Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

Saul having his hair cut: Five Oaks’s north-side barbershop contained four chairs, a black-and-white television set on a wheeled table, a set of old magazines, and one barber with a permanently downcast expression. An antique barber pole twirled listlessly outside the front door. The barbershop looked more like a bookie joint than a genuine barbershop. When Saul sat down in the chair, the barber, whose name was Harold, tucked his cover cloth under Saul’s collar and whistled between his teeth. “Don’t see hair like yours much around here,” he said. “It’s almost kinky, wouldn’t you say?” The barber looked young but acted old.

Saul said yes, it was almost kinky, and what he basically wanted was a trim.

The barber set to work, sneaking looks at Days of Our Lives, which appeared in a pointillist quilt of snow and interference on the television set. Saul closed his eyes but opened them five minutes later, feeling the barber’s hand resting peacefully on his shoulder, the scissors motionless in his hair. “Say,” Saul said, nudging the barber’s stomach with his elbow. “Are we awake here? Harold? Hello?”

The barber inhaled, exhaled, snorted, and said sure, of course he was awake. The scissors started up again, their tips scraping Saul’s scalp. “Could be I did doze off there a minute,” the barber said. “But it’s only the third. . no, fourth time I’ve ever done that in this particular shop. I can sleep standing up, you see. Learned it in the army. Like a horse. The truth is, I have my troubles. I have woman trouble. It keeps me up part of the night, thinking about it. The soaps usually keep me awake. Are you from around here? We don’t see hair like yours too much in this town. It’s hard to cut.”

“We just moved here,” Saul said, to explain.

“From New York City, I’ll bet,” the barber, Harold, said. “They see hair like yours a lot in New York City, I hear.” He shook his head, as if to shake off his dreams. “But I imagine they have insomnia there, too. By the way, do you ever play basketball?”

Once classes at the high school had started, Saul’s route took him down Whitefeather Road for two miles before he turned left onto County Road E. On County Road E he pressed the car’s cruise-control button and removed his foot from the accelerator for the six-mile straightaway. There were no curves to the road; there never had been. With his foot off the accelerator, he ate his breakfast of Patsy’s muffins washed down with low-caffeine cola while he shaved with his electric razor and listened to the car’s tape deck, his early-morning music friend, Thelonious Monk, whose attitude toward daylight was offhand, smart, and antirural.

Three miles down County Road E and half a mile before it intersected with Bailey — Fraser Road was the morning’s bad news, standing on two legs on an average of three days a week. This bad news wore a hat and a jacket, sported gray socks and thick glasses — on some days he looked like the barber’s brother — and he stared at Saul with a mean, hateful expression.

The first few times Saul passed him, he waved. Saul didn’t expect a counterwave, and he didn’t get it. Like a sentry, the man stood glaring, an unwobbling pivot, his arms down at his sides. At last, in October, Saul slowed down on a Tuesday, and on the next day he stopped. Saul leaned out and said, “You want to say hello? Here’s your opportunity. The name’s Saul. Howdy.”

His greeting was returned with a blank look. Slowly, carefully, Saul lifted the finger to him and then hit the accelerator.

Saul to Patsy at dinner: “There’s this ghoul standing in his yard every morning giving me the Big Stare, and he’s got this hat nailed to his skull, and what I think is, he’s on to me, the schmuck hates Jews. Have I mentioned him? I have? He wants me out. One of these days he’s going to hoist a rifle and get me between the eyes.”

“You’re paranoid.” They were in the dining room and had been listening to Nielsen’s Four Temperaments Symphony, the anger movement. Choler spilled out of the speakers. It was not dinner music but an antidote to the rest of the day. Nielsen or Mingus, that was the choice.

“I’ve got a right to be paranoid,” Saul said angrily. “History encourages it. Plus, the man hates me. And for no reason: he doesn’t know me. I bet he’s a colonel in a Minuteman cadre. Or some militia or other. I’m going to get the Jewish Defense League on his case. They’ll blow him out of his yard straight into Lake Huron.”

Patsy stood up. “I’ll call Mrs. O’Neill.”

“You’d better not.” Saul looked alarmed. “What if she’s part of this conspiracy? She’d tip the rest of them off.”

Patsy shrugged. In five minutes she was back.

“Well?” While they ate, they had also been playing Scrabble, and when she was out of the room, Saul had traded two of his bad letters for better ones.

“Mrs. O’Neill says his name is Bart Connell.”

“A rabid anti-Semite.”

“Not exactly. He has Alzheimer’s. He lives with his daughter. They don’t let him stray out of the yard — we’re talking category-three dementia, living on his own private planet. He used to wander off onto the road. He flew bombing missions during the Second World War. Then he worked as a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Could fix anything. Now he can’t, quote, figure out how to put a key to a keyhole. Shame on you, Saul. He’s a plain good man with all his mind gone.”

Saul sulked.

“And put those two letters back,” she said. “I saw what you did.”

Saul’s students were younger than he remembered students were supposed to be for high school. Some were intelligent; others were not. How Saul performed in class didn’t seem to make that much difference one way or another. Those who were stupid stayed stupid, stubbornly. Some he inspired with an interest in American history, or with writing, or public speech. The work was hard, the preparations for his classes longer and more grueling than he had expected, the grading onerous, and the rewards only occasional, and he found himself now and then losing his train of thought from the effect of so many youthful eyes watching him, all those students wondering what he would do next. In the back of his classroom, the losers — those with learning deficiencies and antisocial habits — fell asleep or chewed gum or laughed inappropriately or wrote their illiterate little notes. Saul felt he should do something about them, and one of these days he would think of what that something would be. The mean-spirited, learning-disabled lost souls: he would attend to them sooner or later.

The Five Oaks School District was close to bankruptcy, and in his classrooms the fluorescent lights flickered or burned out and were not replaced. There was always a shortage of chalk, and the windows leaked. The district had pink-slipped its remedial-reading teacher the previous year.

In the teachers’ lounge, the talk was of their children, or health insurance, or places to go on vacation in July, or what had been on television the night before, or gossip. Sometimes Saul joined in. He often thought he was observing them and himself from a distance.

Now and then in his classrooms he watched, with sympathy and irritation, the boys and girls falling in love with each other.

One weekend evening in the late fall, an old blues guitarist whose music both Saul and Patsy liked was advertised as playing on the following Saturday night at Holbein College. The campus was on the other side of Five Oaks, about twenty minutes away. He would be performing in an auditorium in the campus student center, the ad said, and the event was open to the public, with tickets on sale at the door. The next weekend, Saul and Patsy dressed in the most drab-and-ratty clothes they still owned, to disguise themselves as postadolescent but preadult, and drove over to the campus one hour early, hoping that the concert hadn’t been sold out.