Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan Page B

dandruff treatment, louse dip, hot rocks to rub old men’s froze-up balls with, fully equipped barber services, next! who’s next! step right up, ain’t nothing to be skeered of, I hope you ain’t wanting one them new do’s we be seeing in
Ebony
, get yo throat cut wearing one them do’s in Arrow Catcher, let me slop on some of this here White Rose, give you that shiny petroleum-jelly look they’s talking so much about in Paris, France, plaster that nappy got-damn rag of yore’s down on yo field-nigger Ubangi-ass haid.
    Somebody said, “That Chicago boy got off lucky, what I say.”
    Somebody else said, “Uh-huh.”
    The one-handed monkey was there, as usual, sitting in one of the empty theater seats, with the stuffing coming out of the seat bottoms. The monkey was holding last Sunday’s funny paper up in front of his face like he was reading it. The monkey was real old and had gray hair on his head and face and armpits. It had learned a long time ago to balanceone edge of a folded newspaper on its little stump of a hand and to hold the other edge with the good hand. He didn’t act like no handicapped monkey.
    Blue John Jackson was there, the blues man, from out in the country. He was tall and a little stooped and had a gravelly voice. He had quit drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes a long time ago, but his voice still sounded like a whiskey drinker. About all he ever drank now was a whole heap of strong coffee, with a little sweetmilk.
    Blue John brought his guitar over to the barber shop most every night since Rage Gage moved his business from Fourth Street. Blue John played “The Spoonful” sometimes, and “Little Bo Peep” and “Corrina, Corrina,” if you axed him just right.
    Just then the little redheaded peckerwood Roy Dale Conroy, the gravedigger’s child, come easing in, white boy with a strange way about him, done snuck out of his daddy’s house again, in the middle of the night.
    Roy Dale said, “Hey, Rage Gage.”
    Rage Gage said, “Hey, Peckerwood.”
    Roy Dale had a timid little voice.
    He said, “Y’ all blowing?”
    Rage Gage said, “Git one them dry towels off the sink rack.”
    Roy Dale took a couple of thin-cloth shaving towels off arack on the double sink in the middle of the floor and dried off his face and hair. Then he rubbed his neck and arms good, too.
    Blue John said to Roy Dale, “She’ll come back. She’ll come back some day.”
    Roy Dale said, “I don’t know.”
    Blue John said, “She will.”
    Roy Dale eased into the empty theater seat next to the one-handed monkey. The monkey looked up and saw Roy Dale and recognized him and put the newspaper aside and crawled over the chair arm and into his lap and wrapped his tail around in a circle and cuddled up close to Roy Dale’s chest.
    Roy Dale took off first one shoe and then the other, and then he took off his stretched-out argyle socks, and laid them out on top of the cold space heater to dry out a little.
    Roy Dale was missing his mama, that was true enough.
    Roy Dale said, “I heard about what happened, down at Mr. Red’s.”
    Rage Gage said, “Where’d you hear about that?”
    Roy Dale said, “Schoolyard.”
    Rage Gage said, “Ain’t no telling how news be traveling.”
    Roy Dale said, “I own know.”
    Rage Gage said, “Well—”
    There were two other people in the room. One was TheRider, the frail, frail little albino blues man, with white nappy hair and pink skin. His eyes were always covered up with dark glasses, like blind people wear. He walked into walls. He played a Gibson guitar, which he didn’t need to see. Blue John Jackson claimed he couldn’t play a lick of the blues without The Rider alongside him, he took him everywhere he went.
    The other person in the barber shop was the old shoeshine boy from Red’s