The Haircut I Finished on Our Tailgate

Iris had the mirror. Her arms were already shaking.

I held the clippers against my own forearm first. Then I put them in Jaxon’s hand, and he clicked them on, and off, and on, and off, and I counted aloud with him. Six times.

Robin had her fist against her mouth. I did not look at her. I looked at the boy, and I started on the right side, one slow pass at a time.

By eleven there were eight trucks in the lot.

I never learned how they knew. Arlette said she had told three customers and one of them told the whole elevator. I think the sign did the rest. Nobody stops for a sign that says a kid is the boss unless he has been waiting a long time for somebody to say it.

A woman I had never met brought a little girl in a pink coat who covered her ears when the clippers came out and would not uncover them until Caleb sat beside her and said, “It’s a different kind of buzz.”

A father in a seed cap stood at the back with his arms folded and a boy of about seven who had been sent out of two shops and a dentist’s office. He did not say why they had come. He did not need to.

Tyson rode up on his bicycle, fifteen, tall and quiet. He sat on an upturned feed bucket and trimmed his own hair in front of the whole line, with clippers he had fixed with masking tape on the guard. He said very little. He showed the boys his hands. The line watched him like he was giving a sermon.

Tom held the thermos and the coffee cups and the chair, and did not say a word to anybody for two hours.

At about half past eleven a long gray Buick pulled into the lot much too slowly, the way a man drives who is not sure he is welcome. Barney Brennan got out with his cane. In his other hand he carried a flour sack.

He crossed the gravel and stood beside the tailgate and looked at the boy in the headphones, a quarter of the way through a haircut and calm as a stone.

“Mrs. Calloway,” he said. “I wonder if you’d let an old man sit.”

“There’s a bale back there, Barney. Tom, get him the bale.”

He sat. He said nothing else for a long time. Then he opened the flour sack on his knees and took out a pair of sewing shears, black with age, the finish worn off the handles.

“These were Marian’s,” he said. “She cut Eugene’s hair with them for twelve years on our back porch. Every month.” He turned them over in his hands. “Nobody ever said out loud that a boy like that was welcome. I’d have given a good deal to hear it.”

“They’re beautiful, Barney.”

“They’re yours, if you want them. For the neck. Scissors are quiet, I hear.”

I could not answer. I took them with my free hand and laid them on the towel beside Jaxon’s knee, where he could see.

I should say what else I saw that morning, because I promised myself I would leave nothing out.

A little before noon Darwin Ritter’s pickup came into the lot. His daughter was driving. In the back seat sat a girl of about eleven, his granddaughter, with her hands pressed over her ears. I watched Darwin take his cap off before he walked up.