.”
“It wouldn’t have been decent.”
I was unprepared for what happened next. Larry, a selfpossessed, dignified man of forty-nine with a professorial air and a graceful bearing, just fell apart. He began weeping, quietly at first and then with greater and greater vehemence. After a while, he put his fists up against his ears, like a little boy protecting himself against a flurry of physical blows, and keened in the utmost despondency. Finally he put his head down against ground, like a Muslim at prayers, and sobbed into the dirt. I crouched down beside him to try to give him some comfort, but I honestly didn’t know what to say. I just patted him on the shoulders. Bogie, the dog, tried to nuzzle him. Larry kept at it for a couple of minutes, and then with equally surprising suddenness pulled himself together. I stayed there with him. He eventually kneeled upright again, sniffled some, dried his cheeks with each sleeve, and finally gave a big fraught sigh as if letting go of all that emotion.
“It got to me, Robert,” he said.
“I guess it did.”
“He appeared healthy. He just slipped away.”
“Nobody’s blaming you.”
Larry let out another tortured sigh. “I don’t know if I can practice anymore.”
I listened to the birds and insects for a moment, noticing that the peas in one of the raised beds had about gone by. He had peppers coming along nicely in another bed.
“We don’t have another dentist in town, Larry.”
He was scribing in the dirt with a pair of Japanese garden shears that he had probably gotten from some fancy mail-order catalog in the old days. In his other hand he held a bunch of cloth ties, torn from some old rags, which he was using to secure his tomatoes to their stakes.
“He needed a root canal so I had to put him under pretty deep,” Larry said. “I finished the damn tooth before I even realized he wasn’t breathing anymore. Man, when I got out of dental school, we had no idea what we were in for. All that fabulous high-tech stuff we took for granted, gone! Now I’ve got to put patients under crude general anesthesia and drill with a damned foot treadle. It’s madness. You know, what really bothers me is the thought that I’m going to lose some little kid the same way. There’s no precision with these crude opiates.”
“It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”
“The effective dose is sometimes close to the lethal dose,” he said.
“Even back in the old days, in the big hospitals, the docs lost patients,” I said. “What they gained in technological magic, they lost in bureaucracy and inattention and sloppiness.”
“Dentists didn’t lose patients,” he said. “This is not thoracic surgery.
“Well, whatever else is happening, you’ve still got your knowledge and skill. And the people here in town aren’t dying of simple abscesses.”
Larry resumed tying up his tomato vines.
“This Greg Meers had a couple of kids,” he said. “God knows what happens to them now. There’s no social safety net. There’s nothing.”
“He used to run with Wayne Karp’s bunch,” I said. “The wife too. Maybe they’ll end up back there, in Karptown.”
Larry glanced up at me.
“They came around here last night,” he said. “Wayne Karp. And two of his cronies.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Sharon and I were back here in the garden, sitting outside around sundown. Bogie ran barking around the front of the house. I went in from the back and found Wayne on the entrance portico with his, uh, associates, when I opened the front door.”
“Did they seem surprised to find you at home?”
“Actually, I assumed at first that they came over because of what happened to Greg Meers. I was afraid they were going to, I don’t know, rough me up, or maybe something worse.”
“Did they do anything?”
“No. But they did seem kind of surprised that I answered the door, now that you mention it. I wasn’t too comfortable finding them there, of course.”
“Did they say what they wanted?”
“They said the town hired them to act as security for the night while everybody went off to Bullock’s and they were just making rounds.”
“Security? That’s a laugh. I sure didn’t hire them. And I’m certain Loren didn’t either.”
“Do you think they were up to no good.”
“Of course they were,” I said.
Forty-eight
The more I thought about it, the more pissed off it made me. Now I’d have to go all over town alerting everybody to check and see if any of their belongings had been stolen, and make up some kind of inventory of missing articles, and in any case, sooner or later, I would have to go up to Karptown and have a discussion with Wayne about the whole deal, and about him barging into my house and manhandling Britney, and probably have him arrested-meaning Loren would have to be involved, and that suddenly didn’t seem like a very good idea, since Loren was not exactly a tough guy-and apart from any of this I, at least, would not get back to the job at Larry’s house after all, meaning another day robbed of normality and a day’s pay.
I headed over to the rectory on Salem Street to lay all of this on Loren and see if I could enlist him in going around town and talking to people too. To get there from Larry’s the quickest route was down Main Street. On the corner of Main and Van Buren, there was a nineteenth-century brick building that had not been occupied for years. It had last been an art gallery, back in the old days when the chain stores were still going strong out in the strip malls and the only other commerce left down on Main Street was real estate offices. The art that the gallery had sold was embarrassing-pictures of covered bridges and other nostalgic scenes totally at odds with the reality of the time. Anyway, Brother Jobe was down there on Main and Van Buren this morning with a crew of New Faith men putting the finishing touches on a brand-new barbershop, of all things.
“Morning, Mr. Mayor,” Jobe said. “Heck of a fandango last night, huh?”
“Mr. Bullock can put on the dog, all right.”
“And very nice fiddling too, sir. How’s your old noggin today?”
“Not a hundred percent,” I said. “Yours?”
“Earlier on it felt like it was filled with weevils and hornets, but the good Lord has come through and blew them clean out and filled up the space with fresh air, sunshine, and love of fellow man.”
“That’s nice. I wish he’d do the same for me.”
“Try prayer. It works.”
“Maybe later. What’s going on here?”
“What’s it look like?”
“Looks like an old-fashioned barbershop.”
“It ain’t nothing old about it,” he said. “It’s the latest and most up-to-date.”
“I hope you’re not looking for a profit center here.”
“More like a public service.”
“You buy this building too?”
“Heck no. Renting it from Mr. Murray.”
“Does he own it?”
“Holds it in receivership, I believe.”
“That figures,” I said. “Most folks get their hair cut at home these days.”
“Well, that’s country, don’t you think? We aim to civilize them up. Get a town look going. Come on in. You can be our very first customer.”
We stepped inside. They had done a nice job of cleaning it up. Two brothers were still painting the wainscot. Another brother painted black lettering backward on the window up in the shop front: FREE SHAVES AND HAIRCUTS. A fourth was sweeping the hardwood floor. The room seemed especially large because so little was in it: one authentic barber chair, a sink, a counter, a few old bentwood chairs for the theoretical customers to wait in, and a mirror on the wall in front of the barber seat. He even had a motley assortment of old magazines on hand: National Geograpbics from the 1980s, a 1967 Life, a Popular Science with a cover story on-what else?-flying cars!