The End by Salvatore Scibona

complaints.
    With the handle of a comb the barber artfully elevated the tip of Rocco’s nose and snipped the hair growing from his nostrils into his mustache.
    “I don’t go in for the hunting of waterfowl with dogs, do you?” the barber said. “I don’t think it’s right to train a predator to put food in its mouth and not eat it. I wonder what you think.”
    “I don’t follow,” Rocco tried to say without moving his lips, on which the barber pressed with a finger.
    “I’ll give you a for-instance. You take a woman to a store that sells fine linen sheets and tablecloths and what have you.” He turned to rummage a drawer. “You roll up a hundred dollars in her fist and tell her to walk through the aisles for an afternoon and then to give you the money back. Why, that’s cruelty! Tell me what you think while I’m stirring this here.”
    “I thought they had that type of training in the breed.”
    “That’s a good point. I never thought of that. It’s an important insight.”
    “Thank you.”
    “And let me ask you something else. I think about this here in my store when it rains and nobody thinks of coming to be groomed. Say you could go to any city in the world for a week’s vacation. Which city would it be? My answer is Perth, Australia.”
    “The boat trip would be longest,” Rocco surmised.
    “Just so. I would take the eastern route, following the coast of Africa as the Portuguese traders did. Which country do you come from that you talk like that?”
    “Ohio,” Rocco said.
    “Where’s that, in Russia somewhere?”
    “Ohio,” he said. “Next door. The mother of presidents. The land of Thomas Edison and the buckeye tree.”
    “Frankly, I don’t have the first idea what you’re saying,” the barber said lightly.
    Rocco’s eyes were closed; the chair reclined; the barber piled a hot towel on his face. Rocco drew the letters in the air.
    “I see,” said the barber. “Condolences.”
    “Warren Harding, Orville Wright, the vice president’s father, all from Ohio,” Rocco said into the towel.
    The barber laughed with a snort.
    “You think the invention of the airplane is trivia. It’s a circus act to you.”
    “Okay. I’ll tell you what. I knew what you were saying. I’m just a frolicsome kind of a person. I like to give the foreigners a hard time. I was a foreigner once myself,” he said, removing the towel. “Gua dalcanal. I wasn’t received so kindly by the natives as you were here, I’m sure. Everywhere you stepped on the sand, a dead marine.”
    “I have a boy in the marines,” Rocco said. “There are those who believe he is no longer among us. They were taken in by a mountebank writing in the newspaper.” He inhaled profoundly, and the mentholated vapor of the shaving foam beneath his nose submerged his nasal passages and soaked his brain. “But I know that my redeemer lives,” he said.
    “Is that so? They bring your body back to this country, they do. Give them that. The other services have more important work, I suppose. And you’re married, then.”
    “As it happens. I am married these thirty-three years. However, she has been living at a distance from me, which I regret. And tomorrow I will see her again for the first time in so long. So make me up nice. She doesn’t know it yet, but I have had my full of her desertment. And I’m putting a stop to it. When I come back through here in a few days’ time, I will have her with me, and the boys, first, middle, and last, if I have to cut them in pieces.”
    In Libya and in Sweden there was the hot towel and the rasp of the stropping of the razor, a sound that sent aged men into dim boyhood afternoons sitting on the bench, swinging the feet that did not yet reach the floor, while Papa, the master of the universe, reclined and another man scraped a blade over his gullet. There was a figure of speech in dialect, a phrase his own boys wouldn’t know since they hardly spoke dialect (their mother had forbidden Rocco to