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[ 898] THE CONVENIENCE STORE ON THE SOUTHEASTERN CORNER was selling the sort of stuff that gave it a good enough excuse to be open on a Sunday morning. Open, but not busy. There was nobody in there except the guy behind the register. But he had coffee. I sat up at the little counter and ordered a big mug and bought a Sunday newspaper.

[ 899] The president was still on the front page. Now he was in California. He was explaining to defense contractors why their gravy train was grinding to a halt after fifty glorious years. The aftershock from his Pensacola announcement about the Coast Guard was still rumbling on. Their boats were returning to their harbors on Saturday night. They wouldn’t go out again without new funding. The paper’s editorial guys were all stirred up about it.

[ 900] I stopped reading and glanced up when I heard the door open. A woman came in. She took a stool at the opposite end of the counter. She was older than me, maybe forty. Dark hair, very slender, expensively dressed in black. She had very pale skin. So pale, it was almost luminous. She moved with a kind of nervous tension. I could see tendons like slim ropes in her wrists. I could see some kind of an appalling strain in her face. The counter guy slid over to her and she ordered coffee in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it, even though she was pretty close by and it was a silent room.

[ 901] She didn’t stay long. She got through half her coffee, watching the window all the time. Then a big black pickup truck pulled up outside and she shivered. It was a brand-new truck and obviously it had never hauled anything worth hauling. I caught a glimpse of the driver as he leaned over inside to spring the door. He was a tough-looking guy. Pretty tall. Broad shoulders and a thick neck. Black hair. Black hair all over long knotted arms. Maybe thirty years old. The pale woman slid off her stool like a ghost and stood up. Swallowed once. As she opened the shop door I heard the burble of a big motor idling. The woman got into the truck, but it didn’t move away. Just sat there at the curb. I swiveled on my stool to face the counter guy.

[ 902] “Who is that?” I asked him.

[ 903] The guy looked at me like I was from another planet.

“That’s Mrs. Kliner,” he said. “You don’t know the Kliners?”

[ 904] “I heard about them,” I said. “I’m a stranger in town. Kliner owns the warehouses up near the highway, right?”

[ 905] “Right,” he said. “And a whole lot more besides. Big deal round here, Mr. Kliner.”

[ 906] “He is?” I said.

[ 907] “Sure,” the guy said. “You heard about the Foundation?”

[ 908] I shook my head. Finished my coffee and pushed the mug over for a refill.

[ 909] “Kliner set up the Kliner Foundation,” the guy said. “Benefits the town in a lot of ways. Came here five years ago, been like Christmas ever since.”

[ 910] I nodded.

[ 911] “Is Mrs. Kliner OK?” I asked him.

[ 912] He shook his head as he filled my mug.

[ 913] “She’s a sick woman,” he said. “Very sick. Very pale, right? A very sick woman. Could be tuberculosis. I seen tuberculosis do that to folks. She used to be a fine-looking woman, but now she looks like something grown in a closet, right? A very sick woman, that’s for damn sure.”

[ 914] “Who’s the guy in the truck?” I said.

[ 915] “Stepson,” he said. “Kliner’s kid by his first wife. Mrs. Kliner’s his second. I’ve heard she don’t get along so good with the kid.”

[ 916] He gave me the sort of nod that terminates casual conversations. Moved away to wipe off some kind of a chromium machine behind the other end of the counter. The black pickup was still waiting outside. I agreed with the guy that the woman looked like something grown in a closet. She looked like some kind of a rare orchid starved of light and sustenance. But I didn’t agree with him that she looked sick. I didn’t think she had tuberculosis. I thought she was suffering from something else. Something I’d seen once or twice before. I thought she was suffering from sheer terror. Terror of what, I didn’t know. Terror of what, I didn’t want to know. Not my problem. I stood up and dropped a five on the counter. The guy made change all in coins. He had no dollar bills. The pickup was still there, stationary at the curb. The driver was leaning up, chest against the wheel, looking sideways across his stepmother, staring in straight at me.

[ 917] There was a mirror opposite me behind the counter. I looked exactly like a guy who’d been on an all-night bus and then spent two days in jail. I figured I needed to get cleaned up before I took Roscoe to lunch. The counter guy saw me figuring.

[ 918] “Try the barbershop,” he said.

[ 919] “On a Sunday?” I said.

[ 920] The guy shrugged.

[ 921] “They’re always in there,” he said. “Never exactly closed. Never exactly open, either.”

[ 922] I nodded and pushed out through the door. I saw a small crowd of people coming out of the church and chatting on the lawns and getting into their cars. The rest of the town was still deserted. But the black pickup was still at the curb, right outside the convenience store. The driver was still staring at me.

[ 923] I walked north in the sun and the pickup moved slowly alongside, keeping pace. The guy was still hunched forward, staring sideways. I stretched out a couple of steps and the truck sped up to keep station. Then I stopped dead and he overshot. I stood there. The guy evidently decided backing up wasn’t on his agenda. He floored it and took off with a roar. I shrugged and carried on. Reached the barbershop. Ducked under the striped awning and tried the door. Unlocked. I went in.

[ 924] LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN MARGRAVE, THE BARBERSHOP looked wonderful. It gleamed with ancient chairs and fittings lovingly polished and maintained. It had the kind of barbershop gear everybody tore out thirty years ago. Now everybody wants it back. They pay a fortune for it because it re-creates the way people want America to look. The way they think it used to look. It’s certainly the way I thought it used to look. I would sit in some schoolyard in Manila or Munich and imagine green lawns and trees and flags and a gleaming chrome barbershop like this one.

[ 925] It was run by two old black guys. They were just hanging out there. Not really open for business, not really closed. But they indicated they would serve me. Like they were there, and I was there, so why not? And I guess I looked like an urgent case. I asked them for the works. A shave, a haircut, a hot towel and a shoe shine. There were framed newspaper front pages here and there on the walls. Big headlines. Roosevelt dies, VJ Day, JFK assassinated, Martin Luther King murdered. There was an old mahogany table radio thumping warmly away. The new Sunday paper was crisply folded on a bench in the window.

[ 926] The old guys mixed up soapy lather in a bowl, stropped a straight razor, rinsed a shaving brush. They shrouded me with towels and got to work. One guy shaved me with the old straight razor. The other guy stood around doing not much of anything. I figured maybe he came into play later. The busy guy started chatting away, like barbers do. Told me the history of his business. The two of them had been buddies since childhood. Always lived here in Margrave since way back. Started out as barbers way before the World War Two. Apprenticed in Atlanta. Opened a shop together as young men. Moved it to this location when the old neighborhood was razed. He told me the history of the county from a barber’s perspective. Listed the personalities who’d been in and out of these old chairs. Told me about all kinds of people.

[ 927] “So tell me about the Kliners,” I said.

[ 928] He was a chatty guy, but that question shut him up. He stopped work and thought about it.