Page 145 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

Rainbow County 133

they looked. I tell you. More than once before I left, I had to comb
my teeth. It was murder. Door-to-door can kill you.”
“That so?” Lloyd fielded like W. C. “I’m what you might say
interested in hair brushes too. Being a barber and all, it’s natural.”
“I bet you’ve heard everything too,” Robert, doing his best
Holden Caulfield said. “At least twice.”
“Frankly, I never hear the half of it. In one ear. Out the other.
I’d go crazy if I really listened. We’re all maniacs except when
we’re not. I must confess music’s my mania.”
“Is that right?”
“Right as rain.”
“What kind of music? Grateful Dead? Judy Collins? Law-
rence Welk? What?”
“Piano. I play the piano. But not with these hands. These
are the hands of a barber. I always play piano with my feet.”
He surveyed Robert’s puzzled face and grinned. “I catch me one
everytime with that,” he said. “Player piano, of course.”
“I knew that,” Robert said.
Lloyd gestured to the plaster-of-paris busts sitting awry on a
shelf over Robert’s head. He had saved and bought each one of
them from Silvestri’s statuary compa ny in South San Francisco.
“There you see them.” He pointed with his screwdriver. “Bach.
Mozart. Schubert. Beethoven. Liszt.”
“A whole shooting gallery.” Robert stared straight at the bar-
ber. Lloyd was a man dragging age forty-five like it was sixty.
He combed his graying hair into the stiff part and pomp he had
learned as a boy thirty years before. His glasses were as thick as
binoculars. Robert liked that. He liked the way some older men
and older women kept on with the styles they got locked into
when they were young, like they were fixed in some time warp,
instead of changing with the fashions and looking ridiculous in
clothes that were too young for them, or too modern, or too ugly,
like the new uniform for the old, polyester leisure suits for the
men and polyester pant suits for the ladies, topped off with a frizzy
reddish short perm, or worse, one of those Dynel wigs that catch
the sun like orange copper wire. If he got old, which he doubted,
that’s what he planned to do. Sort of stay just like he was. Not
change a thing.

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