Page 124 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

112 Jack Fritscher

Robert looked up straight into Floyd’s eyes through his thick
glasses. “I have a gun,” he announced. “A .22 caliber handgun.”
“You don’t say.” Floyd backed off.
“Does that make you scared of me?”
“Do you have it on you?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t scare me. Your gun scares me. I don’t like guns.”
“Sometimes you have to scare people. Terror’s the only thing
they respect. If you scare them, you get their undivided attention.”
“Whyn’t you finish up,” Floyd was changing the subject, “read-
ing that magazine.”
“Sure,” Robert said. “So far I like it fine. It’s your best one yet.”
Floyd took a last few snips here and there around Robert’s ears,
then tried to gentle him down, and sidle on in, seductively rubbing
Robert’s neck with an electric massager. He was surprised to find
very little tension in Robert’s neck and shoulders. “You’re a cool
customer,” he said, “as cool as a cucumber.”
Suddenly, Robert sat bolt upright in Floyd’s barber chair. He
held it in his hands: a black-and-white photo graph on an un-
numbered magazine page. It was the picture he had spent his life
looking for: magazines in one hand, razor blade in the other. The
photo was of a man seated alone. On either side of the photo were
separate single shots of athletic women. The one on the left held a
golf club. She was set to putt and her breasts hung down between
her stiffened arms. The naked woman on the right held a jaunty
tennis racquet. But it was the naked athlete in the middle photo
who mesmer ized him as much as if he’d found a snapshot of his
real father, the original missing person, whom he had never seen.
He was seated, stretched slightly back straddling a locker-room
bench. He was a little older than Robert, and bigger, very blond,
with a fully developed chest over his washboard abdomen. His
thick wrists connected his athlete’s hands to his powerful arms.
He wore football pads across his broad shoulders, and a football
helmet, and, between his casually spread legs, he was erect. His eyes

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