The Brave, page 4
At the back of the barbershop, the barber ran moderately warm water into a cracked sink. “God knows what diseases you’ve got.”
“I’m healthy,” Rafael said.
“Sure,” the barber said. “‘Healthy. ’ Drunk. Filthy.”
Rafael looked down at his dusty jeans, cracked boots.
The barber handed him a plastic bottle. “This is shampoo. You know how to use shampoo?”
Holding it, Rafael studied the bottle as if he were reading the words on it.
“Put your head in the sink, soak your hair. Squeeze some of this soap from the bottle onto your head, lather it in, I mean, rub it around in your hair so there’s soap everywhere, then stick your head in the sink again and rinse out, wash out all the soap.” The barber held up two fingers. “Then do it again. You understand me?”
“Usually I use bar soap,” Rafael explained.
“Well, this is called shampoo, and it’s what you’re gonna use now. Chee!”
The barber returned to the customer he had in his chair. The barber said to his customer, “I didn’t touch him.”
Rafael took off his shirt and dropped it on the floor. He lowered his head into the sink and used both hands to wet his hair thoroughly.
He heard the barber shouting. Straightening his back, he banged the back of his head against one of the water taps.
The barber, scissors in hand, had returned to the back of the shop and was red-faced. “Put your shirt on!”
Rafael looked at the water pouring down from his head onto his shoulders, chest, stomach. The top of his jeans were getting wet.
“Chee! Who told you to take off your shirt?”
“I’ll get it wet!”
“So get it wet! Where do you think you are, anyway? Put on your shirt!”
Water in his eyes, Rafael found the shirt on the floor. He tried to shake the hair from the floor of the barbershop off his shirt.
The barber said, “Damned shirt’s probably never been washed anyway.”
“It’s been washed,” Rafael said. “Plenty.”
The shirt hanging from his fingers, Rafael looked around the shop, at Larry concentrating on his magazine, at the middle-aged customer sitting in the barber chair watching Rafael through the mirror. “What’s the matter with you, anyway, man?”
“There’s nothing the matter with me!” The barber pointed the scissors at his own chest. “Look at how dirty you are.”
“I’m not dirty,” Rafael said. “My skin isn’t dirty.” He rubbed the ball of his thumb against his chest. “Sweaty, maybe. I’ve been sweatin’.”
The barber glanced over his shoulder at Larry. He said quietly to Rafael, “Boy, you stink.”
“I’ve been sweatin’ a lot.”
The barber took a step closer to Rafael. Still speaking quietly, he said, “I can smell your liver rotting.”
Rafael stared down into the barber’s face.
“Put your shirt on.” The barber turned away. “Wash your hair.”
Waving his scissors in the air, the barber returned to his customer.
At the back of the shop, Rafael still held his shirt in his hand. He said, “I’m in the movies!”
“Sure you are!” the barber said.
“I am!”
“And I’m the president’s wife!”
The customer in the barber chair laughed.
“Ask that man, that Larry there! He’ll tell you I’m in the movies. Aren’t I in the movies, Larry? Tell him I got a contract to be in the movies.”
Larry shifted in his chair. “Hurry up.”
Rafael put his shirt on. He did not button it. He washed his hair.
Dripping, he sat in the barber chair as soon as the other customer left it.
Paying the barber, the customer said, “Good luck.”
“You come back, you hear?” The barber gave the customer his change.
The customer pocketed the change. “I don’t know.”
“Chee.” Looking at Rafael in the chair, the barber sighed. “Button your shirt.”
“Button your shirt, Rafael,” Larry said. “You’re makin’ the little man excited.”
The barber raised one finger to Larry.
“Listen close, shit,” Larry said to the barber. “We want his hair cut right. Don’t cut it short.”
“I’d like to shave it,” the barber said. “God knows what’s been growin’ in there.”
“Cut it neat but long,” Larry said. “Over his ears. Bring out his Indian look.”
“‘Indian. ’”
“You do it right,” Larry said, “or before we leave here, your head will be shaved as clean as a baby’s ass. You got me?” Larry held out his right hand and showed how it could shake. “And I’m none too steady myself this morning.” He raised his index finger to the barber. “No games. No tricks.”
“Chee.”
Larry returned to his magazine. He said, “He’s in the movies.”
The barber held up strands of Rafael’s hair. “This mess ever been cut before?”
“Plenty,” Rafael said. “My wife cuts it.”
“What does she use, Chief, a hacksaw?”
“Sometimes I’ve cut it myself. It’s been cut plenty of times.”
“Ever been to a barber before, in your life?”
Rafael never had known what going to a barber for a haircut cost. “I like it the way my wife cuts it,” he said.
“If she ever needs a job,” the barber said, “send her to the guy down the street.”
Rafael had never seen such a big, well-lit mirror before, surely never sat in front of one before, with almost nowhere else to look. The mirrors behind some of the bars at which he had sat had always been dark and pretty well covered by bottles of liquor and decayed signs for one brand or another.
First he looked at the long fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the barbershop reflected in the mirror. He looked at Larry, behind him, sitting somewhat sideways in a chair, concentrating on his magazine. He looked at the other chairs along the wall, with metal tubular legs and arms. Most of the plastic-covered cushions on the arms of the chairs were ripped. Rafael thought of the big, square wooden chair he had sat naked in that morning, the dried blood in the cracks of the wood, the leather straps at the ends of the chair arms and legs. Some real men have died in that chair, the uncle had said. So would Rafael. He noticed himself smiling in the mirror. He had just realized he now knew something he had never known before, something very few people ever knew about themselves: where, and when, and how… he was going to die; in that chair, in that loft, Thursday, a little before noon… The barber, acting so superior, knew no such thing about himself, nor did Larry, the fat, fair kid so proud he could read, not even the uncle himself.
Rafael had been sitting in the barber chair several moments before he looked at himself in the mirror.
There was a cracked mirror in the bathroom of the trailer he used when he shaved a few times a week, but Rafael was not all that familiar with his looks. He noticed little pimples on his chin. For the most part his skin was smooth and dark. He had no beard lines, as many men have. His brothers also had very sparse body and facial hair. The skin around his eyes was his whitest, and, puffiest. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. There was the mark on Rafael’s right jaw he had received the week before when he fell down drunk and hit his jaw against he did not know what. At least he thought that was what happened. He hoped no one had hit him on the jaw. Rafael noticed how thin his shoulders were. He was pretty sure his shoulders once had been heavier, more muscled than now. And his thighs, beneath his denim jeans were thin, but they always had been.
The short barber was concentrating on cutting Rafael’s hair. He did not seem to be having such a bad time.
The barber had said he could smell Rafael’s rot-‘ ting liver.
Rafael wondered if that was true.
He wondered exactly what it meant about his liver.
About himself, it meant that as he was living, the life he was in, Rafael had no future. Somehow (and, it was true, Rafael did not exactly remember how) he had a wife and three children and they needed things, food, clothes to go to school, the trailer’s propane gas tank filled so Rita could make warm meals, a few nice things, presents, toys so they would know they were loved, so many things he had seen and seen and seen over time he could not attain. The man from the government had stopped coming to Morgantown and then the checks from the government had stopped coming and then the food stamps had stopped. There had not been a delivery of the surplus food, the dried, old cheese, to Morgantown for a long time now. Some people explained the disappearance of the man and the money one way, others another way. Some said the government man was living very well in a suburb off the money that was supposed to come to Morgantown; they had seen him driving a new car. Others said he died. And still others said they had heard someone had decided to get rid of Morgantown altogether, the people there, by starving them out. Rafael’s family, all the people in Morgantown, needed money to make their own lives go, they needed food more than they needed anybody. They needed money just to go, to leave Morgantown, to find places to live, jobs, to get to some place else, a place from which the government agent, money, food stamps, surplus food had not disappeared. Rafael did not know the answers to any of these questions; he had never thought he had known what he, his family ought do. To Rafael it seemed life had just happened to them. His response, no worse than most others, had been to try to drown the hunger, the pain, to stave it off, be as insensitive, insensate to it as possible, ignore it as the best means of surviving it. Rafael had some understanding of how sick he was. He guessed he could smell his own liver rotting. As a young man, he knew he was as helplessly drunk as some of the oldest men in Morgantown. He had seen them dead of rotted livers, dehydrated dead in the August sun, frozen dead on the December earth. The uncle had said, A year from now I probably even wouldn’t want ya. You’ll be totally worthless. Rafael knew that was about right. The uncle had said, I think you’re right to-be doin’ what you’re doin’.
It had taken him weeks to figure out, ever since Freedo first spoke to him about the job, but Rafael did figure that he had only one thing to sell for money, and that was time.
The uncle had said, You can stand an hour of anything, isn’t that right?
Better an hour, Rafael reasoned, than a year.
Better to cash in a year, or two…
“Finished with the movie star.” The barber dropped his scissors and comb into his wash basin. “Hope I never see him again.”
Standing up, Larry said, “You never will.”
With his hands, Rafael tried brushing his cut hair off the front of his wet shirt. He had noticed the barber had covered the front of his earlier customer with a cloth, but had not spread a cloth on him.
“Take your shit outside, Chief,” the barber said.
Larry’s hand was on the doorknob.
“Hey!” the barber said sharply.
“Suck it,” Larry said. “You’re swallowin’ this one.”
“What the hell?” the barber asked.
“You expect me to pay you?” Larry asked. “After all the shit you gave me?”
“God damn!”
“Jerk off.” Larry opened the door. “Come on, movie star.”
f
“WHY?” WALKING down the busy noontime city street with him, several times Larry had glanced sideways at Rafael.
“Why so what?” Rafael said.
“So why are you takin’ on this job?” Larry asked.
Rafael giggled. “Why not?”
Taking him by the elbow, Larry steered Rafael around a group of well-dressed people outside a restaurant. Larry had set a fast walking pace. “Not much future in it.”
“Haven’t got much future anyway,” Rafael said. “Didn’t you hear what Mister McCarthy said?”
“Who’s Mister McCarthy?”
“Your uncle.”
“No. What does he know?”
“I’m a drunk,” Rafael said.
Again Larry cut his eyes at Rafael. “You’re young. Younger’n I am.”
“That makes it worse.”
“You like to drink,” Larry said, “stay alive to drink.”
“Not enough money,” Rafael said. “Not ever enough to drink.”
“You mean, to kill yourself?”
Rafael stumbled stepping off a curb. “Worth more dead than alive,” Rafael said. “I heard a man on television say that about himself. That’s me. I’m worth more dead than alive.”
“I don’t get why you’re doin’ it this way.”
“Got a family.” The hot sun, the fast walking pace, the air, the confusion of all the people on the sidewalk was making Rafael feel more drunk than he had felt sitting in the barber chair. “It’s all over for me, bozo.”
“Why don’t you do it quick and quiet then?”
“Do what?”
“Get it over with. Make it easy on yourself.”
“Naw,” Rafael said. “That wouldn’t do anybody any good.”
“It’s your flesh and blood, I guess,” Larry said. “Wait here a minute.”
Leaving Rafael in the hot sun at the edge of the sidewalk, Larry approached three young men huddled near the corner of the building. One wore an ankle length horse coat and a hat with a very wide brim.
Larry shook hands with each of the three but really only spoke to the one in the long coat.
After a short conversation, Larry took the wad of fifty dollar bills his uncle had given him out of his pocket. He peeled off one fifty dollar bill. To the fifty he added the ten dollar bill his uncle had given him for Rafael’s haircut. He handed both bills to the man.
The youngest man, standing to the right of the long-coated man, took plastiscene bags out of his pocket, counted out a few, and handed them to Larry. The long coated man checked the number of the bags.
Larry put the bags into his pocket.
Without saying anything more, Larry resumed walking down the sidewalk at his quick pace.
He nodded to Rafael to join him.
Catching up to him, Rafael said, “You do drugs.” “So?”
“You’re no better’n I am,” Rafael said. “You’ll come to it.”
“Come to what?”
“You know.”
“Never,” Larry said. “You might try really good shit, you know. Before you go. Might change your mind about things. You owe it to yourself to try it.”
Rafael smiled. “That shit’ll kill ya.”
After they turned the corner onto Commercial Street, Rafael chuckled. “I’m keepin’ you in shit, I guess.”
After going through two sets of glass doors, Rafael found himself in a huge, high ceilinged room. The room was more cold than cool. The floor and the walls were of smooth, white stone. The furniture, the teller booths, the desks at which people sat, taller desks in the middle of the floor at which people stood, the railings were of dark, polished wood.
All the people in the room were well dressed. Most of the men wore jackets and neck ties. One woman at a desk wore an open sweater over her blouse.
Most of the people were looking at Rafael standing inside the door gawking.
Larry said to the woman at the desk nearest the door, “This boy needs to open a checking account.”
“Oh, yes.” Her eyes scanning Rafael said she doubted that was what Rafael needed. “I’ll ask Miss Christie to help you.”
“Who’s Miss Christie?” Larry looked over the rows of desks one side of the room.
“The woman in pink and black.” The receptionist was picking up the telephone to call only a meter or two.
“Come on,” Larry said to Rafael.
By the time they got to Miss Christie’s desk she had answered the phone. Her eyebrows rose as she looked at Larry and Rafael.
Larry lifted a side chair from the next desk and sat down beside Miss Christie’s desk.
“I see,” Miss Christie said into the telephone. She hung up.
Larry said, “He’s opening a checking account.”
“Is he?” Miss Christie spoke as if needed permission had not been granted.
“What’s your full name, Rafael?” Larry asked.
“Brown.”
“Rafael Brown,” Larry said to Miss Christie.
Slowly, Miss Christie withdrew a single sheet of paper, a printed form, from a desk drawer. “How much will you be depositing initially into the account?”
Larry peeled another bill from the bunch his uncle had given him and put it on the desk. “Fifty dollars.”
“Is that enough?” Rafael smiled at Miss Christie.
Larry said, “Shut up, Rafael.”
“Is that with a ph or an f?” Miss Christie asked.
“Is what?” Larry asked.
“Rafael,” she stated.
Larry waited for Rafael to answer. Larry finally answered, “Make it with an f.”
Pen poised over her paper, Miss Christie asked, “Doesn’t he know?”
“F is right,” Rafael said.
“Address?” Miss Christie asked.
“Morgantown,” Rafael answered.
“Street address?”
“There are no streets,” Rafael answered. “Not really.”
“Is Morgantown a real place?” Miss Christie asked.
Larry laughed. “You ever seen it?”
Miss Christie said, “I’ve heard about it. I doubt there’s a post office there.”
“People leave things at the store,” Rafael said. “The little store. That’s where all the mail to Morgantown goes.”
“From what I’ve heard Morgantown is due to be plowed under.” Miss Christie sighed. “Does ‘the little store’ have a name?”
“The store,” Rafael said. “Everybody just calls it the store.”
Writing, Miss Christie said, “‘The Store, Morgantown. ’ Social security number?”
Rafael said, “340J96728S.”
“My, my,” Larry said. “You have applied for jobs.”
“Sure,” Rafael said. “All the time.”
“Next of kin?” Miss Christie asked.
“Closest living relative,” Larry said.
“Rita.”
“Rita Brown,” Larry said.
