Page 100 - Stonewall-50th-v2_Book_WEB-PDF_Cover_Neat

70 Jack Fritscher

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?” Floyd 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 Floyd, same as all bar-
bers, 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,” Floyd said, “in the unutter-
able 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, trying
out the sample brushes, teasing me, asking me how I thought 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?” Floyd 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.”
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK