Page 144 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

132 Jack Fritscher

less than an hour playing the slots at a filling station somewhere
in Nevada.
“I hope you’re not in a hurry,” Lloyd repeated.
Robert remembered his appointment book on the front seat
of his unlocked car. Never had he ever left his car unlocked. He
peered through Lloyd’s gilt-lettered window. At the parking meter
he had forgotten to feed, a white-helmeted metermaid ticketed his
windshield. She turned slowly from the Chevy toward Robert
as if she could feel him watching her every move. The noon sun
glinted from her helmet. Robert could not see her face. He did
not want to. He did not need to. Back home he could drop a deer
at a hundred yards. She was a dead bitch in his book.
“No,” he said, “I’m in no hurry. I was late for the last appoint-
ments I made four days ago. I sell, I mean, I used to sell Fuller
Brushes door to door.” He was warming up, trying to feel like
himself again. “I can tell you more than you’d ever want to know
about natural bristle brushes for your hair and your bottles and
your carpets and your drapes and your dog and your cat.”
“That a fact?” Lloyd said. More than once he’d been told his
droll roll of a phrase reminded the teller of W. C. Fields, which
only encouraged him, despite his efforts to speak naturally.
“And the women!” Robert presumed that Lloyd, same as all
barbers, liked to talk about women, when he should have known
only most of them like to talk about women, but they all love to
talk about sex, except the Seventh Day Adventist ones who were
always closed on a Saturday when a man was most likely to get
his hair barbered. “Let me tell you,” Robert said, “about those
little housewives. Those lonely ladies sure do want to talk, talk,
talk. Always saying, ‘Well, Robert, enough me talking about me.
What do you think about me?’ Do you believe the utter conceit
of women?”
“Much, much less than I believe,” Lloyd said, “in the unut-
terable conceits of men.”
“Those girls were always giving me coffee till I thought I was
going to drown. Always asking me if the coffee was sweet enough
and how they could make it sweeter, shaking their hair down, try-
ing out the sample brushes, teasing me, asking me how I thought

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