Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

Manny stood behind Cuate and looked him over. He clucked his tongue, looked up at Pap, and said, “Well, I suppose we should be grateful you left the ears…”

“I told you, Manny, the old boy was infested. Weren’t exactly tryin’ to make him perty.”

Cuate felt warm, soft fingertips prod at his scalp, moving his head this way and that.

“Well, there’s not much I can do with this. I think the best thing would be to buzz him and start fresh. Is that alright with you?”

“Sure. It’s all my daddy ev’r did with me when I was his age.”

“Oh, have we figured out his age now?”

Pap nodded. “Youngish.”

“Right.”

The entire room spun suddenly; Cuate gripped the armrests of his chair as his eyes widened and rolled in his head. When he stopped, he was facing the other direction and looking straight at Manny. The barber had a concerned expression on his face.

“Well, you weren’t expecting that were you?”

He shook his head.

“The chair spins is all. Sometimes it’s easier for me to move you than to move around you.” He pinched an armrest and rotated him slowly. “See?”

“Okay.”

“Good,” Manny nodded. “Now, I’m going to use the clippers to even out that hair, okay? You ever see a set of clippers before?”

Cuate didn’t know what he was talking about, so he said nothing.

Manny held up a black device a little larger than his hand; on one side it had a shiny, metal comb with fine and perfect teeth. “This thing cuts hair, see?”

Cuate looked at the cord running from the back of the clippers, saw where it connected to another cord running across the floor and through the door to the back room, and understood. He drew back from the thing.

“No, no! It’s not dangerous. Look!”

He flipped a button, and it began to buzz. Cuate saw that the metal comb had become a blur. Manny took the comb and pressed it into the palm of his hand.

“Look, it can’t cut you, see? This doesn’t even hurt; it just tickles.” He moved it all around on his hand, jamming it into the skin hard enough to leave a mark, and pulled it away. He held it out, and Cuate extended a finger, touching it lightly before jerking back.

“How does it cut hair, then?”

“Like this.” He ran the comb up a forearm, and the boy saw a patch of hair fall away as if it had been melted off the skin.

“Okay? Will you let me run this over your head?”

Cuate stared at the buzzing thing in his hand a few moments, then nodded. Manny smiled and then the room was spinning again until he could see Pap and the front door of the shop. He enjoyed the spinning more the second time around.

Somewhere to his left, the old juke machine clicked and whirred; a few moments later a song began to play. Pap’s head lifted immediately in response; him smiling as though his own dead mother had come back from the grave to kiss him on the brow a final time. He said, “That’ll be Roy Orbison. Blue Bayou.” He laced his fingers over his stomach, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

Cuate felt Manny’s device touch his head and when it did, he could hear the buzzing inside himself, drowning out the music. It sounded incredibly loud, which surprised him, and he tensed at first. Then he realized that no hurt was being done to him and he spent more time focusing on the experience, finding a great deal of interest in how the buzz of the clippers could drown out the sound of the music coming out of the multi-colored machine over by the huge mirrors. His mind began to drift, and he was brought back to the present only by a sharp rapping at the shop window. He heard a loud click and the buzz of the clippers muted. The music was suddenly loud again.

A man stood outside on the sidewalk, shouting angrily and slapping the window. He stood just behind Pap, alternating between jabbing his finger directly at him, hollering, and throwing his arms out into the air.

“That’s Uly’s dad, isn’t it?” said one of the men in the shop. “What in hell’s got him so worked up?”

“Reckon I have a few ideas…” said Pap. He stood from the chair by the door but did not retrieve his hat. He looked oddly naked to Cuate as he opened and then stepped through the shop door. As it opened, those inside heard the brief flash of unbridled anger from the man outside; then it shut again, and all noise of the outside world was drowned out by the music.

They stood out on the sidewalk, framed in the large picture window like two men giving a performance, Pap with his hands rested on his hips; his expression darkening slowly from mild annoyance to real anger. The other man, Uly’s father by one man’s reckoning, continued to shout and point. He threw out his hands and then walked at Pap as though he would hit him, only to stop short. He pointed down at Pap’s belt where the big black revolver rode. Pap’s eyebrows hoisted; he pointed at the gun and then held up a hand in gesture of abeyance.

He unbuckled his belt and pulled the gun and holster away. Opening the door to the shop, he set the gun down in the chair he’d recently occupied and then let the door swing shut without a word to anyone in the room. He stepped away from the building, refastening the belt, his face bright red and quivering. He moved out into the street, and the other man followed.

“Oh, Jesus, there they go,” said Manny. He left Cuate’s side and went to go stand at the window, joined by the others who had only lately been lining the walls in various states of relaxation. They all filled up the window looking out, muttering quietly to each other; one of them asked if they’d better go out there and stop it, to which the rest scoffed.

Uly’s father took a swing at Pap, seemingly out of nowhere, and caught him on the chin. He’d moved so quickly that Cuate squeaked in surprise from his position at the chair. Then the man was close-in to Pap, one arm bound up in the elbow of the Texan while the other hammered rapid shots into his ribcage. Pap had his back to the window by then, but each punch as it was driven home elicited a jerking of the man’s spine as though he was being jolted insensate by repeated blasts of electricity. This continued a few moments until he managed to bind up the man’s other arm in his left. Being the larger of the two by a comfortable margin, Pap bent over to lay his considerable weight onto the man’s shoulders, whose legs strained and began to buckle under the weight. They lowered together by turns and were soon obscured by the spectators lining the shop window.

Cuate slipped from the chair, pouring out onto the hard floor with the boneless malleability of youth, as that terrible, warbling ghost voice in the jukebox said, “ …With their sails afloat, if I could only see, that familiar sunrise… ” He crept forward and reached between the knees of two faceless men; men he’d only known in the brief space of time since Pap had brought him to this place, and who would again disappear into the fog of yesterday when they departed, and grasped the revolver by the smoothed, wooden grip. His thumb searched out the loop’s snap, pushed until it popped and he removed the weapon’s holster and stuffed it into his back pocket. Then he pushed between the people standing stupidly in the window, through the front door, and out onto the sidewalk.

The disembodied voice of the singer first faded and then disappeared as the glass door clicked shut; muted jingle of a shop bell filtering out beyond. It was replaced by the grunting of the men fighting in the street. As he walked along the sidewalk to get them both into view—oblivious to the men and women in the barbershop who looked on in dismay, who noticed what the boy held in his hand—Pap braced into the ground through his heels and hoisted backward. The tangle of their arms locked up and Uly’s father was lifted into the air bodily, head pointed down at the pavement and legs jutting straight into the sky like a frantic, living tuning fork.