Facing the Music by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

under the couch again and feels it again. It’s cold and hard, feels scary.
    Mr. P.’s never been much of a drinking man, but he knows there’s some whiskey in the kitchen cabinet. Sometimes when the kids get colds or the sore throat, he mixes up a little whiskey and lemon juice and honey and gives it to them in a teaspoon. That and a peppermint stick always helps their throats.
    He gets the whiskey, gets a little drink, and then gets another pretty good drink. It’s only ten o’clock. He should havehad a lot of work done by now. Any other time he’d be out on the tractor or down in the field or up in the woods cutting firewood.
    Unless it was summer. If it was summer he’d be out in the garden picking butter beans or sticking tomatoes or cutting hay or fixing fences or working on the barn roof or digging up the septic tank or swinging a joe-blade along the driveway or cultivating the cotton or spraying or trying to borrow some more money to buy some more poison or painting the house or cutting the grass or doing a whole bunch of other things he doesn’t want to do anymore at all. All he wants to do now’s stay on the couch.
    Mr. P. turns over on the couch and sees the picture of Jesus on the wall. It’s been hanging up there for years. Old Jesus, he thinks. Mr. P. used to know Jesus. He used to talk to Jesus all the time. There was a time when he could have a little talk with Jesus and everything’d be all right. Four or five years ago he could. Things were better then, though. You could raise cotton and hire people to pick it. They even used to let the kids out of school to pick it. Not no more, though. Only thing kids wanted to do now was grow long hair and listen to the damn Beatles.
    Mr. P. knows about hair because he cuts it in his house. People come in at night and sit around the fire in his living room and spit tobacco juice on the hearth and Mr. P. cuts their hair. He talks to them about cotton and cows and shuffles, clockwise and counterclockwise around the chair they’re sitting in, in his house shoes and undershirt and overalls and snips here and there.
    Most of the time they watch TV, “Gunsmoke” or “Perry Mason.” Sometimes they watch Perry Como. And
sometimes,
they’ll get all involved and interested in a show and stay till the show’s over.
    One of Mr. P.’s customers—this man who lives down the road and doesn’t have a TV—comes every Wednesday night to get his haircut. But Mr. P. can’t cut much of his hair, having to cut it every week like that. He has to just snip the scissors around on his head some and make out like he’s cutting it, comb it a little, walk around his head a few times, to make him think he’s getting a real haircut. This man always comes in at 6:45 P.M ., just as Mr. P. and his family are getting up from the supper table.
    This man always walks up, and old Frank used to bark at him when he’d come up in the yard. It was kind of like a signal that old Frank and Mr. P. had, just between them. But it wasn’t a secret code or anything. Mr. P. would be at the supper table, and he’d hear old Frank start barking, and if it was Wednesday night, he’d know to get up from the table and get his scissors. The Hillbillies always come on that night at seven, and it takes Mr. P. about fifteen minutes to cut somebody’s hair.
    This man starts laughing at the opening credits of the Hillbillies, and shaking his head when it shows old Jed finding his black gold, his Texas tea, just as Mr. P.’s getting through with his head. So by the time he’s finished, the Hillbillies have already been on for one or two minutes. And then, when Mr. P. unpins the bedsheet around this man’s neck, if there’s nobody else sitting in his living room watching TV or waiting for a haircut,this man just stays in the chair, doesn’t get up, and says, “I bleve I’ll jest set here