Page 112 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

100 Jack Fritscher

Robert’s chest and arms. The boy rolled defensively to his stom ach.
His father saw the scuffs and tears on the jacket. “Sonuvabitch!”
he said. In fury he tore Robert’s corduroy slacks down below his
slim haunches. His left hand shredded his son’s worn cotton shorts.
The blows from his belt welted across Robert’s flesh, until finally,
his father, hardened in rage, fell across him. His breath had the
copper tobacco smell of Camels. “You tell your ma any of this,”
he whispered close into Robert’s ear, “and next time I’ll kill you.
Make it look like an accident and kill you. Just hang you up by your
neck in the attic and kill you. Just knock over a chair like you did
it yourself, and kill you, you little sissy suicide, just like all faggot
suicides. Send you straight to hell!”
“My old man was a real bulldog lady-killer,” Robert bragged to
the barber. “Everytime I come into a barber shop it reminds me of
him. The way he used to smell once a month of all that Fitch Hair
Tonic and rosewater. Once a month I could smell him coming.”
“You don’t say,” Floyd said.
“He got himself killed in a fight on an oil rig in Louisiana.”
“That a fact.” Floyd combed and clipped at Robert’s head.
“Getting kind of thin on the top.”
“Yeah,” Robert said. “So it goes.”
Floyd clipped at one small hair growing in Robert’s left ear.
“Do you suppose,” he said, “that they put out their eyes when
they’re kids?”
“Who?” Robert looked up from the magazine in his lap.
“Those pianists on TV. The ones that can’t see because it makes
them play better.”
“I don’t know,” Robert said. “Most people’ll do most anything.”
“Sometimes in India they put out a kid’s eyes so he can hustle
more from tourists. Hear the Mex do that too.”
“Sounds to me,” Robert said, “something like the boys who sang
soprano for the pope. I got an article I tore out of some magazine at
home on that. They’d take these altar boys and, you know, sort of spay
them, operate on them, you know, down there, so they’d keep their

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